Fresh Reads

Amodei in his latest blog post wrote a mix of agreeable things and things that I believe misrepresent where the real risk of AI is located. I want to focus my attention on why, among all the risks, open weight models constitute the mildest one. I write these words as a person…

(This blog post was adapted from the transcription obtained from my YouTube video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6lxgYeVZqs) When Linus Torvalds developed the first Linux kernel, he had studied the Minix sources, he had studied computer architecture, he had the base…

Even if you are as averse to semver as I used to be in the course of my programming activity, you can still think of open source software distribution as something that used to follow a fixed number of steps. There is a branch where developments happen, and this branch…

Look at the past history of this blog. There are many blog posts about programming with AI, a few of them date back to January 2024 (like this: https://antirez.com/news/140). I’m a relatively well regarded programmer, after all. I don’t have the need to still be in the “loop” as…

Automatic programming dramatically speeds up writing software in certain use cases and in the right hands. In my experience the output does not reach the structural quality and economy of complexity of the best hand-written software. However, not all the software is stellar, and…

High end NVIDIA cards, and the server and power needed to run them, cost a lot of money, especially if you plan to reach enough VRAM to run massive models. The alternative, so far, has been Apple hardware, or the DGX Spark that, even if severely limited because of memory…

EDIT: of course this was already done in the past! I had little doubts but people just confirmed me about it on Twitter :) But, keep reading: the CRC32 compromise at the end is an interesting tradeoff, and this is a good discussion to have in general. Right now I'm working to an…

I didn’t expect DwarfStar 4 (https://github.com/antirez/ds4) to become so popular so fast. It is clear that there was a need for single-model integration focused local AI experience, and that a few things happened together: the release of a quasi-frontier model that is large and…

I started working on the new Array data type for Redis in the first days of January. The PR landed the repository only now, so this code was cooked for four months. I worked at the implementation kinda part time (kinda because many weeks were actually full time, sometimes to…

The proof of work is the wrong analogy: finding hash collisions, while exponentially harder with N, is guaranteed to find, with enough work, some S so that H(S) satisfies N, so an asymmetry of resources used will see the side with more "work ability" eventually winning. But bugs…

Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. A sentence that I never really liked, and what is happening with AI, about software projects reimplementations, shows all the limits of such an idea. Many people are protesting the fairness of rewriting existing…

Here LLM and coding agents can find: 1. Exhaustive documentation about Redis commands and data types. 2. Patterns commonly used. 3. Configuration hints. 4. Algorithms that can be mounted using Redis commands. https://redis.antirez.com/ Some humans claim this documentation is…

Anthropic recently released a blog post with the description of an experiment in which the last version of Opus, the 4.6, was instructed to write a C compiler in Rust, in a “clean room” setup. The experiment methodology left me dubious about the kind of point they wanted to…

In my YouTube channel, for some time now I started to refer to the process of writing software using AI assistance (soon to become just "the process of writing software", I believe) with the term "Automatic Programming". In case you didn't notice, automatic programming produces…

I love writing software, line by line. It could be said that my career was a continuous effort to create software well written, minimal, where the human touch was the fundamental feature. I also hope for a society where the last are not forgotten. Moreover, I don't want AI to…

* For years, despite functional evidence and scientific hints accumulating, certain AI researchers continued to claim LLMs were stochastic parrots: probabilistic machines that would: 1. NOT have any representation about the meaning of the prompt. 2. NOT have any representation…

I’m taking a few weeks of pause on my HNSWs developments (now working on some other data structure, news soon). At this point, the new type I added to Redis is stable and complete enough, it’s the perfect moment to reason about what I learned about HNSWs, and turn it into a blog…

Regardless of their flaws, AI systems continue to impress with their ability to replicate certain human skills. Even if imperfect, such systems were a few years ago science fiction. It was not even clear that we were so near to create machines that could understand the human…

Frontier LLMs such as Gemini 2.5 PRO, with their vast understanding of many topics and their ability to grasp thousands of lines of code in a few seconds, are able to extend and amplify the programmer capabilities. If you are able to describe problems in a clear way and, if you…

This is a short story of how humans are still so much more capable of LLMs. Note that I'm not anti-AI or alike, you know it if you know me / follow me somewhere. I use LLMs routinely, like I did today, when I want to test my ideas, for code reviews, to understand if there are…

Yesterday, it was a very intense day. In Italy it was 1st of May, the workers holiday, so in the morning I went for a 4h walk in the Etna with friends <3, I love walking, and I often take pauses when coding just to walk, to return later at the keyboard with a few more kilometers…

Five months ago, I rejoined Redis and quickly started to talk with my colleagues about a possible switch to the AGPL license, only to discover that there was already an ongoing discussion, a very old one, too. Many people, within the company, had the feeling that the AGPL was a…

About three years ago I saw a quite curious and interesting post on Hacker News. A student, Christopher Tarry, was able to use cosine similarity against a vector of top words frequencies in comments, in order to detect similar HN accounts — and, sometimes, even accounts actually…

Yesterday we finally merged vector sets into Redis, here you can find the README that explains in detail what you get: https://github.com/redis/redis/blob/unstable/modules/vector-sets/README.md The goal of the new data structure is, in short, to create a new “Set alike” data…