Bus factors & conspiracy theories

Welcome to Changelog and Friends, a weekly talk show about sweet, sweet merch. Big thanks to our partners at Fly .io. You know, we love Fly. Finally, a public cloud that's built for developers who ship. Check it out at Fly .io. OK, let's talk. Hey, friends, I'm here with a friend of mine, Dave Rosenthal, CTO at Sentry. So Dave, I've heard you say trace connected before. I know that the next big frontier for Sentry is tracing this metrics platform. How did you get there? And what do developers need to know about how you're thinking about this product? Before I

came to Sentry, Sentry was sort of working on a metrics product. We started building that metrics product in a more traditional way with the metrics just kind of being more like kind of just just disconnected. They're just like another source of data. They're another table somewhere. Yeah, you can line them up by time. Sure, you can drill into them a little bit, but really, they weren't connected to that trace. And we took a big step back from that after trying it ourselves, after trying it with users and realizing that there was a whole class of things we wanted to be able to do that you couldn't do with this kind of disconnected metrics. And so, you know, we changed our APIs, we changed our approach. And we're kind of now really on a very clear direction of building a metric system that isn't one of these kind of like legacy disconnected metric systems. It's trace connected so that we can get that kind of rich debugging context when you actually dig into a real problem. And, you know, there's tradeoffs. It's not quite as easy to just like log random metrics at random times into a system. You have to put the thought when you're building the telemetry into how this metric actually does relate to the structure of the code that's running underneath. But we think it's the right tradeoff for users because it's like a little extra time to figure that connection out. But then when you actually go to use the data, the connections there for you. So small investment, big return. And it's just an example of how we're kind of making decisions internally to set our users up for for success with this trace connected idea.

Very cool. It's cool to see how you think about getting to the end results with any of these products you're building. It's so cool to see behind the scenes, the way you think and the way you iterate. OK, friends, go to Sentry dot I .O. Use our code changelog to get 100 bucks off the team plan. That's basically almost four months for free sentry dot I .O. Use the code changelog. Don't use anything else. Use our code. It's good for you. Once again, Sentry dot I .O. Where shall we begin with this? Friends, Jared. All things open? No. All things closed. All things open AI. Did you get that email? Maybe. Maybe you did. I get a lot of email. Tell me what it says. All things open dot AI. Oh, checking it out. Checking it out. Also checking it out. So you have all things open dot org, which is where the conference lives. All things open. Oh, it's a whole new conference. It's a whole new conference. An AI practitioners and end users conference focused on technologies, processes and people. Next year, March. Save the date. March 17th and 18th in Durham, North Carolina. Very close to Raleigh, North Carolina. Darn near the same place, isn't it? And I don't know how it works. Raleigh, Durham. I don't know. I think they're so close. They merge. It's kind of like Fort Worth and in Dallas here in Texas or St. Paul and Minneapolis. Yeah, I didn't know Minneapolis was a different was a city. Oh, gosh, I'm just kidding with you. You're going to offend some of our friends up there. Good old city of Minneapolis. Well, I knew I knew the Twin Cities were a thing, but I didn't realize how actually touching they are until the last time I was there, because I've been to Minneapolis a bunch of times. But I actually went to St. Paul, which is basically on the other side of a not even a river. Is it a river? It's a stream. I don't know. There's a small moving body of water that separates them. But you basically just cross a little bridge and you're on the other in the other city. You never know unless there's a sign that said you're in Minneapolis now or whatever it says. The folks who live there know, though. Oh, they know because there's like rivalries and stuff, you know, like which one's better. At one point, I would just stop caring unless the rivalry is just on like a way of life, I guess. That's when it makes sense. I think it is. I don't think anybody really cares because I mean, you know, here in my small town, Dripping Springs, we merge in and out of Austin all the time. I'm not even upset about it. It's just yeah, but you're more like a that's more like an attached to, you know, my point stands. Okay, I think Dallas and Fort Worth is a better comparison because those are two big cities that are probably competing in certain ways. But they're also do they merge? Like, can you tell the difference? Is there a blank space? I'm not from there, so I don't know for sure. But what I know is that people move from Dallas to Fort Worth to get away from Dallas. Oh, they do. So it must be far enough that it feels like they're away. But then they realize that they can't, you know, that mainly when they move there, it's like, oh, that's 20 minutes away. I can't have those friends anymore. Yeah, that's rough. My experience with those cities is just driving through on my way south, right? And then eventually north on my way back from the border, or at least the ocean, at least the Gulf. Do you see this banner? There's a banner on merge .changelaw .com. Oh, yeah, I put a banner there. Where'd that come from? Did I see the banner? Have you seen it? I am the banner. This is the banner. Yes, I put a banner up, you know, like, when you want to get people's attention, you put a little banner up. Did you know that used to be hard on websites? There used to be a JavaScript snippet, I believe, to do that, right? Oh, absolutely. Throw a banner up. You know how easy that is now? How easy is it? It's just one chat GPT question, you know, it's one div. Okay. And about six lines of CSS, maybe seven. That's it, huh? Yeah. And then it's just like, what, skew the div? You're just rotating it. Yeah, diagonal rotation. And it's like position absolute, you know, set the top, set the right or the left, and then just futz with it. You know, you go, you open up your dev tools, and you just futz with it till it looks alright. And then you move on with your life. The web is pretty awesome now, actually. It is. It is pretty awesome. There's still things that are hard, like a blank web page that you have to put stuff on. But if you have an existing thing and you want to move stuff around or change things, it's pretty easy nowadays. So yes, we are having our sale. I just announced it on Monday, a year end sale. That's why you mentioned this banner. I thought you were talking about some sort of banner hanging over a road in Dallas or something like that made the news. You know, people are putting up a lot of signs right now. Well, this should have been in Dallas, Fort Worth, honestly, this year end sale. This should be. We probably get more sales if we put it there. They'd be like, what? What's changelog merch? Of course, probably a lot of our listeners are wondering the same. What is changelog merch? Well, you know, we have some merch. We got shirts, got stickers, and we're doing a year end sale. So they are on sale now. Through the end of the year or until supplies last on this particular set of merch and hence the banner that rotated div. How do you like that? I'm pretty good. 320. I also got a media query in there as you go to a mobile phone. It stops doing that and it goes to the top kind of quality I'm bringing to my web dev. You are, uh, you're, you're pretty good at this. I'm going to tell you how long that took me. How long did it take you? Honestly, uh, seven minutes for the initial implementation and then probably 20 minutes of tweaking things around and then probably another 10 minutes to make sure it looked good on phones. And so I would say somewhere in the range of 30 to 45 minutes and soup to nuts. As I

