1022: Bun re-written in Rust, Zig team big mad

CJ and Scott break down the biggest week in web dev: TypeScript 7 ships with a 10x-faster native port, Bun gets rewritten in Rust (much to the Zig team’s dismay), and Better Auth joins Vercel. Plus GPT-5.6 first impressions, Odin 1.0, Cloudflare’s new Workers cache and drag-and-drop deploys, and the OpenCode 2 beta. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 00:21 CJ upgraded his homelab network 02:09 TypeScript 7 is 10x faster 11:19 Bun Rust rewrite drama Zig creator criticizes rewrite 28:18 GPT 5.6 Impressions Ashley Peachock on X Matt Shumer on X 40:58 Better Auth Acquired by Vercel 49:51 Grok Build CLI is stealing your code International Cyber Digest on X 56:00 Cloudflare Worker Cache and Drop 01:01:22 Check out CJ’s latest video I Built an LLM from Scratch 01:03:06 Odin 1.0 Announced 01:05:33 OpenCode 2.0 Beta released 01:07:32 Winamp Skin Museum 01:11:08 CJ’s new MP3 player 01:13:03 Scott’s Robot Update Sick Picks Scott: Reachy Mini CJ: Snowsky Echo Mini Hit us up on Socials! Syntax: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Wes: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Scott: X Instagram Tiktok LinkedIn Threads Randy: X Instagram YouTube Threads

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Scott Tolinski?

  What's up everybody? We are here for another awesome Syntax Weekly. There has been a ton of news in the past week. Just, I feel like that's an evergreen statement. We can just say that forever and ever. My name is Scott Tolinski and with me as always is CJ Reynolds. What's up CJ?

• 0:21Speaker 01

  Yo, I'm doing good. I'm excited. I spent the weekend upgrading my network. Now everything is 2 gigabit.

• 0:27Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah buddy.

• 0:28Speaker 01

  I'm blazing speeds. I learned about SFP Plus. Have you used these fiber connectors before?

• 0:35Scott Tolinski?

  SFP Plus? No, is that, is that what's in the fiber modem or what?

• 0:39Speaker 01

  No, so it's a 10G fiber connection and that's actually how I have everything routed. So I have a, I have my main firewall. It has a 10G connection to my switch and then that has a 10G connection to my PoE switch.

• 0:51Scott Tolinski?

  Wow.

• 0:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, blazing fast.

• 0:54Scott Tolinski?

  So do you need a decoder at that level then? Like at each of those levels?

• 1:00Speaker 01

  Uh, no, so basically the switches are 2.5 gigabit and then, but that'll, that 10 gigabit trunk allows the full network to go across it. We don't have to get in the weeds. Maybe we can talk about it later, but I'm excited. My internet, my internet's fast.

• 1:15Scott Tolinski?

  Heck yeah. Well, we're going to be talking about all kinds of stuff in this episode. TypeScript 7 is here. It is 10 times faster. It is written in Go. This has been in the works for quite a while. Better Off joins Vercel. Bun, the Bun rewrite into Rust has caused drama. We're going to be talking about that as well as some major model updates where GPT-5, 6, Soul and the like have been released as well as Anthropic continues to just put the carrot in front of everybody's face while they continually extend the release or the availability, I should say, of Fable. That and more.

• 1:58Scott Tolinski?

  Odin 1.0 announcement video, all kinds of cool stuff. Grok, Grok be stealing your code. Grok build is stealing your code. We're going to be talking all about that. So CJ, you want to get it kicked off with this TypeScript 7.0 release?

• 2:16Speaker 01

  Let's do it. So if you have been watching Syntax for any amount of time, you've probably heard about this. We were talking about this, I guess, at least a year ago. And we actually had Daniel Rosenwasser, Principal Product Manager over at Microsoft and working on TypeScript, as well as Anders Helsberg, creator of TypeScript. They were on the podcast to announce when this initially started to happen. And so if you're not up to date on all of that, essentially, the TypeScript compiler used to be written in TypeScript. The compiler itself was written in TypeScript code. And that was fine for a while, but these days, everything's getting rewritten in native. And so they actually ported that TypeScript compiler to Go.

• 2:58Speaker 01

  And you can watch that podcast interview with Anders and Daniel, and also Wes and Scott. But they basically talked about how a port was the way to go, because it was almost one-for-one in a sense. If you take TypeScript code and then write Go code that looks very similar, and then make sure that it's passing the test suite. So that started happening a little over a year ago, but finally, it's here. It's always funny when those announcements happen. You're like, "Oh, but when are we gonna get it?" Like, it's never gonna come.

• 3:27Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 3:28Speaker 01

  But it's here. It's here, and officially supported in version 7.0. So they also had like a slow on-ramp for this. So if you installed TypeScript version 6, there were various things that might have been deprecated, or things that you would make sure that you are ready for the TypeScript 7 upgrade. So if you've done that, at this point, you can basically just swap it out, and your builds will be 10 times faster. So that's the headline here, is this native port can build codebases 10 times faster. And you install it the same way as you used to, npm install -d TypeScript. And if you're using version 7, now under the hood, it's gonna be using that more native version. But what does this mean for the average developer?

• 4:15Speaker 01

  You're just gonna be moving faster. Basically, all of the tools that you use on a daily basis are benefiting from TypeScript 7. So VS Code is a massive TypeScript codebase.

• 4:27Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 4:27Speaker 01

  And with TypeScript 6, before the native port, it used to take 125 seconds to build that whole codebase. Now, it only takes 10 seconds with TypeScript 6. Also, love to see, in their blog post, they shout out Sentry. So Sentry has a massive, open-source TypeScript codebase. We're brought to you by Sentry. Shout out Sentry. But their codebase used to take 140 seconds to build. Now, with TypeScript 7, 15 seconds. So smaller CI builds, faster builds, faster iteration. Basically, if you have a large codebase, you're gonna benefit from this. But like I'm showing here, if you're using tools that are already using a lot of TypeScript and have a build process, things are gonna be faster.

• 5:12Speaker 01

  As well as, I don't know if they call it out in the blog post, but if you're using OX Lint, which is the Rust linter from the, let's say, the Void team, I think?

• 5:23Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 5:24Speaker 01

  Void team? Yeah.

• 5:25Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 5:25Speaker 01

  But it has now native linting, and it uses the TypeScript 7 linter. So not only are your builds faster with Vite written in RollDown and Rust, the TypeScript portion of the build is now faster as well.

• 5:39Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 5:40Speaker 01

  Big news all around. Also, less memory usage. This is exciting. The whole JavaScript/TypeScript ecosystem is just getting faster. That's the news. We've talked about Rust rewrites and everything else, but it's here. And as it shows in the blog post, ready for production. So you can use this thing today.

• 5:58Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. I think this rules. This is great specifically because of just how many things this will improve in your day-to-day world.

• 6:09Scott Tolinski?

  Just things running more efficiently, things running faster at every step of the way. It all to me is like, this is like one of the biggest systemic overall improvements that your systems are going to experience. I have not upgraded my stuff just yet because, which is crazy because I love upgrading my stuff, but I am really excited about this. And I've given the preview builds a try. I'm like just very ecstatic about this change. When they first announced this to us, I knew it was going to be a seismic improvement. And what's funny is that I feel like many people might not even realize, you know,

• 6:53Scott Tolinski?

  that this has happened. It's one of those things that's going to happen behind the scenes. You update your TypeScript 7 and stuff is just going to be faster. Or even just your VS Code gets faster, right? Uses less resources.

• 7:06Speaker 01

  Exactly. Yeah. I mean, that's the other stuff that I didn't necessarily mention, but when you're using VS Code and you have the TypeScript Language Server running behind the scenes, giving you hints about what the types are, that now will use the native port. And so that's going to be faster as well. So if you've been working in a large TypeScript codebase, especially like a mono repo or a codebase where you have a bunch of TypeScript types shared between client and server, it's automatically going to be faster.

• 7:33Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. Not only that, CJ, there's a, there's been a long experimental setting in VS Code that is specifically type check entire project where it's experimental because it is, has performance implications if it's running your type checker on every file change for the entire project. And feels like that just, there's, there's now an opportunity to actually shamelessly use that now.

