The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Bus factors & conspiracy theories (Friends)

Episode Date: November 15, 2024

Adam & Jerod discuss the news! Our Merch sale, useful built-in macOS CLI utilities, the slow death of the hyperlink, systematically estimating a project's bus factor, The Browser Company abandoning Arc, the Dead Internet theory & more!

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

in a more traditional way with the metrics just kind of being more like kind of just disconnected. They're just like another source of data. They're another table somewhere. Yeah, you can line them up by time. Sure, you can drill into them a little bit, but really they weren't connected to that trace. And we took a big step back from that after trying it ourselves, after trying it with users and realizing that there was a whole class of things we wanted to be able to do that you couldn't do with this kind of disconnected metrics. And so, you know, we changed our APIs, we changed our approach, and we're kind of now really on a very clear direction of building a metric system

that isn't one of these kind of like legacy disconnected metric systems. It's trace connected so that we can get that kind of rich debugging context when you actually dig into a real problem. And, you know, there's trade-offs. It's not quite as easy to just like log random metrics at random times into a system. You have to put the thought when you're building the telemetry into how this metric actually does relate to the structure of the code that's running underneath. But we think it's the right trade-off for users because it's like a little extra time to figure that connection out. But then when you actually go to use the data, the connection's there for you. So small investment, big return. And it's just an

example of how we're kind of making decisions internally to set our users up for success with this trace connected idea. Very cool. It's cool to see how you think about getting to the end results with any of these products you're building. It's so cool to see behind the scenes the way you think and the way you iterate. Okay, friends, go to Sentry.io. Use our code CHANGELOG to get 100 bucks off the team plan. That's basically almost four months for free. Sentry.io. Use the code CHANGELOG.

Don't use anything else. Use our code. It's good for you once again century.io where should we begin with this Friends, Jared? All Things Open? No. All Things Closed? All Things Open AI.

Did you get that email? Maybe. Maybe you did. I get a lot of email. Tell me what it says. AllThingsOpen.ai. what it says. Allthingsopen.ai Check it out. Checking it out. Also checking it out.

So you have allthingsopen.org which is where the conference lives. All Things Open. Oh, it's a whole new conference. It's a whole new conference. An AI practitioners and end users conference focused on technologies, processes, and people.

Next year, March. Save the date, March 17th and 18th in Durham, North Carolina. Very close to Raleigh, North Carolina. Darn near the same place, isn't it? I don't know how that works. Raleigh, Durham. I don't know. I think they're so close they merge.

It's kind of like Fort Worth and Dallas here in Texas. Yeah, or St. Paul and Minneapolis. Yeah. I didn't know Minneapolis was a different

was a city. Oh, gosh. I'm just kidding with you. You're going to offend some of our friends up there in good old city of Minneapolis. Well, I knew

the Twin Cities were a thing, but I didn't realize how actually touching they are until the last time I was there. Because I've been to Minneapolis a bunch of times, but I actually went to St. Paul. Right. Which is basically on the other side of a, not even a river. Is it a river?

It's a stream. I don't know. There's a small moving body of water that separates them. But you basically just cross a little bridge and you're in the other city. You never know unless there's a sign that said you're in Minneapolis now or whatever it says

the folks who live there know though oh they know because there's like rivalries and stuff you know like which one's better at one point

I would just stop caring unless the rivalry is just on like a way of life I guess that's when it makes sense I think it is I don't think anybody really cares

because I mean you know here in my small town Dripping Springs we merge in and out of Austin all the time. I'm not even upset about it. Yeah, but you're more like a,

that's more like an attached to. My point stands. I think Dallas and Fort Worth is a better comparison because those are two big cities that are probably competing in certain ways. But they're also,

do they merge? Can you tell the difference? Is there a blank space in between? I'm not from there, so I don't know for sure. But what I know is that people move from Dallas to Fort Worth to get away from Dallas. Oh, they do.

So it must be far enough that it feels like they're away. But then they realize that they can't. Mainly when they move there, it's like, oh, that's 20 minutes away. I can't have those friends anymore. Yeah, that's rough. My experience with those cities is just driving through on my way south. Right. And then eventually north on my way back from the border, or at least the ocean, at least the Gulf.

Do you see this banner? There's a banner on merge.changelaw.com. Oh, yeah, I put a banner there. Where'd that come from? Did I see the banner? Have you seen it? I am the banner. This is the banner. Yes, I put a banner there. Where'd that come from? Did I see the banner? Have you seen it? I am the banner. This is the banner?

Yes, I put a banner up. You know, like when you want to get people's attention, you put a little banner up. Did you know that used to be hard on websites? There used to be a JavaScript snippet, I believe, to do that, right? Oh, absolutely. Throw a banner up. You know how easy that is now?

How easy is it? It's just one chat GPT question, you know? It's one div. Okay. And about six lines of CSS, maybe seven. That's it, huh? Yeah.

It's just like what skew the div? You're just rotating it, yeah. Yeah. Diagonal rotation, and it's like position absolute, you know, set the top, set the right,

or the left, and then just futz with it. You know, you open up your dev tools, and you just futz with it. You open up your dev tools and you just futz with it until it looks alright. And then you move on with your life. The web is pretty awesome now actually.

It is. It is pretty awesome. There's still things that are hard like a blank webpage that you have to put stuff on. But if you have an existing thing and you want to move stuff around or change things

it's pretty easy nowadays. So, yes, we are having our sale. I just announced it on Monday. Year-end sale. That's why you mentioned this banner. I thought you were talking about some sort of banner hanging over a road in Dallas or something that made the news. People are putting up a lot of signs right now. Right.

Well, this should have been in Dallas-Fort Worth, honestly, this year-end sale. It should be. We'd probably get more sales if we put it there. They'd be like, what's changelog merch? Of course, probably a lot of our listeners are wondering the same. What is changelog merch? Well, you know, we have some merch. We got shirts, got stickers, and we're doing a year-end sale. So they are on sale now through the end of the year or until supplies last on this particular set of merch and hence the banner that rotated div how you like that i'm pretty good 320 i also got a media query in there as you go to a mobile phone it stops doing that and it goes to the top the kind of quality i'm bringing to my web dev. You are, you're pretty good at this.

I'm going to tell you how long that took me. How long did it take you? Honestly, seven minutes for the initial implementation, and then probably 20 minutes of tweaking things around, and then probably another 10 minutes to make sure it looked good on phones. And so I would say somewhere in the range of 30 to 45 minutes. Soup to nuts, as they say. This is not something you're doing on the daily, though.

So, I mean, if it was, then the next time it's like 10, because now you know. Well, next time I just copy-paste that CSS snippet in. I don't have to ask an LLM. I just go do it. Right. I also ripped out a bunch of code that you wrote, by the way. So that was kind of fun. Should we go here? What did I write?

