This escalated quickly. I don’t know about you, but I’m a daily user of ChatGPT. Just yesterday, I asked “What options does Linux offer for fast RAID 0 software RAID?” and I had an entire conversation that settled on Btrfs as a good option and I learned how to create and configure the array, mount it, and most importantly scrub it for errors. I’ll still use ZFS, of course. But, I’ve never had that experience using Google (nor can you).

…according to a report by Semafor, Microsoft Corp is discussing the possibility of acquiring OpenAI, the parent company of ChatGPT. The tech-industry giant is ready to pay upwards of $10 billion for the acquisition.

Clearly, Microsoft sees the bigger picture here for Bing, Microsoft 365, GitHub Copilot, and more. This also speaks to the conversation we had with Swyx about AI’s future being tied to capitalism and eventually being controlled by the FAANGs.

Most of you already know what it’s like to work in a startup or a small company. A few of you have been asking us for conversations with engineers that work for big companies, the kind that run everything from big title games to banking, and even critical national infrastructure.

In today’s episode, we talk to Ganeshkumar, a Software Engineer in the Azure Kubernetes Service team, who works on Node Lifecycle and Kubernetes Versioning, and Brendan, Kubernetes project co-founder and engineering Corporate Vice President of Microsoft Azure OSS and Cloud-native Compute. We talk about what it’s like to work for Microsoft, how mentoring works in practice, and what Kubernetes, Omega, & Borg have to do with it all.

The coolest thing about this story is that the entire endeavor was apparently prompted by a random developer tweet! If you’ve ever wondered what all goes in to opening the source of historic software products like this one:

This code was restored from the Microsoft corporate archives and cleared for release.

• Developer names and aliases were removed, with the exception of current employees who worked on the original release who consented to keeping their names in place
• The archive consisted of several CDs, some of which were for alternate builds or products, and have been excluded
• The code does not build with today’s engineering tools, and is released as-is.

A brief (6 minutes to read) history of MS-DOS:

First released on August 12, 1981, MS-DOS became the foundation for business computing for almost two decades. MS-DOS stood for Microsoft Disk Operating System and was often referred to simply as “DOS”. It is the software that helped build Microsoft, becoming the foundation Microsoft built the Windows operating system on. It went through 8 (and a half-ish) major revisions, with the final version being shipped with Windows ME in September, 2000.

dos-like is a programming library/framework, kind of like a tiny game engine, for writing games and programs with a similar feel to MS-DOS productions from the early 90s.

Rather than writing code that would run on a real DOS machine, dos-like is about making programs which run on modern platforms like Windows, Mac and Linux, but which attempts to recreate the look, feel, and sound of old DOS programs.

I’ve been skeptical of the recent no-code movement (which from my perspective is mostly pushed by startups trying to create a market), but this low-code concept seems much more fitting for 2021 and useful in general:

Microsoft Power Fx is a low-code general purpose programming language based on spreadsheet-like formulas. It is a strongly typed, declarative, and functional language, with imperative logic and state management available as needed.

What’s ironic about Power Fix (as of today) is that there is literally no code in the repo:

Power Fx started with Power Apps canvas apps and that is where you can experience it now. We are in the process of extracting the language from that product so that we can use it in more Microsoft Power Platform products and make it available here for you to use.

What they do have today is a start on the language docs. Over time this repo will transition from no-code, to low-code, and eventually to full-code. If everything goes as planned…

Microsoft’s researchers believe they’ve now finally transformed Excel into a full-fledged programming language, thanks to the introduction of a new feature called LAMBDA. “With LAMBDA, Excel has become Turing-complete. You can now, in principle, write any computation in the Excel formula language,” a Microsoft blog proclaimed.

Two questions:

1. What’s the most influential consumer application history and why is it Excel?
2. Can we please stop naming things Lambda?

Bharat Sandhu, Director of Azure AI and Mixed Reality at Microsoft, joins Chris and Daniel to talk about how Microsoft is making AI accessible and productive for users, and how AI solutions can address real world challenges that customers face. He also shares Microsoft’s research-to-product process, along with the advances they have made in computer vision, image captioning, and how researchers were able to make AI that can describe images as well as people do.

Hayden Barnes explains how Windows and Linux exist in a “cosmic duality” and whether or not Microsoft will ever “shift the core of the Windows operating system to the Linux kernel.”