say,

this is not something you're doing on the daily though. So, I mean, if it was then, you know, the next time it's like 10. Cause now you know, well, next time I just copy paste that CSS snippet and I have to ask an LLM. I just go do it right. I also ripped out a bunch of code that you wrote by the way. So that was kind of fun. Should we do that? Should we go here? What did I write? So I think you did the initial implementation of merch .change .com with Cody, but your name's on all the get blames. Cause you know, I gotta be mad at somebody and sure I go figure out who that's going to be. And this one was you. Now it might've been because you're the one that checked everything into version control potentially, or it might've been cause you originally authored this code potentially, but that was three years ago. So that last commit was 2021. Now it's 2024 and the web has gotten better. You just had stuff in there that wasn't necessary. Mostly. Oh preach. You had some modernizer stuff, which may have been necessary back then, but no longer is. That was Cody. Oh, it was like body tags and stuff. Yeah. Just modernizing like polyfills mostly for like different things. But the code that I actually removed and rewrote was jQuery was getting pulled in, in order to adjust the quantity on the form when you click a button. And so it's just a lot of overkill to accomplish what is essentially a single click handler that adjusts the quantity. So I just wrote that in pure JavaScript, inlined it in the page, remove jQuery, remove modernize. JavaScript Spinkles, baby. Yeah. Just put it right in there. It loads a lot faster now. Can you tell the difference in speed? Honestly, it's noticeable. Yeah. Yeah. What's the speed difference? I didn't actually measure it. It's like, you can see it with your eyes. I don't know. Maybe like 200 milliseconds, something like that. It's worth a deletion though. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. Cause you're, I mean, what's jQuery 30 K 60 K who knows? Keep that stuff. Plus it's from a third party CDN. So we were not drinking our own. We can't do that. We are drinking our own malpractices, you know, I mean, in three years of best practice does become a malpractice. So I just modernized that thing by removing modernizer and I could probably go further, but you know, it's just a merch site. So yeah, there's a lot you could do. Well, good for you. Yeah. Thank you. You're in sale up to 40 % off merch .changelog .com. Yeah. Get yourself some threads. Support your favorite developer pods with sweet, sweet merch. Now, did you change that line too? Wasn't that changed? I did. I adjusted some copy, you know, there was some old copy on there. What did you change it from? Support your favorite developer pods with some sweet, sweet merch. What did it used to say?

Yeah.

Can't blame that. Well, that might be in the Shopify admin. Oh, I think it might be. Yeah. That's one of the things to figure out is like, where do we configure different things? Cause it's not all in source control or there is stuff that's in source control, but actually gets pulled out of the admin or overwritten, which is like settings. Data .json or something. I had to figure all that out cause it's been so long. I don't remember what it used to say. It was just slightly outdated. I think it said like merch and threads for developers, which is kind of going off of our new, our podcasts and new news and podcasts. Yes. We don't really say anymore. Oh, I think you might've said like support your favorite podcasts by repping the merch. Something like that. I don't know. I just thought it's time for a new little tagline,

but

we digress. What are we here to talk about the news? Maybe this is news. What is the wayback machine working again? I think so. I think it's back. Yeah. It was DDoSed, right? It was like, they got taken offline. They got DDoSed by some sort of hacking crew. Who attacks the wayback machine? It's like, this is,

this

is like a cultural touchstone of the world and they're going to take it offline. Like what, who, why, when, where, and how, but yeah, I think it's back now. Officially closing the loop. Support your favorite podcast by ripping the merch. That's what it said, which wasn't bad, but you know, it was up there for three years. And then at the very bottom, it says merch and threads for developers. I changed that one too. What did I change it to? I think it says world, world -class threads for the world's classiest devs. World -class with a hyphen. Merch. Yeah, world -class for the world's classiest devs. Yeah. If you, are you a classy dev? Go get yourself some classy merch. I don't disagree with that. Good. My copywriting passes muster. The Adam test. That's right. What's first on the list? Well, we are here to discuss some goings on and, uh, we have a long list, so we thought we would just take turns picking what topics to discuss out of this list of links, which is not sorted shortest to longest, unfortunately, however, it is sorted in a way that is readable. I would like to talk about this one. This is by Wei Yen, W E I first name. Y E N last name Wei Yen, useful built in Mac OS command line utilities. These are useful and they're built in Mac OS. So our friends on Linux, you know, take a bathroom break or hang out and type which, and then the command and see if it actually has an executable on your machine, because these are Mac OS command line utilities. Some of which I know and love others. I didn't know about. So I thought we could talk through these. The first one, the command is called security. Did you know about this man called

security,

which allows you to access your key chain programmatically. So we do this with one password, you know, the OP command, you can pull secrets out of your one password. We used to do this with last pass. They have a CLI where you can pull secrets out of your last pass and use them for various scripting uses and utilities. And this security command, if you type security and then find dash internet dash password space dash S I'm not sure what the S is for. Hopefully secure. And then you give it a website. It will return to you your key chain stored password for said website. That's sweet, right? If only I use key chain, I guess I do use key chain, right? You do use it man, don't you? I mean, not on purpose, let's just say.

When

do you use it? Definitely use it for operating system level, things like wifi passwords and stuff like that, but I'm not trying to use key chain purposefully. So every once in a while you accidentally use it. Well, you know, I'm a user of the Mac OS operating system, so it's using it. So I'm using it. There you go. All right. So there's one, that one didn't impress you because you're a one password CLI person, fine, fair. Here's the one that impresses me. Okay. Or at least I didn't know this. Caffeine, caffeinate. I didn't know that caffeinate was built in. And I just went to my favorite LLM and confirmed if it's not hallucinating that caffeinate, which is a separate, I guess, menu bar tool called caffeine. I thought it might use caffeinate. It's like, it's just this UI layer on top. It's not, but caffeine is cool. And caffeinate being built in is even cooler. So caffeine is like you said, it's a menu bar utility. That is a third party thing written where somebody puts this little coffee cup in your menu bar. I think it's free and open source. I know it's free. I'm not sure if it's open source and you click on it and when it's on your screen will never turn off. I think it will also never go to screen saver mode, but it certainly won't dim. None of the power saving features like it's caffeinated. And of course the cup of Joe fills up when it's on and you click it off. It just on off toggle. And that's what you're referring to with caffeine, right? Caffeinate is a command line utility. This is a built -in which does the same thing. And so there you go caffeinate. If you just want to make sure your screen doesn't turn off for a while, maybe you're given a presentation. Maybe you're, I don't know what you're up to, but if you're up to something. Type caffeinate. That's a cool, I did not know about that one either. Did you know about network quality? No. Yeah. Network quality is a built -in speed test. It's all one word, capital Q, which is strange. So that's camel case. But what's the name of camel case when the first letter is not camel. There's a separate term for this inchworm inchworm case. It kind of does look like that. I'm going to roll with it. No fact checks, please. We were, we were told you weren't going to fact check a network quality with the inchworm case. Built -in speed test. I thought this would be fun. Let's run. It sounds funny to say that it does. I kind of like it. Let's do a, let's do a test here. Let's go run network quality at the same time and he's got better internet. Okay. Uplink capacity. Well, your report price is not there yet. I'll wait. Oh, you already ran it already ran it. I was going to do a countdown. All right. I'm just running it. Sorry. I got excited. You must have, although I'm our videos cutting out now. Cause I'm saturating. How long did yours take to run? Mine's still going. Uh, about 20 seconds. Okay. Done. All right. First of all, who do we think is faster? I think I have better internet than you, but I'm not sure. We'll see. Do you agree or disagree? Oh, you know, my one's more reliable. Yours might be faster. Less reliable lately. It's a upload, maybe slower, but I don't know. I don't even know,

man.