So I think you did the initial implementation of merch.changelog.com with Cody. But your name's on all the get blames. Because I got to be mad at somebody. And I go figure out who that's going to be. And this one was you. Now, it might have been because you're the one that checked everything into version control. Potentially. Or it might have been because you originally authored this checked everything into version control. Potentially. Or it might have been because you

originally authored this code. Potentially. But that was three years ago, so that last commit was 2021, now it's 2024. And the web has gotten better. You just had stuff in there that wasn't necessary, mostly. Preach. You had some modernizer stuff, which may have

been necessary back then, but no longer is. That was Cody. Oh, it was. It was like body tags and stuff? Yeah, just modernizing, like polyfills mostly. Yeah. For like different things. But the code that I actually removed and rewrote was jQuery was getting pulled in

in order to adjust the quantity on the form when you click a button. And so it's just a lot of overkill to accomplish what is essentially a single click handler that adjusts the quantity. So I just wrote that

in pure JavaScript, inlined it in the page, removed jQuery, removed Modernizr. JavaScript sprinkles, baby. Yeah, just put it right in there. Slim it down.

It loads a lot faster now. Can you tell the difference in speed, honestly? It's noticeable, yeah. Yeah? What's the speed difference? I didn't actually measure it. It's like you can see it with your eyes.

I don't know, maybe like 200 milliseconds, something like that. It's worth a deletion, though. Oh, absolutely. Yeah. I mean, what's jQuery? 30K? 60K? Who knows?

Keep that stuff. Plus, it's from a third-party CDN. So we were not drinking our own... We can't do that. We are drinking our own malpractices. I mean, in three years, a best practice does become a malpractice. So I just modernized that thing by removing Modernizer.

And I could probably go further, but it's just a merch site. Yeah, there's a lot you could do. Well, good for you. Yeah, thank you. You're in sale up to 40% off merch.changelog.com. Yeah,

get yourself some threads. Support your favorite developer pods with sweet, sweet merch. Now, did you change that line too? Wasn't that changed?

I did. I adjusted some copy. You know, there was a copy on there. What did you change it from? Support your favorite developer pods with some sweet,

sweet merch. What did it used to say? Yeah. Can't blame that. Well, that might be in the Shopify admin. Oh, I think it might be.

Yeah. That's one of the things to figure out is like, where do we configure different things? Cause it's not all in source control or there is stuff

that's in source control, but actually gets pulled out of the admin or overwritten, which is like settings data.json or something. I had to figure all that out cause it's been so long.

Yeah. I don't remember what it used to say. It was just slightly outdated. I think it said like merch and threads for developers which is kind of going off of our new our podcasts and new news and podcasts uh yes yes we don't really say anymore oh i think it might have said like support your favorite podcast by repping the merch something like that i don't know i just thought it's time for a new little tagline. But we digress.

What are we here to talk about? The news. Maybe this is news. Is the Wayback Machine working again? I think so. I think it's back. Yeah? It was DDoSed, right? It was like, yeah.

They got taken offline. They got DDoSed by some sort of hacking crew. Who attacks the Wayback Machine? It's like, this is like a cultural touchstone of the world. And they're going to take it offline? Like, what? Who? Why?

When, where, and how? But yeah, I think it's back now. Officially closing the loop. Support your favorite podcast by ripping the merch. That's what it said. Which wasn't bad, but you know, it was up there for three years. And then at the very bottom it says, Merch and Threads for Developers.

I changed that one too. What did I change it to? I think it says world-class threads for the world's classiest devs. World-class with a hyphen. Merch. Yeah, world-class. For the world's classiest devs.

Yeah. Are you a classy dev? Go get yourself some classy merch. I don't disagree with that. All right. Good. My copy't disagree with that. All right. Good. My copywriting passes muster. The Adam test.

That's right. What's first on the list? Well, we are here to discuss some goings on. And we have a long list. So we thought we would just take turns picking what topics to discuss out of this list of links, which is not sorted shortest to longest, unfortunately. However, it is sorted in a way that is readable.

I would like to talk about this one. This is by Wei Yen, W-E-I, first name, Y-E-N, last name, Wei YYen, useful built-in macOS command line utilities. These are useful, and they're built-in. macOS, so our friends on Linux, take a bathroom break, or hang out and type which, and then the command, and see if it actually has an executable on your machine.

Because these are macOS command line utilities, some of which I know and love, others I didn't know about, so I thought we could talk through these. The first one, the command is called security. Did you know about this? There's a command called security which allows you to access your keychain programmatically.

So we do this with 1Password. You know the OP command. You can pull secrets out of your 1Password. We used to do this with LastPass. They have a CLI where you can pull secrets out of your LastPass and use them for various scripting uses and utilities. And this security command, if you type security and then find-internet-password-s, I'm not sure what the S is for, hopefully secure, and then you give it a website, it will return to you your keychain stored password for said website. That's sweet, right? If only I use keychain. I guess I do use keychain, right?

You do use it, man, don't you? I mean, not on purpose, let's just say. When do you use it? Definitely use it for operating system level things like Wi-Fi passwords and stuff like that, but I'm not trying to use Keychain purposefully. So every once in a while you accidentally use it. Well, you know, I'm a user of the Mac OS operating system,

so it's using it, so I'm using it. There you go. All right, so there's one. That one didn't impress you because you're a 1% CLI person. Fine, fair. Here's the one that impresses me. Okay. Or at least I didn't know this.

Caffeine, caffeinate. Yeah. I didn't know that caffeinate was built in, and I just went to my favorite llm and confirmed if it's not hallucinating that caffeinate which is a separate i guess menu bar tool called caffeine i thought it might use caffeinate it's like it's just this ui layer on top it's not but caffeine is cool and caffeinate being built in is even cooler. Right. So caffeine is, like you said,

it's a menu bar utility that is a third party thing written where somebody puts this little coffee cup in your menu bar. I think it's free and open source. I know it's free. I'm not sure if it's open source. And you click on it and when it's on, your

screen will never turn off. I think it will also never go to screensaver mode, but it certainly won't dim. None of the power saving features. Like, it's caffeinated. And of course, the cup of joe fills up when it's on. And you click it off, it just on-off toggle. And that's what you're referring to with caffeine.

Caffeinate is a command line utility. This is a built-in, which does the same thing and so there you go caffeinate if you just want to make sure your screen doesn't turn off for a while maybe you're giving a presentation maybe you're i don't know what you're up to but if you're up to something type caffeinate that's a cool i did not know about that one either did you know about network quality no, network quality is a built-in speed test. It's all one word, capital Q, which is strange.

So that's camel case. What's the name of camel case when the first letter is not camel? There's a separate term for this. Inchworm. Inchworm case. It kind of does look like that.

I'm going to roll with it. No fact checks, please. We were told you weren't going to fact check. Network quality with the inchworm case. Built-in speed test. I thought this would be fun. Let's run.

It sounds funny to say that. It does. I kind of like it. Let's do a test here. Let's both run network quality at the same time. I've done it. And see who's got better internet. Okay.

Uplink capacitylink capacity well your report probably it's not there yet i'll wait oh you already ran it i already ran it i was gonna do a countdown all right i'm just running it sorry i got excited you must have although i'm our videos cutting out now because i'm saturating how long do yours take to run mine's still going uh about 20 seconds. Okay, done. All right. First of all, who do we think is faster? I think I have better internet than you, but I'm not sure.

