Turn him into a walrus

First link in the show notes… Oh, it’s an entire chapter.

What?!

We talked about it for two minutes and 28 seconds, at least; probably also in here, probably in here…

You know, it’s –

“I recommend MinBrowser.” You said, “Sounds promising.” I said, “Yeah.” And then you said, “At least by name.” And then “I remember because Perplexity pointed me to it.” “Is that what you’re using now?” And I’m like “Yeah, it is.” And you’re like “Is this a reveal?” And I said, “Yeah, it’s a big reveal. MinBrowser. Oh my gosh, I love this… It is cool. And I like it’s up to date and maintained well.” You just kept going on and on about it.

Oooh…! Okay.

I’m thinking maybe I’m talking to Adam’s innie right now… Because we mostly work together. I mean, we kind of are always just –

Yeah. We’re the innies.

We’re the two innies talking to each other.

Yeah. Maybe a – MinBrowser… Let me see. Let me see.

You don’t remember the MinBrowser? It’s this minimal browser that I found, that I was going to use while I screen-share during our recordings, which is exactly what I’m doing right now.

Oh, my gosh…

And so I said, “Can you see Min?”

I still think it looks promising, okay? I just didn’t download it.

If you just reread the transcript…

I’m very happy with Safari.

I love Safari too, I just use Min specifically for this one use case… And here we are.

What’s the use case?

We’re friendsing together. Sharing my screen while we friends, so there’s minimal Chrome…

Okay. Minimal Chrome.

Is this bringing you back? Are you remembering this or you’ve still got nothing?

I’m with you now. I’m tracking fully. I’m what they call up to date. Up to date.

Awesome. Well, have you heard any of the hubbub around OpenAI’s new image capabilities? ChatGPT, new image creation abilities.

You know, I’m constantly just kind of peeling back the top layer from that fire hose called AI stuff, or announcements.

And I recall hearing about this… I’ve got to say, I’ve been away a little bit. I had my brother in town, so I just ejected from the news, let’s just say.

Right.

But I do pay attention always, as you know. So I heard about it, but I didn’t play with it yet.

You haven’t played with it yet. Alright. Well, there’s a couple aspects to this particular story. First you have the advancement of the tooling itself inside ChatGPT. I would say that – you know I’ve been switching over to LLaMA, I’ve been using DeepSeek, I’m trying to use these other models, local LLMs… But every time I leave, I feel like OpenAI just pulls me back in. Like, ChatGPT has this tractor beam around it. And they’re really, I think, developing – I don’t know if it’s a moat, but maybe it’s a habit for me, to where eventually Google just won, because you’re just going to go to google.com, because that’s what you do… It’s pulling me back in. And this new image capabilities pulled me back in big time.

But there’s also an IP angle to this, copyright etc, stealing from artists… There’s, I think, a coding angle that I can at least draw out… But first let me say that recently, probably while you were away, OpenAI announced some crazy new capabilities inside of ChatGPT, specifically around image generation. And I will just say it’s super-compelling. It’s like really good. And you haven’t played with this yet.

No, I have not.

Alright.

Do you have a file?

I do have a file. Let me show it to you.

Okay. Show me your file.

For those who are watching along, you’ll see this, and the others - we’ll add show notes links.

This is a temporary chat. They’re not keeping this.

I have a temporary chat. I don’t want this in my history, you know… It’s gonna get dirty.

Come on now…

I’ve dropped an image of you into ChatGPT. This is you staying in front of a golf club, it seems…

Yes, we were golfing.

…wearing a Callaway hat… Now, this is an HEIC file, because - I’m not sure why. Because that’s what you gave me. And I’m not sure if ChatGPT is going to like it or not, but I’m going to ask it to transform you into something. Now, I’m going to step on Lego’s copyright, I think - I don’t know - and say “Turn him into a Lego character.” And we’ll get that going. Now, it is slower, but it’s kind of cool how it does it. Now, this is not an ad, by the way. Maybe that’ll be a conversation for later. [unintelligible 00:08:30.02]

[00:08:31.02] Oooh, yeah. Ad or not.

They should, but they don’t. They have lots of dollars, I hear. But they’ve changed the way they do this to where now it’s like this top to bottom phase-in kind of thing, where they’re going pixel by pixel, left to right, top to bottom… Which is cool, because it kind of like – I mean, this just takes a long time, but they are changing it, or they are demonstrating it in a way that you kind of like to watch along while it does its modifications… However, it’s just getting started, so we’re going to have to talk for a while. This is a large HEIC file. Let me tell you what else happened in the wake of this.

Okay.

So they made this announcement, and somebody very quickly realized that you can say things like “Take this picture and make the people in it into Studio Ghibli style”, or Studio Ghibli, if you prefer. Are you familiar with the Miyazaki movies?

School me, Jerod.

Okay…

Catch me all the way up to all the things.

Jerod takes Adam to school. Studio – it’s controversial whether it’s Ghibli, or Ghibli.

Okay…

And in fact, the creator – you know, it’s like GIF and GIF. Normally I’d come down on the Ghibli side, because I don’t acknowledge GIF as a file format… But the creator, I think, is cool with either way. So whatever you want to call it. Studio Ghibli - or Ghibli - is a…

I’m going Ghibli.

…animation studio. Okay, let’s go with Ghibli. Headed up by Miyazaki, who’s a Japanese animator, filmmaker etc. And artist. And they’ve had some amazing movies spirited away. Probably the most popular… Where’s the actual list of movies here?

Feature films. Right there.

Oh, I’m in it. I just couldn’t see – all I was reading was Japanese names.

Yeah, I know. The left column.

Yeah, it’s the left column.

Second from left.

Castle in the Sky, My Neighbor Totoro… What are other good ones? Princess Mononoke… Spirited Away is the most popular. Howl’s Moving Castle… Tons of good movies. You’ve probably seen none of these… Because you have to kind of search them out.

Yeah, I’m not –

But specifically the art style is… Let’s go to images. So they’ve created a very well-known…

Style.

…style. It’s very anime. And somebody found out that you can say “Make this picture in Studio Ghibli style”, and it just does it. And the results are kind of amazing.

No way…

Yeah, they’re really good.

You should have Ghibli’d me.

