The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Trogon, StableStudio, life after Apple, Google's problematic new TLDs & how to discuss programming languages (News)

Episode Date: May 22, 2023

Will McGugan's Trogon auto-generates friendly TUIs for your CLI apps, Stability AI's official open source variant of DreamStudio, John Calhoun writes about life after 26 years programming at Apple, Google's news TLDs could be a boon to scammers & Pablo Meier documents a way to discuss programming languages.

What up nerds, I'm Jared and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, May 22nd, 2023. I know, I know, we are pumping out 5-ish hours of podcasts each week and some of you don't have time to keep up with all that. One friend slash listener recently confessed to me that news is the only thing he listens to because, hey, it's only eight minutes and that's all he has. For those feeling the pain, we got your back. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to get all the highlights. We also post to Instagram reels and TikTok if that's your bag. I don't even know what this is. This sort of thing ain't my bag, baby. Okay, let's get into the news. Will McGugan from Textualize,

who we interviewed on the pod last year, is at it again. This time, he's using his TUI creation skills to help Python devs wrap friendly terminal user interfaces around their existing command line apps with his new project, Trogon. Will says, quote, Trogon inspects existing command line apps with his new project, Trogon. Will says, quote, Trogon inspects your command line app and extracts a schema which describes the options slash switches slash help, etc. It then uses that information to build a textual UI you can use to

edit and run the command. Ultimately, we would like to formalize this schema and a protocol to extract or expose it from apps. This would allow Trogon to build TUIs for any CLI app regardless of how it was built. If you are familiar with Swagger, think Swagger for CLIs. End quote. Swagger for CLIs could be pretty cool. Trogon only works for Python CLIs and specifically those using the Qlik library, but as you can see from Will's words, they have much bigger plans in the works. Dream Studio is Stability AI's hosted, powerful web app for generative image creation. It's free to try, but you quickly hit up against a paywall when you want to do any serious work with it. This is one of the ways the company, which is famous for releasing the open source stable diffusion models, makes money. I'm sure they have other plans to make money as well,

because they raised over $100 million, and you know their investors are bullish on their future profit-generating power. Many FOSS alternatives to Dream Studio exist, but now stability is entering the fray itself with Stable Studio, a first-party community interface for generative AI. What's the difference between Stable Studio and Dream Studio? Not much. They removed some Dream Studio specific branding, turned their API calls into a plugin system so it can talk to different backends, and yanked out business-y features like billing, API key management, etc. Other than that, they're the same.

I'm not sure what this means for Stability's ability to charge people for Dream Studio, but I do respect their predilection to open source, what they're working on. John with an H Calhoun, not to be confused with John without an H Calhoun from GoTime, retired from Apple one and a half years ago after 26 years in Cupertino and was surprised to find out that he is now programming full-time again, but for himself. John says, quote, Though I eventually began programming again, in the first 14 months of retirement, I did all manner of other things

in my spare time as well. I kept also busy with woodworking projects, experiments learning Blender and 3D printing, bike riding, just to name a few. But somehow this year I have found myself tipping headlong back into full-time programming. It is distinctly reminding me of my sleepless days spent writing chairware games for the Macintosh 35 years ago. I'm not sure if that is a good thing. I am back to coding late into the night and back at it after coffee and an English muffin the next morning. Thankfully, though, I quit the cigarettes decades ago. Programming is beginning again to be the exclusion of all else in my life. The table saw sits slowly rusting.

The bike hangs on the wall in the garage. End quote. What's more surprising, he's coding with and against his old nemesis, C. This is like when Spock had to fight Kirk on Star Trek. Best friends forced to do battle. John's many years of experience and hard-earned wisdom come through in his prose. I'll definitely subscribe to read more of what he writes and we might need to get him on the podcast

if we can tear him away from his code editor long enough for a conversation. You know what time it is. It's sponsored news time. Having a clear view of the entire operation flow of a specific action from the front end to the database is a huge advantage for any project. Distributed tracing provides exactly that, but it isn't always straightforward how to get there. That's why the Sentry team put together an eight video series demonstrating how to use Sentry's SDK to implement distributed tracing in a Next.js app. So sit back, relax,

and level up your skills by learning all about distributed tracing from the experts at Sentry. The link is in the newsletter and chapter data thanks to Sentry for sponsoring this week's edition of Changelog News. In what appears to be a particularly security unaware move, Google has added eight new top-level domains, two of which are quite concerning,.zip and.mov. Yikes. Ars Technica writes, quote, while Google marketers say the aim is to designate tying things together or moving really fast, and moving pictures and whatever moves you, these suffixes are already widely used to designate something altogether different.

Specifically,.zip is an extension used in archive files that use a compression format known as zip. The format.mov, meanwhile, appears at the end of video files, usually when they were created in Apple's QuickTime format. Fishers and scammers rejoice. The rest of us, beware and be ready to help protect your family and friends from this otherwise completely avoidable new threat vector. The linked Ars Technica article demonstrates a few URLs scammers could now craft, and they're darn near indistinguishable from the legit URL,

even to someone like myself with trained eyes. One such URL in the example is a Kubernetes release, which, yes, is distributed as a zip file. Pablo Meyer was frustrated when he and a friend sat down to discuss their differing opinions on Go and Rust, but ended up talking past each other due to their differing values. Pablo says, quote, This was not a fruitful conversation. I think we both felt like we weren't valuing what the other cared about.

When people talk about languages they like or dislike, I group the things people talk about into three broad categories, which I'll call soil, surface, and atmosphere. End quote. He defines soil as the properties of running code in that language, surface as the features, and atmosphere as the broader community around the language. No taxonomy is perfect, but I do find it useful to have shared nomenclature when discussing complex topics such as programming language choice. Check Pablo's post for more detailed descriptions of those categories, and stick around to the end for some solid flame bait. That is the news for now.

If you're hankering for more, scan through the companion newsletter for additional stories on data visualization techniques, an e-paper computer for hackers, writing Python like it's Rust, numbers every LLM dev should know, and more. On Wednesday's interview show, we're bringing you three awesome convos

from the hallway track at OS Summit. Byung-Loo from Sourcecraft talking Cody, Danny Lee from Databricks talking Dolly 2.0. And Stella Bitterman talking Eleuther AI. Have a great week. Share the changelog with a friend who might dig it. And I'll talk to you again real soon.