Changelog News
Developer news en route to KubeCon
Jerod here! š
Elon Muskās xAI announced their first AI chatbot over the weekend. Itās called āGrokā and is modeled after the Hitchhikerās Guide to the Galaxy. Muskās āGrokā joins Zuckerbergās āMetaā as the now 2nd blatant attempt to destroy all my favorite words. š
Ok, letās get into the news. (Audio Here)
š¬ How to write a good comment
David Hugh-Jones has a lot to say about what makes a good comment. Heās not specifically talking about code comments, or commit message comments, or even issue commentsā¦ but online comments in general. His advice, however, certain applies in those contexts. David says:
Most comments are a waste of time to read and write. Yet online debate is now central to politics and culture. So, making people better at commenting would be a useful thing to do.
What follows is a litany of actionable things you can do to improve your online commenting. He starts with:
Know why youāre writing. Otherwise, youāre the sucker.
Understanding your venue is also important and brevity is the soul of whit. Ok that one is Shakespeareās, but David agrees when he says:
Short words, sentences and paragraphs are easier to read. Prose stuffed with long words will make stupid people think you are smartā¦ and vice versa.
š¤« HugginFaceās distilled variant of Whisper
Hugging Face released a distilled variant of Whisper for speech recognition. Itās English-only and optimized to the hiltā¦ which resulted in running 6 times faster while being 49% smaller, and performing within 1% word error rate from the original Whisper model.
Itās designed to be a drop-in replacement and the Hugging Face team cite 5 reasons why you might use it: faster inference, robustness to noise, robustness to hallucinations, designed for speculative decoding & permissively MIT licensed.
āļø Stroustrupās plan for bringing safety to C++
The New Stack reports on C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrupās plan for bringing safety to the language. Speaking at this yearās CppCon, Stroustrup addressed critics who say the problem is C++ itself, and that the solution is switching to another language. He says:
Often the safety mentioned is just memory safety ā thatās not enoughā¦ And the need to interoperate with other languages, including C++ and C, tend not to be mentioned. And the cost of conversion can be ferocious. Thatās rarely mentionedā¦
He then went on to lay out his plan for the future of C++, which includes a new concept called āprofiles.ā A profiles is a set of rules which, when followed, achieve specific safety guarantees. His suggested standard profiles start with Type_safety, range, and arithmetic.
This is very much a work in progress, but he has a public GitHub repo called profiles where you can go to learn more and even get involved.
š¤ Meet the new Appwrite
Thanks to Appwrite for sponsoring Changelog News š°
Appwrite helps you build secure and scalable applications with less code. Add authentication, databases, storage, and more using Appwriteās development platform.
And, they just recently unveiled a completely overhauled brand, website and experience. At the core of this redesign is an upgraded website and importantly, enhanced documentation featuring specialized tutorials to guide you through project setup and feature implementation step by step.
If itās been awhile since youāve checked out what Appwrite is up to, thereās never been a better time.
š„³ CSS is fun again
Jeff Sandberg declares that CSS is fun again:
CSS has been undergoing a quiet renaissance lately. Lots of big features which previously required an external tool to use, are now native parts of the language, and its growing more and more all the time. If you havenāt used CSS in a long time, for whatever reason, now is the time to take a look again.
The big features heās referring to include custom properties, nesting, color-mix, containment and style queries, and many smaller features which he thinks really add up. So much so, that pre and post processors are no longer required, even though he still uses them on larger projects.
But for small, simple projects, he doesnāt use them at all. Just pure CSS. Bundle these CSS advancements with modern JavaScript features like ES modules and HTTP 3 and perhaps the days of web dev build steps are drawing to and end?
š The beauty of finished software
Jose M. Gilgado writes about WordStar 4.0, a popular word processor from the early 80s:
As old as it seems, George R.R. Martin used it to write āA Song of Ice and Fireā.
Why would someone use such an old piece of software to write over 5,000 pages? I love how he puts it:
It does everything I want a word processing program to do and it doesnāt do anything else. I donāt want any help. I hate some of these modern systems where you type up a lowercase letter and it becomes a capital. I donāt want a capital, if Iād wanted a capital, I would have typed the capital.
Jose goes on to praise the beauty of finished software. He says finished software is software that isnāt expected to change. And thatās a feature. Because you can rely on it to do some real work.
