Coding Blocks - Easy and Cheap AI for Developers, Reddit API Changes and Sherlocking

Episode Date: June 11, 2023

We’re back after a brief break for a busy month of May, and we’re here to talk about some pretty cool stuff happening in the developer world. Outlaw took vacation and can remember nothing, Joe introduces us to Sherlocking, and Allen discovered what all the fuss was about with Chat GPT as a software developer. […]

You're listening to Coding Blocks, episode 211. Subscribe to us on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, wherever you'd like to find your podcasts. Visit us at codingblocks.net, where you can find the show notes, examples, discussion, and more. Look who's going off the script. What's this? Whoa, whoa, whoa. Don't tell everybody there's a script. Right?

Hey, you can send your feedback, questions, and rants to comments at codingblocks.net and follow us on Twitter at Coding Blocks. And, hey, we've got Twitter at Coding Blocks, and you can send your feedback, questions, rants, comments at codingblocks.net and subscribe to us on iTunes. Oh, wait. Oh, no. Well, I'm Joe Zach.

I'm Michael. My anxiety levels have shot through the roof i'm alan underwood and i'm michael yes and yes all right reading backwards hey so so we're back with some more random topics um you know, random developer-centric type stuff. So, yeah, enjoy. So, I guess we'll get into it here. Yeah, who's first? Yeah, I guess I'm first. I'm looking at what's in there, but I don't know who did it, so I didn't know, like, who to cue. All right, yeah, so check this out.

Like, I know we've talked the past several episodes. It seems like the AI stuff has come up quite a bit, right? We've been talking about chat GPT, right? Um, co-pilot, all this kind of stuff. Well,

so I went to SD times to take a look at what was at the top of their list of things. And AI surprisingly enough is, is at the top of their stack. Like, and there's this one that's kind of interesting. It's called monster AI and, or monster API. And what it is, it sounds like it's cheaper access for developers to do AI type processing. So basically what their whole goal is, is they set up their stack that you can use.

So you get access to GPUs and all the intense processing that's needed to do these AI models and all this crazy stuff at a fraction of the cost that it would cost you if you spun up the same type environments in AWS or Azure or anything like that. So that is their promise on their own page. They've got text to image things. They've got, they've got chat GPT type, you know, language models and whatnot that work. And they, I want to say that somewhere on there, they said that they had saved one of the customers that switched over from using AWS, like over $300,000 just by using their stack instead of that one over there. So if you want to get into this thing and, and see what you can do programmatically with AI, this might be a good way to try some things out. And it says you can even try it for free with no credit card required. So, um, that's monster API.ai is the website, so it seems pretty cool, probably worth checking out.

Yeah, see, they have a thing about fine-tuning jobs, so you can go and kind of tweak the model, too, a little bit, which is not something you can do with, like, ChatGPT. It's pretty cool, and you have a selection of a bunch of different language models, like LAMA, GPT-J, just a bunch of them. Yeah, it's pretty cool to kind of have that choice and ability to kind of refine things a little bit if you have special needs in addition to saving money. It reminds me of, we talked about it years ago, but I'm trying to remember what it was called. Maybe it was just called Azure ML. Was that it?

Oh, yeah. Yeah, machine learning. The services that you could just use that were amazing. Because they had a super cool UI on top of it. You could go through, see what kind of model you were trying to generate. You could give it the data, see like – man, I'm so out of it. Sorry. I just, I was traveling in across the country and now I'm like, you know, a little bit jet lag, but yeah, see, you could see like the, the results, uh, you know, like see the curve and, and see like what kind of results you

were getting. So you could try to perfect, uh, you know, or not perfect technically, but you know, like get as good a result as you, you'd want, you, you might be aiming for like a 97% or something like that type of result. But, um, that's what this concept reminds me of. But then looking at their, uh, their, their website though, like just on the home screen alone, they're talking about one where, you know, they give it a sample image and they're like, like just on the home screen alone, they're talking about one where, you know, they give it a sample image and they're like, yeah,

replace the, the background with mountains, you know, or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. So I live in a crazy time. Like,

can we just agree on that for starters? Totally. So I want to read a little snippet here from the SD times article. Um, these are quotes that they took from, I guess the monster API C they took from, I guess, the monster API CEO by 2030 AI will impact the lives of 8 billion people, right? So the whole planet with monster API, our ultimate wish is to see developers unleash their genius and dazzle the universe by helping them bring

their innovations to life in a matter of hours. So that's pretty cool. Just even thinking that you would have access to that, but then this is where they talk about what they're actually doing. They eliminate the need to worry about GPU infrastructure, containerization, setting up Kubernetes clusters, managing scalable API deployments, all that kind of garbage. Right. So so the it's just like what I was saying, the thing that was so sweet about the Azure ML thing. Right. Like I remember they had the aging thing. If you remember, you could take a picture of yourself and it was like, what age am I?

We mentioned this way back in the day. But it would guess your age just by looking at the picture and comparing a bunch of other stuff. That's kind of what this promise is. Here is simplifying your programming interface into this world of AI, which is like, I think I kind of want to go play with it now. So when do you think we talked about Azure ML? Oh man, that's been a while. That's probably, I'm going to say 2018 five years ago. Okay. You want to throw a guess out there, Jay-Z?

2017. Jay-Z wins. Really? All right. 2017, episode 69, Paradigms. Paradigms. Those are the best ones. Yeah.

So it looks like the Azure ML, though, is being retired next year. So they're calling what we were talking about at that time, studio.azureml.net. Say that 10 times fast and be jet-lagged. They're calling that now Machine Learning Studio Classic. So now they have another one just called train, you know, where you can transition to Azure machine learning.

Uh, so yeah, we'll have links to that though. I think what's crazy to me in this whole AI sort of boom that we've had here in the past year is how quickly things transition from machine learning to full on AI type modeling, right? Like, I mean, so we just said that this thing was around six years ago. So we've been talking about machine learning for a while, but I don't think anybody expected

that a, the AI stuff would come out and be as good as what it has been already. Yeah. Speaking of good, have you been seeing the stuff people are doing with the Adobe Photoshop generated fill? Oh, I've heard it's crazy i mean geez let's take the mona lisa and they're like zoom out and they'll fill in the rest of the picture and it just keeps going going i mean amazing and like funny stuff too like um people will take a picture of someone like sitting at a blank table they'll like erase out a little circle and next thing there's a pizza there it looks like it's perfect the lighting matches like i don't i don't understand but it's amazing yeah i think i saw an article titled something like

with the new photoshop ai type stuff photography is not even going to be necessary anymore like it's going to be a dying art which i mean that's that's pushing it that's like saying that programming won't be necessary but it's still it's insane what they're able to do with some of this stuff right now. Well, okay. Uh, dang, let me see if I can find this.

Now there was a thing on, um, the programming subreddit that I saw yesterday that I read yesterday where they were talking about, uh, the article was talking about AI coming up with a better sort algorithm that was previously unknown. Oh, wow. Oh,

wow. Oh, wow. So now, now there was a lot of, there was a lot of discussion about it. Cause it was like, yeah,

but they're only talking about like a, you know, small number of lists, a small list of elements that you're, you're sorting through. And even as I was reading through, I'm like, man,

am I missing something here? Cause like, it seems like the, the, the supposed change seemed kind of trivial um and you know I was like okay maybe I'm just misunderstanding this because I was I woke up super early uh that morning when I was reading it but um yeah I'll include a link to I'm gonna find it here in the background I just found it dude um hold on I'm getting ready to drop it here if I can get this link to it. I'm going to find it here in the background. I just found it, dude. Hold on. I'm getting ready to drop it here. If I can get this thing. Here it is.

Boom. I think that's what you're talking about. The Google finds faster sorting algorithm. It's weird that it's now called Google because it wasn't. Let me look through this article and see if it's the same. Okay. Yes. This, this is the,

the article that it links to nature on nature.com is ultimately the article that I was reading through. Okay. Um, and again, like this was ridiculously early in the morning as I was reading it. And I was like, man, I,

I, I must be missing something, but I'll, you know, you have your own, but you know, read it for yourself and figure it and see but like i said in the reddit that you shared in that in that thread there were people discussing like okay yeah but you know this isn't going to replace the need for merge sort and other

sort algorithms you know this is novel it's unique it's interesting sure and also super cool that you know an ai found this but apparently it's only for some sorting lists of size three four or five right see like very limited but i didn't even know that was the thing right so yeah like i said it was small small list sorry i didn't mean to interrupt. No, no, you're good. That's the thing that's interesting, right? So maybe its usefulness is sort of limited here, but the fact that AI is generating something like this in the first place is sort of the story, right?

That's pretty cool. Yeah, I'm here for it. It's great. Yeah, yeah. I mean, there have been other things, about like where um what was i think we talked about this too right where that the i think it was the ceo maybe from open ai that's responsible for chat gpt had a um uh what do you call it where you're in front of congress and um you know they were asking all kinds of questions and he was asking for legislation like he was asking for regulation of that that field

in that market so it's kind of like when have you ever i think we've might have said this comment before like when have you ever heard anyone asked to be regulated you know and and so i don't know right now i just feel like the whole topic of ai a super fascinating but also there's like you know it's real easy to like fall into a rabbit hole of like everything that you're reading is like a scare tactic yeah totally oh it's coming after coming after jobs you know or whatever you know it's like reminds me of an episode of south park i mean it's it's coming after coming after jobs, you know, or whatever, you know, it's like reminds me of an episode of South Park. I mean, it's all the media, right? Everything is a scare tactic or everything's sensationalized to the point that it's just trying to shift people in one direction or the other, which is frustrating because it it takes away from the usefulness and the and the and the coolness of what's out there. Oh, hey, by the way, Jay-Z, I think you dropped something up in our news section

that is probably worth mentioning before we go any further. Yeah, I totally forgot to mention earlier. I'm going to be speaking at the Orlando Google Developers Meetup on June 20th. So if you're in there, you should stop on by. We'll be talking about Scaffold. We send up a Kubernetes cluster

showing you what it's like to work locally and then pushing it on to production. So it should be a good time. Come out and give me a kick in the shins if you can. Good luck. Very cool. I'm kicking the shins if you can. Good luck. Very cool. I'm coming. I'm coming for you.

