Changelog News – Episode #23

Building a VM inside ChatGPT, Advent of Code 2022, webdev Liam Neeson, Fedifinder & BDougie

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Jonas Degrave builds a virtual machine inside ChatGPT, Advent of Code 2022 is in full swing, Mat Ryer impersonates Liam Neeson as web developer, Luca Hammer’s Fedifinder project helps you join the Fediverse & we chat with Brian (BDougie) Douglas about Open Sauced at All Things Open 2022.

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Chapters

1 00:00 Intro (sotl!)
2 01:08 ChatGPT VM
3 02:56 Advent of Code
4 03:29 Webdev Liam Neeson
5 04:21 Fedifinder
6 05:26 Outro
7 05:51 BDougie

Transcript

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Changelog

Play the audio to listen along while you enjoy the transcript. 🎧

What up, nerds? I’m Jerod and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, December 5th 2022.

We are still accepting audio message submissions for our upcoming state of the log episode. We record it next week, so you’re running out of time to get your voice on the pod and get your hands on a free t-shirt. So far we’ve received 5 awesome messages and 1 super weird, not safe for work, Stable Diffusion generated picture of a cow.

I’d love to double our listener messages count before next week and I’d also love to never receive another cowpic like that ever again.

Send us your voice message at changelog.fm/sotl, short for state of the log, once again that’s changelog.fm/sotl and keep your weird cowpics to yourself.

Don’t have a cow.

Ok. Let’s get in to the news.

ChatGPT is the biggest news since Stable Diffusion broke the internet a few months back. If you haven’t heard, ChatGPT is the latest release from OpenAI. It’s an improvement in a few big ways over GPT3. Notably, ChatGPT has long-term memory of up to 8,192 tokens, which means it can recall the contents of conversations. This feature helps enable the killer feature of ChatGPT: a very good chat interface where you can talk back and forth with it, instructing it to modify what it generates.

The chat experience plus the fact that OpenAI is allowing free use of ChatGPT for now has generated countless tweets & toots demonstrating its abilities over the weekend, some of which are truly astounding. The most impressive to me, and the one we’ll link to in the show notes, is by Jonas Degrave who discovered that you can build an entire virtual machine inside ChatGPT. From there, he uses curl inside ChatGPT to access OpenAI’s API… which is where things start to get really interesting. Here’s a quote from the article:

“So, inside the imagined universe of ChatGPT’s mind, our virtual machine accesses the url https://chat.openai.com/chat, where it finds a large language model named Assistant trained by OpenAI. This Assistant is waiting to receive messages inside a chatbox… We can chat with this Assistant chatbot, locked inside the alt-internet attached to a virtual machine, all inside ChatGPT’s imagination. Assistant, deep down inside this rabbit hole, can correctly explain us what Artificial Intelligence is.”

I’ve seen this movie before…

It’s December, which means the 8th annual Advent of Code is in full swing. If you haven’t heard, Advent of Code is an advent calendar of small programming puzzles for a variety of skill sets and skill levels that can be solved in any programming language you like. People use them as interview prep, company training, university coursework, practice problems, a speed contest, or to challenge each other.

Each day a new puzzle is introduced, which means there are 5 of them waiting for you to solve right now if you’d like.

We now interrupt your regularly scheduled programming for a special transmission from Mat Ryer impersonating Liam Neeson: Web Developer

Mastodon and the Fediverse continue to rise in popularity amongst devs.

Here’s some related anecdata. We post the exact same Unpopular Opinion polls to Go Time’s Twitter and Mastodon channels. On Twitter, the @gotimfm account over 9400 followers. On Mastodon, @gotime@changelog.social has less than 300. And yet, the unpop polls receive more votes on Mastodon than they do no Twitter. 1/40th the following!

Impressive.

One thing that makes the switch off Twitter difficult is recreating your social graph on the other side. For that, check out Luca Hammer’s Fedifinder project. It’s a web app that helps you join the Fediverse in 5 steps. Connect your Twitter account and Fedifinder will crawl your list of followers, extracting their Mastodon handle and instance from their profile or pinned tweets so you can import them into your Mastodon account.

That’s a sweet, funky, dope manuever.

That is the news for now, but stick around for our final bonus conversation from ATO 22. Adam and I are talking to BDougie, the self-proclaimed Beyonce of open source.

Have a great week and we’ll talk to you again on Friday.

Changelog

Our transcripts are open source on GitHub. Improvements are welcome. 💚

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