A 10% reduction in cache size in exchange for a 4% slowdown doesn't seem obviously worthwhile to me, especially when it comes at an increase in complexity.
Whereas I made a mistake and bought an underspeced MacBook and my 512GB disk is constantly on the brink of full as I reclaim the last 40 GB over and over from different caches, downloads, and wherever else and had to simply give up on several projects because of their disk usage.
Exactly my experience, even worse because for me it's 2x256GB drives. Eventually I bit the bullet and upgraded one of them to 1TB, but not the one my root partition is mounted on (too lazy for that), so now I find myself moving various large directories across to my "extra" drive and symlinking them. Funnily enough I don't remember this ever being a problem back when 50GB was considered a lot.
The things which use my disk are things like package caches in several languages, build artifacts in both release and debug, multiplied by worktrees, things like iOS device support and release files + simulators, docker containers and related.
I had to give up on things like Lean theorem prover projects and VM projects because the disk space wasn't there.
The causes of disk waste are manifold and usually can't just be disabled and even when they can the result is constant rebuilding, redownloading, etc.
Too many developer products act like disk and memory is free to waste and the consequences have gotten ridiculous.
What is the point of using packaging software that belongs to ClosedAI?
Astral people are already in the comments making pro AI coding statements. By using uv, you are literally supporting the people who want to make you unemployed for stock options.
> By using uv, you are literally supporting the people who want to make you unemployed for stock options.
By using any FOSS or software produced by software developers and programmers, you are supporting the idea that computation can and should be automated, instead of having humans doing it. This is the origin of computing, and what we've been doing so far, and it continues to "eat the world" via automation, just like the past decades of it.
That is a false equivalency. FOSS started as a counter movement against Microsoft in order to escape from surveillance and corporate control.
The AI cartel is the new Microsoft.
It is amazing how software developers have been brainwashed. Ted Ts'o, Google employee and pro-AI shill at Debian and LWN, recently argued that supporting AI is similar to supporting the Internet in 2000.
That is another fallacy. The Internet is a common carrier and was supposed to lead to freedom in 2000. It has nothing to do with outsourcing your thinking to a bunch of wannabe trillionaires.
> That is a false equivalency. FOSS started as a counter movement against Microsoft in order to escape from surveillance and corporate control.
"Programming" as a concept started with humans being "tired" of manually calculating things, then it became faster than humans, and now our sand can talk human language.
And speaking about false equivalency, there are plenty of models you can run locally yourself. I agree that big tech sucks, and many places in the world need less surveillance and less corporate control, but I don't think the entire LLM-space (besides very obviously the biggest companies) are responsible for that kind of usage.
It's so human that many software engineers started to worry about automation and being replaced when it started to be something that might affect them.
And it is machine like that many software engineers still cheer on being replaced once it is happening.
Software engineers are the socially dumbest creatures on the planet and deserve every bit of scorn that was heaped on them at high school. The industry used them for multi level marketing since about 2010 and now has instructed them to direct the MLM against themselves.
Well, it's fast. Perhaps "they" want me and everyone else unemployed, but it's not immediate and not particularly certain. However, I can use uv here and now to greatly simplify my workflows, so I use it.
I think `pdm` is much nicer. I think if pdm had become a think earlier people would have switched from poetry to pdm rather than this uv thing which is a lot of different things at once.
> deduplication at the file level: every file is now stored under its BLAKE3 hash
Blake3 is really a wonderfully fast cryptographic hash. I use it for my own "deduplication / integrity / berzerker" utility (which I made before LLMs were a thing).
If I've got a file named:
DSC98731-b3-7b39197a22.JPG
then:
- if that file doesn't checksum back to 7b39197a22 there's a file integrity problem (amazing and it already helped me troubleshoot issues)
- if any other file has the same Blake3 7b39197a22 hash, it's a duplicate
- if that 7b39197a22 checksum is in my database, "things can happen".
For example my DB can say "any file with a Blake3 hash of 7b39197a22 can always be deleted" or "any file with a Blake3 hash of 887463c09e, if it's got a generic filename like "dscXXXXX" can always be renamed to "20260722jackJohnAtTheBeach-b3-778463c09e.jpg" (or whatever suits you).
It's really great (and I know several here independently made similar schemes) and Blake3 is an amazing hash for those kind of use.
For those wondering like me: Blake3 generates hashes of at least 224 bits, not, as a literal reading of that comment indicates, 40 bits (which would be bad for file deduplication, giving you a 50% hash collision after around a million files)
Yup sorry if I mislead people. I usually use 10 hexdigits (40 bits) but no matter how many there are, it's the x bits of the beginning of the checksum that are verified against the hash (in the examples I gave 40 bits).
No sadly I don't have any public repo: it's mostly really a collection of shell scripts and then the database one (for the berzerker/renamer) is in Clojure and I run it from my always-on REPL.
But I know others did similar thing so maybe there are public repos out there. But in any case: it should now be the kind of thing relatively easy to vibe-code if it's for your own use.
Another cool thing about BLAKE3 is that it is a merkle tree. Not only it allows for good parallelism, but it also has a lot of cool property for data transfer. For example, you can check for partial validity, which allow for streaming error-detection and resend during the transfer. You only need to have the data and checksum in a way that you can start to reconstruct one or more subtree.
It's annoying that most file formats don't checksum their own content.
Even formats which should know better, like SQLite, delegate that to the filesystem, most of which are also not checksumed and which delegate that further to the storage.
PostgreSQL, which prides itself by it's quality and reliability, only turned on checksums by default in the last version, 18.
