C++'s Borg-like mission continues, and some thoughts on Rails 8.1. Plus, there is a little trouble in Microsoft Paradise. And why Chris finally paid for an LLM.
This is Coder Radio, episode 592, recorded on October 22nd, 2024. Hey friend, welcome in to Jupyter Broadcasting's weekly talk show. It takes a pragmatic look at the art, the business, the software development, and the world of technology. My name is Chris, and keeping an eye... On the world, it's our host, Mr. Dominic. Hello, Mike. Hello, Chris. Yeah. I've decided you are our C++ correspondent.
What a mixed honor. You know, like, if we were to bring you on to another show, we would be like, host of Coderator Program and Jupiter Broadcasting's C++ correspondent joins us tonight to break down C++'s continued Borg-like mission. Mr. Dominic, what are you learning...
Well, you know, that feature you just got there, Go and Rust, C++ has already assimilated it, and your science will service them.
We would like some of that, please.
They just wait. They're like, what are they doing?
Do you think, so the safe C++ extension proposal, which was last month, like late last month, which is an evolution in C++, a proposal for safe C++ extensions to enhance memory safety and, you know, basically respond to the great threat that is Rust. Exactly, right.
Rust in the Linux kernel? Okay, we need to do something here.
So the work's being done via the C++ Alliance. Its president and executive director, Vinny Flacco, said that it was, quote, a revolutionary proposal that adds memory safety features to the C++ programming language. You know, this kind of – the article that we'll have linked to the show notes kind of puts it in context. And it is worth mentioning, right?
So in 2020, Google did a little study and identified that 70 percent of Chrome's severe vulnerabilities were memory safety issues. We've also – we also saw another study came out that the White House cited in February. And their national cyber director. We actually talked about on the show really briefly where they kind of came out.
Remember earlier this year when the White House came out and said programmers should be using memory safe programming languages. They said, quote, experts have identified a few programming languages that both lack traits associated with memory safety and also have high proliferation across critical systems.
such as C and C++, and that things like Rust would be a memory-safe language to use, according to the White House and their recommendations back in February. So we've kind of been building to this pressure, I think, around C++. And then you have market competition as well coming from things like Go and Rust. So I don't know. Do you think this could become a reality?
Will we see a safe C++ world in a year or two?
Well, so it's like all of C++. Those who use it will use it. And many people are stuck on like C++. Then, you know, whatever it is. I forgot the exact most common standard here. But think Android. A lot of people aren't using the latest and greatest.
See, this is my thinking, is C++ is going to be around historically. Just with so much legacy software, we have 30, 40 years now of software the industry has been building. I totally get why new projects that are starting at zero are choosing things like Rust at a pretty high clip or have chosen things like Go or other things. But just look at the Linux kernel.
That's not going to get rewritten anytime soon. Maybe it will one day. Maybe one day we'll have, I don't know, version, maybe version 10. Isn't it mostly in C, though? Yeah.
Not C++, right?
But my point is you're not going to get legacy code rewritten into Go or Rust. That's not going to happen. And you're right. Maybe a new project, if you're building something new, if they can get compatibility to work, you could see somebody using safe C++ with an older C++ project and – Perhaps those two worlds can coexist, but you're not going to rewrite the whole thing.
Right, but with that said, there's tons of embedded C++, and those tend to be newer projects. I mean I see no reason if you were starting Greenfield. Well, let's cool our love a little bit, right? Let's leave some room for Jesus. We don't need to be bumping and grinding on the new standard just yet. It is not, in fact, the new standard yet. It's a proposal. There's a lot of stakeholders.
We know how they like to grip their stakes like Van Helsing. That's why they're holders. They hold tight, baby. I think it's probably going to... So the problem is they can't not do something like this. Whether it gets changed in the process is possible. Adoption level...
think it's gonna be pretty high of people doing greenfield projects everything else and for the overall ecosystem it's gonna be pretty low i mean that's actually more positive than i expected from you well it's it's the android developer problem that we talked about for years and years when you know that was a thing we cared about where yeah these apis are great but you have to target what you have to target it's a little different in c++ world because really what you're targeting is your enterprise's legacy system that was written in like
Yeah, exactly. But it's – I don't know. I keep – for the things I need it for, I had my flirtation with Rust. I do like Rust. I haven't really looked at Go other than a bit for the show and a couple small things just to play around with. I don't see why I wouldn't. Do you know what I mean?
