The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
The wrong place to slap a person (Friends)
Fri, 27 Sep 2024
Nick Nisi joins Adam and Jerod to talk about Karaoke, ARC and the business model of web browsers, this WordPress drama, and an epic bonus for Changelog ++ subscribers.
Welcome to ChangeLog and Friends, a weekly talk show about WordPress drama. Big thank you to our friends over at Fly.io. Fly is a public cloud built for developers who ship. Over 3 million apps have launched on Fly, including us. Learn more at Fly.io. Okay, let's talk. What's up, friends? I'm here with a new friend of ours over at Assembly AI, founder and CEO Dylan Fox.
Dylan, tell me about Universal One. This is the newest, most powerful speech AI model to date. You released this recently. Tell me more.
So Universal One is our flagship industry leading model for speech to text and various other speech understanding tasks. So it's about a year long effort. That really is the culmination of like the years that we've spent building infrastructure and tooling at assembly to even train large scale speech AI models.
It was trained on about 12 and a half million hours of voice data, multilingual, super wide range of domains and sources of audio data. So it's super robust model.
We're seeing developers use it for extremely high accuracy, low cost, super fast speech to text and speech understanding tasks within their products, within automations, within workflows that they're building at their companies or within their products.
Very cool. So Dylan, one thing I love is this playground you have. You can go there, assemblyai.com slash playground, and you can just play around with all the things that is assembly. Is this the recommended path? Is this the try before you buy experience? Look people do?
Yeah. So our Playground is a GUI experience over the API that's free. You can just go to it on our website, assemblyai.com slash Playground. You drop in an audio file, you can talk to the Playground. And it's a way to, in a no-code environment, interact with our models, interact with our API to see what our models and what our API can do without having to write any code.
Then once you see what the models can do and you're ready to start building with the API, you can quickly transition to the API docs. start writing code start integrating our sdks into your code to start leveraging our models and all our tech via our sdks instead okay constantly updated speech am models at your fingertips well at your api fingertips that is
A good next step is to go to their playground. You can test out their models for free right there in the browser. Or you can get started with a $50 credit at assemblyai.com slash practical AI. Again, that's assemblyai.com slash practical AI.
I never understood the term eavesdropping because this is more like eaves picking stuff up.
I only know of eaves as like the ceiling things, like the roof things.
So you're dropping stuff off the eave? Maybe that's why it's like they drop it and you pick it up. I don't know. It's a weird word. Eavesdropping.
Yeah. Let's see what ChatGPT has to say about this. The term... Eavesdropping originates from the practice of listening to conversations from outside the house. Typically by standing under the eaves. Okay. The part of the roof that overhangs the walls to catch the sound of conversations on the inside. That would be eaves catching. I don't disagree with you on the eaves catching.
Eaves hoping they drop something. The word eavesdrop itself comes from Old English, which I can't pronounce. Y-F-E-S-D-R-E. This E with maybe an año and an P and an E afterwards, which refer to the water that falls from the eaves of a house. So maybe it's like that water drops.
So Nick had the eaves down. That was exactly what the reference is. I thought it was maybe the female rapper from the late 90s, Eve. Do a rap. Do a rap. I'm down. Well, when Eve would drop things, she was also eavesdropping. She was dropping. She would drop bars, though, not raindrops.
I'm just thinking of Enya. I can't think of Eve.
You can't think of Eve? No. She's quite a bit more hardcore than Enya. And so far, she's an actual rapper, and Enya's more of a, what's her genre? See here, I thought you were talking about Eve from the Bible.
I don't even know who these people are.
That goes way back. I'm talking about Eve. I'm so non-cultured. I did listen to Enya in religion class. I remember that.
Oh, did you?
Yeah.
Does she turn the lights off and light some incense and say?
Like a little meditation thing.
Oh. Mm-hmm.
Who can say? Oh, my gosh.
Don't stop, Nick. Can't stop. Nick Karaoke Machine. That's the name of the show, Jared. Nick Karaoke Machine.
When's the last time you karaoke, Nick?
Amsterdam. Amsterdam.
Tell him your favorite song, Nick.
React Summit, Amsterdam.
I know his favorite song. It's Prince. Don't, don't. Let him say it. Okay, go ahead, Nick.
Well, Jared and Adam.
And then you have to sing it. A little bit. Okay.
My favorite one, because it's memorable and it's quick. It's only like two and a half minutes. And it's fun because there's no way that I can sing this properly. And that is Kiss by Prince. Because it's all falsetto. And it just like starts off with like, da-na-na-na-na-na-na-na.
And then you just like immediately go into it and you just immediately drop down and you're like, you don't even have to scream it.
Like you can just be like, you don't have to be beautiful.
You just like go from there.
That is a good song. And you're never embarrassed by that because you can't achieve Prince Love anyway. So why be embarrassed, right? Exactly. Exactly.
And you're just doing your best. Yeah. And you're going and making an ass of yourself and it's, it's wonderful. And then you can like, I think that that primes you for like conference speaking and talking on a podcast, like just make an ass of yourself or karaoke by yourself with no music on a podcast.
Like I couldn't possibly embarrass myself more than I already have karaoke. So yeah, that's true. I'll just go on a podcast.
There's no limit to my embarrassment. I can, I can go lower for sure. What's your second favorite song? Ooh, I've got, it depends on the mood and like the mood of the room for sure. Okay. Read the room. You got to read the room. You got to work the room too. You really like, you got to have a wireless mic. You know, if there's a pool table, you got to be up on the pool table.
So you're more about the show than the song. Yeah.
You got to go up to a random, like the, the person who looks the most uncomfortable being there and just like get down on one knee and just belt it right into their face, get them into it or not. And you know, you get, you get everybody on your side that way. Or you get punched in the face. Yeah. Hasn't happened yet.
Not yet. Have you ever tried the Pee Wee Herman move? You know, get up on the bar and dance.
Ooh, not yet. That would be amazing. I haven't been to a setup that has that, like the bar.
Oh, hold on, hold on, hold on.
Oh, my phone. Get your phone out of here.
Get out of here, phone. Throw it. Just throw it. Just chuck it across the room. I've got two of them. I just threw them.
Weren't we on a podcast where somebody did that? They chucked their phone across the room. For some reason, that's like a memory in my brain.
Yes, but I can't remember who. I know I threw mine on the couch last week. Somebody just chucked it across the room. They're like, it won't stop talking, so just chuck it. That's right. I think it wasn't because it was buzzing. It was because it was ringing. It wasn't what Nick just did. Okay, Nick, continue. You got two phones, Nick? No, let's stop.
Is this like a daytime phone, nighttime phone thing? So you're always on offense like that one guy?
Pretty much. I have a work phone and a personal phone, which I just upgraded to the 16 Pro Max. Oh, wow. The camera control button.
You must have large pockets.
I do.
To fit that phone in.
That was way too suggestive. I do.
I have such large pockets.
The max, huh? Those things, those suckers are big. It got bigger this year. Did it really? By shrinking the bezel, I think.
Okay, so same overall size probably.
Roughly, but yeah, shrinking the bezel. So it is slightly noticeably larger, like reaching my thumb up to the top side. My work phone is a 14 Pro, so the smaller one. And so it was nice, I had both of them just to kind of compare. I just like the screen real estate of the Pro Max. I have an iPad Pro and I kind of don't use it anymore just because, I don't know, it doesn't fit my lifestyle anymore.
Yeah, I had multiple iPads and I discarded them all or gave them away eventually because, again, I just never used them. It's like I have a laptop and a phone and there's really not much room in my life for something in between. But I'm rocking the 14 Pro as my daily driver, as my singular phone, although I am planning on upgrading because I'm on an every-other-year upgrade cycle.
But this is probably the first time where I was like, do I need to go every other year? Because this phone I have is pretty stinking fine.
I don't know. You have two fewer buttons than I do.
That's right. You have two new buttons. So there's the camera control and then the action button. Now of those two, I feel like, why? Why the action button? It just does one thing, right?
It can do one thing or many things, depending on how crazy you want to be.
Do you push it differently for each thing?
No, actually, I don't like that. You have to push and hold, I think.
Yeah.
To get it to do whatever you program it to do.
The long press is back.
Yeah. But you can set it up to like for on my 15, I had it set up to open the camera because it was a nice and easy way to quickly and reliably get into the camera.
Don't need that now.
Yeah. I got a whole dedicated button for that. So I have it set right now because I'm an old guy, I guess, to the flashlight.
Oh, the flashlight. Yeah. I thought I just launched BIM on your computer.
But you can, like, through the magic of shortcuts, you could set it to run a shortcut, which could do some logic like, oh, it's, you know, you're at home and it's 3.30 p.m., so that means you probably are at work and you want to run this action. And, oh, it's 7 p.m., it's at night and you're off work and you, you know, want to turn on Enya. Like, you could have it set to do any of that.
Right. Like, at what time of the day should I just start Kiss by Prince, you know? Like, 9.30 p.m. is just that song. 7.30 a.m., man. That's the wake-up song. Okay.
Don't Stop Till You Get Enough by Michael Jackson is my wake-up song. Really? Yeah. I downloaded that as a ringtone like forever when ringtones were things that you would seek out and download.
Right. That was a fun time in life.
Yeah. Now it's my alarm sound like for waking up at 5 a.m.
Don't you hate that song though?
Yeah.
That's the problem. That's why you never set your favorite song to wake you up because you end up hating it.
I haven't gotten enough yet. I don't stop till I get enough.
Well, let us know when you've had enough. I'd like to know. It'd be a good social experiment.
I'm with you, though, Jared, on this every two years. And now I'm like, ish, because I don't feel like what made me upgrade last time was my phone had a scratch on it. It was just driving me crazy. And then I felt FOMO of the island.