We'll see. Do you agree or disagree? I know mine's more reliable. Yours might be faster. Mine has been less reliable lately. Upload may be slower, but I don't know. I don't even know man Let's find out My uplink capacity is

83.159 megabits per second Oh yeah you beat me then Uplink for me is 2.653 megabits per second So Downlink capacity 511.325 megabits per second Man you're just like You're landsliding me here man

30.167 megabits per second download now i'm also i think those are oh you know what though hang on a second i do have tail scale running and i'm also tunneling through homestead exit you're going home yeah all right get off tail scale let me see if I can do this. Let me... I will say that those speeds, while very impressive in destroying your speeds, are not the fastest my network will go. Running it again.

Sans tail scale. Already demolishing your numbers. It is a reverse landslide. It's a land push. Did you hear me call you out about that push? Yeah, I was like, why is he calling out my reverse push? I had to, man. It's provocative.

Okay, it's not a complete landslide, but it's definitely better. Uplink is now 24.439 megabits per second. Okay. Download capacity is 3. No, sorry. 399.163 megabits per second. Okay. Download capacity is 3. No, sorry. 399.163 megabits per second. Nice. So that improves.

So much better. Now are you wired into your local network? Let's see. I would have to walk around. Hang on a second. Okay. The reason why I ask

while he's doing that. Oh, he can't hear me. I totally smoked him. Just destroyed. Embarrassment. I totally smoked him. Just destroyed. Embarrassment. That's an embarrassment. It's a verm. But I am wired in. Oh, you are wired in. I am.

So those are legit numbers then. I am on wireless here. And so I think mine's capped by my wireless network card. Do you have Wi-Fi as well as when you have wired in, when you are wired in, I should say, do you also run Wi-Fi? Hard to answer because I'm pretty much never wired in. When I do, I'll turn my Wi-Fi off because I just want to make sure that sucker's using the wire, you know?

Okay. Let me run this test one more time then. Okay. Did you have your wire? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I don't think it's going to change it. I don't think it is either, but let's just see. Here we go.

Big money, big money, big money, no whammies. Oh, yeah, upload capacity is not any better. So I'm supposed to have a gig down and half a gig up, and I'm at 84 up and half a gig down. So I'm pretty sure this is my WAN, not my WAN, my LAN, my wireless LAN, my WLAN, holding me down. And if I plugged in, it would be faster. Because I know I've run my UniFi device.

My UDM Pro runs its own speed test each night. And it runs it, and it gets about what's advertised for my ISP, which is one down and half of a meg or half of a gig up. All right. Well, that was fun. So nothing improved with removing wifi, by the way. Yeah. As expected, but had to confirm, you know, cause you know, going through tail scale and

using my exit node, which is not here locally. It's, it's external cause I don't run a pie hole in two locations. It's stupid. Yeah. Well, let's speed run a couple more of these commands here for folks. So the open command, this one's commonly known. I've been using this one for years, but useful if you don't know. If you type open and then space and then a file name,

it will launch the default associated application for that file type. So if it's default to open up in pages, for instance, it'll launch pages with that file opened. If you do open space dot, it will open the current directory in Finder, which is the one that I use the most. I use that all the time. All the time.

Yeah. Take me here in Finder. That's right. And then copy paste are cool. PB copy, PB paste. So if you echo something, you can pipe it to PB copy, throws it into your clipboard. I think it's paste board, what they call it to pb copy throws into your clipboard i think it's

pasteboard what they call it hence the pb and not the clip copy pb copy and then of course you can pb paste out of that back into other things super useful you can get utc dates out of the date command you can generate uuids you can do mb searches, screen capture, all kinds of stuff. I will highlight this one, Say. Say is super cool, especially now that they've added a whole bunch of voices. Say will actually just take whatever text you pass to it and audibly say it with the built-in macOS voice. And you can customize that thing with command line flags

in order to change to the various built-in voices. And because Apple has been expanding that set of voices, mostly because of Siri, I believe, there's tons of different voices available. And as a person who dabbles in audio and makes podcasts, I've used that quite a bit, especially for things like horse JS and acting like there's somebody there who's not there, inserting a robot voice into a podcast, you know, that kind of stuff. So that's a good one. All right. So shout out to Wei Yan and these useful utility, useful built-in utilities post links in the show notes. Adam, what do you want to talk about what is next on the list

i kind of want to talk about this slow death of a hyperlink i feel like this is an attack on the internet it's been happening for a while it's not that big of a topic but it's it's intriguing to me you know the fact that you know instagram has done this for a while where you can't link out to something. It's like, hey, we're not going to allow the links to live. And that's not cool. Yeah. Well, Instagram was born that way. So at least they're consistent where they even from day one, like link in bio is very much an Instagram statement because that's the only place you're allowed to put a link.

So at least they're consistently anti-web, whereas now we're getting a lot of previously pro-web websites that are wanting you to stay, stay in their silo. So I think this article that we covered in ChangeLog News was coming from a journalism focused perspective, but it was speaking specifically about LinkedIn, X, whose algorithm was open source at some point. And you can clearly see that if you put a link into a post on X, that it will deprioritize that in the algorithm.

And how the same thing is going on at LinkedIn, it seems like increasingly so. Facebook as well has turned their tide away from outbound links and deprioritizing posts that include them. And so this is just a huge bummer, and just against everything that I believe in, in the web, as well as against small businesses like ours. So that's my take on it.

I think it's lame. Obviously, they're well within their rights to do it. I like small web, and the small web just keeps getting smaller I think because of reasons like this it's like they want you to they obviously want you to put your content there

yes like them be the hub not the spoke kind of thing they want to be everything they're like just post everything right here and never leave

and that's not cool necessarily as you said they are within their rights to do so but I think you know you know what can we do as developers can we just scream and cry can we from within if you're

one of these operatives on the inside as a developer making these platforms can you push back on this idea that hey this is not for the web i don't think that would really work unless you're going to sneak code in that does this. Right. Because the argument is not strong in a pure capitalistic environment. It's just not. It's like, well, we make more money this way. The more time you spend on my platform,

the more money I make. Why would I link out to somewhere else? So that's a really tough sell. I'm sure there's people who are master debaters who can probably give good reasoning to do that. But a lot of it's touchy feely in my opinion, like I don't like it. I would forego more money in order to support a flourishing and diverse web. But when you have shareholders, I also own stock in companies, and I want those companies to return value to me as a shareholder.

We all want that as shareholders. And so they are beholden to shareholders to do that. And so it's a really tough sell as a developer. Now, what can we do? I think we build things that don't do that. Just to be corny, be the change, right? So you build the web

that you want to see out there. And we're, I mean, we're doing that here at ChangeLog. Like, look at ChangeLog News. Our main publication is entirely a thing that links to other people's stuff.

Like, that's entirely what it is. It's a redirect. Yeah. It's pointers. Now, it's pointers with commentary and tastemaking and all that stuff

which makes it hopefully good but we're building the web that we want to see out there but we are like the scum they scrape off

the scum you know like we're like scum scum we're nobodies so does it really matter I wouldn't say we're scum

but okay you know what I mean from the perspective of the we're a small a small fish yeah we're a barnacle on the that's right we're a small uh small fish yeah we're a barnacle on the that's right or krill backside of a giant whale i'm cool krill i could be your

krill i mean that's very small in comparison to the whale and the whale eats you right i was going with barnacles because they attach to the whale and they survive the krill get eaten the barnacles live you know but maybe they're like down there in the armpit of the whale do our do whales have armpits okay i'm i'm tracking with you anywaysit of the whale do whales have armpits? okay I'm tracking with you anyways and the whale doesn't even know we're here they're like ah I didn't realize I had barnacles oh my gosh what you doing here barnacle

I would say to close this loop though we experience this personally directly in the fact that our podcasts are more frequently listened to in a podcast client which they deserve to be there. That's cool. That's where it should be listened to.