Yeah, I might have to. I may fly down there. Yeah, I haven't kicked anybody in the shins in a while. It's going to happen now. Yeah, it's going to happen. All right, so the next topic, again, I was just looking through the SD times, and this came up, and I don't know if we've talked about AWS glue before. We might've mentioned it. Maybe not. I don't know. So if, if you work with a lot

of data, we, the three of us happened to, and we have for a long time, right? Like, I mean, I think since we met each other, we've all been working with, with fairly large sets of data. And so the need to join that data and make sense out of that data in some sort of fashion has always been a thing, right? And usually that involves ETL processing, right? Whether you're doing something like, well, I can't even think of what it's called anymore. What's the ETL in SQL Server? Oh, man. How do we not know this anymore?

It used to be a DTS package. It's called slink SS SS SSI package. S S S S S S SQL server. No, no. S S I S packages or something like, Oh man, that's horrible.

Okay. So we've lost it all. We're old. So, you know, whether you're doing ETL that way or whether you would write your own things, I want to say even Kubernetes. I had it right. SSIS package. Sweet. There it is.

I was right. Hey, nice job. So people are probably familiar with that. Even FluentD is a thing that is used for moving messages around. I think sort of the Kubernetes type way, the cloud computing type way. There's tons of ways that people have done ETL over time. Well, I've got a link in here. It's aws.amazon.com slash glue, as in Elmer's glue. And if you go look at that, the promise of this thing is pretty cool. It's basically, you have the ability to set up these ETL methods, either using drag and drop, you can write code, you can connect it using notebooks. Like there's all kinds of ways to do this, but it allows you to join disparate sources of data and bring them together.

So they have a graphic on this page to where they show some of these sources. Amazon S3, Amazon DynamoDB, Amazon RDS. Imagine that. They have a lot of Amazon services. Databases running on Amazon EC2. Other databases. Software as a service. I think they'd even mentioned things like flat files, whatever. There's all kinds of things that you could hook

up to this and then put them together using this interface. So instead of writing ETL processes in SSIS packages or whatever, you can do it up here. And you can do it at scale without having to set up all your own infrastructure. So super duper cool, right? Like that's, I mean, that's really, that's the power of the cloud right there. So I know I'm going to get a lot of flack for my comment about, you know, jokingly referring to Flink as the as the ssis package so uh if you want to send me your rants you can hit me up on slack at joe and i'll uh i'll respond there so this was cool and and we should probably talk about flink later too just because it's it's a whole nother um cool path we could go

down yeah beast um okay so the article that actually popped up though was aws glue data quality so it was that that even took me to glue to take a look at what that was this data quality thing is actually pretty cool so what it allows you to do, and it sort of does it for you, is you set up your glue stuff, right? Like it joins all your data together and tries to give you this unified ability to query your data at scale. But then this AWS Glue has these recommendations it will give you to sort of customize your data and make sure that it's quality. And then it will also examine that and monitor it for you and let you know when the quality of it seems to be going down. So it has all these custom metrics and learning things that it's doing to make sure

that you're getting as good a data as you want, right? As much as you're willing to tolerate in some sort of threshold. And I'm just like, man, that's, I mean, when you think about all the ETL type stuff that we've done over the years and, and the amount of code and effort you put into making these things solid and make sure you're not getting trash data and all that, like, isn't it amazing that some groups of people sat back and said, this is a problem that everybody's been solving for years and years and years, right? Like decades. And now on top of that, we want to make sure that you know when the quality of your data is fluctuating. It's just, it's amazing. Yeah. I mean, this whole topic sounds rather sticky. Right? It does. Elmer's like even.

But, you know, all joking aside though, like it does kind of make you stay on that platform. you've got tools like that that are providing the data quality metrics. Yeah, and don't have analog. So there really is a stickiness about it. There totally is. I mean, these two things right here are the type of tools that will give you vendor lock-in. If you were to say, hey, AWS is the cloud I want to start with, and you start building things on top of this, it's going to be really hard for you to ever decide

to want to turn around and go to Azure or Google Cloud or wherever else, right? And that's why they make stuff like this, because they know they've got you. Right then, they've got you. Yeah, for real. So real. So very cool. So those two things came up and then.

All right. So Jay-Z had had mentioned his use of GPT, you know, multiple times in in previous episodes, and they were all very cool. And I hadn't taken I hadn't taken the time yet to actually dive into it. Um, I think basically because I was trying to cheat the signup process. So a funny little backstory here. Uh, when you, when you go to get a GPT account, you have to give it an email. Well, I've always loved being the guy that didn't give my real email, right? Like I would, I would try and get some mailinator email address so that I could get a thing and they don't actually have my information.

Well, apparently they're smarter than I am and they wouldn't let me sign up with a mailinator account, but they wouldn't tell me that that was the reason it was breaking. So I eventually had to put in my real email account. It ended up working. So then I got in there, right? So I tried. I tried to fight it multiple times. You also had to give a phone number too. Fair call.

I did have to give a phone number and that really bugged me too. And I started looking up how, yeah, I wanted to give a fake phone number too. Cause I hate giving up my, my personal information. That's text you immediately. That's the one man.

You're like, okay, do I really want to give an AI my phone number? Like, right. Yeah. All the, of all the ones like that's the one that bugged me the most. Yeah, I didn't like it.

So I seriously, the reason I had not signed up months ago was for those two reasons. I did not want to give my email and I did not want to give my phone number. And at any rate, I did. Just, hey, for this podcast, right? Like, for the betterment of our, of I gave up my personal information. So with all that backstory aside, I had mentioned this baseball app, right? Like, so real quick summary, uh, you know, I got thrust into coaching my kids' baseball team and setting the lineups was an absolute real pain.

Like figuring out which kids to bench, where to put where, all that kind of stuff, right? It was an absolute pain. I hated doing it. So the first thing I did, first thing, I didn't even try out ChatGPT any other way. I just said, hey, make, I forget exactly what my wording was but it was very english it was something along the lines of hey i need an application written in i want to say i started in python just for kicks written in python that will set rosters per inning uh given you know a list of players and i'll be doggone if that thing didn't understand what a baseball game was, already knew how many players were on the field. And I forget how it started, but it gave me a very basic application in Python that looked like a good skeleton for what I'd asked.

Right. And then to what what Jay-Z had said in the past that was mind blowing to me is after it gave me that, I was like, okay, all right. Hey, could you make it so that I can, one of the things I said was, hey, can you make it so that I can rank players per position? And it said, okay, let me see if I could do that. And then, and then it spits out some other stuff and it actually put like it initially, it was just like what you'd think if you started out a program, right? Like you're not going to do a bunch of OO type stuff. You're just going to write something that works. And then when it saw what I asked, it knew it needed to start storing some state with the players. And so it created me a player object or a player class. And then it put a

ranking per position on that thing. And I was like, wow, this is impressive. Now here's the part that was even more mind boggling to me. And this is where I see that you as a developer can get a ton of use out of this for this very reason. After I got it done that way, I was really just trying to screw with it. And I was like, hey, you know what? Can you convert that to TypeScript? I'll be doggone, man. Like it turned that whole thing into beautiful TypeScript.

Like put in the classes, the interfaces, all the stuff there. And it was just, I was, I was sort of mind blown. Well, I won't take you through every single thing that I did, right? Like it bore you. If you weren't watching it, if you saw it live, you'd probably be like mind blown. But let's just say I went through, I don't know, 10, 15 more iterations of this, like just refining it. Because as I got more into it and it showed me more, it's just like you do as you program. You're like, oh, man, I need this now, too. Right. And so so you'll tell it, hey, oh, man, I messed up. Hey, you can't bench the same player two innings in a row and it would understand it and turn it back and then it would

keep a list of players that had benched the previous inning and then wouldn't do it the next right so it kept doing all this stuff and by the end of it i seriously was like slack jawed like this is this is unreal was the code perfect no um it spit it out like and basically think think you just had one you know run.py or or index.js right like that's what it gives you so obviously you're not going to take that and use it as is but man i'm telling you for a starting ground on something absolutely unreal and then and i'll say these last couple of things, I'll let you guys chime in here. Then I was like, you know what? Hey, I want to be able to load this thing later. Right? Like I said, something along those lines. And so it suggested, Hey, well,

we can write this thing out to a JSON file. right? And so it gave code to actually store it to a JSON file. And then it also wrote the code to where when you run the program, it would load up that file if it was there and bring everything back into memory. And I said, hey, well, what kind of database might I use? And it actually brought back a list of popular databases, MongoDB, Postgres, MySQL. And then I said something along the lines of, well, which one's best? It goes through and it's like, well, there's good reasons to use this one and this one and this one. You really need to look at your overall use case and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right? It depends. Yeah. Yeah. It was an, it depends answer, which was like amazing.

But I think after the mind blown parts and the fact that it actually understood my plain English questions, right? It understood the game of baseball enough to do what I wanted. It understood my questions enough to keep forming this thing to a point where I got it to a pretty decent state. What I loved the most was at the end, I said, hey, what are some other suggestions to make this better? I swear, I think that's what I asked. And it came back with a beautiful set of things like, hey, you'd probably want to consider real storage.

You'd probably want to consider logins. You'd probably want to consider security. You probably want to consider this, this, this. It's the kind of checklist that honestly most developers should start with when they're doing an application. And the fact that I asked at the end, like, hey, what are some good practices? And it gave me some legit valid ones that even though this model is, what, two years old at this point, they are absolutely what you should be doing today. So I say all that for everybody listening, if you have not set up a chat GPT account, you need to do it just to walk through this and see what it gives you. Because what I said that I think developers just, they could use daily.

That is just amazing. Is this whole thing of, uh, let's say that you go find some code on the internet that is done in C sharp, but you want it in Kotlin, you know, you could actually be like, Hey, chat GPT, can you show this to me in Kotlin form? And it will do a really good job for you translating. I mean, I know a lot of database people that take a sql statement and say hey turn this into the equivalent java code and it'll do it that's unreal you can tell the version too like uh this is the old version of kauf of colin let's go with uh you know this but in 1.2.7 it's unreal dude like like truly unreal yeah that's. We're glad to hear it. It went cool. And like next step is like writing JIRAs, right? Can you imagine a day when you like,

you can kind of interrogate your JIRA after you get it. So first off, like you estimate it. Now I'm going to ask a couple of questions and then maybe you'll revise that estimate. So good. So I was trying, I was trying to confirm in the background here and I think I messed up my, I might need to clear some cookies or something to see it now.

