Changelog News

Puter puts an entire operating system in your web browser, the kapa.ai team write down how to structure your docs for LLMs, Daytona is an open source Codespaces alternative, Gleam v1.0 has been released & Rolldown is a JavaScript bundler written in Rust.

Apple backs off killing web apps (but the fight continues), Luka Kladaric writes about how to ship quality software in hostile environments, Deno's new package registry is an npm superset, Martin Fowler on the value of periodic face-to-face & Eugene Ghanizadeh wants us to get more decentralized than the Fediverse. Leave us nice words!

GPTScript is a new scripting language to automate your interactions with LLMs, Adam Wiggins conducts a retrospective on Muse, Nikita Prokopov surveyed a bunch of popular websites to see how much JS they loaded on their pages, Pages CMS is a no-hassle CMS for GitHub pages & Jim Nielsen writes about the subversive hyperlink.

Ship It is back! IEEE Spectrum writes about quantum computing's reality check, Maxim Dounin announces freenginx, Nadia Asparouhova goes deep on AI & the "effective accelerationism" movement, Angie Byron helps first time open source contributors avoid common pitfalls & Miroslav Nikolov writes up his advice for high-risk refactoring.

Changelog Beats drops a new Dance Party album, Will McGugan's new Toolong (`tl`) terminal app, Mitchell Baker is out as Mozilla CEO, Microsoft's Jordi Adoumie announces sudo for Windows, Tatu Ylonen tells the tale of how they got SSH to be port 22 & Jack Lindamood gives an "Endorse" or "Regret" rating for ~50 different services, tools & processes he used over the 4 years he led infrastructure at a startup.

Geoffrey Litt thinks browser extensions are underrated, Adolfo Ochagavía on being a generalist in a specialist's world, Jack Garbus praises the Arch Wiki, Terence Eden tries to rebuild FourSquare for ActivityPub using OpenStreetMap & Sebastien Dubois teaches us how to connect ideas together.

The Rune team announces $100k in open source grants for indie game devs, the Zed code editor is now open source, the Ollama team releases Python & JavaScript libraries, Max Bernstein tells the story of Scrapscript & Pooya Parsa writes up some notes from a tired maintainer.

Alex Ellis' new actions-batch project uses GitHub Actions as a time-sharing supercomputer, DevDocs.io combines multiple API documentations in a fast, organized, and searchable interface, Jarred Sumner announces Bun's very own JavaScript shell, Shoelace is a forward-thinking library of web components & Martin Heinz writes an awesome guide to building an indoor air quality monitoring system with Prometheus, Grafana & a CO2 sensor.

Niklaus Wirth makes his plea for lean software, PocketBase puts your entire backend in 1 file, Vanna is a Python RAG framework for accurate text-to-SQL generation, Henrik Karlsson wants you to think more about what to focus on & Calvin Wankhede shares how he built a fully offline smart home (and you should too).

Daniel Stenberg is frustrated with the state of AI tooling for finding security bugs, Brian Birtles is surprised by weird things engineers believe about web dev, Feross Aboukhadijeh details the fallout from a nasty npm prank, Rob Pike shares what he thinks they got right and wrong with Go & Gavin Howard writes up why he believes "all code is tech debt" is all wrong.

This episodes diverges from our traditional fare. I've reviewed the 50 previous editions and picked (IMHO) the coolest code, best prose & my favorite podcast episode from each month!

A group of researchers set out to test claims that its open source rivals had achieved parity (or even better) with ChatGPT on certain tasks, Richard Hipp and his team have rewritten SQLite's text-based JSON functions, Ratatui is a Rust crate for cooking up TUIs, Morris Brodersen built a complex app in vanilla JS as a case study & Headscale is Kristoffer Dalby's open source, self-hosted implementation of the Tailscale control server.

ChatGPT's new GPTs feature leak their prompts, Firefox's share of the browser market will soon drop below 2%, Robin Berjon tries to formalize a name for those who can't be named, Amy Lai tells the tale of the weirdest bug she's ever seen & Facundo Olano trumps the "code is read more than written" cliche with his own: "code is run more than read."

Zach Leatherman on the tension and future of the Jamstack community, Chenxin Li helps you avoid 13 bad practices in data visualization, Laravel Pulse is coming real soon, Max Chernyak develops a new way to accomplish long term refactors & Spencer Baugh makes the case for more libraries and less services in our software stacks.