If I had to write a small data processing or whatever package for Alice, why wouldn't I just go ahead and use the memory safety features?
Sure. I'd love to hear from the dark matter devs out there because I feel like something like Rust or Go, you might try that with an entirely new project, something kind of small, something that doesn't have an immediate timeline. But There's no way you're going to be able to convince any of the management types.
No.
Any of the project planning types that you should rewrite that enterprise app that Mike mentioned from 2004. Even though you're dragging it up a hill like a bag of rocks and it's like probably a major pain in your butt to keep running on modern systems. There's probably no way you're going to convince them they should rewrite that. And you probably know it's riddled with insecurity. Yeah.
We should mention the big Washington State elephant in the room here. So when is Microsoft's C++ compiler going to adopt this when it eventually comes out as a standard? Because for our dark matter friends out there, that's a pretty big chunk of the C++ market.
See, I would think so, right? Do you think that's like one of the dominoes that has to fall?
I think it'll be used a lot in Embedded First. Does it have to fall? I don't know. See, once you're talking C++, you're talking game engines, which is a whole other universe that is just its own thing, man. That's a whole world by itself.
You know, I got to ask, Wes brought this up in the live chat, and I want to put this out there to the audience. You can go to that show slash contact or boost in. Has anyone out there ever worked at a place where they've done an actual rewrite and actually tackled tech debt at the institution? Has anyone worked there?
I would think maybe, maybe a gaming company of all of them might just because, you know, you have to to achieve the performance levels you're looking for or something. But I got to know.
I wonder if anyone within the reach of our voice has ever worked at a place that has actually invested thousands of dollars to improve their existing infrastructure and rewrite some core application they created a decade ago.
I don't think they exist. I'd add the caveat of was that ultimately successful and did it replace the existing system?
Oh, God, could you imagine? Yeah. Because maybe that's what happened, man, is, you know, like 20 years ago, it was it was people were replacing and legacy stuff. And then those those migrations. You know what? There's actually kind of I started joking. It's actually kind of ring true. The migrations went badly. People got burned. And so management became very resistant to it.
It's already hard to spend the money, but those early migrations and stuff, we didn't build stuff for portability. We didn't really know what we were doing. We didn't have the systems as well designed as they were, so they weren't necessarily easy to swap over. We didn't have it down back in the day, and so migrations sucked.
And a lot of the software that is out there now is written from that era, even though we've learned so much more now. I'd be fascinated to know if anybody's actually ever gotten their company to do it.
Yeah, it would be surprising.
I don't think it's ever happened. Yeah. All right. Well, there you go. Save C++.
Coming sometime, somewhere, somehow. Somewhere.
One day. At least if the C++ Alliance has anything to say about it. Coder.show slash membership. That's how you can support the show and keep us going directly right there on autopilot. The show's had no sponsor for over a year. I'm amazed it's worked out, but it's thanks to the support of our audience. You want to keep us going? You can do it automatically at Coder.show slash membership.
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Maybe it always should have been this way. You know, a show like Coder does get a little spicy sometimes. Maybe it should have always been this way. Friends, let old Chris tell you a story for a moment. Stay a while and listen. Even if you're not a listener, you're probably familiar with This American Life. They're one of the major podcasts out there.
And as Pod News covered, even this American life has realized the podcasting ad market has collapsed.
Hey there, podcast listeners. Ira here. There have been some changes in the podcast industry. Basically, the ad market has dropped. It's harder to run a podcast by selling ads. And it's affected nearly everybody who does a podcast. In the last few years, we've watched friends at podcasting companies all around us as they made massive staff cuts. Some companies have gone under.
And because of these changes in the industry, this coming year, we expect our ad revenue to be a third less. A third less. than what we brought in just a few years ago.
So they're launching direct support programs. They even joke that it should be called This American Life Support or This American Lifeboat. I think they went with something a little more mundane for the actual name. But it's not just now the niche podcasts. It's across the entire podcast industry.
And I just hate to see something like that wipe us out because podcasting is such a unique medium with such a range from This American Life with a staff of like 36 people Dakota Radio with like myself, Mike and editor Drew making it happen. It's like just totally different scale. And yet podcasting can be great in all aspects. And it's truly, truly open and distributed.