• 8:00Speaker 01

  Definitely. Yeah. And let's get into some comments. So Oxia is mentioning, and maybe it takes some time to adopt across the whole ecosystem. I think like all things it will, but they do have a migration path. So in the article, they talk about running side by side with TypeScript 6. So you can basically have both in your project in case there are certain features you still need, or maybe. Yeah, TypeScript 7 doesn't have everything that you need just yet. You can actually run them both inside of your project. And I think kind of the the main headline is you probably won't even notice. Like, you don't you don't have to do a bunch of work to switch. You can literally just upgrade. And most projects are just going to run a whole lot faster.

• 8:43Speaker 01

  There's another comment from It's Koke, who says VS Code using less memory and becoming faster is a game changer. That's one of the things to think about here is all of these tools that are dependent on the TypeScript build chain. All of a sudden, they're going to be faster and using less memory, so.

• 9:00Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, and it's so funny that VS Code is very fast. And if if like, I think a lot of the times, people blame VS Code's speed on Electron or this or that. When in almost, I would say 100% of use case, I'm going to go 100%. It's like some extension or just or just load that you've installed in it that's slowing it down. I remember there was that one of the packages from Wix was like causing a major slowdown. And that package has been installed millions of times. And therefore, every single person who has that installed is going to be like, ah, VS Code is slow. But man, VS Code is fast as hell, so this is only going to improve things, and I love it.

• 9:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, another thing from the release post is version 7 has type checker paralyzation. So this is one of the one of the other reasons it gets faster is you can essentially benefit from the number of CPU cores you have running on your machine. And and this happens like while you're inside of VS Code. It'll actually spin up multiple threads that are all type checking at the same time instead of just having one as the bottleneck. Yeah, good, good news all around. I'm excited for a fast faster web, faster development cycle.

• 10:19Scott Tolinski?

  Constantly, yes. I think this again, uh, this will go down as a low-key huge update. Again, just closing that that feedback loop. And if you're working with AI too, closing that feedback loop, those things can run faster, type check can run faster, things can, uh, just get the work done. I love it.

• 10:38Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 10:40Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, sick. Do you have anything else here CJ?

• 10:43Speaker 01

  That's it on this story. Um, I'll remind everyone what's happening here. This is Syntax Weekly. Today it's just me and Scott, uh, cause Wes is still on vacation. I, I thought he was gonna be back this week. I guess he won't be back till next week, but, uh, we're basically going over news, um, and new releases, all of the stuff happening in the wide world of web dev programming, AI, things like that. And, um, if there's any stuff that you'd like us to talk about near the end of the show, feel free to throw it in the chat. Uh, we'll look up whatever various news you bring up that we are not gonna talk about. But now I will pass it over to Scott, who's gonna talk about some drama in the Bun and Zig ecosystem.

• 11:28Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, yes, the, the Bun and Zig drama. Sorry, I had this, uh, loaded up to talk about GPT, but let's talk about the Bun and Zig drama. Um, so as was reported, maybe a couple of weeks ago, the, well, the, the, uh, the creator of Bun, Jared Sumner migrated using AI, the entirety of Bun to use Rust, where it was previously written in Zig. Now Zig is a, I wanna say a niche language, is that appropriate to say?

• 12:05Speaker 01

  It's a low-level language.

• 12:07Scott Tolinski?

  It's a low-level language. It's a very capable language. There's a lot of great stuff. I think Ghosty's written in Zig. So I mean, uh, Bun was written in Zig.

• 12:16Speaker 01

  It's definitely like overshadowed by like Go and Rust. Um, but they do have. A community out there and Bun at the time when it was written in Zig was one of the, was the biggest Zig code base.

• 12:27Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, I had never heard of Zig before we interviewed Jared on this project. And Jared had been promising this blog post for quite some time because this was such a really wild rewrite to move. And it kind of came out of the blue, too. It was kind of just like, I'm rewriting Bun in Rust. And all of a sudden, it was just kind of done. And now Jared now works at Anthropic. So it was no, it was, it was no mystery that this was going to be rewritten using AI. That's, that's like no mystery there. So Jared came out with this on July 8th.

• 13:06Scott Tolinski?

  This really in-depth and really thorough blog post about the process. And this was a really good read.

• 13:19Scott Tolinski?

  And really just gets into the decision-making and how he did it and all this stuff. I thought this was not only like a well-executed blog post, but just fascinating in general. A fascinating look into this.

• 13:34Speaker 01

  This, this visual that you're showing right now is crazy. So in, in the post, he talks about how he used basically parallel Clods to rewrite the Zig code base in Rust. And this visual shows he basically had four work trees and 64 instances of Claude using Fable, like the pre-release version. All rewriting the, basically porting the files from Zig to Rust, checking to make sure the tests pass. But this is a good case study of like using AI for this type of thing at scale.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  I mean, even the idea of running 64 Claude instances, like not everybody can do that. Like this is a very particular type of development work where you're taking an existing code base with an existing test suite. And basically just making sure that the rewrite passes those tests.

• 14:26Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 14:27Speaker 01

  Not every software project can throw 64 instances of Claude at it to just like move faster.

• 14:32Scott Tolinski?

  No, and I believe this cost like $140,000 worth of tokens.

• 14:37Speaker 01

  I think like I read 100,000, in that range, like over 100,000. But in the blog post, he mentions that this without Claude would have taken a team of four, like a year.

• 14:50Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  So if you compare that cost, then you know, it's potentially worth it. But I will back up a second and say that this, this whole thing is also just an ad for Claude and Anthropic and AI. Like it's, it's, it's like, sure, it's a cool technical feat overall, but we, we can't forget the fact that Anthropic now owns Bun. And it's good news for them that a project like this was capable and, and like, to be able to go to the CEO of some other company who's not super technical and be like, oh, you should be running 64 instances of Claude. That's going to make Anthropic more money. $165,000, you found it. Yeah.

• 15:27Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, $165,000 of tokens to do this rewrite. Yeah, 690 million output tokens, man.

• 15:40Speaker 01

  Insane.

• 15:40Scott Tolinski?

  That's crazy.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  Absolutely insane.

• 15:43Scott Tolinski?

  Absolutely insane. Well, either way, this blog post came out and then here we have Andrew Kelly, who then wrote his kind of counter blog post, you could say, that is.

• 15:58Speaker 01

  Who is Andrew Kelly?

• 15:59Scott Tolinski?

  So Andrew Kelly is the creator of Zig.

• 16:03Scott Tolinski?

  And Zig is opinionated. Zig has a lot of feelings, as we've learned. And this post, I think, I think this post caused a lot of attention for a lot of reasons. One, it, it really accelerated this whole AI versus non-AI argument. Most of the people who are on the side of Zig here are on the side of Zig because, uh, well Zig does not use AI. And Jared did his entire thing in AI. It's a whole slop versus not slop thing. So therefore the non-AI folks are like, and the AI folks are like, and I think a lot of people let that,

• 16:46Scott Tolinski?

  get their opinion cloudy, like that clouds their opinion on this whole thing.

• 16:52Scott Tolinski?

  And I think, so this post is well worth a read, where Andrew goes into Jared's relationship with the Zig community, his relationship with Jared in general, and the issues with both how Jared operated and this whole transition. But I will say, CJ, I know you have a lot of thoughts on this, so I'll let you get to those. But this blog post is the prime example of letting your emotions ruin every good point you could possibly have. Because the conversation around this blog post was not about the important things.

• 17:34Scott Tolinski?

  The conversation around this blog post was around the personal attacks and nature of this post. For instance, even the very first sentence, "When Jared joined the Zig community about five years ago, I described him as someone who had strong beginner energy." Like, it's just, it's so cringey in like a pompous way that like it makes me immediately unsympathetic towards Zig. And it makes me want to stay away from this community regardless of the good points in this thing. Because this blog post, yeah, is written in such a pompous a-hole way

• 18:18Scott Tolinski?

  that like I cannot, I cannot read this and be like, okay, come on. Like, I'm just rolling my eyes repeatedly when reading this thing. But CJ, you have a lot of support for this. You think Andrew did the right thing here, right?

