A new weekly note. The rule is simple: an item makes the list only if we measured something on this machine, or if it changes what you should check before adopting a tool. Plain news does not qualify. Everything below was run this week on a Mac mini M4 Pro with Python 3.14.6, five runs each, medians. 1. Polars 2.0 release candidate versus the cache trick (measured) Last week's video found that a script parsing one million date strings spent most of its time in strptime , and tha...