And so with your support directly, we'll keep on going. So either if you boost or if you become a member, we just really appreciate that you help us. And we've been we've been able to do this for like more than a year. I should get the actual days because it's I'm Pretty proud of it. Thank you, everybody who supports us and keeps us going. I've been following DHH's adventures.
I mean, how could you not? If you open a door, he's probably behind it.
On YouTube, on Twitter. I mean, he's all over the place. And Ruby on Rails has been getting a lot of attention as a result. RailsConf, I think, just happened as well.
It did. It sure did.
And we got Rails 8.1. So, I don't know. Where do you want to start?
Yeah, I'm just going to run through, I think, some of the interesting things that are new in Rails 8, 8.1. I'm conflating the two because basically, you know, things that were keynotes in the conf, right? And I do love me some Rails. So Rails 8.1 has a couple things that I think are interesting. Come all, we talked about it briefly.
It's basically an out-of-the-box way to handle Docker containers, right? I will say that this seems like a big push. They've put a lot into this to make the whole Rails is developer-friendly thing a step further and handle deployment. There's a few other things that I think do that well.
If you listen to DHH for long enough, he will eventually tell you how wonderful SQLite is and that you could probably use it on the server. Okay. A reason for that is SQLite, of all the variants, requires almost no configuration.
Don't, don't, don't.
I don't agree with it. I'm Postgres for life.
I am actually really glad you took this side because I've been seeing that too. And I'm like, what the hell is going on here? I mean, okay, anyways. Yeah.
Yeah. It's there's a whole. Yeah, but it is nice. I fear that a lot more complex applications that are written on Rails, but probably have tendrils into like native binaries and things that they run will find Kamal a touch lacking and still end up using things like bash scripts and. Whatever, right, whatever Tom Fuller you want, but it is built on Docker and we get to claim that win yet again.
And I'm pretty sure, so I didn't put it in the doc, but what is the name of his Linux PC dev bootstrap thing? We talked about a couple months ago. That has gotten a ton of traction. Super fast.
It's not Bootsy, is it? Is it?
No, we'll look it up. It's got like a very... It's something like weird. It's got a... Okay. Yeah.
I like weird. So we'll keep an eye on the chat room, see if anybody... So again, he's still on Linux.
He's still... Getting in weird fights with the WordPress guy. I don't know if I care about that, but sure. Why not? I don't know.
Oh, Amacube.
Amacube, that's what it is, right? Yes, yes, yes. Amacube. Wes is always there. He's clutch. Other things, speaking of things that end in cube, SolidCube. This one I'm actually going to end up using in two to three years when I get to ship a Greenfield product in Rails. Because, of course, all my stuff is running older stuff. It is a built-in abstraction for the hell that is...
Ultimately, it's like kind of cron jobs. I don't want to get too railsy here, but they're like delay jobs. You could be using – my brain isn't working today – Sidekick, all kinds of stuff to do asynchronous tasks that need to go off and report back. Think large data processing and how I might find this helpful, but also think about large –
I need to process all the sales from last night and do the sales tax report for the manager for 2 a.m. in the morning. But that takes a lot, and if people are using our website, we probably don't want it running the main processes, right? That is a gross oversimplification, and depending on what system you're using, they handle processes very differently.
Yeah, and this is nice because for a small project, you could run Solid Q on the same machine as, say, your web server, and you got everything you need right there. But they've built in the ability to scale it out so you can run it across multiple machines. You can have multiple machines working the job but still using a single database.
So you can have a separate database that they all refer back to. That's nice. So if you can start small and if your application needs grow, it's got horizontal scaling out of the box.
And actually, you hit on his main point and the Rails team's main point that I kind of overlooked here. There's this whole idea of getting away from AWS, which I'm all for. and just moving to putting things on one box. Now, DHH and company over at Basecamp are like self-hosting again, which I briefly did, and I guess a few of the people, great.
Hey, we're maniacs over here. You have a whole show about it. Yeah, we just set up a colo in Toronto.
There you go.
And we're setting up infrastructure because, you know, you can buy now a pretty nice rig if you can get the rack space, the power, and the connection at some colo. You know, month to month, I mean, maybe you have a little bit more up front, but you save, I think, month to month.
I know those DO bills are breaking my soul.
yeah yeah yeah our matrix server alone you know it could be a thousand dollars a month on a cloud provider yeah i've been tempted but that you know that is kind of the general goal i i'm there's a lot of stuff about turbo and like rails is front end changing this is a theme if you if you don't know anything about rails where every couple years they throw out all the front end stuff start over all i can say is uh you know goodbye webpack and i hope you burn in hell so
I'm pretty happy with it if I ever get to use it anytime soon.