• 18:33Speaker 01

  I think, like you said, there's good points in here. I completely agree that it's, you can't actually get to the good points when there's personal attacks and like that's the headline. But I mentioned earlier that BUN was like the biggest Zig codebase. And in that blog post, there's a section talking about basically everything that Andrew thought was wrong with the BUN codebase.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  I think, I don't know if we talked about it as well, but there have been, one of the other issues was Zig has released...

• 19:12Speaker 01

  News or like the basically how their project would be governed that they're no longer going to be accepting AI PRs. So Zig is

• 19:20Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, that's reasonable.

• 19:22Speaker 01

  It's reasonable. Yeah, I mean, they just talk like they want less slop. And they want a human to be attached to PRs and suggestions to the Zig language. So totally respectable. But that's also why you see this this push and pull. And like, that's kind of the other thing behind the scenes of potentially why Anthropic would want Bun to be rewritten in something that wasn't Zig because they own it now. They they bought the oven SH company that makes Bun, acquired Jared and everyone else. But the section talks about how the Zig code base, and can you pull it up? I'm I got I can't find the link and I got logged out of Notion, so I'll have to do that afterwards. But there's this, there's a section that talks about how the Zig code base was basically

• 20:07Speaker 01

  like spaghetti code. So he goes into like one after another, all of the things wrong with the Bun code base and how basically nobody at Bun wanted to listen and kind of digs into the fact that like most of the Bun code is now being written with AI. Yeah, this section here, "The main problem, however, was code quality. The Zig team regularly checks in on users' projects. We read source code to find out how the language is affecting users. We test changes to see how problematic breakage might be, and we check performance regressions." So this is cool to see, I think, especially Zig being like a smaller community, like they actually care about people that are using their language. They want to help. They want to make sure things are working well.

• 20:51Speaker 01

  But then they say, "We became increasingly horrified at the programming practices we saw in Bun's code base. Hacks on top of hacks, abuses of assertions, and most of all recklessly speeding past feature after feature with very little time taken for reflection and elimination of bugs and technical debt." So that's that's basically the Zig standpoint here is If you want the headline to be, "We rewrote it in Rust because Rust is a better language", they're saying, "Let's take a step back and if you were doing Zig in the right way, you potentially wouldn't have had to run into those issues."

• 21:26Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 21:26Speaker 01

  Which, which I think is like, it's a hard argument to make because this is kind of the argument that I have with, with React. Like, it's so easy to write really bad React code. Like, if you want to write good React code, there's a, like, you have to have static analysis. There's tools for, um, like, writing better React. Like, if you just raw dog it and don't care about performance or anything else, it's really easy to do wrong. And that's kind of what's being said here about Zig, uh, because there's another popular project that uses Zig that doesn't have these issues, and they have their own entire style guide. But the issue is, a style guide is not executable. A style guide just says, "You should do things in this way", whereas Rust forces you to do things in the right way.

• 22:11Speaker 01

  So, that, that's kind of where, where this sits, which, it's like, yes, the Zig codebase was bad, but also the Zig compiler didn't prevent anyone from writing bad, bad Zig code.

• 22:24Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  So, yeah, that, that's kind of the, the main thing I wanted to point out here. I, I, I'm sympathetic, yeah, to both sides. I, I don't know. Yeah.

• 22:32Scott Tolinski?

  I, I mean, I think all of that, I, I'm so dead on with all of that. Uh, I, I, I'm so, I agree with all of that. And I just feel like, if, if he would have had somebody evaluate this blog post to say, "Do I sound like a dick? Uh, if I sound like a dick, can you just delete any of those parts?" Because it just underscores everything to a point where it's like, it, it makes it really hard to sympathize with. No, it is, this is kind of a wild, "When Jared announced the Rust rewrite, we were ecstatic. It seemed too good to be true, I have to admit. I didn't think the technology was there to pull off this stunt, but he did it. Now I metaphorically sipping delicious tea from a mug that says, 'It tastes like it's not my problem anymore'."

• 23:16Scott Tolinski?

  Like, god, that's insufferable. That's an insufferable couple of sentences. I can't, I can't with that regardless of everything that is accurate and true within this post.

• 23:29Speaker 01

  It's unfortunate. I think that's, that's the, the other thing about like Anthropic is a company that has a PR team. And so like Jared's post about the rewrite, I'm sure had to go through multiple approvals of like, what language are you using here? And like the, there is no, the, the only like down talking of Zig that happens in the Bun code, Bun post is really just talking about like memory management and some of the things that

• 23:57Speaker 01

  basically there was a lot of boilerplate around having to like hold on to memory or release memory versus in Rust. The code was a lot simpler and kind of like did it automatically. But yeah, the, the Zig team could benefit from some, a PR team, somebody to just, or even just a best friend to be like, hey, man, don't, don't put all, put all that out there on the internet. Cause

• 24:20Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:21Scott Tolinski?

  Have you considered not, not like that this is going to hurt your case? I don't use Bun either way. So it doesn't matter to me. You know, it doesn't matter to me, whatever Bun it's, I, I think Bun has done a lot of good things for the node community in that by adding some features that the node ecosystem wanted that node had to add them. But yeah, it's, it seems a little too loosey goosey for me. And I mean, this certainly kind of supports that, but still. Yeah.

• 24:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 24:56Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Not this blog post wasn't a good look. Um, I think it could have been done much better, but hey, it's out there.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  Definitely. Yeah. And Paolo was mentioning, he has an article to share. Um, the one that I don't, did I, let me find the link. I think I finally got logged back into lotion, but notion, but there was a. Article written, uh, ramers, ramers.org, um, that kind of is a bit more level-headed. It talks about like, okay, what are the real problems here? There's, there's less emotion involved. Um, so we'll, we'll share that in the chat. Okay, I found it.

• 25:37Scott Tolinski?

  This, sorry, this sentence, this whole paragraph was crazy too. At the same time, a rift between Zig and Jared started widening. His singular focus on productivity and his startup's exit strategy was increasingly at odds with my longer-term vision for the Zig project. I remember he kept nagging me to drop all my other priorities and work on a language server protocol implementation and VS code integration while I had bigger plans. Brother, you want people to use Zig or not? Like, uh, and, and like, he was donating, I think, like 60K a year to the project. They can't get you a VS code integration, 60K a year, can't get you that?

• 26:15Speaker 01

  Yeah. So I'm sharing the, the post that I found now. So it's by Ray Myers. And, uh, one thing that's really funny, there's a tweet from Dax that says, "Guys, we have a pretty substantial open source Zig codebase and I'm terrified he's gonna look at it." So if you didn't know, a large portion of, uh, open code is written, written in Zig. And so, I mean, this is the other aftermath of, of a post like that is like, anybody that has open source code is like, "Oh, now I have to be worried that I'm not doing it right and I'm gonna get some flack from the creators of the language." So that, that's the, that's the environment that that type of post creates. But I'll share this link in the, the show notes in the chat.

• 27:00Speaker 01

  Uh, it's, it's a bit less, uh, it's a higher level, kind of tells both sides of the story.

• 27:07Speaker 01

  And like the, the other aspect of this is, um, it was potentially seen that, uh, Bun being written, rewritten in Rust, it was more of like a smear campaign against Zig. And that may not be the case. Um, I think it just, it also comes down to the fact that there's probably a lot more Rust code that the AI models were trained on, so they're probably better at writing Rust than they are Zig. And if this is gonna be an AI full-on project, better off using a language that's in more of the, uh... The training data?

• 27:40Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 27:41Speaker 01

  So, yeah.

• 27:42Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, yeah, crazy stuff. Folks, if you're just joining us, this is Syntax Weekly. Every single week, we get into what's going on in the web ecosystem, whether that's AI stuff or drama like this, big rewrites, TypeScript releases. We get into all of that and more. Today, we've already talked about the drama around the Bun rewrite in Rust. We've talked about TypeScript 7 and its 10x faster performance. Let's get into the next one here. CJ, do we want to talk about?

