The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source - Watching OpenAI unravel in real-time (News)

Episode Date: November 20, 2023

The internet watches OpenAI unravel in real-time, tldraw has a new experiment going with GPT-4 Vision that turns mockups into code, Tony Ennis makes the case for HTML First, James Somers writes a "eulogy" to coding for The New Yorker & Laurence Tratt describes and details four kinds of optimisation.

What up nerds! I'm Jared and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, November 20th, 2023. Merch alert! Our merch shop is all stocked up except for a few go-time variants. So, if you've been holding on to a coupon code or just waiting for your size to be available, now's the time to buy. We even have Kaizens available, but not for long. Get yours at merch.changelog.com.

Okay, let's get into the news. The OpenAI unraveling is still underway and it's all happening so quickly that my coverage might be outdated by the time you're hearing this. The major events thus far, in case you weren't plugged in over the weekend, and yes, all of this happened in the course of about 72 hours. First, OpenAI's board announced that co-founder slash CEO Sam Altman was fired. The reason, quote, he was not consistently candid in his communications with the board, end quote. Then co-founder Greg Brockman, GDB, quits in response to Sam's ouster. Then Sam tweets, quote, I love the OpenAI team so much, end quote. A seemingly coordinated barrage of OpenAI employees quote tweet his tweet

with the heart emoji. Then Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella gets furious, demands the board reinstate Sam. After rumors swirled that they would renege, the board doubles down on its decision and hires former Twitch boss Emmett Shear as the interim CEO. Microsoft then hires Sam and Greg. Sam is named CEO of a new advanced AI research team. Then nearly all 700 OpenAI employees threaten to resign and join Microsoft. Are you out of breath yet? I haven't even mentioned any of the reasoning,

the analyses, or backroom whisperings. And I won't, because they're probably wrong, and they will definitely be outdated faster than your local Firefox install. There will be countless blog posts, threads, books, and maybe even movies telling this tale once we can look back at it and gather all the evidence. But for today, all I will say is that this is the biggest shakeup in the tech industry since last November, when these same people launched J ChatGPT in the first place. TL Draw, the very good free whiteboard, has a new experiment going with GPT-4 Vision where it will take a picture of the mockup that you created, send the picture to GPT-4V, and get back the HTML and CSS for a working website based on the drawing.

Wes Boss posted a quick demo video on YouTube where the feature makes him utter such adjectives as That's unreal. It's pretty impressive. Unbelievable. The source code is out there and you can try it for yourself if you're okay with sticking your OpenAI API key into somebody else's

web app. This seems to be the start of something very cool. TL Draw's Steve Ruiz says, quote, we've barely scratched the surface of what you can do with this technology, and we can't possibly explore it all. Our hope is that you can take this starter and run with it too. You've got a canvas that can hold the whole internet and an AI that can see and think, what will you make? HTML First is a set of principles that aims to make building web software easier, faster, more inclusive, and more maintainable by leveraging the default capabilities of modern web

browsers, leveraging the extreme simplicity of HTML's attribute syntax, and leveraging the web's view source affordance. That's a lot of leverage. I hope nobody gets hurt. Tony Ennis, the author of the HTML First website, says, The main goal of HTML First is to substantially widen the pool of people who can work on web software codebases. A second goal of HTML First is to make it more enjoyable and seamless to build web software. The way we achieve these goals is by acknowledging that HTML is very easy to understand,

and thus using HTML as the bedrock of our product, not only to define content and structure, but also to set styling and behaviors. End quote. As we've seen in the previous TL Draw story, HTML is also very easy to generate. Another great reason to use it as the bedrock of your product. It's now time for some sponsored news. Our friends at Neon have been taking the developer world by storm with their serverless Postgres offering. What makes Neon's Postgres different? They separate storage and compute to make on-demand scalability possible.

Compute activates on an incoming connection and scales to zero when not in use. Their storage is different too. The fault-tolerant scale-out system integrates with cloud object stores like S3 to offload cold data for cost optimization. Very cool stuff. Plus, their Developer Days event is happening this week. Tune in to learn all about the new stuff they've been cooking up for Postgres

and Neon users. Oh, and did you know you can try serverless Postgres with just a single command? Type psql-h pg.neon.tech and you're up and running with a scalable, cost-efficient, and easy-to-use database. Thanks

again to Neon for sponsoring ChangeLog News. Check out what they're up to by following the link in your show notes. James Somers wrote a eulogy to coding for The New Yorker. Quote, I have always taken it for granted that, just as my parents made sure that I could read and write, I would make sure that my kids could program computers. It is among the newer arts, but also among the most essential, and ever more so day by day,

encompassing everything from filmmaking to physics. Fluency with code would round out my children's literacy and keep them employable. But as I write this, my wife is pregnant with her first child due in about three weeks. I code professionally, but by the time that child can type, coding as a valuable skill might have faded from the world." End quote. You already know the villain in this unfolding drama, but this long read by James weaves beautifully as it describes a future that is all but inevitable. Quote, In chess, which for decades now has been dominated by AI, a player's only hope is pairing with a bot.

Such half-human, half-AI teams, known as centaurs, might still be able to beat the best humans and the best AI engines working alone. Programming has not yet gone the way of chess, but the centaurs have arrived. GPT-4 on its own is, for the moment, a worse programmer than I am. Ben is much worse, But where does that leave James' and all of our children? What do we teach them in the wake of change? He concludes, I was reading an oral history of neural networks recently, and it struck me how many of the people interviewed, people born in and around the 1930s, had played with radios when they were little.

Maybe the next cohort will spend their late nights in the guts of the AIs their parents once regarded as black boxes. I shouldn't worry that the era of coding is winding down. Hacking is forever. Lawrence Tratt writes, quote, premature optimization might be the root of all evil, but overdue optimization is the root of all frustration. No matter how fast hardware becomes, we find it easy to write programs which run too slow. Often, this is not immediately apparent. Users can go for years without considering a program's performance

to be an issue before it suddenly becomes so, often in the space of a single working day. End quote. Spurious replacement of Z with S aside, Lawrence knows a lot about optimization. In the linked post, he shares his four main ways of going about it. One, use a better algorithm. Two,

use a better data structure. Three, use a lower level system. And four, accept a less precise solution. In the rest of the post, he goes through each of these and gives suggestions for the trade-offs involved. It's a good read. You should read it. That's the news for now, but stay tuned because on Wednesday, we're sitting down with Emil Skolander from Figma to hear all about how they brought dev mode to the designer developer world. Have a great week. Tell your friends about changelog news if you dig it, and I'll talk to you again real soon.