I have a unique perspective on Microsoft’s Linux involvement. I help deliver Ubuntu on Windows Subsystem for Linux in my job at Canonical. … I have become somewhat of an intermediary between the Microsoft and Linux communities. It is something I am glad to do. There are creative, kind, and fascinating people in both communities. Interesting things happen when the lines between them blur. Fostering cross-pollination will make computing better for everyone.

What’s linked is the official PyTorch implementation of a paper published in April of this year called Bringing Old Photos Back to Life.

We propose to restore old photos that suffer from severe degradation through a deep learning approach. Unlike conventional restoration tasks that can be solved through supervised learning, the degradation in real photos is complex and the domain gap between synthetic images and real old photos makes the network fail to generalize. Therefore, we propose a novel triplet domain translation network by leveraging real photos along with massive synthetic image pairs. Specifically, we train two variational autoencoders (VAEs) to respectively transform old photos and clean photos into two latent spaces.

The results are impressive!

Kayla Cinnamon, Program Manager at Microsoft for Windows Terminal, Console, Command Line, and Cascadia Code joined us to talk about the release of Windows Terminal 1.0 and the new Windows command-line experience. We talk about everything that went into rethinking the command line experience on Windows, the UX and UI design behind it all, the learnings of working in open source, and what’s to come for the Windows command line experience.

No matter how much investment software companies may put into tooling and training their developers, “C++, at its core, is not a safe language,” said Ryan Levick, Microsoft cloud developer advocate, during the AllThingsOpen virtual conference last month, explaining, in a virtual talk, why Microsoft is gradually switching to Rust to build its infrastructure software, away from C/C++. And it is encouraging other software industry giants to consider the same.

This sounds SO familiar, as heard from Josh Aas recently on The Changelog (listen here).

We certainly should not be writing any new code in C and C++. The opportunity for vulnerabilities – I mean, it absolutely will have vulnerabilities, and we need to get that type of code away from our networks to start with, and then probably away from most other things, too… So I would hope that in 10-20 years we think it’s crazy to be deploying major (or maybe even minor) pieces of software that are written in languages that are not memory-safe.

So we’re trying to remove code written in C and C++ from our infrastructure at Let’s Encrypt. I think that’s just a basic part of diligence applied to secure infrastructure. If your stack is some giant pile of C++ or C at the network edge, followed by OpenSSL written in C, followed by a Linux kernel written in C, glibc - your whole pathway has got all this code that you just know is full of security holes. It absolutely is. You just can’t claim that those are even close to secure systems. They’re absolutely not. We’re gonna look back on this and say “That was crazy. We have better options today.”

Excellent work coming from Microsoft’s VIDA research group

This new version of SandDance has been rebuilt from scratch with the goal of being modular, extensible, and embeddable into your custom applications.

Cascadia Code is designed “to enhance the modern look and feel of the Windows Terminal”, but it also looks quite nice in VS Code or your text editor of choice.

Like many out there, I was a skeptic of Microsoft’s acquisition of GitHub. To be honest, in some ways I still am. We’ve been tracking this topic very closely over the last several years. What’s particularly interesting to me is this story — Scott Guthrie wrote a proposal in 2014 to acquire GitHub and filed it away in a drawer.

In 2014, Microsoft Corp. cloud chief Scott Guthrie wrote up a proposal to acquire GitHub Inc. Then he filed the plan away in a drawer. Every once in a while he’d take the plan out and look at it, and then return it to the cabinet. Guthrie felt Microsoft just wasn’t ready to acquire the popular open-source company…

Fast forward 5 years…GitHub has been acquired and Nat Friedman (CEO of GitHub) says “GitHub has to be neutral and GitHub has to be independent. Developers want choice. GitHub can’t have any favoritism.”

With that kind of intention and posture, my skepticism is eroding.

Yomi Kazeem writing for Quartz Africa:

Last year, when Microsoft executives were doing their due diligence ahead of paying $7.5 billion for GitHub, the software engineer marketplace, they might have been surprised by one unexpected data point: Nigeria had the fourth-fastest growing developer community on the platform the previous year.

Microsoft has now fully turned its sights on software engineering talent in Africa and will spend over $100 million on a software development center initiative. Microsoft’s first development centers in Africa will open in Lagos, Nigeria and Nairobi, Kenya this year and will employ 100 full-time developers who will work across artificial intelligence, machine learning and mixed reality innovation.

