Hello fellow developer, this is the 1st "out of the can" edition of 3 as I am on vacation in Greece going "whee are you cute" at donkeys. So, fewer news, but lots of great resources. Enjoy!
News and Articles
OpenAI has been the big topic winning in the raising money space, and announced a lot of new features on their DevDay. Simon Willison did a great job live blogging it. Meanwhile, Meta's new fancy AI glasses have been used to dox people in realtime (more detail in this document). Microsoft discontinues HoloLens 2, adds voice and vision to Copilot and starts paying publishers for content surfaced by it. Apple removed 60 VPNs from its Russian App Store and 60% of ProductHunt's 1 million users are bots. There is much drama and a lawsuit about Wordpress with Mullenweg threatening corporate takeover of WP Engine.
AI is doing well, and also isn't. Drowning in Slop describes a thriving underground economy clogging the internet with AI garbage, developers seem to gain little (if anything) from AI coding assistants, Copilot makes programmers worse at programming and coding challenges like Codeforces ban AI generated code. A government trial found out that AI is worse than humans at summarising information, and researchers start to prefer running small models on their laptops instead of using the big players. There is a massive human cost of AI and developers are getting tired of it and wonder if AI helps us that much as products aren't getting better. Hey, but at least bots can now read those traffic-image CAPTCHAs. The 2024 Ruby on Rails Community Survey Results are out as is Python 3.13. And Fair Source is a new-ish idea to bridge the gap between open source and proprietary licensing.
Code and Tools
Palantir share lessons from over a million lines of TypeScript, there is a visual primer on durable JavaScript functions and an intro to command injection vulnerabilities by Liran Tal of Snyk who spoke at our Data and Security LIVE day. Writing code for computers is hard, but it's even harder to write for humans.
In JavaScript land, functional style is a way to avoid if-else Hell, you can drastically improve performance by optimising bundle sizes, use Chrome AI to re-write text and do OCR scanning with the Tesseract OCR engine.
A new drama in web standards vs.framework development is around Web Components, with some stating that they are okay, other calling them not the future, others just celebrating them as the present and yet others stating the obvious that could have cut this short, namely that it is OK that Web Components are not Framework Components. Often when these discussions arise it is about browser support and an abridged history of Safari showstoppers shows how often the iOS browser was an issue.
Some tools for you:
- Local File Organizer - on device AI File Management.
- vuln-regex-detector - find vulnerbilities in regular expressions
- git-secrets - stops you from committing passwords to a git repository.
- Sourcebot - fast code indexing and search for your codebases.
- Excalidraw - paint in a squiggly way.
- Fast Grid - A 120fps multithreaded web table.
Cool code demos
Talks and Videos
Stephan Gillich of Intel answers how we make AI real, accessible and safe, responsibly – together. Check it out!
Other videos and talk write-ups of note:
- Liuba Gonta and Yuliya Khadasevich - GitHub Copilot Beyond the Basics (30m)
- Panel - Responsible AI in Practice: Real-World Examples and Challenges (30m)
- Amanda-Jane Lamont - Making of a (TA) Manager: moving to the Dark Side (30m)
Work and Jobs
Simon Willison shares what he learned serving on the board of the Python Software Foundation, Conway's Law is shaping software architecture more than anything else, 91% of polled Amazon staff is unhappy with return-to-office and 75% ponder jumping ship and their RTO policy says a lot about remote work culture. Read about shared learnings from 7 failed tech interviews and that mentorship is the underrated perk of working in big tech.
Procrastination Corner / Wonderful Weird Web
- Bop Spotter is constantly surveilling San Francisco for Good Music
- Someones grandpa already wrote about Cobol being "Dead"
- Earth has caught a 'second moon' and NASA is developing a new time zone for the one we have, so set your watches when traveling there.
- How to Monetize a Blog is tongue in cheek but sadly has truth to it.
