Adam Stacoviak: “Let me get my T-R-U-M-P domain… [laughter] Anyways…

Adam Stacoviak: Trump.

Salvatore Sanfilippo: No, no. I said, “Okay, I understand. It can inflate, but then I will find a new project. I will not die if Redis is no longer used.” But instead, after this stage, especially in the San Francisco area, to use Redis was worse than saying “I vote for Trump”, or something like that. It was impossible to say “I use Redis” without people watching you very – or it was even worse than not having a kitchen in your house, because it was very big to have a kitchen, you know?

[00:20:13.01] And so people that I ran away from this Redis thing… But then, for example, there were very important companies that in the wave of this feeling was switched away from Redis, and then six months again they were back to Redis, because they created a lot of issues, trying to serve with other services. And so I continued. And at this point they said “Okay, this thing didn’t die in this moment, so it’s worth to –” Also, I was with VMware at that point, and they paid me a good amount of money, so I was no longer working for free… And then I switched to Pivotal, and then to Redis Labs. And it was a good setup. Basically, this was the start of the story. And then the story continued with incremental improvements to different subsystems of Redis, always trying to avoid making it too much complicated.

Adam Stacoviak: I’m joking, because last year I said 11, and I actually – so because I just listened back, I laughed at myself, because you said “How many do you have?” and I was like… Dramatic pause, “11.” And it was a lot. 11 is a lot. So I was like “I’ve got to trump that number.” 15.

Daniel Whitenack: One thing that was kind of brought up in the midst of this talk of the Trump administration and AI is this sort of AI and China discussion, where there’s a thought AI is kind of thriving in China, and maybe China is pulling ahead in AI… I know we’ve talked about this on the show before. There’s kind of this discussion of China and AI every time policy decisions are discussed on this show, and kind of factors in… And one of those things that I think is relevant is just the dominance of Qwen-based models in recent times. So if people aren’t aware, one of the things that I think is interesting to follow recently is Alibaba’s Qwen family of models. That’s spelled Q-W-E-N, Qwen. The latest of these is the Qwen 2.5 model family. And generally, these Qwen 2.5 models are quite impressive. They generally top the open LLM leaderboards in various categories. You’ll see them in the top spots.

So obviously, these are Chinese models, that is they’re models being built by a Chinese company, Alibaba. The CEO of Hugging Face, Clem, is quoted in one article I was reading of “Qwen 72B is the king, and Chinese models are dominating.” That’s a pretty clear statement. That was earlier in the summer, but I think we’ve seen continued domination of these models.

Any interesting takes on that, Chris, in terms of how you’ve seen the model landscape shift from closed model providers, to open, to maybe more geographically diverse, and certainly China being within that?

Adam Stacoviak: I mean – yeah, exactly. So cross-examine that against, obviously, X/Twitter, Threads, and then Blue Sky. Is it truly worth – I think the thing I think about is less “Is X for me or is Threads for me?” and more “Is Blue Sky worth giving any attention to?” It’s almost synonymous with Arc, in the fact that they’re trying to do something different, but kind of the same. Blue Sky is not much different. How much different could you make a social media application though, or a platform? It’s not drastically different. Like, even True Social. I think Trump did that, didn’t he?

Chris Benson: And I agree with you. I want to go back to something you mentioned though, as you were talking your way through the example… And that’s that it gives you these kind of intermediary steps that it says it’s following along the way. And from my standpoint, I think that’s more - once again, on the marketing side, trying to reinforce that reasoning, marketing message that they’re driving on that…

You know, as we talk about what’s an appropriate set of tasks to use with each of these models, and especially with this 01 preview that’s out right now, it warrants knowing that there are a few drawbacks to the model, which we have not called out yet. One of them is that it still has a cutoff date on knowledge, which is tied back to October of 2023. So it’s almost a year since it has access to that knowledge. And unlike some of the other models before it, which had internet access to go out and kind of make up for that and get some more current information to throw into the model that was trained up until the cutoff date, this one does not have the ability to browse the internet. So that alone may change kind of how you use it because – so going back to what I was suggesting, if I’m coding, well, it may be that if I’m worrying about whether it’s Python code or Rust code or Go code, not a huge amount has changed in the coding world in that time in terms of what’s available library-wise, unless it’s just the latest, greatest thing to come out. And so I can probably use it really beneficially in a coding context there.

