Good Morning! There's a new programming language called emiT that lets you send variables back in time, creating parallel timelines and managing paradoxes just like a coding time machine. In a major shift, Meta is opening up Llama for military use by US national security agencies and the "Five Eyes" alliance, marking a significant change in their previous stance on defense applications. And if you've been wondering whether AI is making coding skills obsolete, Google's Research Head has some reassuring news - coding fundamentals are still crucial, even as AI transforms development workflows.

— Forrest Knight & Meghanadh Vasireddy

emiT: A Time Traveling Programming language.

Meet emiT, a C#-based language brings a mind-bending twist to coding by implementing time travel mechanics directly into its syntax. Currently sitting at 62 stars on GitHub, this hobby project was largely crafted in a single afternoon but packs some seriously intriguing concepts.

What's New: The language introduces a unique approach to variable management and program flow. Unlike traditional programming paradigms, emiT lets you send variables back in time to modify the program's past state, creating parallel timelines. Think Git branches, but with paradoxes!

Key Features:

• Time Warping: Variables can travel back to predefined points and modify the source code

• Variable Lifecycle Management: Variables can be "killed" (and potentially resurrected through time travel)

• Paradox Detection: Creating temporal paradoxes causes timeline collapse (essentially next-level error handling)

• Timeline Persistence: Changes in the timeline remain until explicitly altered by going further back

The language implements these concepts through distinctive keywords like 'create', 'kills', and 'warps', while tracking variable states through properties like 'alive', 'dead', and 'exists'. What makes this particularly interesting is how it handles state management – changes to the timeline persist across executions until you explicitly go back to prevent them, creating a fascinating approach to program flow control.

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Meta Opens Llama for Military Use—But There's a Catch

Context: Meta's open-source LLM Llama has been extremely popular as a free alternative to ChatGPT, with restrictions prohibiting military and warfare applications. That's changing now - but only for select nations.

Meta just announced it's granting US national security agencies and defense contractors access to Llama. This extends to the "Five Eyes" intelligence alliance:

• United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand

Tech Details: While Meta markets Llama as "open-source," it doesn't quite fit the bill. The model allows free use, even commercially, but Meta keeps its training data under wraps. This partial openness raises interesting questions about data sovereignty and model control, especially given recent news that Chinese military researchers allegedly used an older version of Llama for defense applications.

Impact: This move signals a significant shift in how tech giants are positioning themselves in the AI arms race. Meta's president Nick Clegg frames it as supporting "US open-source standards in the global race for AI leadership." For developers and security professionals, this means potentially working with contractors like Lockheed Martin, Palantir, and AWS who now have access to Llama's capabilities.

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Coding Still Crucial in AI Era, Says Google Research Head

Google's Head of Research, Yossi Matias, is pushing back against the narrative that coding will be dead in the future. In a recent interview, he emphasized that understanding coding fundamentals remains critical, even as AI reshapes development workflows.

While tools like GitHub Copilot promise up to 70% reduction in coding time, the data tells a different story:

• A recent survey of 800 developers revealed no productivity gains with Copilot, and a 41% increase in bugs in pull requests

This aligns with what many senior developers have observed – AI is excellent at assisting with boilerplate and routine tasks, but it can't replace the deeper understanding needed for system design, optimization, and debugging. Think of AI as pair programming on steroids, not a replacement for core engineering skills.

Looking Ahead: Matias suggests that rather than replacing developers, AI is transforming the development landscape into a hybrid environment where human expertise in code review, validation, and system architecture becomes even more crucial. For junior developers especially, mastering the fundamentals remains essential for effective collaboration with AI tools.

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🔥 More Notes

• Two Upstart Search Engines Are Teaming Up to Take on Google

• Visual Basic 6 rebuilt in C# - complete with form designer and IDE, runs directly in browser (WASM)

• Apple teams with global airlines to locate lost baggage via AirTag. Details

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