This is one great benefit of using .zip files as file formats, you get this for free.
> It's annoying that most file formats don't checksum their own content.
I agree.
> Even formats which should know better, like SQLite, delegate that to the filesystem, most of which are also not checksumed and which delegate that further to the storage.
I mostly run ext4 (desktop, laptops, etc.) but for my main server at home, it's a ZFS (mirrored) tank on an old server with ECC RAM.
I think it's reasonable for a DB like SQLite to delegate that to the filesystem. There is an overhead for doing it on the DB level, and since SQLite is just a file on the filesystem which, presumably, is serving many other files as well, why would you trust anything else on the filesystem if you don't trust SQLite? Like, your PHP script (or nginx server executable, or whatever) that is calling SQLite, that's not going to be check-summed either. Either you trust your filesystem or you don't, and if you don't, checksum and error correct on the filesystem level.
Though fair enough, it could offer it as an opt-in thing.
People say uv is good because it's fast, but honestly I don't care about that. We switched to using it for distribution of our Python-based tools because it makes it very convenient to install directly from a git repository and then to subsequently update from same repository. No need to build a package.
I tried it out successfully for the first time the other day (had 1 false start some months ago). This is after 10 ish years of system wide installs or venvs. I didn't find it fast at all. Every time I went to run the script it spent multiple seconds checking dependencies. Then one time it updated one, which luckily didn't break anything but I did get concerned. I'm sure there're some flags I didn't know to use but uvx was not great. On the other hand, it did seem to install the packages faster than pip.
YMMV depending on specific needs but generally even on Windows on an average machine with an imperfect setup I've found it exceptionally fast, often well inside the sub-second range, to the point that I do sometimes worry if it really ran.
Sounds like it's worth another look at your settings to make sure they are right.
I do avoid uv run for this reason but it’s useful for managing python projects. The speed claims actually have a lot to do with efficient caching, and I run several projects on the same Python (patch) version with similar packages on the same system
https://stephenlf.dev/blog/python-library-in-2026/
Or (nasty) bugs hard to debug
Disk isn't free, especially now.
I had to give up on things like Lean theorem prover projects and VM projects because the disk space wasn't there.
The causes of disk waste are manifold and usually can't just be disabled and even when they can the result is constant rebuilding, redownloading, etc.
Too many developer products act like disk and memory is free to waste and the consequences have gotten ridiculous.
Astral people are already in the comments making pro AI coding statements. By using uv, you are literally supporting the people who want to make you unemployed for stock options.
By using any FOSS or software produced by software developers and programmers, you are supporting the idea that computation can and should be automated, instead of having humans doing it. This is the origin of computing, and what we've been doing so far, and it continues to "eat the world" via automation, just like the past decades of it.
The AI cartel is the new Microsoft.
It is amazing how software developers have been brainwashed. Ted Ts'o, Google employee and pro-AI shill at Debian and LWN, recently argued that supporting AI is similar to supporting the Internet in 2000.
That is another fallacy. The Internet is a common carrier and was supposed to lead to freedom in 2000. It has nothing to do with outsourcing your thinking to a bunch of wannabe trillionaires.
"Programming" as a concept started with humans being "tired" of manually calculating things, then it became faster than humans, and now our sand can talk human language.
And speaking about false equivalency, there are plenty of models you can run locally yourself. I agree that big tech sucks, and many places in the world need less surveillance and less corporate control, but I don't think the entire LLM-space (besides very obviously the biggest companies) are responsible for that kind of usage.
Software engineers are the socially dumbest creatures on the planet and deserve every bit of scorn that was heaped on them at high school. The industry used them for multi level marketing since about 2010 and now has instructed them to direct the MLM against themselves.
And they comply!
I can't see any other comment on this post mentioning AI, did you just make this up?
Blake3 is really a wonderfully fast cryptographic hash. I use it for my own "deduplication / integrity / berzerker" utility (which I made before LLMs were a thing).
If I've got a file named:
then: For example my DB can say "any file with a Blake3 hash of 7b39197a22 can always be deleted" or "any file with a Blake3 hash of 887463c09e, if it's got a generic filename like "dscXXXXX" can always be renamed to "20260722jackJohnAtTheBeach-b3-778463c09e.jpg" (or whatever suits you).It's really great (and I know several here independently made similar schemes) and Blake3 is an amazing hash for those kind of use.
I wasn't very clear.
Do you have it in a public repo you could share?
But I know others did similar thing so maybe there are public repos out there. But in any case: it should now be the kind of thing relatively easy to vibe-code if it's for your own use.
Even formats which should know better, like SQLite, delegate that to the filesystem, most of which are also not checksumed and which delegate that further to the storage.
PostgreSQL, which prides itself by it's quality and reliability, only turned on checksums by default in the last version, 18.
This is one great benefit of using .zip files as file formats, you get this for free.
I agree.
> Even formats which should know better, like SQLite, delegate that to the filesystem, most of which are also not checksumed and which delegate that further to the storage.
I mostly run ext4 (desktop, laptops, etc.) but for my main server at home, it's a ZFS (mirrored) tank on an old server with ECC RAM.
And backups. So much backups.
Though fair enough, it could offer it as an opt-in thing.
Whereas your sqlite data are your data, and if they're corrupted they can be lost forever or propagate the issue to backups.
Compared to what? Fast is relative. Compared to pip it's miles ahead.
Sounds like it's worth another look at your settings to make sure they are right.
https://stephenlf.dev/blog/python-library-in-2026/