That's where the best experience really is. And a lot of people, even for a long time, would say, I haven't been to changelog.com and basically never. Or for basically, you know, for a very long time. And so as somebody who puts a lot of effort into making the website possible, it's not just a place you go, it's a thing that serves. So obviously the client couldn't get the MP3 or different content from it if the website didn't exist, but you don't have to go to changelog.com,

the hyperlink, the web link, the URL that we're advocating for to enjoy our content. You can forego that indefinitely if you want to. And we have no say in that at all. I guess this is how it's supposed to be, right? Well, it's the way that it is. While you're here, y'all,

go to changeblog.com and there you go. What's up, friends? I'm here with Kurt Mackey, co-founder and ceo of fly as you know we love fly that is the home of changelog.com but kurt i want to know how you explain fly to developers do you tell them a story first how do you do it i kind of change how i explain it based on almost like the generation of developer i'm talking to so like for me i built and shipped apps on heroku which if you've never used Heroku is roughly like building and shipping an app on Vercel today. It's just it's 2024

instead of 2008 or whatever. And what frustrated me about doing that was I didn't, I got stuck. You can build and ship a Rails app with a Postgres on Heroku the same way you can build and ship a Next.js app on Vercel. But as soon as you want to do something interesting, like as soon as you want to, at the time, I think one of the things I to do something interesting, like as soon as you want to, at the time, I think one of the things I ran into is like, I wanted to add what used to be like kind of the basis for Elasticsearch. I want to do full text search in my applications. You kind of hit this wall with something like Heroku where you can't really do that. I think lately we've seen it with like people wanting to add LLMs kind of inference stuff to their applications on Vercel

or Heroku or Cloudflare or whoever these days, they've started like releasing abstractions that sort of let you do this, but I can't just run the model I'd run locally on these black box platforms that are very specialized. For the people my age, it's always like, oh, Heroku was great, but I outgrew it. And one of the things that I felt like I should be able

to do when I was using Heroku was like run my app close to people in Tokyo for users that were in Tokyo. And that was never possible. For modern generation devs, it's a lot more Vercel based. It's a lot like Vercel is great right up until you hit one of their hard line boundaries. And then you're kind of stuck. The other one, we've had someone within the company. I can't remember the name of this game, but the tagline was like five minutes to start forever to master.

That's sort of how we're pitching Fly. It's like you can get an app going in five minutes, but there's so much depth to the platform that you're never going to run out of things you can do with it. So unlike AWS or Heroku or Vercel, which are all great platforms, the cool thing we love here at ChangeLab most about Fly is that no matter what we want to do on the platform, we have primitives, we have abilities, and we as developers can charge our own mission on Fly. It is a no-limits platform built for developers, and we think you should try it out. Go to fly.io to learn more.

Launch your app in five minutes. Too easy. Once again, fly.io. I love my 8sleep. Check them out, 8sleep.com. I've never slept better. And you know, I love biohacking. I love sleep science. And this is all about sleep science mixed with AI to keep you at your best while you sleep. This technology is pushing the boundaries of what's possible in our bedrooms. Let me tell you about 8Sleep and their cutting edge Pod 4 Ultra. So what exactly is the pod? Imagine a high-tech mattress cover that you can easily add to any bed. But this isn't just any

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It's a game changer, and it's going to change your game. Once again, eightsleep.com slash changelog. not to write a GitHub plugin. Shea Arison wrote a GitHub plugin to calculate the bus factor or truck factor on GitHub repositories. Of course, we all know what a bus factor is. This is the minimum number of team members you can have on a project who can disappear before the thing becomes not driven anymore right on it stalls out or it fails or it dies and so the worst bus factor you

could possibly have is one and the best bus factor you could possibly have is infinity i guess i don't know one is bad more than one is generally better. That's right. Here's a story. In 2015 or so, Shay's employer had layoffs. One of them was the only contributor to part of the code base that made money for the company. He remembered reading about truck number, which is the same thing. It's just trucks instead of buses. And thought it'd be fun to write a GitHub Enterprise plugin that calculates who you can't afford to fire. Shea found a research paper called the Truck Factor research paper, which actually went through this in a somewhat vigorous way.

I started writing the plugin and talked five minutes on it at our Thursday afternoon lightning talks. His co-worker said it would immediately hit Goodhart's Law, once a metric becomes a measure and no longer is a good metric. And they say they saw it as a way for management to easily calculate who you can fire. So, you know, all good tools can be used for good and evil. But long story short, went out out used this truck factor paper which is a way actually describes a way you can go about

calculating this at least you know fuzzily to find out the key contributors to projects and ran against the Linux kernel don't run against the foundation run against the Linux kernel found a way using the linguist plugin

to filter out documentation and third-party libraries just to make sure it's actually the people who are like working on the linux kernel and found that not only is it small even on something as large as linux kernel it's going down currently she found a truck factor of 12. 12 people on the Linux kernel down from in the 40s when it was run originally. So from 2015 until now, from the 40s down to 12. And his collaborator, M. Claire, who did some visualizations and stuff, also installed the plugin on her system. She got a factor of 8. I'm not sure why there's a discrepancy between the two you know this is a developer's blog post that I'm that I'm mining for this information but yeah so

we have now this tool I assume you can go take it and run it against other repositories I would think depending on the repository it may or may not be accurate. Because if you have, probably the smaller the project, the harder it is to know that number for sure. But maybe you can know that number just by looking at the list of contributors in that case. But for large projects with thousands of contributors, you can actually understand how many of these are key in order to keep that sucker running. And it turns out, over time, it appears the Linux kernel in particular has been going down, down, down. What are your thoughts on this, Adam?

I'm looking at different angles. I also went to M. Claire's blog. She has a parallel to use a pun. I'll bring up in a second. Not relevant in the moment, but it will be relevant here in just a second. I promise. Stay tuned for the pun landing.

She wrote a parallel blog post to this post that has a bit more detail. Okay. Different detail, I'd say. And the pun will land now. There's one more built-in command to macOS that is kind of cool, parallel. Oh.

I think it's built-in. Okay. Because I've used it before. I can't recall if I had to install the command or a package to make it work. I think it works. And so she mentioned when cloning the repos that it was very resource intensive despite passing a job count of eight to parallel. And so she used the command parallel dashj 8 get clone and the rest of the command

to pull down tons of repos in this repo list that was in this.txt file. Kind of cool. So that's the pun there. Here is the closing of that loop. This is a third-party library. It is third-party. Called parallel. Hosted at savannah.ganu.org.

