News and podcasts for developers

This week we’re talking with Georgi Gerganov about his work on Whisper.cpp and llama.cpp. Georgi first crossed our radar with whisper.cpp, his port of OpenAI’s Whisper model in C and C++. Whisper is a speech recognition model enabling audio transcription and translation. Something we’re paying close attention to here at Changelog, for obvious reasons. Between the invite and the show’s recording, he had a new hit project on his hands: llama.cpp. This is a port of Facebook’s LLaMA model in C and C++. Whisper.cpp made a splash, but llama.cpp is growing in GitHub stars faster than Stable Diffusion did, which was a rocket ship itself.

Often folks think that chasing the next promotion is the best thing to do, but sometimes you should just enjoy where you are..

Our “Hacking with Go” series continues! This time Natalie & Johnny are joined by Ivan Kwiatkowski & Juan Andrés Guerrero-Saade and the conversation is we’re focused around generics and AI.

Typst is a new markup-based typsetting system that is designed to be as powerful as LaTeX while being much easier to learn and use.

Andrew Quinn:

fzf is a bit of a weird program because installing it actually overwrites a whole bunch of keyboard shortcuts, in the interest of making them better. Normally I would hate this. But…

Lots of good stuff in this post 👍

This project brings stable diffusion models onto web browsers. Everything runs inside the browser with no server support. To our knowledge, this is the the world’s first stable diffusion completely running on the browser. Please checkout our demo webpage to try it out.

Josh Comeau:

Over the past few months, I’ve spoken with lots of early-career devs who are getting more and more anxious about AI. They’ve seen the increasingly-impressive demos from tools like GPT-4, and they worry that by the time they’re fluent in HTML/CSS/JS, there won’t be any jobs left for them.

I couldn’t disagree more. I don’t think web developer jobs are going anywhere. And I’m getting pretty sick of the FUD? being spread online.

So, in this blog post, I’m going to share my hypothesis for what will happen. Things are going to change, but not in the scary way people are saying.

Michal Warda on self-hosting in 2023, Martin Heinz will never use Alpine Linux again, Oliver Rice at Supabase creates type constraints in Postgres with just 65 lines of SQL, Aaron Patterson converted a BMW shifter into a Bluetooth keyboard that can control Vim, Piet Terheyden has been curating beautiful & functional websites daily since 2013, Ryan Lucas put together a history of Visual Basic, turns out it’s easy for an open source project to buy fake GitHub stars & Mastodon hit 10 million accounts.

Nowadays, Alpine Linux is one of the most popular options for container base images. Many people (maybe including you) use it for anything and everything. Some people use it because of its small size, some because of habit and some, just because they copy-pasted a Dockerfile from some tutorial. Yet, there are plenty of reasons why you should not use Alpine for your container images, some of which can cause you great amount of grief…

This is an awesome HN thread on all the ways blogging have improved the lives of developers around the world. It’s brimming with statements like:

I’ve been blogging since 1998 and can trace every major step forward in my career to my blog.

The best time to start your developer blog was 1998. The second best time is right now.

Dan Abramov & Joe Savona from the React Team join Jerod & Nick for a wide-ranging discussion about React’s place in the frontend ecosystem. We cover everything from React competing with React, their responses to SPA fatigue and recent criticisms, to Server Components and the future of the framework.

Docker CMO, Tim Anglade:

For those of you catching up, we recently emailed accounts that are members of Free Team organizations, to let them know that they will lose features unless they move to one of our supported free or paid offerings. This impacted less than 2% of our users…

The Docker Free Team subscription was deprecated in part because it was poorly targeted. In particular, it didn’t serve the open source audience as well as our recently updated Docker-Sponsored Open Source program, the latter offering benefits that exceed those of the deprecated Free Team plan.

We’d also like to clarify that public images will only be removed from Docker Hub if their maintainer decides to delete them. We’re sorry that our initial communications failed to make this clear.

Just to be clear: their apology is not about the change, it’s about how they communicated the change. There’s more details in the post about deleting public images, squatting names, etc, but that’s the gist.

TypeScript PM, Daniel Rosenwasser:

This release brings many new features, while aiming to make TypeScript smaller, simpler, and faster. We’ve implemented the new decorators standard, added functionality to better support ESM projects in Node and bundlers, provided new ways for library authors to control generic inference, expanded our JSDoc functionality, simplified configuration, and made many other improvements.

Congrats to Dan, Rachel and the entire React team for shipping a new docs site! Here’s their TLDR:

• The new React site (react.dev) teaches modern React with function components and Hooks.
• We’ve included diagrams, illustrations, challenges, and over 600 new interactive examples.
• The previous React documentation site has now moved to legacy.reactjs.org.

The panel discuss the parts of Go they never use. Do they avoid them because of pain in the past? Were they overused? Did they always end up getting refactoring out? Is there a preferred alternative?

Alex Ellis:

Yesterday, Docker sent an email to any Docker Hub user who had created an “organisation”, telling them their account will be deleted including all images, if they do not upgrade to a paid team plan. The email contained a link to a tersely written PDF (since, silently edited) which was missing many important details which caused significant anxiety and additional work for open source maintainers.

He goes on to explain the problem in great details. Btw, Alex is no Docker hater. He has a long history of using and supporting the tech. He goes on to say:

Open Source has a funding problem, and Docker was born in Open Source. We the community were their king makers, and now that they’re turning over significant revenue, they are only too ready to forget their roots.

This decision seems myopic. There are other image hosting options, one of them even shares (inspired?) half of DockerHub’s name… Oh, and here’s our open invitation to the folks at Docker to come on the pod.

This web-based tool has a lot of cool features: node search, embeddable widgets, downloadable images, dark mode & more. Jump straight to the online editor to try it out.

Neural search and chat-based search are all the rage right now. However, You.com has been innovating in these topics long before ChatGPT. In this episode, Bryan McCann from You.com shares insights related to our mental model of Large Language Model (LLM) interactions and practical tips related to integrating LLMs into production systems.

This week we’re talking with Nathan Sobo about his next big thing. Nathan is known for his work on the Atom editor while at GitHub. But his work wasn’t finished when he left, so…he started Zed, a high-performance multiplayer editor that’s engineered for performance. And today, Nathan talks us through all the details.

This site categorizes, displays & provides CSS font-family declarations for the system fonts on every modern OS. Why are system fonts cool? Because they’re the fastest fonts your website can use. No downloading, no layout shifts, no flashes — just instant renders.

Sualeh Asif from Control (an AI code editor):

We’ve been using GPT-4 for a few months internally, and we thought we’d highlight a few examples](https://github.com/anysphere/gpt-4-for-code) that have been both particularly impressive and really useful to us.

Here it’s converting a Python dict of member functions to esoteric but correct-on-first-try C++ code 👇