One day on your green field.
When Rails 9 is coming out, there I'll be.
I wonder if Microsoft and OpenAI will still be in a partnership by then because it sounds like things are.
Don't you hate it when a good couple just starts to quarrel?
Man, you know, this is why you got to make sure you get all the bank account stuff figured out before you move in together, because once you move in together, it starts to get a little weird. And the Wall Street Journal today cited sources. Actually, this was like a day or two ago, cited sources that OpenAI is now being advised by a Goldman Sachs advisor and Microsoft has turned to Morgan Stanley.
These two companies, these two ginormous banks are. are acting as like intermediary negotiators because the direct talks have essentially fallen apart. And it looks like the deal is, you know, a focus on some sort of like – it's got to be around the restructuring that's happening at OpenAI and where Microsoft's cut is and all of that and what their say is and all of that.
You know it's got to be related, but of course we don't have anything that directly says it is. But reading through the lines here, it kind of seems like that's probably the case. This is sort of heated up as OpenAI is restructured and as people have left.
As Sam Q has executed the rebels in Times Square, yeah.
Yeah, and OpenAI is in a tough spot. They reportedly expect to lose about $5 billion on $3.7 billion in revenue this year. So they're going to supposedly make $3.7 in bill, but they're going to lose $5 billion. So they're in a tough spot. They need money. They're restructuring. They expect profit one day.
Microsoft wants like a 49% stake in what becomes of the public company or something like that is what's been reported recently. But having these two massive banks do the negotiations on behalf of the two companies that have traditionally worked directly, even originally they were working CEO to CEO, especially when Sam got fired for a weekend. It was CEO to CEO negotiations, right?
It was top level to top level. Yeah. But now we're like Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan are doing the conversation.
Well, to use the divorce analogy that you mentioned, right? Isn't that like when all of a sudden one of the parties, one of the spouses just lawyers up and it's like, you know.
That is what's happened.
Right. I feel like replace lawyers with bankers and it works perfectly.
And the implication here is Microsoft was the first one to lawyer up.
Oh, yeah, dude. I think Satya... Okay, can I fry some bacon? Dude, you know I always bring bacon for you. You bet. Here you go. Oh, that smells great, Chris. What kind of bacon is this?
Yeah, it's something I got off the back of a truck. He said his freezer failed, and he was just trying to unload it.
Oh, gator bacon. We got a lot of them right on the street. You could go buy it out of an F-150. Either way, I'm eating it. All right, so... Satya is apparently very famously a nice guy, which is tough for me to believe about the CEO of Microsoft, but let's just go with it for a moment. Sam Albit? You know, some sharp elbows there, right? Is it possible that Satya's eyes got opened?
Remember the scorpion and the frog? You know, the frogs in the river with the scorpion on his back. Sure. I think Satya might have realized he gave a scorpion a ride here. Needs to get at it.
Well, you know, think about it as if, but just for a moment to try to like steel man this. Imagine you or I came up with a product that got the interest of Microsoft, right? This is like one of a hundred things Microsoft makes millions of dollars on, right? But this is the only thing we make money on. Like, you get what I'm saying? It's like life and death for open AI companies.
And for Microsoft, it's like, well, it's one of their investments. And so I think that is an impedance mismatch right there. Microsoft would like to have, you know, Clippy 2.0, as the Salesforce CEO likes to joke. OpenAI is trying to become a top tech company and quote-unquote revolutionize.
Well, OpenAI wants to turn Fang into Fango, although Fang somehow misses Microsoft. But I just – you're totally – that's got to be part of it, right? There's so much drama with this company, and I can't help that some of it has to be a little bit of the personality involved.
I agree. Yeah. It seems like some folks in the chat or in the chat, you know, some folks out there in tech, they just don't really seem to draw any drama at all. And then other folks just over and over and over again, the drama seems to follow them everywhere they go. You explain that to me.
I know you, though, talking about the product, were kind of impressed by some of the new features that they announced recently, like this Canvas feature.
I was. I got a chance to play with it. I only played with it for a few hours because, you know, got to make money and be a dad and all that. It's pretty good. I mean, I will give OpenAI one thing. They are moving super fast. They're shipping a lot of stuff. They're still making crazy inflated promises. But they are, in fact, shipping. It's not pure vaporware, right?