Let's find out. My uplink capacity is 83 .159 megabits per second. Oh yeah. You beat me then uplink for me is 2 .653 megabits per second. So downlink capacity, 511 .325 megabits per second, man. You're just like, uh, you're land sliding me here, man. 30 .167 megabits per second download. I'm also, I think those are. Oh, you know what though? Hang on a second. I do have tail scale running and I'm also tunneling through homestead. Oh, you're going home. Yeah. All right. Get off tail scale. Let me see if I could do this. Let me, let me, I will say that those speeds, while very impressive and destroying your speeds are not the fastest my network will go. Running it again. Sans tail scale already demolishing your numbers. It is a reverse landslide. It's a land push. Did you hear me call you out about that push? I was like, why is he calling out my, my reverse, my run push man. It's a provocative. Okay. It's not a complete landslide, but it's definitely better. Uh, uplink is now 24 .439 megabits per second. Download capacity is three point. No, sorry. Three nine nine point one six three megabits per second. Nice. So, so much better. Are you now, are you wired into your local network? Uh, let's see. I would have to walk around. Hang on a second. Okay. The reason why I ask while he's doing that. Oh, he can't hear me. I totally smoked him. Just destroyed embarrassment. There's an embarrassment. I am wired in. Oh, you are wired in. I am not. So those are legit numbers. Then I, I'm on wireless here. And so I think mine's capped by my wireless network card. Do you have wifi as well as when you have wired in, uh, when you are wired in, I should say, do you also run wifi? Hard to answer. Cause I'm pretty much never wired in. When I do, I'll turn my wifi off. Cause I just want to make sure that sucker's using the wire, you know? Okay. Let me, let me run this test one more time then. Okay. Did you have your wife? Yeah. You're, I don't think it's going to change it either, but let's just see. Here we go. Big money, big money, big money. No whammies. Oh yeah. Upload capacity is, uh, not any better. So I'm supposed to have a gig down and half a gig up and I'm, I'm at 84 up and half a gig down, so yeah. I'm pretty sure this is my WAN, not my WAN, my LAN, my wireless LAN, my WLAN holding me down. And if I plugged in, it'd be faster because I know I've run my unified advice. My UDM pro runs its own speed test each night and it runs it and it gets about what's advertised for my ISP, which is one down and half of a meg or half of a gig up. All right. Well, that was fun. So nothing improved with removing wifi by the way. Yeah. As expected, but had to confirm, you know, cause, uh, you know, going through tail scale and using my exit node, which is not here locally, it's, it's external cause I don't run a pie hole in two locations. It's stupid. Yeah. Well, let's speed run a couple more of these commands here for folks. So the open command, this one's commonly known. I've been using this one for years, but useful if you don't know, if you type open and then space and then a file name, it will launch the default associated application for that file type. So if it's default to open up in pages, for instance, it'll launch pages with that file opened. If you do open space dot, it will open the current directory and finder, which is the one that I use all the time. All the time. Yeah. Tape me here and finder. That's right. And then copy paste or cool PB copy PB paste. So if you echo something, you can pipe it to PB copy throws in your clipboard. I think it's paste board, what they call it. Hence the PB and not the clip copy PB copy. And then of course you can keep you paste out of that back into other things. Super useful. You can get a UTC dates out of the date command. You can generate UUIDs. You can do MD five searches, screen capture, all kinds of stuff. I will highlight this one. Say, say is super cool, especially now that they've added a whole bunch of voices, say, we'll actually just take whatever text you pass to it and audibly say it with the built -in macOS voice. And you can customize that thing with command line flags in order to change to the various built -in voices. And because Apple has been expanding that set of voices, mostly because of Siri, I believe there's tons of different voices available. And as a person who dabbles in audio and makes podcasts, I've used that quite a bit, especially for things like horse JS and acting like there's somebody there who's not there inserting a robot voice into a podcast, you know, that kind of stuff. So that's a good one. All right. So shout out to Wei Yan and these useful utility useful built -in utilities, post links in the show notes, Adam, what do you want to talk about? What is next on the list? I kind of want to talk about this slow death of a hyperlink. I feel like this is an attack on the internet. It's been happening for a while. It's not that big of a topic, but it's, it's intriguing to me, you know, the fact that, you know, Instagram has done this for a while, where you can't link out to something, it's like, Hey, we're not going to allow the links to live. And that's not cool. Well, Instagram was born that way. So at least they're consistent where they, even from day one, like link in bio is very much an Instagram statement because that's the only place you are allowed to put a link. So at least they're consistently anti -web whereas now we're getting a lot of previously pro web websites that are wanting you to stay, stay in their silo. So I think this article that was, we covered in changelog news was coming from a journalism focused perspective, but it was TAR. It was speaking specifically about LinkedIn X whose algorithm was open source at some point. And you can clearly see that if you put a link into a post on X, that it will deprioritize that in the algorithm and how the same thing is going on at LinkedIn. It seems like increasingly so Facebook as well has turned their tide away from outbound links and deprioritizing posts that include them. And so this is just a huge bummer and just against everything that I believe in, in the web as well as against small businesses like ours.

So

that's my take on it. I think it's, I think it's lame. Obviously they're well within their rights to do it. I like small web and the small web just keeps getting smaller. I think because of reasons like this, it's like, they want you to, they obviously want you to put your contents there. Yes. Like them be the hub, not the spoke kind of thing. They want to be everything. They're like, just post everything right here and never leave. And that's not cool necessarily. As you said, they are within their rights to do so. But I think, you know, you know, what can we do as developers? Can we just scream and cry? Can we, from within, if you're one of these operatives on the inside as a developer making these platforms, can you push back on this idea that, Hey, this is not for the web? I don't think that would really work unless you're going to like sneak code in that does this, which is because the, the argument is not strong in a pure capitalistic environment. It's just not, it's like, well, we make more money this way. The more time you spend on my platform, the more money I make. Why would I link out to somewhere else? So that's a really tough sell. I'm sure there's people who are master debaters who can probably give good reasoning to do that. But a lot of it's touchy feely in my opinion, like I don't like it. I would forego more money in order to support a flourishing and diverse web. But when you have shareholders, I also own stock in companies and I want those companies to return value to me as a shareholder, right? Like we all want that as shareholders. And so they are beholden to shareholders to do that. And so it's a really tough sell as a developer. Now, what can we do? I think we build things that don't do that. We, you know, just to be corny, be the change, right? So you build the web that you want to see out there. And we're, I mean, we're doing that here at Changelog. Like look at Changelog News, our main publication is entirely a thing that links to other people's stuff. Like that's entirely what it is. It's a redirect. Yeah. It's a pointers. Now it's pointers with commentary and taste making and all that stuff, which makes it hopefully good. But we're building the web that we want to be, want to see out there. But we are like the scum. They scrape off the scum, you know, like we're like scum scum. We're no, we're no buddies. So does it really matter? I wouldn't say we're scum, but okay. You know what I mean? From the perspective of the, we're a small, a small fish. Yeah. We're a barnacle on the, that's right. We're krill. Backside of a giant whale. I'm cool with krill. I could be your krill. I mean, that's very small in comparison to the whale and the whale eats you. Right. I was going with barnacles cause they attached to the whale and they survive. The krill get eaten. The barnacles live, you know, but maybe they're like down there in the armpit of the whale. Do whales have armpits? Okay. I'm, I'm, I'm tracking with you. Anyways, we, and the whale doesn't even know we're here. They're like, ah, I didn't realize I had barnacles. Oh my gosh. What's he doing here? Barnacle. I would say to close this loop though, we experienced this personally, directly in the fact that our podcasts are more frequently listened to in a podcast client, which they, they deserve to be there. That's cool. That's where it should be listened to. That's where the best experience really is. And a lot of people, even for a long time would say, I didn't even, I haven't been to changelaw .com and basically never, or for basically, you know, for a very long time. And so as somebody who puts a lot of effort into making the website possible, it's not just a place you go, it's a thing that serves. So obviously the client couldn't get the MP3 or different content from it if the website didn't exist, but you don't have to go to changelaw .com, the hyperlink, the web link, the URL that we're advocating for, to enjoy our content. You can forego that indefinitely if you want to. And there's, we have no say in that at all. I guess this is how it's supposed to be, right? It's just, well, it's the way that it is. While you're here, y 'all go to changelaw .com and there you go. What's up friends. I'm here with Kurt Mackey, co -founder and CEO of Fly. As you know, we love Fly. That is the home of changelaw .com. But Kurt, I want to know how you explain Fly to developers. Do you tell them a story first? How do you do it? I