Because my suspicion was, as we were talking, I was like, you know, I bet you, because one of the options is when you create your account, you can do like, you know, that, that folder trick we've talked about, or the filtering trick we've talked about with Google, where you can do like the plus sign, you know? So I abused that. I don't know if you guys do, but if you didn't want to do that, the other options that they give you are to continue with your Google account or your Microsoft account or Apple.

And it got, I got the thing. I'm like, Hey, wait a minute. Apple has the hide my email feature. I wonder if you do that, then what does it prompt you with next? And I got part of the way through it, and it wasn't prompting me for the phone number.

And then I'm like, oh, wait a minute. Let me check something. And now I can't get back to it. So I'm not sure. I'm messed up. I mean, if you're as paranoid as me and outlaw, there are services out there to where like, you can seriously like legit, you can pay to borrow a phone number for like a couple minutes, get a text message, you know, get whatever the code is

and then go plop it in somewhere. Like there are services out there that can do that. And I just, I wasn't feeling that paranoid at the moment it was like man i really just want to get this thing working so that i can try it out um i mean i haven't answered my phone in years anyway you know what that's a true story anytime i've ever called him i get called back later so yeah oh i thought i'm silent i think Yeah. Oh, I think the reason why is because it Apple on their end had already associated with it and that's why it never gave me the option again. Ah, okay.

I think so. It probably linked it up and they probably also provided your phone number of chat. GPT required it is my guess. Yeah, they're buddies. Well, I don't know because when you,

you get to, you get to, you get to, Apple's thing about sign in with Apple says at first sign in apps and websites can ask only for your name and email address to set up an account for you. So phone number not included. And that was part of what got me curious about like, ooh, I wonder if I can do this with an apple account i hide my email you know feature with the apple account like how

that would work i'll experiment with it more later but you know i don't want to hold us up for that that that would be good to know um one other thing worth mentioning uh we saw an email about this and while you're looking for that email, can I say something? Yeah, please. While we're still on the topic of chat GPT. So,

you know, there's an official chat GPT app. Did you know that for phone? I've heard. Yeah, I did not know that. Yeah. Is it for Android too or just Apple?

You know, that's a good question. When you go to OpenAI.com, it says download on the App Store. And I don't know if it was just being smart. Well, no, because the link is specific to Apple. Yeah, it's just Apple. But yeah, so take that, Google. No, but yeah, it's available for the iPhone and the iPad, um,

four and a half out of five stars out of 9,300 ratings. So, so that, that leads into, and I can't find it. I'll, I'll have to go back and find this thing, but it leads into what the note of this was chat GPT.

You need to be careful and make sure you're actually using the real chat GPT because you could be using an app that is basically a front for chat GPT and people are mining your data, right? So any personal stuff that you're feeding into this thing, it could be, I mean, think of a man in the middle attack. That's more or less what they're getting at. I'll have to find the thing, but you know, like if you're going to go download an app on your phone, that's chat GPT app. You need to make sure that it's actually from, you know, what is it? Open AI. Open AI.com.

Yeah. Open AI.com. So be careful, right? Like, especially as you start using this thing, you're going to feel more excited and you're going to feed it more and more stuff. And you don't want to feed it to a third party that is doing things with your data that you have no idea about and accidentally pasting something in that is private, personal,

whatever. So first of all, can we, like you shouldn't even be given, even if it is the official chat GPT thing, don't give it personal stuff. Like you already don't know what else might be used for it. I don't give it personal stuff. Like agreed. You already don't know what else might be used for it.

Because if you give that thing, you don't know how it might be later used in a future model. And all of a sudden somebody asks for something in a creative way. And Oh, I now have everything I ever wanted to know about Alan. Yes, totally. I completely agree.

Like I, I mean, outlaw and I, and I think even Jay-Z, we felt this way forever about like even social media, right? Like, I don't know. You should be selective about what you give it, but especially with something like this, that you have no idea what it's doing behind the scenes, how it's using the data by all means, try and milk it to get all the information you can but give as little of your personal stuff as you can to it right social media media is only for sharing what you're about to eat

and that's it if you're using it for anything else you're doing it wrong and even then that's sharing too much information because especially if that picture includes any kind of gps data in it but also like if it sees it if everyone sees a trend of the things you eat and the things you don't eat, you know, so yeah, don't share it all the time. He's more paranoid than I am, right?

Like if people know that you eat hot dogs every night at six o'clock, then they're going to know when you're home and when you're not. Are there, are, are, I'm going to assume Alan is a hard no on this question, but Jay-Z might be. Are either of you a fan of Parks and Recreation?

Yes. I've never seen it. Okay. So do you remember the episode where like Ron Swanson was, he discovered that his information was out there on the internet and he was going around like tearing everything up and like he would show you a picture of his kid and then immediately tear it up because he didn't want anyone else to be able to see the picture and yeah you know he there was a random photo of him eating some like uh saw beating some food eating challenge at the local restaurant and

just had a polaroid picture of him and above it, it said man. And he's like, that's already too much information. And he hangs it down off the board. That's outlaw. No, no, no, no, no. That that's paranoid. I'm just normal. That was extreme. I'm not Ron Swanson.

Extreme is my, is where I was going with that. That was so funny. You got to give it, you got to give it a fake info that doesn't take your feet your hiding info i i think zoom busted him out loud okay i don't know why yeah okay for me so so you know background for everybody else we just lost our hearing um because jay-z's game got super high there from zoom it was very loudly yes um so yeah man i gotta say so jay-z talked me into going and and trying this thing out and and i really do want to make a youtube video after i after i did this i was seriously sort of mind blown um again did it do what i what I would call what everybody's deeming the end of a developer is no,

like, I don't think so. And, and I don't know what the generative code would be like, if you were looking at existing code base, right? Like, like when the three of us are writing code, there's, I mean, we had discussions today with somebody about this. He's like, man, should I put a domain model here or should I put it in another project or should I create something new? Like, those are all type things that require some decisions to be made. And I don't know that asking something, I mean, now if you asked something very targeted and said, hey, please create me a domain model in this project over here. Maybe do it. Right. But is it going to create intelligent decisions for, for an application like that off the top? I don't know, especially integrating into a new one. The answer is currently no. Like I forget where, where this came up, but I don't remember if I read it or it was a conversation or something, but you know, somebody basically equated to

chat GPT and similar things in their current form is just being smart copy and paste generators. Sort of really all they are. They're taking like known information that they've, they've used before you ask it some kind of question. And it's like, Oh, uh, based off of this question, I can, you know, copy paste. Here's the thing. It knows nothing of context, domain models. It doesn't know anything like that. You know, so in current form, I would say no. Right. And to what you're saying, I mean, more or less, I mean, if you break down what we do on a daily basis is we take a problem and we try and

break it down into algorithms that we know, right. Whether it's for loops or, or, you know, some sort of branching logic or whatever. And that's what I watched it do, right? Like when I said, Hey, can I score, can I rank my players per position? Right. And it knew what I was saying. It said, Hey, I want to add an attribute to a player, right? And I want each position to have a score that I put on it. And so it knew that there's a data structure that it had to slot in there, right? So it's the same thing that we do as developers, but it is a little bit refreshing to be able to ask a computer that way in an English manner and have it do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. And then you can go in and massage it and chop it all up and put it into a format that makes sense.

Right. I'm going to try to find, I'm pretty sure that it was something that I read where it was basically making the argument of, you know, the current form of chat GPT and similar things just being a smart, a smart. Yeah, yeah,

exactly. That it had to know it's not creating something from scratch necessary. It's, it's based off of previous information that it got somewhere and based off of some context clues that you gave it. It was like, Oh, I think that thing applies here.

I'm going to like regurgitate what i saw there yep but you know so that's that's what that's where i was coming from with it yeah it's you're taking me to see stories it's like hey this person uh stanford professor asked the computer how it would take over the world and it gave a plan it's like look it didn't think about it it didn't have that in his back pocket sitting on it. What happened is a generated text that was like probabilistically, you know, something, something of human might say back to it when asked the same question. Yeah.

Yeah. And, and here's another good use case for it. And I mean, Jay Z shared the other day is if you, if you have something like, I don't know, say you're getting ready to use a new library, say you're getting ready to use Kafka for the first time and you want to know how you can write a message to Kafka. You can be like, hey, give me an application written in language of choice that will create a producer into Kafka. And I guarantee you, you're going to arrive at something way faster than if you wouldn't looked up all the documentation for a producer for hooking into Kafka in your language

of choice, right? Like it's going to take you 20 minutes just to find the right articles. And then it's going to take you another two hours to get something working as opposed to, Hey, give me something. It'll do this and it'll spit it out. And now you have something you can start playing with. Okay. I found, I found the article that I was talking about. Coincidentally, it was something we were already going to discuss. So I gave you the tease. So what I'm going to say now is if you haven't already left us a review, head to www.codingblocks.net slash review,

and you can find some helpful links there to leave us a review. We greatly appreciate it. They mean a lot to us. Now, the the article how about that's real nice man that's real good so the article was um you know we were talking about like different strikes and everything that are happening i don't know if you guys read about this or heard about this but there's a moderator strike happening for Stack Exchange in all of the Stack Exchange network. Oh, no.

Right? And in that, I have a link here in the show notes for it to the specific post on meta.stackexchange.com where it was being discussed. But in that article, one of the problems they were talking about discussing is the problem with AI-generated content. And there was a statement in here that I read where they're referencing another moderator whose username I'm going to butcher because usernames are weird in Stack Overflow. So to reference Stack Overflow moderator, Maka Vitti, AI chatbots are like parrots. ChatGPT, for example, doesn't understand the responses it gives you.

It simply associates a given prompt with information it has access to and regurgitates plausible sounding sentences. And that's what I was referencing a moment ago when you were talking about chat GPT, understanding the context and everything. And it was like, no, no, no, no. It has no knowledge of any of that. And in fact, they say content posted without innate. Well, never mind. I won't get into that. That was more specific.

But yeah. So if you want to shift now to the stacker flow thing. Yeah, right? But so, yeah. It's crazy how well it works. And even for everything you said, I totally agree with that. I 100% believe you. I agree with that.