[00:42:11.24] But as we record this, for instance, on this model, just to talk about current events, a potential second - it sounds like a second assassination attempt on Donald Trump occurred today in the news. And if I wanted to ask the model to get information about that, this would not be the model. And I’m just pulling that one out simply because it’s a big news event that happened on the day that we’re recording.

And so in that case, if I’m curious to explore the story or whatever, using a set of models, I might have to go to some of the other models that have the internet access, and might be able to frame things that I’d be curious about for my consumption and my knowledge, whereas that current event would not be applicable here.

And then finally, I wanted to point out that we’re kind of used to being able to upload into the 4.0 series, the external documents from a RAG perspective, retrieval-augmented generation; that’s not available in the preview here. So that’s yet another limitation.

And when you add up the cutoff date, you add the lack of file upload, and you add the lack of internet access, those are some fairly substantial limitations on this model at the current time. So there truly are certainly a set of use cases that you might go to different models to see. Current events, it’s not going to be this one.

Adam Stacoviak: That was kind of like a Trump sounding laugh. I felt like I was channeling somebody there… Carol J…

Adam Stacoviak: We need a better harness the most available energy source ever, and that’s solar. All the things that the Earth provides as its natural ways. I’m for Bitcoin. I understand the whole “It sucks a bunch of energy”, but let’s be humans and innovate and find ways around the dirty ways. And again, to Jerod’s point, I don’t know a ton about energy necessarily, but at the same time, the word I feel is more hybrid.

[46:14] There’s places where something Diesel-powered will trump, for the moment, the output of something that is electric-powered. Or LiPo battery-powered, or whatever it might be-powered. The world is more hybrid. I think we need balance, rather than cut-off.

Adam Stacoviak: I actually did some math… I couldn’t help it, because I was thinking - you know, when you think about directors, or particular actors, you think about Tom Cruise, for example. I think Top Gun was his all-time – Mavericks, of course; the latest one. It was his top-grossing movie of all time for himself, right? It trumped every other – and sorry, Jerod; I used that word trump. It has exceeded all past records for Tom Cruise as an actor in a movie. And so I was like “Well, what has José done in terms of listenership on the Changelog Podcast Network?” Because you’ve been on Practical AI, talking about different things, you’ve been on this show, you’ve been on now Friends, you’ve had Chris along with you to sort of talk through some things… So collectively, you’re responsible for at least 210,000 listens on our podcast.

Jerod Santo: What I’ve realized over the years - I didn’t realize this as a young person - is how communication is like the… I won’t call it the trump card, just because that word has been sullied in the minds… But it’s a cross-referential – it’s like just the best skill that helps in every niche, every area of the stack, every business… And if you add that to whatever you’re doing, you are ahead of the game, or you’re ahead of where you were for sure. That’s a skill you want to stack. And it moves with you.

[00:27:57.27] In software, one of our problems is we invest in skills that become irrelevant. And that’s a real challenge. I mean, it’s not something to be taken lightly, and it’s a difficult thing to see what’s coming next, and to be at least well-versed in it, if not competent, if not excellent at it… And not wasting a bunch of time on something that’s going to go away, like your Cordova book that you wrote and your company decided “No more Cordova.” That’s kind of just like a sunk cost at that point, unless you’re gonna take your skills elsewhere… And that’s been a real challenge, and one of the reasons why we exist even, and why I got involved in the Changelog back in the day, was just trying to stay relevant, know what’s going on, keep up with the trends… Do you have advice for new developers on that front, like how to invest in things that are going to last, or how to float above that area where you can become, like, “I spent six years becoming the best jQuery developer in the world, and now everybody wants to React.” I mean, even that’s a David reference, but… You know? That happened; it’s happened to all of us. And you’ve lasted a long time in this industry, Dan.

Chris Benson: Oh, that’s really nice. [laughter] But an executive order, in short - and I’m sure if we have listeners that say I’m slightly off, they can correct us on this… But the President of the United States can issue an executive order, which is a legal device which essentially has the effect of law. It can be overridden a couple of different ways. The US Congress can override it by passing an actual law. So if an executive order is in conflict with a law that is passed in Congress, that law in Congress will trump that. And in addition, an executive order, I believe, can be the US Supreme Court can also override it on a constitutional basis. But unless one of those two things happen, my understanding is executive orders otherwise have the effect for all practical purposes of law in the United States of America.

Jon Evans: Right. In the same way that we got the governor of Minnesota from the movie Predator, we got [unintelligible 00:42:24.27] President Donald Trump… You don’t look back and think, “Well, what are the odds that we’re going to have Republican or Democrat governors in these states, or this country?” That was not even an option when we look back on this, what actually happened. The weirdness of the world is accelerating and increasing, and I think that’s gonna keep happening.

