The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Share your terminal with anyone on the web (News)

Episode Date: November 13, 2023

sshx lets you share your terminal with anyone on a multiplayer infinite canvas, Herbert Lui writes three things about your competitors, Anton Medvedev's fx is a terminal JSON viewer & processor, Danny Castonguay shares advice on attending large conferences & Jeremy Pinto's experimental RAGTheDocs project is working toward an exciting reality.

What up nerds, I'm Jared and this is ChangeLog News for the week of Monday, November 13th, 2023. Most of the buzz of late is in response to OpenAI's Dev Day keynote, where they announced GPT-4 Turbo and no-code custom AI agents they're calling GPTs. It's still early, but OpenAI is looking a lot like the iPhone of this new platform opportunity, App Store and all. If true, this begs the question, what might be the Android of AI? Oh, and at Universe, GitHub said they've been refounded on Copilot.

But I think that's silly, so I'm not really going to talk about it any further. Okay, let's get into the news. SSHX lets you share your terminal with anyone using a link on a multiplayer infinite canvas. It has real-time collaboration with remote cursors and all. It's also fast and end-to-end encrypted with a lightweight server written in Rust, so you know it's cool. All you have to do is install the open source CLI by curling sshx.io slash get and piping that to your shell. Or build it from source, if that's more your thing.

This gives you the sHX command, which when executed, kicks off a live encrypted session. Send the link to anyone you want to join, and they open it up in a browser. Resizing, moving windows, zoom and pan, they all work. You can see other people's cursors in real time and more. Check it out at sshx.io. Herbert Liu has a blog on creativity, marketing, and the human condition, where he recently published a brief post called Three Things About Your Competitors. Thing one is, quote, if a tattoo artist does a good job the first time you get a tattoo, you'll be interested in getting more tattoos. They've just created an opportunity for other artists. Thing two is, quote, if somebody reads a book about creativity

they're probably actually more likely to read another book about the topic, not less. And thing three summarizes things one and two, quote, while competitive energy can be helpful it's certainly not the only or the most accurate way to see the world. There are enough problems to go around, and a problem often requires more than one solution. End quote. That is the entire post, so no need to go read it. But if you're picking up what Herbert's putting down with this one, check out his other writings.

He even has a book titled Creative Doing, which is linked up in this week's newsletter. It's sponsor news time. This week is Sentry's big launch week. Five days of new features that you probably won't hate. Tune into their daily video drop on YouTube at 9 a.m. Pacific, or if you're too busy for all that, follow the link in the show notes and chapter data, enter your email address,

and get all the announcements sent to your inbox, plus enter to win some sweet, sweet Sentry swag. Congrats to Sentry on all the big features they're launching this week, and thanks once again for sponsoring Changelog News. There are now umpteen ways to deal with JSON in your terminal, and FX by Anton Medvedev looks like a great one. It's written in Go, so efficient performance and universal binaries mean easy installation. It's interactive, which means you can visualize the JSON tree structure, folding and unfolding areas that interest you. Plus, it supports streaming JSON data, which helps process large datasets. It has JSON common support, mouse support, and clipboard integration. Looks nice. Check it out for yourself at fx.wtf. Danny Kastengui's team at Build.ai are attending

COP28 in Dubai alongside 70,000 other people. So he wrote up some advice that resonated with me having attended KubeCon last week. Danny says, quote, Large conferences can be chaotic and draining. The fear of missing out is real. I recommend steering clear of the main stages unless there's a superstar speaker you're eager to meet. Instead, prioritize scheduling in-depth, one-on-one interactions with a few individuals you're looking to build lasting connections with. End quote.

He says a good rule of thumb is to add one to three at most new connections per day. This would have been good advice for me before I left for KubeCon. Cue up Robbie Hart from The Wedding Singer. Once again, things that could have been brought to my attention yesterday! Jeremy Pinto's experimental RAG the Docs project is working toward a reality I'm very much excited about. It's an open source library that enables a one-click deploy of retrieval augmented generation, RAG, on any read the docs documentation to Hugging Face spaces. RAG, for the uninitiated, is an AI framework for improving the quality of LLM-generated responses by grounding the model on external sources of knowledge to supplement the LLM's internal representation of information. In the case of Rag the Docs, that external source of knowledge is your project's docs, of course. How it works. Rag the Docs automatically scrapes and

embeds documentation from any website generated by Read the Docs slash Sphinx using OpenAI embeddings. It also ships with a Gradio UI for users to interact with and lets you customize the experience as well. It's early days and still an experiment, but there's a lot of potential here to have custom-tuned LLMs who have automatically read the docs, so we don't have to. That's the news for now, but it's time once again for some Changelog++ shoutouts. Shoutout to our newest members, Alexander C, Ayaz K, Nathan S, Pascal P, Gilberto C., Matthew S., Isaac, Daniel T., Valon L., Jacob C., and Seven Ears. We appreciate you for supporting our work with your hard-earned cash. If Changelog++ is news to you, that's our membership program.

You can join to ditch the ads, get closer to the metal with bonus content, directly support our work, and get shout outs like the ones you just heard. ChangeLog++. It's better. Have a great week. Hook us up with a five-star review if you dig it, and I'll talk to you again real soon.