The Weekly Squeak

Bouncing stereo drums over a bed of bass and guitar confusion. Only a rasping synth pierces through the mess.

Jagged guitars jutting through the ethereal blackness of space, dotted by stars. Sound track for a spoken word piece.

Pounding lumbering drums with a heavy bass and delicate harpsichord. Sound track for a spoken word piece.

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I'm Bored by Chris Chinchilla

Crisis by Chris Chinchilla

Let’s start with some fun This newsletter gets dark quickly, so first something to enjoy. Farrago 2 soundboard for Mac arrives with 50 new features including Shortcuts and Stream Deck integration → Rogue Amoeba is releasing a major update to Farrago, the great soundboard app for Mac. Farrago 2.0 includes 50 new features ranging from fun emoji art to well-designed Stream Deck interactivity. Thanks for reading Chinchilla Squeaks! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Microsoft is busy rewriting core Windows code in memory-safe Rust → Microsoft is rewriting core Windows libraries in the Rust programming language, and the more memory-safe code is already reaching developers. David Rumsey Map Collection → 111,792 RESULTS Media Type Year Collection Creator Language Tech makes cutbacks For years we’ve told people with less job prospects to “learn to code”, now tie cutbacks and AI, what do we tell people instead? Learning to code isn’t enough → A decade ago, tech powerhouses the likes of Microsoft, Google, and Amazon helped boost the nonprofit Code.org, a learn-to-code program with a vision: “That every student in every school has the opportunity to learn computer science as part of their core K–12 education. Tech companies are finally firing tech workers → Software engineers made up the biggest portion of tech layoffs in 2023. That advice is starting to feel even less welcome. Amazon and Microsoft’s AI Gains Mask Cloud Slowdown → (Bloomberg) -- The buzz around artificial intelligence that’s helped juice gains for Microsoft Corp. and Amazon.com Inc. this year may also be masking struggles in a business far more critical to the pair’s bottom lines. AI, when and where will it stop? Palantir Demos AI to Fight Wars But Says It Will Be Totally Ethical Don’t Worry About It → Palantir, the company of billionaire Peter Thiel, is launching Palantir Artificial Intelligence Platform (AIP), software meant to run large language models like GPT-4 and alternatives on private networks. In one of its pitch videos, Palantir demos how a military might use AIP to fight a war. The first babies conceived with a sperm-injecting robot have been born → Last spring, engineers in Barcelona packed up the sperm-injecting robot they’d designed and sent it by DHL to New York City. Why I'm no longer writing stories with AI → Preface: Stories by AI is on hiatus. We may or may not be back soon. If you’d be interesting in writing stories for us, get in touch! contact@storiesby.ai I won’t be publishing any more stories with storiesby.ai. What was once a quirky lark of a side-side-project hits darker now. Thanks for reading Chinchilla Squeaks! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chinchillasqueaks.substack.com

KubeCon, back to business Ahead of the event I arranged some interviews with companies that piqued my interest and don’t all fit under the headings in my write up that you can read here - https://chinchillasqueaks.substack.com/p/9c266812-78f0-4985-a719-2b745ff7053c SLIM.AI I previously covered the slim toolkit from Slim.ai and in the interview I am joined by Nnenna Ndukwe, developer advocate at the company, to discuss their new vulnerability scanning and hardening features. MINIO Another company I covered previously, I speak with Daniel Valdivia, MinIO’s Kubernetes expert to cover how their S3 compatible API helps users streamline object storage. INCIDENT.IO I speak with Christopher and Stephen about their new(ish) companythat attempts to solve the human side of incident management. The company also had some awesome T-Shirts that channeled their english roots with “Don’t Panic” emblazoned across them. HIVEMQ Dominik Obermaier joins me to explain why message queues may not be new, but there are still many niche use cases where companies like HiveMQ can excel, and for them it’s IoT end edge computing. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chinchillasqueaks.substack.com