Well, I didn’t want to Ghibli you. I wanted to try something else.

Okay…

But of course, this caused a huge copyright kerfuffle, because - hey, if it can just make Studio Ghibli style pictures, that means they basically just went out and trained it on all the Studio Ghibli stuff…

Oh, yeah.

…they have no permission to do that… Are they going to sue? Is this immoral? Etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.

Immoral? Gosh, they’re going deep now.

Well, what happened was everybody started turning everything into Studio Ghibli style. imagine a famous picture, imagine all the memes… Every meme got turned into –

Monalisa.

Yes. You name it, and people were posting –

Trump.

Of course…

Who else…? Elon Musk? Is he still famous?

[00:11:51.20] Elon Musk, I’m sure… It happened to him… It happened to – remember the girl in the foreground of the house that’s burning down, and she’s got that look on her face?

Oh, yeah…

Every single meme got converted into this style, within hours.

Oh, my gosh…

And so it’s kind of a joyous moment on the internet, because everybody forgot their troubles and just said “What if everything was Studio Ghibli style?”

And then the world would be great.

And then it was great for a few short hours.

Okay. TIL, Disaster Girl, Real Story. Check this out, folks in Zulip, in the General channel… TIL, Disaster Girl, Real Story. We will just talk right over this. Okay, what’s happening here?

So one of the other things that happened in the wake of this is Sam Altman’s like “Hey guys, our computers are on fire here. Stop using this like crazy.” And everything slowed down, and things started to fail. I’m trying to get you an example… However, at the current time it’s failing. So that makes for great audio. I’ll try to get you into a Lego character, see if that one works. Maybe they’ve put an outlaw on Studio Ghibli for now.

Well, while it does that, there is a little thread there, linking out to a closing the loop story on the little girl who is the Disaster Girl. This YouTube channel, which I have become a fan of, called Buzzfeed Video… Gosh, ever hear that? And she accidentally became a meme… So it went to the backstory.

So if you ever wanted to know who’s that girl - no, Jerod, not your “Who’s that girl…?” I knew you were thinking that. As soon as I said it, I knew you were thinking that.

Of course. So is that the who?

What do you mean the who?

Who sings that song? Who’s that girl?

I don’t know.

Is that the who?

Is it the who?

[laughs] Oh, it’s not even “Who’s that girl…?” It’s “Oooh, that girl…”

Oh, is it “Ooh, that girl”?

Ooh-ooh, that smell… [laughs]

Oh, my gosh… You just crossed two paths, but I’m chasing you now.

Yes. It’s that smell… It’s literally Skynyrd. And the lyric is, “Ooh, that smell.” For some reason, we both went to “Who’s that girl…?!” That’s amazing.

Well, I went to “Who’s that girl” because of your show… What’s it called again?

What’s my show?

Your favorite show, man. Ever.

Princess Bride?

New Girl.

Oh, New Girl.

Yeah. It’s Jess.

Oh, yes. “Who’s that girl…? Who’s that girl…? It’s Jess!”

That’s right.

That’s a completely different tone, but…

Totally.

…fair enough.

Well, see, if you’re playing the game “Who’s that girl?”, guess what happens?

Got you.

You find out who that girl is, and she’s a meme now. Or she was a meme, and she still is a meme, I suppose.

What if you’re playing the game “What’s that smell?”

Oh, man…

Can you say? What do you say then?

What do you think this song is about, this “Ooh, that smell”? That’s what I want to go to.

Oh… Death? Isn’t it the smell of death? Let’s check out on one of my favorite websites, genius.com, where people annotate lyrics.

Oh, man.

Yeah, here’s the chorus. “Ooh, that smell. Can’t you smell that smell? Ooh, that smell. The smell of death surrounds you.” So the smell is death, Adam. The smell is death.

This is a dark song.

I know.

It’s got coke in there, and smoke in there, and death in there… Drinking like fools… Is this image generated yet or not?

It says it’s created, but it’s just utterly failing us. So…

I’m thinking it’s your browser, man… In a whole new screen, just go do it elsewhere. Off-screen. See what happens.

I’m going to go do it off-screen.

Expose us to the Jerod world… This [unintelligible 00:15:30.01] you’ve created.

I want to show you how good this is. In the meantime, I do have a software development angle into this particular event. Here’s my software development take. So – gosh, this is really good. It’s a step change from the previous version. In fact, people were comparing this to like the Apple emoji stuff, the Apple genmoji stuff, where it will generate you things… There’s a great one as a comparison - maybe I can find it for the show notes - where it’s like “Here’s ChatGPT 4.0”, whatever new stuff. “Make me a picture of the main Severance characters, the four main Severance people as Legos.” And then the exact same prompt to Apple Intelligence, and it’s like night and day. I mean, the OpenAI one is just so good.

[00:16:22.05] It just smears their face with the ooze of goodness.

It is.

Oh, my gosh…

And it’s so good that you’re like “I’m sorry, illustrators…” You know? Like, “I’m sorry, you creative people out there.” It’s just happening. And it’s happening right before our eyes… And now you can see my software development crossover angle into this. It’s like…

I’m sorry, developers. It’s happening right now.

…we’re getting there. It’s happening…! I mean, we’re two years in, plus, and… Gosh, this has just got so good.

Yeah. I mean, we did just kind of like make fun of vibe-coding. And then somebody said we didn’t. That we said it was good.

Well, they might have been talking about my conversation with Amal Hussein, not with you.

Okay. So you were misquoting them?

I think you misread. I think they were talking about LinkedIn. Because I told Amal that LinkedIn is not so bad anymore… And they thought I meant LinkedIn was good. Vibe-coding, I’m very much ambivalent about. I actually love the term, and I think that as my most famous of my vibe-coding memes said, vibe-shipping is really the problem. Vibe-coding’s totally cool. It’s when you ship that into production that it gets hairy and gnarly. However, somebody just posted something on Hacker News yesterday… “I vibe-coded a 35,000 lines of code app.” A recipe app, with pretty impressive results. I mean, that’s a large codebase, compared to what lots of folks have been putting out there. This is Tom Blomfield, who says “Over the last two to three weeks I vibe-coded the recipe app that I always wish existed.” RecipeNinja.ai. It now includes a fully interactive voice assistant, so you don’t need to get your dirty hands over your new iPad when you’re cooking.