So the prior one's cool.
It is cool. And anytime there's a major UI update that only a subset gets, which is the new, obviously in most cases, I just felt like I was missing out.
Don't you have Apple intelligence FOMO? Cause that's, they're, they're limiting it to the new ones.
I don't know. I don't know if I do. I feel like, you know, I wouldn't mind playing with it, I suppose, but at this point, no.
At this point, there's not much. At this point, it's not there yet, right? Well, I was running the beta on my 15, and I decidedly did not want to run the beta on my new phone, mostly because I just want to experience what's this phone like when it achieves its full battery potential? Because on the 15 Pro Max, I was at zero by 4 p.m. every day, and I wasn't doing anything with it.
So it was just draining constantly. That's terrible. Yeah. The Apple Intelligence features that it had, which were still limited, were pretty awesome. Like, the summary of, like, text messages, I could ignore a text thread all day and get a quick summary, and it was kind of comical sometimes.
Mm-hmm. Are you getting FOMO, Adam? Is it working?
No, I think we're in that camp of, like, you know, summaries is still the killer feature for most AI-related things, I think, especially in that context.
Mm-hmm.
I don't know. Honestly, I feel like if I saw it in practice, maybe I think maps would be fun. Like take me somewhere. I think Siri upgrades with voice would be where I would get FOMO. And if that's what intelligence brings, which I'm not even closely paying attention, I feel like it's purposefully not paying attention to the details of their announcements so that I don't get this FOMO.
But I talk to my phone a lot, and I wish that's the part I would be getting FOMO about. The intelligence of that speaking to something that's tangible that it can do. Like, take me somewhere.
That's the killer app, isn't it? It's better Siri. That's what this thing is selling.
Yeah. It's at least it's not quite there. Like the, the better Siri there yet though.
Well, they haven't really released it yet. Right?
No, I'm talking about the beta and I'm not running that anymore, but on the beta, like the one nice thing is you do get the new animation for Siri, which is cool. But then you also get like, it holds some context. So I can be like, you know, how old is this actor on TV? And then I can say, oh, what movie did they star in? And I don't have to say their name again.
It remembers from the previous question that I'm still in the context of that actor.
16.
Well, yeah, I think 32 is in a quart. A pint, I believe, is 16. You're going to have to go ask again.
I'm going to have to go ask again. I knew it was one of those two, but off the top of my head, I wouldn't know. I think it's 32.
But I opened up a tab on mobile. No, actually, I opened up the app, the chat GPT app and asked the app. And it's like this ephemeral question you don't ever want to go back to as a chat. So that's kind of the thing I wouldn't mind. The Apple intelligence, the phone level to give me those little quick hits. It's like math, but but harder. You know, it's not like two plus two.
It's how many ounces is in the court. It's not exactly like math. It's harder than math. Well, it might be easily fetchable, but it's not like 2 plus 2.
No, that's also a pretty basic math.
Right.
There are more complicated maths than that one.
Well, it's words, right? I don't know if Siri has that. Let's test. Let's test Siri right now. I don't have Apple intelligence. How many ounces are in a quart?
It's 32 fluid ounces.
Drilled it. Just wasting my time talking to chat GPT in that app. She's already smart enough.
That one's probably like embedded in Ram, you know, enough people ask that. Touche. I just asked Raycast and not Raycast AI. I just typed into the Raycast thing one quart and then OZ and it told me exactly what it was.
Well, that whole deal is a lookup table. One person coded that thing one time, and it's just some sort of thing that just lives in memory on every device in the world. For everyone who ever needs to know. That's the kind of stuff that humans ask all the time. I mean, I can't remember that stuff.
I did see a video today that I can't speak to the validity of it. And I do have chat GPT Pro, but I don't have the advanced voice thing that they have. They announced that forever ago.
Yeah, where you talk to it like her.
Yeah.
I still don't have that.
Someone else, specifically someone else. Now it's specifically somebody else. Uh, but I saw a video on Twitter today of somebody using that to tune their guitar. And so chat GPT was like, you know, we're going to tune this string first and it sounds like this. And then he plays it and he's like, how about that? And she's like, no, go a little, like tighten it a little bit more.
And then she's like, yeah, that's cool.
Yeah. Okay. That's cool. That is cool. Speaking of voice impersonations and ScarJo. Oh, gosh. Just left adjacent to ScarJo is a guy named Jeff Geerling.
Have you heard about this? I saw him post on Macedon about someone using his voice, but I didn't read it. Okay. Is that what you're going to talk about? I'm going to reference it at least. I'm going to lightly talk about it. Let me see if I can pull up the information quick enough. Jeff Geerling, for those who don't know, is a home labber YouTube. What's his particular... He's a YouTuber.
He's been on the pod.
I would call him an open source developer. I would call him a developer.
I would call him a home labber. What's his... His channel's more about hardware and stuff, though.
Yeah, but he's got roots in the Python community and Django, and he definitely has tons of open source out there, too. Anyways, keep going. Yeah, I think his channel is just Jeff Geerling. I don't think it's named anything. Anyways, there's a company called Elkro. To my knowledge, they have several videos out there. When I say several, it's more than one.
I think it's probably 10 or so potentially. And he's like this, some, I think somebody told him about it. Somehow he found out and he shared a video on his YouTube channel, which we can link up in the show notes, highlighting the fact that he's like, does this sound, does this voice sound familiar? And he plays it and it sounds just like him. Just like him.
And so, not that I've got a cool voice or Jared, you've got a cool voice, but our voice is out there a lot. I'm wondering, when are we going to get ScarJo'd? Oh, you want this to happen to you. I don't think I want it to happen, but is it going to happen? We have influential voices. I don't know. You know how this works.
I mean, I know how it works technically. I don't know how it works in the way that you're talking about it. All I know is somebody's going to put out there and finish that song Nick Nisi started. That's right. In the Nick voice. Mm-hmm. Just the falsetto, the Prince falsetto.
Sing the whole thing. Well, I do think it would be cool to tune a guitar like that.
Yeah.
That's super cool, actually. I mean, that's a good example of tomorrow's tech today.
That sounds like a corporate advertisement.
Well, I mean, a lot of people don't see it as like this is here and it is.
And that's cool. I prefer to just hand the guitar to the robot and say, will you play Kiss by Prince so I can sing this falsetto? Like that's when it's really here. It's like you go to a restaurant. And it's advertised, you know, maybe there's even a $5 cover at the door. Live music tonight. McNeesy.
And you go to this restaurant and you sit down and you look up on stage and there's nobody on stage. Just a couple of laptops. Yeah.
cool laptops talking to each other and they're they're hardwired into different instruments and those they just start playing songs you know taking requests and then get down on one knee and somebody and sing right in their face i don't know it's gonna be weird it's getting weird i would watch that for sure yeah i would probably watch that too that's the problem is we're so easy we're like this is dangerous and crazy and it's like but i would totally participate
You know, aren't we just kind of along for the ride this whole way? That's the problem, right? How can we stop it?
Like, I don't know. There was also, I didn't read about it or I didn't read the post, but I think there was a post by Sam Altman this week about like, we're like a thousand days away from super intelligence or something like that.
Yeah, I don't really believe anything he says.
I agree. I agree.
It's like Elon Musk and then we'll be self-driving by 18 months from now. Totally. And he's completely invested in that being true. Yes. And so highly motivated to say it's going to be true pretty soon. Yes.
If it is true, let's assume that we are that close. There's nothing we can do to stop it. There's no one... I don't know. It could just be devastating. Already, we've put out all of the guitar tuning apps. They're gone. We don't need them anymore. We don't need the... We're just slowly going down this market until...
Unless they evolve, though. I mean, that's just one application. The thing I don't like about ChatGPT is not what it does. It is its interface. In the web version of it, you can't star things and use it as a resource you go back to for continued intelligence development for yourself.
And maybe that's where other client applications apply, where it's like you're an interface, an API away from a better ChatGPT. I feel like that's where the tuning app that is not evolved can evolve. Right? Yeah. Because it doesn't have to die. It just moves, like Jared has said a couple times, it's about changing your spot on the value chain. Say it, Jared. What's your soundbite, dude?
It's about changing your spot on the value chain. That's my paraphrase version of it. You gotta, you gotta move around the value chain. It's not, you gotta move up.
You can't move around. You can't go down or sideways. It's gotta be up. You can't stagnate. You have to be more valuable, higher up.
This, this reminds me, I just read, uh, Charlie and the chocolate factory with my daughter and you know, her, her dad was, uh, like he was, he was like putting tooth, the, the lids on toothpastes, uh, and like then times changed and he had to evolve to be the repair man for the robot that does that. But what if you find Zen in just putting the toothpaste on the bottle, the lid on the bottle?
There's other ways to find Zen.
Yeah.
There's many roads to Rome. He could do it in his spare time for free. He could brush his teeth a lot. Just take the thing off, brush his teeth, put it back on. You'd have the cleanest teeth in the world.
And that's why I still write TypeScript.
That's more like flossing, isn't it? I mean, TypeScript is always going the extra mile, is it not?
It's just table stakes now.
You must like typing. Not types, but like literally.
I do like types.
Because you type a whole bunch more than I do. And we accomplish the same thing. Just with regular JavaScript over here. Correct?
Yes, absolutely. Well, I close my case. But do I type more or do you? Like when you go fix all of your type errors later on.
Oh, I don't do that part.
Okay.
Yeah. Fix type errors. How am I going to know about them?
Okay, we're here in the breaks. I'm here with Firas Bukidji, founder and CEO of Socket.dev. So Firas, you put out this fire post recently on X. And I'm going to paraphrase. You say the XZ package backdoor was just the tip of the iceberg. Give me just a peek behind the scenes of this incident and what you mean by it's just the tip of the iceberg.