Jerod Santo: Even legendary computer scientist, Donald Knuth, is playing with ChatGPT. Inspired by a conversation he had with Stephen Wolfram, Knuth asked it 20 questions and wrote up his analysis of its response.

His questions are… interesting. Much more intentional than anything I’d come up with. Does Donald Trump eat betel nuts? Write a sonnet that is also a haiku. What is the most beautiful algorithm? Stuff like that. He provides the answers verbatim, as well.

Here’s my favorite part, from his conclusions:

I find it fascinating that novelists galore have written for decades about scenarios that might occur after a “singularity” in which superintelligent machines exist. But as far as I know, not a single novelist has realized that such a singularity would almost surely be preceded by a world in which machines are 0.01% intelligent (say), and in which millions of real people would be able to interact with them freely at essentially no cost.

Despite this game of 20 questions, Knuth does not plan on continuing his generative AI research. He says he’s going to spend his time developing concepts that are authentic and trustworthy.

Juan Andrés Guerrero-Saade: Or the 400-pound hacker from like the Trump era…

Mat Ryer: That’s very true in British. In British, Trump does mean – that is what that means, so… Yeah.

Lior Hakim: [20:20] What we are trying to do is create positive use cases, and just let people see the positive uses of such things. And actually, in our company we see a lot of people that want to become characters and have their own character, and we communicate in work with our own characters with one on one, sending Slack messages or videos and stuff like that, and having ourselves on the platform and be able to create that. And aside from that, we have a lot of people asking, “When can I be my character?” So those are early adopters.

And I think as things play out and those use cases are out there, and people see other people appear in content, and they see it’s safe, and it’s put to good use, and they are being rewarded for that, I think the general positivity is something that is built gradually, and the trust is built gradually. And I think it’s a good start that we’ve seen the misuses before, so we know what to watch out for. And going forward, we can start to see better and better uses of the technology. It started with a talk with Obama or Tom Cruise, or Trump, or whatever examples of people frightening, and then we can just build from there with the good uses, and people read are already in place that might be fine, but once they see positive uses, I think they might want to subscribe to this notion and join basically this character economy or virtual human economy that is being built.

Adam Stacoviak: Yeah. It’s good, but it’s foreign for a SaaS business - or in quotes, a “SaaS business” - to be also in advertising. It’s like, “Well, isn’t SaaS bigger?” If you’d get more subscribers, wouldn’t that trump advertisements?

Josh Meyer: So I think that I’m glad you brought this up, because it is a huge part of working in this technology. If you ignore it, you say, “I’m working in voice technology, and I’m just going to work in my bubble, and I’m not even going to care about the fact that somebody might be using our speech recognition for illegal surveillance”, right? Like, if you ignore that that is a possibility, you are doing yourself and also the community a disservice.

So there’s a lot with this… For one, I’d like to point – and hopefully, we can get maybe a link to this… There’s an issue on our GitHub for text to speech, which is an open discussion on ways of mitigating misuse of synthetic speech systems. And that started as kind of – actually, not an issue; it was as a GitHub discussion, I think. And it started as this kind of, “Hey, let’s throw some ideas together” and it just evolved, and now it’s just kind of a growing discussion. And I think being open, having these conversations openly is really important, because we’ve got some feedback… There were ideas that came from the people in the community that I’d never even thought of. There’s watermarking audio, which is kind of obvious… But there’s whole layers of that.

[40:04] And then there was somebody who’s doing their master’s thesis on this in particular, and they weighed in… So I think that one first step is to not brush it off, to think about what kinds of misuse is possible… Because there’s so many different kinds, and if you lump them all together, then it becomes too kind of hard of a problem, and it can just kind of lock up; you get brain freeze, or however you want to call it.

But I like to think about kinds of misuse as basically two major groups. There’s people who will misuse technology accidentally, where they don’t think they’re doing something bad, but it just blows up… Which could happen very easily on social media. The Onion, as a satirical newspaper from the United States, famously – I don’t know, every other month there’s an article from The Onion that gets taken seriously by people who don’t know The Onion. And that can cause real harm, right? It can get people very upset, because they have a satirical headline, and it looks like a real news site, but it’s not.

And so that is an example of somebody who’s not – they’re not trying to spread fake news, but because people don’t know the context, because it’s just shared as a screenshot on social media, it loses all context, and it just snowballs into something that it was never intended to be. So there’s examples like that.