Podcast version Find the podcast version of this newsletter, including my interview with Bertrand of Canonical on the Substack podcast page or wherever you find your podcasts. Tech A mixed bag this issue covering everything from the slow death of Russia’s tech scene, a visual history of Android, GPT-4 in role-play games in role-play games in classified comment leaks. Erm, yes, you read that right. How Russia killed its tech industry → Seven days after the invasion of Ukraine, Vladimir Belugin packed up his and his family’s belongings, canceled the lease on his apartment in Moscow, withdrew his kids from kindergarten, and started a new life outside of Russia. My kids and I just played D&D with ChatGPT4 as the DM → My two oldest kids Taylor Anne and Liam, are 26 and 23 (respectively). My youngest son Tenzin is 15 years old. All of us are together at my house in Mexico City this week, and the discussion topic generating the most heat is OpenAI and GPT4. Leaked Classified Documents Also Include Roleplaying Game Character Stats → Over the past month, classified Pentagon documents have circulated on 4chan, Telegram, and various Discord servers. The documents contain daily intelligence briefings, sensitive information about Ukrainian military positions, and a handwritten character sheet for a table-top roleplaying game. Android versions: A living history from 1.0 to 12 → What a long, strange trip it's been. From its inaugural release to today, Android has transformed visually, conceptually and functionally — time and time again. Google's mobile operating system may have started out scrappy, but holy moly, has it ever evolved. And finally… The Most Spoken Languages In The World, Ranked → There are over 7,000 languages in use across the globe, but for various reasons (like, for example, colonialism), some are spoken a lot more around the world than others. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chinchillasqueaks.substack.com

It's time for open-source users to open their wallets → It was around the year 1999 and I was attending my first Linux convention at the Research Triangle where Red Hat was headquartered. I was, needless to say, excited. Internet Arcade → The Internet Arcade is a web-based library of arcade (coin-operated) video games from the 1970s through to the 1990s, emulated in JSMAME, part of the JSMESS software package. MS-DOS Meets ChatGPT → ChatGPT has to be one of the hottest buzz words right now. It seems to constantly be in the news as well as gaining more attention and users by the day. In addition, OpenAI has also released APIs allowing developers to integrate chatbots into their applications. Content from me Creating interactive fiction with Inform 7 Dynamic repositories with GitHub Blocks Could you work all day on a phone? This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chinchillasqueaks.substack.com

Hello everyone welcome to my regular ramble through geeky subjects from tech, to history, games, writing, language, and more. This issue is a little light on links, but I have a great interview with Marshall Jung of Tabnine you can hear in the voiceover section of this newsletter or wherever you find your podcasts. We spoke about the company’s take on AI coding assistants and how they’ve been doing things differently from some time. Thanks for reading Chinchilla Squeaks! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. That aside I look at some of the best content for digging into what happened with Silicon Valley Bank, what will AI to do music, and more! xx Chinch Tech "It's always going to be very biased towards the data it's trained on" – Red Hot Chili Peppers and Adele mixing engineer Andrew Scheps shares his views on AI machine learning, and his tips → Three-time Grammy Award-winning mixing engineer Andrew Scheps worked on Adele's 21, RHCP's Stadium Arcadium (both of which is won Grammys for) and has mixed for Black Sabbath, Metallica, Beyoncé, Lady Gaga, Neil Diamond and man, many others. How the Weekend-Long Freakout Over Silicon Valley Bank Ended → Unless you happened to take a digital detox this weekend, you probably witnessed a lot of online commotion regarding tech startups, the banking system, and the institution formerly known as Silicon Valley Bank. The Silicon Valley Bank Contagion Is Just Beginning → When Silicon Valley Bank collapsed on March 10, Garry Tan, president and CEO of startup incubator Y Combinator, called SVB’s failure “an extinction level event for startups” that “will set startups and innovation back by 10 years or more. What you need to know about the SVB bank rescue plan → Question and answers about the federal government's plan to stop bank runs. Language The Moral Case Against Equity Language → What’s a “justice-involved person”? The Sierra Club’s Equity Language Guide discourages using the words stand, Americans, blind, and crazy. The first two fail at inclusion, because not everyone can stand and not everyone living in this country is a citizen. Content from me My creative writing setup How do I write my creative works? I tell you how… Technical writing with JetBrains' Writerside and Grazie And finally Thanks for reading Chinchilla Squeaks! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chinchillasqueaks.substack.com