Yeah, so I think the XZutils backdoor was really eye-opening to a lot of developers. It showed the vulnerability of the open-source ecosystem. You had this maintainer who had been tirelessly maintaining this package for 15 years, who was targeted by nation-state actors. who created like literally, it's like a spy movie, right?
They had multiple personas, fake personas that were contacting this poor maintainer and, you know, working on him psychologically to convince him over the course of two years to add them to the repository and give them publish permissions. And they did this through a bunch of kind of negative messages, but also by being helpful and by sending good positive pull requests.
It's really like, I really think it's out of a spy movie, just kind of the level of effort that they put into this. And what they were able to do is get access to this package. This is built into pretty much every Linux server out there. And what this would have let them do is it would have let them SSH into any server and run any command on the server without...
knowing the password without being authenticated to the server. So this would have been like a world ending, potentially kind of an attack, right? It would have been probably the worst attack we've ever seen. I'm not exaggerating. It could have been that bad, but we were lucky.
Through a total accident, this backdoor dependency had made it into the beta builds of some popular Linux distros, but it hadn't made it all the way out to the stable version yet. And a developer who was testing out the beta versions of these Linux distros noticed some weird behavior, he noticed that his SSH connection was taking half a second too long.
And so he pulled the thread and traced it back to this backdoor dependency and we were all saved because of this total accident. It's mind blowing to me for a couple reasons. One, obviously, wow, there's literally states out there, countries that are trying to target open source now. Clearly there's like a team behind this. They probably didn't just work on this one dependency.
They were probably working on getting access to many other ones in parallel. If you just look at the time between the emails they sent to the maintainer, they were about a month between some of these emails. So they were probably working on other maintainers and trying to get access during that time. So that's really scary.
I also think it's pretty scary to see kind of the fact that it took an accident to find the attack. It makes me think like, how many have we not caught as a community? How many have we missed if this one was caught by a total accident? It was eye opening to a lot of people and it made people realize that there really is a threat in the open source ecosystem.
And it's not because most people are bad. It's the opposite. Most people are good, but there are few bad actors out there taking advantage of the trust in the system. That's really where we come in. We're trying to give every company the tools to protect themselves from those types of attacks. And that's what we do at Socket.
Okay, friends, go to socket.dev. Security dependencies. Socket is on the front lines of securing the open source ecosystem. They're a developer-first security platform that protects your code from both vulnerable and malicious dependencies. Install the GitHub app or book a demo. Again, socket.dev. That's S-O-C-K-E-T dot dev.
And by our friends over at Superbase, here in the breaks, I'm here with Ant Wilson, CTO over at Superbase. So Ant, I know our listeners know a lot about Superbase, but who are you?
So I'm the CTO at Superbase, and so I care a lot about the platform, whether it comes to uptime, security, availability, but I'm also extremely passionate about bringing Superbase to more developers.
okay so bringing postgres to more developers i'm a big fan of that we love postgres here at changelog a lot of developers feel like the main choice or a primary choice for them is amazon web services aws right no one gets fired for using amazon web services but suit base is build no weekend scale of billions what's your vantage point on this as cto of super base
When I started in my career, AWS was kind of like new and shiny. And it was so cool that you could go to this website and spin up infrastructure. And then they give you all the tools to manage it. You can drop into the console. You can kind of do whatever you want and you pay for it on a usage basis. If you use a little bit, you get a little bit. Use a lot, you pay a lot.
The expectations of developers have raised since then and I think will continue to be raised because I no longer want to manage my own infrastructure. I don't want to drop into the console every time I get an additional 10,000 users on my platform to tweak the knobs and make sure that the service is still up.
Oh, by the way, I've now got to go and make adjustments to the API gateway to allow for a new geography or whatever it is. I don't want to do that stuff. I want to concentrate on building the cool stuff that I imagined the night before.
And I think just giving people the ability to focus on the cool thing you want to build and not have to worry about the infrastructure anymore is kind of the promise of Superbase. That will change in the future as well. You know, now you have to write your schemas like you shouldn't have to do that in the future. Again, just focus on the cool thing that you want to build.
Well, Superbase is open source. You can self-host it if you want to. It is Postgres for life. It is open source for life. Authentication, instant APIs, edge functions, real-time subscriptions, storage, vector embeddings, things for AI. It's got it all. And no servers managed by you. Just build your app, build in a weekend, scale to billions as you grow.
Learn more about their recent launch week at superbase.com slash launch week or go to superbase.com and get started. Once again, superbase.com. That's S-U-P-A-B-A-S-E.com. Well, AI is crazy. I am not, to summarize, I am not yet FOMOed by Apple intelligence.
Well, wait till I get it on my hands and start showing you cool stuff it's doing for a few months.
Just don't get it before ATL. Maybe now is a good time to mention we got some free passes. What are we going to do? We're going to be there again. Correct. All things open. All things open. This is a staple for us. We love Todd. We love the team. I'm trying to encourage Adam Jacob to come there, even though he wasn't planning to come there, just to go eat steak with us, Jared. Okay.
I mean, I could say more, but that's all I'm going to say. All right.
That's all you're going to say.
I have experienced eating steak with both of you. Oh, yes. It is intense, right? I would recommend.
We don't mess around. And we ate steak together at, where were we? That conference. That conf. You went to that conf in Wisconsin, didn't you, Nick?
I did. How was it? It was a lot of fun. Bigger? It was bigger. Yeah, I think. Yeah, it definitely was bigger. It was more fun. I had my family there that time.
Right on.
They had like a pool party thing. After the water park closed to the public, they reopened it just for that conference, which was awesome. That's cool.
Shout out to Clark Sell, who runs that conference. The organizer of it, he always pushes back on that and says, it's me and other people. A lot of people are part of the front of that conference, but it is literally called that conference. It is. All caps, T-H-A-T conference.
Speaking of which. Now's a good time to let you guys know that at that conference in Wisconsin, Clark, I just happened to have a solid state drive and Clark gave me the recording from January. No way. Yeah.
We can finally publish that episode. I've asked. I was like, okay, we're not going to get it. Was it Danny?
It was Danny, right? Danny Thompson. We interviewed him on stage. Yes. And then that was that. That was that. So he gave it to you just because you're friends with us, basically?
He was like, oh, do you want this? And do you have a means of taking this very large file? And I just so happened to have a two terabyte drive with me. And I was like, yeah, let's do it. And then I forgot to tell you guys. Hilarious. He gave you our proprietary intellectual properties, what you're saying. Yes. And I reposted it under my name.
Trained some voice LLMs on it. We might actually need to just do a redo on the Danny Thompson thing.
Yeah, I feel like at this point, shipping that show is probably not going to happen.
Although it was pretty good.
Let's listen back to it and we'll see if we actually like it. Because sometimes we listen back and we're like, that was better than I thought. Other times we listen back and we're like, that was worse than I thought. Yeah.
And we did JS Danger there on stage. Only half of it was recorded, and it was a great show.
Oh, man, that was a great episode, actually. It came down to the final question, and nobody could get it. And I think the final answer was something hilarious like... It was. Thunderbird, I think. Thunderbird. Like, the final answer was Thunderbird. The male client, Thunderbird. Yeah, the male client. And, I mean, the crowd went crazy. I thought, this is an award-winning episode of Front End Feud.
Not J.S. Danger, Front End Feud. Which is our Family Feud style, not our Jeopardy style game. And then I went to the... Well, now we're going to start. Maybe we should stop here because we're going to start complaining. No, no, no.
Did he give you that? Did he give you that file too?
No, I went up to the guys afterwards and I'm like, the guys who are running the AV right there. Like, that was so awesome. Can't wait to turn it into an episode. He goes, oh, you wanted to record that? And I was like, you got to be kidding me. Yeah, like there was a big plan. We're podcasters. Always be recording. That's our whole thing. ABR. ABR, man.
So today for the first time in a very, very, very, very long time, I opened up ARK just because, just because I was like, well, I got to talk about a browser that isn't Safari. And so I've been in meetings recently. I've like screen share with folks and they're sharing their stuff with me and they're navigating around and give me demos and stuff like that. Sure.
And at least a couple of occasions, I was like, what's that browser? And it was ARK. It's kind of cool. That's it. That's it. I still can't use it though. Why not? It's such a departure from standard web browser that I don't know how to use it. I got to retrain my brain how to use a browser.
Believe it. Yeah. Yeah.
That's about it. I mean, that's the reason. It's just like VIM. It's enough change.
Take that back right now.
I mean, like for somebody who hasn't VIMed.
VIM is totally worth it though.
But for someone who hasn't and they're intimidated or they have imposter syndrome. I can understand why it's challenging to get over that hump to even be comfortable in Vim. And so I would say that Arc or a browser that is uniquely different like it is has similar characteristics of the challenge that Vim has to capture users. And when you're over that hump, maybe you're like, I'm sweet.
It's great. I get it. But for me, it's like, well, I just can't get past this departure. It's hard.
I would say that's true for any life-changing tool like Vim. I wouldn't necessarily say Arc, but Arc does have a lot of... Are you saying Arc is life-changing? No. You're not saying that? No. Okay. And in fact, I think it's funny that you came in right as they had a critical CVE. Did you see this?
Yeah, they had something last week, wasn't it?
What was the CVE?
Spill the beans.
They could execute code on your machine without you even visiting a website to initiate it.
Who's they? The people?
The attacker. The bad folks. I didn't read it exactly, but I know that it was some vulnerability through Firebase or something.
Yeah, it was through Firebase.