You can think of somebody who uses our voice cloning to make a clone of president Trump saying something and they share it on social media… And earlier, we had a voice cloning demo which was – you didn’t need to sign up to have an account to do it. So anybody could do it. And what we did then, because anybody could do it without having us know who they were, we put basically a watermark, a very audible watermark in the background, which is background music. I mean, it’s like a very low-hanging fruit, but anybody listening to it would not think, “Oh, this is an actual recording, a secret recording of Trump in the Oval Office.”

Bryan Cantrill: So I let it absolutely sit there. And I was just like, “Okay, this is impressive. This is really impressive.” And he – I mean, more or less ordered his direct reports. Like, I’m sorry - in order for us to be able to communicate with one another, you’re going to have to actually not just watch this, but retain it. Just like with the news yesterday, and Trump throwing his lunch across the room - that is a Gavin Belson scene. That is Gavin Belson destroying his own house in a rage. Anyway…

Josh Goldberg: It’s a great question, statement. I actually know – I’m not clear on the origins technically of TypeScript ESLint; I think James Henry started it. There were a few different efforts to create some similar project. Now the maintainer crew is James Henry, Brad Zacher, a person whose real name I don’t know and never seen a photo of, an enigma called Armano2, and myself.

TSLint - yes, it was the linter for TypeScript. It took a very different strategy from TS ESLint. Instead of working on top of ESLint, which allows it to reuse a lot of the infrastructure and rules such as the React Hooks rules that are very good and popular, it is a complete reimplementation, a separate project specifically for TypeScript. I should say “was”, because it was archived in 2019, or some similar year.

[28:10] I actually was a maintainer on TSLint when it was killed. I helped kill it. I wrote TSLint to ESLint config, which converts your TSLint config to ESLint… And actually, I felt a lot of joy in killing my old – the first major project that I’d maintained.

Two issues with Palantir being the corporate sponsor of the project… Although they did a good job of not pushing any corporate interests or whatnot, the name Palantir has a lot of negative associations, especially since 2016, Trump got elected and Palantir was what many believe to be the wrong side of history. And there was a great moment where - I’m not gonna name names, but some well-known JavaScript community member started posting “TSLint, brought to you by fascists” on the GitHub issues page… Which was weird for me, since I have never associated with Palantir. Anyway…

The second issue was that Palantir is a corporate sponsor, and they are a sole sponsor, whereas ESLint is much more community-run and funded. So ESLint was getting features at a much more rapid pace.

In general, also, why would you have two linters? That’s a lot of maintenance burden. Every time one linter got a feature - normally ESLint - the other one would have to scramble to get it, too. If you had a React plugin, or JSX accessibility, or Angular lint rules or whatnot, you’d then have to implement it in the other.

So now TypeScript ESLint, as of - I forget if it was 2020 or 2019, or 2018, some year several years ago now, took over from ESLint and has all the features that you would expect from a modern linter, plus the ability to use TypeScript-specific type information… Which actually gives it a huge leg up in power over just vanilla ESLint rules.

We can locate your code, understand your types, whether it’s JS code with checkJs/allowJs, or TypeScript itself, and we can make really good, informed decisions on the code, and give you really nice, specific, powerful editor complaint squiggles as a result.

Adam Stacoviak: So in the end, product does not trump everything. It takes more than just simply great engineering, great product… At what point did you begin learning those lessons? You wouldn’t really call your first business a failure necessarily, because I think that anything that we do, and do trying well, I think is a success… Because you can always take away learnings. You can always take away some experience from that into the next thing. There’s always sort of this positive to any sort of negative… Would you agree with that?

Carmen Andoh: Ha-ha! Kyle Simpson in The Economy of Keystrokes - another wonderful talk. He talks about the taxonomy of needs in the JavaScript world, which is “How do we rank the needs?” The needs of the reader trump the needs of the writer, trump the needs of the maintainer… And he goes on to explain in that talk - some of these idioms that we have, what are they for? Is terseness really better if you can’t read it?

I really love the ideas coming out of that talk there. They’re very similar to your words, Dave.

Adam Stacoviak: Well, all too often in anything you feel like - especially when there’s opportunity and you’re ambitious - all too often do the opportunities trump your ability to say no. And next thing you know, you’re going in places you don’t really want to, for other reasons. And it’s like, if you feel pulled in anything you’re doing beyond your capacity, slow down and check yourself. That’s what we say.