Everything I've read lines up with that. And then the way I use it, and I see the answers, and it's just crazy. I just ask it like, hey, Gradle's known for being a faster build solution than maven what did it do to get that performance and gave me a list of six bullet points that i would have to go run down and check on and read ultimately but it was pretty dang good like this lines up with the things i've heard about and it's just crazy that it's so good at answers like why or things that are creative or being able to like match two things together like baseball and programming and like ways that like work out surprisingly well it feels like alien technology honestly because it's like based on a

extreme wealth of information that you know so i mean, you can almost view, in my mind, you can almost view chat GPT and similar things as like the next evolution of a Google, right? I was going to say the same thing. When Google hit the market, it was game changer for how we did search. Right. But now, now instead of searching for things and trying to go through it, now we just ask a question to something and it's already done all the searching and already has those indexes built into its model. And it spits out the answer for us. And we can use that information the same as we did with, with Google. Like any answer you got from Google wasn't necessarily like verbatim,

exactly what you needed. Click download and then run. No, you know, you often had to tweak it to meet whatever your domain model, your specific needs, your specific requirements were. The same thing is happening with chat GBT responses.

So I was going to say something very similar, man. So the coding stuff that we're talking about as developers is truly amazing, right? Like straight up awesome can save you hours a day. Like I don't even think I'm exaggerating here. If especially if it's something new that you've never broken into before, like I said, if you're trying to be, if this is the first time you've done a Kafka producer, if you're trying to figure out how to do a Mongo update, right? Like just stupid little things that will save you from clicking on sites like Baodong will save you tons and tons and tons of time.

But what I found amazing and refreshing is you could ask chat GPT a question about something you were truly interested in. And instead of getting, you know, two or three pages of just complete hot trash garbage of Amazon links and everything else, you can actually get a real answer. It's like, oh, okay. Like I probably could have pieced that together if I'd gone and read 10 different articles from various different authors, but it did a pretty good job of sort of condensing that down into the message that I was looking for. Here's the thing, though, because what you started off with made me think about something when you were talking about you're you could be with this thing i don't think i don't think mankind has seen just how efficient we can be with this thing yet agreed because it's so new in its infancy that so many companies have restrictions against letting their employees

use it that because of that and because of fears of like what might get leaked out that, you know, at the corporate level, they're not using it. So they're not iterating fast yet. And I, you know, we heard rumors about like on-prem versions, like, you know, if something like that happened, then, you know, maybe then we can iterate faster, you know, as, as a civilization. Right. But I don't think we've seen our potential yet, let alone its potential. Agreed. And I don't know how, I mean, so,

so Jay-Z's used it more than them, probably either of us. Like, I mean, what are your thoughts? Like we we've talked about the dangers and like i want it everywhere i want it embedded in my tools i want it in windows i want it in my terminal we'll talk about that in a minute i like pretty much everywhere i can like i want an app on my phone so if i'm driving i can just like talk about it you know how like back in the early days of the internet like when wikipedia was still kind of new you might go down a rabbit hole like what's the first book to talk about dragons and next thing you know you're reading about dragons till three in the morning i'll be able to do it on drive and just kind of have a conversation or say like hey what's the first book about dragons like what did that you know use it for and you know it's like what it's telling you may not be true but it can still be interesting it can still you know spark your uh

your imagination you imagine be like a long-haul trucker or something and uh you spend six hours driving from i don't know nashville to i don't know miami or that's not six hours but anyway i was gonna say how fast you got you're going right it's pretty fast you end up doing a long drive and the whole time you're talking about uh books that feature dragons and what are the best ones that you haven't read yet and uh what would be a new story that featured robots and dragons and you're just like just weird stuff that embraces the things that it's good at so like i said uh jay-z you know it sounds like you need the new iphone 14 because there is such an app um it exists only for the iphone and the ipad so, so welcome. I do have two more additional thoughts before we move away from the chat GP chat, chat GPT thing. Yeah. Easy for you to say. Yeah. Right. Um,

so what you said, Jay-Z is really important. What it tells you may not be the truth, right? And that's, that's really important to note. And it's not that it's trying to lie to you. It's just that based off its model that it created, it's the most truthful or accurate factual thing. It thinks it found based off what you asked. Right. So that's dangerous. Um, and then two, as a coder, you have to be careful, right? Like when you're talking about just, Hey, give me an algorithm to tell me how to create

a baseball game app for making rotations. There's nothing all that crazy in there, right? Like when you're talking about just, Hey, give me an algorithm to tell me how to create a baseball game app for making rotations. There's nothing all that crazy in there, right? If you ask it to write you code to secure your application, blindly trusting, whatever it says may not be the right thing, especially considering this model's two years old, right? And, and encryption algorithms change, get broken. All kinds of stuff happens relatively quickly, especially in the security space. So I guess a word of caution here is be careful exactly what you're trying to grab from it. And, you know, be selective, I guess, is the key here. Well, not to put words in your mouth, Jay-Z, but I believe the way you previously referred to this was

it is confidently wrong. It can be confidently wrong. Yes. Yeah, I wouldn't use the word confidently, though, because that implies that it's like you know, those were your words. I'm taking that back now. It could be convincingly wrong. It can sound

you know, it can sound confident yeah i mean that's i mean it's dangerous right like i guess i guess what i'm saying is if you found out you have cancer and you go ask it how to cure it and it gives you an answer and it's like you know eat 20 20 D3 vitamins a day and you'll be good in a week. I don't know that I'd take that as the gospel, right? Like you might get a second opinion is what I'm saying. I mean, it does raise the question though, like how – okay. So OpenAI has – you could almost make the argument that they have an obligation to society, since they're putting this out there to society,information, unquote, thing that is now talked about more commonly than ever before that I recall, assuming that it was to use that, then to your point about take 20D3 vitamins and you'll be fine, Like, you know, it could, it could start putting

that kind of information out there and it would seem convincingly or confidently, however you choose, whatever C word you choose to, you know, it could, it could seem correct. And, you know, you, you can't trust it blindly to your previous point. And you can't, but, but, oh man, it's such a slippery slope, right? Like the disinformation thing, like depending on how far you want to go down that hole, who, who owns the correct information. And, and that's not to say if you didn't go to, let's say you got some sort of diagnosis for cancer, right? You can go to five different doctors and you might be told five different things that you should do.

Who's right and who's wrong. Who's who's going off their experience of what they've seen and who's going off books that they've read or articles. Like I'm not, I wasn't even thinking that way. I mean, it's so hard. Think of it. Think of it in this regard. Let's say that, you know, evil Michael comes along coincidentally,

coincidentally, his name is also outlaw. Um, and, and he decides, Hey, you know what? I'm going to start seeding the internet with something that's going to pay me dividends in a few years. I'm gonna wait for the next model, but it's going to pay dividends. So we've all seen these things where like you know all these backlinks that you can get like sites that'll post content or you can you know uh without even caring what it is right like just let you post whatever article you want right like wing farms so evil michael Evil Michael, maybe his name should be like the law. Evil Michael the law, he decides to start in 2023 blasting out bad information on how to do security, right? Like a bad way to implement security and has all the right words in there, right. Specific for,

you know, a model to capture on. And if these models are simply just spidering the internet as, as their source, right. Then the hope being that, Hey, in two years or whenever the next model gets trained,

now I can ask it questions and see like, Hey, did my, uh, did, did my, uh, did, did my seeds, are they visible? Right. And maybe I have to iterate on it again, but eventually I could start putting out enough bad information and seeding it out there through these link farms to where somebody might not, you know, uh, do their research and they might just trust blindly whatever they get.

And now all of a sudden, eventually the next heartbleed comes out because someone copy and pasted the wrong piece of data, the wrong implementation, right? So that's why I say they have an obligation. It's almost like you could make an argument that, hey, if you're going to put out this thing that's going to just answer anything, then you kind of owe it to society to verify that you're not feeding it with bad information. How do you verify that much data? I know.

I had an argument with regulations and stuff and the various laws protecting internet companies or not protecting either one i think we're going to see a long period of like kind of laws and stuff catching up to it i will say if you ever ask it for like legal advice or medical advice or anything dangerous like it shuts it down real quick but uh it also is uh you know there's things ways you can work around it and stuff of course too but um some of the stuff like sensitive you know so like controversial issues like it not this doesn't necessarily pick a side but just by um curbing and like refusing to answer some questions and not refusing to answer others like you can kind of see the hand at work behind it you know well that's why that's why i went with a technology type of uh scenario that you, you get out of like medical or legal type of ethics and everything.

And instead you're going, but also to, to your point, uh, man, I, this is what I get for being away for so long. So there was another,

uh, one that I was reading and man, this one's been weeks. So I definitely, I don't have trouble finding this one, but it was talking about how, um, there's how, um, there's already, uh, this thing like globally, right.

Where English has over the decades become more and more of a predominant force around the globe, right? Like it's, it's more becoming the common denominator, like, like how to communicate with people around the globe. Or maybe you don't agree with that, and that's why you two are being so quiet. Listening, listening. For other countries, for other cultures, their concern is that they're losing their culture by going to an English language and it becoming their kid's first language. just from the past few days, whereas like he was having trouble, you know, communicating with his kids because his, his, his first language is Chinese or Mandarin and his kids is English. And they don't want to teach him English. Cause they're like,

no dad, you're silly. You're old. And he, and, and so he's struggling to like, try to keep up with them. Right.

But that's their primary language. So, you know, for some cultures, like they're, the concern is that Right. But that's their primary language. So, you know, for some cultures, like they're, the concern is that they're losing their culture because like, take that, that,

you know, uh, example is like, you know, now their kids aren't learning that. And things like chat GPT are only escalating that because its responses are English based responses, you know,

English answers, English responses. You know, English answers, English responses. Yeah, you're totally right. I think there's a whole... There was kind of a lot of talk around ethics and AI and stuff in the last couple years, but I think we obviously can see that we need a lot more

discussion around that and need to figure out how to solve all these problems. And it's just kind of like what people were saying with Sam Altman talking to Congress and stuff like, I think that, you know, we don't necessarily, I don't know whether we need to slow down or not, but there are a lot of things to think about.

