Changelog Master Feed

At the recent ODSC East conference, Daniel got a chance to sit down with Erin Mikail Staples to discuss the process of gathering human feedback and creating an instruction tuned Large Language Models (LLM). They also chatted about the importance of open data and practical tooling for data annotation and fine-tuning. Do you want to create your own custom generative AI models? This is the episode for you!

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.

Developer slash artist Alex Miller joins Jerod & Amelia to discuss the challenge he faced after deciding to eschew fancy frameworks and libraries in favor of vanilla JS to build an interactive essay called Grid World for the html review.

Conferences are an integral part of the Go community, but the experience of conferences has remained the same even as the value propositions change. In this episode we discuss what conferences generally provide, how value propositions have changed, and what changes conference organizers could make to realign their conference experience to a new set of value propositions.

There are a ton of problems around building LLM apps in production and the last mile of that problem. Travis Fischer, builder of open AI projects like @ChatGPTBot, joins us to talk through these problems (and how to overcome them). He helps us understand the hierarchy of complexity from simple prompting to augmentation, agents, and fine-tuning. Along the way we discuss the frontend developer community that is rapidly adopting AI technology via Typescript (not Python).

This week we’re celebrating Maintainer Month along with our friends at GitHub. Open source runs the world, but who runs open source? Maintainers. Open source maintainers are behind the software we use everyday, but they don’t always have the community or support they need. That’s why we’re celebrating open source maintainers during the month of May. Today’s conversation features Alyssa Wright (Bloomberg), Chad Whitacre (Sentry), and Duane O’Brien (Creator of the FOSS Contributor Fund and framework). We get into all the details, the why, the hows, and the struggles involved for companies to support open source.

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.

This week Adam is joined by Michael Grinich, Founder & CEO at WorkOS. Michael shares his journey to build WorkOS, what it takes to cross the Enterprise Chasm, and how he’s building his sales organization for growth.

Dax Raad joins KBall and Nick to chat about SST, a framework that makes it easier to build full-stack applications on AWS. We chat about how the project got started and its goals. Then we discuss OpenNext, an open source, framework-agnostic server less adapter for Next.js.

The DevCycle team joins Jon & Kris for a deep conversation on WebAssembly (Wasm) and Go! After a high-level discussion of what Wasm is all about, we learn how they’re using it in production in cool and interesting ways. We finish up with a spicy unpop segment featuring buzzwords like “ChatGPT”, “LLM”, “NFT” and “AGI”

José Valim joins Jerod to talk all about what’s new in Livebook – the Elixir-based interactive code notebook he’s been working on the last few years. José made a big bet when he decided to bring machine learning to Elixir. That bet is now paying off with amazing new capabilities such as building and deploying a Whisper-based chat app to Hugging Face in just 15 minutes. José demoed that and much more during Livebook’s first-ever launch week. Let’s get into it.

Model sizes are crazy these days with billions and billions of parameters. As Mark Kurtz explains in this episode, this makes inference slow and expensive despite the fact that up to 90%+ of the parameters don’t influence the outputs at all. Mark helps us understand all of the practicalities and progress that is being made in model optimization and CPU inference, including the increasing opportunities to run LLMs and other Generative AI models on commodity hardware.

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.

Adam Argyle joins Amelia and Nick to catch them up on all the goings on within the world of CSS colors. There are a lot more options than you’d expect if you haven’t been keeping up, and Adam’s here to help you avoid the “gray dead zone”!

Go conferences are not as diverse as we’d like them to be. There are initiatives in place to improve this situation. Among other roles, Ronna Steinberg is the Head of Diversity at GopherCon Europe. In this episode we’ll learn more about the goal, the process and the problems, and how can each one of us help make this better.

This week Adam talks with Andy Klein from Backblaze about hard drive reliability at scale.

With all the LLM hype, it’s worth remembering that enterprise stakeholders want answers to “why” questions. Enter causal inference. Paul Hünermund has been doing research and writing on this topic for some time and joins us to introduce the topic. He also shares some relevant trends and some tips for getting started with methods including double machine learning, experimentation, difference-in-difference, and more.

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.

Feross and his team at Socket recently shipped a wrapper library for the ubiquitous npm package manager’s command-line interface that brings enhanced security when you need it most: before executing any code Bradly Farias lead this effort, so Jerod & Chris invited him on the show to learn all about it.

This week Adam is joined by Alex Gallego, Founder & CEO at Redpanda Data, to share his builder journey to create the Redpanda streaming data platform.