But I don't use it anymore, unfortunately. Or fortunately. I just don't like Chrome. And it seemed like a better Chromium to use.
Agreed. I still use Brave as my better Chromium for now. Brave Browser is just what it is. It's basically rip out the Google parts.
And replace it with crypto parts, though?
None of that stuff is on by default. There's a VPN button that I don't use. There's crypto things that I don't use. I do think the idea of the bat token was interesting, but you don't have to use any of that. And it's just like Chrome minus the Google bits. And honestly, I use it for Riverside and for development. And that's it.
Mm-hmm.
Same. I do want to clarify, just because we put this security mention out there, I pulled up the CVE, the CTO, Hirsch, I believe, of the browser company, the makers of the Arc browser. On August 25th, there was an incident and a fix was out the very next day. The loop to be closed is not the details of it, but that they say no ARC members were affected by this vulnerability.
They did an analysis of their Firebase access log. So they use Firebase to deploy certain and use certain features inside of the ARC browser. And so they trolled their, I guess they combed. Trolled is probably a bad word. But they combed their Firebase access logs and confirmed that no creator IDs had been changed outside those changed by the security researcher.
So TLDR, at least on the breach, is there was no vulnerability. There was a vulnerability, but no one was affected by it.
Yeah.
I'll link this up in the show notes.
That's good. And I brought it up because it was topical, but I don't think it's a reason to not use Arc. I don't use it anymore because I'm forced to not use it anymore at work. Why is that? Because it's not Chrome. And Chrome has enterprise tools that don't ship in Chromium, apparently.
So you have to use Chrome by dictate. He's nodded his head, by the way.
Yes, I said yes.
And then he said yes. That was a dramatic pause for our listener, but not for us as we saw you nod your head. And he smiled while doing it, too. Affirmation. Is the browser company... VC-backed. Gosh, I don't know. What's that website that's like TechCrunch, but it's just for CrunchBase? CrunchBase. Is that where you would find that information?
Mm-hmm. If ChatGPT is to be believed, then yes. They have raised significant funding, including a $50 million round at a $550 million valuation.
Google's also correct. I Googled that. CrunchBase also seems to confirm it.
we all did three different things to find that information.
Which means it's pretty reliable, right? Unless two are using the one source and they're just, which they probably are. Crunchbase is probably the source and Google and ChatGPT are probably scraping that. ChatGPT gives links to Reddit and TechCrunch. Okay, well Crunchbase and TechCrunch are like the same people, I think. Could be wrong about that. So that gives me pause in general with browsers.
I'm going to stick with Safari until Lady Bird can be used as my daily driver, and I'll probably switch to Lady Bird as, well, even if it can be my development, and I'll swap Brave for Lady Bird and then eventually, hopefully, Safari for Lady Bird.
But I think if I'm going to have a large corporate entity that either is VC-backed or publicly traded or whatever, I'm just going to stick with Apple because I feel like their incentives for now are pretty well aligned with mine as a customer of theirs. And, you know, the browser company, I appreciate that they're out there innovating and trying to do new stuff.
But for me personally, I just feel like there's so many pressures on a company like that when things aren't going hockey stick in the way they have to, that there's incentives to compromise my side of the equation for theirs.
Yeah.
And, you know, I mentioned this when we talked to Chris Wanstroth and Andreas, when we were talking about Lady Bird, was I think if we can incorporate, I think Safari has done some base level security things. And I believe for the most part, Apple has my privacy in check. Maybe for everyone else, maybe not so much for them.
Maybe they're using a lot of my data, but they're at least not giving it away to my knowledge. Right to repair is a whole different issue. We'll can that for now. But I feel like maybe this max enable max thing that Arc has might be things like what the pie hole does in the browser, like different security things you can do and different features that make sense that would be a paid feature.
And that would be a for profit company. Or at least a company that wants to make money to sustain, even if it's not for profit. It could be a public good company. I think when you raise money, though, we've seen that chat GPT was open. AI was once open, and now they're not open. So there can be a rug pull even in venture capital land.
The part I may disagree about a little bit, and the jury is still out on this for me, is that while I'm not an ARC user, I can appreciate a browser trying to be...
sustainably capitalistic and deploy features that are paid that i may want and may use the browser so i can pay for them because they're not anywhere else or i have to cobble together some self-hosted stuff which is kind of cool if you're into that but if you're not then making that readily available to the masses for $10 a month or some fee may be kind of cool.
I don't know what they're doing, but it's something like that. It's like ask on page, five-second previews, tidy up tab titles, tidy downloads. These are things that seem to be free. So I could be misspeaking about these being paid features.
There's a subscription model here? Is that what you're saying?
Well, I think there's room for one because I speculated with Lady Bird that there could be some sort of subscription model to sustain it. There's definitely room for the browser caring more about security and privacy. And the incumbents, Chrome, Google has had a bad reputation for user privacy. Apple has been on the fence of privacy focused.
But then they also have lots of things that are behind the scenes that get spoken about their practices that... that may be somewhat true or mostly true, and I still trust Apple. I'm not distrusting Apple.
What I'm trying to say is I think there's room for a browser to do stuff like this as a business model that isn't just here's a Firefox clone or a Chrome clone or a Safari clone and we're a new company, sustain us. where they can deliver more innovation.
I think insofar as they've done with the browsing experience, which is the jarring part that I've said that's hard for me to cross that chasm, there's room for features, in my opinion.
Yeah. I think that there's a lot of like really cool things in arc that are like UI level fundamental changes to the way that you would browse specifically the things like a split view, being able to split into three different panels and view things side by side. That's really awesome. Having the tab bar on the side and hideable and then like having, you can swipe between multiple tab bars.
So like when I was using it, every project that I was working on had its own tab bar. And I could just leave those tabs open and then I wanted to go work on something else. I switch over to that one and go really nice. And you could rename tabs too. So, you know, the 40th Google sheet that you open, you can rename it to be something memorable so that you can actually get back to it.
And that was all just like really cool stuff. This max stuff I have turned off completely. And that's because it's all just AI stuff. It's you want to search for something and the page, it will generate a page that cobbles together a bunch of stuff from around the internet into one page for you. Or it'll do like smart things about tidying your tabs or renaming them or things like that.
All of that, A, is not all that easy.
useful when like it's just saving me one or two steps which i could just do on my own when i need them but then also like it kind of muddies things up because like a lot of companies don't want these ai features in they don't want them bleeding into to the workplace because they don't know how to control their data with that and when it's built fundamentally into the browser like that then companies can overreact and be like we're just going to block that browser completely
Yeah, it's a lot of AI hate.
Copilot is a massive loss. Last time I heard for Microsoft or GitHub, it costs them $30 a user and I pay $10 a month for that. It's just not that profitable because it's so intense to train these models.
I misspoke assuming that Max was paid. It is not paid. Although there's room for a version of this to be cooler than this AI stuff and be paid, and sustain and potentially profit.
Yeah, I mean, that's what I'm not seeing is like, where is the business model here? Yeah. And when you don't see one and you see $50 million plus raised and you see them going for it's free, free, free, free, I just think the long-term ramifications of all those things usually end poorly for the end user. And so that's why I'm skeptical. But I would love for them to have a pay plan right now.
And maybe they've talked about it and it's just not out there. They're going to do that with Macs.
I was skeptical of switching to Raycast when it was all free because it was like, I don't want to build up my workflow around you and then you die because you couldn't sustain yourself. And then I have to go crawling back to Alfred. Spotlight, man. It's right there. It's built in. That's true. Raycast does so much, though. It's so nice.
But yeah, like once they had that, and it was for pretty simple features. Like I have more than one Mac. I'll sync between those. That's totally worth it for me. And they have some AI stuff, which is pretty nice too. Like that's probably my primary interface into all of these chatbots is like through the Raycast interface for that.
But it's also something that you can completely ignore if you don't want to use it.
Do you have the AI feature then? He's nodding his head again. Nick, stop nodding your head. I'm just kidding with you. Yeah, I love this AI stuff. I use it. I think it's a feature they could push further into. I talked to Thomas, one of the co-founders and the CEO of Raycast. On a podcast, you can listen to episode 587. Go back a little bit. changelaw.fm slash 587. And
I'm an advocate for them turning this into a full-on, not in Raycast, chat app that's like an AI chat app. Because you can interface with all the models. You can easily switch. You can favorite them. You can search them. There's room to unify the world of AI chat into a single application. And I feel like they do that with...
with raycast but it obfuscates it because it's like within this raycast world and you kind of have to adopt raycast to get the chat app and it's like a sub app of it it doesn't have a full native app i mean it has a full native app experience but there's some unique non-native ux that comes with it and if they made it a dedicated application i think they could dominate
Like, be the single interface for all of the iChat.
Well, let me use this opportunity to mention a tool that I found called Enchanted. Enchanted is an iOS and macOS app for chatting with private, self-hosted language models such as Lama 2, 3.1 as well. Mistral by Kuna using Ollama. And so this is open source. I've been using it for a while. It's unified chat. Switch your model up in the corner.
I don't know it actually has a chat GPT option where you can just put in your OpenAI API key because it's all about the open source side of things. But That's a good one. Well written. I've been using it. I enjoy it. And so check that out unless you are ChatGPT for life because it is O-Lama based. It looks really good. And I think Lama 3 is good enough that...
I only use ChatGPT now on my phone because I don't have this on my phone. So I'll go to this and it answers, I would say, nine out of ten things sufficiently. The other time I'll use ChatGPT in the browser is when I want to use the Dolly features and generate images.
But for just asking my computer questions, it's a pretty good option, which I think is probably similar to what you're thinking of with this breakout chat app for computers. Raycast. For sure. So that's a cool one.
