ALOHA stands for “A Low-cost Open-source Hardware System for Bimanual Teleoperation”, which is certainly a stretch in terms of acronym, but the project itself is so cool that I don’t think it really matters… Here’s the pitch:

Fine manipulation tasks, such as threading cable ties or slotting a battery, are notoriously difficult for robots because they require precision, careful coordination of contact forces, and closed-loop visual feedback. Performing these tasks typically requires high-end robots, accurate sensors, or careful calibration, which can be expensive and difficult to set up. Can learning enable low-cost and imprecise hardware to perform these fine manipulation tasks? We present a low-cost system that performs end-to-end imitation learning directly from real demonstrations, collected with a custom teleoperation interface.

Sualeh Asif from Control (an AI code editor):

We’ve been using GPT-4 for a few months internally, and we thought we’d highlight a few examples](https://github.com/anysphere/gpt-4-for-code) that have been both particularly impressive and really useful to us.

Here it’s converting a Python dict of member functions to esoteric but correct-on-first-try C++ code 👇

In a tweet, of all places:

Come to @tumblr. We’ll add activitypub for interconnect. Don’t stress.

This is exactly the kind of adoption necessary for the Fediverse to really take off. its_happening.gif?

Dracula UI is a dark-first collection of UI patterns and components. Key features:

Built for Dark Mode: Most templates are built using light colors and later on adapted to dark colors. Dark themes shouldn’t be an afterthought, they should be a top priority.

Designer Friendly: Speed up the prototyping phase by using a highly configurable Design System. Collaborate easily by taking advantage of a carefully crafted Figma file.

Great Developer Experience: Don’t worry about class names, just use the Visual Studio Code snippets. You can take advantage of autocomplete and also access the entire documentation right from your code editor.

CSS co-designer Steven Pemberton, on Twitter:

!important was added for one reason only: laws in the US that require certain text to be in a given font-size. !important stops the cascade from changing it.

Anything else is probably misuse, and a sign you may not understand the cascade properly.

Cool move by Vercel. Rich says:

so happy about what this means for svelte’s future. it’ll be the same independent, pluralistic project as before, but with Vercel’s backing we can get ✨ a m b i t i o u s ✨

Congrats to the Svelte community! We’ll surely dicsuss this move and what all it means when Rich joins us on JS Party in early December.

This bold statement starts a long Twitter thread by Brantly Millegan:

“Sign-In w/ Ethereum” is the future of login for every app on the Internet, crypto-related or not. Not just an idea, it’s already the norm for web3 & will spread.

This idea was the most interesting/exciting thing for me that came out of our NFT talk with Mikeal Rogers. Could cryptocurrency be the carrot that attracts the masses to obtain a public/private key pair and be financially incentivized to secure it? If so, this makes for a far superior global identity system to anything previous.

For this to happen, I think mainstream browsers will have to build crypto wallets into them. Plugins and extensions like MetaMask are probably asking too much of people. What do you think? Feasible? Likely? Why or why not?

Guido van Rossum:

I decided that retirement was boring and have joined the Developer Division at Microsoft. To do what? Too many options to say! But it’ll make using Python better for sure (and not just on Windows :-). There’s lots of open source here. Watch this space.

Late last year Guido left Dropbox to head into retirement. Apparently “retirement was boring.” I’m curious to see how coming out of retirement changes things at the steering level of Python.

We talked mid last year with Brett Cannon about Python’s new governance and core team. I don’t recall their plan accounting for the possibility for their BDFL to come back from retirement. 😱

I’m sure whatever is to come for Python with Guido being back, it’ll be a net positive.

Here’s what worked for Vlad Mihalcea…

1. I started a blog first. This allows you to practice your writing and build an audience.

2. I self-published my book because publishers only wanted to give me just 10% from the profit. I used Leanpub to write and sell the book while I was still writing it and Teachable to sell it when it was done. Leanpub gives you 80% royalties. Teachable gives you around 95%.

3. …

Check his Twitter thread for the other twelve (12) things he did to make money with his book idea.

This thread from Tobias Lütke (CEO of Shopify) on Twitter…talks about digital by default, a unified work experience, WFH setup, empathy, company culture, change, and silver linings.

As of today, Shopify is a digital by default company. We will keep our offices closed until 2021 so that we can rework them for this new reality. And after that, most will permanently work remotely. Office centricity is over.

Until recently, work happened in the office. We’ve always had some people remote, but they used the internet as a bridge to the office. This will reverse now. The future of the office is to act as an on-ramp to the same digital workplace that you can access from your #WFH setup.

He goes on to say…

We haven’t figured this whole thing out. There is a lot of change ahead, but that is what we’re good at. “Thrive on change” is written on our (now digital) walls for a reason.

Jack Dorsey:

Twitter is funding a small independent team of up to five open source architects, engineers, and designers to develop an open and decentralized standard for social media. The goal is for Twitter to ultimately be a client of this standard.

Color me surprised and impressed. My first thought was, “why create something brand new when smart people have been working on open standards for a long time already?” Then I read on:

For social media, we’d like this team to either find an existing decentralized standard they can help move forward, or failing that, create one from scratch. That’s the only direction we at Twitter, Inc. will provide.

