Changelog News

Developer news worth a few kinds words

Jerod here! 👋

Did you know that poet Shel Silverstein “predicted” ChatGPT all the way back in 1981?! I present to you: The Homework Machine (via J Wolfgang Goerlich)

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

🎧 Good pods for your week

🎙️ iFixit’s Kyle Wiens says we have a right to repair! changelog.fm/582
💚 Shannon & Parker Selbert are the Oban Pros changelog.com/friends/35
🚀 Kyle Quest puts containers on a diet shipit.show/95
🪩 Advocating for the future of the open web jsparty.fm/316
🤖 Generating the future of art & entertainment practicalai.fm/260
⏰ Jumping into an existing codebase gotime.fm/307

🪧 No Maintenance Intended

When you really think about it, open source is a gift to the world. Some gifts are ongoing efforts, sure. But other gifts are just one-offs. You build something, you give it away, and that’s it. You have no intention of improving it, maintaining it, or even looking at it again. That’s totally fine! But if/when that’s the case, it’s a good idea to clearly communicate that expectation. Enter the “No Maintenance Intended” badge.

Add the badge to your hobby project and send folks to this message when they follow the link:

If you’re here, that likely means a project linked you here.
Thanks so much for being interested in that project!
Open Source is rewarding- but it can also be exhausting.
The linking project’s code is provided as-is, and is not actively maintained.
The author(s) of that project invite you to peruse their code and even use it in your next project, provided you follow the included license!
No guarantee of support for the code is provided, and there is no promise that pull requests will be reviewed or merged.
It’s open source, so forking is allowed; just be sure to give credit where it’s due!

In a somewhat ironic twist, the “No Maintenance Intended” badge project IS maintained and is on GitHub.

👩‍🎓 What I learned from looking at 900 most popular open source AI tools

Four years ago, Chip Huyen did an analysis of the open source ML ecosystem. Since then, the landscape has changed, so she revisited the topic. This time, she focused exclusively on the stack around foundation models.

This is a #longread, so I’ll just list her personal favorite ideas for you here and let you take the deep-dive on your own time:

Batch inference optimization: FlexGen, llama.cpp
Faster decoder with techniques such as Medusa, LookaheadDecoding
Model merging: mergekit
Constrained sampling: outlines, guidance, SGLang
Seemingly niche tools that solve one problem really well, such as einops and safetensors.

You can find most of these on her cool-llm-repos list on GitHub.

👀 Neo4j for all your graph database needs

Thanks to Neo4j for sponsoring Changelog News 💰

If you are experiencing slowdowns in your app due to excessive JOINs and lengthy query durations, it might be time to re-evaluate your database.

Graph databases excel in scenarios rich with interconnected data, such as:

Managing intricate supply chains
Detecting fraud
Conducting real-time analytics
Powering genAI applications

Neo4j offers the flexibility to develop using your preferred programming languages and connect via any driver, ensuring seamless integration with your existing technology stack.

Begin your journey at Neo4j.com/developer

😰 Laid-off techies struggle to find jobs with cuts at highest since 2001

Alex Koller, writing for CNBC:

Since the start of the year, more than 50,000 workers have been laid off from over 200 tech companies, according to tracking website Layoffs.fyi. It’s a continuation of the predominant theme of 2023, when more than 260,000 workers across nearly 1,200 tech companies lost their jobs.
Alphabet, Amazon, Meta and Microsoft have all taken part in the downsizing this year, along with eBay, Unity Software, SAP and Cisco.

Rolling in to the new year, it seemed like sentiments were shifting positive again, but what momentum we had seems to have dried up. Adding to the layoff-based trepidation is the pending codegen AI “takeover”, of which Devin is the newest poster child. As DHH wrote on the subject, developers are on edge. But I’ll echo his concluding words, because they’re as good as any I’ve got on the matter:

So while it’s hard to do, it’s useless to worry. The Future is out of your hands and out of your control. No profession has ever successfully resisted automation or redundancy in the face of technological advancement over the long term. Screaming at Devin will only distract you from enjoying the last glorious years of a golden run.

✨ Teable is a Postgres-Airtable fusion

Teable is a super fast, real-time, professional, developer friendly, no-code database built on Postgres. It uses a simple, spreadsheet-like interface to create complex enterprise-level database applications. Unlock efficient app development with no-code, free from the hurdles of data security and scalability.

Do you like the idea of Airtable, but would rather it be self-hosted and actually just Postgres under the hood? I sure do.

🎯 Announcing Target’s Open Source Fund

Brian Muenzenmeyer, on Target’s tech blog:

It’s no secret that an engaged open source team yields transformative, innovative, and collaborative outcomes. As we looked to discover more ways to engage our team in open source, the success of Sentry’s and Microsoft’s open source fund efforts inspired us to pursue a similar program. Our efforts today, along with sustained and empowered upstream engagement, aim to strengthen the open source movement, reduce maintainer burnout, and normalize corporate contributions back into the ecosystem. We learned a lot from our first round and look forward to iterating with our community on future rounds.

The good news is that Target has seen the light and is now donating to five open source projects selected through their process. Kudos to them for that!

The bad news is their 2024 donation budget is $12,500, which will hopefully move the needle for the projects selected, but doesn’t seem like much from a publicly traded company with a market cap of ~$75 billion…

📡 POSSE Pulse

Last time I had Justin Searls on the show, we talked about his new #indieweb setup. I encouraged him to open source his work, since he has gone through the pain of making a statically built website that syndicates itself via RSS, email, podcast players, Mastodon, Instagram & even X.

Justin decided not to take my advice (😜), but he did do the next best thing: create a page on his site explaining how it all works:

Syndication from a single authoritative web site means I can own my work and present it however I want, while still meeting people wherever they prefer to consume content—whether that’s an RSS client, a social network timeline, or an e-mail inbox.

🦀 CrabNebula Cloud is here!

Thanks to CrabNebula for sponsoring Changelog News 💰

Thanks to CrabNebula Cloud, Tauri app developers can now seamlessly distribute their apps on all platforms. This is a huge step forward for Tauri’s fast-growing ecosystem, but don’t take our word for it… here’s Rustacean Marc Espín:

One thing I missed in the Rust ecosystem was a standard for app distribution. And I believe that the Rust community now has a solid choice for such task, thanks to CrabNebula Cloud. It is easy to use, secure and will be framework-agnostic.

CrabNebula Cloud features a purpose-built CDN, security updates as first-class citizens & smart organization management that mirrors GitHub’s hierarchical structure. Check it out!

⬇ A desktop app for easily viewing & editing Markdown files

Marker has an Obsidian look to it, but it’s 100% open source & built with Tauri.

🎞️ Clip of the week

Oh, the pain of SSH’ing into a deployed satellite! (Ship It #92)

◣ Pyramid(ical) scheme

Before I let you go, here’s some more interesting links that I didn’t feel like writing about, but I did feel like doing an ORDER BY LENGTH(title) ASC for no good reason that I can recall.

That’s the news for now, but we have some awesome podcast episodes coming your way later this week:

Kris Moore talking TrueNAS and the end of the FreeBSD version
Cameron Seay from last year’s mainframes are still a big thing

Have a great week, forward this to a friend who might dig it & I’ll talk to you again real soon. 💚

–Jerod