Even as I look at the screenshots, what I like about it is when you go to the GitHub repo, it has the link to the app store. Download on the app store, which is this is a Mac app. And as I'm going through the screenshots, it has similar characteristics. I mean, how much different can you make a chat app really? So I'm not even knocking them necessarily, but like it has similar characteristics to
of what I like about Raycast AI chat. And Thomas, if you're listening to this show or anybody from your team's listening to the show, you may be doing this already, but gosh, strike the goal while it's hot. Be the single application. And I guess maybe Enchanted might have a leg up because they... What's the license? ALV2? Apache License Version 2? So... Yep. Liberally licensed open source.
Permissively licensed open source. What's the better way to say that, Jared?
Permissive, I think.
Liberally, permissively. They're probably interchangeable to some degree. I'm sticking to my guns. Great job, Enchanted and whoever's behind this. AugustDev. Fantastic work. This is free.
You just download it. What do you do to get access to it? You have to have a token. Is that right? No. So this is like an interface for Ollama. And Ollama is a open source project that will run these different LLMs that you have the models downloaded on your machine. And so if you look at the repo for Enchanted, it'll say things like, you must have Ollama running first.
And so there's a little bit to do there. It doesn't actually embed or download the models for you. So Ollama is really cool as well. So you're running Ollama as like a home lab thing then?
Just on my laptop. Yeah. Well, it's not really a home lab. That's exactly what a home lab kind of is.
It's a single machine home lab. It's my work computer. It's my only computer. I'm running it here on my laptop. And so there's, I can't remember how I installed Ollama. Probably brew install Ollama. Brew install, yeah. And then I pick Mistral 3.1 latest. Or sorry, Llama 3.1 latest, not Mistral. in enchanted and llama is running. Oh, llama is running as a service on my laptop.
That starts when my laptop starts. And so enchanted talks to that backend.
This would be a good chance for you to mention your post on LinkedIn, which is where I learned about this. I actually learned a lot of things about you on LinkedIn.
Jared, if you didn't know, I didn't know that.
Uh, you mentioned your stack for, I think it was a llama and I don't think it was enchanted at the time. Was it something different? Do you recall this? Like maybe three weeks back you mentioned your stack four, you're removing chat GPT and you're moving to something else?
I was using it from the command line at the time.
Okay.
Just talking into my command line. I can't remember if I had a tool for that or if Olamar provides a command line UI. Oh, I think I found a TUI. Oh, yeah. I'm going to quote you. You mind? Oh, cool. Yeah, I like this.
Llama 3.1 is good enough to ditch ChatGPT as my daily LLM driver. Current toolkit, Ollama and Enchanted. Also interested, and it said something else like a 2E or whatever. So maybe that was a 2E you were mentioning. So it was Enchanted at the time. It was. I didn't think it was. That was a month ago. So you're 30 days ahead of this podcast mention. I love it.
So to summarize, you have a Mac app installed that speaks to Ollama running locally on your machine, not on your network, on your machine. Right. Can you network Ollama and make Enchanted just be like the network driven, like everybody who can install Enchanted? Yeah. Is that a possibility?
Yeah. If you go to the Enchanted settings, the first thing it asks you for is an Olamo server URI. So you can definitely run it on the network and connect to a beefier machine or something that you have right now. Now you're home labbing. Now you're self-hosting. You transcended the singular machine and you went straight on home lab. That's right. And you can probably post it.
You know, you could probably have a fly server out there or digital ocean. Get it. You know, preach brother run EC2 instance and run it there. And then no EC2. I'm just kidding. I'm just hating a little bit.
We're not paid to hate. We just got a little bit of hate in our hearts. Okay. That's how it works. That's cool. I have to learn how to self-host in the cloud better, which I don't have experience there. My confidence would come from past success. I don't have past success.
You have past success. I mean, look at the old DigitalOcean box that you set up.
Yes, I suppose. That's what that is. Is that it? Just a little bit of UFW and that's it?
Yeah, man. Load up Ubuntu on a machine, get a VPS, load up Ubuntu, install some stuff on it, expose a port and an IP, and start connecting your stuff to that. That's it, huh? It's so easy, Nick could do it. Okay. He needs to.
I might make it a project.
What have you hosted, Nick, historically?
Just websites, mostly.
Running Apache or Nginx or what?
Yeah, Nginx. I did, oh, and probably Apache. Because I kind of stopped doing it. I was hosting a WordPress site for a friend. And I just log in. And it got really, there's malware everywhere. Yeah. All this extra PHP code. I had to manually go change 100 files. I was not smart enough at the time. I was in college.
I didn't use any kind of version control, so all of the files got modified and I had to manually go unmodify them.
That's funny. Did you know that I once set up my own little intrusion detection system on a WordPress install using Git and a shell script? I didn't want it to change. unless I change it, right? And so I had WordPress installed and I just initialized a Git repository on all the PHP files and then initial commit. And then I assumed that none of these files are going to change.
And so I wrote a shell script that basically ran git status. And if it had any modified files, it would email me. Like, hey, there's a file here that's changed. That's awesome. And that was pretty eye-opening. Because WordPress sites get files changed arbitrarily or seemingly arbitrarily more often than you would want them to. You know, oh, there's a new file here or something.
Of course, you have to ignore certain directories like caches and stuff. Yeah. Yeah, it was like a little intrusion detection, like the dumbest one you could possibly do because I didn't know how to run IDSs and stuff. That's clever. It worked. Yeah.
The problem with that and with every intrusion detection system is false positives where it's like it detects something and you're like, oh, that makes sense. And then you try to, and then it's like my only tool is get ignore. Whereas if you have smarter tools, you can obviously fingerprint much better and say like this part of a file makes sense to change or whatever, whatever.
It was dumb, like literally a dumb solution, but good enough for what I needed at the time.
Mm-hmm.
What's up, friends? I'm here with a good friend of mine, Adam Jacob, co-founder and CEO of System Initiative. And I'm pretty excited to have him here because that means System Initiative is out there. It's GA. Adam, I heard that you launched something.
Yeah. Oh, I'm stoked. We did. Yeah, we launched something on the 25th of September. And yeah, you can use System Initiative now by going to a website and signing up and three clicks and you're in. And then you can automate infrastructure. It's sick. It's the coolest thing in the universe. I'm so proud of it.
Well, let's level some folks up. Let's level up the Terraform folks, the Pulumi folks, the AWS CDK folks. As of System Initiative being GA, these folks are kind of doing things the old way, right?
Yeah. I mean, that's what I hope is true. Okay. Yeah. I think, look, here's what it is. Basically, we figured out that part of the reason that it's so hard for us to achieve the outcomes we're looking to achieve with the kind of DevOps and operational work that we do is because the tools we're using sort of help bring about those tough outcomes. It's a lot harder to like.
write static code, have your friends review it. In System Initiative, what you do is you use this living architecture diagram to put together all the different relationships between the things that you use. And then you can program that architecture diagram to do all the stuff you need it to do.
So it automatically understands how to do things like create resources and delete them or update their tags or do those things. But then you can also extend it with your own custom policy. And the whole thing happens in real time in multiplayer Let's say you're going to like build some infrastructure. You've got to go, you know, use an AWS account. You're going to launch a new service.
So you've got to go set up all the different pieces, the VPCs and the EKS clusters and, you know, ECS and database services. And you've got to set up IAM rules. There's all this stuff you've got to do. With system initiative, what will happen is you'll sign up, you'll get this workspace, and then you'll have this list of all the different architecture assets that AWS provides.
And what you'll do is throw those things into this big diagram in the center of the screen, which is basically this living architecture diagram. And then you'll connect them together, just like you would if you were drawing an architecture. And what it's doing when you do that is actually writing the code to describe how these things work. And it's running it as a simulation.
So it's telling you in real time, this would work or this wouldn't. So you don't have to wait. There's no long feedback loops. We actually vet all of that infrastructure and all that architecture in advance. You can say, hey, this looks good. It's what I want to see in the real world.
And you can apply that change set and it's keeping track of all the different things you have to do to actually go make that infrastructure real. And then it goes and does it. And then after it does, it keeps track of those things, too. So you can see both sides. You can see the real thing in the world.
that is what you created and it's and it's attached to the model of what you thought you wanted and then you can use that to manage it over time and then when you have customizations or tweaks or things you need to build for yourself you can go write that directly into the system in real time in these same kind of change sets that you use to do the infrastructure and so that's what it's like to use system initiative it's it's the most powerful intuitive collaborative way to do this work that's ever existed
Okay, System Initiative is out there. It is GA, and it's the future. Go to systeminit.com. Get started in three clicks. They do have a free tier. That means free. No credit card required that you can play with. Again, systeminit.com. That's S-Y-S-T-E-M-I-N-I-T.com. Well, our friends over at Speakeasy have the complete platform for API developer experience.
They can generate SDKs, Terraform providers, API testing, docs, and more. And they just released a new version of their Python SDK generation that's optimized for anyone building an AI API. Every Python SDK comes with Pydantic models for request and response objects and HTTPX client for async and synchronous method calls and support for server sent events as well.
Speakeasy is everything you need to give your Python users an amazing experience integrating with your API. Learn more at speakeasy.com slash Python. Again, speakeasy.com slash Python. But speaking of WordPress... Okay, Adam here in post-production.
Just want to jump in here real quick before we open up this WordPress topic because there has been a lot of details uncovered since we recorded this show. Not that we didn't talk about a lot of good stuff, but some of what we talked about went stale. Some of what we talked about speculated. And some of the stuff we talked about didn't get talked about at all. So there was more to uncover.
There's lots of things happening around this drama, this topic, this feud, this war. And I just want to let you know that we didn't cover everything. So there you go. Should we segue? Did you mention WordPress?