And I think it's going to take us a long time to figure them out. Even the English, you know, there's even like a, you can make an argument that even the internet as a whole has a bias towards English because look at the domain names all right yeah so yeah it's true or at least the english alphabet yeah an english alphabet that works conveniently for some languages but not for all yeah totally and the language influences the culture the way you talk the things that are considered polite

or not polite or the way you ask questions. Everything has a huge influence on real things. It's crazy. Okay, so we promised that we would stop talking about ChatGPT eventually. Okay, so I'm going to segue to this because the other day I was on a Zoom call, and I told a joke, and nobody laughed. And it was really depressing because i'm not even remotely funny oh you're talking oh that was a joke my bad i thought you were talking about never mind thank you uh mike rg but wow joe that hurt

i was on mute. That's awesome. So I got a fun topic. So Reddit had a free API for many, many years. I don't know how long Reddit's been around, but people have made all sorts of tools that either help them moderate by kind of highlighting important things or getting rid of spam, stuff like that, or also just flat out new clients. So you can go download the Apollo client or there's a sync client that offer way better experiences than the the the website or reddit's official apps and these

have been around for forever uh and i didn't finish typing notes here well so i'll answer your question you you're curious like how old is Reddit? Yep. Reddit is 17 years old. Wow. For real. And this month, it will have its 18th birthday. And to put that into context, guess who turned 18 in February? And I know you're thinking me because I look at it. I looked apart.

I don't know. I don't know. YouTube. Wow. YouTube. Geez. Yeah. Remember the days of YouTube before it was owned by Google? Yeah. 2005, February of 2005, YouTube was started. June of 2005, Reddit was started. Wow, man. Oh, hey, you know, I got, I got one more aside for you just for me.

Uh, so, you know, like a meta Facebook's been laying off, like, you know, 10,000 developers at a time. And like,

you know, I went and looked up like how many developers like Facebook had, because I'm just telling employees, because that seems like a lot of, a lot of people, right? Uh, so Facebook employees at peak,

you want to guess? A hundred thousand. I was, I was going to say 300 000 but that's wow too high almost 90 000 90 almost 90 000 okay so um so keep that in mind so we talked about you know how like uh you know myspace if people don't really talk about so much anymore but for a while there there was like a you know who's gonna win like microsoft or microsoft my there was like a, you know, who's going to win like Microsoft or Microsoft MySpace or Facebook? And, you know, after Facebook was clearly the winner, like a lot of people kind of made jokes about, you know, MySpace and whatnot. And kind of we saw today we kind of think of MySpace as being like kind of a loser, right? At least in that battle.

How many employees do you think MySpace had at peak? A hundred. I was going to say 80. Yeah, let's see here. How many employees do you think MySpace had at peak? 100. I was going to say 80. Yeah, let's see here. At peak, the biggest, 1,600. Okay, more than I would have thought, but yeah. Yeah, more than I would have thought. That was at their biggest.

I'm not sure which year it was, but yeah. Back in the day they were making like a billion dollars with a thousand employees uh not too shabby so who was the real winner i don't know i feel like if everybody who worked in my space walked away a multi-millionaire uh if not billionaire then uh you know who really won the war see i the reason why i uh i i said the,000 was because when you asked the question, it immediately made me think of IBM because IBM had like a ridiculous number of employees. They peaked at 434,000 in 2012. Wow.

And when I think of Facebook, I mean mean their market capitalization is way above ibm and so i was like well let's see how many i guess they're like at least one ibm dude ibm still got two well based off uh december 2022 numbers you want to take a stab? $288. Oh, you looked it up. That's no fair. Where do you think? $288. Dog, got it. Oh, I'm really good. Hey, can you do the feud questions from now on?

I'm really good. Right? No doubt, man. Yeah. I mean, I just don't see IBM being that big anymore, but apparently, yeah. It takes quite a few people to run a services organization. Amazon has 1.5

million employees. Does that include office and warehouse? Yeah. That makes a lot of sense because I mean, think about all of the drivers that they have delivering packages. Everybody who's packing those packages.

Yeah, I can see that. Yeah, that's a one for five. It's so crazy. Walmart has two million. They're the biggest employer in the U.S. China Railway was the second biggest employer in the world, by the way. It's with two million. So close to Walmart.

Well, Walmart's not the largest employer in the U.S. No? Yeah, definitely. Oh, interesting. I think the Department of Defense is technically, in the U.S., largest employer. Wow. Prove me wrong. No, I believe you.

No. I think the article I looked at was like Fortune 500 companies or something, so I think it excluded government. Oh. Wow. Global number of employees by Walmart is 2.3 million. That's a lot. Yeah. So back to Reddit.

Sorry. So Reddit has long had a free API. And coming up, I think June 12th and 13th, is that right? They're about to basically have a strike. Similar to the strike that Alon mentioned with the moderators, except in this case it's actually the moderators of Reddit instead of StackUp

Floor. They're going dark. They're making communities private to kind of protest the changes that are being made. The changes notably being they're going to start charging. And it's not so much that they're charging, but it's the amount that they're charging. The Apollo developer, which is an interface for just a website, it's basically like an app for the whole website, is currently making $7 billion in requests per month. Which at today's prices that Reddit is going to be charging, is going to cost

them $20 million a year, which is unsustainable, so the app is done. So apps like that have been shutting down left to right, and it's a shame because some of those apps, you know, like moderator tools helped eliminate spam, but also improved accessibility, like screen readers

letting more people access the content on reddit than the official app does so a lot of these groups are going uh going dark in protests and so i thought that was kind of interesting yeah this isn't even the um the thread that i i thought you were going to be um posting to because there was another one i was reading about this um let me see i'm gonna throw you a link. It's 24 cents for a thousand API calls, which sounds like a lot,

but it goes quick. And there was this image that is on that thread that I'm going to specifically call out in another link. So there you go, boom. And if you read through that, that image walks you down down why this is a problem and why it's being protested. And part of it was not only are they wanting to kill off some of these third-party apps and make the ones that want to stay around pay a lot, the time frame in which they're being given to switch

is extremely short um i remember right it was like 30 days or less maybe even that before they had to like you know you had to decide do you want to pay or do you just want to shut down your app yeah that's really quick so i have 17 years you know i don't know when they released their api but uh it's been a while it's been a long time you remember when twitter made changes their api used to be that like creating a tweet bot was like the hello world for programming there for a few years facebook 2 used to have api so you remember when like super poke was around on facebook and like even images was a separate app you would install the images app in your facebook in order to be able to like have photo albums yep yeah and then they

locked it down to where you can only get so many feeds or whatever yeah yep so maybe it'll be much to do about nothing but maybe you know may will also i don't know i I mean, it's interesting, right? Like, this is such a tough one. Like, I get that there are apps that add useful things that maybe Reddit hasn't done, right? But like that one, I don't remember how many hits you said that one app hits a month. Seven billion requests per month. Seven billion requests. It takes a lot of infrastructure

and things to make that happen and if it weren't free do you think that that maybe they would have found a better way a more efficient way to hit their apis instead of hitting it 7 billion times you know what i mean like man it's reddit is almost a victim of their own success here. And, and now, and now they're going to be called evil for being like, yo, I mean, that's a lot of process time. That's a, I mean, if you're hitting it 7 billion times, that's just one, right? That doesn't include all the other ones out there and we have to scale to make this stuff work. So I don't know, man, it's, it's a danged. If you do danged,

if you don't type thing, that part of the complaint though, is that they're charged, they're charging a quote predatory amount that is claimed to be 10 to 20 times the cost of similar other services. Okay. Right. And so that,

that's, that's part of it. So an extreme amount and a stupid short amount of time for you to decide it's not like this was communicated and like hey you've got a year to decide right and we're gonna or else we're gonna sunset it no it's 30 days like yeah that's ridiculous your house in order and figure out what you want to do and oh by the way so if you're making seven billion calls and it's going to be 20 times the cost of something else, like, yeah. But, I mean, you brought up the Twitter thing.

So, I don't know. I mean, it's probably – that's a great analogy to what this is, right? I mean, did Twitter go away because you can't use tweet bot or, you know, tweet deck or whatever? How many of them had tweet in the name? Right. You know, so no, I mean, Twitter did just fine. Yeah. And ultimately Twitter tried to fill in those gaps that the other apps were that they had.

Right. But I mean, even to the point would. So I agree on the 30 day nobody can turn something around in 30 days that's that's too little time to get something done however though let's say that it is 10 times the cost is that company going to be happy paying two million dollars a year because that's a tenth of it right that you just went from 20 to 2 i still don't think they're going to be happy about it so yeah i don't know i don't know that's a tough situation you remember when his surah had a free tier for like 10 years a long time and then

suddenly they turned it off people got upset and abandoned to surah and it's uh i think to me it's a lesson about like giving away too much in your initial offering and because it's gonna be hard to pull it back because people get really upset about it and also a good example of how not to handle a price increase right no doubt but uh yeah some now some of the things we talked about also roll into the next topic i brought which is uh sherlocking have you all ever heard the term sherlocking oh go ahead well yeah i mean we were gonna like segue this because this was also like very similar to the Stack Overflow strike. So backing back up to that, I mean, both of these, the problem is you could almost make it an argument that in both cases, stack exchange and Reddit,

you said they're a victim of their own success, but they're also, I don't know how to phrase this, a victim of the volunteer labor that helped build them into what they are. Right. Yeah. In terms of like the moderators who are moderating both of those platforms. Because part of the complaint in the Reddit strike

is that the moderators are using tools that are now no longer going to be able to hit those APIs. So they can't use those tools anymore to filter out a lot of content. Backing up to the Stack Overflow strike, the issue there was, and not a moderator, so communication between Stack Exchange and the moderators and the community at large, as well as a history of not living up to the promises that they've made to the moderators in the past when moderators have brought up issues. And as well as, you know, because there's a private instance, you know, of Stack Overflow for teams that the moderators can be a part of and they can discuss bugs and issues and everything like that. So one of the other complaints is that, you know, the moderators are putting out like

legit things like, hey, this should be fixed or this feature should be added. And those things aren't being prioritized because at the end of the day, Stack Exchange needs to make a profit. So the complaint is that they're only focused on those things that are going to turn a profit. And meanwhile, the moderators are left holding the bag. And specific to the communication issue was that in private, in the moderator Stack Overflow for Teams instance, in the mod channels there, the moderators were being told one thing as it related to AI generated content and how to police it or moderate it. But what was publicly stated was something else. And the moderators aren't, you know, there's no way for them to tell a user, hey, I'm your content is being flagged and removed because of this thing, because that user can't see it. It's private.