So – I mean, kind of a cool app. Here’s his background. “I’m a startup founder turned investor. I taught myself bad PHP in 2000, and picked up Ruby on Rails in 2011. I’d guess 2015 was the last time I wrote a line of Ruby professionally.” So that’s a decade ago. “Last month I decided to use Windsurf”, which I don’t even know what that is, “to build a Rails 8 API backend and React frontend app.” I assume Windsurf is like a Cursor style thing… “I’m using OpenAI’s real-time API for voice-to-voice responses. Over the last few days I used Claude Code and Gemini 2.5 Pro for some of the trickier features. 35,000 lines of code later, this is what I’ve built.” And they link it up… And you know, it’s a real website, with categories, voice search, cool loading images… It looks like they progressively load. And the recipe steps. Entirely vine-coded. So it’s not quite “Take this image and turn it into Studio Ghibli”, but… Not bad.

Not bad.

Now, is it easily hacked? Time will tell.

Maybe.

It’s on the public internet now, and it’s gotten some attention. Are there any actual inputs besides search? How do you create a new recipe? You can sign in with Google, you can start cooking… But where is the third-party inputs? Because that’s where rubber hits the road on the internet. It’s like, once I have a Submit button somewhere. I don’t see any of those. Maybe you have to sign in to do that. But how do you create your own recipes? So it’s still basic in that way.

[00:20:10.12] Do you think these images are AI-generated based on the recipe?

I don’t know. I mean, the first one looks like, because it’s like a Wonder Woman picture…

Well, A Very Boring Life Cake, the one on the second row…

Oh, A Very Boring Life Cake. It looks like a poundcake, maybe… Or a cheesecake.

Yeah. I mean, that looks like a pretty awesome, non-boring cake. I’d eat that.

[laughs]

I’m thinking about eating it right now…

Deepest Deep Dish Pizza… Yeah, these must be AI-generated images, because this thing looks like it’s like a stack of pizzas, and it’s not real.

Yeah.

So yeah, also probably using that…

So I think I’m hovering in the world of “It’s all plastic.” Do you know that term, “It’s all plastic”?

No. School me.

It’s generally derogatory, because like you get this nice thing, and you expect it to be sturdy, and all the things. Durable… To use a recent term. But it’s all plastic, and it breaks easily. So that’s maybe a take on the vibe-coding; you know, is that code maintainable by a non-human? Maybe you don’t care.

Sometimes zero to one is not the hard part. It’s maintaining one, and going to two. That’s the challenge. Although I’ve gotta say, I agree with you, I think it’s super-cool… And it actually leads me – I mean, this is sort of off topic. I can riff a second. I had this idea, or at least this insight last night… Let me see if I can conjure this into show material here momentarily. I had some really good ideas last night. I’m gonna share with you anyways. Anyways, anyways. So I had this idea called the AI layer, where every meaningful application that you touch on the daily, these kind of tools you touch - from email to, you know, layer something in - will have some sort of AI layer to it. I think MCP is what’s really ushering this interface into play. This AI layer to interface with, which means we will begin to truly begin to program our world. So think vibe-coding for everyone.

I’ve got home automation around me. At some point, these things will have this – it’s already got it, but it’s not accessible via this automation, I would say. That’s where the AI comes in; it’s more automation than it is generative. But this AI layer where you can begin to orchestrate your life. That’s where I think the next frontier might be, and I think vibe-coding is one layer of this future AI layer we’ll live in.

Break: [00:23:04.03]

I got ChatGPT to do the thing.

Oh gosh, how did it do?

I’m screen-sharing it now. Can you see it?

I’m going to go back to my tab… Let me see… Oh, my gosh…!

Alright, so I dropped in a picture of you standing in front of a clubhouse, with a hat on, and glasses…

That’s amazing.

“Turn him into a Lego character.” And the end result is basically exactly that.

That’s uncanny.

What do you think? Pretty good, right?

That’s uncanny.

I mean, the details are – it really gets it, because it’s not just…

Give me that image as fast as possible. I need to keep that. That’s amazing. I want that.

Ain’t that cool?

That might become my avatar. I don’t know.

Right?

I’m sharing it with my brother, for sure. He’s going to love it.

It’s just too much fun. I mean, everybody wants themselves to just get turned into… You can do like South Park style, obviously Ghibli style, Lego style… I mean, you imagine it, and it will do it for you. And it’s not even hard. I didn’t give it like a sophisticated prompt. “Turn him into a Lego character.”

How many words is that? Six, seven?

And the background was interesting. Your original picture has a guy in the background. I think he’s walking out…

It was going to rain that day.

And then in this picture - look, there’s a guy. He’s going in, so it’s a little bit different. You can notice how the logo on the clubhouse –

[unintelligible 00:26:40.17]

This was like a falcon flying, and then in this one it looks more like an F, but it actually is still the same shape and the same color…

Dude, that’s actually pretty cool for [unintelligible 00:26:53.16] Falcon head, because the bird’s now in an F shape…

That’s right. Calloway came across, so the exact spelling of Calloway is there on your hat… Now, you have an Under Armor… Oh, look at that. You do have Under Armor on.

Dude, the picture is even backwards. Look at that. It’s not even – it’s in selfie mode.

Well, they put it in a better spot for you. Oh, that’s true. So you’re actually in selfie mode. So your Calloway reads backwards.

Yes.

And the actual generated one reads forward, which is actually preferable, too.

You know, they were like “No, we can’t give him back selfie mode. We’ve got to give him back straight up mode.”

“I’m going to put that Under Armor logo where it fits…”

That’s compelling.

I mean, I’ve been using this nonstop. I just drop stuff in there and tell it to do things, and it’s just amazing.

Oh, my gosh… What is it doing for you?

I’m just generating pictures of my kids doing different stuff, funny stuff… We have a talent show upcoming at our church. It’s actually tomorrow night. And one of the things there is going to be a walrus impersonation contest. This is still on the down low, so don’t tell anybody this… Because if people find out, it’ll ruin the surprise. But I’m taking pictures of these different kids who are all going to do a walrus impression, and I’m turning them into walruses using this. I’m going to show it to them, and they’re going to absolutely just lose it, because they’re so funny. Because it pulls across your likeness, but then transforms you into a walrus. Let me do it for you real quick.

