Changelog News

Developer news re-founded on humanity

Jerod here! 👋

Most of the buzz of late is in response to OpenAI’s DevDay keynote, where they announced GPT-4 Turbo and no-code custom AI agents called “GPTs.”

It’s still early, but OpenAI is looking a lot like the iPhone of this new platform opportunity, app store and all. If true, this begs the question: what might be the Android of “AI”? 🤔

Oh, and GitHub says they’ve been “re-founded” on Copilot. But I think that’s silly, so I’m not really going to talk about it any further…

Ok, let’s get into the news. (Audio Edition)

💭 Quote of the week

A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox – Henrik Karlsson

🖥️ A secure web-based, collaborative terminal

sshx lets you share your terminal with anyone by link, on a multiplayer infinite canvas. It has real-time collaboration, with remote cursors and chat. It’s also fast and end-to-end encrypted, with a lightweight server written in Rust (so you know it’s cool).

All you have to do is run curl -sSf https://sshx.io/get | sh, or build it from source if that’s more your thing. This gives you the sshx command, which, when executed kicks off a live, encrypted session. Send the link to anyone you want to join in and they open it in a web browser.

☘️ Three things about your competitors

Herbert Lui, on his blog about creativity, marketing, and the human condition:

If a tattoo artist does a good job the first time you get a tattoo, you’ll be interested in getting more tattoos. They’ve just created an opportunity for other tattoo artists.
If somebody reads a book about creativity, they’re probably actually more likely to read another book about the topic—not less.
While competitive energy can be helpful, it’s certainly not the only—or the most accurate—way to see the world. There are enough problems to go around, and a problem often requires more than one solution.

That’s the entire post, so no need to go read it. But if you’re picking up what he’s putting down with this one, check out his other writings. He even has a book titled Creative Doing.

🚀 It’s Sentry Launch Week!

Thanks to Sentry for sponsoring Changelog News 💰

Five days of new features that you probably won’t hate (their words).

Monday: Performance Monitoring
Tuesday: Session Replay and User Feedback
Wednesday: Data Residency and Platform
Thursday: SDKs and Integrations
Friday: Future of Open Source

Tune in to their daily video drop on YouTube at 9am Pacific, or if you’re too busy for all that…

Click here, enter your email address, and get all the announcements sent to your inbox. Plus enter to win some sweet, sweet Sentry swag.

🔬 fx is a terminal JSON viewer & processor

There are umpteen ways to deal with JSON in your terminal, and fx by Anton Medvedev looks like a great one. It’s written in Go, so efficient performance and universal binaries mean easy installation. It’s interactive, which means you can visualize the JSON tree structure, folding and unfolding areas that interest you. Plus, it supports streaming JSON data, which helps process large datasets. It has JSON comments support, mouse support, and clipboard integration.

🤝 Quality over quantity at conferences

Danny Castonguay’s team at bld.ai are attending COP28 in Dubai alongside 70k other people, so he wrote up some advice that resonated with me, having attended KubeCon last week. Danny says:

Large conferences can be chaotic and draining. The fear of missing out is real. I recommend steering clear of the main stage(s), unless there’s a superstar speaker you’re eager to meet. Instead, prioritize scheduling in-depth, one-on-one interactions with a few individuals you’re looking to build lasting connections with.

He says a good rule of thumb is to add one to three (at most) new connections per day. This would’ve been good advice for me before I left for KubeCon! Oh well, there’s always next time…

🤓 RAGTheDocs using HuggingFace spaces

Jeremy Pinto’s experimental RAGTheDocs project is working toward a reality I’m very much waiting for! It’s an open source library that enables a one-click deploy of retrieval augmented generation (RAG) on any readthedocs documentation to HuggingFace spaces!

RAG, for the uninitiated, is:

an AI framework for improving the quality of LLM-generated responses by grounding the model on external sources of knowledge to supplement the LLM’s internal representation of information.

