The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Humanity has prevailed (for now!) (News)

Episode Date: July 21, 2025

Przemysław Dębiak beat an advanced AI model from OpenAI in a 10-hour head-to-head coding marathon, Linux breaks 5% desktop share in U.S., Stefano Marinelli is writing a series on making your own backup system, César Soto Valero switched to Python (and is liking it), and Charlie Graham thinks it's rude to show AI output to people.

What's up nerds? I'm Jared and this is changelog news for the week of Monday July 21st 2025. The mystery guest for Saturday's changelog live show is a mystery no more. The amazing Nora Jones will be joining us on stage at the Oriental Theater for a fireside chat. Add that to a Breakmaster Cylinder musical performance, Kaizen 20 featuring our big Pively launch, and a trail hike at Red Rocks. That's a pretty nice little Saturday. It's actually a pretty nice little Saturday. We're gonna go to Home Depot. Yeah, buy some wallpaper, maybe get some flooring, stuff like that. Maybe Bed Bath & Beyond. I don't know. I don't know if we'll have enough time. Get in on it at changelog.com slash live and let's get into this week's news.

Humanity has prevailed for now. Last Wednesday a Polish programmer, Szemysław Debia, did what may soon be impossible. He beat an advanced AI model from OpenAI in a 10-hour head-to-head coding marathon. Quote, the competition required contestants to solve a single complex optimization problem over 600 minutes. The contest echoes the American folk tale of John Henry, the steel-driving man who raced against a steam-powered drilling machine in the 1870s. Like Henry's legendary battle against industrial automation, Debbie Ack's victory represents a human expert pushing themselves to their physical limits to prove that human skill

still matters in an age of advancing AI. For his efforts, Debbie Ack won 500,000 yen, that's about 3400 USD, and had the following to say on X. Quote. Humanity has prevailed for now. I'm completely exhausted. I figured I had 10 hours of sleep in the last 3 days and I'm barely alive. Linux breaks 5% desktop share in the US.

Is the year of the Linux desktop finally upon us? Quote. In a landmark shift for the computing landscape, Linux has finally crossed the 5% threshold in desktop market share within the United States, marking a pivotal moment for open source software enthusiasts and industry observers alike. This surge reflects broader dissatisfaction with dominant players like Microsoft Windows and Apple Mac OS, driven by factors including privacy concerns, customization demands, and the rising cost of proprietary ecosystems."

According to the report, analysts are eyeing 7% by 2027. What a time to be alive. Make Your Own Backup System Stefano Marinelli is writing a series on making your own backup system and if part one is any indicator, it's going to be an absolute banger. After describing his general philosophy around backups, which is that data must always be restoreable

in an open format and consistent, Stefano helps us develop a plan. Quote, before touching a single file, you must start with a plan and that plan starts with asking the right questions. How much risk am I willing to take? What do I need to protect? What downtime can I tolerate in case of data loss?

What type and amount of storage space do I have available? End quote. Click through if you want Stefano to help you with a core decision, which is full disk versus individual files. To read about the power of snapshots and for him to weigh in on the age-old question, push or pull.

It's now time for sponsored news. Vibe code with confidence. You've heard of vibe coding, letting intuition take the wheel and writing code that feels right. But what about shipping that code? That's where confidence tends to fade. This is where CodeRabbit's AI code review platform and their IDE integration comes in, giving you a new way to code with vibes and guardrails.

CodeRabbit blends the freedom of your flow state with the confidence of continuous review. It reads your mind, okay, your code. And flags bugs, smells, missed tests and hallucinations as you write. No context switching, no guessing, just real- time feedback baked into VS Code, Cursor and Windsurf. Learn more and start vibe coding with confidence at code rabbit dot AI slash IDE. I'm switching to Python and actually liking it. Six months ago, Cesar Soto-Villero started coding in Python because AI and was surprised by how much it

has improved over the decades. He gives three examples. 1. Python has created a very complete ecosystem of libraries and tools for processing and analyzing data. 2. Python has gotten faster with optimized static compilers like Cython. 3.

Python has done a good job of hiding its legacy ugliness, sweetening its syntax to accommodate developers. In this post, Cesar shares the tools, libraries, configs, and other integrations that bring him joy while building Python apps. Notably, he's using UV as his package manager, which I'm hearing has largely solved one of Python's biggest pain points… managing third party code. Related, we're having UVs creator, Charlie Marsh, on the podcast in September.

It's rude to show AI output to people. Alex Marcinovich says what we've all been thinking. Quote, for the longest time, writing was more expensive than reading. If you encountered a body of written text, you could be sure that at the very least, a human spent some time writing it down. The text used to have an innate proof of thought,

a basic token of humanity. There's nothing wrong with using AI. When you do, you know what you're getting. The transaction is fully consensual. But when you propagate AI output, you're at risk of intentionally or unintentionally legitimizing it with your good name, providing it with a fake proof of thought."

I asked ChatGPT and this is what it said. Is the new… I had the weirdest dream last night. It all started when… People will listen to what you say next, but they're doing it for you. Not for them. That's the news for now,

but go and subscribe to the ChangeLog newsletter for the full scoop of links worth clicking on such as Gaslight driven development Junior roles aren't going away and how to purge a global CDN in elixir Get in on that newsletter at changelog.news This week on the pod, Sugu Sugamorane talks with us about bringing Vitesse to Postgres on Wednesday and on Friday we play a round of Pound to Find with some of our changelog plus plus members.

Have a great week, like, subscribe and 5 star review us if you dig the show and I'll talk to you again real soon.