So this seems like it's an old GNU project. Yeah. Appears to be written in Perl. So an old thing that you can definitely use on macOS. But probably

an apt-get install or a brew install kind of a thing. I've used it before. That's why I thought maybe it is built in because I've used it before and I wasn't sure if I installed something to make it work. Fair enough. Yeah, no problem. I think this is cool. Honestly, I think it's cool insofar as that I do agree with Goodhart's law that it will

become this thing that you can measure against and use it in the incorrect way, so to speak. But sure. I like the idea of being able to, as, as someone who's trying to make choices to guide the ship, to have a, a bus factor, a truck factor number, it does resolve people to numbers literally. Yeah. Which is not cool, but you know, data, they say, you know, make data driven decisions. decisions hello that's data right i think it's cool but i think at the same time it could let some folks go it's like hey i'm management and uh jared is useful and adam is not right let's let adam go which would not be cool no that would not be cool but if it it was deserved, maybe it is cool. Not cool for me circumstantially, but totally cool in terms of project or product or direction.

Efficiency and appropriate if somebody's not bringing value. What I wish I had more time to do, though, was dig through this paper. The title of it is A Novel Approach for Estimating Truck Factors. It's pretty deep. That's cool. That is the coolest part for me. It reminds me of Aminota's subsection of our show with him, where he talked about measuring developer productivity. And I mentioned how hard it is to actually compare it with technical debt, because you have quantitative measures with money, and it's just easy. And I kind of get fatalistic, I guess, with certain things that are hard to

measure. I'm just like, ah, we can't measure that. Let's move on. I think it's cool that people take the time and the effort and do the research and the novel ideas in figuring out how to actually measure something which seems, it seems immeasurableurable but really that just means it's not easy to measure and so that doesn't mean it's actually immeasurable but most of the time you have to measure something that's proximate to it in order to find yeah this measure so i think it's just cool i thought i didn't think about ever being able to quantify bus factor in terms of it being proven out like this project has a bus factor of X. And we know that's true-ish because we've done this novel approach. I think what it does let you do, though, in terms, like, let's forget the list of people you can fire aspect of this

and think of it more in terms of how in trouble is your project? How many open source projects out there could leverage this to its better advantage, its greater advantage? Because in the intro of the paper, it says a systems truck factor, TF, is defined, as you said before, Jared, as the number of people on your team that have to be hit by a truck or quit before the project is in serious trouble. And that is not a good thing for the project, obviously. So if you have people who quit because of just natural attrition, maybe you've got, you know, the WordPress thing happening and people are just like

considering being, you know, let go or offered to leave for money or literally just quitting, you have this opportunity to say, well, this is how in trouble my project could be if things went sideways, you know, if these things did happen. And what you could do in the opposite of that is to insulate from that, is to say, okay, let's reduce that number. Or I guess, what is the opposite here? Well, you want to raise it. So raise it so you got a tf of what was it like 40 something four at first and then now it's down to like eight ish yeah but what's strange about this is that it seems like she got one measure and then right claire got slightly less so i'm not sure why they would change he said running on her machine and got an eight and these are i don't

understand that so maybe there's more information to be figured out there. Yeah, call it single digits. Well now you have at least some measure to say well, we've got a declining bus factor. I wonder who came up with truck factor and then who came up with bus factor.

Because somebody must have thought it'd be a good idea to consider how many people on our project are going to get hit by a truck. Like, that's just a very morbid thing to think. And then someone else is like, nah, let's just call it a bus. Like, maybe that's slightly less. No, it's just.

There's probably more to it. But I think I would imagine that it's more common to be hit by a bus. I would think so. Right? City streets. Buses are more frequent than trucks. That's why it's called bus factor because it's the norm, not the anomaly. And why wouldn't you just call it like

leave the team factor, right? Like you just feel like, why do we have to bring death into this? I do think there's a reason for that. And I think it's a fair reason. I think the reason is because a bus or a truck factor brings to mind the very real possibility that somebody could suddenly, without planning,

leave the team. That's what you think of as like, everything was great until Fred got hit by a bus. And so now all of a sudden we don't have time to do any sort of preparation for this. Fred was going to be at BDFL. There was no plans of quitting. And so I think that's why death gets brought in,

is because you have to think about it in a way of it could be a surprise. Anyways, that's just my trying to read the tea leaves on the etymology of the term, because otherwise it's kind of a morbid term it is a very morbid term i i do agree with it suddenness maybe that's why you as you said is pinned back to sudden and unexpected i mean it even went as far in this paper i might as well read the whole paper to everybody at this point in section two it says truck factor an example from the early days of Python. In quotes, what if you saw this posted tomorrow?

Guido's unexpected death has come as a shock to us all. Disgruntled members of the TCL mob are suspected, but no smoking gun has been found. Oh, that's hilarious. Yeah. The TCL mob. So that's a competing language, right? TCL. So they're making up this hypothetical in which people from the TCL language community,

the mob somehow came and killed Guido van Rossum. That's kind of funny, but also even more morbid. There's like surmising there'd be some sort of like inner language rivalry so harsh that they would execute a man. Wow. Who wrote this paper? If you've seen Glass Onion, I believe, it was the first one. You know what I'm talking about.

Oh, you're talking about the- The pair of movies that are similar but not the same. They're not sequels. Yeah, where they're in the house. It's Murder Mysteries. Yeah, Murder Mystery. I love those movies. I mean, those are so good

i mean we need more of those it's like that's the kind of thing this reminds me of this you know it's killing me right now what's that movie called everybody's listening like has seen it and they're like you idiots knives out thank you onion thank you knives out i was googling that the easiest way to google something when you want to find something is glass onion versus and it's going to come up with knives out. It's going to come up with the opposite. I was just typing glass onion movie. Yeah.

Ryan Johnson. There we go. I would've got there. Now, if we want to talk about that, the problem was I got auto-completed. Let's bring that in as a topic because I think that's a good non sequitur, but it's, it's a good one. Glass onion versus knives out. Oh, knives out.

Hands down. Have you seen glass onion? Yeah. Oh. Knives Out, hands down. Have you seen Glass Onion? Yeah. Oh. Or you must be the opposite. You haven't thought about it before. Yeah, I really haven't, actually. I know I'm thinking about it.

There was a lot that I liked about Glass Onion. I actually haven't thought much about it. Obviously, I compared them after I saw Glass Onion. I compared it to the original in my head. But I haven't had anybody ask me that. So that was my guttural reaction was hands down the original. But I don't know if you asked me like for reasoning, I'd just be like,

uh, it's just better. I don't know why I liked them both. First of all. So I'm not saying anything against the second one. Wasn't the second one was very much like this hypothetical Elon Musk kind of character who was like, was it Elon Musk that it was,

was it based after him? It was based off of some eccentric billionaire right i don't know we're getting into areas where i flaunt how little i paid attention to movies they're they all go to an island i don't think it's epstein island you know that's who i was thinking about actually was epstein like maybe it's comparative to epstein although it doesn't i don't think it parallels one more pun very well to it, but I think it's similar in the fact that it's an island.

Maybe that's what it is. It was a very we're in the weeds here on this, but my thoughts on it, I suppose both very good. And I really can't say which one I like better. Honestly, I think they were like equally good in their own right. I think they were like equally good in their own right.

I think the Glass Onion movie had a really cool premise, whereas Knives Out also had a really cool premise. And I think you couldn't see either of them coming. You really couldn't. Oh, they're both well-written. They're both well-executed. Yes. Great stories.