In the case of RAGTheDocs, that external source of knowledge is your project’s docs! It automatically scrapes and embeds documentation from any website generated by ReadTheDocs/Sphinx using OpenAI embeddings. It also ships with a gradio UI for users to interact with and lets you customize the experience as well.

🎧 ICYMI: Recent good pods from us

Backslashes are trash – Mat Ryer returns with his guitar, an unpopular opinion & his favorite internet virus.

Early Review: “This show is PURE #GOLD”

Pushing back on unconstrained capitalism – We’re talking with Cory Doctorow about how we can get back to that “new good internet.” Cory’s new book The Internet Con offers a lens to this conversation about disenshittifying the internet through anti-trust laws, limits on corporate tweaking, regulating unconstrained capitalism, and all the ways enshittification is enabled.

Best of the fest! Volume 2 – JS Party listeners and panelists celebrate great moments from the last 100 episodes! You’ll hear from 14 of our favorite humans (and 1 horse) across 11 episodes. Here’s to our first 300 episodes and the next 300 as well. 🥂

Principles of simplicity – Rob Pike says, “Simplicity is the art of hiding complexity.” If that’s true, what is simplicity in the context of writing software in Go? Is it even something we should strive for? Can software be too simple? Ian & Kris discuss with return guest sam boyer.

Government regulation of AI has arrived – In this Fully Connected episode, Daniel and Chris parse the details and highlight key takeaways from new AI-related government documents, especially the extensive and detailed executive order, which has the force of law in the United States.

🫣 Hard-to-swallow truths they won’t tell you about SWE

Mensur Durakovic wrote up some harsh realities about the software industry that he shared with a few fresh college grads, including:

College will not prepare you for the job
You will rarely get greenfield projects
You will sometimes work with incompetent people

🔮 Fast, light, simple Docker containers & Linux machines for macOS

This was one of my favorite discoveries from KubeCon last week (thanks, Tammer!) OrbStack is a replacement for Docker Desktop on macOS so you can actually have a “fast, light, and easy way to run Docker containers and Linux.”

I haven’t tried it yet, but I’m excited to and wanted to share with anyone else who has felt the same pain I have!

🛑 Don’t build AI products the way everyone else is doing it

Steve Sewell says if your product is mostly a wrapper for OpenAI or some other model… you’re doing it wrong and won’t survive very long.

If you’ve noticed that one person creates a chat with a PDF app, and then another dozen people do too, and then OpenAI builds that into ChatGPT directly, it’s because nobody there actually built something differentiated.
They use a simple technique, with a pre-trained model, which anyone can copy in a very short period of time.
When building a product whose unique value proposition is some type of advanced AI technology, it’s a very risky position to be so easy to copy.

He goes on to suggest a better way to go about it…

🎥 Clip of the week

A relatively-new-but-increasingly-common phenomenon is the intersection of VC-backed startups and open source projects. I’m of two minds about this:

On one hand, it’s awesome seeing capital pouring in to the open source community and fueling innovation that may have otherwise never gotten out of the starting gates.

On the other hand, VCs want a return on their investment. This puts growth burdens on software makers that might compromise their decision-making.

This dichotomy fascinates me, so whenever I have the opportunity to ask someone living it their thoughts on the matter, well, I take that opportunity. Most recently, I was talking to Jarred Sumner about Bun, his open source JavaScript runtime that popped out of Oven, his VC-backed company… What happens to Bun if Oven fails?

That’s the news for now, but it’s time once again for some Changelog++ shout outs!

SHOUT OUT to our newest members: Alexandru C, Ayaz K, Nathan S, Pascal P, Gilberto C, Matthew S, Isaac, Daniel T, Valon L, Jakub C & Savinirs! We appreciate you for supporting our work with your hard-earned cash.

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Have a great week, send Changelog News to your friends if you dig it, and I’ll talk to you again real soon. 💚

–Jerod