The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - New OpenAI APIs, self-hosting all the things, the Dart Frog project, curl's NuGet story & Hacker Stations (News)

Episode Date: March 6, 2023

Reorx lists awesome apps & tools using the new ChatGPT API, Ernie Smith ranks self-hosted app alternatives, Very Good Ventures brings Dart to the server, Daniel Stenberg tells curl's NuGet story & Hacker Stations showcases tech workspace setups from all over the world.

What up nerds, I'm Jared and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, January 6th, 2023. It's time once again for some Changelog++ shoutouts. It's all about putting on a show. Thank you to our new members, Mark, Andy, Lars, Andre, Matt, and Robert. It means so much to us that you choose to support our work with your hard-earned cash. Seriously, thank you. If Changelog++ is news to you, learn all about it at changelog.com slash plus plus.

Ditch the ads, get extended episodes, and shout outs from me on this very program. Once again, that's changelog.com slash plus plus. Check it. Okay, let's get into the news. The biggest announcement of late is OpenAI's new chat GPT and Whisper APIs, which let you integrate these two models with your apps or products. The biggest news of the big news, the price. The ChatGPT model is priced at $0.002 per 1,000 tokens, which is 10 times cheaper than their existing GPT 3.5 models. That's $2 per million tokens generated. And the Whisper model is priced at $0.006 per minute or $0.36 per hour of audio. Now, Whisper is also open source, which means you can run it yourself for the cost of electricity,

but it can be difficult to run, so they're aiming for convenience here. Side note, Georgi Gerganov created whisper.cpp, a high-performance port of whisper to C++ that is a lot simpler and easier to run than OpenAI's Python-based tooling. He's also agreed to come on the changelog to tell us about it. I'm very excited for that conversation. We have a dog in this hunt, our transcripts. Instead of pointing you to OpenAI's API announcement post, I'd like to highlight a GitHub repo by user Ryorix called Awesome Chat GPT API. Awesome!

It's a curated list of apps and tools that not only use the new API, but also allow users to configure their own API keys, enabling free and on-demand usage of their own quota. In addition, there's also a development section which features projects and articles to help you get going. That's where I'd start if I were digging in. In a world where every service wants to put you on a subscription forever, and now it's time for Everybody Loves Hypnotoad. Even in a depression, the entertainment industry thrives. Is now the

time to start self-hosting your apps instead? Ernie Smith looks at the landscape in TDM, a web publication about the dull side of the internet. Ernie tries out alternatives in the realms of web analytics, email newsletters, no-code automation, and calendar booking. He then offers up three options that fit a Goldilocks model. Too hot, too cold, or just right. Can open-source, self-hosted alternatives dethrone Google Analytics, MailChimp, Zapier, and Calendly? The short answer is yes and no. For the long answer, read Ernie's analysis.

Lorraine Lawson at the Newstack writes, quote, Dart is best known for its use in Flutter and its deployment in mobile apps, but a new framework called Dart Frog All glory to the Hypno-Toad mobile apps, but a new framework called Dart Frog allows developers to leverage Dart on the backend. It's the creation of Very Good Ventures, a consulting firm that specializes in Flutter applications. VGV is best known for the Hamilton app, yes, the musical, which was one of the first commercial apps built with Flutter outside of Google. Dart Frog is still a young project, but it is stable and working towards a 1.0 release.

We've been asked a few times to discuss Dart on the changelog, but to be honest, I didn't think the language was going to make it outside of Google's walls. Flutter sure seems to have changed the calculus on that. So, should we do a show on this? And if we do, who would be the best guest for such a conversation? Let us know in the comments. When it comes to the open source software supply chain, there's been many debates about the supplier part of that supply chain moniker. A supplier has a contractual agreement with its customers. Hey, if you want me to take a dump in a box and mark it guaranteed, I will. I got spare time.

But for now, for your customer's sake, for your daughter's sake, you might want to think about buying a quality product from me. Okay, I'll buy from you. Oh, that's... What? But open source devs provide their wares for free

and without any warranties. That means they aren't technically suppliers, they're just creators and gift givers. Curl creator slash maintainer Daniel Stenberg says it gets even more complicated than that because there are also intermediates. And to drive this home, he tells the story of Curl and Nougat. The TLDR is that Microsoft hosts the Nougat package registry

and somebody who is neither Daniel nor Microsoft registered a curl package there that was last updated in 2013. The consequence of this? NuGet has been serving up a version of curl with 68 documented vulnerabilities. I'm so embarrassed. I wish everybody else was dead. This sent Daniel on a wild goose chase to fix things up. Definitely read his post for the full story. Speaking of Daniel, his home office hardware and software setup were recently featured on HackerStations, a collection of workspace setups by tech professionals from all over the world. Whether you are looking for inspiration for your own setup,

or just want to see how others design their workspaces for focus and productivity, this website and newsletter is a lot of fun to follow. That is the news for now. This week on The Change Log, Adam talks with Marcin Kirk, founder and CEO at Noble9, about all things SLOs. I'll leave you today with a quote from Joshua Block, learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them. Have a great week. Share the show with a friend if you dig it. And we'll talk to you again real soon.