How’s that even possible.

I’m just going to say, “Turn him into a walrus.”

Oh.

[00:28:20.27] Now, this won’t be that flattering, but it will be funny.

Let’s cut this, Jason. Let’s cut this just in case he goes south here.

Let’s keep this, Jason, if it goes south.

Cut the feed. Cut the feed.

If it doesn’t go south, cut it. If it goes south, keep it.

Keep it no matter what. It’s good…!

Alright, so we’ll let that generate. Oh, this must’ve been my MinBrowser versus my Safari browser.

It was.

It likes it. Maybe it was temporary mode. Like, I can’t do temporary mode, because I’ll lose some stuff…

No, we’re keeping it.

…because this is going right into my stinking history.

We’re [unintelligible 00:28:49.05]

That’s right. I’ve been turning lots of people into walruses in my chat history… So ChatGPT is already onto me.

Well, it’s line by lining us here… Let’s go back to what you said before, which was private AI is watching. I’m just kidding, it’s not watching you. It’s actually not watching you. So private AI versus this tractor beam, this gravity, this…

Yes.

This pull back into the OpenAI world.

Yes.

I’m feeling that, because here’s me wanting to have agency, wanting to – oh my gosh, this is looking cool. Wanting to have this world where I’m like “No. I’ve got my own GPU, and I’ve got my own models called DeepSeek and others, and I’m running my show.” But it’s not about the billions of parameters in the model, or even what the model can generate. It’s the structured output and the utility of the application that makes it useful. And obviously, you’re not doing this image generation yet in your local LLMs.

Right.

But they keep delivering features. Claude as well. They keep delivering features that are above the model, above what the model is trained on in terms of its knowledge inside. It’s like the layering on top that is truly the cherry on top of this pie, because I can get - and I’ve compared DeepSeek to LLaMA 3.2 and to LLaMA 3.3 and waited for a bit… And DeepSeek R71, for example, whatever it might be, versus 4.0, paid model, or even 0.1, or this image generation stuff you’re doing, versus Claude Sonnet 3.7, I believe… And what is – Haiku is 3.5… And when I compare a prompt that I want to put into these things, I get marginally, if not dramatically better enjoyment in riffing, I would say - this riffing, vibing - with the thing, because it’s just got better output, better structured output. Even if the ideas aren’t necessarily better, the way it packages it, the way it bullet-lists it, the way it structures the output into an outline… Have you tried to make this thing your task list, ever? Just imagine you being overwhelmed for a moment. Have you been overwhelmed recently with like your to-do list?

No. Never.

Well, when you take a break for a few days, you get overwhelmed a little bit. So I’m like “Hey, I’ve gotta come back into work after a few days being totally departed… Here’s what’s on my mind. Here’s what I’ve gotta get done. Organize this for me.” I just talked to it like that. Bam! Oh, my gosh… Here I am, a walrus, by the way… I just looked down for the first time in a minute…

You’ve still got your Calloway hat on, you’ve got your glasses… You’ve lost –

Oh my gosh, dude…

You’ve lost your Under Armor shirt… So walrus is going commando. But everything else is still the same.

Do you think that’s me, though? [laughter]

Hey, I mean, it’s art.

You’re like “Everything else is the same”, as if it’s like going to be me…

Well, I mean, it’s –

As close to me as you can get. Okay.

It’s a walrus… And so it’s going to be a walrus, but it’s going to try to have – it’s got your eyes.

Is my nose like that, Jerod?

It’s got your eyes. I mean –

[00:32:10.19] My tusks…

The tusks are slightly longer. It does have your facial hair, so…

My stubble. Oh my gosh, dude… And it’s holding the camera. It’s selfie-ing.

It is selfie-ing, absolutely.

[laughs]

So… Just too much fun.

Ooh… Okay. This is good stuff, man. I mean, this is what the internet is made for right here.

I know, that’s the thing. I’m sympathetic to the artists and I feel bad, but I’m also sympathetic to us developers, and I’m going to feel bad as it continues to go away from us, but… Gosh, this is good stuff.

What do you think we should do?

It’s just too much fun. This is what – you didn’t see my Indiana Pacers thing in the recent Changelog News, because you didn’t listen this week, but…

This week no.

And this isn’t even new. I just came across this. It happened last year, but it’s kind of something that I’m into right now, which I’m calling joyous use of tech. It’s like, let’s use technology to bring joy to people. And at Indiana Pacers games - you know the Jumbotron, and they show like different things, like the kiss cam, and all this stuff that happens during the breaks…

Yes…

Well, this is at a Pacers versus Lakers game. And whoever’s around the Jumbotron, they put this crying filter, like just standard Snapchat filters, over the Lakers’ fans faces. And so they’ll zoom in on some Lakers fans, but they replace their face with a crying filter… And it just looks like they’re crying. And it’s absolutely hilarious. Everyone’s laughing, even the person who’s getting their face covered up with a crying face; and the fact that they start to laugh, it actually looks like they’re like sobbing and convulsing, and so it kind of compounds the effect…

Oh, yes…

And I just highlighted that on Changelog news, because it’s like, let’s use software to bring each other joy, you know? And this – I mean, for me, turning people into walruses, or anything else I think of, I can imagine, it’s just so much fun.

Oh, my gosh. This walrus is uncanny. I mean, it’s just – I can’t believe it. Now I’m not sure which one I want more, the Lego version of the walrus version.

Well, you still haven’t done the –

Do the Ghibli one.

I’ll do the Ghibli one.

Let’s run that with a Ghibli, close it there…

So a recent conversation in our general chat - by the way, general is now public, so look out… All of our chats are now public on Changelog.zulipchat.com.

I’m scared about this…

So you can read along, without even signing up. There was a cool idea coming from Brian Douglas about doing some revisits or some catch-up chats. We’ve definitely done catch-up episodes, but not very many. And there’s so many episodes that go back. In fact, Brian was suggesting that we could revisit “The rise of io.js”, number 139.

