Web in July - The Mindless Newsletter by Agney Menon
July’s down and I’m an year older.
This month was all about GPT-3. When OpenAI came up with GPT-2, they said they wouldn’t release it into the world because they did not know of it’s implications, but then they did and we now have online testing tools like Write with Transformer. With GPT-3 OpenAI takes another approach, they hold the resources and models but exposes the services through an API. It’s currently invite only at this point, but lots of people have been checking it out and been mind blown by it. It can write stories, recipes or even make websites.
But then, Open AI founder himself came forward to tell us how we were hyping it too much. It still lacks semantic understanding, holds bias and the new capabilities from GPT-2 seems to be more of pre-training resources rather than new research. But it’s still an exciting time to live in, I would be happy if it could generate and write documentation.
Releases
- Cloudflare Workers unbound - Cloudflare launches a new version of their serverless computing platform workers, without the CPU limits. The pricing comparison with Lambda makes this exciting, also checkout their isolate model with Webkit.
- Framer Motion v2 - Framer Motion’s new update comes with some auto animations and shared layout animations. I have been trying this out since beta and it’s awesome.
- NextJS 9.5 - NextJS now ships with incremental static page generation, would be interesting to see what GatsbyJS is upto.
- Github public roadmap - Github has started mapping out features that they are building with a public roadmap. When you know it were some Github employee comments on third party repositories that was used before, it’s definitely a step up.
Tutorials
- LinkedIn Learning Software Developer courses - Microsoft opened up their web developer courses for free and has a roster with some popular names like Jen Simmons, Annyce Davis and Scott Simpson.
- New Github Profile - Github launched a feature to include a ReadMe markdown file on your profile. Everyone’s got a readme trick, but my favorites for the season are Github Stats with a iframe and CSS and SVG with foreign object
- Collector’s cabinet - Lynn Fisher turned up with art on single.div project with a collector’s cabinet build with 50 single divs 😅
- Minimum Viable SaaS - Jared Palmer build a minimal project that can be sold as SaaS in 400 lines of code (Firebase and Stripe Customer Portal are doing some heavy lifting here)
- CORS - CS Visualised - Even if you know what CORS is, this is worth checking out for Lydia Hallie and her awsome illustrations.
- All the Ways to make a web component - Different ways to make a web component and comparison.
In Other News
- Twitter Security Incident - Twitter had it’s worst security incident this month as hackers gained access to their admin system and tweeted out fake Bitcoin scams from some of the most prominent profiles. The company explains that this was caused by a spear phishing on their employees to gain access. It’s ironic how the weakest point in a computer system is still the humans running it.
- Cloudflare and Internet - Cludflare went down for 25 minutes and took a large chunk of Internet with it. We claim decentralisation of Internet, but everytime Cloudflare or AWS goes down, we are treated with the truth.
- GAFA and AntiTrust Hearing - Tech’s largest companies - Google, Facebook, Amazon and Apple appeared before US Congress to testify. After the inital hearing on monopolies and intimidating competition through 217 questions, world awaits what comes out of this.
- Github Artic Vault - After moving project because of COVID-19 situation, Github has finally completed moving some projects to the Artic vault where they will be safe from extinction (apparently)
- Web in 3D - NYT - The visualisations on this page are mind blowing.