Right. And so, so that was like part of the, part of the complaint. So like that, they spelled it out that, um, there's a, there's a really great write-up that describes the problem, but then there's also another, uh, mod who answers like, Hey, let me fill in some context here. And he goes by the numbers and he's like, I'm removing 10,000 posts a day that take me easily a couple hours that are AI generated. And he said, I've gotten so good at this, I can tell the AI generated content responses uh you know with high accuracy and everything so yeah talk amongst yourselves yeah i mean it's it's crazy and i think you made a

great point about kind of free labor and uh you know there's a lot of questions now about like whose data is it and you know if i put data on the internet like can companies just go and take it and use it and resell it like where does that where does that ownership end like what can i pull back how do i maintain my rights over things i want to maintain my rights over like it's what a mess man it's weird that these two strikes coincidentally came about near, you know, around the same time frame. And at their core, like you said, they're all about like, you know, their use of free labor, you know, as as you or not not being respectful of the free labor that they that they've been built on. But yet that's only like,

that's where the similarities end, right? Yeah, you know, I haven't seen anything tying the Reddit API changes to generated content, but I wouldn't be surprised. Like I get followed every day on Reddit by someone I've never heard about whose account gets banned the next day. People do all sorts of, you know,

it's generated content and like free traffic so if you were trying to sell a sprinkler it makes sense that you would put on a post about it onto reddit's about you know sprinklers and gardens and yards and house ownership and like it makes sense that you would kind of want to hook up a bot to go out there and just constantly generate content that just happens to mention your sprinkler or whatever and so maybe they've seen their traffic go up a lot maybe not maybe these are kind of challenges that we'll be seeing in you know even more and more in the next couple years or maybe it's unrelated i don't know but that wasn't a bot though that was uh well i mean i guess technically it was it was a bot that i wrote um that i was using you as my

guinea pig so i guess it's working um but i was going to pay to keep using it. So we're good. It's very nice. You can imagine like someone does that with Sprinklr and they're like, you know what? That was, I got this for Sprinklr. Why don't I just do it for every product on sale at Amazon? Or just have people generate stuff talking about it in every Reddit that seems even slightly, you know, whatever. I have it create new accounts all the time.

And yeah, I mean, woo. Like that's a problem. And if that stuff's getting fed back into the next version of gpt like oh geez i mean even amazon's being scammed though with like fake reviews oh yeah you know so so or like how many times have you seen the exact same product on amazon listed three different times or more that you know there's slight differences in the title, but the pictures are the same, you know, similar price, but yeah, you know, descriptions are, are, you know, maybe reordered differently. I mean, there's no question that this generated content is going to cause a massive problem for companies like Google, whose whole existence revolved around finding relevant content and linking to each other, right?

Like it's, I mean, you know, not going too deep into SEO type stuff, but if you get a lot of links from other stuff to your page, then all of a sudden your page looks popular, right? Especially when it's on other websites. And if it's just, if it takes half a second to generate a huge article and have it backlinked to you and it looks English written, I mean, you just game the entire internet that people use going through Google or a Bing or whatever. You know, the thing that I'm super curious,

well, one, let me correct myself that the other person on stack exchange, the moderator who was giving some context it wasn't i misspoke when i said it was 10 000 a day it was 10 to 15 000 total since chat gpt has come out he alone or she he or she alone had flagged 10 to 15 000 since what november that's right man um it's insane yeah and and um they said that they spend 40 minutes a day on moderating just chat gpt flags period right um but what i'm super curious

now i mean we've we've joked uh i know in person but i don't recall if on the show or not but that you know you could tell chat gpt code because of all the comments right i'm super curious this i don't doubt this moderator saying that like he he's he or she has gotten a keen eye for being able to tell what it is i'm super curious to know like how it is their credit, they did say, hey, I have made myself available. I would love to speak with the developers and say, this is how we can solve this problem, and nobody will reach out to me. But I would love to know how someone can, with such great confidence, you know, immediately see something and be like, that was chat GPT written.

I'm sure after you look at a thousand of them, you have a pretty good idea, right? I mean, 10,000. There are certain phrases that GPT since they use a lot, like it's important to like, I see that all the time and GPT stuff.

It's pretty funny. Well, okay. So that break, that actually raises a good question though, because I was thinking of just the code so maybe maybe this person was referring to not just the code but the comments the entire uh answer that might include you know um like english english descriptions around it not not as a comment a comment, but the, but the,

the English answer to the thing that might include code samples. So that makes more sense. Yeah. When you ask GPT for code stuff, it typically does give you like a description ahead of time and then like some notes afterwards. Yeah. So,

so maybe that's the pattern that this person's looking for then. Yeah. I hadn't, I hadn't considered that. I was only thinking of the code itself and I'm like, man, like if I remove all the comments, how, how do you know? But yeah, that, that makes a lot more sense. It's, it's, it's crazy to think that like two of our favorite resources on the internet

might be going dark for a while or, you know, in the case of stack exchange might become like unreliable with the things that might get voted up, you know, and left. So, yeah,

yeah, we may be, we may be losing a lot with all the stuff that we're gaining i'm just not realizing yet so with that yeah can you be sure locked yeah so have you ever heard the term sherlocked i have not i'm about to yeah so i've never heard before and suddenly like the last couple days i've heard it like several times in reference to several things that have been going on in the news and uh so i went back and checked to see where the term came from and it comes from an old mac os 8 app that was bundled with the operating system called sherlock and it was basically uh integrated

with the finder so it would like find stuff on your disk or find stuff on the internet woohoo right third party uh company came along and built the app called watson charged 30 bucks for it people loved it it extended upon everything that sherlock did it was just better in every way oh what do you know next wwdc uh apple releases the new version of sherlock that has all the features of watson and it's still built in. It's still free. And like overnight Watson's gone. Like no one's paying for it anymore. The company is basically washed up now. And so people have kind of latched onto this phrase.

And if you kind of like look back to the history of like WWCs and stuff, you'll see people using a little bit, but it's really kind of ramped up in particular after this WWDC, because there are a bunch of items that were released that new features and stuff that were released on phones or operating systems that basically take the place of apps that were, you know, sometimes popular. Siri. Siri. Yeah. Great example.

Yep. But in that case, though, like Apple purchased it. So, yeah. yep but in that case though like apple purchased it so yeah you can kind of make a claim that like that's not exactly the same thing but it is an example of like someone else created something that a larger company company gobbled up but at least they got paid for it i know unity has like at least five examples like just think off the top of my head like tmp pro text essentials like pro builder like their features that are things that people were selling in the Asset Store that Unity just

bought up and made free. Just kind of considered built-in. But there's also things like Splines, another package that was popular that Unity kind of took a look at and said, yeah, you know what? A lot of people are using this. We're going to build our own though in this case. We're not going to buy you out. We're going to make a competitor that's free and built-in

and is included in our documentation. So that's what sherlock means when someone says something sherlock they're basically saying uh the the provider the owner of that ecosystem did something that devalued a third-party product that was also living in that ecosystem uh and so i've got a list here uh from tech of, of the various apps. And like, I don't even have Apple, you know, I'm not involved in the ecosystem too much aside from laptop.

So, you know, like none of these like affect me at all, but it was just kind of crazy to go scrolling through the list and be like, Oh yeah, look, Hey, now they have medication tracking and here's a couple of apps that used to do

that. And now you don't need them anymore. And so I thought that was kind of interesting. I thought it was kind of an interesting topic in terms of kind of understanding, like, what your role is and what you're doing if you, like, start a new business or if, like, you're working for a company that makes, like, third-party plugins. And, you know, we talked about Reddit. So that's where I – that was the final last straw. I saw someone talking about the Apollo app being Sherlocked, and I was like, okay, let me go look this up.

But, you know, WWC is also like a prime driver of that kind of term. So just thought it was an interesting topic. Can you all think of any other examples of like other apps or anything that kind of fit that description? Visual Studio has done it for a long time. Like ReSharper has tons of features in it, right? Visual Studio, every iteration of it would include things

that ReSharper did, right? Yeah, they just tipped away at it. And Venus Code totally replaced Atom and other editors that people were paying for. Yeah. I mean, yeah, Sublime. When's the last time you heard anybody actually going hardcore after Sublime anymore, right? Yeah, I didn't pay for it. Not anymore. So it's crazy they've erased money that people were paying and they just erased it. actually going hardcore after sublime anymore right yeah i didn't pay for it not anymore so

it's crazy they've erased money that people were paying and they just erased it i mean those those don't feel as sherlocked as like what apple does because i mean this this link that you put up here like it's it's pretty shocking how many things that apple saw that became popular that of course they're keeping track of right like Apple owning the app store and everything. They know the popularity of the things that people are going after, right? So it's almost cheating for them because they can see exactly, Oh, people on Mac OS are buying this particular app a lot. That means instead of us giving, you know,

away 70% of the revenue because if i remember right the app store is still 70 30 right 70 to the developer 30 to apple they can now take 100 percent of those profits and if it's not a huge a huge lift for the developers to build it into mac os you know it's almost like a no-brainer and if it's a small competitor that's really not going to have the resources to fight it. Right. Why wouldn't you? Right. So, yeah, I mean, that's the danger always of building on somebody else's platform. Like, I don't know.

In the past, I've looked into like white labeling. So like what what Outlaw was talking about on Amazon, where you go and you search for whatever, pick your thing, right? Like a koozie or something, a cup holder for your desk or something. You'll find the same one from 10 different people and it'll have a different label on the bottom of it. That's white labeling, right? Well, the danger that everybody's always talked about with building your store, let's say you're trying to create a new storefront and you build it all completely on Amazon. If Amazon changes something, it could take your business completely under, right?