kind of change how I explain it based on almost like the generation of developer I'm talking to. So like for me, I built and shipped apps on Heroku, which if you've never used Heroku is roughly like building and shipping an app on Vercel today. It's just it's 2024 instead of 2008 or whatever. And what frustrated me about doing that was I didn't, I got stuck. You can build and ship a Rails app with a Postgres on Heroku, the same way you can build and ship a Next .js app on Vercel, but as soon as you want to do something interesting, like as soon as you want to, at the time, I think one of the things I ran into is like, I wanted to add what used to be like kind of the basis for Elasticsearch. I want to do full -text search in my applications. You kind of hit this wall with something like Heroku where you can't really do that. I think lately we've seen it with like people wanting to add LLMs kind of inference stuff to their applications on Vercel or Heroku or Cloudflare, whoever these days they've, they've started like releasing abstractions that sort of let you do this, but I can't just run the model I'd run locally on these black box platforms that are very specialized. For the people my age, it's always like, Oh, Heroku was great, but I outgrew it. And one of the things that I felt like I should be able to do when I was using Heroku was like run my app close to people in Tokyo for users that were in Tokyo, and that was never possible. For modern generation devs, it's, it's a lot more Vercel based. It's a lot like Vercel is great right up until you hit one of their hard line boundaries. And then you're kind of stuck. There's the other one we've had someone within the company. I can't remember the name of this game. But the tagline was like five minutes to start forever to master. That's sort of how we're pitching Fly is like, you can get an app going in five minutes, but there's so much depth to the platform that you're never going to run out of things you can do with it.

So unlike AWS or Heroku or Vercel, which are all great platforms, the cool thing we love here at Changela most about Fly is that no matter what we want to do on the platform, we have primitives, we have abilities, and we, as developers can charge our own mission on Fly, it is a no limits platform built for developers, and we think you should try it out. Go to fly .io to learn more. Launch your app in five minutes. Too easy. Once again, fly .io. I love my eight sleep. Check them out. Eight sleep .com. I've never slept better. And you know, I love biohacking. I love sleep science. And this is all about sleep science mixed with AI to keep you at your best while you sleep. This technology is pushing the boundaries of what's possible in our bedrooms. Let me tell you about eight sleep and their cutting edge pod for ultra. So what exactly is the pod? Imagine a high tech mattress cover that you can easily add to any bed, but this isn't just any cover it's packed with sensors, heating and cooling elements, and it's all controlled by sophisticated AI algorithms. It's like having a sleep lab, a smart thermostat, and a personal sleep coach all rolled into one single device. And the pod uses a network of sensors to track a wide array of biometrics. While you sleep, it tracks sleep stages, heart rate, variability, respiratory rate, temperature, and more. And the really cool part is this. It does all this without you having to wear any devices. The accuracy of this thing rivals what you would get in a professional sleep lab. Now, let me tell you about my personal favorite thing. Autopilot recap. Every day, my eight sleep tells me what my autopilot did for me to help me sleep better at night. Here's what it said last night. Last night, autopilot made adjustments to boost your REM sleep by 62%. Wow. 62%. That means that it updated and changed my temperature to cool, to warm, and helped me fine tune exactly where I wanted to be with precision temperature control to get to that maximum REM sleep. And sleep is the most important function we do every single day. As you can probably tell, I'm a massive fan of my eight sleep, and I think you should get one. So go to eight sleep .com slash changelog. And right now they have an awesome deal for Black Friday going from November 11th through December 14th. The discount code changelog will get you up to $600 off the plug for ultra when you bundle it. Again, the code to use is changelog and that's from November 11th through December 14th. Once again, that's eight sleep .com slash changelog. I know you love it. I sleep on this thing every night and I absolutely love it. It's a game changer and it's going to change your game. Once again, eight sleep .com slash changelog. All right, next up the GitHub plugin. My coworkers asked me not to write the GitHub plugin. Shay Arison wrote a GitHub plugin to calculate the bus factor or truck factor on GitHub repositories. Of course, we all know what a bus factor is. This is the minimum number of team members you can have on a project who can disappear before the thing becomes not driven anymore, right? It stalls out or it fails or it dies. And so the worst bus factor you could possibly have is one. And the best bus factor you could possibly have is infinity, I guess. I don't know. One is bad. More than one is generally better. That's right. Here's the story. In 2015 or so, Shay's employer had layoffs. One of them was the only contributor to part of the code base that made money for the company. He remembered reading about truck number, which is the same thing. It's just trucks instead of buses and thought it'd be fun to write a GitHub enterprise plugin that calculates who you can't afford to fire. Shay found a research paper called the truck factor research paper, which actually went through this in a somewhat vigorous way. I started writing the plugin and talked five minutes on it at our Thursday afternoon lightning talks. His coworkers said it would immediately hit Goodhart's law once a metric becomes a measure and no longer is a good metric, and they say they saw it as a way for management to easily calculate who you can fire, so, you know, all good tools can be used for good and evil, but long story short, went out, used this truck factor paper, which is a way, actually describes a way you can go about calculating this, at least, you know, fuzzily to find out the key contributors to projects and ran against the Linux found that the Linux kernel don't run against the foundation run against the Linux kernel found a way using the linguist plugin to filter out documentation and third party libraries, just to make sure it's actually the people who are like working on the Linux kernel and found that not only is it small, even on something as large as Linux kernel, it's going down. Currently Shay found a truck factor of 12, 12 people on the Linux kernel down from in the forties when it was run originally. So from 2015 till now, from the forties down to 12 and his collaborator M Claire, who did some visualizations and stuff also installed the plugin on her system. She got a factor of eight. I'm not sure why there's a discrepancy between the two, you know, this is a developer's blog post that I'm, that I'm mining for this information, but yeah, so we have now as tool, I assume you can go take it and run it against other repositories. I would think depending on the repository, it may or may not be accurate. Cause like if you have probably the smaller the project, the harder it is to know that number for sure. But maybe you can know that number just by looking at the list of contributors in that case. But for large projects with thousands of contributors, you can actually understand how many of these are key in order to keep that sucker running. And it turns out over time, it appears the Linux kernel in particular has been going down, down, down. What are your thoughts on this Adam? I'm looking at different angles. I also went to M Claire's blog. She has a parallel to use a pun. I'll bring up in a second. Not relevant in the moment, but it will be relevant here in just a second. I promise. Stay tuned for the pun landing. She wrote a parallel blog post to this post that has a bit more detail. Different detail I'd say. And the pun will end now. There's one more built in command to Mac OS that is kind of cool. Parallel. I think it's built in because I've used it before. I can't recall if I had to install the command or a package to make it work. I think it works. And so she mentioned when cloning the repos that it was very resource intensive despite passing a job count of eight to parallel. And so she used the command parallel dash J eight get clone and the rest of the command to pull down tons of repos in this repo list that was in this dot text file. Kind of cool. So that's the pun there. Here is the closing of that loop. This is a third party library. Is there a tool called parallel hosted at savannah dot gnu dot org. So it seems like it's an old gnu project. Yeah. Appears to be written with in Pearl. So an old thing that you can definitely use on Mac OS, but probably an app kit install or a brew install kind of a thing. Right. Keep going. I've used it before. That's why I thought maybe it is built in because I've used it before and I wasn't sure if I installed something to make it work. Fair enough. Yeah, no problem. I think this is cool. Honestly, I think it's cool in so far as that. I do agree with good hearts law that it will become this thing that you can measure against and use it in the incorrect way, so to speak. But sure. I like the idea of being able to as as someone who's trying to make choices to guide the ship to have a a bus factor, a truck factor number. It does resolve people to numbers literally. Yeah, which is not cool, but, you know, data, they say, you know, make data driven decisions. Hello, that's data, right? I think it's cool, but I think at the same time it could let some folks go. It's like, hey, I'm management and Jared is useful and Adam is not right. Let's let Adam go, which would not be cool. No, that would not be cool. But if it was, if it was deserved, maybe, yeah, maybe it is cool. You know, not cool for me circumstantially, but totally cool in terms of project or product or direction. Efficiency and appropriate if somebody's not bringing value. What I wish I had more time to do, though, was dig through this paper. Yeah, the title of it is A Novel Approach for Estimating Truck Factors. It's, it's pretty deep. That's cool. That is the coolest part for me. It reminds me of Abhinota's subsection of our show with him, where he talked about measuring developer productivity. And I mentioned how hard it is to actually compare it with technical debt because you have quantitative measures with money and it's just easy. And I can get fatalistic, I guess, with certain things that are hard to measure. I'm just like, ah, we can't measure that. Let's move on. I think it's cool that people take the time and the effort and do the research and the novel ideas in figuring out how to actually measure something, which seems, it seems immeasurable, but really that just means it's not easy to measure. And so that doesn't mean it's actually immeasurable, but most of the time you have to measure something that's proximate to it in order to find this measure. So I think it's just cool. I thought I didn't think about ever being able to quantify bus factor in terms of it being proven out. This project has a bus factor of X and we know that's true -ish because we've done this novel approach. I think what it does let you do, though, in terms, let's forget the list of people you can fire aspect of this and think of it more in terms of how in trouble is your project, how many open source projects out there could leverage this to its better advantage, its systems truck factor, TF, is defined, as you said before, Jared, as the number of people on your team that have to be hit by a truck or quit before the project is in serious trouble. And that is not a good thing for the project, obviously. So if you have people who quit because of just natural attrition, maybe you've got, you know, the WordPress thing happening and people are just like considering being, you know, let go or offered to leave for money or literally just quitting, you have this opportunity to say, well, this is how in trouble my project could be if

