1054: Reddit Closing it’s Doors

Wes, Scott, and CJ are back with two weeks of news: Reddit is forcing everyone to log in, r/opensource bans anything AI, and CSS-Tricks is independent again. Plus Anomaly's Hex dictation app, Mitchell Hashimoto's Rex terminal, TanStack Redact, Cloudflare's TypeScript port to Rust, Vercel's Agent Desktop, the new touchscreen MacBook Pros, a flood of CVEs, and a certificate authority whose private key was the number 4. Show Notes 00:00 Welcome to Syntax! 01:11 Anomaly’s Hex Dictation App 05:00 The Battle to Own Your Computer 07:45 Raycast’s iOS Keyboard 10:11 The New AI Design Meta 11:05 Rex: A Next Gen Terminal 17:37 Rex Remote Hosts and Scripting 22:55 Reddit Is Closing Its Doors 28:46 Bots and Captchas 33:29 r/opensource Bans AI 37:41 CSS-Tricks Has a New Owner 41:08 Brought to you by Sentry! 41:34 Silent Dictation Glasses Silent dictation with Airpods Silent dictation on Mac 45:49 Arc Is Dead 49:42 Pico CSS Is Unmaintained 50:49 TanStack Redact 52:37 tsrs: TypeScript in Rust 55:34 Vercel’s Agent Desktop Launch post Cua 59:26 Agents in a macOS VM 01:00:38 Claude Is Back in OpenCode 01:01:41 Touchscreen MacBook Pros 01:11:21 Discord Goes Discoverable AnswerOverflow 01:13:31 Notification Overload 01:14:50 Security Roundup 01:15:33 What Is a CVE? Common Vulnerabilities and Exposure CVE Tracker 01:18:01 PHP, Linux and GitLab CVEs 01:22:18 Abliterated Models 01:23:38 eMudhra’s Private Key Was 4 eMudhra’s CA keys cracked in milliseconds mitmproxy 01:31:09 Apple Music’s iPod 404 Page 01:33:18 Norway’s Best Toilets 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.

• 0:00Wes Bos?

  What's up everybody? Welcome to Syntax Live. We got a packed show for you. We weren't here last week, so we've got double the news for you on anomaly releases. Hex, we got to talk about the MacBook Pros of touchscreen, Anthropic returning to open code, Rex, and a different thing than Hex. Arc is good for dead, good, sorry, dead for good. Reddit is closing their doors. We've got tons of stuff to talk about today. My name is Wes. With me as always is Scott and CJ. How you doing, guys?

• 0:30Scott Tolinski?

  Doing good. Randy is out today, folks. So CJ is manning the boards. So let's all wish him a lot of luck because it's, he's gonna be doing double duty here.

• 0:42Wes Bos?

  Lots of things to chime in on.

• 0:46Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. Yes, yes, yes. And it's like kind of raining and storming outside. So maybe CJ is gonna lose access to one of his 18 internet connections he has.

• 0:56Speaker 02

  At least one will stay up, hopefully.

• 0:58Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, at least one. Yeah.

• 1:01Speaker 02

  Let us know if you can, if you can see us on YouTube as well. It looks like we were having issues there, but I think it's resolved, but hopefully it's.

• 1:07Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. Chime in if we're having any issues of any kind. CJ would love to know. Cool. So let's kick it off. First one that we have for you today is Hex. Hex from Anomaly. Anomaly, the folks behind open code. And Hex is basically a dictation app, local voice dictation, hold option, and say what you mean. Okay, so one thing that I liked a lot about this, this demo page initially, and folks, this might be a little loud, so I'll refresh. I saw this and was initially excited as the words were streaming into the inputs, thinking that like, oh, like macOS dictation, it's gonna

• 1:50Scott Tolinski?

  be like, as you're speaking. But sadly, in my experience, that is not the case. It is just basically a free voice dictation alternative here. Yeah, I've been using Hex and it's nice. It's free. It works well. The cool thing about Hex, and let me bop this over here. Basically, it's working like any other voice dictation. You hold option, whatever, the thing pops up, and it's got a really cool little bar up top here showing your voice. It's nice because it stays out of the way and it's relatively small. That's like something that a lot of them are like, oh, let's make this bad boy big. But it does not stream the text into the inputs. So it doesn't do that. There is.

• 2:33Wes Bos?

  We can get that. That's like the macOS dictation does that. And it's so good to see what you're saying as you're saying it.

• 2:40Scott Tolinski?