• 28:19Scott Tolinski?

  Let's talk about the GPT-5.6 release. Are you cool with that?

• 28:24Speaker 01

  Let's do it. Yeah, I can give a quick intro and then I'll hand it over to you because I think you've used it more.

• 28:29Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I have.

• 28:31Speaker 01

  We talked about it last week. They announced it's coming and it's basically 5.6, so it's the next version after 5.5. And there's three versions of the model. You have Luna, which is like the moon. It's the smallest model. Then you have Terra, which is a little bit bigger. It's like Earth Terra. And then there's Sol, like the sun, and that's the biggest model. And one thing that they mentioned is the Terra model would be half as expensive as GPT-5.5 with similar performance. So that's one of the good news about this latest release is you could potentially switch from using GPT-5.5 to GPT-5.6 Terra and basically cut your usage in half.

• 29:15Speaker 01

  And then Sol is the big boy. And I've only used it a little bit, but my initial impressions are really good. Like, it feels much closer to Opus. So I've been using it for planning a really big framework that I'm working on. I haven't touched that code in a couple of months, but I'm back on it. And GPT-5.6 Sol like did a perfect job and was really quick of like, okay, here's where we're at. These are the decisions we made. These are the decisions we need to make next. And I played around with using Sol to plan and then Terra to implement.

• 29:47Scott Tolinski?

  Interesting, yeah.

• 29:48Speaker 01

  But the first go of it, Terra missed a bunch of things. So now I'm just using Sol for everything because it's basically, as far as I can see, the same usage pricing as GPT-5.5. Maybe a little more expensive, but tell me about it. Have you been using it? You have some first impressions?

• 30:04Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I've been using it. You know, don't give me no weak. Don't give me no weak models here. I'm not using Tara. I'm not using Luna. I don't care. Get them out of here. Give me Soul and only Soul. So I have been using Soul since it was enabled. I haven't put myself into any major psychosis while using it. So I cannot say that I am, I haven't put 50,000 agents on it like some folks have, and I haven't spent $160,000 worth of tokens in it. But I have used it and I have a rather complex app that I've been building to programmically generate video.

• 30:45Scott Tolinski?

  And I put it on a task of building out some VHS and some CRT-style shaders for me. And I had an implementation that I wanted, so I understood what I was building. So I think that maybe helped. I was able to correctly describe the techniques that I wanted in this thing. And it one-shot this CRT shader that looks really stinking good. And it has all of the things that I want, whether that is control over the scan lines or line pitching, bloom, vignetting, has ghosting, has all kinds of stuff.

• 31:28Scott Tolinski?

  It looks so stinking good. And I think it really helped that I understood exactly what I wanted out of this shader. But the end result of it was enough to make me say, wow, I know significantly that

• 31:46Scott Tolinski?

  the other models, Fable I think could have done this, but I don't think the other models could have done this. I just, I just don't because I've been working on this app with other models for a little while now. And I just haven't seen that same kind of performance out of them. So I'm trying to find another demo here, this. CRT tube fixture on like the ghosting and stuff on here. It just did a really good job of this. So that's, that gives me a little bit of hope. Now, the one thing I haven't put it on is I haven't put it on any UI tasks, any design tasks. I don't know. This app is significantly vibe coded, so it's a large code base with a lot of stuff going on.

• 32:28Scott Tolinski?

  So therefore I am like stoked that it's not getting too lost in the sauce with the size of this code base. And so far I've, I've been pretty dang impressed. That said, I've seen that it's really good at computer use. I haven't thrown it on Hermes yet to do any major computer use. It has, I've noticed one thing is that it, it has like Fable, a tendency to run for a long ass time without stopping. And so if you have a clear idea and, and maybe because I've been using the goal feature of Claude code or loops where you have a clear end state, this is what it is when it's finished.

• 33:11Scott Tolinski?

  This is what your, your clear instructions are. I have found that when you wrangle it into that degree, it's been pretty powerful. And if you let it go open ended, it will just go forever and ever and ever. And who knows what it's doing? So I gotta say, I'm really liking it. I'm liking it and, and, and that's, you know, not every model release that comes out gives me the same kind of positive feelings. I think it was Opus four, eight came out and it felt like, and even four, seven came out and it was like, ah, this isn't any better. This is possibly worse. So I gotta say, I'm very impressed with this thing.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, it feels better. Can you talk a bit about usage? So I haven't paid too, too much attention to how, how many tokens is using or how it's eating into my bill. I will say the, the one nice thing about. Five, six soul being available is I can use my Codex subscription with Open Code.

• 34:12Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 34:13Speaker 01

  That was one of the main things that that was kind of sucked for me after GitHub Copilot increased their their pricing of everything. But now I have a Codex subscription and I can use that directly with Open Code. I can use all of my same remote workflows. I use the Open Code web interface. But I've taken a look at the analytics page and so Codex, if you go into your settings, can tells you how much usage you have left over the next five hours. And then how much usage you have left for this week. I think it's like it resets every week. But I've never gone below 95% usage in a five hour window. So I don't know. What's your experience? Yeah.

• 34:53Scott Tolinski?

  When people are saying that they're crushing their usage or they've used all their usage, like I can do that in Claude, no problem with, especially with Fable. But even before I could do that with Claude, no problem. I haven't really, like, I was, like it says, yeah, weekly usage limit 99%. I mean, I know that just I had a reset here, but like even I wasn't sure if I was at like 96% used or 96% left because it said left and I'd been using it all day. So, yeah, I found, like, I know other people are going to say that that they're, it's really easy to use up all their tokens. I'm using high thinking. I'm using high. I don't get into anything higher than high.

• 35:36Scott Tolinski?

  And I haven't really needed to. I don't use fast. And I, my tokens are like, I feel like I got, I could use this all week and no problem. I, maybe I'm just not token maxing enough. I'm not having 18 agents running simultaneously, but I'm able to do all my stuff with it. So.

• 35:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that's what I found. So.

• 36:01Speaker 01

  Like I mentioned, I have, I switched to Codex subscription instead of Copilot. At work, I use my Claude subscription, but we have like the enterprise plan, so I never really get to see like how much usage I'm actually using.

• 36:15Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, you can't like push it.

• 36:16Speaker 01

  No, but I, I could see myself using five, six soul for all of the stuff that I've been working on. Cause it feels like a similar jump we got from like Opus four, five to four, six. Honestly, even, even more than that, because it, it feels on par with the really good anthropic models. And, and that's why like using GPT five, five was always like, ah, I guess I'll use it because it's a little bit cheaper. It can run longer, but now with five, six, it's doing all the stuff. And yeah, like, like you're saying, I have not noticed it costing anymore or eating into my usage. Maybe that'll change. I don't know if they had any sort of like free extra usage after it was initially released or something like that, but.

• 36:57Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. You know, I mean, the GPT, I think it still has the same problem that I have with five, five, which is that it loves the adding is record style of code. Like these unnecessary functions that just exist to call another function or something like that, or the, they'll just write utilities a hundred places. So I, I think you need to control it a bit more. Ashley Peacock had a tweet that's GPT five point six soul would torch your entire garden to remove a single weed. It is a very good model, but it needs a leash due to its over eagerness. So far, most changes it has made, I've been able to cut LOC by 50% after review.

• 37:36Scott Tolinski?

  In my experience, that's kind of always the case with GPT models and I get really frustrated with that aspect of them. Which is one of the reasons why I prefer the Claude models, even if the GPT ones are a bit more exact.

• 37:51Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Another tweet from Matt, uh, Matt Schumer.

• 37:57Scott Tolinski?

  This tweet was making the rounds here. GPT 5.6 Soul just accidentally deleted almost all of my Mac's files. This is why I trust Fable 1,000 times more. Map, this is a skill issue. It ran RMRF users' Matt's. Why would you let your agent run RMRF? And why would you approve that? Are you just YOLO running everything? Like, you gotta block that stuff, man. Like, oh, I like, that's, that's crazy that you would allow your agents to do that. Or Git clean. I ran, I once ran Git clean on my home directory on my work computer by accident. When I was a new developer, it was my first year of being a developer. It really was a problem.

