The Daily Index — Wednesday, February 26, 2025 · TLDR Index

PROGRAMMING, DESIGN & DATA SCIENCE

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FAST COLUMNAR JSON DECODING WITH ARROW-RS

A lot of data pipelines spend the bulk of their CPU time deserializing JSON. If you want to build a fast stream processing engine, you need to start with a fast JSON deserialization strategy. This post is aimed at helping developers gain some intuition for how to work with columnar data, something many engineers find challenging and unfamiliar with in our typically row-oriented world. It covers batched decoding, column building, streaming extensions, and more.

arroyo.dev · 25 min

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AI PROMISE AND CHIP PRECARIOUSNESS

There is currently sufficient incentive for the leading research labs to raise money and continue investing in new foundation models, even as competition drives API prices down relentlessly. Getting to a future where the US has a strong AI industry running on US-made chips will take significant interventions in the market to undo the overwhelming incentives for US companies to simply rely on TSMC. Such a shift will take time, which is why making Taiwan indispensable to China's technology industry is the price that needs to be paid in the meantime.

stratechery.com · 32 min

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THE DEEP RESEARCH PROBLEM

While the examples of the work Deep Research can do OpenAI has provided look great, there are several issues with the tool. It appears the tool made intern-level mistakes when sourcing its data for one of the examples. While these models are definitely getting better, any model that generates mistakes can't be trusted. The best use cases for tools like this so far are for tasks where the error rate doesn't matter.

ben-evans.com · 6 min

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ANTHROPIC'S LATEST FLAGSHIP AI MIGHT NOT HAVE BEEN INCREDIBLY COSTLY TO TRAIN

Claude 3.7 Sonnet apparently cost just a few tens of millions of dollars to train, not factoring in related expenses - a sign of how relatively cheap it is becoming to release state-of-the-art models.

techcrunch.com · 1 min

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HOW CORE GIT DEVELOPERS CONFIGURE GIT

This post looks at the settings in git defaults that even the core developers change.

blog.gitbutler.com · 13 min

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THERE ISN'T MUCH POINT TO HTTP/2 PAST THE LOAD BALANCER

Handling HTTP/2 is better left to the infrastructure entry point, typically the load balancer or reverse proxy, as they have to decrypt and decompress the request to know what to do with it, so there is no need to re-encrypt and re-compress it to forward to the app server.

byroot.github.io · 5 min

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HARD PROBLEMS THAT REDUCE TO DOCUMENT RANKING

Some complex problems can be solved by transforming them into document ranking problems, which large language models can be used effectively for.

noperator.dev · 2 min