Changelog News

Developer news worth your attention

Hello, again! 👋

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

🤥 Devin’s Upwork “side hustle” exposed

YouTuber Internet of Bugs posted a lengthy breakdown exposing Devin creators (Cognition Labs) for falsifying claims about their “world’s first AI software engineer.” Devin was pitched as a fully autonomous software developer and one of the more impressive demos showed it completing and getting paid for freelance jobs on Upwork.

Sound too good to be true? It did to Internet of Bugs:

I broke down the Devin Upwork video frame by frame, and here I show what Devin was supposed to do, what it actually managed to do instead, and how bad a job of that it did. On the whole that’s not surprising given the current state of Generative AI, and I wouldn’t be bothering to debunk it, except:
The company lied about what Devin could do in the video description, and
a lot of people uncritically parroted the lie all over the Internet, and
That caused a lot of non-technical people to believe that AI might replace programmers soon.

Devin really did garner a LOT of attention (a.k.a. money) because of that demo. We talked about it on our shows (with a healthy amount of skepticism), so I’m thankful their claims have been debunked and I hope we all give Cognition Labs the side eye from here on out.

Exaggerating your development capabilities? Maybe Devin really is human after all… 😜

☄️ Redis re-implemented with SQLite

Redka is Anton Zhiyanov’s attempt to reimplement (in Go) the good parts of Redis with SQLite, while remaining compatible with the Redis API. The goal is to support five core Redis data types: strings, lists, sets, hashes & sorted sets.

This is cool, because so many devs (and tools) already know/love Redis’ API, but the project’s legal woes and administration needs (not that complex, but one more moving part) aren’t ideal. SQLite, on the other hand… is entirely open source and the most deployed in-process database in the world.

Redka is slower than Redis (2-6 times by early benchmarks), but that’s no big surprise considering the relational backend and it can still do 22K writes/sec and 57K reads/sec, which is nothing to shake a stick at.

🧑‍⚖️ OpenTofu responds to Hashicorp’s Cease and Desist

Last week’s big story was Hashicorp’s nasty-gram to OpenTofu and the question of whether or not they forked up by copying copyrighted Terraform code in an attempt to maintain feature parity.

The OpenTofu team has now issued their response, which includes a lengthy source code origination document and a 3-page letter written by their lawyer, with this sentence in bold text:

To my client’s knowledge, none of the Terraform code subject to the BUSL has been improperly copied, incorrectly sourced, or used for any purpose.

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Thanks to Tailscale for sponsoring Changelog News 💰

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🆙 Introducing Enhance WASM

Brian LeRoux:

Web Components are the browser native way to extend HTML. But as a primarily browser based technology they are defined with JavaScript which limits them to either rendering solely client side — which has janky performance, poor SEO, and is not optimally accessible — or within a server-side JavaScript runtime, which isn’t always an option for shops that use other backend runtimes.
Enhance WASM unlocks server-side rendering Web Components for any backend runtime.

Pretty cool! You write standard web components and then deploy them with any backend (Rails, Django, Node, Wordpress, etc). Enhance WASM is an open source initiative, and they’re looking for collaborators to join them on this mission.

Oh, and Brian has agreed to join me on an upcoming JS Party episode to discuss this effort in-depth.

🎃 PumpkinOS is a re-implementation of PalmOS

This is not your average PalmOS emulator… no PalmOS ROM required. It is full-on re-implementation of PalmOS that runs on modern architectures (x86, ARM, etc) can run m68K PalmOS apps. It currently runs as a normal application on a host operating system, but efforts to strip down the underlying things is underway.

As far as I can tell, this project is purely for the joy of it. That being said, it’s written in C… so how much joy could there possibly be? 😉 Regardless, if you have PalmOS nostalgia and/or the desire to hack on some low-level code, check it out.

🎧 Some pods you might enjoy

🎙️ Scott Chacon on replacing Git with Git changelog.fm/586
💚 The beat freak in residence is back changelog.com/friends/39
🚀 Ádám from LastPass, from Kubernetes to Nix shipit.show/99
🪩 What in the world is Google’s Wiz? jsparty.fm/318
🤖 Demetrios Brinkmann from MLOps Community practicalai.fm/264
⏰ Carlos Becker says ship software, not code gotime.fm/311

👩‍🎤 Lenssort for making some cool pfps

This tool does facial recognition and uses pixelsort on images to create glitched, Snapchat-like lenses.

📟 Beeper is joining Automattic

Eric Migicovsky, former Beeper CEO who is now Automattic’s Head of Messaging:

Given the state of the messaging world, we’ve long felt the need for a strong ally with the resources to support us on our quest. Automattic has a long history of putting user control and privacy first with open source, and great bilateral relationships with Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Google, Matrix and others that we hope can usher in a new era of collaboration.

Automattic may have a “great bilateral relationship” with Apple, but I’m not sure it’s great enough to convince the Cupertino Giant that Beeper is worthy to re-enter its walled garden. Still, Matt Mullenweg is savvy and has done will with other acquisitions (except Tumblr). considering Beeper only has 115k users and few options… this does seem like a good match. 🙏

✊ Submissions from around the community

Optimizing SQLite for servers (via Jamie Tanna)
Shell History Is Your Best Productivity Tool (via Martin Heinz)
Why No IPv6?! (via Lasse Haugen)
The Standard Webhooks specification (via Ken Ruf)
Code Generation with AlphaCodium (via Daphne Cavanaugh)

🎞️ Clip of the week

I swing both modes (light & dark), so it’s only half unpopular with me. You?

That’s the news for now, but this is issue #90, so that means it’s time once again for some Changelog++ shout outs!

SHOUT OUT to our newest members: Nathn N, Luke P, Addison G, Sonny B, Dominik S, Steven B, Richard W, Eric N & Christian B!

We appreciate you for supporting our work with your hard-earned cash.

(If Changelog++ is new to you, it is our membership program you can join to ditch the ads, get closer to the metal with bonus content, receive a free sticker pack in the mail, directly support our work & get shout outs like the ones above. ☝)

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

–Jerod