They're shipping stuff, and it's getting better all the time. So, I don't, you know, this is not me pulling the fire alarm and saying...
oh my god they're going to replace all the coders i don't believe that but i think this or something like it is going to be a tool in a lot of folks's tool chest which kind of circling back to the trouble in paradise stuff isn't that what co-pilot like okay i hate that microsoft overloads the names of everything because you don't know what i mean the original co-pilot from github which is also microsoft isn't that what that was supposed to be
Yes, they way overuse. Remember HoloLens or something? They've reused things several times recently. They've reused names. Copilot is one that now they're trying to fade away from. By the way, as of like this morning, the word is that the branding hasn't gone so well and that Microsoft's going to de-emphasize the Copilot branding.
So maybe it's going to be used for something else now, or it's going to go back to the original meaning. I don't know.
Oh, good. It'll be my VS Code agent. Got to get it like a little martini glass and a tuxedo. I love it.
Yes, they're going to call them agents now. So Canvas is a nice UI improvement to ChatGPT's results, where if you ask it a coding problem, it will put it out in a sort of pastebin-like style that renders it with syntax highlighting and line numbers and all of that. And it lets you review code and ask specific questions on each line of code and essentially try to debug potentially code.
I'll put a link to this in the show notes so you can see it. And it is a really nice feature. I'll have to try it. I have been playing around with Claude. which has had that same thing for a bit now.
And it's really quite nice because you can go into Cloud and you can say, I need a Nix configuration file that stands up these services, put all of the various variables that I need to predefine at the top of the file for me, and this is the name of my host, this is the URL, integrate all of that. And it will spit out into this side sheet Perfectly formatted syntax. You can take that.
You can try to build it. If it fails, you can take the error message, drop that back into Claude and say, hey, dummy, I tried to build and I got this error message. And then Claude will be, oh, you're right, my bad. Hee hee, I missed this thing that's changed. Let me update that output for you. And it refreshes, just like I think ChatGPT does, that sort of paste bin line numbered error.
syntax highlighted code that goes along now with your chat. And it will reproduce a new one, and it's got one little click so you can copy all of the contents. It works really well. Sometimes they go off into wild kind of suggestions. If you actually were just to follow blindly, it'd be like driving your car into a lake. Apple Maps. Yeah, yeah. But for the most part, it's pretty effective. So
I finally broke down and I subscribed to Claude. I don't know. It's $20 a month, so I may cancel it after a month. But when you're really kind of in a debug process and you're like you're so close to this thing building, you really just like – and then it's like, hey, you've been chatting way too much. This conversation has gotten real big. You got to come back at 8 p.m., brother.
You need to take a break. Or you can upgrade to pro and keep on going. Well, they got me. Of course. I'm like, I want this working. The kids are going to be home soon. I just want this to be finished. So I paid the 20 bucks and I did get it working. So I kind of I don't know. I'm going to keep trying, see if it's actually useful for that kind of stuff.
But then I don't know if you saw this morning, Anthropic announced that now Claude will have the ability to use your computer. and interact with elements on your screen. Have you seen this?
No, that's brutal.
So it can remote control and click stuff, interact with desktop apps, and it will imitate mouse and keyboard input via computer use API. So I think you run a local app, which means it's probably only Mac and Windows, but you run a local app from Cloud on your machine, and then it will talk to that app, and then it will talk to the OS and click on crap for you.
And they have video demos of it out right now where you can ask Claude how to do something and then just have it take over and do it for you on the computer. What if it hallucinates and clicks the wrong thing? I mean, this feels like a wild step and also kind of a weird intermediary step, sort of strange.
Like maybe the AI should just be communicating to some API instead of like going through the humans interface that's been designed for their meat fingers. It just seems like a weird roundabout way to solve problems. but also kind of a powerful tool. I don't know. Would you try it? Would you let it take over if you were trying to, say, configure something on a WordPress backend?
Maybe a new WordPress fork drops and you're trying to get it working. Wouldn't it be nice if you go into Cloud and say, hey, help me export from my old WordPress install to now FreePress or whatever they're going to call it?
And it just does it for you. Oh, man, I think I'd have a hard time with that.
Yeah. Yeah. Especially if you had like any kind of like administrative access or confidential data on the computer.