For me, the stream of constant updates and changes to software are both virtuous and troublesome. Itās a beautiful thing when your tools improve overnight. You donāt wake up in the morning and expect your trusty oleā hammer to have some new functionality, but this happens all the time in the software world. On the other hand, you can also trust your hammer to work exactly the way it did yesterday. How many times have you launched a software tool only to find its maker has rearranged things, ruining your workflow in the process?
Jose finishes up with:
In a world where constant change is the norm, finished software provides a breath of fresh air. Itās a reminder that reliability, consistency, and user satisfaction can coexist in the realm of software development. So the next time you find yourself yearning for the latest update, remember that sometimes, the best software is the one that doesnāt change at all.
š§ ICYMI: Recent good pods from us
š¶ Beat freak in residence ā Weāre joined this week by the beat freak in residence himself, the mysterious Breakmaster Cylinder. Listen along as we talk about how we make our beats, what inspires us for our music, and some behind the scenes on our latest albums.
Early Review: āOne of the all-time best episodes and I am not through it yet. BMC is a very entertaining listen :)ā
šŖµ Observing the power of APIs ā Jean Yangās research on programming languages at Carnegie Mellon led her to realize that APIs are the layer that makes or breaks quality software systems. Unfortunately, developers are underserved by tools for dealing with, securing & understanding APIs. That realization led her to found Akita Software, which led her to join Postman by way of acquisition. That move, at least in part, also led her to join us on this very podcast. We think youāre going to enjoy this interview, we sure did.
š¤ Self-hosting & scaling models ā Weāre excited to have Tuhin Srivastava join Practical AI again to talk about self-hosting open access models. Tuhinās company, Baseten, specializes in model deployment and monitoring at any scale, and it was a privilege to talk with him about the trends he is seeing in both tooling and usage of open access models.
ā° Whatās new in Goās cryptography libraries ā Filippo Valsorda & Roland Shoemaker from the Go Team sit down with Natalie to catch us up on whatās new in Goās crypto libraries. No, not that cryptoā¦ good olā cryptography!
šŖ© Helping people enter, stay & thrive in tech ā Valerie Phoenix from Tech By Choice joins Amal & Kball on JS Party to tell them all about her non-profit thatās passionate about helping people interested in technology, no matter their experience level.
š¼ In brief, more news worth knowing about
MIT Technology Review asked dozens of people to identify what problem at the intersection of technology and society that they think we should focus more of our energy on.
tailspin is a log file highlighter written in Rust that works by reading through a log file line by line, running a series of regexes against each line. The regexes recognize patterns like dates, numbers, severity keywords and more.
WinterJS is a JavaScript Service Workers server by the Wasmer team that uses Firefoxās SpiderMonkey runtime to execute JavaScript. It follows the WinterCG spec to aim for maximum compatibility with other services such as Cloudflare Workers, Deno Deploy and Vercel
Joelle Pineau, Metaās AI research head tells The Verge she thinks open source licensing needs to change because ācurrent licensing schemes were not built to work with software that takes in vast amounts of outside data.ā Meanwhile, Stefano Maffulli, executive director of OSI, āunderstands that current OSI-approved licenses may fall short of certain needs of AI models. He says OSI is reviewing how to work with AI developers to provide transparent, permissionless, yet safe access to models.ā
The Startup CTOās Handbook covers leadership, management & technical topics for leaders of software engineering teams. The author says, āMy goal is that the handbook is a useful tool that grows over time and improves organically, with community feedback and criticism. To that end, the book is NOT copyrighted, it is licensed as CC BY-NC-SA 4.0ā
Salvatore Sanfilippo (creator of Redis) coded up a minimal programming example for a chat server in C for his friends who do frontend dev. Salvatore is pretty good at this stuff, which makes this little program great for learning and he even walks us through it on YouTube.
The Ludicity blog set the interwebs ablaze last week when its author told the gory tale of the time they āsaved my company half a million dollars in about five minutes.ā Incompetency abounds and the nasty twist at the end is that they arenāt personally any better off now than before the killer config change. Arguably worse!
Thatās the news for now! We have an awesome week of podcasts coming your way Very Soon:
- Cory Doctorow returns for a serious convo about the future of the internet
- Mat Ryer returns for a !serious convo about the history of internet worms
- JS Party celebrates 300 episodes with āBest of the festā
Have a great week, forward this email to a friend who might dig it, and Iāll talk to you again real soon. š
āJerod