  It is. There is some interesting little sound effects when you, I don't know if you guys could hear that click. Can you hear those clicks? There's like weird clicks when you hold down the dictation button, which you can probably turn off. But overall, I would say I've been using this. The default model is Parakeet. You can download larger models or different models. If you so care to do that, and you're not having good results, you can do the, the output changing. Sorry, where is that? Where you're giving it words? Yeah, I don't know. I don't see where that is right now. You can give it words, so like century to change to.

• 3:16Wes Bos?

  Yeah, commonly said things. A lot of these also will have like, it will like run it through a quick little LLM pass where if you were to goof up, like I'll often be like, I'm going to the, no, I will be going to, you know, like if you correct yourself, then it will actually correct itself in the text, which is a very nice feature. I personally, I'm in Super Whisper, but there's just, there's so many of these applications. And it's unbelievable. Like if you think of it like, there's a company called what Whisper Flow that is like worth bazillions of dollars from these things. Whereas like, there are many free ones out there, you know, handy dot computer is another free one that a lot of people use. And everybody probably in

• 4:01Wes Bos?

  the comments will be like, I just made my own.

• 4:03Scott Tolinski?

  Yep. Yep. This one's kind of cool. There's a, there's this, tell your, your agent how Hex should write. So basically, again, taking a pass at like actual writing here. So like Talk Like a Pirate on Fridays. And then whenever you dictate on, I don't know personally, how well I would use this. Maybe I would say like, yeah, remove ums and like and stuff like that. That, ooh, remove stuff like that. That's one that I need to have it read. Yeah, have it remove those things. I do kind of like that vibe. I wonder how I would use this. Maybe like, hey, make this cohesive instead of rambling. So yeah, that, that's one thing. I think it's

• 4:44Scott Tolinski?

  pretty good in my use case. It's reliable. I was having issues with Super Whisper being reliable or Whisper Flow being reliable. That's like the one thing I cannot have with voice dictation is for it to not work when I need it to work at that given point. Yes. There's also this whole annotations and screen recording business, which I don't necessarily, maybe it's not for me, but record your screen drawn and then talk over with a shortcut.

• 5:13Wes Bos?

  You know what they're doing here.

• 5:14Scott Tolinski?

  For business kind of sharing. Yeah.

• 5:16Wes Bos?

  Like, cool app, cool features, right? Probably well designed. But what they're doing here really is they're trying to get into the game of being the main thing on your computer, right? They're trying, everybody's trying to kill Raycast as the thing where your, your entry point to your computer. OpenAI did this. They automatically turned on their, I don't know, what, what do they have? Like this little dinosaur or something pops up? I had to turn it off immediately. It's super obnoxious. And then OpenAI or Anthropic did it as well, where they put the little, the little lobster run around your computer. All of these are

• 5:57Wes Bos?

  super annoying, but everybody is trying to eat their way into being the entry point on your computer. Because if they can get that, if they can be like the first place where you go to do something on your computer, whether it's take a screenshot and annotate something, then putting that into your LLM is going to be the next thing. Whereas like your, your initial input to doing something on your computer right now is not open code. When you want to like, build something, when you want to like run a task, absolutely, open up Eternal, open up, open code, run those all day long. They want to get a step closer to this type of thing. And I guarantee that this is their stab at being in that space. Because

• 6:38Wes Bos?

  you, they're probably seeing all of these other companies, all of their competitors rolling out a very similar thing. And this is a very first good way to get it on people's computer where it's like, look, really good free dictation.

• 6:51Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. Yeah, totally. There's also a number of cool little lab stuff in here. Record calls and keep transcripts. There's a voice filter. This live text made me excited. Again, I was hoping that it would stream in and it kind of does. But when you do this, and let's do the dictation, I can show you what it does. It just kind of puts it directly below here. And it's slow enough where it's not going to be that useful, not like the macOS one. And it doesn't put it into the input that you're typing in. So it still just has it up here. And not bad. Certainly not bad, but not good enough for me to want to use. So, yeah, I think it's good. I mean, I'll use it. I'm not using anything else currently. I'll

• 7:31Scott Tolinski?

  hook it up to my foot pedal and have it work like that. Parakeet Ultra is an option here. There's a number of things in this, this whole thing. You could say comma or hashtag or whatever. Yeah, all that normal stuff. On that note of Raycast, did you see they released a keyboard for their mobile app?

• 7:52Wes Bos?

  No, I thought they had that for a while. I've never had any luck with third-party iOS keyboards. So I haven't even checked it.

• 7:59Speaker 02

  Have you? Like a Bluetooth keyboard or what?