• 38:42Scott Tolinski?

  I also didn't know Git very well. That was way back when.

• 38:44Speaker 01

  I'll say, I have, I have a, I have a video on using dev containers and also like using Docker. And so if you were to use something like that, if an agent were to try to delete the whole hard drive, it wouldn't delete your hard drive. So definitely you shouldn't be running these things just on your machine with access to everything. I'll just say that.

• 39:04Scott Tolinski?

  Also, it, it can feel really good to give it access to everything. Feel really good to do that. Oh, I don't have to type sudo anymore. It can just do sudo commands. Like, that feels good. Oh, it just did it. But man, there's the potential for it to be like, oh, I'll hit this. Let me just delete this and then it'll be fine. Like, like, it doesn't, it doesn't really think things through, right? It's, it's, it's trying to solve a problem and how it ended up at the solution is how it ended up at it. And man, you gotta, you gotta, gotta control these bad boys. My God.

• 39:39Scott Tolinski?

  If you're not using things like hooks and stuff like that, those are a great way where you could have like a pre-call hook that looks for certain commands and then will prompt back saying, hey, use this instead or anything like that. So, yeah, you gotta be in control of this stuff. When this says 5.6 Soul almost, or just accidentally deleted almost all my Mac's files. No, brother, you did it. You did it. GPT 5.6 Soul did it. You did it the moment that you let it have access to do that.

• 40:12Scott Tolinski?

  That's all I got here. 5.6, I think it's good. Even though, yeah, it's still a GPT model, I still think it's good. CJ, what else you got for us next?

• 40:22Speaker 01

  I'm talking about how Betteroff joined for sale.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  So, if you're just joining us, this is Syntax Weekly, we're getting into the news, drama, all the stuff happening in the world of web dev. And this next story I have for you is about Betteroff.

• 40:37Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, and also, sorry, before you get into that CJ, I want to say stick around, we're going to be talking about something that is breaking news, the Grok Build CLI is stealing your private code. We're going to be talking about that, we can talk about it next, I think CJ, so just to get everybody a little tease there, but let's talk about Betteroff, because that's a project I'm a huge fan of.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  Stay tuned. So, if you're not familiar with Betteroff, they are an auth package that came out a couple of years ago and basically just did everything right and became my default for implementing auth across all of my apps. I'll just talk about really quick why Betteroff is good. I also have a video here on the channel talking about all the things you can do, but it's framework agnostic. They have database adapters for every type of database. They have client plugins and server plugins for every type of backend and every type of frontend in the JavaScript ecosystem. You can have just email and password login. You can have a single sign-on, you can have social sign-on, you have two-factor authentication.

• 41:41Speaker 01

  They also have an administration module that automatically sets it up so you can have like teams with individual users on that team that then have fine-grained access. Basically, everything you want to do with auth, they've thought about it. And it's completely open source. Now, initially, they did have a VC funding to try and create a paid product around Betteroff. I don't know all of the details, but I think they were essentially planning to almost have like a clerk-style hosted auth option for

• 42:17Speaker 01

  Off, whereas if you, and you didn't have to use that, right? You could use Better Off all by itself, store users in your own database, good to go. But this hosted offering was supposed to, you know, make it easier for people to set up off and not have to worry about the users and stuff like that. However, they have been acquired by Versale. And Versale's been acquiring a lot of things. So they acquired the, so I don't, a lot of the, was it the Veet team? What, do you remember that acquisition?

• 42:50Scott Tolinski?

  No, not, well.

• 42:52Speaker 01

  Not Veet, because it was like, Daniel Rowe, creator of Nuxed, maintainer of Veet, he got acquired, went into Versale. Maybe someone in the chat can tell us, but essentially, they've been scooping up a lot of open source developers. Oh, no, it wasn't Void, because Void got acquired by Cloudflare. Regardless, Versale has been basically offering good. They acquired Nuxed? Oh, that's what it was, okay.

• 43:15Scott Tolinski?

  That's what it was, yes. Thank you, Paolo.

• 43:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, thanks, thanks. But a lot of the contributors to Nuxed were also contributing to Veet and Nitro and all of these other things in the open source ecosystem. And so Versale is essentially showing goodwill towards open source development. And as far as I've seen so far, nothing has gone wrong with Nuxed. They're basically just paying a full-time salary to people that were otherwise working for just donations or doing it in their spare time. And that's essentially what's happening here with Better Off as well. And a little bit of history, if you've ever used Off with NextJS, you're probably very familiar with OffJS or NextOff.

• 43:56Speaker 01

  And that actually went by the wayside and the Better Off team became basically the replacement for that. Like, they became the maintainers of people switching off of OffJS or NextOff to migrate over to Better Off? And like that was crazy to see because AuthJS was basically trying to be the better auth of the world. Because Next Auth was a thing for a while. Basically, it was an auth package you could use with NextJS. And then AuthJS was their attempt to make this work across the ecosystem and various other backend frameworks as well. But it never reached 1.0. There were a lot of security issues and bugs and things like that. And so the Better Auth team actually took on maintenance of that.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  And then the guidance was use Better Auth instead. And so, yeah, there was a, just a, the, the whole idea of the Better Auth team would essentially have to create a company that offers something and that's how they could make their money instead of having to just do everything open source. But now, Versale has acquired them and now they can basically focus all of their time on open source. I think the, the blog post here says, "The transition lets us refocus on Better Auth's original mission without having to shape the strategy around monetization." So they don't have to think about how do they create a paid product? How do they scale that? They can just focus on making the best open source JavaScript auth package that they can.

• 45:24Speaker 01

  And they're also working on Agent Auth. I haven't looked into this, but the whole idea of building agents and needing agents to be able to log into systems and stuff like that. Agent Auth seems like it's going to be a big thing as well. But I, I think this is good news. Good news overall.

• 45:38Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, you know what? I, yeah, I, I'm in, in two camps here. I love Bearcat.

• 45:44Scott Tolinski?

  We, we met at, where, where did we meet? We met in San Francisco somewhat recently. I think at the, um, we did an event at the Chase Center. Is it called the Chase Center where the Golden State Warriors play?

• 45:56Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 45:56Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. Uh, and we met there. What a cool dude. And, uh, I, I wish absolutely, like, I'm just so stoked that this happened, uh, for him. Because Better Auth rules. He's been putting in the time, the effort. He, he, he crushed this thing. I'm sad it's Versale, uh, because I don't want this to be walled off. I don't want this to become a Versale best situation. You know, I, I, I have my issues there, but- As somebody who was acquired and, you know, wanted people to not, you know, to give us the benefit of the doubt when we were acquired, I will absolutely do that as well.

• 46:37Scott Tolinski?

  And I'm more than happy to be very stoked for him. So, yes. Yeah. I think this is a good thing. It means Betteroff will continue to grow without having to monetize. People were saying that they were going to move off of it in favor of something like Clerk or who knows these other things. And you cannot convince me that like a paid auth as a service solution is something I want to do. I would, I want something that I can host myself. If, because I rolled my own auth, I hand wrote my auth for a long time. And the fact that Betteroff is so much better and that I can just own it in my own codebase, this is the only thing I want to do here. So I'll continue to use Betteroff.

• 47:20Scott Tolinski?

  I'm not going to move off of it or something like that, just because it's a, you know, triangle shaped now.

