What up, nerds? I'm Jerod and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, July 21st, 2025. The mystery guest for Saturday's [Changelog LIVE](https://changelog.com/live) show is a mystery no more! The amazing [Nora Jones](https://changelog.com/person/norajones) 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 [Pipely](https://pipely.tech) launch, and a trail hike at Red Rocks... that's a [pretty nice little Saturday](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZYsoEwWNK0)... Ok, let's get into this week's news.
Break: Jerod Santo:[Humanity has prevailed (for now!)](https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/exhausted-man-defeats-ai-model-in-world-coding-championship/) Last Wednesday, a Polish programmer (named Przemysław Dębiak) did what may soon be impossible: he beat an advanced AI model from OpenAI in a 10-hour head-to-head coding marathon. > 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, Dębiak'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, Dębiak won 500,000 yen (~3400 USD) and had the following to say [on X](https://x.com/FakePsyho/status/1945444118924272018): > Humanity has prevailed (for now!) > > I'm completely exhausted. I figured, I had 10h of sleep in the last 3 days and I'm barely alive.
Break: Jerod Santo:[Linux breaks 5% desktop share in U.S.](https://www.webpronews.com/linux-breaks-5-desktop-share-in-u-s-signaling-open-source-surge-against-windows-and-macos/) Is the year of the Linux desktop finally upon us?! > 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 macOS, 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!
Break: Jerod Santo:[Make your own backup system](https://it-notes.dragas.net/2025/07/18/make-your-own-backup-system-part-1-strategy-before-scripts/) Stefano Marinelli is writing a series on making your own backup system, and if Part 1 is any indicator, it's going to be an absolute banger. After describing his general philosophy around backups (data must always be restorable, in an open format, and consistent), Stefano helps us develop a plan: > 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 data 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?" Click through if you want Stefano to help you with the core decision (full disk vs individual files), to read about the power of snapshots, and for him to weigh in on the age ol' question: push or pull?
Break: Jerod Santo:It's now time for sponsored news! [Vibe code with confidence](https://www.coderabbit.ai/ide) 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 [coderabbit.ai/ide](https://coderabbit.ai/ide)
Break: Jerod Santo:[I'm switching to Python and actually liking It](https://www.cesarsotovalero.net/blog/i-am-switching-to-python-and-actually-liking-it.html) Six months ago, César Soto Valero 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, César shares the tools, libraries, configs, and other integrations that bring him joy while building Python applications. Notably, he's using [uv](https://github.com/astral-sh/uv) as his package manager, which I'm hearing has largely solved one of Python's biggest pain points: managing 3rd-party code. Related: we're having uv's creator, [Charlie Marsh](https://crmarsh.com), on the podcast in September.
Break: Jerod Santo:[It's rude to show AI output to people](https://distantprovince.by/posts/its-rude-to-show-ai-output-to-people/) Alex Martsinovich says what we've all been thinking: > 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 whenever 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 ..." We will listen to what you say next, but we're doing it for you. Not for us.
Break: Jerod Santo: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](https://tonsky.me/blog/gaslight-driven-development/) - [Junior roles aren’t going away](https://iamcharliegraham.substack.com/p/junior-roles-arent-going-away) - [How to PURGE a global CDN in Elixir](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhQd9XaZTr8) Get in on the newsletter at changelog.news This week on The Changelog: Sugu Sougoumarane talks with us about bringing Vitess to Postgres on Wednesday, and on Friday, we play a round of pound define with some of our Changelog++ members. Have a great week! Like, subscribe, and leave us a 5-star review if you dig the show, and I'll talk to you again real soon.