Nick mentioned WordPress.
Are we allowed to mention WordPress? Or is that like some kind of... I think we have to.
Oh, shoot. Are we violating trademark if we do that? I think we might get a cease and desist, honestly. Let's just call it WP. Okay, WP. All right, so I was driving this engine. Let's just call it WP Engine. And I won't tell you what open source software I was running.
Okay, so for those who don't know, there's a lot going on between some large players in the WordPress community, the largest probably two players, one being Matt Mullenweg, creator of WordPress and owner of Automatic, which is a company that capitalizes WordPress through hosting, and WP Engine, which is another company that capitalizes WordPress through hosting.
both of which have contributed to the open source WordPress project, lovingly hosted at WordPress.org. But from what I can tell, not to an extent that Matt Mullenweg is happy with on WP Engine's behalf. So Matt started this project brouhaha by calling out WP Engine at WordCamp US 2024. Guys, hop in here and correct anything I'm saying that's wrong.
I'm not hopping in because it's all correct so far. Great job. Keep going. I'm really just trying to summarize what I know. We are not WordPress community members. We are very much just watching. We know Matt. We've had him on the show once or twice, but we don't know him very well. I don't know anybody at WP Engine. Very much just reporting the news that we've read.
So Matt called out them for two reasons, one of which is that they agreed to contribute more. They agreed to contribute, I guess, at a pace that was somewhat equivalent to automatic, and then they didn't. This is Matt Mullenbeck's report, not mine. And then the second reason is that they change core functionality of WordPress when they host it.
And they change it for reasons that he does not like. Specifically, he pointed out that they will disable revision control, which is, according to Matt Mullenweg, a core aspect of what WordPress offers, since it is a content editing system and it has built-in revision control for many years. WP Engine... disables that feature.
Matt Mullenweg says in order to save money on hosting, they don't have to host all those different versions of every post or page. So those are the things that he said, and he said it live on, he said it from the WordCamp stage, so it was kind of like a public call-out. I mean, it literally was a public call-out.
So WP Engine then, their lawyers got together and sent a cease and desist to Automatic,
For WP Engine, they responded, I think, the next day or two days later with a pretty lengthy, I guess, cease and desist.
Like, layered up, you know, straight up. Literally a cease and desist, saying automatic must stop doing what? Slandering them? The WP Engine trademark or something?
So I was actually paying attention to this closely because, hey, if you didn't know, we now use Zulip as our community chat. True. We're trying it out. It's not officially the one. However, shout out to Nabel. for posting this new topic in general called WordPress drama. And so I've literally been using our own source as a source. Don McKinnon's in there. I'm in there. Nabel's back in there.
Nabel, Eric's in there. There's some link ups. And so on September 23rd, today's the 25th, we're recording this on a Wednesday in the morning. And so on Monday, Brighton, well, Brighton Light, 5.52 p.m., WP Engine on X slash Twitter, posts today WP Engine sent what is called a cease and desist letter, blah, blah, blah, all that good stuff.
And then the chef's kiss to this was that it was a PDF from their counsel, and the PDF lives in slash WP dash content slash uploads, which was just like, yeah, right? Cool. And then I believe the response back from Automatic was September 25th or maybe the 24th. Automatic sends WP Engine its own cease and desist.
Like, hey, I'm going to cease and desist if you cease and desist over WordPress trademark infringement. And I think Matt mentioned this in his talk because I skimmed a lot of that talk. where they use the term WP. And I got to agree. I think I know because I've been in the community for a while to know that it's not WordPress official.
But being called WP Engine, it is pretty closely aligned to the trademark so much so that you feel like it's as official as it can be without explicitly saying between the parties this is official. You would almost assume as a Passer by user of WordPress and of such, there's many like it powers a lot of the web. It's not that these people are not smart.
They just don't generally take the time to dig into some of the details that may not matter to them. And I think this may be one of those details you're like, yeah, cool. It's one of the most trusted hosting companies out there for WordPress. So it's probably pretty good. So long story short, Automatic is second on their cease and desist while WP Engine is first.
Gotcha. And the WP Engine cease and desist letter has some pretty shady stuff in it that it seems that Matt Mullenweg has done. Specifically, which seems kind of extortative. Is that the word? Extortion? Or is it... I don't know. It does seem like that, right? It's because it's kind of like, you know, you got a nice business there. It'd be terrible if you lost it. You know, that kind of thing.
It'd be terrible if something happened to it. Yeah. In fact, they claim, now this is all claims now. I don't know if this has been adjudicated in a court of law.
Yeah, we should say allegedly. Yes. Is the term that mainstream media uses. Maybe we should use that term here.
Allegedly. So we mentioned that he originally called them out at WordCamp US during his keynote. Yes. Well, allegedly, WP Engine's lawyers allege that in the days leading up to Mr. Mullenweg's September 20th keynote address at the WordCamp U.S. convention, Automatic suddenly began demanding that WP Engine pay Automatic large sums of money.
And if it didn't, Automatic would wage a war against WP Engine. This demand was accompanied by allegations about WP Engine's business that were not only baseless, but also bore no relation to the payment demand. So they go on, of course, they're going to lay out those kind of things. My assumption here is this is like, hey, you are infringing on our trademark.
You're also doing other things I don't like. If you give us a bunch of money, then we will basically license you, or I don't know what the exact... Agreement would be, but so much so that he's sending text messages to WP Engine's CEO, whose name I don't know, leading up to the keynote and saying like, hey, I don't have to do this. You know, let's make a deal.
He even says in this text message that they include in the document, if I'm going to make the case to the WP community about why we're banning WP Engine, I need to do it in my talk tomorrow. Your Delane is just trying to remove that. And he says some other things as well, which you can read too. We'll link up to the PDF. This is crazy, this.
So I'm not a lawyer. I'll start there. And we've said the word allegedly a couple times. Enough so that what I'm about to say is allegedly true or not true. What this cease and desist from WP Engine does not share... It only shares the one side, insofar as I know. Yeah, it's their side. All the screenshots I saw were from Matt Mullenweg to the existing CEO of WP Engine.
Which, part of, which you didn't mention yet, but part of the thing I think that, and I don't think this is the place you state these concerns... On Matt's side, but part of the issue he takes is that it's a private equity firm that acquired a previously more purposeful company entity called WP Engine. Like the VPN has been around for 15 years or more. I don't even know.
It's like it's an institution at this point to the WordPress community. It's exchanged hands or change hands has been acquired by a private equity firm that has assets managed, which to my to my taste, like it doesn't matter how much assets under management you have, but it's big. It's billions.
His issue that he takes in his talk is that I couldn't find the video in the title of it, but it was like private equity is eating the world of X or something like that. It's like something bad to the WordPress community. And so part of the issue is that.
And so what we don't have, and to zoom back out again, is we only see in their cease and desist to Automatic slash Matt and team, or whoever this is to, their council, is the texts from Matt to them that are pretty damning, if you ask me. They're damaging. They're not... But we don't have context. We don't know what the other part of the conversation is.
But the issue I think that may have started this was that here's this – I want to say for-good company called WP Engine that was acquired by private equity and has less for-good. They have this thing, this terminology – audience, correct me on this. Nick, if you know, I almost called you Matt –
There's this thing where they commit to giving back, almost like a tithe, back to the WordPress community. So Automag does this. They're a for-profit company. Matt Mullenweg is also, I believe, the chairman of the board for the WordPress Foundation. They allege he has more access to the community than he should. He has more power than he should, and so his words weigh quite heavily.
But there's this idea of giving back to the open-sourceness community. Of WordPress, of which Automatic invests heavily, of which WP Engine historically, at least recently historically, does not.
Yeah, Matt gives numbers on that. He says that Automatic, which is a similar size company in terms of revenue to WP Engine, contributes back 3,915 hours a week to WordPress, the open source project. WP Engine, under this new ownership, contributes back 40 hours a week. Yeah, like probably one person.
And so that's where I go back into Zulip. Because I scanned this document. The moment that Don Mackinen shared this, things are getting spicy. And he links up this ex-post with the cease and desist to Automag CEO. Yeah. And I said, quote, scanned. If this is even close to accurate and those screenshots are true words that Matt shared with WPE, then that's pretty damaging.
Not sure what this percentage is behind the scenes being referenced, but that wasn't discussed by Matt in the keynote. And so if you watch the keynote, Matt talks from one side too. There's like context missing on both sides. Here's the clincher for me on this. And I don't know what your mileage is on this. I'll say, quote,
If open source is free in all the ways that free is free, then WPE is also free. WP Engine is also free not to contribute or contribute very little. It's not cool, but they are free to act as such. That's why open source is so powerful. You are free in every way to or not to participate. It's not cool to only give 40 hours, but they can do it because it's called open source. That's how it works.
So zooming out again, like private equity, siphoning off dollars from the community, Matt's argument, I think it's a sound argument or even a prerogative to have or an opinion to have. I don't think the stage in which he shared it and the way in which it was shared was necessarily right. Again, we are missing some context.
So maybe that context is pertinent to course correcting that feeling I have, but I just don't feel like you do that. Like that's not, that's like a, that's like a Will Smith all over again. And Chris Rock, man, you don't go up on a stage and slap somebody. Okay.
It's just not how you do things. You think Matt Mullenweg said, you know, get the name WordPress out your mouth.
Get the name WordPress out your mouth.
Nick, your thoughts on the matter. You've been silent as we review and correct each other on the details. Lots of details here. We may not have it. Like Adam said, there's probably missing context on both sides for us.
