The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - All your CAPTCHAs are belong to bots (News)

Episode Date: August 21, 2023

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

What up, nerds? I'm Jared. Shaboy! And this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, August 21st, 2023. For the second time in three weeks, a beloved member of the software community has passed away. This time, we lost Chris Nova to a climbing accident. Ashley Willis said this about Chris on Hacker News. Quote, Chris was more than just a prominent figure in our industry. She was a beacon of inspiration in open source. Her passion wasn't just about writing code, but about bringing people together, breaking barriers, and making technology accessible to all. Chris's vibrant personality and dedication to collaboration will be deeply missed, but

her impact on the world of open source won't be forgotten. She has left a personal imprint on many of us, and her spirit will continue to inspire those who believe in the power of community-driven innovation. I will miss her so much. She was truly one of a kind." Okay, let's get into the news. It's official. Advancements in computer vision have rendered CAPTCHAs obsolete as new research shows AI bots are 15% more accurate than humans at picking which

images have a bridge or a sign or a bicycle or whatever in them. The researchers recruited 1,400 participants to test websites that use capture puzzles, which account for 120 of the world's 200 most popular websites. The bots' accuracy ranges from 85 to 100%, with the majority above 96%. Meanwhile, we mere mortals check in at a pathetic 50 to 85% accuracy, and we answer slower than the robots to add insult to injury. I've surmised this for months now, as we've been unable to ward off spam account creations on changelog.com, no matter which shiny new CAPTCHA service we tried. There are other efforts in the works besides CAPTCHA in order to differentiate between robots and humans, but so far, the robots are winning. In the wake of last week's big

HashiCorp relicensing news, hundreds of concerned technologists signed a manifesto because, quote, in our opinion, this change threatens the entire community and ecosystem that's built up around End quote. The group's goal is to ensure Terraform stays truly open source forever, and they're asking HashiCorp to switch the license back from the business source license to the permissive Mozilla public license the code previously used. If HashiCorp doesn't do that, the fallback plan is to fork the legacy MPL license code and maintain the fork in a foundation. This is akin to the open search fork of Elasticsearch, except for that was, and I think still largely is, the work of Amazon.

Whereas this effort represents almost 100 different companies so far. Josh Collinsworth seems to have perfected the craft of absolutely dumping on React. You know why React is so high in satisfaction? Because it's so complicated to use, it makes you feel like you're a total ninja when you're using it. You feel called out. When really all you're doing is using 10 lines to solve a two line problem. It makes you jump through so many hoops that you feel like you're on American Ninja Warrior

reaching the top of that giant thing just for writing a little bit of code when really they made you do this. This was just solving a web problem. This time around, he draws an analogy to pop music and to his once naive belief that anything good inevitably becomes popular and therefore anything worth knowing about would eventually come its way on its own. Unfortunately, that's not the case, but I do still believe this is true when it comes to memes, which are literally ideas that spread. So the best memes, by definition, are the ones that spread the furthest and eventually will reach you, right? Anyway, back to Josh and React. He says, quote, assuming we are only talking about personal preferences, I'd never write a blog post arguing about what you like or

trying to change your mind. Not at this age anyway, who cares? But unlike music or other subjective things meant for our own enjoyment, our choice of front-end tools has empirical, measurable effects on others. End quote. His overarching point is to look beyond React because you don't know what you might be missing. He goes into extreme detail on why React has fallen behind and all the other stuff you should try instead. Unsurprising to me, but maybe surprising to you. We've discussed literally every single one of these tools, often with the creator on the JS Party podcast. Let's do some sponsored news. On September 7th, Sentry is hosting a

discussion with the CEOs of three SaaS companies that adopted an open source strategy for their core product. Pierre Richelson from Cal.com, Ya Anokwe from ODK, and Jared Engelberg from CodeCov. On the agenda, one, what open source means in the context of SaaS. Two, why they operate their companies using open source.

Three, why we're seeing a shift in SaaS companies adopting this model. And four, how you can apply similar approaches in your startup or company. This is a completely free event and you don't want to miss it. So register to attend using the link in your show notes and chapter data. Thanks again to Sentry for sponsoring this episode of Changelog News. Mike Seidel shared some quick but powerful advice on building new software features. He says, make it work, ship it. Improve it so people like it, ship it.

Then improve it more so people love it and ship it. This sounds an awful lot like Kent Beck's make it work, make it right, make it fast that I quoted on last week's ChangeLogging Friends, but with a different spin on the process. Two things pop out to me. One, iteration is the key here. And two, it needs to work right out of the gate. Mike concludes by saying, if you focus on getting your software to work 100%, then your software is useful.

It's hard to like something that doesn't work. It's even harder to love something that you don't like. Erland Hagen urges new open source projects to join the Fediverse by way of Mastodon. He says, joining the Fediverse is a lot like installing your first Linux distro. Nothing is quite as easy as what you're used to. Seemingly simple tweaks lead you down deep rabbit holes of community-curated knowledge spread across unofficial wikis and old-school bulletin boards. But somehow, it doesn't feel all that laborious. That's because you didn't install Linux to save time.

You entered the world of Linux, or WordPress, Node, Python, etc. because you got the sense that something is happening over there, end quote. I like that analogy quite a bit. And here's the kicker, which I found to be quite true. Quote, permeating the whole experience is the deeply reassuring certainty that you are considerably more in control of your digital experience than you ever were before you took the leap. End quote. If and when you do join the Feneverse by way of Macedon, connect with us at changelog.social. That's the news for now. Of course, our companion newsletter has more stories, including the nerdiest game ever,

system initiative going open source, why you probably don't need to fine tune LLMs, a nerdy meme I created about GitHub Copilot not getting me, and six new tools you should add to your toolbox. So give that a scan using the link in your show notes and pop your email address in to receive it directly in your inbox every Monday. This week's interview show features Andreas Kling from Serenity OS and the Lady Bird browser, so stay tuned right here. Have a great week. Tell your friends about the changelog if you dig it,

and I'll talk to you again real soon.