Verrry interesting, indeed. What do you think will come of all this?

Jane Lytvynenko went digging through the Equifax class-action suit and uncovered some absolute gems:

Furthermore, Equifax employed the username “admin” and the password “admin” to protect a portal used to manage credit disputes, a password that “is a surefire way to get hacked.” This portal contained a vast trove of personal information.

Hanlon’s razor often applies in security breaches like these, but I can’t see this as anything but pure negligence by Equifax’s technical teams. There’s more:

Equifax also failed to encrypt sensitive data in its custody… admitted that sensitive personal information relating to hundreds of millions of Americans was not encrypted… Not only was this information unencrypted, but it was also accessible through a public-facing, widely used website.

Filed under you-gotta-be-freakin-kiddin-me

Matt Steele was inspired by Mikeal Rogers’ “ode to GitHub Actions” on JS Party #91. Code is forthcoming. For now, just click through to the tweet to watch the embedded video…

This in-beta feature should be stolen by all browser DevTools teams. Such a great idea!

After announcing the program in a tweet, Jack Dorsey followed up with some details:

This will be Square’s first open source initiative independent of our business objectives. These folks will focus entirely on what’s best for the crypto community and individual economic empowerment, not on Square’s commercial interests. All resulting work will be open and free.

Followed by:

Square has taken a lot from the open source community to get us here. We haven’t given enough back. This is a small way to give back, and one that’s aligned with our broader interests: a more accessible global financial system for the internet.

Whether you’re a devout Bitcoin hodler or an avid nocoiner, you have to admit this a great way (the greatest?) for corporate entities to support the open source community. Full-time salaries. Not focused on commercial interests.

Let’s hope it plays out that way! 🙏

In response to questions about how this change will affect compensation on Medium, Ev says:

It doesn’t affect compensation—assuming you mean for Partner Program. That’s determined by readership from paying members, which will still be counted (assuming they’re logged in). #

In response to questions about the state and future of Medium, Ev says:

Generally it’s 📈. Lots of growth and good stuff happening. I have been meaning to give an update. Thanks for the nudge. #

This tweet from Shannon Ashley states she made $8,069.96 writing on Medium in February 2019 and has the screenshot to prove it. She even wrote “What It’s Like To Be All-In On Medium” but you have to be a paying member to read it.

This is an epic open source funding thread by @SwiftOnSecurity:

Corporate purchasing and policies make funding open source Literally Impossible. Nothing’s going to change until you make them pay you.

Someone filed a bug?
Support contract.

Someone wants a feature?
Support contract.

It’s literally easier to pay you $1500/yr than $25 once.

Followed by:

I want to donate $150 to this open source project.
“Do I look like a communist? Is that what you think of me?”

We need a $1.5k support contract rather than pay an on-staff developer $180k.
“Okay submit their IRS W-9 and Point Of Contact for vendor management to reach out to.”

That’s just the beginning. Lots to ponder if you have corporate users and you’re currently using donations as your primary source of funding.

Very cool! I tried to get to a Command Prompt, but it seems key input has been disabled.

There’s lots of fun comments in this Twitter thread.

Wohooo! JS Party live at JSConf US 2018 🤘 🎤

Thanks to Felipe for an awesome shot and tweet of our panelists on stage for the live JS Party at JSConf.

Ives van Hoorne, creator of CodeSandbox, tweeted this and the attached video has already racked up more than 41.5K views!

… This is not only Monaco, this is VSCode itself directly running in the browser with node shims connected to the APIs of CodeSandbox. This means that we can get Grid View, VSCode Extension support, breadcrumbs + more! I’m so excited by this! #

I’m close to getting VSCode extensions working in their own web worker, then we’ll get things like VIM mode, first class TypeScript support and more! The great thing is that it will work exactly as VSCode, it’s literally the same code base. #

It took years!

We’re finally finished removing jQuery from GitHub.com’s frontend. What did we replace it with? No framework whatsoever…

This is a long thread with some great conversations and questions.

This tweet from Dan Dean, an engineer at Simple, made me lol.

How your web application makes it through the framework wars

Jürg Lenhi, writes in this tweet thread:

Let’s talk about open-source. I’ve been developing and maintaining Paper.js for years. It has 8,700 stars on GitHub. Multiple big companies have done projects and products with it. Yet donations and sponsored features are very few, and I need to accept other work to sustain a living.

There are several more tweets that follow this up with more details from Jürg, but what I found missing, is an awareness of what a healthy relationship for him and this project looks like.

If we’ve learned anything from Request For Commits, it is that money doesn’t solve the open source maintainer problem, so donations or Patreon alone aren’t a fix.

(Thanks to Cody for sharing this in our community Slack.)

If so, then this Twitter thread should be a great read for you.

If you’re avoiding services like DynamoDB/Datastore/Spanner/SQS/PubSub out of fear of lock in, remember that managing Cassandra, Kafka, ZooKeeper, etc yourself is also lock in.

💣.

Ecto’s issues have been cleaned up and tagged with labels like Level:Advanced, Level:Intermediate, and Level:Starter to make it easier to know where you’d like to contribute.

@elixirlang on Twitter:

We have just tidied up the issues tracker for Ecto. If you were planning to contribute, pull requests and feedback are definitely welcome. #