Feross and his team at Socket recently shipped a wrapper library for the ubiquitous npm package manager’s command-line interface that brings enhanced security when you need it most: before executing any code

Bradly Farias lead this effort, so Jerod & Chris invited him on the show to learn all about it.

This week we’re joined by Zach Latta, the Founder of Hack Club. At 16, Zach tested out of high school and moved to SF to join Yo as their first engineer. After playing a key role at Yo, he founded Hack Club to help teen hackers start coding clubs around the world. Today, teen hackers can meet IRL, online, at a hackathon, or leverage Hack Club Bank a fiscal sponsor to create their own organization. Hack Club is the program Zach wished he had in high school.

Kara Deloss announces GitHub Accelerator’s 2023 cohort, Databricks releases the first open source, instruction-following LLM, fine-tuned on a human-generated instruction dataset licensed for research and commercial use, Mihai Parparita writes how he improved Tailscale thanks to Apple’s open source & Neal Fennimore asks and answers the question: Passkeys: what the heck and why?!

This week we’re talking with Cory Doctorow (this episode contains explicit language) about his newest book Chokepoint Capitalism, which he co-autored with Rebecca Giblin. Chokepoint Capitalism is about how big tech and big content have captured creative labor markets and the ways we can win them back. We talk about chokepoints creating chickenized reverse-centaurs, paying for your robot boss (think Uber, Doordash, Amazon Drivers), the chickenization that’s climbing the priviledge gradient from the most blue collar workers to the middle-class. There are chokepoints in open source, AI generative art, interoperability, music, film, and media. To quote Cory, “We’re all fighting the same fight.”

Ken Thompson’s 75-year-project is a jukebox for the ages, Tabby is a self-hosted AI coding assistant, Codeberg is a collaboration platform and Git hosting for open source software, content and projects, TheSequence explains The LLama Effect & Paul Orlando writes about Ghosts, Guilds and Generative AI.

This week we’re talking about LLMs with Simon Willison. We can not avoid this topic. Last time it was Stable Diffusion breaking the internet. This time it’s LLMs breaking the internet. Large Language Models, ChatGPT, Bard, Claude, Bing, GitHub Copilot X, Cody…we cover it all.

Twitter publishes (some of) its recommendation algorithm, Toran Bruce Richards puts GPT-4 on autopilot, Simon Willison shares a good way for us to think about LLMs, Eric Elliot creates a powerful pseudocode programming language for LLMs & I define and demystify the term “stochastic parrot”.

Jerod & the gang catch you up on what’s new and poppin’ in the web development world. We go deep on GitHub Copilot X and the latest AI advancements, take a bathroom break while Nick talks about TypeScript 5 & continue the debate about the future of React.

After years of working for Google on the Go Team, Filippo Valsorda quit last year to experiment with more sustainable paths for open source maintainers. Good news, it worked! Filippo is now a full-time open source maintainer and he joins Jerod on this episode to tell everyone exactly how he’s making the equivalent to his total compensation package at Google in open source.

GitHub announces Copilot X, Mckay Wrigley created an open source ChatGPT UI buit with Next.js, TypeScripe & Tailwind CSS, OpenAI is also launching a ChatGPT plugin initiative, Brad Woods writes about juice in software development, Logto is an open source alternative to Auth0, Basaran is an open source alternative to the OpenAI text completion API & llama-cli is a straightforward Go CLI interface for llama.cpp.

Node core committer Erick Wendel joins Jerod & KBall to talk us through how he created his own JS runtime using V8, Libuv & more. Along the way we learn from his learnings, wrap our heads around the differences between Node, Bun & Deno, and talk about creating awesome content for developers… whether they like it or not!

This week we’re talking with Georgi Gerganov about his work on Whisper.cpp and llama.cpp. Georgi first crossed our radar with whisper.cpp, his port of OpenAI’s Whisper model in C and C++. Whisper is a speech recognition model enabling audio transcription and translation. Something we’re paying close attention to here at Changelog, for obvious reasons. Between the invite and the show’s recording, he had a new hit project on his hands: llama.cpp. This is a port of Facebook’s LLaMA model in C and C++. Whisper.cpp made a splash, but llama.cpp is growing in GitHub stars faster than Stable Diffusion did, which was a rocket ship itself.

Michal Warda on self-hosting in 2023, Martin Heinz will never use Alpine Linux again, Oliver Rice at Supabase creates type constraints in Postgres with just 65 lines of SQL, Aaron Patterson converted a BMW shifter into a Bluetooth keyboard that can control Vim, Piet Terheyden has been curating beautiful & functional websites daily since 2013, Ryan Lucas put together a history of Visual Basic, turns out it’s easy for an open source project to buy fake GitHub stars & Mastodon hit 10 million accounts.

Dan Abramov & Joe Savona from the React Team join Jerod & Nick for a wide-ranging discussion about React’s place in the frontend ecosystem. We cover everything from React competing with React, their responses to SPA fatigue and recent criticisms, to Server Components and the future of the framework.

This week we’re talking with Nathan Sobo about his next big thing. Nathan is known for his work on the Atom editor while at GitHub. But his work wasn’t finished when he left, so…he started Zed, a high-performance multiplayer editor that’s engineered for performance. And today, Nathan talks us through all the details.

Dalai is the simplest way to run LLaMA on your local machine, simple web tools that just work without annoying you, Wik is a tool to view wikipedia pages from your terminal, Rspack is a fast, Rust-based web bundler, Doodle is a pure Kotlin UI framework, Marqo is tensor search for humans & iLLA is an open source alternative to Retool.

Reorx lists awesome apps & tools using the new ChatGPT API, Ernie Smith ranks self-hosted app alternatives, Very Good Ventures brings Dart to the server, Daniel Stenberg tells curl’s NuGet story & Hacker Stations showcases tech workspace setups from all over the world.

This is our 9th Kaizen with Adam & Jerod. We start today’s conversation with the most important thing: embracing change. For Gerhard, this means putting Ship It on hold after this episode. It also means making more time to experiment, maybe try a few of those small bets that we recently talked about with Daniel. Kaizen will continue, we are thinking on the Changelog. Stick around to hear the rest.

This week we’re joined by Brigit Murtaugh, Product Manager on the Visual Studio Code team at Microsoft, and we’re talking about Development Containers and the Dev Container spec. Ever since we talked with Cory Wilkerson about Coding in the cloud with Codespaces we’ve wanted to get the Changelog.com codebase setup with a dev environment in the cloud to more easily support contributions. After getting a drive-by contribution from Chris Eggert to add a Dev Container spec to our codebase, we got curious and reached out to Brigit and asked her to come on the show to give us all the details.

Sahn Lam details Stack Overflow’s monolith/on-prem architecture, Hillel Wayne asks the Lobsters community for killer libraries, Linux 6.2 is ready to run on M1 Macs thanks to Asahi Linux, Johan Halse writes up what to expect from your web framework & Eli Bendersky on using GoatCounter for blog analytics.