I think Knives Out is a more classic whodunit which nobody was making i mean hollywood hasn't taken a chance like that in a long time it's all like reboots and sequels and like the seventh version of this movie and like here comes a classic whodunit with a brand new character brand new storyline so i really appreciated it for that great cast cast. Another thing about it, Knives Out, they both had great casts though, but I think Knives Out had a more classically good cast. Like it had a lot of, you know,

actors that are not in their 20s or 30s, like 40s, 50s, 60s kind of actors and actresses. So to close the loop on Elon Musk, I was right that everybody compared it to Elon Musk. People, especially because it came out right around the time that he bought Twitter.

And there are dozens of articles comparing it, calling it a veiled dig at Elon Musk because of the eccentric billionaire who is a major part of the story. However, Ryan Johnson says that that comparison was accidental and merely coincident. He was not thinking about Elon Musk when he wrote it, but you be the judge, I suppose.

Well, social media was involved, right? And putting someone on, well, I guess it was YouTube or a version of YouTube. I can't recall if it was literally YouTube or not, but social media for sure. Let's move on before we have to use our spoiler horn. Oh my gosh. Yes, that's true. All right.

Next up, ARK is a dead browser walking. ARK, the ARK browser. Yes. I was actually going to go there, so I'm glad you did. Some of the guns killed it, man. They killed it. Is this news? Did it die?

Well, okay. I'm being dramatic no it's not dead but the ceo and head person has moved on to a new browser oh okay it's been put into maintenance mode what an absolute shame for the people who use it really i just like wow what a what a shame to like begin to adopt something begin to be excited about something, and then it just not work out. Okay, so this website is why I turned on my Tailscale. Not sponsored, by the way. Do love Tailscale.

And then I enabled my exit node because I don't have my pie hole here at the studio. I have it at home. And so I don't – this website is just full of ads. I can't even enjoy the content or find the content because there's just so many ads. Yes. This is the howtogeek.com website. It's just, I'm sorry y'all have to do this to sustain your business. It's an absolute shame.

The web shouldn't be like this. This is not the web I'm fighting for. Right. I'm fighting for your freedom to publish, of course, but not your freedom to put all these ads everywhere. It's just like, come on. So I actually didn't notice that because I've got built-in ad blockers and stuff and NextDNS.

Otherwise, that sounded like a brag. I didn't mean to sound like a brag, but the reason I was saying it is because I link to this in news and we tend to not link to sites that are yucky. Like we don't like that. Yeah, this is yucky. And so I'm kind of apologizing to a certain extent because I didn't notice how bad it was yeah on how to geek.com so I agree with you 100% I should probably should have linked over to the verge which generally has a much classier website yes and does a better job

of coverage as well but I just found this one first this is is the article I linked to in Change Dog News when I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago. But just, I don't know, I feel validated because last time we talked about browsers, I was like, I don't just trust a VC funded browser that doesn't have a clear business model. I just feel like it's going to go away. And I didn't expect to be correct so quickly. Like that's what shocks me is. And I get. You've got to move fast if you're a startup. So why keep working on something even though we were impressed by their adoption?

Lots of loyal fans of the ARK browser. But not fast enough. Yeah, they changed the... I wonder what really happened here. So I'm going to read a little bit because it says we haven't closed the loop fully on what exactly happened here because we've been

meandering a bit maybe my fault in terms of the ads and stuff but it says the browser company best known for the ARC browser

is developing a new completely new browser the company has been working for years on a browser unrelated to ARC ARC won't be abandoned but the new focus

will primarily be on stability updates and bug fixes. That's kind of like, it's not abandonment, but there's no... That's maintenance mode. It's done. Might as well be abandoned. There's nothing new here in a new thing.

So, what's the point of the new? Yes, so that's the story. And the reason was because they did not think they could take ARK to mass adoption. To the masses. And their goalK to mass adoption, to the masses. And their goal is to make a browser for the masses. You know, I'm somewhat reminded of Ryan Dahl with Deno, because I had Ryan Dahl on the

show, I don't know, a couple months ago around the Deno 2 launch. And we talked about how he's very much had to be pragmatic with his choices with Dino. Whereas when he started it as the big rewrite, right? The second effort after having made all these regrets with Node.js, he was going to do things differently and better. And he took a very pure approach at first to Dino in order to eschew backwards compat and like all to leave node JS behind. But he said he wasn't happy building a runtime for a small group of people. He wanted to build something for the masses.

And he realizes that he will not get mass adoption unless he goes back on some of those ideals and compromises. Point in case is the eventual adoption of the NPM ecosystem and all the work they had to do inside Deno in order to make NPM support happen. Ryan was very torn about that. He did not want to do it, but he just had to, he felt like,

in order to get people, to meet people where they are and to build software for everybody. And that's kind of what ARK is trying to do, right? They're trying to create a browser for everybody. And they just feel like the current one they built was too power user focused. It was too esoteric and too many knobs and switches and things you had to relearn. I was somewhat turned off because of how different it was for me. And they're like, it's never going to get there. Now, Ryan's taking Deno and changing it, and he thinks it can get there.

And time will tell. But with Arc, they're just like, nah, this browser's never going to get there. We're going to start with a new one, which is totally cool. They can go ahead and do that. I'm just not going to try it. I'm out. There's enough browsers out there. I don't need to use one by somebody who's going to

rug pull me again. I do think the premise they have for this new version has some legs, so to speak. Well, they got some stuff out there about it. Same article, just more hints at what the future could be. It says, the goal for the new browser is to turn the browser into an app platform that is

proactive, powerful, and AI-centric. What is not AI-centric these days? The goal is to make the initial user experience seamless to attract a larger audience to explore its capabilities. And then it says the company's... I'm just passing by some of those details.

Oh, I should read this part. The goal is to make the initial user experience seamless and to attract a larger audience, which I just said, to its capabilities, with an interface that more people are used to with horizontal tabs. The company's vision for the new browser involves using AI and machine learning to automate tasks like data transfer between enterprise applications or retrieving order numbers for customer support. That seems kind of niche, but I like the idea, I suppose, of more smarts in the browser. Let other people deal with web standards. That's what Chrome is doing, right?

Safari is doing. Put a layer on top of that that is familiar to the person, not crazily different like Arc was. I love the adventure though. I applaud their courage to do something so different than a typical browser. Because maybe that's actually what got them a lot of the shiny object kind of thing. Like, oh, what's this?

This is the purple cow aspect that Seth Godin talked about, right? Is that here you have this factor of a brand new browser that isn't just simply trying to be faster, better, et cetera. It's like just literally different in terms of user experience and starkly different compared to horizontal tabs. Right.

I could never get past the, like, and I'm a power user. I think I am at least, or I aim to be, or I try to be, or all those to be. You aspire to be a power user. I'm an aspiring power user. You know, and I really tried Arc in earnest several times,

and I was just like, I just can't get used to this experience. I liked other aspects about it, but to my point, though, and to their point is I like the idea of something that builds on top of where the browser is more of a platform in terms of on top of the web. I like the idea of like automating some things, but how does that actually translate? I don't know. We'll see. So Josh Miller is the CEO of the browser company.

And I've DM'd, I believe, on Twitter slash X. And I'm sure that we emailed trying to coordinate. So Josh, if you're listening to this or somebody who knows you, let this be an open invite to dig in. Let's talk about it. Let's go deep on what happened with Arc. What lessons did you learn?