Welcome Hello everyone welcome to my regular ramble through geeky subjects from tech, to history, games, writing, language, and more. This issue is a little light on links, but I have a great interview with Josh Koenig of Pantheon you can hear in the voiceover section of this newsletter or wherever you find your podcasts. I remember Pantheon from my Drupal days. And we spoke a lot about the past, present and future of content delivering what where they came from what they have been doing and what they're about to do with the proliferation of new ways of managing and providing content. Tech After 20 years are developers now ready for Nix? First something that relates nicely to the interview I had last week with Jetpack.io who have built some tools on top of NixOS. This article from John Leonard pondered if Nix was ahead of its time, and only now are companies and users (at scale) building on top of it. Most of this ties into increased requirements for “software bills of materials” and an operating system that you can rebuild from configuration and is comprised a literal bill of materials is compelling. I try something similar with my own solutions for macOS, but that isn’t an operating system designed from the ground up to function this way. LastPass tells (mostly) all Months later, LastPass finally revealed what happened to cause their large data breach last year. I stopped using LastPass ages ago in favour of 1Password mostly as LastPass is so ugly to use. However, this was a huge betrayal of faith for a company whose main business is to keep things safe and I wonder how their competitors have benefited? ChatGPT vs Writers Of course, it wouldn’t be a tech newsletter without a quick mention of ChatGPT. S.E. Ireland worries about the implications for tech writers and as that’s where I make money, so am I. For the more precudural aspect of that job, I am already worried. For the more human “how to connect the dots” content, not quite yet. We shall see… Clarkesworld had to close submissions due to a flood of content written by people using ChatGPT and I would imagine they aren’t the only ones. As someone attempting to get short stories published right now, this is another shot fired by ChatGPT for aspiring writers, but is this akin the zoom bombers or spam comments on blogs and will all the trolls just get bored in a few weeks? As a creative writer, I like writing and don’t necessarily want an AI interfering with that process. But others (ab)using it to flood publications still affects writers indirectly as I can’t get anything published right now… New content from me DiffusionBee and Amazing AI for generating images on macOS with Stable Diffusion Mixing documentation and React components with Mintlify And finally! Never been a better “and finally”. My new website is ready… Mostly… But I am happy it’s live. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chinchillasqueaks.substack.com

Podcast version Find the podcast version of this newsletter, including my interview with Daniel on the Substack podcast page or wherever you find your podcasts. From me… Read more about my experiments with managing the macOS home folder with version control. Storytelling Collective Flash February Every day I am writing 500 words of flash fiction, read them on Medium. Using AI to generate music with Magenta and Ableton Live How did I find creating music with AI? Tech What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work? → That ChatGPT can automatically generate something that reads even superficially like human-written text is remarkable, and unexpected. Microsoft finally authorizes Windows 11 on Apple M1 and M2 Macs → Microsoft is finally supporting the practice of running Windows 11 on Macs powered by Apple's M1 and M2 chips, opening the door for VMware and Parallels to offer full support for running virtualized Windows 11 on Arm. 1Password is saying goodbye to passwords in favor of passkeys. Here's why → Password manager provider 1Password has announced that it will allow users to abandon passwords in favor of passkeys as the company pushes towards a passwordless future. Linux 6.2: The first mainstream Linux kernel for Apple M1 chips arrives → Linux 6.2 was released yesterday, and Linus Torvalds described the latest Linux kernel release as, "Maybe it's not a sexy LTS release like 6.1 ended up being, but all those regular pedestrian kernels want some test love too." For once, I disagree with Torvalds. And finally… Scientists Warn of A “Friendship Recession” → A few weeks ago, I joined a local “comedic acting” class. The instructor asked us to introduce ourselves and explain why we were there — probably assuming we’d say things like I’ve always wanted to be on stage! or I did improv in college and it was fun. The people who live inside airplanes → After losing her house to a fire, Jo Ann Ussery had a peculiar idea: to live in an airplane. She bought an old Boeing 727 that was destined for the scrapyard, had it shipped to a plot of land she already owned, and spent six months renovating, doing most of the work by herself. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chinchillasqueaks.substack.com