Yeah. I think I'd have a real hard time, especially. Yeah. I don't think I would do that.
It's interesting how they can even do it. How from inference, you know, from essentially auto auto match.
Yeah.
Really sophisticated auto match. They can somehow control the computer. You know, Apple released a study that kind of confirms what we already know on the show. But Apple put their scientists to it and released a paper that shows that These LLMs do not reason. They are doing – it's more association and it's more autocomplete and they have scientific data.
And interestingly, Mike, I don't know if you saw it, but one of the things that was really kind of obvious but yet clearly shows that their reasoning is not all there is they fed LLMs word math problems. You know, like a train is coming at you at 25 miles per hour and you're going at the train at five miles per hour. Like how long until you collide? Right.
If you just change the names of, like, Susie and Bob, you know, Susie's driving the train and Bob's on a motorcycle, and you change it to, like, Fred and Rachel, the mathematical results it'll give you from the word math problem will be different.
Yeah.
So just changing the names of the people in the story produce different math results from the numbers. But that's one of many things that they sort of demonstrated, that these things are really nice high-end autocomplete.
Terrible, terrible things all the time.
Yeah, they mess up a lot. They go sideways.
I mean, although if you've hired junior developers, just saying.
Well, okay. So here's my steel man argument. Tell me what you think of this. The airplane flies faster and higher than the bird, but it doesn't fly at all like a bird, and early airplanes crashed an awful lot and were really rickety and seemed sort of silly.
And even though it isn't the way nature does it, you could argue an airplane can fly further, can fly faster, and can fly higher than any bird, so it's superior to a bird, even though it's not the way a bird flies.
I mean I think we're – superior I find a little tough. But are we at the point where there's no putting the genie back in the bottle? I think that's almost certainly true, right? I mean that is true.
I think we're now at a point where these tech companies have realized they don't have true AI but they have something that kind of smells like AI, kind of quacks a little bit like AI. And maybe if they just throw more horsepower at it, they can get it even closer. Remember what Zuck said.
I played a clip of Zuck saying, you know, we don't really know how much power we can throw at this thing and the results we'll get. Maybe if we throw, you know, a dozen nuclear reactors worth of data centers at it.
I was going to say, let's open our own nuclear reactor.
Right. Maybe once we get a dozen nuclear reactor-powered data centers all trying to do autocomplete real good, maybe it goes to some next level. Like, we don't know. But that's what they're going to find out. And we may end up being like, ah, this actually isn't the way to go. Probably not, but it's possible. It's just a wild thing. It's a wild world we live in. It's a wild world.
Four score and seven boosts to go. That's why we are grateful for the support we get from the audience. And Hybrid Sarcasm is our baller booster this week with 100,000 cents. Hey, Rich Law! He's giving you a shout out for sacrificing more of your prep time again, which we appreciate. How did all that go? Because last we did a double. So that way you had time to prepare for the hurricane.
Did you get any house damage or anything like that?
A couple of projectiles, but no real damage. So that's nice. Did you lose power? Very briefly and my little baby Jack regenerator was really not needed but it was there so just in case right yeah well folks near me did get waxed I got I just I happen to live slightly above land enough that my little section of the town was fine.
strategically well-placed, I guess.
You couldn't go anywhere because there was no roads or there were no traffic lights for like a week. Whoa. School was like my, all the kids had a little vacation, which was, let me tell you how fun that is. Come on, ChatGPT. Can you go ahead and play some Nintendo with them, please?
There you go. Oh, my God, Mike. How long until somebody gets Claude to play a video game? You're right. Somebody's going to get Claude to play Mario.
Go.
Yeah, well, we're all glad. We're all glad.
It's all good. I mean, and the season only has one month left, so I probably will survive.
Meanwhile, it's going to get down into the 30s here later this week.
Oh, Jesus, you're going to get whacked. You get blizzards.
It sucks, man. It sucks. It's either really rainy, windy, or really cold. So when the clouds finally clear, then it just gets really cold. That's what keeps it above freezing here is all the rain.
Coder Radio, we're both screwed on opposite schedules.
Yep. All right. Adversary 17 comes in with a handsome 73,728 sets. I hoard that which all kind covet. He's great and happy and glad to hear that you survive the crazy weather out there. He says, about my last boost regarding the rust tool chain. Clippy is a rust linter. that makes your Rust code better, often suggesting patterns that are more like the Rust way of making things easier and simpler.