Oh, my gosh…

And I got to thinking, “Well, io.js doesn’t exist anymore.” It got merged back into Node. And so there’s nothing to revisit. And then he also suggested “Hoodie, noBackend, Offline-First”, episode 111… And I was like “I don’t think any of that’s very relevant anymore.” And then he mentioned Exercism, so what if we caught up with the Exercism folks… That one still exists, it’s still out there; it’s just run by different people, and so we don’t know them anymore. It was Katrina Owen back when we had her on the show a couple of times…

She’s still involved.

I don’t think so.

I’m pretty sure she is.

Okay, well, she’s not running the show anymore. I know that. Anywho… It’s tough sometimes, because a lot of these things just don’t exist anymore. And that got me thinking about some of our earlier episodes…

Right… I know where you’re going with this.

And where are they now?

Ooph… You said it.

Where are they now…? So I thought it’d be fun for us to just go through a few early episodes of the Changelog, and just figure out where are they now? What’s up with the project? Is it still a thing? etc. Because so many things have come and gone, or changed form over the years. And the very first episode was about Haml, Sass and Compass. Where are they now? Where’s Haml? Where’s Sass? And where is Compass? Any thoughts?

[00:36:26.09] Well, Haml is still there, apparently.

Haml still has a website. Haml is a templating language for Ruby. This is very much our Ruby roots coming out as we go back to our first episodes, because a lot of it’s in the Ruby community. It’s basically a way of –

So much cleaner, right? Look at that. How beautiful it was.

Right. Making cleaner templates…

What a dramatic shift.

And the website still exists. Copyright 2006 to 2023. Does that give you any hints?

That’s a couple of years dated, yeah.

It’s a couple of years dated. So if you look at the latest version of Haml, 6.3.0, and you click around and find out when that actually shipped, it was back in 2023. So there is a commit four months ago… So not like forever ago dead, but last release, December 2023. So certainly, not super-active anymore. What about Sass?

Sass, yes…

Sass, of course…

I don’t use Sass anymore.

CSS with superpowers. You were big into this one. You even have thesassway.com, didn’t you?

Oh, the sassway.com. It was good. John and I just talked about this super-briefly in that frontend with friends episode. John W. Long, by the way. Yes, Sass was really the first open source project that really got me into, I would say, more open source. I did some libraries around it, that are obviously dead now to me. Some others may be still using them, but… Yeah, Sass was really cool. Because CSS was static, obviously, and generating CSS with Sass was cool.

I think largely, though, most of the features that I enjoyed in Sass now exist in CSS proper, or Tailwind has abstracted those things to make me feel like they’re CSS-native tooling. And forgive me, because I just don’t do any frontend work, unless it’s got Tailwind involved. I just prefer it.

So Sass looks like it is still maintained. It says here “Sass has been actively supported for over 18 years by its loving core team.” So props to them for that. There even is a Mastodon account, which tells me that, you know, relatively new…

Yeah. Copyright’s there, 2025.

Copyright as of this year, Sass on GitHub. Are there still active commits going on? Here’s Sass/sass… Three days ago, Dependabot at least.

Can’t tell you the status of this, though. What does this mean? Because there was always the Scss and Sass world. And I think Sass, similar to Haml, just went away.

Yeah. This is specifically the Sass library slash executables that I think were written in Ruby and then were eventually rewritten in JavaScript to be Npm installed, versus Rvm installed, or gem installed. And so yeah, I think all these are successful projects. They just, like you said, kind of got brought into the web platform in a certain way. Haml didn’t, but Sass certainly did. Compass was even more specific, right? Compass was all about –

You know, it was hard to separate.

Oh, look at that…! Compass is now – the domain’s been taken over. I may be getting malware as we speak.

Oh my gosh, get out of there, man…

So this is no longer cool.

Abort. Abort. And we should probably remove that link from our stuff… Which reminds me, YouTube’s been hitting us up with all kinds of takedowns because of some of our old links on old episodes now point to domains which have malware on them… Maybe we should do some sort of a link scanner that goes through and checks those links and changes them, and it goes to archive.org… I don’t know. A lot of work. But when you maintain a website that points at things for 2009 until now, eventually some of those links are going to rot.

[00:40:25.29] Oh, yeah. A lot of rot going on there.

So that’s episode one. You know, a mixed bag. Episode two was the original Changelog Weekly, so that’s not really even a…

Oh, gosh…

Episode three was about the Go programming language –

Where has this gone?

…so that was very much relevant. Rob Pike, episode three… We all know where Go is now.

All of us do.

Episode four is a half hour conversation, probably just with you and Wynn, about ChromeOS, Thor, and Roar. Do you know what these are? You didn’t even know what MinBrowser was after a few weeks…

No. Thor - I know what Thor is.

Thor was some sort of deployment tool, right?

Thor was a lot like make. No, rake.

Rake, yeah. It was like that.

Yeah, it was Ruby-esque…

WebROaR?

It’s hard to tell, Jerod, where you land…

None of these tabs are loading.

Thor was…

Broken links, y’all. Broken…

He created Ember. Who’s that fellow? What’s his name?

Oh yeah, wycats. Yehuda.

Um, no…

Oh. Yehuda Katz created Ember, I think…

Yehuda Katz, yes.

That’s what I just said.

You said wycats.

That’s his handle. Then I said Yehuda Katz.

Oh. My bad. I was thinking – when you said that, I was thinking the dude that aborted on Ruby. What’s his name? Why The Lucky Stiff.

Oh yeah, Why.

For whatever reason, when you said wycats, I thought Why The Lucky Stiff. So my bad.

Yeah. Well, Why The Lucky Stiff aborted on the entire internet.

And now he’s just… Happy. Jeremy Ashkenas…

Yeah, Ashkin5 was Jeremy Ashkinas, or Ashkenas…

Ashinkas…

DocumentCloud and Underscore.js. Dude, I loved Underscore.js so much.

Yes… It was the way for a very long time.

It was. It looks like it’s still actively maintained. 286 contributors. Stuff going on.

I’m like, who’s using this now?

Nine months ago… Legacy apps that just haven’t installed already, and they’re just not going to. What would you do, rip it out? You might as well just use it.

Yeah, I guess so. It works.

I don’t think anybody’s installing it today. But you know, jQuery’s still on 75% of websites… And so those who don’t know, Underscore.js is a utility-belt library, where alongside the dollar sign for jQuery, the underscore was how you access all of these fun, functional functions, like map, reduce, filter etc.