I actually heard about this on Sunday. I don't know when WordCamp actually was, but I heard about it on Sunday from a friend who works at WP Engine and was telling me, oh, did you see this drama where they were calling us out on stage? And I was like, oh, that's...
interesting i'm like i haven't heard of it because i'm not really in the wordpress scene but from what i do know from the periphery about like wordpress and automatic and matt mullenweg like he seems like a really nice guy so it seems out of character yeah to be like disparaging like singling you out specifically and like i can't remember if he said that they like
escorted their booth away or something, like made them get off.
Really? Yeah. They were a sponsor of WordCamp. $75,000 they spent to be a sponsor. So a large sponsor of WordCamp. And so I do think that Matt probably hit some sort of a boiling point here.
Yeah.
As I said in the beginning, Adam and I have interviewed Matt a couple of times. He is a very nice guy. He's soft-spoken. He's very thoughtful. Yeah. He's been very successful and brought a lot of success to a lot of people. I don't know him personally. I don't know if he, you know, a lot of very soft-spoken, nice people also have tempers and can just go off. Maybe that's him. I don't know.
But this does seem like an out-of-character thing, or it was a surprise to me when I heard about it.
And they definitely have a good reputation, too. I'm not a WordPress user. I don't want to ever use WordPress, to be honest. Ooh, dang. Fair. It's not for me.
You're a PHP guy, though, aren't you, Nick? I'm starting to be more. But I would go, yeah. Do you have a Lambo yet? Not yet. Not yet.
Okay. We work on that.
But they like, you know, they, they've come in and like, I think automatic or maybe somewhere around that vicinity owns a Tumblr now. Right. And day one, uh, the, the journaling app and like, you know, yes, it seems like, oh, that's a good trustworthy company to be stewarding these, these apps that otherwise might just die off.
And a lot of people and pocket casts, they bought pocket casts and they open sourced it after they bought it. Yeah. I just switched to pocket casts. Oh, That's interesting.
I've always appreciated Matt Molenbeek's investments. He like invests in things that I think are cool. And then he a lot of times will open source them after investing. That's awesome.
I didn't know the podcast was open though. So when you go to their website, it's not very clear that it is, which kind of is a bummer. But I, I agree with you, Jared. I think it's super cool that when he does like day one, I was a fan of day one. It was awesome. Probably one of the best Mac apps to journal personally.
It's such a cool application and podcast of old and a whole different show, different idea. I think it was called the Industry Radio Show back with like Drew Wilson and Jared Arandu, a different Jared Arandu, sorry. We podcast with the creator of that back in the day. It was like an indie startup that got acquired by Automatic and then it was open source, I believe too.
Simple Note was part of that. You know, he's got a track record of doing the right thing, I think. Which I do think it's surprising his seemingly harsh way to put this cat out of the bag or push it out of the bag or let it out of the bag. There's some context I'm assuming that's missing because this doesn't seem characteristic of his past behavior.
Yeah. And it seems like, I mean, we all should be rooting for Matt and the WordPress side, right? The open source side. Because that's what...
what so many people that we know try and do is like find some way to fund open source in a meaningful way and this is the same thing wordpress is a massively successful project but at the end of the day it is an open source project that needs funding it needs people to work on it it needs all that maintenance because as i personally found out it's quite easy to to get in there and hack now that wasn't wordpress fault probably it was probably just poor security on my
my Linode instance. I'll blame myself for that.
What was this feature that they disabled, Jared? I was reading something while you were sharing that context.
Revision control. So every time you make an edit, it saves the version.
Which would be database costs on WP Engine's side.
Yeah, I mean, at their scale, it's probably significant savings. This does sound like a private equity move, would be like to go in and cut costs, and that would be one way to cut costs. Now, having said that, This is not like changing the way WordPress works. This is a WP config option that is default to on, that WP Engine, the company, defaults now to off.
And so I think you can go back in, I would hope that you go back in through their interface. Surely you can configure your WordPress through hostings and turn it back on again. But this is just totally a private equity thing to do. It's like, let's cut costs. Here's one way to do it.
And I can see where that's a legit move by them as a business, but it also offends Matt Molenweg as the creator of WordPress.
But it is a config setting. It is. It makes total sense to me, especially if it's, I don't know because I don't use it, but if it is something that you could easily just go flip on, then it seems totally acceptable. If you're actually someone who cares, it's not gone. It's right there. But yeah, I don't know. This seems like a new angle for sustainable open source, which is just attack.
And I don't know that that's the right way.
Right, litigation now. Litigation. I mean, the trademark thing is murky, like Adam said. But then here's a challenge to you. You're going to start up a WordPress hosting company. What can you call it? Flywheel. Flywheel. Well, they don't exist anymore. Exactly. I mean, they get bought by WP Engine. I don't know who Flywheel is. I think they probably did. I think they did. Yeah, they did.
We know Flywheel well because Flywheel is an Omaha company. Did you know that? Yeah, I did know that. Yeah.
And that's part of the beauty of a startup too. For sure. Is that you don't have to be named adjacent. or similarly to be successful, Flywood did a great job. They were very innovative early on and they ran WordPress websites very fast and they were competitive with WP Engine. Yeah, they were a great company. Nick, you said that we should be on the side of open source, right?
We should be on the side of WordPress. I mostly agree with that. We should. I'm not against open source. I want to be clear with that. That was very foreboding, wasn't it? I'm for the freedom. I'm for the freedom. Again, I don't think it's cool that WP Engine doesn't give back. There's some context maybe we're missing there. Maybe it's a private equity thing.
Maybe it's we haven't done – maybe they got a good reason. Maybe they have a reason period that's their prerogative. But that is the freedom and free of open source in my opinion. It is not cool. Does that elicit this kind of response? Like for the founder, the creator of WordPress to go on stage and say, you guys are jerks. Like, is that, is this that egregious of an offense?
I think it's not cool. I don't think it's the place for the stage of the WordPress or the WordCamp keynote. It could be a blog post like, hey, private equity, siphoning off money, WordPress open source, help me get behind this. Not so much ban them, but like this is not cool. Can we convince them to change their behavior versus like get out of here? You're not welcome here anymore as a sponsor.
You're being banned. If we want to have a free world in terms of open source, we have to have a free world in terms of participation as well.
I don't see the difference between a blog post and a WordCamp keynote. I think that like that's just to the level.
It's a big difference.
Why? You think a blog post isn't going to also create an entire news cycle around this? I mean, of course it would.
Okay. So I'll give you that. I think that it's, I think, so my lens on that is that somebody else said we would rather hear about community updates and changes to WordPress and roadmap and direction versus this drama. So that's my reasoning for it. I don't disagree that they would both have similar amplification. I think it's like poor taste. It's kind of poor taste. It's not the place.
Again, Will Smith going up on stage laughing at Chris Rock. That is not the place to slap Chris Rock. I mean, you shouldn't slap him anyways, but you certainly shouldn't do it at the Oscars.
I didn't read Will Smith's blog post on this situation, so it carried more weight being on stage.
I don't think there is one. I don't think she let him write one. No. Ooh, Jared. That's fair. I think there's probably some taste to that. I think it speaks to the level of his anger. I don't have a problem with the WordCamp keynote. He created WordPress. He's there to give an update. He can say what he wants. I think he's earned that right.
For me, it's like the give me a bunch of money and I won't do this thing like that is where it's super dicey. Like, no, that's not integrity at all. Like, why? Why all of a sudden, if you pay me a bunch of money, does it not matter anymore? I mean, isn't he already uber rich? Why would he that whole deal?
And like, I'm about to do this, like to me, like that's where he loses me more so than the venue. But I do understand your argument there about not the time or the place. I do go back to this, though, like whose side do we have to be on? First of all, You know, what does it matter what we think?
But secondly, I agree, like WordPress.org, I think we should all be on the side of WordPress, the open source community. And when we look about these two corporate entities, both of which are making billions of dollars in revenue, so there's no small dog here. Didn't he say? I think he said 500 million ARR. They do have about a half a billion in revenue.
Okay, so half a billion on top of WordPress.
Two years later, it's a billion.
So you're mostly accurate. Yeah, sure. So what's a billion between friends? WP Engine is contributing back one developer, one full-time developer. Meanwhile, Automatic is employing 97.875 developers. full time on this open source project, that's an astounding amount of investment. Almost 100 people working full time on an open source project. I think they've earned their bona fides for that.
I mean, I think these two things are not comparable. It's like comparing a million dollars to a billion dollars. And the difference is like roughly a billion.
39.
39.
15. Okay, let's just say 4,000. That's rounding up. Let's run up to 100 developers. That's pretty accurate, right? Yeah. Yeah. Let's do the comparative math here. If it's one developer, let's just give them a potentially a low average of 100K per year for developer. It's probably somewhat ish. Maybe an average brings it down to 100K. Maybe it's 150. Let's just use round numbers of 100K.
If you're employing 100 developers, At $100,000 a year, this is pretty basic math, that's $10 million a year in terms of a salary expense. Right. If you do that for one developer for the entire year, it's, well, that's pretty easy math. Like one times one is one, right? Right. One times 100,000 is, tell them, Nick. Right. 100,000. 100,000, Nick. That's the right answer. That's what I said. Yeah.
He nodded his head. So do me this math then, Nick, since you're sharp here on the pencil. Fire a break. I have it ready. Get Siri out. That Apple intelligence Siri. 10 million minus 100,000.
9,999,000.
9,900,000.
That's the difference.
It's two orders of magnitude.
It's like, it's a hundred times more. If that's accurate. If that truly breaks up into 100 people.
Well, I mean, we're doing, it's not 100. We rounded and stuff. We did. Like we're just basically. Fine. I will take it to 97.
No, this is napkin math. It's fine. Okay. 9.7 million versus. We're all with you. Yeah. I'm joking around. It's for a podcast. It's a difference. It's a big difference. It's a huge difference.