Yeah. Amazon essentials. Yeah. Yeah, totally. Yeah. I mean, that's a perfect example. You know, we used to talk about our ergo trial monitor mounts and everything, right? Buy one of those for 250 bucks and then go buy the a hundred dollar equivalent of the Amazon basics. And it's the same design. and it's the same design. It's the same mount. Amazon has gotten into lawsuits because of that because there was a designer bag that someone had created and was selling on Amazon,

and Amazon came out with an Amazon Basics version of it, and you put the two together, and you're like, this is a straight-up copy. And this was supposed to be a designer bag two together and you're like this is a straight up copy and this was supposed to be a designer bag so it's not like this was generic to where you could be like no i just it's a bag you know whatever no this was a designer bag and it was straight up clone a ripoff i mean the what's the uh thing that people have told us in the past that we should do where they could sign up for five bucks or whatever oh patreon or whatever yeah patreon apple kind of kind of hurt the podcasting space with that as well because a lot of people or they kind of stole that market from patreon

because it used to be podcasters would be like hey sign up for five dollars a month or whatever and you get access to more content well apple they introduced paid for podcasts right and you could actually have a paywall for some of your content and have the other stuff free like they they do it a lot a whole lot i don't know in the podcasting window i i i feel a little bit different about that one because in that case an argument could be made that they made it easier for the small podcaster to introduce a paywall yes that would have otherwise been complex to to create your own to roll your own which is what others were doing and so the ones who did it they had they did it at significant cost in terms of time and infrastructure, like development time and infrastructure effort to put in.

Yeah, effort to put in. So now when I kind of forgive. Yeah, yeah, I get it. I mean, it's tough, man. I don't know. Does that mean, does that mean that you shouldn't build apps on other people's ecosystems and platforms? Or does it mean that you should do it, but not rest on your laurels, right? Like, yeah, like that, you know, right. That's, that's kind of what I take away because I mean,

it doesn't matter. Like any, any part of your life, it doesn't even have to be just focused on this one specific thing of developing on somebody's, uh, someone else's ecosystem. Even if, even if you're not developing on anyone's ecosystem, there's the old, uh, adage of, uh, he who hesitates is lost. Right. is lost right if you don't if you create something one time and then never do anything on it like chances are it would have to be super niche right for it to remain a dominant force otherwise other people are going to gobble up that functionality over time or or the functionality just becomes uh you know, unneeded. I mean, here's a good example, Jay-Z. And I mean, curious your thoughts on this.

I mean, look at Evernote. That at one point in time was probably the most popular cross-platform or platform-independent like note-taking app, right? Like if you wanted to snap a picture or something and write some notes down, that was what you did. taking app right like if you wanted to snap a picture or something and write some notes down that was what you did but then came along one note on windows that was basically free right and and you could access it anywhere and then apple did the same thing with its notes and now it's like do you even know anybody that has ever note or pays for it or anything like no i stopped right i mean i noticed that you didn't say Google Keep. So, you know.

It's so bad. It's so bad. Wow. That took a dark turn. It's worse than notepad. But. I don't know that I go that far. But let's not be all gloom and doom.

Doom and gloom? gloom and doom. Doom and gloom? Gloom and doom. Oh, now you got me. I don't know. Doom and gloom. Nah, whatever. We'll never ask ChatGPT.

It'll tell us. So sometimes it goes the other way around, though. Sometimes it goes the other way around. So I swear that this was introduced like 10 years ago, but I found the oldest article I could find for it was 2016, uh, where this feature was introduced. But do you remember a minute back where Adobe had introduced a piece of software that where the software could listen to someone speak and it could,

then you could make it say whatever you wanted in that person's voice. It was called Voco and it was something that they premiered at their conference. Um, Adobe max creativity conference back in 2016. And they claimed that if they, if you let it listen to, uh, any bit of audio for 20 minutes of whatever the voice

you wanted it to sound like, you could literally just in a, in a, a text window, start typing and get it to say whatever you typed in, in that voice. Right. And they demoed,

they demoed this thing and it was, it was, I could have sworn it was done in the voice of Michael Jordan, but here reading about it, uh, it's re it's referencing Keegan, Michael, yeah. Keegan, Michael key. Um, but, uh, and I'll, I'll include a link to it, but now that's something that like these AI generators are doing for you. You could just ask it to generate it for you. So like, it's kind of like now I don't need this thing from Adobe that they probably

have like a slew of patents around. I can only imagine it being Adobe. So I have, I have some more thoughts on this. Oh, so, all right. So let's go back to the more thoughts on this. Oh, so, all right. So let's go back to the Sherlock thing.

Okay. Apple, Apple had their own finder. Somebody was like, oh, I can make this way better. And they made their Sherlock finder enhancement, right? Okay, cool. They did that. Apple looked at it and said, oh yeah. All right.

Why don't we just build that in? It's going to go away. I think now, and I'm not saying that you shouldn't do this as a developer, right? Like you saw a need to did it, right? Um, but there are platforms out there made to be plugged into, right? So Shopify is a perfect example. Um, if you want to go out and create some sort of modules for Shopify, whether it's drop shipping or all kinds of, there's all kinds of things you can do there, right? It was built for plugins. And so it was built because Shopify wanted people to create stuff to work in their ecosystem and do all that.

And they wanted to monetize people for doing it, right? So if you go build a plugin for Shopify that is important and people want, you're going to get paid five bucks a month for it or 10 or 20 or a hundred, whatever it is, right? It was built for that reason. Maybe if you're looking at platforms that like Salesforce is another good example, right? Like Salesforce has made companies bundles of money because they made it plug-in-able. Same thing with Facebook. Like Facebook was all about, hey, we will give you a platform to create your own applications to plug into. We'll give you access to the data and you have access to the platform. So maybe instead of trying to encroach upon an existing OS or ecosystem, you find the ones that encourage plug-ins and encourage a way to capitalize that stuff.

And then you don't have to worry about it so much. And honestly, instead of Apple looking at it and going, oh, well, that's not that hard to do. I could do Sherlock and, you know in one week, one sprint, right? Something like that. Instead of that, it might be something where Facebook or Shopify looks at you and they're like, man, there's a whole lot of people buying this. I'm just going to buy this company and sort of elbow your way in on the big person in the room, they can very easily squash you, right? When you were invited into the room, it's a different feel.

And you may actually be called to the table to hang out instead of being kicked out of the room. It might be one way to look at it. But I'm not saying you can't, right? I'm not saying you can't because innovation is what drives all this stuff. I'm trying to remember. Mark. Oh, gosh. I always mess this name up.

And we've talked about him before. Mark Resinovich. I hope I said that correctly. Otherwise, it sounds really close to something bad. At least the way I pronounce it. So sometimes you just get purchased. Yeah. Because he wrote Sysinternals and then Microsoft's like,

hey, this is great. These were just like all things that, you know, some of them were add-ons, some of them were just command line utilities, some of them were like separate programs, some of them were add-ons into, or plugins as you're calling it, into existing shells or whatnot.

You know, but I don't know if I like the term plugin because it was just like, thisin because this is the way, if you wanted to add something to the context menu in Windows, this is how you did it, period. And it wasn't necessarily called a plug-in. At least I don't recall it being called a plug-in. So depending on the success of your thing, it can lead to something. And then from last I recall, he actually became like a, uh, fellow at Microsoft or something, or some kind of big title. Well, his is different too, though, right? Because he wasn't charging for CIS internals,

right? That was just a bunch of free utilities to make windows way better. And windows was like, Oh, we love this guy. We want his brain, right? As opposed to, Hey, I built this Sherlock thing. I'm making 29 bucks a pop. And all of a sudden the rug just got pulled out from underneath me.

I'm sorry. He, he's currently the CTO of Microsoft Azure. So a little bit of a, of a big deal. Yeah, that's okay. But,

but, but that's my point though is that like yeah sometimes it doesn't have to be all doom and gloom sometimes that thing can lead to something big so you know try it and if you get sherlocked well you know all right but don't give up right like don't let that be the takeaway. Yeah, totally. I mean, look in life, we, as we know, you're going to win some and you're going to lose some, right. It's not everything. Not everything's going to be a home run.

Actually, most things aren't home runs, right? Like there's going to be a ton of failures along the way. And then there's going to be the things that just take off that you may not even expected. So, yeah, I mean. So do me a favor. I put the link to Mark's Wikipedia page in there. We're on a first-name basis for the moment. I want you to say his name, since you're so much better at that, and tell me, like, do I owe him an apology or did I get it right? I think you said it very close.

It's Racinovich. Damn it right i think you said it's very close it's racinovich damn it what'd you say you said close you didn't say i nailed it you just said i was close that implies that i didn't say it correctly well i didn't memorize what you said so i think it was pretty close that's what i'm saying i i don't i don't recall it being much different than what i just saw so i think you're good man and And I think we lost Jay-Z for a moment. But I think I said, and you said Reese? No, Russ. Russinovich. Okay.

Yeah, I think you said it pretty close to that. It's all a blur. Mark, we're on first name basis still. I probably owe you an apology, so I'm sorry. Messing up your name. So I think we did lose Jay-Z for a second here, but he did have a couple of things here. He's like, hey, are these other examples of Sherlocking, like TweetDeck? Was it?

I think so, maybe. But I don't think anybody ever replaced what TweetDeck did in Twitter. did well in twitter to me to me it goes back to the uh the the reddit api change it's more similar to that because you know what happened there was uh twitter blocking the api yes to it yeah so i don't see that as like you know assuming because i don't know like man it's been a minute since i used tweet deck but from what i recall with tweet deck you could have multiple twitter profiles opened at one time yes and see all of them like all of those instances live streaming yes if you wanted it to which was my preferred way of like how i used to like uh my twitter was i would just like have it live stream you know uh like news sites in so you could kind of see like what was going on right and then there's just got to be too many users and whatnot and following too many

it just got to be a total blur but um so yeah i don't think tweet deck counts yeah i don't or even tweetbot i don't count either of those yeah tweet deck wasn't sherlock because twitter didn't grab that functionality and bring it into their platform they basically just cut them off that's all they did now now resharper absolutely i think that uh microsoft absolutely sherlocked some of the resharper features. And maybe that's why resharper eventually, you know, said, we're not going to support the,

we're not going to use or rely on Microsoft's compiler, which was when they've changed to Roslyn. And instead resharper is like, we're, we're doing our own thing. Right. So maybe, maybe that was part of the,

the rationale there. I don't know. Yeah. Reshar, maybe that was part of the, the rationale there. I don't know. Yeah. ReSharper was 100%. They were Sherlocking features from it. They'd never, they'd never totally replaced them, which is why I think ReSharper is still a thing,

but man, they grabbed some of the popular features out of it and made it part. Um, the game engines, that's pretty interesting. So basically you said that anytime somebody comes out with some decent plugin orin or package or whatever they end up writing it into their own stuff jay-z uh yeah i agree with that um yeah i kind of thought from maybe from the angle where it's like they there was some sort of change that devalues it so you know happened over time so definitely

uh resharper and yeah i agree with what you said about tweet deck and tweet pick too what about the game engines they're always bringing stuff in oh yeah like every new feature in a game engine is something that is dying on the app store gotcha the asset store um but zynga though is like one of the examples that you had here and i thought that they were just purchased though. Am I right? So what I actually asked TedGPT for a list and then I went through and did a little bit of extra research and I was like, yeah, Zynga. I had the same reaction. I was like, Zynga.