• 8:02Scott Tolinski?

  No, no, no.

• 8:02Wes Bos?

  Like a, yeah.

• 8:03Speaker 02

  Software keyboard. Like an app keyboard. Okay, okay.

• 8:06Scott Tolinski?

  And yeah, I did, I did use it. And I, I don't know if you'll be able to even see this. Aesthetically, it's really nice looking. It's the nicest looking one of these keyboards. The big problem with the Raycast keyboard is that they hide dictation behind a paywall. When, come on, every, you can't hide a feature that the core, like, because I understand needing a paywall for the Raycast app, but you can't hide a core feature like dictation that every other keyboard has behind a wall. So.

• 8:39Wes Bos?

  Does it have swipe as well?

• 8:41Scott Tolinski?

  I don't know. I never.

• 8:41Wes Bos?

  You're a swiper?

• 8:43Scott Tolinski?

  No.

• 8:44Wes Bos?

  CJ, you a swiper?

• 8:45Speaker 02

  I'm a swiper.

• 8:46Scott Tolinski?

  It does have swipe.

• 8:46Speaker 02

  You gotta be. You gotta be at this point.

• 8:48Wes Bos?

  If you don't use swipe, I'm immediately, you're just like, like your, your phone is a toy to you. You know, you're not.

• 8:55Scott Tolinski?

  I'm not like this. I'm usually just dictating, dictating everything into it.

• 8:59Wes Bos?

  Yeah, but like.

• 9:01Wes Bos?

  You gotta like swipe it around. I a huge swipe user, huge dictation user, and that's why I worry about moving to something else.

• 9:09Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 9:10Wes Bos?

  Somebody in the chat, hold on, there's a really good one here. Says, I feel like I'm missing the value prop of these. The native voice input for Claude code, and I think cursor as well, last I checked, is pretty good. That's that therein is the is the problem is that they people don't want to use, and maybe I'm wrong about this, people don't want to use the individual text voice input for every single app.

• 9:33Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 9:33Wes Bos?

  I just want to have it in anything. I want to dictate it into Notion. I want to dictate it into my Slack, into text messages, into absolutely anything. And you can use, I'm assuming this is the same thing with Claude as well. You can use the Codex Chat GPT one globally as well, which is, again, everybody wants to be that button press, that that shortcut on your computer, which is pretty gutsy of them to just take the option key. You know, it's obviously going to break some other stuff.

• 10:02Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, I think, I mean, you could obviously set it, but you're so right on that. Also, actually, in that same regard, let me even pull up the hex. There's a new meta, folks, for AI design. The new meta, and this has been this way for a little bit, is the circle area, or this the circle area, the rounded corner area here, the sidebar here, and then the gaps. So that's the same thing. This is Rex, which another app will look at. This same design is in everything. I got access to the OMP terminal app called Turn Same Business. There it's like, that is what everybody is is landing on right now. This is the current

• 10:44Scott Tolinski?

  meta, is this rounded corners within a slight gap, just like this, small border. Yeah, that's it right there. Maybe some box shadows too, right?

• 10:55Wes Bos?

  I like it. I like that look.

• 10:57Scott Tolinski?

  I do too. It looks good. It looks better than the previous slop outputs that we've been having. And it looks better than the iOS or than macOS chat app. Either way, let's talk about Rex. We done with Hex? You guys got more to say here?

• 11:09Wes Bos?

  Yeah, done with Hex, moved to Rex.

• 11:11Scott Tolinski?

  All right, folks, this is something different. This is not Hex. This is Rex. And what what Rex is, I'm gonna, I'm gonna keep, I'm gonna keep goofing these up, is basically, it's a terminal app from Michael Hashimoto, the creator of Ghosty.

• 11:26Wes Bos?

  Mitchell.

• 11:27Scott Tolinski?

  Mitchell, Mike, did I say Michael? Holy cow.

• 11:30Speaker 02

  Hashimoto?

• 11:31Scott Tolinski?

  Bro, we've been talking about Michael Jackson all week. Mitchell Hashimoto, folks. Oh, he also made Ghosty, and that's it. That's the only thing he's ever made. No, just kidding. He also created HashiCorp, which was acquired by IBM for $6.4 billion. So he's been around, he's done all kinds of stuff.

• 11:48Wes Bos?

  Smart guy, really cares about performance, and Ghosty is an awesome terminal app. But we want more. We yearn for more.

• 11:57Scott Tolinski?