Bob Martin: It talks to me about Donald Trump, and it’s continuously talking to me about Donald Trump. It’s remarkable.

Chris Benson: Gotcha. So while you were doing that, I googled and got a Bloomberg article called - and I’m probably gonna butcher the name, too - “China’s Hikvision has probably filmed you”, is what the article title is. It starts with a couple of bullets that say “Cameras are installed at army bases, airports and schools”, and then a second bullet says “Trump administration concerned about Chinese spying tactics.”

As I scanned down through this article while you were talking, there was one paragraph that kind of jumped out. It says “Hikvision, which is controlled by the Chinese government and Dahua are leaders in the market for surveillance technology, with cameras that can produce sharp, full-color images in fog and near-total darkness. They also use artificial intelligence to–”

Chris Benson: [19:45] It’s funny - when you said that, about whether or not people after the fact would learn that… That was addressed in the congressional hearing today. It was noted that when one of these videos goes out and goes viral, even if it’s widely reported that the video was a fake after the fact, it tends not to hit as many people… So you inevitably have changed the landscape by the initial post, and then the “fix” afterwards doesn’t actually completely fix it… And they noted that psychologically even if people know it was a fake that they saw, psychologically they still hold on to some of that bias that was introduced through the fake.

So even if I found out that the picture of President Trump and Nicholas Cage was in fact a deepfake, as it was, in theory there’s the potential for that to influence me in some way, depending on what the video author was shooting for. It’s an interesting side effect.

Sacha Greif: Yeah, that’s a good question. It’s really tough to answer… For me, I thought about that a lot, especially after last year, where a lot of the criticisms – because the survey got bigger, so I got more criticism, which is fair… So my philosophy is not really the number, or whatever that matters; it’s just people knowing what the data says and where it’s from.

If you survey 20 people, that’s fine, as long as you say that it was 20 people. If it’s 200,000, that’s fine too. If it’s 20,000, but they come from such-and-such sources, which might introduce its own bias, it’s fine as long as you disclose that. So that’s really what we’re trying to do.

For example, for the State of CSS, since a lot of our respondents are coming from having done the State of JS survey, I’m sure there will be a bias towards things like CSS-in-JS, or whatever… But I think that’s fine, because people can know that, and see that, and also then use the data critically. For example, maybe the proportion of respondents who use CSS-in-JS libraries will be higher, but their opinion of these libraries will still be representative of the larger community.

I think in our daily life, when we see numbers in surveys, we’re not taught how to analyze them. It’s like “Oh, Trump has 30% chance of winning”, or something, so you’re like “That’s tiny. It’s never gonna happen.” Then he wins and you’re like “Well, the polls were wrong, because the polls said 30% and he still won.” But obviously, that’s not how polls work, and I think there’s kind of an effort on the part of the people reading the data as well to see the raw data and then make their own opinion, rather than just want something that’s kind of pre-baked for them.

Sahil Lavingia: I think it was reactive in the sense that I was spending a lot of money in San Francisco, my landlord was about to increase the rent on me, Trump had just won the election, and San Francisco became this not super-fun place to be… And it felt like everyone just was very comfortable; even though upset with the election, I think people were like “We’re on the right side of things, so we’ll just have to wait it out” sort of thing. To me, that just felt like “Why?”, like “What am I learning from being here right now?”, besides watching my bank balance go down, or whatever… And so that was reactive in the sense where I’m like “I need to leave.” I think everything can be looked at probably in both lenses, reactive/proactive.

Then a fantasy author that I really like – so in the meantime Gumroad was going through that slump, and I had started trying to figure out what I could do to have goals that I could measure, things that I wanted to do for a long time and never could, and one of those things was writing fiction. So I started writing a fantasy novel.

I wrote the first draft, and I was working on the second draft I believe at the time, and a fantasy author that I love, this guy Brandon Sanderson, who lives in Provo, Utah, and teaches a class at BYU, the local university, run by the LDS Church… And I applied to it; anyone could apply and get in, and you just had to move to Provo. Then I got an email saying “Hey, you got in.” I submitted the first chapter of my book. They told me “Class is in two weeks.” I was like, “Okay. I guess I’m moving to Provo, Utah.”

Jerod Santo: I think in the news space, the New York Times put years of journalistic effort into the Trump background as finances, and there was this bombshell report in the New York Times, and for some reason - because our politic is so crazy and the news cycle is every half an hour - they put literally years of effort into that, with multiple journalists, and it just kind of flew under the radar. So they lost a bet in that regard.