The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Syncthing, Thunderbird, Baseline & vector databases (News)

Episode Date: May 15, 2023

Thunderbird is thriving on small donations, Syncthing is a super-cool continuous file sync program, LLMs are so hot right now and they're making vectors hot by proxy & MDN defines a Baseline for stable web features.

What up nerds, I'm Jared and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, May 15th, 2023. Adam and I had a blast in Vancouver at OS Summit last week hanging out and recording conversations in GitHub's Maintainer Month booth. We saw old friends, made some new ones, and even got out into the city a little bit. The first episode with interviews from the hallway track will drop next week. I think you're going to like it. Okay, let's get into the news. So, Thunderbird, the FOSS email app that's been around a long time but kind of flies under the radar, was in survival mode a few

years ago, but now it's thriving thanks to, wait for it, user donations. Last year, their donor base contributed a total of $6,442,000. Even better, they don't have any major donors. 95% of donations were less than a hundred bucks. The average is $1578 and the largest single donation was 3,000 euro. Congrats to the Thunderbird team and community for sustaining a project the traditional way, the way nobody thinks will work. SyncThing is a super cool continuous file sync program. Now, it does have 51,000 plus stars on GitHub already, so this might only be news to me. But still, I wanted to feature it because it has no central server, encrypts all network communications, has an open protocol, it's cross-platform, there's no manual network config,

and the list of goodness goes on and on. This one has me wondering why we're still using Dropbox. Too good to be true? If you're a SyncThing user and can confirm or deny, I'd love to hear about it. Holla at your boy. Holla at your boy. LLMs are so hot right now. So hot right now. And they're making vectors hot by proxy. The reason for this is that AI models generate vector embeddings, a type of data representation

that carries semantic information that's critical for inference purposes. We have clearance, Clarence. Roger, roger. What's our vector, Victor? I'm still wrapping my head around all of this, and this post by Pinecone called What is a Vector Database does a great job of explaining why vector embeddings are useful, differentiating between vector indexes and vector databases, and laying out how vector databases work.

Side note, Pinecone is a venture-funded purveyor of vector databases, so keep that in mind while reading. For an even deeper dive on the topic, which also happens to be with a Pinecone employee, these folks sure know how to content market, check out episode 139 of Practical AI titled Vector Databases for Machine Learning. Heads up, sponsored news. Take Postman's 2023 State of the API survey. It takes about 15 minutes to fill out. They'll email you the full report

once it's done. But most importantly, you can win prizes. Up for grabs are one Sony PlayStation 5, one Steam Deck, five $100 Amazon gift cards, and 10 $50 gift certificates for Postman swag. Link in the chapter data and newsletter. Thank you to Postman for sponsoring Changelog News. Believe it or not, MDN just got even better. Hermina Kondai announces, quote, starting today, MDN is introducing baseline labeling on our site, and we plan to cover all relevant features in the coming months, end quote. This is a big win for being able to quickly determine if a web feature you want to use is good to go, broadly speaking. No need to check caniuse.com because a baseline graphic will be right there alongside each feature's docs, letting you know with a glance if that feature is available in what they have defined as the, quote, core browser set.

This set includes the two most recent major versions of Firefox, Chrome, Edge, and Safari. That is the news for now, but it's time once again for shoutouts to our latest Changelog++ members. H, Stephen, Patrick, John, Marcus, Emily, Daniel, Ryan, Constantine, and Andrew for directly supporting our work, making the ads disappear from all of our episodes, and getting in on bonus content and other goodies. We appreciate you. If you also get value from our podcast and want to support everything we do here at Changelog, check out our membership at changelog.com slash plus plus. ChangeLog plus plus. It's better. On Wednesday's interview episode, we sit down with the one and only Sarah Drasner to discuss her new book, Engineering Management, for the rest of us.

All right. Have a great week. Share this with your friends if you dig it. And we'll talk to you again real soon.