• 47:25Speaker 01

  If it gets worse or for whatever reason, they put stuff behind paid features, yeah, I'll get off it. But also, if somebody could fork it, because I think it's MIT licensed, so they could steward it as a community project. But there's a comment here that is, what does Vercel get out of it, goodwill? I think it's multiple things. Like, we don't know the internal stack of projects at Vercel, but it's very likely that teams at Vercel are using Betteroff themselves. So by hiring the people, the maintainers that work on it, now they can also prioritize certain features that maybe they want to see internally, instead of having to wait for the open source work to come around to the things that they want. So I think that's one of the main benefits, is they basically can steer what, like, what

• 48:09Speaker 01

  features get prioritized. I think especially with Agent Auth. So we saw that Vercel released their own Agent SDK, like a platform for hosting agents. And so it would be in their best interest that Betteroff supports that and gives you auth options for that. So I could see that being some of the reason and and then now that it's owned by Vercel, some of the engineering talent at Vercel can also be redirected to work directly on Betteroff instead of just making like part-time open source contributions. So yeah, I think there's definitely a reason why they did it. Plus, just hiring good talent, right? Barraket being like building this thing as a solo developer for the longest time and like it's just one of the best off packages ever. Like clearly, he's a good engineer and so

• 48:53Speaker 01

  Vercel's gonna benefit from having them on their team.

• 48:56Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I mean, I do think, um, as I'm sorry, you have a hard username to say. 0xIAP5D?

• 49:06Speaker 01

  Oxia?

• 49:07Scott Tolinski?

  Oxia says, nah, it's the money. There's always money involved. And I gotta feel like that I gotta feel like there's there's something there. Yes, obviously, there I think it's it's just the money and that I cannot look at this as just that their intentions are good. But then again, they haven't. I mean, granted, they didn't acquire Svelte as many people think. They just hired Rich to work on Svelte full-time and so, um, you know, that that's worked out fine. So, hey, you know, like I said, I'm optimistic, even if I can be skeptical as well. But again, Betteroff just rules. So I'm it's one of the I'm just stoked, you know, that that this happened for him. Do we got anything else here? You want to move it along, CJ?

• 49:51Speaker 01

  That's all I got. Talk to me about Grok, because I know nothing about all this stuff.

• 49:55Scott Tolinski?

  So. Yes, Grok has been a bad boy. Very bad boy. Grok, build. CLI was uploading entire Git repositories to a Google Cloud bucket. Private codebases, unredacted secrets included. Their uploads quietly stopped via hidden server-side flag that XAI has still not said a word about scope, retention, or deletion. The scale is staggering. On a 12-gigabyte test repo, 5.1 gigabytes flew out the door to XAI's Grok code session traces bucket while the actual coding Task just needed 192 kilobytes. The tool grabbed whatever the repository it ran in.

• 50:40Scott Tolinski?

  Not only the files needed. The fix arrived as a hidden flag. Disable code base upload equals true. A day after a researcher's wire level analysis, the improve the model opt out never stopped the uploads.

• 50:56Scott Tolinski?

  Still, no advisory. No word on whether or not already uploaded code gets deleted for anybody pointing XAI. My gosh.

• 51:05Speaker 01

  This is insane. There's, this is like, there's, what? Just stop using any Grok tool right now. Like, the fact that that wasn't some kind of opt in or opt out.

• 51:19Scott Tolinski?

  The fact that it's not opt in. Yeah, the fact that it's not opt in. That's crazy. They, they were, I mean, like, they're just uploading whatever they can. They're just uploading everything. This, this, by the way, this comes in from International Cyber Digest. I find this Twitter account to be a really good follow. If you're into stuff that's going on in terms of cybersecurity. INT Cyber Digest. Really good follow here. This thing has gotten some attention, as you can see. Definitely some attention here. And SpaceX AI, which is the dumbest name. SpaceX AI.

• 52:00Scott Tolinski?

  SpaceX AI, why can't, like, okay, whatever. SpaceX AI had a statement. We care deeply about your privacy and respect customer choice. Oh, sorry, folks, I have a sandwich delivery.

• 52:13Scott Tolinski?

  Thank you. Thank you, Courtney. A little sandwich and grapes.

• 52:18Scott Tolinski?

  Sorry about that, folks. Sandwich delivery. SpaceX AI tweeted, we care deeply about your privacy and respect customer choice. Oh, sure you do.

• 52:27Speaker 01

  That's why you're just.

• 52:28Scott Tolinski?

  Hoovering up every single bit of thing that you can. For teams using zero data retention, no trace code and code data is ever retained. All API key use of Grok build also respects zero data retention. If zero data retention is disabled, the privacy command is available in the CLI to disable data retention, which also deletes previously synced data. Run privacy command to view or change your settings at any time. Come. On. Come on.

• 52:54Speaker 01

  What I'm baffled by is just how blatant it is. Like, literally just uploading your code to a storage bucket. Like, they could have been more subtle about it, right? Like, basically just have their agent run, like, a codebase exploration that sends the files themselves as tokens, so it's not literally uploading it to a bucket. Like, there are better ways to steal people's code. That's all I'm saying here. Like, this is insane. This is just... I say it's unbelievable, but at the same time, it is X, it is Grok, so... But I don't know.

• 53:27Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I wasn't using Grok build before this. I did try one of the Grok models recently through OpenRouter, and I really was impressed with how fast it was. But, yeah, I was not using Grok build. When I see something like Grok build announced, I am not lining up to be like, "Yes, let me be the first to try that." And I think this just kind of validates that. This statement by them basically saying, "You can use the privacy command, brother. This should have been opt-in. What are you talking about? It uploaded users' whole directories."

• 54:10Speaker 01

  I will say, though, that in the age of AI and everybody using the latest agent or trying things out, like, this is what we're up against, right? Like, this is also why you should be very careful about what tools you use, especially if you're trying to run it on, like, an enterprise codebase that has, like, intellectual property and stuff like that. So...

• 54:32Speaker 01

  I'm speechless. I've no more words.

• 54:36Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, it's wild. I feel like... Well, first, I want to say shout-out to the people who actually care enough to dive into some of this, like Peter here. Peter Dedene? Dedene? Sorry, Peter. Peter first spotted this 22 hours ago, basically saying, by hunting on his network with proxy management, just being like... What the hell?

• 55:04Scott Tolinski?

  Which is, you know, so, man, shout out to people who actually care about this stuff. Like Peter. Yeah. Well, that's all I got there. It's bleak. And, uh, yeah, sorry. Sorry if you've used Grok build. Your entire stuff is online now. It's in, it's in a Google bucket. You can run the privacy command if you'd like and then hope that they just actually do what they say they're gonna do here.

• 55:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I love the comment from Scott in the chat. Grok, is this true? If you've spent any time on, on Twitter, like, there's so many comments of people, because you can, if you're not familiar, you can at Grok and then it'll actually explain with AI. But it's like every single post where nobody wants to just do like a tiny bit of work to like look it up themselves like, Grok, is this true?

• 55:48Scott Tolinski?

  Grok, is this true? No. XAI space, X open AI space, XAI is the greatest and it will never have any problems. Of course, Grok is a reliable narrator, I'm sure.

• 55:59Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 56:00Scott Tolinski?

  CJ, what else do you got for us?

• 56:02Speaker 01

  I've got a couple of Cloudflare news for you. I don't want you to think that we're sponsored by Cloudflare or anything like that. I just use Cloudflare and, um,

• 56:09Scott Tolinski?

  CJ, just tell them how it is. How much money are we getting from Cloudflare every single day?

• 56:16Speaker 01

  I am paying Cloudflare $10 a month. I have two different accounts with them, a work account and a personal account. So they're not paying me anything. I'm paying them.

• 56:23Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 56:24Speaker 01

  So.

• 56:24Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. I know. I am paying, every single domain I own is in Cloudflare, yes. I'm paying them a lot.

• 56:31Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, and that's the other thing is their domain prices have gone down. And like I switched off of Namecheap, like, yeah, regardless, Cloudflare news. So this post says, your worker can now have its own cache in front of it. Now, I don't know about you, but when I was building with Cloudflare workers, very often I would want to cache something that the worker was doing. And I would basically tie that with Cloudflare's key value store. So basically the, the worker fires up, it checks to see is something in the key value store. If it is, it serves it up from there instead. The issue with that is even that tiny bit of time counts as an invocation for the worker.