  We yearn for more. And the terminal has evolved in how we're using it. And well, now we have Rex from Superlogical, which uses lib Ghosty to do the terminal stuff behind the scenes. It's a next gen terminal app. I got access to it. You are looking at it right here. Now, what does Rex do? That's interesting. It has its own multiplexer, and it's multiplexer like TMUX or anything like that can create new pains. And, you know, your AI has access to the the the Rex CLI that can then therefore create pains, and your AI can control this thing completely. So it's a multiplexer that's made for modern

• 12:39Scott Tolinski?

  stuff. So it's not TMUX. And as far as I know, it's not a TMUX fork. It is just its own multiplexer. Now, the app itself, as far as terminal apps go.

• 12:49Wes Bos?

  Can you say what what this, what is this for? Before we get into the features, like, why would somebody be excited about this?

• 12:55Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Well, I'm trying to, that's actually what I was just saying, that those are the features. It's a terminal app. It's a terminal app with features.

• 13:02Speaker 02

  So like it replaces, it would replace iTerm, it would replace Ghosty, that kind of thing?

• 13:06Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, it would replace Ghosty, iTerm, Alacriti, whatever all those apps are.

• 13:11Wes Bos?

  Yeah, more. But it's more than that, right?

• 13:15Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, barely.

• 13:15Wes Bos?

  Is it a Herder replacement?

• 13:17Scott Tolinski?

  It is also a Herder replacement, yes. But I'll get to that, Wes.

• 13:21Wes Bos?

  Okay.

• 13:22Scott Tolinski?

  There's a lot of features.

• 13:23Wes Bos?

  We want to know where this, where this thing sits. Before we get into the features, we want to like, I want to understand what it is. And I intentionally didn't look into it too much.

• 13:32Scott Tolinski?

  It sits in replacement of your terminal app, whatever that may be. The additional features, though, are are where it sets apart. And that multiplexer is a big part of that, Wes. So that is the, that is the the basis for which all this works. For the Herder like stuff, it has integrations with hooks into your agents. So that way it can alert you as to the status of any of your agents. So let's say if you have multiple agents running in the sidebar, it'll be able to show you directly in the sidebar. So I can just say like, hey, think for one sec. Who knows what the heck this thing is going to say? Oh,

• 14:13Scott Tolinski?

  okay. Well, I'm not even logged in. Well, either way, it would come back and it would say, it would, it would show you that I was waiting, just like Herder does, same sidebar. Now, the killer feature that Herder has, that this also has, is that it's a long running server, meaning that if I close the terminal app, it does not stop my my Rex server from running, the processes running. And likewise, if I have a Rex server running on another machine, same deal. So that way, if you visit the Rex server remote address from any of your machines, whether that is one machine to another or on mobile, it's always going to connect to those sessions regardless if the terminal app is currently open. So again,

• 14:55Scott Tolinski?

  that's what makes it special, is the fact that it has that server the same way that Herder does. So this would replace Herder in your flow.

• 15:04Speaker 02

  To me, that's, that's the killer feature, though. Like, at least the term iTerm doesn't do that. And I always have to worry about accidentally closing a tab or like closing the window. So the fact that it's running in the background, I can always come back to it. Like, that's, that's the ideal flow. Because you also have like SSH connections and just that's, that is how I use the terminal. So yeah, I like that.

• 15:23Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. A lot of great stuff there. And so for the most part, I just got access to this like two days ago. But it does seem really nice in practice. And terminal UIs are always terrible. So it's not just a fancy UI, though. It has that nice server integration. It has the integration with your agents to do those things. But there's also quite a bit more in here. Besides, like controlling the UI and changing the interface and making it look nicer. Yes, that's always great. You can put your tabs anywhere you want them. You can have it configured to your liking. You can make this thing look really good, or however you want to make it look. I think it's really neat in terms of aesthetics. If we're talking about the details, they've definitely sweated the details here. You

• 16:06Scott Tolinski?

  can even like tune the animation styles, and you can have trackpad gestures and things like that. Swipe stuff. I keep saying stuff like that. I had to stop saying that. So you got all this stuff. It's really great. The themes, everything looks good, yada, yada, yada. Aesthetically, man, this thing rips. Big fan.

• 16:24Wes Bos?

  Yeah, you can import all your Ghosty stuff. Move past like TuI at some point into a GUI. Because like, this seems awesome, where like you can, you can use all of your existing things, but you still have the limitation of everything is in the TuI. Whereas like, sometimes desktops apps are much better of a UI.

• 16:46Scott Tolinski?