things

went sideways, you know, if these things did happen. And what you could do in the opposite of that is to insulate from that, is to say, okay, let's let's reduce that number or I guess what is the opposite here? Well, you want to raise it. So, yeah, raise it. So you got a TF of what was it like 40 something for at first and then now it's down to like eight -ish. Yeah, but what's strange about this is that it seems like Shay got one measure and then Claire got slightly less. So I'm not sure why they would change. He said running on her machine and got an eight. And these are, I don't understand that. So maybe there's more information to be figured out there, but

yeah,

call it single digits. Well, now you have at least some measures to say, well, we've got a... A declining bus factor. Yeah. I wonder who came up with truck factor and then who came up with bus factor because somebody must've thought it'd be a good idea to consider how many people on our project are going to get hit by a truck. Like that's just a very morbid thing to think. And then someone else is like, nah, let's just call it a bus. Like maybe that's slightly less. No, it's just... There's probably more to it, but I think I would imagine that it's more common to be hit by a bus. I would think so. Right? City streets, buses are more frequent than trucks. That's why it's called bus factor because it's the norm, not the anomaly. And why wouldn't you just call it like leave the team factor? Like you just feel like, why would we have to bring death into this? I do think there's a reason for that. And I think it's a fair reason. I think the reason is because a bus or a truck factor brings to mind the very real possibility that somebody could suddenly without planning, leave the team. Oof. Right? Like that's what you think of as like, everything was great until Fred got hit by a bus. And so now all of a sudden we don't have time to like do any sort of preparation for this. You know, Fred was going to be a BDFL. There was no plans of quitting. And so I think that's why death gets brought in is because you have to think about it in the way of it could be a surprise. Anyway, that's just my trying to read the tea leaves on the etymology of the term. Cause otherwise it's kind of a morbid term. It is a very morbid term. I do agree with it. Suddenness. Maybe that's why you, as you said, is pinned back to... Sudden and unexpected. I mean, it even went as far in this paper. I might as well read the whole paper to everybody at this point. In section two, it says truck factor, an example from the early days of Python in quotes. What if you saw this posted tomorrow? Guido's unexpected death has come as a shock to us all. Disgruntled members of the TCL mob are suspected, but no smoking gun has been found. Oh, that's hilarious. Yeah. The TCL mob. So that's a competing language, right? TCL. So they're, they're making up this hypothetical in which people from the TCL language community, the mob somehow came and killed Guido van Rossum. That's kind of funny, but also even more and more, but there's like surmising there'd be some sort of like inner language rivalry so harsh that they would execute a man. Well, if you've seen Glass Onion, I believe it was the first one. You know what I'm talking about? Oh, you're talking about the... The pair of movies that are similar, but not the same. They're not sequels. Yeah. Where they're in the house. It's a murder mysteries. Murder mystery. Yeah. I love those movies. I mean, those are so good. I mean, we need more of those. It's like, that's the kind of thing. This reminds me of this, you know? It's killing me right now. What's that movie called? Everybody's listening, like has seen it and they're like, you idiot. Knives Out, Glass Onion. Thank you. Knives Out. I was Googling that. The easiest way to Google something when you want to find something is Glass Onion versus, and it's going to come up with

Knives

Out. It's going to come up with the opposite. I was just typing Glass Onion movie. Yeah. Brian Johnson. There we go. I would have got there. Now, if we want to talk about that. The problem was I got auto -completed. Let's bring that in as a topic because I think that's a good non -sequitur, but it's a good one. Glass Onion versus Knives Out. Oh, Knives Out, hands down. Have you seen Glass Onion? Yeah. Oh. Or you must be the opposite. You haven't thought about it before. Yeah, I really haven't actually. I know I'm thinking about it. There was a lot that I liked about Glass Onion. I actually haven't thought much about it. Obviously I compared them after I saw Glass Onion. I compared it to the original in my head, but I haven't had anybody ask me that. So that was my guttural reaction was hands down the original. But I don't know if you asked me like for reasoning. I'd just be like, uh, it's just better. I don't know why. I liked them both, first of all. So I'm not saying anything against the second one. Wasn't the second one was very much like this hypothetical Elon Musk kind of character who was like, was it Elon Musk that it was? Was it based after him? Yeah, it was based off of some eccentric billionaire, right? I don't know. We're getting into the areas where I flaunt how little I paid attention to movies. They all go to an island. I don't think it's Epstein Island. You know, that's who I was thinking about actually was Epstein. Like maybe it's comparative to Epstein. Although it doesn't, I don't think it parallels one more pun very well to it, but I think it's similar in the fact that it's an island, you know, maybe that's what it is. It was a very, yeah, we're in the weeds here on this, but my thoughts on it, I suppose both very good. Yes. And I really can't say which one I like better. Honestly, I think they're, they were like equally good in their own right. I think they're the glass onion movie had a really cool premise. Whereas knives out also had a really cool premise. And I think you couldn't see either of them coming in or you really couldn't. Oh, they're both well written. They're both well executed. Yes. Great stories. I think knives out is a more classic who done it, which nobody was making. I mean, Hollywood hasn't taken a chance like that in a long time. It's all like reboots and sequels and like the seventh version of this movie. Here comes a classic who done it with a brand new character, brand new storyline. So I really appreciated it for that. Great cast. Great cast. Another thing about a knives out, they both had great cast though, but I think they did knives out had a more classically good cast. Like it had a lot of, you know, actors that are not in their twenties or thirties, like forties, fifties, sixties kind of actress and actresses. Yeah. So to close the loop on Elon Musk, I was right that everybody compared it to Elon Musk people, especially because it came out right around the time that he bought Twitter. And there are dozens of articles comparing it, calling it a veiled dig at Elon Musk because of the eccentric billionaire who, you know, is a major part of the story. However, Ryan Johnson says that that comparison was accidental and merely coincident. He was not thinking about Elon Musk when he wrote it, but you be the judge, I suppose. Well, social media was involved, right? And putting someone on, well, I guess it was YouTube or a version of YouTube. I can't recall if it was like literally YouTube or not,