How are you reformulating your IDM plan? Because it is a 2025 plan it's early 2025 so this is not Lady Bird's 2026 beta you know this is it says the new browser expected launch at the

beginning of next year but it's not set in stone and maybe push further into 2025 but their plan is soon and they've been working on this other thing

in parallel so come on here Josh let, let's talk. Yeah, a hundred percent. What's up friends. I'm here with a new friend of ours over at Assembly AI, founder and CEO, Dylan Fox. Dylan, tell me about Universal One. This is the newest, most powerful speech AI model to date.

You released this recently. Tell me more. So Universal One is our flagship industry-leading model for speech-to-text and various other speech understanding tasks. So it's about a year-long effort that really is the culmination of the years that we've spent building infrastructure and tooling at Assembly to even train large-scale speech AI models. It was trained on about 12.5 million hours of voice data, multilingual, super wide range of

domains and sources of audio data. So it's super robust model. We're seeing developers use it for extremely high accuracy, low cost, super fast speech to text and speech understanding tasks within their products, within automations, within workflows that they're building at their companies or within their products. Okay. Constantly updated speech AI models at your fingertips. Well, at your API fingertips, that is. A good next step is to go to their playground. You can test out their models for free right there in the browser, or you can get started with a $50 credit at assemblyai.com slash practical AI. Again, that's assemblyai.com slash practical AI. Are you on officially blue sky? I am not. Do you have an account? I don't think so. I know. I don't think so. I don't think I do either. I could have an account? I don't think so. I know. I don't think so.

I don't think I do either. I could have sworn I created an account. I know that changelog.com is on there, and I've coded against their API, and our platform posts our new stuff there. Right. And so if you want to follow Changelog on Blue Sky, by all means, please do. But I'm not personally on there. And I know that they're getting massive adoption all of a sudden, at least in terms of brand new social networks go.

They're getting a huge uptick. And people are raving. I would love to see a comparison of Blue Sky because the reason why I ask this is there's a headline that you covered, I believe, in news. Blue Sky crosses the 15 million user mark, which is a lot of people. It's not billions. No, it believe, in news. Blue Sky crosses the 15 million user mark, which is a lot of people. It's not billions. No, it's nowhere near threads.

I mean, yeah, exactly. So cross-examine that against obviously X slash Twitter, threads, and then Blue Sky. Is it truly worth, I think the thing I think about is less like, is X for me or is threats for me? And more like is blue sky worth giving any attention to? It's almost

synonymous with ARK in the fact that they're trying to do something different, but kind of the same. Blue sky is not much different. How much different could you make a social media application though? Or a platform? It's not drastically different.

Like even True Social, I think Trump did that, didn't he? I've never been on there. I have no idea. But like every time I saw it in the news, it was like a copy and paste of Twitter slash X posts. Like there's not much

you can revolutionize there. That's what Blue Sky is for the most part. There's a few things that set it apart. Technicalities. But for most people. There's a few things that set it apart, technicalities. But for most people, it's going to be like Twitter minus Elon Musk and crew for the most part. And that's what it looks like at least. And I think that it's not very big because 15 million, while they've had 700,000 coming on a week is what I read on The Verge,

or in the last couple of weeks, probably on a week, is what I read on The Verge, or in the last couple of weeks, probably not a week, but recent weeks, it's not how many people are there, it's who's there to a certain extent. And I think that a lot of developers are going there, which makes it interesting, and creatives. But Threads has something like 275 million people on there.

And so 15 million in that light is a barnacle. You know? A large barnacle. Good throwback. Grant you. But a barnacle. Lots of people were talking it up. You know, Twitter used to be a nice place in the early days

and it feels probably like that. I don't think there's anything inherent in there that makes it not become what Twitter became eventually anyways. And so I think resistance is futile to a certain extent. And I'm at this point in my life, and maybe this is foolish as a podcaster, but like, I'm just ready to opt out of the next thing. Like, let's put ChangeLog on there. But do I want to be on Blue Sky personally? I just really don't care anymore.

I'm kind of over it all. I'm kind of over it all. Social media, I'm talking about. Right. New short form text platforms. Right. Like how much value do they bring to our lives in reality? Well, the value is distribution of ideas.

Obviously, you know this. I'm not speaking to the choir, or I am speaking to the choir. Please keep speaking. Right. So, I mean, to state the obvious, the value is distribution of ideas. And so I think so long as you would like to distribute your ideas, then they do hold a use, whether it's personally or corporately. And, you know, we do the job of spreading and distributing the ideas as a corporation or corporately. We're not literally a corporation. I guess we kind of are. I feel you on that. You know, I've sort of opted out in a way to a lot of these things, I think, to the betterment of my mental health. I didn't do it because I was like,

oh, I'm mentally taxed, let me get off of Instagram. But I can tell you that if you had like a CAT scan on my brain whenever I scan Instagram, comparative to life without Instagram, as an example, this is the one I for sure opted out of. It's just all vanity. Vanity is everywhere out there and it just drives me crazy. It's all comparative, all vanity. Vanity is everywhere out there and it just drives me crazy. It's all comparative,

all vanity. And I just, I'm like you, like I just opted out. And I almost feel like X is the same. Like I don't have much to share there aside from the things we can share. And anything more than that

is just like, I'd rather just share it in like Zulip or Slack or something that's just a bit more focused and a bit more personal. And so I haven't really been in the zone of my life where I want to speak to the masses ad nauseum. I'm just like, yeah, here's the ideas. Take them or not.

And there's lots of people who remember fondly the early days of Twitter, and I am one of them. Me too. I remember that very well. I loved it. And I definitely made a lot of friends that way. I mean, if you look at our lives paths crossing, Twitter played a role in that. Blogs played a role in that. So I got involved in the change log because Wynn Netherland read my blog and I read his

blog. And so we were blog buddies and we were Twitter friends. And Wynn, of course, Adam, you know, I'm not telling you this. I'm telling everybody else. Wynn was one of the original creators of the Change Log and was on the show for a couple of years before moving on, getting a job at GitHub, moving on, in which time I stepped in slowly and became your co-host.

But that all happened because of Twitter plus blogging. And that's radically changed the course of my life. And so I don't, I don't want to discount that. And so maybe that's what I'm doing. I'm discounting those kinds of things because tons of friends and colleagues and interesting people have been met that way. I just don't know if I'm ready to do it all over again. Like I was in my twenties then my 20s then and didn't know a lot of people. And now I've met a lot of people. I don't know. I'm ready to maybe let that be a different person's game.

But Change Dogs should still be there. Which means I have to be there to a certain extent, which also means maybe I have to read stuff and then I get sucked in. I'm just back at some point. I'm like, I'm back. Blue Sky is amazing. Well, I think there's a different version

of being back. There's a back where you consume slash lurk and there's a back where you do that as well as create. Right.

And I would say that's different. Yeah, for sure. Well, I could go Justin Searle's mode so Justin automates everything to all the social networks

and he reads none of them. So it's very, uh, that's the way to do it, man. It's broadcast only. Gosh. And I feel like there's something lame about that.