It is a huge difference, for sure. But I don't know. I keep coming back to how many companies are massively profiting on the backs of open source developers and contribute nothing back?
Well, that there is the rub, Rick. How many things are you going to call him that's not his name?
Rick? Leave it in. Fine. I was going to correct myself. Rick? Nick Rick. That's the rub, Rick.
That is the rub, Rick. I was doing two R's there. I got tongue-tied.
Rick Rubin.
That's the rub, is that this is a call-out moment without enough context. They are both equally generating similar ARR. That stands for annual recurring revenue for those. I'm just kidding with you. I know you know that, Nick. You're smart. You got this. You got this, Nick. Don't assume things. I don't know. I got very condescending there for a moment.
I know you know this.
I know you know this. And that's where the argument, I believe, is. But we're camping in this world of lack of context. And potentially the wrong place to slap a person. Okay?
Show title. The wrong place to slap a person. All right. Well, that's how it stands right now. And then you have our comments on the matter. I think we're starting to circle the wagon. So let's not camp out here any longer to reuse Adam's pun.
This will be figured out in the court of law, it seems, unless there's a settlement, because now they're both suing each other and it's going to get nastier from here. So maybe we'll talk about it more.
At least threaten. There's some threats.
Yeah.
I did DM Matt prior to cease and desist letters being shared on X. We have exchanged DMs in the past. I don't know why he's being so silent. Just kidding. I totally know why. And I did email Matt. Matt asking for, and this is again, both in both occasions prior to the cease and desist. And I will email it longer because I know why there's no response.
Cause when you have legal issues or concerns or exchanged legal details, you know, it gets, it gets spicy. I can see that my email has been opened because that's how I got it.
It's okay. There you go. He can leave it to the experts on WordPress like me to talk about this. That's right. That's right.
That's right. So, did we give away those ATO tickets, Jared? Did we? Did we? I don't think we did. We mentioned it.
I still have them right here.
How many you got? Can you fan them out? Like money, can you make them rain, these ATO tickets?
I can. There are 10 of them. We have 10 free passes to the in-person All Things Open 2024 in Raleigh, North Carolina at the end of October. These are ours to give to whomever we please. Yes. And so we're going to give them away here soon to members of our community in our new community chat, which lives in Zulip. Don't slack it to us.
Slack has been slacking and we are now in Zulip chatting in a much more organized fashion. We're enjoying it quite a bit. Keyboard driven, open source, indie. Built by hackers. Bootstrapped, right? Yeah. Yes. Not so much anti-VC, but VC-resistant. So far, no VC. VC-resistant. Straightforward business model. I'm not even against VC, clearly, by the way. Me either.
I'm against VC with, we'll figure out the business model later. That's what I'm against. Anytime it's like, we'll make it up in volume, that's where it ends up being advertising is the only answer. and now you are not incentivized with your end users. I don't mind VC to bootstrap a company that otherwise wouldn't exist otherwise. There's too many otherwises. But have a business model.
I think that developer tools and developer communities have a much more straightforward line. than something like a browser, a consumer product, because we've seen it. Hosting is a straight line, as WordPress has proven out, and freemium is a straight line, as many dev tools have figured out. You build these extra features, not around a single individual user, but around a team.
which means they're backed by a company, hopefully a company that's making money for itself and has money to spend. And so I think a lot of these venture-backed dev tools companies, I don't know if Raycast is venture-backed or not. I guess it is. A lot of our advertisers are venture-backed, and that's why they have some money to spend on getting their name out there, right?
And so that's a straightforward thing. I don't know if Raycast is a premium based on a pro version, right? But a lot of these are going teams. When you have a team, there's our business model. Warp is doing that, Zed is doing that, et cetera, et cetera. And I think that's a pretty straightforward line. That doesn't bug me.
Of course, there's still the question of can you actually make enough money with that model to... make money for your investors and thrive and all that. But at least it's there and it's obvious. And it's not like, well, we'll just figure it out later. That's my biggest concern with venture backed. What about those ATO tickets? 10 free tickets. A little sideways monologue there. I liked it.
For getting me back. Well, I was trying to clarify my stance earlier. I'm not just a hater.
I have a retort. Can I retort? What about these tickets? Well, that was partially my retort. I have a retort to your stance. All right, go ahead. Then we'll do the tickets. What bothers me in the marketplace is when an up-and-coming, maybe even a company that's using venture capital in a way that has sustainability behind it,
Cannot generate revenue or is completely wiped clean because a behemoth of the fangs potentially decides to make their thing free. And I think just maybe in the case of our friends at Zulip, you've got teams that is generally given away. It's paid. There's paid version of it. There's a lot of it where they're able to give away so much for free because they're so big.
And you have a hard time competing. That's another challenge too is like I'm not against – but again, in the world of commerce, you kind of have to be flexible. But I agree with you on there's healthy ways to take venture capital and there's unhealthy ways to take venture capital. And there's things that unhealthy venture capital does to you as a leader of your product. After you take the money.
Things that get forced on you. That's my simple retort. Okay. All right, fair. I have an idea for how we can get these tickets away.
Okay.
I think you might like it. Do you mind if I share it? Only if I'm going to like it. I will give you the option to reserve the right to veto my idea. Okay. Okay, cool. We pre-discussed this, so it's not far off from pre-discussion. What if... maybe around this WordPress drama. Maybe not to dive into the WordPress drama topic, but hey, hop in Zulip. We're going to give you a URL to go to.
Hop in Zulip and give us the best pun against this WordPress drama or just something funny to say back about what's happening here. I don't know. Is that an idea? What do you think about that idea? Like I said, we're going to camp out here for a bit. Maybe there's some other. That's probably it. We've already used the best one. Okay. It's like the number one option on Jeopardy.
Here's my concern with provide us a pun in our Zulip chat. Is that... That's just a lot of friction. He's vetoing it. Fine. I just want to get those 10 tickets out there for people, you know, make it easy. You know, introduce yourself. How about that? That's a good way. Introduce yourself in Zulip and say, uh, I take a free pass to ATO. Something like that. Yeah. It'll be yours.
First 10 people to do that. Bam.
There is an introduce yourself topic inside of the channel called general, which Nick hasn't done yet.
I haven't. Gosh, Nick. I like this, though. You like this? Press your luck, drop a word into Zulip, and then camp out in there.
You can't just keep reusing the same funds over and over again, Nick. You've got to add something to the mix.
You don't know me, sir.
You know you don't know Nick. Not well, if you don't know, he will repeat himself. I'm very used to this.
Ahoy, hoy. Yeah, there you go. Let's do it that way. If you put a pun in there. Bonus. You're going to get so many reaction emoji. Nick will be all over it. He might even camp out in there with you. In fact, I'll just put it out there right now. If you have a good pun, Nick will put on your post every single emoji in the list. Trust me, he has time.
It's going to flex his scripting skills on this one. Actually, there is a way in the Zulip API, which I've been coding against this week, to add reactions to a post. So actually, Nick, you could code that up if you wanted to.
I could. And it's not something that has passed me, for sure. I mentioned that I actually worked at Flywheel for three months. You did? On my first day there, did I learn about WordPress? No. I set the record by day one adding 3,754 new emojis to their Slack.
Gosh. Wow. What a contribution. Did they give you a raise? They didn't fire you the next day?
They didn't. I had metrics. I created impact on day one. I had metrics.
That is day one. It's called noise, not signal. That's not, that's, that's metrics though. That's good. Good job.
Everybody knows Nick is here. He's bringing song and emojis. Watch out. Is that it for the show? Is this, is this the friends episode? Is this over? Can we start recording?
Not your track. We don't need yours. We'll, we'll drop you out in post.
Bye.
What an Epic Friends episode. Nick is so awesome. I love Nick. He's so much fun to talk to. He is a good friend. He's a lot more fun in person, but he's just as fun in a podcast, as you can tell. But if you like Nick, you'll love Nick even more if you're a Plus Plus subscriber because we...
did an epic bonus content for our plus plus subscribers jared was there for a little bit and then had to bail and then nick and i were just unleashed to just talk and we did i think it's about 40 minutes i don't know it's a long one And I think you'll enjoy it. So we do have some ATO tickets to give away. We also have a discount code and this is usable by anyone. So here it is.
Go to 2024.allthingsopen.org. That is the website for All Things Open, the conference. There is a registration link. Click that. And when you go there, use the coupon code MediaChangelog20. Now, to be clear, it's capital M Media, capital C Changelog20. So MediaChangelog20 and then CamelCase, Media and Changelog. And then add 20 afterwards. No spaces.
Details are in the show notes, so check that out too if this is confusing. There you go. Hope to see you there. And if we see you there, high fives, hugs, handshakes. Hot mics, whatever. Let's do it. Okay, so if you're not a Plus Plus subscriber and you want to listen to this epic afterwards from me and Nick, then you're going to want to go to changelog.com slash plus plus. It's better.
You know what? It's better because Nick and I are going at length deep on some books, on some coffee, on some fun stuff. I had a lot of fun. I think you'll really enjoy it. Again, changelog.com slash plus plus. $10 a month, $100 a year. You get to drop the ads. You get to come a little closer to that cool changelog medal. You get bonus content like today.
You get a free sticker pack sent to you, to your address. And shoutouts on changelognews.com. Here and there. It's so cool. And we had some awesome sponsors today. Assembly AI, Socket, Supabase, and Speakeasy. And of course, to our partners in crime, Fly.io. Share the love. They support us. Go support them if you want to.
And a big thank you to the Beat Freak in residence, Breakmaster Cylinder for those awesome beats. Hey, that's it. This, friends, is over. So, bye, friends.