but

social media for sure. Let's move on before we have to use our spoiler horn. Oh my gosh. Yes, that's true. All right. Next up. Arc is a dead browser walking. Arc, the Arc browser. Yes. I was actually going to go there, so I'm glad you did. Hope Sons of Guns killed it, man. They killed it. Is this news? Did it die? Well, okay, I'm being dramatic. No, it's not dead, but the CEO and head person has moved on to a new browser. Oh, okay. It's been put into maintenance mode. What an absolute shame for the people who use it, really. I just like, wow, what a shame to like begin to adopt something, begin to be excited about something, and then it just not work out. Okay, so this website is why I turned on my Tailscale, not sponsored by the way, do love Tailscale. And then I enabled my exit node because I don't have my pie hole here at the studio. I have it at home. And so I don't, this website is just full of ads. I can't even enjoy the content or find the content because there's just so many ads. Yes, this is the howtogeek .com website. It's just, I'm sorry y 'all have to do this to sustain your business. It's an absolute shame. The web shouldn't be like this. This is not the web I'm fighting for. Right. I'm fighting for your freedom to publish, of course, but not your freedom to put all these ads everywhere. It's just like, come on. So I actually didn't notice that because I've got, you know, built -in ad blockers and stuff and NextDNS. Otherwise, that sounded like a brag. I didn't mean to sound like a brag, but the reason I was saying it is because I linked to this in news and we tend to not link to sites that are yucky. Like we don't like that. And so I'm kind of apologizing to a certain extent because I didn't notice how bad it was on howtogeek .com. So I agree with you 100%. I should probably should have linked over to The Verge, which generally has a much classier website and does a better job of coverage as well. But I just found this one first. This is the article I linked to in Change .News when I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago. But just, I don't know, I feel validated because last time we talked about browsers, I was like, I don't just trust a VC funded browser that doesn't have a clear business model. I just feel like it's going to go away. And I didn't expect to be correct so quickly. Like that's what shocks me is. And I get it. You got to move fast if you're a startup. So why keep working on something? Even though we were impressed by their adoption. Lots of loyal fans of the Arc browser. Yeah, but not fast enough. Yeah, they changed the, I wonder what really happened here. So I'm going to read a little bit because it says this is, we haven't closed the loop fully on what exactly happened here because we've been meandering a bit. Maybe, maybe my fault in terms of the ads and stuff. But it says the browser company best known for the Arc browser is developing a new, completely new browser. The company has been working for years on a browser unrelated to Arc. Arc won't be abandoned, but the new focus will primarily be on stability updates and bug fixes. That's kind of like, it's not abandonment, but there's no maintenance mode. It's done. Yeah, might as well be abandoned. There's nothing new here in a new thing. So what's the point of the new? Yes. So that's the story. And the reason was because they did not think they could take Arc to mass adoption to the masses. And their goal is to make a browser for the masses. You know, I'm somewhat reminded of Ryan Doll with Dino because I had Ryan Doll on the show, I don't know, a couple of months ago around the Dino 2 launch. And we talked about how he's very much had to be pragmatic with his choices with Dino. Whereas when he started it as the big rewrite, right, the second effort after having made all these regrets with Node .js, he was going to do things differently and better. And he took a very pure approach at first to Dino in order to eschew backwards compat and to leave Node .js behind. But he said he wasn't happy building a runtime for a small group of people. He wanted to build something for the masses. And he realizes that he will not get mass adoption unless he goes back on some of those ideals and compromises.