I found it useful as it provides links to documentation behind each lint and why you do it.
But will it also help you write a breakup letter? Because that's what the old Clippy was good for.
Yeah, that's true. Although it does sound very handy. Thank you for clarifying, Adversary17. Appreciate that. Rotted Mood comes in with a handsome 20,000 sats. And I don't know. I think he wants some mac and cheese on there. Should I get him? Should I give him some mac and cheese? Here you go. Put some macaroni and cheese on there, too. I think Rotted Mood wants mac and cheese.
He has no message, though, just sending us some support. So I don't know for sure. I don't know for sure. But there you go. I hope you liked it. Retrogear comes in with 3,000 sats. B-O-O-S-T. I don't like my job and I don't think I'm going to go anymore. Well, you have our support, Retrogear. Let us know how it works. You could always become like, I don't know, like an AI tester.
Just put AI and go start an AI company. Do it for six months and put it on your resume. Now you can claim you're an AI expert.
Just write, just form in Delaware, fundme.ai LLC. Yeah. Or I guess it has to be a C-Corp. Fundme.ai Inc. or core. There you go.
There you go. Problem solved. Cronrad comes in with 8,675 sats. The traders love the vol. Catching up on the shows, but a good tool for software diagramming is IcePanel.io. It follows C4 modeling, and I think it works really well. Also streaming some splits to editor drew or sometimes failed for me. Yeah.
Every now and then nodes go offline, but let me know if you have any persistent problems because everything should be a okay right now. Thank you. Gran rad for that boost. And the, again, the diagramming software he's talking about is ice panel. You can find it at ice panel.
I, Oh, I'm kind of amazed that these guys have Y combinator funding, but damn, they have a snazzy website.
Yeah, I think that's a requirement. If you get Y Combi money, you've got to have a nice – oh, this is a nice website.
Really? And it's got, like, it's in a – I'm like, I might use this now.
Look at that thing. It floats there. That's cool. All right. That actually looks pretty legit. Real project?
Like a real product being funded?
Oh, my God. Well, if you're going to get a website like that, you better have a real one behind it, I guess.
It's never stopped anybody before. What are you talking about?
Oh, that's a good point. All you really need is a great website and then, you know, a timeline of some sort. Thank you, everybody who supports the show with a boost on your own terms. As you like it, we had 26 of you just stream your sats as you listen. 23,899 sats sent in that way. Thank you, sat streamers.
When you combine it with everybody who sent in a message, we stacked a grand total of 229,302 sats. Not a barn burner, but not a bad one, and we appreciate the support. Thank you, everybody, who keeps us going. It is a Value for Value podcast. It's all made possible by our audience. You can boost with a new podcast app at podcastapps.com.
We'll have some links to get started at the top of the show notes to make it real easy, or go pick your app of choice at podcastapps.com. So I want to play this for you. You may have heard this already because it's not the first time I've played it, but in case you haven't, I want you to hear this because I think it's important we get this on the Coder Radio program.
We've talked before on the show about Notebook LM, Google's little Skunk Works project that's gone quite viral. And it's getting used by our audience out there. And one of our listeners threw in some Red Hat course material to help just kind of digest it and prepare for the exam. Seems like a pretty great idea. The results they got surprised them, and they had to send it to me.
I want to play it for you. It's less than a minute long, and then I want to hear what you think on the other end.
This deep dive has been an incredible journey. We started with the basics of the command line and file management, then explored the intricacies of system services, networking, storage management, and even security. We delved into configuration files, uncovered the power of automation, and even touched on advanced concepts like containerization and cloud computing.
And the journey doesn't end here. This is just the beginning. As you continue exploring the world of Linux, remember that you're not alone. The Linux community is vast and welcoming, always eager to share knowledge, lend a helping hand, and push the boundaries of what's possible with this incredible operating system.
It's that spirit of collaboration and shared knowledge that makes the Linux world so exciting and rewarding. So to our listeners, as you continue your Linux adventure, remember to embrace the command line, explore new tools, and never stop learning. Who knows what incredible things you'll achieve with the power of Linux at your fingertips.
Now, I don't know about you, Mike, but I think that sounds a bit like me. Just a touch. That was the clip from Notebook LM. That was not me speaking. Yeah. And of course, it's also weird because it's a topic I would talk about. Here, I'll play just a second of it. A spirit of collaboration and shared knowledge that makes the Linux world so exciting and rewarding.