From me… Migrating a website from… Read more about my journey overhauling my old old website, and my progress so far. Storytelling Collective Flash February Every day I am writing 500 words of flash fiction, read them on Medium. In bots we trust My new show with my friend Killian where we look at generative AI, because, well, everyone else is! Tech Fake Pictures of People of Color Won’t Fix AI Bias → Armed with a belief in technology’s generative potential, a growing faction of researchers and companies aims to solve the problem of bias in AI by creating artificial images of people of color. Tech CEOs screwed up → Now laid-off employees are paying the price Download the app CEOs made mistakes, workers bear the bruntWith great power comes no responsibility Google's ChatGPT competitor spaces out at the start → Google and other major tech companies this week have been showcasing how conversational chatbots can help improve internet search. In one instance, however, Google may have inadvertently showcased the technology's shortcomings. Mozilla, like Google, is looking ahead to the end of Apple's WebKit rule → Updated Mozilla is planning for the day when Apple will no longer require its competitors to use the WebKit browser engine in iOS. How Did the Duck Hunt Gun Work? → The Duck Hunt gun, officially called the NES Zapper, seems downright primitive next to today’s technology. But in the late ’80s, it filled plenty of young heads with wonder. And finally The death of the customer service hotline → Need to call Facebook? Frontier? Good luck. There’s been a breach of the Jonny Boston’s International Facebook page. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chinchillasqueaks.substack.com

Updates from me… Alternative browsers for macOS I was interested in diving into the many new browsers emerging right now, especially for macOS. * Video * Blog post Flash fiction February 2023 This daily writing challenge is back, read my entries on Medium, pretty much every day. Thanks for reading Chinchilla Squeaks! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Tech Try Astro 2.0 Today → Astro 2.0 is available on npm today. Upgrade an existing project by running npm i astro@latest or start a new Astro project right in your browser by visiting astro.new. Looking for more? Tune into a special Twitter space this afternoon at 12pm PST feat. After inking its OpenAI deal, Shutterstock rolls out a generative AI toolkit to create images based on text prompts → When Shutterstock and OpenAI announced a partnership to help develop OpenAI’s Dall-E 2 artificial intelligence image-generating platform with Shutterstock libraries to train and feed the algorithm, the stock photo and media giant also hinted that it would soon be bringing its own generative AI too. This 1980s computer was a huge leap forward. Now you can download its source code → To celebrate the 40th birthday of the Apple Lisa computer, the Computer History Museum (CHM) has released the source code for the first graphical user interface computer. The Calculator Drawer → Remember scientific calculators? The Internet Archive now has dozens for you to play with in emulators and remember how we all used to live. Writing I Finished My Novel. Now What? → Most people have ideas for a novel. Many people start a novel. Some people even bang out a good chunk of manuscript. But few ever finish a real novel with an actual conflict, characters, climax, and all that jazz — and it’s no wonder. That s**t is no joke. And finally The Search for Extraterrestrial Life as We Don’t Know It → Sarah Stewart Johnson was a college sophomore when she first stood atop Hawaii’s Mauna Kea volcano. Its dried lava surface was so different from the eroded, tree-draped mountains of her home state of Kentucky. Thanks for reading Chinchilla Squeaks! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chinchillasqueaks.substack.com