Point

in case is the eventual adoption of the NPM ecosystem and all the work they had to do inside Dino in order to make NPM support happen. Ryan was very torn about that. He did not want to do it. But he just had to, he felt like, in order to get people to meet people where they are and to build software for everybody. And that's kind of what Arc is trying to do, right? They're trying to create a browser for everybody. And they just feel like the current one they built was too power user focused. It was too esoteric and too many knobs and switches and things you had to relearn. I was somewhat turned off because of how different it was for me. And they're like, it's never going to get there. Now, Ryan's taking Dino and changing it. And he thinks it can get there. And time will tell. But with Arc, they're just like, nah, this browser is never going to get there. We're going to start with a new one, which is totally cool. They can go ahead and do that. I'm just not going to try it. I'm out. There's enough browsers out there. I don't need to use one by somebody who's going to rug pull me again. I do think the premise they have for this new version has some legs, so to speak. Well, they got some stuff out there about it. Same article, just more hints at what the future could be. It says the goal for the new browser is to turn the browser into an app platform that is proactive, powerful, and AI centric. What is not AI centric these days? The goal is to make the initial user experience seamless to attract a larger audience to explore capabilities. And then it says the companies, I'm just passing by some of those details. Oh, I should read this part. The goal is to make the initial user experience seamless and to attract a larger audience, which I just said to escape abilities, with an interface that more people are used to with horizontal tabs. The company's vision for the new browser involves using AI and machine learning to automate tasks like data transfer between enterprise applications or retrieving order numbers for customer support. That seems kind of niche, but I like the idea, I suppose, of more smarts in the browser. You know, let other people deal with web standards. That's what Chrome is doing, right? Safari is doing. Put a layer on top of that that is familiar to the person, not crazily different like Arc was. I love the adventure, though. You know, I applaud their courage to do something so different than a typical browser because maybe that's actually what got them a lot of the, you know, like the shiny object kind of thing. You know, like, oh, what's this? This is the purple cow aspect that Seth Godin talked about, right? Is that here you have this factor of a brand new browser that isn't just simply trying to be faster, better, et cetera. It's like just literally different in terms of user experience and starkly different compared to horizontal tabs. I could never get past the, like, and I'm a power user. I think I am, at least. Or I aim to be. Or I try to be. You aspire to be a power user. I'm an aspiring power user, you know? And I really tried Arc in earnest several times, and I was just like, I just can't get used to this experience. I liked other aspects about it. But to my point, though, and to their point is I like the idea of something that builds on top of where the browser is more of a platform in terms of on top of the Web. I like the idea of, like, automating some things. But how does that actually translate? I don't know. We'll see. So Josh Miller is the CEO of the browser company, and I've DM'd, I believe, on Twitter slash X, and I'm sure that we emailed trying to coordinate. So, Josh, if you're listening to this or somebody who knows you, let this be an open invite to dig in. Let's talk about it. Let's go deep on what happened with Arc. What lessons did you learn? How are you reformulating your IDM plan? Because it is a 2025 plan. It's early 2025. So this is not Ladybird's 2026 beta. It says the new browser expected to launch at the beginning of next year, but it's not set in stone and may be pushed further into 2025. But their plan is soon, and they've been working on this other thing in parallel. So come on here, Josh. Let's talk. Yeah, 100%. What's up, friends? I'm here with a new friend of ours over at Assembly AI, founder and CEO Dylan Fox. Dylan, tell me about Universal One. This is the newest, most powerful speech AI model to date. You released this recently. Tell me more. So Universal One is our flagship industry leading model for speech to text and various other speech understanding tasks. So it's about a year long effort that really is the culmination of the years that we've spent building infrastructure and tooling at Assembly to even train large scale speech AI models. It was trained on about 12 and a half million hours of voice data, multilingual, super wide range of domains and sources of audio data. So it's super robust model. We're seeing developers use it for extremely high accuracy, low cost, super fast speech to text and speech understanding tasks within their products, within automations, within workflows that they're building at their companies or within their products. Okay. Constantly updated speech AI models at your fingertips. Well, at your API fingertips, that is. A good next step is to go to their playground. You can test out their models for free right there in the browser, or you can get started with a $50 credit at assemblyai .com slash practical AI. Again, that's assemblyai .com slash practical AI. Are you on officially Blue Sky? I am not. Do you have an account? I don't think so. I know. I don't think so. I don't think I do either. I could have sworn I created an account. I know that changelog .com is on there and I've coded against their API and our platform posts our new stuff there. And so if you want to follow a changelog on Blue Sky, by all means, please do. But I'm not personally on there and I know that they're getting massive adoption all of a sudden, at least in terms of brand new social networks go, they're getting a huge uptick and people are raving. I would love to see a comparison of Blue Sky because the reason why I asked this is there's a headline that you covered. I believe in news, Blue Sky crosses the 15 million news remark, which is, it's a lot of people. It's not billions. No, it's nowhere near threads. I mean, yeah, exactly. So cross, you know, cross examine that against obviously X slash Twitter threads and then Blue Sky. Is it truly worth? I think the thing I think about is less like is X for me or is threads for me and more like is Blue Sky worth giving any attention to? It's almost, you know, synonymous with Arc, you know, in the fact that they're trying to do something different, but kind of the same, you know, Blue Sky is not much different. How much different could you make a social media application, though, or a platform? It's not drastically different, like even true social. I think Trump did that, didn't he? I've never been on there. I have no idea. But like every time I saw it in the news, it was like a copy and paste of Twitter slash X posts. Like there's not much you can revolutionize there. That's what Blue Sky is for the most part. There's a few things that set it apart. Technicalities. But for most people, it's going to be like Twitter minus Elon Musk and crew for the most part. And that's what it looks like, at least. And I think that it's not very big because 15 million, while they've had 700 ,000 coming on a week is what I read on the verge or in the last couple of weeks, probably not a week, but recent weeks. It's not how many people are there, it's who's there to a certain extent. And I think that a lot of developers are going there, which makes it interesting and creatives. But threads has something like 275 million people on there. And so 15 million in that light is a barnacle. You