So Notebook LM just kind of like accidentally cut this in. You know, I don't think they meant to do this. I think this is like they were drawing from JB content to help, you know, inform their podcast because it would kind of make sense. They're making a podcast, so they probably skew towards preferring other podcast content about this topic.
But, A, it means they're lifting what I say and they're building a product on top of this without even talking to me. And, B, it means that, like, my voice is out there in a domain that I actively am actually working in, Linux.
My voice is out there talking about Linux, talking about it in a way that is a little cheesy and campy that I wouldn't really prefer to be associated with by a company that I'm not super comfortable with, which is Google. And the whole thing's really bizarre, and I'm still processing it.
And we've tried several times to get it to reproduce by throwing Red Hat material at it and other Linux material at it and have not gotten it to reproduce my voice since. That's, yeah, that's going to be a problem. Maybe I should join ScarJo, you know?
I was going to say, join ScarJo. You know, if the Black Widow's on your team.
Could be a great marketing stunt for the show.
Also, there's like a 0.0001% chance you'd end up in a courtroom with ScarJo on the same side. And I got to tell you, it's worth it. Worth it. I wish I could do that.
So a couple of days ago, Google announced that now you can tweak what the hosts talk about and you can kind of customize.
Oh, great. You can AI cancel people now.
Yeah, I suppose so. Yeah, don't mention this person.
No, no, no. You get it, right? Oh, I shouldn't even put this out there because somebody's going to do it. But somebody you don't like, right, that has some sort of platform, you get – you coax – and trust me, you can coax these AIs to do stuff and be like, let's have so-and-so talk about the softer side of the National Socialist Party. And there you go.
Yeah, if you could actually get the... It seems like you cannot provoke it to use a voice, but it clearly has the capability of emulating... That's the other thing I think this reveals, this clip, is that this Notebook LM doesn't just do their voices, the two hosts. It can do... Other people's voices as well.
I wonder, is it hoovering up publicly available RSS feeds? It must be.
Yeah, it must be. Yeah. And because this was a – they were making a Linux podcast, right? So it's not surprising that they would kind of – because even if you just sucked in YouTube, we publish our stuff to YouTube, which is a Google property.
Oh, it is Google too, huh? Yeah.
Yeah, so there's a lot of ways they could get my voice, but it's a little weird. It would be nice if I just got an email like, hey, by the way, you just emailed the email address in the RSS feed. That's all I'm asking. You know, you could do that.
Hey, by the way, you have been assimilated and resistance was in fact futile.
And there is nothing you can do about it. So, yeah. Well, now I'm like, okay, if that's the case, then give me the ability to log into my Google account, verify who I am. I'm a Google Apps customer. And let me generate my own stuff. You know? I'll just have a soundboard of me, dude, just saying stuff. It'd be great. Say it once, let the AI do it, and I don't even have to show up some days.
Anyways, I just wanted to get that on the show because after all this we've been talking about it, how ironic that it happened to me, little old Linux podcaster me. Yeah, I don't know. Here we are. We're in the future where there's just nothing you can really do about it. Welcome to making content for the internet, I suppose.
Speaking of which, is there anywhere you'd like to send the good folks before we get out of here?
Go to alice.dev for all your automation ETL processing needs.
Alice.dev is the place to go. You can find me if you want to screw around with the Nostra thing. It's kind of cool. It's a fun technology, chrislas.com. And I'm also chrislas on the Weapon X, if you still do that. Otherwise, I'm not big on the social media.
I do lurk in the Matrix chat from time to time, which you can also find linked on our website, and we always would love to have you join us over there. In fact, links to what we talked about today are at coder.show.com. Yeah, we're in sneezing territory of episode 600, if you can believe it.
Thank you to our members for supporting us for over a year now, for keeping us going, and a shout-out to everybody who boosts in on your terms as you like. We really appreciate that. And, of course, we'd love to have you join us live. We do the show on Tuesdays, typically, at noon Pacific, 3 p.m. Eastern. jupiterbroadcasting.com slash calendar for that schedule.
Or if you've got a podcasting to-do app, you don't got to worry. We'll list it in there for you ahead of time so you know when the show's coming up, and then you can just tap and listen live. Hey, thank you so much for tuning in to this week's episode. See you right back here next week.