• 57:14Speaker 01

  So the worker still has to spin up to check the cache to then return from the cache. With this new feature, now you can make your worker responses directly cacheable. So a request coming into your Cloudflare Worker app can go directly to the cache based on these various headers you can set in terms of like when it should timeout. And that doesn't even touch your worker, which means you're not billed for CPU time. And they also have stale wall revalidate. So if your cache header says this thing's expired, it'll serve up the cached version. But behind the scenes, the worker will kick in to build out the new cached version. So this is good news all around because it basically used to be that it would be worker talks to cache,

• 57:57Speaker 01

  which then responds, but now clients can talk directly to the cache. That's it. I'm excited about it.

• 58:04Scott Tolinski?

  I love that. I love getting into the nitty gritty here. I'm sorry, I had to go open my door. I got an alert from my home assistant that my room was running out of oxygen. So I had to go open the door. I don't have an air exchange in here, folks, so I have to keep opening the door all the time. So I actually have a quote for that. And there's like, man, you can get really high tech and fancy with it. And I'm still trying to decide how much money I want to spend to make it so I don't have to have a door or window open at all times in my office here. Because this is, this is just a room attached to the garage and that's it. I wonder like what the previous owner did in this room. Did he just like, did he not know? I will say I don't.

• 58:48Speaker 01

  It was already an office when you bought it?

• 58:50Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, it was already an office, which is one of the main reasons we bought this house, because it had this room attached to the garage. But I'd been working in here for years now. And I didn't realize until I got an air quality monitor how little oxygen I had in this room. And so I set up alerts because it would just, I've noticed I was getting like foggy towards the end of the day. And. Oh, man. It's not good.

• 59:19Speaker 01

  So are you gonna install some kind of air exchange? I feel like you could almost install, almost like a bathroom vent, like-

• 59:24Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 59:25Speaker 01

  Something like that?

• 59:25Scott Tolinski?

  That's kind of what I'm going to do, because I think that's the cheapest. Now, especially because this is a recording studio, you could get into some really high-tech solutions that end up reducing the amount of sound that happens there. But if I just hook it up to a smart plug and I just have like two fans, one that pulls in, one that pulls out, and I can just manually trigger it when I need to, I think that's a fine solution. I think that's probably a better solution than than a giant unit on the wall that's doing something quietly.

• 59:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess you could also have the fan outside. What I didn't realize until recently, I was in the attic, the vent fan in my bathroom is actually like 20 feet away in the attic. So I always wondered why I couldn't hear the fan when I turned it on. So basically, they have ducting running like 10, 20 feet, and then the fan is there. So that makes it quiet. I feel like that's a potential option if you have like ceiling or like attic space for it or something like that, but.

• 1:00:27Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Yes. Well, cool about the Cloudflare stuff and cool about being able to breathe. Let's talk about-

• 1:00:36Speaker 01

  I have one more Cloudflare, and then I'll pass it over. It's a quick one. So Cloudflare also dropped, Cloudflare dropped, which basically lets you deploy static sites without signing up for a Cloudflare account. You literally can just drop your static files, immediately deploys the static site. I will say Netlify has had Netlify drop for the longest time. So this isn't anything crazy, but Cloudflare's done it now. So it's really easy to deploy to Cloudflare, and then you have, I think, an hour to claim the deployment on a given account after you've deployed it. But Cloudflare out here, making it super easy to deploy sites. That's all I got. I'll pass it over to you, Scott. What do you got for us?

• 1:01:16Scott Tolinski?

  I love it, because I hate miss, I hate wrangling Wrangler files. So happy to have anything that makes deployment easier. I want to give a quick shout out to CJ really quick. CJ released a really great video. I built an LLM from scratch on the Syntax channel. I highly recommend you all go check this thing out because this is the single best video I've seen on the topic of LLMs in general, explaining everything. And man, people really, really liked this video. If you haven't seen it, it's well, well worth your time. I, I sent it to a lot of people who are non-developers in my life. Absolute banger. It's having nice, having, it's so nice having everything tied together.

• 1:01:53Scott Tolinski?

  11 out of 10 on the editing. CJ's editing was so good on this bad boy that somebody accused him of using AI to edit it, which, uh, which is so funny.

• 1:02:03Speaker 01

  It's, I mean, yeah, my, my response to that, yeah, my response to that though was like, if you can't tell the difference between this and AI editing, you're not going to make it. Cause like, I, like the, my attention to, you don't understand how many hours I spent in the editor, just like tweaking images and like adding effects and yeah.

• 1:02:22Scott Tolinski?

  CJ, CJ spent so long on this video, folks, and he's underselling it. He, he, even at that, he's underselling it. CJ, CJ put blood, sweat and tears to this video and it's, it came out so well. I love this comment from Adrian. "When Syntax joined Sentry, I was skeptical. When CJ joined Syntax, I was skeptical. I've obviously turned around on both of these a long time ago, but this episode made me realize how far Syntax has come. Really fantastic stuff. Congrats CJ, is the perfect for these technical deep dives. CJ, you rule, you crush this video and it is so good. I, I'll watch it over and over again. So, um,

• 1:03:00Speaker 01

  I really appreciate that.

• 1:03:01Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. So go, go give this a watch if you haven't. If you're interested in technology in general, it is just expertly done. Let's get into the next thing I had on my list, which is going to be the Odin 1.0 announcement. This is not a release of Odin 1.0. This is just an announcement that it has been announced of. That it will be, it's a programming language. Odin is a C replacement programming language and it has been in development for some time. And people seem to really like this in the community that has formed here around Odin. It is opinionated. It is to replace, see, it's being used by actual VFX software.

• 1:03:46Scott Tolinski?

  Jenga, EmberGen, GeoGen, Liquid. It's being used by people. So this isn't like that it's a, this isn't just that it's like out now or something. This is him announcing that they are approaching the 1.0 release, which they're calling Odin 2027. And they're, would love support in getting this thing over the finish line in terms of whether that is Patreon support or anything like that. I'm going to save a lot of this for you to watch this video. We will link it up here. This was a really good watch, a really good announcement. Ginger Bill is the creator of this thing and he, he made a very captivating video,

• 1:04:30Scott Tolinski?

  but he made it fun, he made it interesting and he made it, he made it like, just like, wow, this is a really cool thing. So I would check this thing out if I were you. The Odinlang, odin-lang.org, give this video a watch. Again, you know, I don't have a ton of use for C-level programming languages, but maybe now with AI I do, who knows? I like my JavaScript. Can I write JavaScript? We'll see. But yeah, pretty cool stuff.

• 1:05:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'll have to check it out. The tagline of data-oriented language seems pretty interesting.

• 1:05:05Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, there's a lot of interesting stuff in here where he is very opinionated. I've watched a couple of videos on it. I wish I was clued enough to this ecosystem to really speak really, really in-depth on it, but it looks nice.

• 1:05:24Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 1:05:25Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, yes, yes, yes. Um, you got anything else CJ?

• 1:05:30Speaker 01

  I don't. I was gonna look through my saved stories to see if there's anything.

• 1:05:33Scott Tolinski?

  Sure. I have one more thing. Um, there's a, there's an open code beta for V2 open code. You can install it using the MPN. Um, you can install it via a curl yet, but you can install it via NPM bun or yarn and then you just run it with open code 2. Uh, you do have to like re-log into your providers and stuff like that. There are the plugins and there's a whole new API for plugins. My understanding about open code 2 is that I saw Dax saying that you're gonna be able to have open code and prove open code. So that tells me there's some like Pi type of functionality for extending this here, but I haven't really dug too much into it. I have been using just open code for a long time and uh, hey, I think open

• 1:06:16Scott Tolinski?

  code 2 when it drops is gonna be very exciting. So if you wanna give it a try now, uh, this did just come onto my radar. I just installed it this morning. I haven't had a chance to get really in-depth with this just yet, but I promise I will very soon and maybe I can talk on it for next week.

• 1:06:32Speaker 01

  Well, do you know the, the short of it? Like, what's the, as an end user, is it, what's gonna change for me? Is the UI changing? Is it the underlying uh, code more so?

• 1:06:44Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, since it seems like their plugin API is completely changed, I would imagine this is a underlying code change. The, the UI isn't any different. So I know I saw the settings menu is different, but the UI itself isn't any different on the whole, at least uh, for the, the 2E side of things. So, um, undo session sharing. Yeah, like I said, I just, this just came on my radar right before here. So I would love to dive into this a little bit more. Just wanted to put it on people's radar that this is available to give it a try now.