I've told Justin this to his face, so I'm not calling him out here on the show. He knows I know this. It's kind of lame. Cause you're just like here, my thoughts are interesting, but yours aren't, you know,

it's like, here, read my stuff, but I'm not going to read yours. It's antisocial, but it's also probably he i mean for him because he's obsessed and compulsive he says it's an absolute necessity because he gets obsessed with these things and he can't check them all the time and so because he's unable to regulate that he has to just turn it all off and that makes 100 sense for him so but it's definitely a technique, but if we're all just broadcasting our voices into

the void, then what are we doing here? Which brings us to, maybe we close with this, dead internet theory. I wanted to actually say two things on that. Okay. I do want to say dead internet theory, but I also want to say you should go to conferences. So I think a somewhat segue could be, well, if you don't want to lurk slash non-participate in social media, participate in IRL.

And the best way to do that is the hallway track. And then my other thought was, yes, the dead internet theory. And are we creators of this dead internet? Like you just admitted to having bots out there, essentially. Automated posting to X, literally X and other Xs in terms of variable. So many puns today. Wow.

Sorry about that. Yeah. We're part of the bots. This dead internet theory. What is the dead internet theory, Jared? So to outline the dead internet theory for folks, if you've been listening to Change Dog News, I brought it up probably three or four times

in the last year, because I guess I'm a conspiracy theorist in that way because this is a conspiracy theory. Aren't we all conspiracy theorists in our own special way, by the way? Here's something I've noticed. Aside. Everybody, left, right, and center, up, down, whatever place you are, we all do this. I'm not a conspiracy theorist, but but and then we launch into our newest conspiracy well as humans we are also very prone to believing and listening to conspiracies well we're trying to figure stuff out it's a mystery figure out the world yeah it's totally natural yeah but i just like how everybody has to preface their new theory with right this disclaimer first like listen i'm not a conspiracy theorist but i don't normally dabble in conspiracies.

I don't want to be labeled as a crazy person, but let me tell you about this theory I have. I just think it's funny. We all do it. I've certainly done it. Here's one theory. The dead internet. It asserts that due to a coordinated... Maybe that's where the conspiracy really comes in. An intentional effort, the internet now

consists mainly of bot activity and automatically generated content manipulated by algorithmic curation to control the population and minimize organic human activity. Now, having read the paragraph again, I don't 100% believe that. I don't think it's coordinated and intentional. I think some of it's probably intentional. I don't think it's coordinated. I just think it's incentives working themselves through the human race. I do think it's happening though.

I do think that more and more and more and more, and even more so, we are out there, the few, the proud on the internet, talking to robots who are talking to other robots and to humans to a point where we're just like completely disconnected from actual humans. And how would we ever know? We used to escape by going onto the internet.

Yeah. Now we escape by leaving the internet. Going back to the real world. Yeah. Yeah, that's a good point. A different version I have, this is from the LLMIS, that's TLDR for me. And so it says different versions of it, but it says. Sure.

Mine was Wikipedia. Yeah. And that's probably just fine. What's the good part to read here? Proponents of the theory believe that government agencies and large corporations are responsible for creating fake content and interactions to manipulate the public opinion, control information, and inflate engagement metrics. I mean, there's a lot of fake content out there.

I wouldn't be surprised. There's a lot of, I mean, especially on TikTok. I mean, I've kind of ejected from TikTok. I was listening to that episode we reposted a little while back. It was a really good episode. Let me go and find what that one was again. 10,000 hours? Yeah.

That, you know, lessons learned from 10,000 hours? Yeah. That's, you know, lessons learned from 10,000 hours of programming. Now, I'd actually scanned that episode because it did not have chapters. That's how far back

it was. And you should go listen to it, by the way, listeners, episode 613, 613, changedall.fm

slash 613. And I said on there, I think this is the early days of me mentioning Silicon Valley on this podcast. Because you mentioned TikTok a bunch and I was getting sick of hearing about TikTok.

And you, yeah, this, there's actually, okay, here it is. It's even better. I earmarked it. There is a chapter for this. Oh, nice. I will tell you what it says. It says, and you're going to laugh, Jared, if you didn't pay attention to this yet. Chapter 15, Jared provokes Adam.

I like this. Yeah. What did I say? You basically said you have to mention TikTok every show or something like that. You might as well. I'm paraphrasing. It was something like a dig because it was definitely early days of me mentioning Silicon Valley. I remember your TikTok phase.

I feel like there's just so much information there. Maybe that's why I believe this theory that, or this conspiracy theory at least of this dead internet because I think there's a lot of content on there that's just like somebody is employing somebody just to generate this content so that it can go viral and so that it can affect a mass amount of people to believe a new thing. Like chickens, for example. I've asked this question a few times. My idea or my awareness of this conspiracy theory that if you begin to cultivate, I don't know, what's it called? When you farm, do you farm chickens? You don't farm chickens. You raise chickens.

Yes. Right? That's the term for it. Yeah. What's weird with a spider is it's husbandry. If you caretake a spider, male or female, doesn't matter. The process is called husbandry

anyways i think husbandry speaks to the production process maybe anyways so you're raising some chickens next thing you know you're questioning all life because you realize that the the eggs you're getting from these chickens is nowhere near the eggs you're getting from the chickens at the store unless you're buying the really expensive ones that are cage free and like even then you got all these marketing terms that sort of like curtail the the idea of what an egg is anyways you start oh yeah you know you start doing all this other stuff you know you're now you're living on the land yeah you go deep you know once you take the pill then like a question the chickens are the pill yeah Yeah. The chickens is the,

I think that's fair. I mean, our, uh, my brother and sister-in-law raised chickens and we eat their eggs and they're epically different than what you buy at the store. And they're like, they probably have opinions,

right? They're like, Oh my gosh, don't ever eat the, if you had an egg in your hand, they're like slapping it out of your hand. Yeah. Slap that egg.

The right place to slap an egg. Yeah, no, I get it. I think that that's, is this your theory or did somebody give you this one? This chicken theory? No, that was given to me via TikTok. That's the point. Oh, they gave you that theory.

Yeah, I became aware of this theory on TikTok. So it could be have- Oh, they planted it. This idea was planted so that we now look at things differently i mean i'm not a conspiracy theorist but parts of this dead internet theory ring true to me yes i agree definitely parts of it you know shades of gray on how much of it's true but But it definitely feels like, if not the intentionality, but the effect is 100% true.

Like there's just way more, there's way more noise than there ever has been on the internet. And I think a lot of that noise is manufactured because it's so easy to manufacture noise and easier than ever to manufacture noise that looks like a human. Well, I think it could be where they literally are using real humans.

Like, it doesn't have to be generated. It could be... Well, they use people as vessels. For instance, whoever wanted to get this chicken theory out there, they got Adam Stachowiak. And look what you're doing with it, dude. You're spreading it. I'm spreading it. Far and wide.

So many places. You are a pawn. And I think that we should close right there. I believe so. Go to conferences shout out to the author of that post sophie coon

at local ghost dot dev great domain great website shout out to sophie for writing that one and that's it

we'll throw the other links that we didn't talk about in the show into the show notes in case you want to do some more

reading I think there's two or three that we passed on but why not share them as well just in case you want to do some more reading. I think there's two or three that we passed on, but why not share them as well just in case you want to dive a little deeper. I have one for our Plus Plus audience. Can we do that? All right. Let's say goodbye to our friends and we'll see you all next week. Goodbye, friends.

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