The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Leaked GPT prompts & Firefox on the brink (News)

Episode Date: December 4, 2023

ChatGPT's new GPTs feature leak their prompts, Firefox's share of the browser market will soon drop below 2%, Robin Berjon tries to formalize a name for those who can't be named, Amy Lai tells the tale of the weirdest bug she's ever seen & Facundo Olano trumps the "code is read more than written" cliche with his own: "code is run more than read."

What up, nerds? I'm Jared, and this is ChangeLog News for the week of Monday, December 4th, 2023. Our sixth annual State of the Log episode is coming right up, and we need your help to make it extra special. We only have two submissions so far. That's not enough. So please leave us a voice message with your favorite moments, guests, topics, or episodes from the past year. If your message is used on the show, we'll hook you up with a free ChangeLog t-shirt. Seriously, do it, do it. Submit yours at changelog.fm slash s-o-t-l. Once again, that's changelog.fm slash s-o- SOTL, short for state of the log. Okay, let's get into

the news. The biggest product news out of OpenAI recently is GPTs, custom versions of chat GPT that you can create and sell for specific purposes. You build these GPTs by crafting special prompts that are fed to chat GPT to it interacting with a user. Is it any surprise that crafty technologists have convinced ChatGPT to spit out a bunch of these custom prompts via prompt injection? I wasn't surprised, but I was a bit delighted to read through the collection of GPT prompts to see what they're made of. This Gen Z 4 meme prompt, which helps you understand the lingo and latest memes that Gen Z are into, is kind of hilarious. Quote,

The answer must be an informal tone, use slang, abbreviations, and anything that can make the message sound hip. Especially use Gen Z slang, as opposed to millennials. The list below has a list of Gen Z slang also speak in low caps, end quote. Low caps, more like no cap. Am I right? I'm so old. Fair warning, though, from the collector of these leaked prompts who says, quote, there is no guarantee that these prompts are the original prompts and these leaked prompts are for reference only. Unless something drastic happens, Firefox's share of the browser market will soon drop below 2%. Why does that matter? Because the US and British

governments officially support any browser above 2% usage as observed by analytics.usa.gov. Bryce Ray writes, quote, in my days in tech marketing, we used to worry about how a dominant competitor would take shelf space in those large stores where we wanted visibility for our goods and their accompanying point-of-purchase brochures. Remember point-of-purchase literature, fellow oldsters? No, I do not. losing, quote, web space thanks to a perfect storm that's been kicked up by the dominance of Chrome, the popularity of mobile devices that run Safari by default, and many corporate and government IT shops' insistence that their users rely on only Microsoft's Chromium-based Edge browser while toiling away each day, end quote. Bryce goes on to describe what he thinks will happen if and when the U.S. web design system drops Firefox support and, spoiler alert, it's not good. In a post titled Chimeraologists, Robin Bergeon tries to

formalize a name to describe people with a certain set of skills that likely resonate with Changelog News listeners. Robin says, quote, no one can explain what you do. Let's face it, you don't do a great job explaining it either. People come to you for advice on issues that they introduce with, I'm not entirely sure how to describe this problem or what exactly I'm looking to do here, but your colleagues and your communities genuinely value your contributions, even as they remain entirely mystified by the exact contour of your position. Whatever you listed on your resume as tangible, easy to summarize, accomplishments from previous jobs is real, but it fails to capture a lot of what you did. People suggest

the most surprising jobs to you compared to what you're actually interested in or capable of. End quote. The name he chooses is technologist because the set of skills he describes are, quote, the skill sets you need to understand technology. Is this you? Robin thinks you might be in need of a club, any starting one, informally. Quote, having heard from many of you and from personal experience, the kind of struggle technologists face to position themselves clearly in their work lives, I think it's about time we got together to define the profession. What would you say you do here?

Who knows? We might even find a way to explain the job to others. Amy Lai from Gusto Engineering tells the tale of the weirdest bug she's ever seen and how she tracked it down. Clever girl. You've likely been down a rabbit hole that starts something like this. Quote, during one of my on-call rotations for our internal tools team,

we got a report that Chrome was crashing for our users of Gusto's internal software. This was causing all sorts of interruptions to our normal customer service, end quote. However, you've likely never gotten to the end of said rabbit hole and been able to say what Amy says. Quote, I would never ever have guessed that the treasure at the end of the debugging rainbow was an animated gif, end quote. I'll leave out the middle because like any good murder mystery,

the best part is going along for the ride. Let's do some sponsored news. On Thursday, December 14th, Sentry is doing a free web browser performance webinar. Quote, nothing drives users away faster than sluggish load times. Join us as we walk through how to solve front-end performance issues

to speed up your LCP and keep users from abandoning your site. End quote. During the session, they will cover interpreting your app's performance score, how to take action on web vitals, and profiling in-browser JavaScript for code-level bottlenecks.

Sign up using the link in the show notes and bring your questions. There will be a Q&A at the end of the stream. You've likely heard the phrase, code is read more than written. What's the takeaway to that fact? The maintainer is greater than the author. That's true, but according to Facundo Olano, it's not the whole truth. Facundo says, quote, This is why he emphasizes that while code is read more than written,

code is also run more than it's read. What's the takeaway to that fact? The user is greater than the dev. In addition to explaining the above, Facundo goes through a series of greater than comparisons and describes their implications. Unusable software? The dev is greater than the user. Works on my machine? The dev is greater than comparisons, and describes their implications. Unusable software? The dev is greater than the user. Works on my machine? The dev is greater than ops.

And so on. An interesting, fun read. Check it out. That is your news for now, but don't forget to scan our companion newsletter for five more interesting links, including Neil Gaiman's radical vision for the future of the Internet and a study of Google's internal code review tooling. If you haven't signed up yet, changelog.com slash news.

Stay tuned right here. On the ChangeLog this week, we have an awesome interview with Drew DeVault from SourceHut, all about Hair, a programming language which aims to become a 100-year language. Have a great week. Tell your friends about ChangeLog News if you dig it, and I'll talk to you again real soon.