Ken Thompson's keynote, Tabby, The LLama Effect, Codeberg & facing the inevitable

Changelog News

Developer news worth your attention

Hello there! 👋

Jerod here, welcoming you to the first ever issue of Changelog News! If you’re a Changelog Weekly subscriber, hopefully you’ll stick around and enjoy this new thing we’re doing even more. 🙏

By the way, you can listen to this as a podcast as well. Cool, huh?

Okay, let’s get into it.

Ken Thompson’s Jukebox for the Ages

You may have heard that Ken Thompson (the 80-year old Unix pioneer) gave the closing keynote at this year’s Southern California Linux Expo. His topic: the tale of his “75-year-project”… a jukebox for the ages.

David Cassel at the New Stack did a great job summarizing the hour-long talk. Ken also took some Q&A at the end, which I found particularly interesting.

Tabby: a self-hosted AI coding assistant

If you listened to LLMs break the Internet with Simon Willison last week, you already know that my “a-ha” moment during that conversation was realizing language models don’t necessarily have to keep getting larger for most use cases, especially once we start providing them tools to find answers on their own. That’s promising.

In that arena… check out Tabby. It’s a self-hosted AI coding assistant. An open source / on-prem alternative to GitHub Copilot.

Codeberg is worth a look

It’s a collaboration platform and Git hosting for open source software, content and projects. Codeberg is not run by a company, but a non-profit based in Berlin. The service boasts about its community roots and commitment to privacy.

Meme break 😹

This was just a joke, but I got so many sincere responses from folks! Also some of the reddit comments were hilarious. 💀

“shift “left” meme

The LLama Effect

This is a story about how an accidental leak sparked a series of impressive open source alternatives to ChatGPT. LLaMA, of course, is Meta’s language model that they open sourced.

I had wondered why they decided to open source it, especially now seeing OpenAI not release any specifics regarding their training of GPT-4. Turns out, they open sourced LLaMA because somebody leaked it on 4chan, sparking thousands of downloads…

Facing the inevitable

Paul Orlando has a new piece on his Unintended Consequences blog. This one’s titled Ghost Shirts, Guilds, and Generative AI. He kicks off by asking:

Are some things inevitable?

And if something is inevitable, what do you do if you don’t like it?

You could fight it indirectly and delay how fast the change happens. In that case, you will quietly subvert the system.

You could fight it directly, even though you will probably lose. In that case, you are fighting for honor.

Or, through a combination of luck and foresight you could build a system that shields you from the inevitable change taking over your corner or the world. In that case, you need to build and defend a boundary.

He is, of course, talking about the latest AI advancements and the Pause Giant AI Experiments letter signed by the likes of Steve Wozniak, Elon Musk, and other business leaders and academics.

Why it’s worth reading: Paul doesn’t merely give his take on the inevitability of AI advancements, he provides historical context by looking at similar phenomena in the past.

Levelling Up Pull Requests

Stig Brautaset shares thoughts on PRs after reading 7 habits of highly effective people:

Nobody likes being pestered, nor pestering others, for reviews. It’s especially frustrating having to request re-reviews. They increase cycle time, and thus decrease our velocity. In part this is a direct control problem: I can change how I create my own PRs to reduce the likelihood of colleagues bouncing them back to me for clarifications, changes, and having to require re-reviews. But to be really effective & for my team to succeed I’ll have to influence my colleagues to do the same: it is an indirect control problem.

⚡️⚡️ LIGHTNING ROUND ⚡️⚡️

  • ChatGDB puts ChatGPT inside the GDB debugger
  • PL/Rust lets you write Postgres functions in Rust. This promises the “absolutely best” performance & compile-time safety guarantees
  • Chroma is an “AI-native” open source embedding database
  • Nadia Asparouhova’s latest #longread goes deep on “atoms” vs “bits”
  • Starship is here to help you pimp out your shell prompts
  • 6 CSS snippets every frontender should know in 2023

That’s the news for now! I’ll have more for you next week. Shipping back to back issues is tough! 😅

Please hit reply and let us know what you think of the new format! We’ll be experimenting, improving & changing things as we go. Kaizen!