Congratulations! If you're watching this video, the good news is that you survived yet another month riding the hockey stick towards the singularity, and you get to put this new badge on your vest. The bad news, though, is that by the end of this video, you'll be five minutes closer to being dead. Every day there's a new JavaScript framework, AI breakthrough, corporate lawsuit, or Tech bro drama. But because I'm just an antique flush-based carbon unit, I don't have the content generation speed to make every single story into a video. We've looked at Apple intelligence and serverless gone wrong, but there's so much other nonsense that I want to inject into your brain. So in today’s video, we'll do something different and look at 10 or 13 or 14 insane Tech stories that you missed in June. It is June 30th, 2024, and you're watching the Code Report.
Yesterday, artificial intelligence took another victim: the UI/UX developer. Thanks to Figma's new collection of AI tools, the design game has changed. I use Figma every day to design side projects and YouTube thumbnails, but now you can generate UIs with a prompt. What's even more exciting, though, is the visual asset search. This is my actual Figma workspace. I know I should probably be locked up in a facility, but with AI search, I can now find things based on how they look and not just the plain text in an artboard.
But that brings us to Story number two. Claude Sonet 3.5. It was looking like AI was going to plateau, but Sonet 3.5 proved us wrong. It's now easily the best LLM for writing code out there and is significantly better both on benchmarks and in my experience than GPT-4o. But it also has a killer new feature for coding called artifacts, which will save your code snippets individually, allowing you to piece them all together into a cohesive application. Not to be outdone, a few days later, OpenAI released its own new model called Critic GPT. It's not a regular LLM but rather a GPT-4-based model designed to find errors in GPT-4's code. It's amazing what these Transformer models can do nowadays, and the demand for these AI tools made Nvidia the most valuable company in the world in June, for a day or two.
In Story number three, there's a new game-changing chip in town from a startup called Etched, which burns the actual Transformer architecture onto silicon, dramatically increasing the speed of inference. Assuming you're running a Transformer model, if Transformers get replaced by a better architecture, this company is screwed. But in 2024, this idea looks pretty genius.
I know many of you are sick of everybody grifting on artificial intelligence, but big companies are not done jamming AI down your throat with things like Apple Intelligence and Microsoft's Copilot Plus PC. We are just getting started, and this AI runs on laptops and phones with ARM chips. But in Story 4, Intel wants to change that with its Lunar Lake chip. It’s an x86 chip but designed to be way more power efficient so you can actually run it in a laptop without it catching on fire.
Now, I just have one more AI update for you, and that’s Meta’s new LLM compiler model and paper. The model is based on Llama but trained on 546 billion tokens of LLVM IR and assembly code. What terrifies me is that this model will eventually learn how to build its own programming languages, and the 15 years I dedicated to mastering HTML programming will all be for nothing.
Let's shift gears to Story number six. Kaspersky Antivirus has been banned in the United States because of potential ties to Putin. If you're affected by this, though, just let me know because I know a guy who can keep you virus-free. Story number seven: Cloudflare extortion. Like a lot of websites, this company was using Cloudflare for its CDN and DDoS protection. They have 4 million monthly active users and were paying $250 a month. Then they got this email from Cloudflare requiring a $120,000 payment upfront for an Enterprise plan; otherwise, they would take all their domains down within the next 24 hours. The one detail I left out, though, is that this website is an online casino, which presents some additional risk for Cloudflare. But the way their sales team handled the situation just looks really bad.
Another company that took a couple of Ls in June is Adobe. At first, they released some new terms and conditions that basically say any content that you create on Adobe products becomes the property of Adobe. Like the video you’re watching right now was edited with Adobe Premiere, which means apparently Adobe owns this video. I don’t think they’re going to reupload it, but they might use it to train their AI. The situation is just like that one Black Mirror episode. Now, your advice might be to cancel Adobe and use Da Vinci Resolve instead, but it’s nearly impossible to cancel Adobe, and that’s why they also got sued by the US government this month for making subscriptions too hard to cancel.
Speaking of the government, Apple also took a big L this month when it was accused of violating the new Digital Markets Act in the EU. Now they’re looking at a $30 billion fine. Yes, that’s billion with a B. But I’m sad to say that my favorite tech YouTuber also took an L this month. Tech Lead was accused of abusing the YouTube copyright system after this channel brought shame upon his reputation. Now, I’ve been a fan of Tech Lead since the very beginning, and it’s been fascinating to watch his channel evolve from programming tutorials to flutter hot takes to crypto rug pulls to why my wife left me, and now blackpill Doomer content. Today he gets a lot of hate, but most people don’t realize that it’s a satire channel. He’s playing 5D influencer chess and creating drama to get videos made about him on all these different channels, mine included. That’s why he’s my Tech Lead.
Now, speaking of nerd drama, there was also a really weird situation that went down on GitHub. One prolific open-source contributor opened up a pull request to expand support for computer repair Node.js 0.4, a version that almost nobody uses. It got over 200 downvotes and zero upvotes. People started to question his motives. Is he a Chinese spy trying to create a backdoor, or is he doing it for the money from Tidelift, a platform that pays open-source contributors for various things related to package health? The author denies those conspiracy theories, and he’s done a lot of good in the JavaScript ecosystem over the years, so maybe he deserves the benefit of the doubt. I really have no idea. It’s just fun to watch JavaScript developers fight each other.
Speaking of JavaScript, the State of JS 2023 results just dropped. React is still the king of JavaScript frameworks, people still love Svelte, and Vue.js is one of the few established frameworks that is paradoxically becoming more loved. Thank you for voting Fireship as the number one JavaScript channel. It’s easily my favorite language to make fun of.
That brings me to thing number 13. YouTube has been at war with ad blockers for a while, and they just unleashed a new secret weapon: server-injected ads. Normally, advertisements load asynchronously with JavaScript on the front end, but in the future, YouTube plans to inject them directly into video files, which, in theory, will make it impossible for ad blockers to deal with them. You are now watching a server-injected ad for the new KFC Double Down Dog because your ad blocker did not work. You will eat Double Down Dog because it is on Fireship Channel. Thank you for choosing KFC for your nutritional needs. This has been the Code Report. Thanks for watching, and I will see you in the next one.
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As we dive into these stories, it's clear that the tech world is constantly evolving, often in unpredictable ways. Whether it’s the rise of AI, new breakthroughs in hardware, or the drama within the developer community, there's always something new to learn and discuss. Stay connected and informed by following the latest updates and innovations, and remember to check out Gadget Kings for all your tech needs.