OGL 1.1/1.2/1.3/😱 Wizards of the Coast goes into firefighting mode to stop the exodus of D&D fans. An Update on the Open Game License (OGL) → When we initially conceived of revising the OGL, it was with three major goals in mind. First, we wanted the ability to prevent the use of D&D content from being included in hateful and discriminatory products. Thanks for reading Chinchilla Squeaks! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. Wizards of the Coast Breaks Its Silence on Dungeons and Dragons' Open Game License → Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro subsidiary that publishes Dungeons & Dragons, revealed details of its new Open Game License on Friday and attempted to answer questions about the future of the D&D community that were raised after io9 broke the news about the contents of a draft of the document last Cancelled D&D Beyond Subscriptions Forced Hasbro's Hand → Dungeons & Dragons publisher Wizards of the Coast finally broke its silence regarding the game’s Open Game License on Friday, attempting to calm tensions in the D&D community and answer questions that were raised after Gizmodo broke the news about the contents of a draft of the document last week. Looking for D&D alternatives? → FATE WORLDS AND TOOLKITS MEETS ITS FATE TONIGHT! Today is your last chance to get our resurrected July 2021 Fate Worlds and Toolkits Bundle featuring the Fate rulebooks, expansions, campaigns, standalone RPGs, and many Worlds of Adventure from Evil Hat Productions. Generative AI starts to monetise Microsoft Considers $10 Billion Investment in ChatGPT Creator → Microsoft Corp. is in discussions to invest as much as $10 billion in OpenAI, the creator of viral artificial intelligence bot ChatGPT, according to people familiar with its plans. The ChatGPT revolution? Microsoft seems to have very big plans for this AI chatbot → Microsoft is reportedly in talks to invest $10 billion into OpenAI, the maker of the popular ChatGPT chatbot, according to a report citing people familiar with deal. Exclusive: OpenAI Used Kenyan Workers on Less Than $2 Per Hour to Make ChatGPT Less Toxic → ChatGPT was hailed as one of 2022’s most impressive technological innovations upon its release last November. The beginning and ends of eras in tech History of Web Browser Engines from 1990 until today → History of Web Browser Engines from 1990 until today Many tried, few remain... Last updated: January 2023 The loss of browser diversity since the rise of Chromium has been greatly lamented. Twitterrific: End of an Era → Twitterrific has been discontinued. A sentence that none of us wanted to write, but have long felt would need to be written someday. We didn’t expect to be writing it so soon, though, and certainly not without having had time to notify you that it was coming. The world around us in games Unreal city: Digital versions of Berlin in video games → In Real Racer 3, you can speed around Tempelhofer Feld in an e-vehicle, just like those kids on scooters. Sequels in Strategy Gaming, Part 1: Civilization II → How do you make a sequel to a game that covers all of human history? Updates from me In the past week over on Twitch I looked at Ableton synths, Spline 3D, and Retool. I am also now streaming my learning livestreams back on YouTube. My new website should be ready very soon as well as a new podcast and video show! See you next time. xxx Chinch Thanks for reading Chinchilla Squeaks! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chinchillasqueaks.substack.com

“The Dead Among Us” is a post-post-apocalyptic love story that shows emotion and understanding can conquer history, resentment, and generational divides to create a truly new world. I have been working on this novel for just over two years and now after several drafts I am ready for public feedback. If you are interested, then fill in this Google form, I won’t accept everyone, but will be very pleased to hear from everyone who is interested. If you just want to know about updates, then you're already in the right place! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chinchillasqueaks.substack.com

Hey everyone! So, I am quite late with this newsletter and podcast as I was travelling blah blah. But also Twitter owns the service I was using for newsletters (Revue), which meant I needed to look for a replacement. I looked at a few but settled on where all the cool kids were… Substack. Then I noticed they also support podcasts, so migrated my podcast too. I wanted to give a good window of time to ensure everything had migrated, and now finally here we are! Substack offers a lot of cool new features and options that I am only starting to explore, so the newsletter will change look a little over the next few issues. OK, enough of that, it’s 2023, it’s going to be a great year. Here we go! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit chinchillasqueaks.substack.com

Hello all! Lots of lovely AI and machine learning links for you this issue as I am working on a new show! Also Twitter, Mozilla, and that internet thing? It's dead. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/chinchillasqueaks/message

I'm back after two weeks of conferences. I interview speakers from Build Stuff in Lithuania, report back from other events, dig into the history of JavaScript frameworks, and hang out with Lana Moore… Or not. --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/chinchillasqueaks/message