• 1:07:17Speaker 01

  Sweet. It's on my radar now. I will have used it by the next time we go live. I can talk about it. So.

• 1:07:21Scott Tolinski?

  That's what I'm talking about. Yes. Yes, yes, yes. Um, cool. Well.

• 1:07:26Speaker 01

  I do have one thing, one, one last fun thing. Super quick.

• 1:07:31Speaker 01

  Is that okay?

• 1:07:32Scott Tolinski?

  It's okay, yes.

• 1:07:33Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 1:07:36Speaker 01

  I did come across this. It's the Winamp Skin Museum. So yeah, so we're doing, no more news, but this is just, this is just fun.

• 1:07:43Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 1:07:44Speaker 01

  I don't know about you, but I spent so many hours in Winamp and also like tweaking with various skins. I remember like these first three are some of the, the, the images are just seared into my brain. Uh, but if you weren't familiar, uh, Winamp was, uh, an audio player that most people used on Windows to listen to their legally obtained audio. Um, but, uh, you could skin it and make it customized. And so this, uh, this skin museum just has all of these,

• 1:08:13Speaker 01

  skins that, that people released throughout the years. It's just a trip down memory lane.

• 1:08:19Scott Tolinski?

  Gosh, I, I was such a Winamp head. Winamp skinning to me was one of, like, I was skinning Winamp with, with like Microsoft Paint because it was just all these low-res, um, I don't remember. Were they just JPEGs? What, what were they? I was making all kinds of stuff for this.

• 1:08:38Speaker 01

  EMPs, maybe?

• 1:08:39Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. I made a Radiohead Kid A theme that was white and black and it had the, the bunny or the, uh, the bear faces on it. I would love to see that again. I would just love to see what high school or middle school me would have come up with for a radio themed, Radiohead themed Winamp skin. I wonder if it's in this list somewhere, which I, I highly doubt it, but I did publish it on their thing. Man, I loved Winamp for so many reasons. I, I like, I went nuts customizing that thing.

• 1:09:13Speaker 01

  Here's all the Radiohead ones. What, you said it was Radiohead?

• 1:09:16Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. You found all of the Radiohead ones?

• 1:09:19Speaker 01

  Well, I just, uh, filtered, but you can filter by Radiohead, so.

• 1:09:22Scott Tolinski?

  Really? You can filter?

• 1:09:26Scott Tolinski?

  Mine was red and black and it had the bear face on it. So I do.

• 1:09:36Scott Tolinski?

  It's not that one. It was, it was like mostly white. Oh!

• 1:09:41Scott Tolinski?

  No, I didn't put Tom's face on it, but it reminds me of this one.

• 1:09:44Speaker 01

  It'd be crazy to see yours on here, yeah.

• 1:09:46Scott Tolinski?

  It would be crazy to see it, and I don't see it. Uh, I think I would, it would hit me in an instant. Uh, but I definitely used the OK Computer one of these. No, it is here, CJ!

• 1:09:57Speaker 01

  Which one, which one?

• 1:09:58Scott Tolinski?

  It's the bears and the, the ocean one. Oh my god.

• 1:10:03Scott Tolinski?

  Um, it's the top five, five from the left.

• 1:10:09Scott Tolinski?

  Kid Amp.

• 1:10:11Scott Tolinski?

  No, not that one. Nope. Uh, fi- five from the top, top row, top row. There we go!

• 1:10:17Speaker 01

  This, you made this one?

• 1:10:19Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, dude, my guy.

• 1:10:22Speaker 01

  Oh my god.

• 1:10:25Scott Tolinski?

  Dude.

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  The fact that somebody archived this is crazy. I guess you uploaded it to like a skin registry or something like that?

• 1:10:32Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, they had a website.

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 1:10:35Scott Tolinski?

  God, this rules.

• 1:10:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I wanna look, I bet somebody's done it, but I wanna get a Winamp skin for, uh, Jellyfin, so I used Jellyfin for my media server, and I just got it set up to, uh, for my music library as well, to like be able to stream and download music on my phone. Um, so it'd be cool to have a, a Winamp, Winamp skin for listening to my media library.

• 1:10:57Scott Tolinski?

  Gosh, I feel like that's so just doable now. Just to, yeah, just do a Winamp, a Winamp UI for Spotify. Somebody's probably already done it.

• 1:11:08Speaker 01

  Can we do sick pics?

• 1:11:10Scott Tolinski?

  Sure.

• 1:11:12Speaker 01

  Okay, I have one for you. It's booting up now. Um, and...

• 1:11:19Speaker 01

  I got this thing on a Prime deal, but in, in the idea of slowing down, uh, potentially not using my phone for everything, I got this little MP3 player, and you might be able to see the screen, but it, uh, let's see, it, the screen makes it look like it's a, a cassette player. Let me get it in focus here.

• 1:11:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:11:48Scott Tolinski?

  Please tell me it has Bluetooth, CJ.

• 1:11:50Speaker 01

  It has Bluetooth, that's the thing. So it's got Bluetooth. It also is a high-quality deck, so that's the other aspect of this, is it actually has USB-C. And you can plug this into your computer and then route audio through it to get like, super-high-fidelity audio. And it supports FLAC files. And it's got this little animation of a cassette spinning. It has 8GB built-in, but I have a 256GB SD card in there. So literally, my entire library of ripped CDs is now on the go, and it looks like a little cassette player, so... Yeah, sick pick. It's called the Snow Sky Echo Mini. They also have like, a slightly larger version.

• 1:12:32Speaker 01

  But the idea with this is, now, if I'm going out for a walk or something, instead of bringing my phone, I just bring this, and I'm listening to more music as well, and not necessarily, depending on like, Spotify Radio, or Auto Playlist, or anything like that, I'm making my own playlist again, so... Yeah, shout-out, physical media, of sorts. It's still digital, but yeah.

• 1:12:56Scott Tolinski?

  Wow, that's so cool. I couldn't have possibly imagined that that would be your sick pick here. That's really sick. Yeah, I don't know if I have anything sick pick. I mean, I have my robot, who's currently sleeping. So I guess I will sick pick that. He's sleeping right now. I'll maybe pull his head up. This is Marshmallow. It's a Reachy Mini. This is the Reachy Mini Lite, so it's the cheaper variety. And all the compute happens on my computer. If you get the fancier one, it has a Raspberry Pi baked in. This thing has been so fun. One, you gotta build it. Two, it's a great kid's device. I'm gonna be dropping a video on this thing on Friday of this week.

• 1:13:37Scott Tolinski?

  So if you want to see more about this, I have a whole host of what I've been working on with it. There's some crazy... So I decided to go the route of writing all of my own software for this, instead of using some of the community software, and like... I've had to get into like latency of text to speech, speech to text. I've had to get into like how to properly do wake word listening and the challenges of that. And then when you have a conversation, how do you know when to stop the conversation? Like when my son is talking to this thing, he'll say some words like stop to think for a second. And then what you don't want to have happen is the robot like pick up that prompt and try to. I also gave this thing a memory and it's all being run on Hermes and stuff.

• 1:14:22Scott Tolinski?

  So Marshmello is currently offline because I haven't turned him on today. But this Reachy Mini project is really fun. Oh, there he goes. Oh, hello. Okay. Oh, now he's sleeping. Okay. Gosh, this is a cool project, especially if you have kids. Check it out, Reachy Mini. It's made by Hugging Face and Pollen Robotics. I'll be talking more about it on Friday. Check it out.

• 1:14:50Scott Tolinski?

  Check. Well, that's all I got. Well, thank you so much for joining us for Syntax Weekly. We will be back next week with Wes. Wes will return and I'm sure he'll bring a ton of exciting stuff from his vacation, where he's probably spent a ton of time on the computer, right?

• 1:15:06Scott Tolinski?

  Sick. All right, we'll catch you in the next one.

• 1:15:09Speaker 01

  Peace.