The internet watches OpenAI unravel in real-time, tldraw has a new experiment going with GPT-4 Vision that turns mockups into code, Tony Ennis makes the case for HTML First, James Somers writes a "eulogy" to coding for The New Yorker & Laurence Tratt describes and details four kinds of optimisation.

sshx lets you share your terminal with anyone on a multiplayer infinite canvas, Herbert Lui writes three things about your competitors, Anton Medvedev's fx is a terminal JSON viewer & processor, Danny Castonguay shares advice on attending large conferences & Jeremy Pinto's experimental RAGTheDocs project is working toward an exciting reality.

David Hugh-Jones has a lot to say about what makes a good comment, Hugging Face released a distilled variant of Whisper for speech recognition, The New Stack reports on C++ creator Bjarne Stroustrup’s plan for bringing safety to the language, Jeff Sandberg declares that CSS is fun again & Jose M. Gilgado praises the beauty of finished software.

The hubbub of the web dev world right now is Next.js' integration of React Server Components, Kent C. Dodds writes up why he doesn't use Next, Lee Robinson responds with why he does, the NixOS team hits a milestone in their reproducible builds effort & OpenSign is an open source alternative to DocuSign.

Changelog drops full-length musical albums in collaboration with Breakmaster Cylinder, Justin Searls on why the right tools fail for the wrong reasons, The Unix Sheikh says we have too many level of abstractions, Adam at PiCockpit compares the newly-announced Raspberry Pi 5 to the competition & Jorge Medina assures us that we're not lacking creativity, we're just overwhelmed by content.

Chip Huyen documents the shifting sand of large data models, Herman Õunapuu reviews the Zimaboard, Bryan Braun shares 4 of his most recent VSCode configuration discoveries & Swizec Teller wrote a great summary of the inaugural AI Engineer Summit.

Jacob Kaplan-Moss' recommendations for remote vs colocated teams, Duarte Carmo created a neural search engine from Changelog transcripts, Tom Hacohen says strong static typing is a hill he's willing to die on, Orhun Parmaksız created a CLI that makes your keyboard sound like a typewriter & Luke Plant spits hard truths about simplicity.

InfluxDB finishes a multi-year rewrite in Rust, the Raspberry Pi 5 will be on sale by the end of the month, the Bruno team builds an open source API explorer that's local-first and will never have a cloud, Xe Iaso thinks gokrazy is really cool & Matt Rickard shares lessons from years of debugging.

ElectricSQL is a project that offers a local-first sync layer for web and mobile apps, Ned Batchelder writes about the myth of the myth of "learning styles", Carl Johnson thinks XML is better than YAML, Berkan Sasmaz defines and describes "idempotency" & HyperDX is an open source alternative Datadog or New Relic.

Andrei Taranchenko says the software industry is learning once again that complexity kills, Casey Muratori outlines a long list of Unity alternatives, Filip Szkandera builds a functioning (macro) processor for RISC-V & Matt Basta tells the tale of the time he built a web-based Excel clone inside Uber only to have it discarded a week later.

Bun 1.0 is out of the oven, Mojo is now available for local download, Vince Lwt asked 60+ LLMs a set of 20 questions & published the answers, Textual Web turns TUIs in to web applications & James Haydon dives deep to discover the bug that the UK air traffic control meltdown.

Dan North tells the tale of Tim, the worst programmer he's worked with (who also is a heck of a programmer), Kevin Lin declares that OpenTelemetry delivers on its promise for open observability, Justin Garrison details Terraform vs GitOps vs System Initiative, Inc. writes how Apple beats burnout & Aline Lerner's advice on how (not) to sabotage your salary negotiations before you even start.

OpenTF announces they're forking Terraform and joining the Linux Foundation, Meta gets in the LLM-for-codegen game with Code Llama, Matt Mullenweg announces WordPress.com's new 100-year plan, Paul Gichuki from Thinkst learns that default behaviors stick (and so do examples) & Marco Otte-Witte makes his case for Rust on the web.

New research shows that CAPTCHAs are now utterly useless, hundreds of concerned technologists signed the OpenTF Manifesto to keep Terraform open source forever, Josh Collinsworth writes down all the things you forgot (or never knew) because of React, Mike Seidle shared some quick-but-powerful advice on building new software features & Erlend Sogge Heggen urges new open source projects to join the Fediverse (by way of Mastodon).

HashiCorp adopts a Business Source license, Matt Rickard hypothesizes why Tailwind CSS won, WarpStream sets out to make a Kafka-compatible offering directly on S3, Vadim Kravcenko publishes an excellent guide for managing difficult software engineers & Russ Cox gives an update on Go 2.