And the reason, the justification was that Zynga was king of the hill for a long time on Facebook app integrations when it came to games. And you remember, I'm talking about like Farmville days when you had to ask friends for nails and came to games. And you remember, I'm talking about like Farmville days when you had to ask friends for nails and stuff like that.

And there was also, there was a bunch of different Zynga games that were on there. And it was a super big part of Facebook. So every time you log into Facebook, you'd see all your friends in the games they were playing in Mafia Wars and they were asking for you to click stuff

with like click like so they can get more coins or whatever. And like overnight, Facebook said, look, we're changing our algorithms. We're not going to highlight these integrations as much anymore. We're going to make it a little bit harder to integrate with our features. And just overnight, games like Farmville and the Mafia Wars, whatever it was called, that one, a bunch of them just disappeared overnight. It just got totally devalued because they weren't able to monetize if they used to okay i got you yeah i always remember

zynga reminded me of a company that just ripped off every other game on the planet so i didn't feel too heartbroken for them but yeah and they got purchased for 12.7 billion dollars with okay like i don't feel sorry one bit okay they got sherlocked but did they but did they i don't think they did and that's only that only happened last year yeah oh wow so yeah i think they i don't think they got a lot yeah they pivoted out of uh they got into like mobile apps and stuff like words with Friends. And I forget some of the others. Weren't they? Didn't they do Draw? Draw Something.

Draw Something. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Wasn't that also a Zynga app? Oh, no, no, no. That one was a Pop. No, Pop, Pop, what was it called? Pop Something. And they got bought by Zynga.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's what I'm remembering. Boy, talk about a walk down memory lane. Yeah, Farmville was Zynga. So Zynga pivoted and did okay, but a bunch of those games that were really popular in that era around 2009, 2008 on Facebook were Zynga games.

Interesting. Yeah, so yeah, this is going to be a Link-heavy episode. So resources we like section will have just a boatload of links to things that we've discussed. And with that, we head into Alan's favorite portion of the show, Survey Says. Well, I have kind of a week week uh recommendation you mean tip of the week a week week a week week a week tip of the week uh yeah so the deal is uh microsoft has announced

they're adding ai support to terminal which is their app uh for you know a terminal not the one that's built in the one you can go download if you remember to go to their Microsoft Windows Store, wherever that is. Or you can Google for it and open it there. Such an awkward experience. But, yeah, they're adding co-pilot support, which is pretty nice. And also adding it to Windows 11. I say it's weak because I looked through your articles. I could not figure out, for the life of me, how to get it working.

You know, i finally found the link to download terminal which like okay this thing was announced years ago like three years ago why isn't it just built into windows right why do i still have the crappy cmd running by default there's this beautiful terminal out there that i have to go like install like some weird third party so that's why i say this week and also uh after i did get installed uh it didn't have uh any records to figure out to sign out for sign up for uh sign in to go pilot so i think that i've got to get some sort of like beta build or something and i got annoyed because i looked at three different articles and each one was basically a slight rewrite of the others like

same words same phrases they were all obviously just like copying the same press release and i was like the bots have already taken over i hate this and so i gave up but i will be keeping an eye out for when it becomes released for real and uh sorry connie moo sorry commander uh sorry all the other shells that exist on windows because you know we talked about Sherlocking uh if if Microsoft ever decided to bundle terminal with windows and it did have copilot support, uh, that would be a killer feature for me. We have talked about windows term terminal a lot.

Yeah. Uh, and it's still not embedded. It's still not done. Come with it. It has been, um, part of tip of the week five times. wow the first time being when was this episode

155 from march of 21 so yeah it's it's it's gotten a minute you know it's been talked about connie mu is so much better my opinion still i like where they're going with terminal it's been talked about it's i connie mu is so much better my opinion still i like where they're going with terminal it's so much better than powershell it's better and commander uh it's brilliant it's got nice features but it's just missing a lot of features that i've grown to like i i i do not support this statement um the thoughts and opinions expressed here are not my own no way man like i nice i in fact i think that it was my tip of the week um i don't recall well yeah it's not listed as like who gave that tip of the week so i'd have to go back and look at the actual show notes but uh it was listed as like the the blurb i put in here at the time was windows terminal is your new favorite terminal and

that's why i think that i wrote that because i loved it so much more and i remember talking about connie mu and um commander one commander before because the evolution at least from my perspective was connie mu then commander then windows terminal and when the terminal was just is so much nicer in my opinion a lot of settings but yeah it absolutely is much more modern it's got that kind of new wp uwp kind of look to it uh kanemu is like definitely old school but it just works great yeah kanemu had way more features and settings and garbage if that's what you cared about and windows terminal integrates better into uh you know the explorer interface too it does yeah yeah it integrates with code too it's got little buttons you can click for like opening

files and stuff that just opens opens up code. It's not just opening your default editor. It's got weird little things like, do you want to open this? It's a JSON file. Stuff like that. So, for my tip of the week, unless you're not done.

I'm done. You should build it in, though. Agreed. Sherlock some people. There was a book that came up, mentioned I'm done. You should build it in though. Okay. Agreed. Sherlock some people. So, uh, there was a book that came up mentioned in our Slack community, which by the way, if you're not part of the Slack,

you should be part of the Slack. You can, uh, find some helpful links at the top of our page, uh, or what is it? www.codebox.net slash Slack. And,

uh, you know, find out some information there on how to join our community. So Bobby had referenced this book in the community called Unit Testing Principles, Practices and Patterns. So I'll show you to a picture of what that book looks like. This is a Manning publication, which I'm a big fan of the Manning publications because once you buy it, you own that book for life in all of its formats because you can register the book and then you can download it in other formats. If you want it in a PDF, you want it on whatever your e-reader application of choice is. Everything except for an audio version of the book.

But so I read this book here just recently, and it's really good. The previous favorite, which I think is actually in our resource slash resources. If I recall, it is the art of unit testing or the art of unit testing. Oh, it is not. I thought it or the art of unit testing oh it is not i thought it was huh okay we should put it yep roy ashrove in the art of unit testing both books use c-sharp as the example language but neither is um specific the the this is conceptual type of topic, so it applies to any language. It doesn't matter what you're talking about, so don't get hung

up on that. This is a great new book. I think this one should be the new king of the hill in terms of discussions about unit testing. I wanted to throw that out there as my tip of the week.

Actually, it's Bobby's tip of the week, but it's my tip of the week now. That's right. We borrowed it. How far do tips come from Bobby? Yeah. Bobby is a tip machine. All right. So mine, I thought that I'd actually share it on the podcast,

but apparently I had not. I guess I'd shared it in my work channel. So JetBrains, if you didn't know, they have all kinds of tools, right? And occasionally I will go up there and just look at what IDEs and plugins and stuff they have just to see, hey, what's new? What am I missing? And I saw this thing called Aqua and I was like, well, what in the world is Aqua? And so I went and looked it up and it is a, an IDE for test automation. So I mean, you have, you have your tests, your unit tests and stuff that you do in your regular development, right? But then there's the actual like integration tests and things that you want to do to make sure that your applications are working end to end how you want them to. Well, they created an IDE for being able to create and

run that type of stuff. So the big thing, what kind of called this out is they were working on building in the ability to use Cypress as well as Playwright. And they've got both of those integrated into it now. So if you are in a world where you're creating Selenium tests or Playwright, and they've got both of those integrated into it now. So if you are in a world where you're creating Selenium tests or Playwright or Cypress tests, all of them sort of are the same vein of things that you're doing, they have an IDE to help you along the way. So I haven't tried this thing out, but the fact that JetBrains has put it together, you can almost guarantee that it's done really well. And my guess is it will help your efficiency and your productivity when putting together these end-to-end type tests. So we'll have a link in the show notes.

That sounds cool. Yeah, and JetBrains, if you're not a part of the newsletter, they have they have been a uh a long time supporter long time supporter of the show like we give away jet brains licenses basically every month so um you know i did forget for a couple but then i did a bunch just recently yeah right out right nine yeah so so yeah man um definitely go check this out at JetBrains.com slash Aqua. And yeah, pretty cool stuff. And it looks like it does support Docker too, like as a first

custom for the testing in Aqua, which is nice. I think that'd be a common way of running tests. Well, with that said, subscribe to us on iTunes, Spotify, Stitcher, wherever you like to find your podcast. Be sure to leave us a review. You can head to www.codingbox.net slash review to find some helpful links there. Like I said earlier, if you want to join our Slack, you can go to www.codingboxcks.net slash slack, or, you know, I mentioned slash resources,

obviously www.codingblocks.net. The lawyers make me say that. So slash resources where you can find a bunch of like some of the, some of the, you know, common ones that we've talked about before, like the DevOps Handbook, Clean Code, the Impostors Handbook. I feel like we need to update it. Oh yeah, I forgot. Designing Data Intensive Applications is there, but the Art of Unit Testing wasn't, so I'll pour one out for that. I do need to update it. The main reason to visit that particular page is if you're interested in the DevOps handbook or designing data intensive applications or whatever, we have links to the various different shows, the episodes that correlated with those books, right?

So it's a nice reference. As well as links to buy those books and not even just books. There's also keyboards in there. So just know that those are affiliate links where applicable. So if you're looking to help out the show, Hey, that's one way that you can do it. That's right.

And I think we covered most of the things. So yeah, you know, thanks for hanging out with us for almost two hours on, on our random developer topics here. ChatGPT, summarize. Right. Thank you.