select links from 2025-02-16
All the Views, beautiful data projects and more - it's link week!
Hi friends, happy State Restoration Day! This week we are kind of back to talking about AI, sorry! Everyone is banging the drum on it for good reason – the technology is transformative. If you are not using AI for your coding work, you are definitely missing out.
However, I think the public discourse misses out on a few nuances. First, there is a significant difference between free and paid tiers. I went from “oh your response is neat but thanks I’ll do it myself anyway” to “alright imma fire up 5 projects in parallel” only when working with Opus 4.5. I haven’t tried Codex 5.3 yet but as far as I under it’s just as good? You really need to give the big boy models for a spin.
Secondly, there is obviously hysteria around junior developers becoming redundant, one person startups but I don’t really think we’re going to see every company rolling their own software. You can find a myriad reasons on the web. My main concern is that if you are building software with AI, you still need hosting, authentication, security and all that jazz. This means AI is a multiplier - if your company already has these capabilities, building with AI will be a breeze. Otherwise you still have to wrestle with the reality of putting software in prod. If your company isn’t investing in software now, chances are that AI won’t change that.
With that out of the way, let’s roll the newsletter!
DORA AI Capabilities Report
DORA recently released their AI Capabilities Report. It’s a good read and aligns with my current views on AI. Give it a read and let me know what you think!
Other links
This week is unique because there’s quite a few great links out there! To be fair, this batch really brings me joy - I implore you to open them.
Apache Parquet supports Geotypes! I think I had a couple of ideas around using map data and this seems like a great opportunity to give this a spin.
Searching for Birds is BEAUTIFUL. If you are going to click one thing from my newsletter today, it’s this.
Lazy Cats is also BEAUTIFUL and a great way to visualise a scientific paper, check it out as well!
Pocket Boss is a Steam game about fixing bar charts - it goes straight to my Wishlist!
Martin Fowler’s thoughts on AI
Broken Chart: discover 9 visualization alternatives
The Longest Lines Of Sight from All the Views uses an algorithm to calculate longest lines of sight across the globe.
Introduction to building (better) R packages is great workshop material to get started
That’s a wrap! Enjoy your weeks!
Strong selection of links, thanks!