You almost said fun, fun, fun.

I did. Fun, fun, function. Remember that show?

Was that a throwback?

Yeah. I mean, it’s an accidental one, but yes.

I dig that. Did you see that it was – the commercial support is offered by Tidelift? Didn’t they get acquired recently?

Tidelift did get acquired, but I don’t remember by whom, or any of the details.

Or what the details are of that. Well, that’s cool… I mean… You know, as you’re going through these links and stuff, I was just thinking, is Haml an attack vector? Is Underscore an attack vector? And you’ve got these older, popularized, like you said, legacies still being used, so maybe under the radar, so to speak, whenever it comes to maintenance, and just oversight from the developers, allowing them to be dependencies… Is there an attack vector there?

I think there definitely could be. I’m not saying that there is. Haml obviously is going to be rendering user-generated content on some websites, as it’s a templating engine that oftentimes will render something that somebody entered… So there could be an attack vector there if you could find some way of exploiting it. And then Underscore is going to be loading up in people’s browsers, and you can obviously check in –

[00:44:19.19] Do a lot there.

You can do stuff there. Yeah. So I would say yes… But also mature software. Underscore has 30 open issues to this day. Most of them are probably people asking “Hey, is this going to…?”

Breaking changes.

“Is this going to be updated anytime soon?” Etc. Alright, how about one more…?

Last one. Last one. Oh, gosh…

MongoDB, episode seven.

This is cool.

Mongo. Still going strong, right? I mean, they’re a publicly-traded company, aren’t they?

Yeah. That’s seven?

This is episode seven, yeah.

I’m going to go to that right now.

MongoDB. Loved by developers.

What was TenGen? TenGen was the company Mongo came out of? My gestures in Safari don’t work anymore, for some reason. My back swipes… Like, who would turn that off? Who would turn that off on me? You will land at MongoDB.com. If you are scared of NoSQL, run. Quickly.

Break: [00:45:24.15]

Yeah, my back swipe gestures are not working anymore in my system, for some reason. And I’m a little angry about it. I’m a little angry.

Well, that could lead us into our next discussion, which is - is this an ad or is this not an ad? Do you want to tee that one up?

Let me get my bearings here real quick, okay? Because somebody cut me deep… Somebody cut me deep.

[laughs] This also was in our Zulip community. I believe it was called “Ad or interview”, something like that.

Yes. Let’s see here… I was mostly sad about the breaking continuity of the episode number, and name, and stuff like that. Then somebody drops in an interview, or an ad and a question mark, and it’s like “Come on now, man… You ruined the beauty of the list.”

So - for context, in our Zulip channels, each new episode gets auto posted by our system with its episode number and title.

True.

And then the conversation for that show will go inside that particular topic. You can also just create topics, but people weren’t really doing that, they were kind of letting those not be… And then somebody created a topic in the interviews channel, which I think makes sense… Probably general might even make more sense. But it’s totally cool. It’s just that you’re a little bit pedantic, I guess.

Well, I figured it might actually upset you more than it did me, so I was kind of sad for you… But then I thought about - you’ve ruined the beauty of the list. [unintelligible 00:49:54.03]

Oh, yeah… I’ve come to embrace the chaos.

Okay. Well, good for you. You’re growing. I’m happy for you.

I am.

Okay. So interview or an ad, question mark. Tim Uken. Sorry… How would you say that, Jerod? Uken. Yeah, Uken.

Tim Uken.

Tim Uken. Sorry about that, Tim. I messed your last name up. Haven’t said it out loud before. I’m not going to read what he said there. Should I read what he said there? I guess so… It’s context. He says, “I’m sure this is a fine line, but at what point does an interview become an ad? I’m not talking about open source maintainers or anything like that… But when you interview the CEO or CTO of a company and that interview centers around their product or service, it starts to smell like product placement, or just plain old advertising to me. Not that people don’t have anything interesting to say, but I think you guys should do your best to steer the conversation away from the product. Maybe talk about their personal history, or whatever. I don’t know.” They said, “Anyway, in the recent Beyang Liu episode–” This is the episode in question. So I talked to Beyang Liu, Sourcegraph co-founder and CTO.

Episode 632.

Yeah, episode 632. He said, “I ended the episode prematurely because of this, even though I am a user of Cody and I like it. Maybe it’s just me.” And so I was like – I was marinating. I read this, stepped away, didn’t jump in right away… And here you are, Jerod, hours or two later. What’d you say?

I said, “Our interviews are never ads. In other words, you cannot pay us money to come on our shows. We only talk to and about things we are genuinely curious about.” So I thought that that was short and sweet.

That’s truth.

[00:51:50.11] That’s truth. I feel like we say that enough, and we – I think Tim probably knows that. I don’t think I was informing Tim of that. I just wanted to put that out there, just to make sure that that’s like 100% clear… Because we’ve always been that way; if it’s up to me, we’ll always be that way. You can’t just buy your way onto an interview with us. In fact, I’ve just turned down some people recently who were willing to pay some good money to just come on the show, and I was like “That’s just not how we do our thing.” So we’ve definitely lost money over the years doing that… But it allows us to just answer these questions with saying - if you’re getting interviewed on our show, it’s because we want to; it’s not because you give us money. And that’s just the way it is. So starting there, but then you expanded and said a lot more… So go ahead.

Yeah. Well, I just think – I mean, I don’t know if you want to go into all these details. That’s not what I’m trying to do here… Unless you are, and I can do that, but I don’t think that’s what we should do. I think it comes down to - what I stepped away and marinated with on this was that I think potentially… One, a couple of things have changed. Founders Talk isn’t a show anymore, and so we’ve absorbed some of the things I did there, which was explore with a CEO, a CTO, a co-founder, their world. Their journey. Sometimes it’s product, sometimes it’s their journey… And so we’ve converted what was Founders Talk into an infrequent episode style for the Changelog.

Right.