know,

a large barnacle, grant you, but a barnacle. Lots of people are talking it up. You know, Twitter used to be a nice place in the early days and it feels probably like that. I don't think there's anything inherent in there that makes it not become what Twitter became eventually anyways. And so I think resistance is futile to a certain extent. And I'm at this point in my life, and maybe this is foolish as a podcaster, but like, I'm just ready to opt out of the next thing. Like, let's put changelog on there. But do I want to be on blue sky personally? I just really don't care anymore. I'm kind of over it all. I'm kind of over it all. Social media I'm talking about. New short form text platforms. Right. Like how much value do they bring to our lives in reality? Well, the value is distribution of ideas. Obviously, you know this. I'm not speaking to the choir or I am speaking to the choir. Please keep speaking. Right. So I mean, to state the obvious, the value is distribution of ideas. And so I think so long as you would like to distribute your ideas, then they do hold a use, whether it's personally or corporately. And, you know, we do the job of spreading and distributing the ideas as a corporation or corporately. We're not literally a corporation. I guess we kind of are. I feel you on that. You know, I've sort of opted out in a way to a lot of these things. I think to the betterment of my mental health. I didn't do it because I was like, oh, I'm mentally taxed. Let me get off of Instagram. But I can tell you that if you had like a CAT scan on my brain whenever I scan Instagram comparative to life without Instagram, as an example, this is the one I for sure opted out of. It's just all vanity. Vanity is everywhere out there and it just drives me crazy. It's all comparative, all vanity. And I just I'm like you like I just opted out and I almost feel like X is the same. Like I don't have much to share there. Aside from the things we can share and anything more than that is just like I'd rather just share it like Zillip or Slack or something that's just a bit more focused, a bit more personal. And so I haven't really been in the zone of my life where I want to speak to the masses ad nauseam. I'm just like, yeah, here's the ideas. Take them, take them or not. And there's lots of people who remember fondly the early days of Twitter and I am one of them. Me too. I remember that very well. I loved it. I definitely made a lot of friends that way. I mean, if you look at our lives paths crossing, Twitter played a role in that. Blogs played a role in that. So I got involved in the changelog because Wynn Netherland read my blog and I read his blog. And so we were blog buddies and we were Twitter friends. And Wynn, of course, Adam, you know, I'm not telling you this, I'm telling everybody else. Wynn was one of the original creators of the changelog and was on the show for a couple of years before moving on, getting a job at GitHub, moving on, in which time I stepped in slowly and became your co -host. But that all happened because of Twitter plus blogging. And that's radically changed the course of my life. And so I don't want to discount that. And so maybe that's what I'm doing and I'm discounting those kind of things because tons of friends and colleagues and interesting people have been met that way. I just don't know if I'm ready to do it all over again. Like I was in my 20s then, you know, and didn't know a lot of people. And like now I've met a lot of people and I don't know, I'm ready to maybe let that be a different person's game, but change should still be there, which means I have to be there to a certain extent, which also means maybe I have to read stuff and then I get sucked in and I'm just back at some point. Like I'm back, blue sky is amazing. I think there's a different version of being back. There's a back where you consume slash lurk and there's a back where you do that as well as create. And I would say that's different. Yeah, for sure. Well, I could go Justin Searles mode. So Justin automates everything to all the social networks and he reads none of them. So it's very, uh, that's the way to do it, man. It's broadcast only. And I feel like there's something lame about that. I've told Justin this to his face, so I'm not calling him out here on the show. It's kind of lame. Cause you're just like, here, my thoughts are interesting, but yours aren't. You know, it's like, here, read my stuff, but I'm not going to read yours. It's antisocial, but it's also probably he, I mean, for him, cause he's obsessed and compulsive, he says it's an absolute necessity because he gets obsessed with these things and he can't check them all the time. And so, because he's unable, unable to regulate that, he has to just turn it all off. And that makes 100 % sense for him. But it's definitely a technique, but if we're all just broadcasting our voices into the void, then why are we doing here? Which brings us to, maybe we'll close with this dead internet theory. I wanted to actually say two things on that. Okay. I do want to say dead internet theory, but I also want to say you should go to conferences. So I think a somewhat segue could be, well, if you don't want to lurk slash non -participate in social media, participate in IRL. And the best way to do that is the hallway track. And then my other thought was, yes, the dead internet theory. And are we creators of this dead internet? Like you just admitted to having bots out there, essentially automated posting to X, literally X and other X's in terms of variable. So many puns today. Wow. Sorry about that. Yeah. We're part of the bots. This dead internet theory. What is the dead internet theory, Jared? So to outline the dead internet theory for folks, if you've been listening to change log news, I brought it up probably three or four times in the last year, because I guess I'm a conspiracy theorist in that way. Cause this is a conspiracy theory. Aren't we all conspiracy theorists in our own special way, by the way. Here's something I've noticed aside, everybody left, right, and center up, down, whatever place you are, we all do this. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but, and then we launch into our newest conspiracy. Well, as humans, we are also very prone to believing and listening to conspiracies. Well, we're trying to figure stuff out. It's a mystery. Figure out the world. Yeah. It's totally natural, but I just like how everybody has to preface their new theory with this disclaimer first, like listen, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but I don't normally dabble in conspiracies. I don't want to be labeled as a crazy person, but let me tell you about this theory I have. I just think it's funny. We all do it. I've certainly done it. And so here's one theory. The dead internet, it asserts that due to a coordinated, maybe that's where the conspiracy really comes in, an intentional effort, the internet now consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation to control the population and minimize organic human activity. Now, having read the paragraph again, I don't 100 % believe that. I don't think it's coordinated and intentional. I think some of it's probably intentional. I don't think it's coordinated. I just think it's incentives working themselves through the human race. I do think it's happening though. I do think that more and more and more and more, and even more so, we are out there, the few, the proud on the internet talking to robots who are talking to other robots and to humans to a point where we're just like completely disconnected from actual humans. And how would we ever know? We used to escape by going onto the internet. Now we escape by leaving the internet. Going back to the real world. Yeah, that's a good point. A different version I have, this is from the LLMI assets, TLDR for me. And so it says different versions of it, but it says... Sure, mine was Wikipedia. Yeah, and that's probably just fine. What's the good part to read here? Proponents of the theory believe that government agencies and large corporations are responsible for creating fake content and interactions to manipulate the public opinion, control information, and inflate engagement metrics. I mean, there's a lot of fake content out there. I wouldn't be surprised. There's a lot of, I mean, especially on TikTok. I mean, I've kind of ejected from TikTok. I was listening to that episode we reposted a little while back. It was a really good episode. Let me go and find what that one was again. 10 ,000 hours? Yeah, that's, you know, lessons learned from 10 ,000 hours of programming. Now I'd actually scanned that episode because it did not have chapters. That's how far back it was. And you should go listen to it, by the way, listeners. Episode 613, changed all .fm slash 613. And I said on there, I think this is the early days of me mentioning Silicon Valley on this podcast. Because you mentioned TikTok a bunch and I was getting sick of hearing about TikTok. And you, yeah, there's actually, okay, here it is. It's even better. I earmarked it. There is a chapter for this. Oh, nice. I'll tell you what it says. It says, and you're gonna laugh, Jared, if you didn't pay attention to this yet. Chapter 15, Jared provokes Adam. I like this. Yeah. So what did I say? You basically said you have to mention TikTok every show or something like that. You might as well, I'm paraphrasing. It was something like a dig because it was definitely early days of me mentioning Silicon Valley. I remember your TikTok phase. I feel like there's just so much information there. Maybe that's why, you know, I believe this theory that, or this conspiracy theory, at least, of this dead internet. Because I think there's a lot of content on there that's just like, somebody is employing somebody just to generate this content so that it can go viral and so that it can affect a mass amount of people to believe a new thing. Like chickens, for example. I've asked this question a few times. My idea or my awareness of this conspiracy theory that if you begin to cultivate, I don't know, what's it called when you farm? Do you farm chickens? You don't farm chickens. You raise chickens. Right? That's the term for it. What's weird with a spider is it's husbandry. If you care take a spider, male or female, doesn't matter. The process is called husbandry. Anyways. I think husbandry speaks to the production process. Maybe. Anyways. You're raising some chickens. Next thing you know, you're questioning all life because you realize that the eggs you're getting from these chickens is nowhere near the eggs you're getting from the chickens at the store. Unless you're buying the really expensive ones that are cage -free. Even then, you've got all these marketing terms that sort of curtail the idea of what an egg is. Anyways, you start doing all the stuff. Now you're living off the land. You go deep. Once you take the pill, then like

question

everything. The chickens are the pill. Yeah. The chickens is the gateway. I think that's fair. I mean, our, uh, my brother and sister -in -law raised chickens and we eat their eggs and they're epically different than what you buy at the store. And they're like, they probably have opinions, right? They're like, Oh my gosh, don't ever eat the, if you had an egg in your hand, they're like slapping you out of your hand. Slap that

egg.

It's the right place to slap an egg. Yeah, no, I get it. I think that that's, is this your theory or did somebody give you this one? This chicken theory? Now that was given via TikTok. That's the point. Oh, they gave you that theory. I became aware of this theory on TikTok, so it could be have, oh, they planted it. This idea was planted so that we now look at things differently. I mean, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but parts of this dead internet theory ring true to me. Yes, I agree. Definitely parts of it. Shades of gray on how much of it's true, but it definitely feels like if not the intentionality, but the effect is 100 % true. Like there's just way more, there's way more noise than there ever has been on the internet. And I think a lot of that noise is manufactured because it's so easy to manufacture noise and easier than ever to manufacture noise that looks like a human. So, well, I think that I think it could be where they literally are using real humans. Like it doesn't have to be generated. It could be, well, they use people as vessels. For instance, whoever wanted to get this chicken theory out there, they got Adam Stokowiak and look what you're doing with it, dude. You're spreading it far and wide. So many places. You are a pawn. And I think that we should close right there. I believe so. Go to conferences. Shout out to the author of that post, Sophie Kuhn at localghost .dev. Great domain, great website. Shout out to Sophie for writing that one. And that's it. We'll throw the other links that we didn't talk about in the show into the show notes. In case you want to do some more reading. I think there's two or three

that

we passed on, but why not share them as well. Just in case you want to dive a little deeper. I have one for our plus plus audience. Can we do that? Let's say goodbye to our friends and we see you all next week. Goodbye friends. Bye friends. At one more thing, Adam kept back for our changelog plus plus supporters, the latest on the WordPress drama. We got to talk about that, right? Stay tuned after this outro, plus plus people. And if you want to join the cool kids club by directly supporting our work, well, you can do that at changelog .com slash plus plus. As a thank you, we make the ads disappear. Send some stickers to your door. Extend many of our episodes like this one and more. It's better. Thanks once again to our sponsors of this episode. Shout out to Sentry, Fly, Ate Sleep, and Assembly AI. Please check out what they're up to. Cool stuff indeed. And of course, a thank you to the one, the only, the beat freak, Breakmaster Cylinder. Next week on the changelog. News on Monday. Helena Zhang and Toby Fried from Phosphor Icons and the rad new Departure Mono font on Wednesday. And are local first apps truly the future? Johannes Schickling and James Long join us to discuss and debate that question right here on changelog and friends on Friday. Have yourself a great weekend. Get some merch while supplies last. And let's talk again real soon.