The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - The slow death of the hyperlink (News)

Episode Date: October 7, 2024

A bias against hyperlinking has developed on platforms, GitHub engineering continues to evolve Issues, Evan You announces VoidZero, some companies are only pretend hiring & Klaas van Schelven asks: does it scale (down)?

What up, nerds? I'm Jared, and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, October 7th, 2024. Do you remember that dead internet theory I was talking about a few weeks back that maybe the internet now consists mainly of bot activity? Well, here's one more piece of evidence that gives credence to the idea. Alan Hamlet reports that of product hunts, 1 million plus user signups, more than 60% are bots. That's astounding. Two questions. How high will that percentage be five years from now? And are we past the point of no return? Oh well, let's get in to this week's news. The slow death of the

hyperlink. The linked article about linking incentives is framed in the context of journalism, but its implications are wide sweepingsweeping and profoundly disturbing. Quote, there is a real bias against hyperlinking that has developed on platforms and apps over the last five years in particular. It's something that's kind of operating hand-in-hand with the rise of algorithmic recommendations. You see this on Elon Musk's version of Twitter, where posts with hyperlinks are degraded. Facebook itself has decided to detach itself from displaying a lot of links. That's why you get so much AI scum on Facebook these days.

Instagram itself has always been kind of hostile to linking. TikTok as well. If you degrade hyperlinks and you degrade this idea of the internet as something that refers you to other things, you instead have this stationary internet where a generative AI agent will hoover up and summarize all the information that's out there and place it right in front of you so that you never have to leave the portal. End quote. This hyperlink degradation they're talking about by the big social networks is entirely real and entirely maddening. Here at ChangeLog, we are completely antithetical to all of that. Our entire purpose

is to act as pointers to interesting stuff that other people are doing. On this point, I align with Nilay Patel, who says that The Verge is going to revolutionize the media through blog posts. That might not sound revolutionary, but in today's internet economy, it certainly is. Evolving GitHub Issues It's nice to see GitHub isn't completely ignoring one of their most used subsystems. Quote, today we are excited to unveil a major evolution of issues and projects featuring a range of highly requested enhancements, including sub-issues, issue types, and advanced search for issues. Together, these additions make it easier than ever to break down work, visualize progress, categorize, and find just the right issue in GitHub. End quote. Sub-issues and issue types in particular look very useful and quite well done. Kudos to the team.

And nary a mention of AI, which is refreshing as well. Evan Yu announces Void Zero. Here's Vue.js creator Evan Yu. Quote, I have founded Void Zero Inc., a company dedicated to building an open source, high performance, and unified development tool chain for the JavaScript ecosystem. We have raised $4.6 million in seed funding, led by Excel. End quote. Evan wants us to imagine a tool chain that is unified, high performance, composable, and runtime agnostic. He goes on, quote, such a toolchain will not only enhance Vite, but also drive significant

improvements throughout the JavaScript ecosystem. This is an ambitious vision and achieving it requires a full-time dedicated team, something that wasn't possible under the independent sustainability model of my past projects. This is why Void Zero was founded. End quote. My biggest question is addressed at the bottom of their FAQ. Why will this be different from previous attempts to create a unified JS toolchain? The answer? The biggest challenge of a unified toolchain is the 0 to 1 problem.

It needs to gain critical mass for exponential adoption to justify continued development. But it's hard to cross the chasm before it actually fulfills the vision. Void Zero does not have this problem because Vite is already the fastest growing toolchain in the JavaScript ecosystem. End quote. Kball and I discussed this announcement and many of its implications on this upcoming Thursday's episode of JS Party. It's now time for sponsored news.

Server-full JavaScript without serverless hassles. Imagine if a server could boot as fast as a serverless function. That's Fly Machines, the backbone of Fly's public cloud that puts developers first. Serverless compute is a trade-off you no longer need to make. Fly lets you graduate to a full-stack cloud and regain control of your hosting bill. Here's three reasons why Fly is rad. One, functions and apps boot and respond to web requests in 250 milliseconds or less with Fly machines.

You decide to keep them running or automatically put them to sleep. Two, JavaScript, TypeScript, Bun, Deno, whatever your flavor is. Fly launch automatically detects your runtime and generates a VM with everything you need to run your app. Three, run workloads that require GPUs or lots of CPUs, memory, and storage in over 30 regions around the world, all interconnected by a private encrypted WireGuard network that works out of the box. We love Fly and you might too. Learn more about it at fly.io. When companies are only pretend hiring. This AskHN post by user Neil K is something Johnny Borsico has brought up on GoTime as well. Here's Neil Kaye, quote,

I'm looking for a job, and like many people in this situation, am finding it unusually difficult. I've read rumors that many firms are actually in a hiring freeze, but they keep job recs open for appearances. Apparently, some investors use job postings as a company health metric. For my contacts, I am personally aware of situations where internally recommended CVs are ignored by HR and other cases had open job postings and passed people

successfully through the interview process and then the hiring manager still didn't pull the trigger. I have no way of knowing how widespread this is, but it is happening at some places. End quote. The comments on that HN thread mostly corroborate the rumor. One commenter says, Be careful out there and give yourself a little bit of leeway. Maybe you didn't get the job, but then again, maybe nobody got the job. Does it scale down? Here's Klaus Van Shelven. Quote, it's 2024 and software is in a ridiculous state. Microservices, Kubernetes, Kafka, Elasticsearch, load balancers, sharded databases, Redis caching, for everything.

Everything's being built like it's about to hit a billion users overnight. Well, guess what? You don't need all that stuff. End quote. I have to agree with Kloss. This is why Yagni, you ain't gonna need it, or you aren't gonna need it if you prefer proper English, is probably my most used programming principle. Kloss nails it. Quote, scaling isn't wrong, but scale down first.

Start small, grow when needed, optimize for iteration speed. That's the news for now. But this is episode number 115. So that means it's time once again for some Changelog++ shoutouts. Shoutout to our newest members, Gabriel P, Rayan A, Anthony J, Alex R, Torbjorn F, Thomas M, Robert C, Christopher D, and Matthew H. We appreciate you for supporting our work with your hard-earned cash. If ChangeLog++ is new to you, that's our membership program that you can join to ditch the ads, get closer to the metal with bonus content, receive a free sticker pack in the mail,

build your own custom feeds, directly support our work, and get shout outs like the ones you just heard. Check it out at changelog.com slash plus plus. Changelog plus plus. It's better. Have a great week. Share the show with your friends who might dig it. And I'll talk to you again real soon.