So that’s one. Two, I think that the style of ad that we do produce was cut from the same cloth that I was cutting Founders Talk and other things from. It was that rather than – I mean, I really just hated reading scripts. I think that’s what it came down to. I was just so – I wasn’t even thinking about the listener, really, at first. I don’t think. I think I was being a little selfish. And I said “I just can’t read one more crappy script this marketing team gives me.” Not because they’re not good at it, it’s just like they don’t know how to talk to our audience. So it’s not their fault… So I was like “I’ve got to change this.” And we started going into the cut, into the scene, talking to CEOs, CTOs, VPs, product engineering, you name it, and we’re peeling back the layers.

So I think our ads have morphed into many interviews, which they very much have… And so now the line - not that we’re not drawing it clearly, but the style of the content you’re getting is so similar that maybe that’s what makes it feel like an ad. Because when we do ads, it feels like content. I don’t know. That was my thought.

Yeah, I think that definitely blurs it slightly, which is why we make it very obvious with the musical transitions, and the music bed beneath the ads… You’ll always hear music beneath our ads. And you’ll rarely hear music beneath our voices, unless it’s like coming into something or going out from something. But it’s always same or similar ad music. So I think that that’s clear enough in the production, but I do think because our ads are many interviews, maybe you think our interviews are long ads. And so it’s definitely worth asking, and I think it’s worth talking about.

Yeah.

We want to be real [unintelligible 00:55:02.28]

Checked.

And so shout-out to Tim for bringing it up, because if Tim’s thinking it, I’m sure there’s other people thinking it, too.

Yeah.

And it’s something that we want to address, and something that we struggle with… Because honestly, we only talk about cool stuff that we think is cool, but also, that does cross over into stuff that people are advertising. Because we are picky with who our sponsors are, and we do think their stuff is cool. And so I can see how that could become a gray area. That’s why we say “This is not an ad, but…” and we start to talk, because it has to be clear that this is just my opinion, and this is actually somebody paying us to speak to you directly, through us.

[00:55:48.19] Right. It is a real challenge, because I will often learn about a brand because they reached out to us. And one in particular - and I’m struggling with this; I want to get Scott Dietzen on the show… And it’s Augment Code. I’m really interested in what they’re doing. They’re doing some cool stuff there. But I’m only learning about it because of how deep we go with our ad style. If I just took a script from them and read it, I wouldn’t know anything like I do about Augment Code. I would just know the surface and what they tell me. I would not have done investigative journalism, and gone on the inside and looked at it, like “How can I expose these details to our world in fun ways?” Which is my approach, is I scan the entire vector of what they do, along with their help, go into the depths, talk to different people… And I kind of come out with what I think their story is to our world.

Sometimes I get an opportunity to go deeper, sometimes it’s a little bit more shallow… But either way, it’s the same approach, which is - not what are they saying, because obviously, what they’re saying is not resonating or it’s not doing so well… And if it is, we’re going to repeat that. If it’s doing well, we will repeat it. But in a lot of cases, I’m like diving in. But I’m struggling, because I want to get Augment Code on, I want to get Scott on… I’ve learned a lot of cool stuff about Retool that I’m in love with… They’re doing some cool stuff… I want to get David Shu back on… But these are anchor sponsors of ours, you know? And so it’s like, “Well, no, we’re not having them on because they paid us, but we did learn about them because they paid us.” We got curious and exposed to their world. And it’s like, well, that’s where the challenge is. Do we gatekeep them from appearing on the show because they’ve paid us in the past? Or they have an active campaign on a different thread?

No. I mean, Sourcegraph paid us in the past… But they’re not paying us right now.

Yeah, Sourcegraph has paid us in the past.

We haven’t done a Sourcegraph spot in a while. Maybe we will in the future. I think we don’t gatekeep because you have sponsored, or might sponsor… We just go where we’re genuinely curious. I think we do have a mandate to go beyond, and find things that aren’t people that come to us with money… But I think we’re obviously doing that all the time. For instance, our show next week, our interview next week is with Stephan Ewen of Restate, which is a direct competitor to a sponsor of ours, Temporal. And I was just like interested in this. It’s a listener request, so I was like “Let’s do a show.” So here’s another thing doing similar stuff, and we’re just going to talk about it, because that’s what we want to do, and that’s what I think people want to hear.

I think so, too. But I do appreciate Tim bringing this up, because I think, like you had said, if he’s thinking it, then others are thinking it too. And I think it’s definitely worth noting. One thing I did say, which I think is worth quoting, is it would have been an ad if I was trying to have Beyang convince us or even me how to get started. And I don’t even think I even asked him “Okay, so now that we’re done, how do people sign up?” It was like, that was not the question. And I just said podcasts are – and I really feel this. It’s why I love podcasting so much… Is that there’s still the most authentic form of content. It’s long form, you can’t hide behind questions, you can’t – I mean, you can if you allow yourself to edit people because they say you have to to have the appearance… And I think in those cases, it’s pretty telling if it’s a controversial interview, for example. But I think for the most part, if we ask people stuff and we have a conversation, you can read between the lines of who they say they are and what they say they can do. If they just vibe-coded the next thing and they’re claiming that it was not vibe-coded, you will find out pretty quickly if it was vibe-coded or not, for example, in a podcast interview format.

Yeah. Well said. Let’s close with this. So I turned you into a studio…

Oh my gosh, there’s more?

[unintelligible 00:59:55.04] This is a happy surprise, a happy accident perhaps, because when I prompted that, I did not go back to the original picture. So actually, it turned your walrus into a studio Ghibli style walrus… And so I’ll show you that now.

[01:00:16.26] And to our listener, definitely check the show notes. Maybe we’ll get it in the chapter data, so that you can see what we’re seeing. And to our viewer, of course, you’re viewing this on YouTube, so just look with us… But we’ll get these images out there. There you are, man. What do you think?

Ooph…

Adam as a walrus, in a studio Ghibli movie.

I like how the Falconhead logo has morphed.

Yeah, every time things slightly changed.

Yeah. It’s cool how it’s turned into an F, though. It’s so strange. Like, do they know Falconhead? And the person still walking to the door.

Maybe the Falconhead logo is a falcon that looks like an F, and we didn’t realize it, but ChatGPT did. And now we’re learning that their logo actually does look like an F on purpose. What do you think? Let’s go back to the original image and see… What do you think? I mean, if I squint, it does look like an F. But if I don’t squint, it just looks like a Falcon. Like a shadow.