This Twitter thread from Floor Drees mentioned Christian Nwamba (@codebeast). Give Christian a follow.

The news about GitHub Sponsor is making the rounds. This post from Owen Williams highlights how GitHub is listening and putting their money where their mouth is, for the good of all of us.

GitHub, it seems, is thriving again. It just showed the fruits of that labor, and what it looks like when a company is participating in the discussion in the open, listening to the developers that know it best.

At an event called GitHub Satellite, the company unveiled the biggest set of new features in memory, all designed to address glaring problems the platform has faced for years. They’re designed to help make GitHub a better place to work, and contribute to the open source community as a whole.

Jeff McAffer (the Director of Microsoft’s Open Source Programs Office) says you can plot their course in open source quite closely in the model he describes in this post. A few years ago they were in denial about the open source movement. Today it’s a different story with 20,000 Microsoft folks activity working on GitHub.

Companies, governments, and other organizations big and small are working with open source to achieve their goals. Teams range from barely considering it to betting their whole business on open source. Putting some structure on this spectrum has helped me think about and evolve Microsoft’s open source program. I’d love to hear if you find it useful, how, or why not.

If you run, participate in, lead, or you are curious about open source programs you should read this.

Chris caught up with Jennifer Marsman, Principal Engineer on the AI for Earth team at Microsoft, right before her speech at Applied Machine Learning Days 2019 in Lausanne, Switzerland. She relayed how the team came into being, what they do, and some of the good deeds they have done for Mother Earth. They are giving away $50 million (US) in grants over five years! It was another excellent example of AI for good!

Adam caught up with Brendan Burns (co-creator of Kubernetes and Partner Architect at Microsoft Azure) at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon 2018 in Seattle, WA to talk about the state of Kubernetes, the importance of community, building healthy cloud platforms, and the future of cloud infrastructure.

Peter Bright writes for Ars Technica:

Microsoft adopting Chromium puts the Web in a perilous place. […] With Microsoft’s decision to end development of its own Web rendering engine and switch to Chromium, control over the Web has functionally been ceded to Google. That’s a worrying turn of events, given the company’s past behavior.

This post was mentioned in Slack by James Lovato about a former Microsoft Edge intern claiming Google callously broke rival web browsers. Then, Nick Nisi chimed in to mention this post by Jeremy Noring as “an interesting rebuttal/defense of what they’re doing.”

Mac users don’t care about mac apps like they used to. Today and the future is a web platform world with JavaScript at the center morphing into this gigantic blackhole (mainly a gravity metaphor) with everything else being pulled into its orbit.

The more Mac users there are, the more Mac apps we should see. The problem is, the users who really care about good native apps — users who know HIG violations when they see them, who care about performance, who care about Mac apps being right — were mostly already on the Mac. A lot of newer Mac users either don’t know or don’t care about what makes for a good Mac app.

John Gruber also quoted SwiftOnSecurity regarding Microsoft’s switch to Chromium as Windows’s built-in rendering engine, saying:

This is the end of desktop applications. There’s nowhere but JavaScript.

If you’ve been watching the news, you know that the latest data breach involved Marriott exposing 500 million guest reservations from its Starwood database. The kicker is that the unauthorized access to the Starwood guest database stretches back to 2014. That’s FOUR YEARS of unfettered access to this database!

It’s breaches like these that helped motivate the team at the Cryptography Research Group at Microsoft to be “extremely excited” to announce the release of Microsoft SEAL (Simple Encrypted Arithmetic Library) as open source under the MIT License.

Big rumor coming out of Redmond this week:

Microsoft is throwing in the towel with EdgeHTML and is instead building a new web browser powered by Chromium, which uses a similar rendering engine first popularized by Google’s Chrome browser known as Blink.

I’ve long been a proponent for browsers differentiating at the feature/integration layers and teaming up at the rendering layer, so I view this as good news. What do you think?

New GitHub CEO, Nat Friedman:

I’m thrilled to share that the Microsoft acquisition of GitHub is complete. 🎉 Monday is my first day as CEO. Millions of people rely on GitHub every day, and I am honored by the opportunity to lead this company.

He goes on to share the two principles for GitHub and these three objectives that are at the top of his mind moving forward:

1. Ensuring GitHub is the best place to run productive communities and teams
2. Making GitHub accessible to more developers around the world
3. Reliability, security, and performance