Matt Asay thinks the open source licensing war is over, LangUI is an open source Tailwind component library for your AI chat app, Ivan Kuleshov modded a Mac mini to run via PoE, Apple joins Pixar and others in the Alliance for OpenUSD & John D. Cook says sometimes you shouldn't pick the best tool for the job.

The fall of Stack Overflow, researches dig up some new (and potentially unavoidable) LLM attacks, Google proposes a new API that Ron Amadeo calls a DRM gatekeeper for the web, the Python Steering Council affirms PEP 703 & Lucas McGregor writes why no one wants to talk to your chatbot.

Our friends at Supabase quietly went public today, Redpoint's InfraRed 100 report is out, Twitter is now X, GitHub's Copilot Chat now in public preview (for businesses) & Oxide has homelab plans (in 2050).

Ellie Huxtable's Atuin makes your shell history magical, Dmitry Kudryavtsev writes why he thinks engineers should focus on writing, LazyVim promises to transform your Neovim setup into a full-fleged IDE, Geoff Graham shares with Smashing Magazine how he writes CSS in 2023 & Brad Fitzpatrick collects a public list of bad issue track behaviors.

Oracle smacks IBM for their handling of RHEL, the folks at The Dam share a Slack clone in 5 lines of Bash, Justin Jaffray writes up 13 ways to think about joins, llama.cpp learns web chat thanks to a contribution by Tobi Lütke & Meta is willing to pay 3 engineers to remove Python's GIL.

Lukas Mathis writes about streak redemption, Jonathan Katz thinks vectors are the new JSON, Andy Jiang says CommonJS is hurting JavaScript & Swyx on the rise of the AI Engineer.

Tracy Durnell thinks AI has already poisoned its own well, Adam Hill's microsite catalogs everything you need to UnsuckJS, Lionel Dricot thinks we need more Richard Stallman, not less & the Vulcan team proves you can't trust ChatGPT's package recommendations.

An open platform for operating LLMs in production, working quickly is more important than it seems, imaginary problems are the root of bad software, Val Town is a social website to write and run code & Aaron Francis' guide to finishing your projects.

Reddit goes dark as subreddits protest, Lemmy lights up as disillusioned redditors turn to the fediverse, OpenObserve is a cloud native observability platform, Julia Evans dispels some myths about blogging & Red Hat's Jeffrey “Jefro” Osier-Mixon tells Adam and Jerod all about Automotive Linux at Open Source Summit NA.

The Astro team releases a new documentation builder, legendary computer scientist Donald Knuth plays with ChatGPT, over 500 volunteer mods have signed an open letter to Stack Overflow Inc, Reddit faces a revolt due to their new API pricing & the Technology Innovation Institute release Falcon, a new open source LLM that's topping Hugging Face's leaderboard.

The Gorilla team is building an API store for LLMs, DeviceScript is Microsoft's new TypeScript programming environment for microcontrollers, Nyxt is a hackable browser written in Lisp, Morgan Housel writes about expectations debt & I issue a gentle reminder to my fellow software engineers: there's still no silver bullet.

Will McGugan's Trogon auto-generates friendly TUIs for your CLI apps, Stability AI's official open source variant of DreamStudio, John Calhoun writes about life after 26 years programming at Apple, Google's news TLDs could be a boon to scammers & Pablo Meier documents a way to discuss programming languages.

Thunderbird is thriving on small donations, Syncthing is a super-cool continuous file sync program, LLMs are so hot right now and they're making vectors hot by proxy & MDN defines a Baseline for stable web features.

Jeremy Howard thinks Mojo might be the biggest programming language advance in decades, Amelia Wattenberger is not impressed by AI chatbots, a leaked Google memo admits big tech has no AI moats & Werner Vogels reminds us that monoliths are not dinosaurs.

Hyperswitch is like the adapter pattern for payments, Austin Henley writes about the future of programming by summarizing recent research papers, Thoughtworks published their 28th volume of their Tech Radar, the team at General Products reminds devs to scan our technical writing for words such as "easy", "painless", "straightforward", "trivial", "simple" and "just" & we finish with a lightning round of cool tools.

The dataset wars are heating up, Bark is a transformer-based text-to-audio model that can generate highly realistic, multilingual speech as well as other audio, Kent Beck needs to recalibrate after using ChatGPT, the team behind Stable Diffusion release a new open source language model & Mitchel Hashimoto weighs in on prompt engineering.

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?!

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.

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".

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.

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.