Yeah, it’s pretty close.

Yeah. You should send that picture to them and be like “You guys missed an opportunity to make your Falcon look like an F.”

Yeah, I’m going to tell them… As soon as this conversation is over, I’m going to call them and let them know.

Yeah, you should.

So original image - not so good…

Lego? Which one’s best? So you’ve got Lego Adam, golfer Adam, you’ve got walrus golfer Adam, and then you have walrus Ghibli golfer. I like this one.

Yeah, this is solid. This would make a good cartoon, Jerod. How does it do it?

I don’t know, it just takes a whole bunch of copyright material and learns its stuff, and then fakes it till it makes it.

Do you think that’s me, though? Can you see me in that walrus?

I’m not going to answer that. I’m too smart to answer that kind of question. [laughs]

I can see me a little bit. I mean, I think my broad shoulders are in there…

Yeah… Well, I mean, walruses do have broad shoulders, but… I mean, the glasses are a dead match. The eyes I think are not too bad… I think it’s lost – you know what it looks like more now? It looks more like King of the Hill style. I feel like it’s lost your –

The Ghibli?

Just your overall shape. It’s kind of lost it. It looks more like you are drinking a six pack, or something. Anyways…

Of near beer…

That’s right.

I’m a big fan of near beer now, man. I think the – I don’t know if you’re doing this, if others are doing this, but a lot of people are opting to not drink alcoholic beer, and they’re drinking a healthy, non-alcoholic beer. So they’re drinking something that tastes like an IPA, it’s got nootropics in it, it’s got like different healthy things in it… And it tastes like an IPA.

So I saw this trend coming a couple of years ago and I invested in a company that does non-alcoholic gin and whiskey… And they’re very popular. And they sent me a bottle, because I was like an early investor, or whatever. It’s one of these – I’m not sure if you had to be accredited or not, but you can invest in private companies now, through sales, in different entities. And one of these – it’s like a crowdfund, to a certain extent, but not like a kickstart. Anyways, they sent me a bottle of it… And I told my wife about it, because I’m like “Yeah, I mean, dry January is a thing now.” Like you said, people are starting to want to have the social aspect of drinking, but without the actual alcohol part… And so more and more of these alternatives are just going to make money. And so I think I put like a thousand bucks in; I’m not like – I’m not a big investor. I like to just place little bets and see what happens with them. It’s fun. And they sent me a bottle. And you know what? We cracked that sucker open and tried it… It was disgusting. [laughs]

[01:04:04.25] It was disgusting…

I mean, maybe it’s better now, but I haven’t tried again. Because they’re always working on their – I’m not going to name the company, [unintelligible 01:04:15.06] But I was like “This is bad.” And my wife is always – she thinks that makes it a bad investment. I’m like “That still might be a good investment, because maybe other people like it”, but we both thought it was gross. And I haven’t had some of the beers… Are they actually good? Like, they taste like an IPA?

Yeah. There’s some really good ones out there. There’s Hop Water, which is kind of like an IPA meets water…

Okay, I think I’ve had Hop Water. It just tastes like hoppy water, right?

Yeah.

Yeah, not bad.

So if you like the hop taste, which is an IPA - Indian Pale Ale is what IPA stands for… You know, if you want to have an alcoholic beverage in a non-alcoholic setting, then I think they’re great. I mean, I’m reaching for them before I’m reaching for beer nowadays. Like, I’m just not even doing it. And I would say the – I’ve always been an IPA fan, and the IPAs are actually - not all of them, but the ones from, I think, Athletic, or Authentic is the beer brand… There’s a really good Heineken zero… They’re calling them zero beers, by the way, because they’re capitalizing on the –

Or NA beers, right?

NA or zero. I think you’re like “Hey, can I get a zero?” And they’re like “Here’s our list.” You just say “Can I get a zero?” Or a zero beer, or something like that. And some of them actually have 0.5% alcohol.

Very little, but not –

Yeah, you’re definitely not going to feel anything from it.

You’re not going to get drunk off of it.

So if you’re abstaining completely and you’re that kind of person, then you might want to steer clear or double check the actual amounts… But the ones I’m tapping into, to use a good pun, is just zeros. Nothing at all. Totally pure over here, just so you know…

Sure.

Every day.

Very cool.

Good stuff, man.

Well, should we call it a Friends? Should we call it a week? Happy Friday, everyone…

What else can we cover? Is that it?

I mean, we’ve got more stuff, but we don’t have to force it, man. Just let it ride. Always leave them wanting more. It’s one of my mottos.

Always leave them wanting more. I would definitely check out this thread… And if you’ve got comments after hearing our comments on this interview or an ad, I would love to hear it. And I think I – again, Tim, thank you for doing this, and others for sticking up for our style. I mean, somebody in there - who was it that said this? I want to pull this out. This is awesome.

Well, John Johnson?

Somebody compared us to Joe Rogan…?

John Johnson.

Yeah, John Johnson.

That was such a good comment that I was like “Dang, we should put that on a website somewhere”, or something.

“Changelog Podcast is highly underrated. It is the best tech podcast, on Joe Rogan’s level. Even their weekly news brief is golden.”

One of my new best friends.

“Not everything here is for everybody, but there’s something here for everyone.”

[unintelligible 01:07:19.18]

That was a solid one, man.

Put that on a T-shirt… Put it on a testimonial page… Yeah. That was very nice, John. We appreciate that you feel that way. It’s awesome.

Yeah. Well, it’s one thing to have an ideal, or a moral, or a belief, and not really say it verbatim to the world, but act it out… And for that to permeate someone’s thought, even though you didn’t say so, you know… I just want to hear – I want to hear more comments, honestly. I don’t want to [unintelligible 01:07:49.11] those lines.

He’s comment fishing now…

Yeah, I really do. I want to hear – if you’ve got something to say…

Let us know in Zulip.

Yeah, absolutely. Because I think we’re going to ruffle some more feathers. I’ve got some more people coming on that could be suspect, let’s just say. Suspect.

Ooh… Now I’m feeling ruffled. I don’t even know what you’re talking about.

I’m just teasing a little bit. It’s been fun…

Yeah, it’s been fun.

Bye, friends.

Bye, friends.