  And I'll tell you, in one way in particular, that they're better for me, is that just straight up reading monospace text, and everything's the same line, everything's the same, you know.

• 16:56Wes Bos?

  Image embeds.

• 16:58Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. I mean, you can do image embeds in terminals. And I, you know, I certainly have that going. But like, the thing that everything in terminal is like one line, monospace font is really hard for me to read personally. So I need things a bit more typographically organized to to really read well. But you have all the stuff you'd expect. Notifications, I have remote host setup. So I have my Mac Mini setup. So it's really super easy for me to just bop open a new session and connect with that one. And again, if this remote connection gets removed, just like Orca, or just like T3 Code, or just like Herder, you just reconnect it, whatever, and it just pops back in. The one thing that I found a little bit odd is that they want you to sign in with TailScale, where Rex

• 17:42Scott Tolinski?

  has its own TailScale host, which I found to be weird, because I would imagine most people who are using TailScale already have it set up on their like computer running. And this doesn't work with that. You have to like, kind of jump through some hoops. And in fact, when I went to do it, even pasting the instructions, my agent was like, I can't do that. And I was like, yes, you can. So you can sign it in as a separate TailScale

• 18:08Scott Tolinski?

  node if you want. But I didn't necessarily see the value in that. I already have TailScale running everywhere. I don't want to do another sign in for this. So either way, it's really good. And in fact, it is going to replace the other terminals for me. It's going to replace Ghosty for me, because it is just a nicer experience to use. And it has the stuff I have baked in without having to, you know, even think about starting up a Herder process or whatever. It's just the terminal. It's just here. All of my interfaces are connected. And when I get access to the phone app, which I don't have access to just yet,

• 18:44Scott Tolinski?

  all my stuff will just be there and easy. So I do like this. I think it's really cool. Again, one thing that I actually didn't even get into, is that there's a whole scripting side of things. So you can script the whole thing with Lua, or you can set up automations. There's you can listen for events. So you can listen directly for Rex events and then do things on those events. And because of this, your agents can work really well to build stuff with it. There's also a whole describe API. So

• 19:16Scott Tolinski?

  If you do Rex API describe, it's going to output the exact input and output schema. So if you had an agent, you were saying, I'm looking to build something on Rex. It would be able to go through and easily, hey, what is that method? Describe that method. Got it. Okay. Let me build on top of it.

• 19:34Wes Bos?

  The thing I love most about these types of things is the having the skill for letting your agent use it. Right? Like very often I will say, hey, do something X, Y, and Z. Open a VIT server or whatever, and it just does it in the background. And then that that thing is headless. And if you want to like, open the terminal to look at logs, or if you want to open the terminal to just simply click on it, you don't really have access to that. Right? So by using, and this is not new in Rex, but if anyone has not tried this workflow, anytime you ask it to do something, say, just open up a new terminal in a pane below and run X, Y, and Z. And it's so nice to like, be able to like, go into the terminal and see exactly what it's doing.

• 20:19Wes Bos?

  Get the outputs. You can run stuff yourself if you want, and it can read the actual output. It's just a great way to work.

• 20:26Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Yeah. And there is a whole example of like, what agents can do. You can tell agents, run the test beside you and fix whatever fails. Right? And it's going to actually, just like you would with TMOx or any of these other skills that you can have, you can see it physically popping open those panes and doing that work directly inside of Rex. Switch my Mac to this session and make the text bigger. And like, it just, there's a skill control plane for AI within this thing that does exist within Herder, and it does exist within TMOx as well. But it's nice that it's all built inside of one editor and I don't have to fuss with it. People are like, you know, with any of this stuff, they love fussing with it. I don't want to fuss with my terminal. I don't want to fuss with it.

• 21:11Wes Bos?

  Dak in the chat on X says, check the taxonomy section of the docs. They may be going beyond a two E. Interesting. I like it.

• 21:23Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. Um, cool. Maybe going beyond the two E. Yes, I would approve of that.

• 21:30Speaker 02

  Is it paid or will it be open source or?

• 21:35Scott Tolinski?

  People in the chat say it's free forever, but

• 21:39Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 21:40Scott Tolinski?

  Um, I haven't seen any price thing.

• 21:44Wes Bos?

  What? So Super Logical is this company that has been formed to make products. And it seems like Rex is the first product.

• 21:55Wes Bos?

  I don't know what it doesn't say what, like, if anything is going to be paid. They were very, they will very likely have some sort of hosted software. Like if you take a look at like where Warp is going right now, like Warp is in a very similar space to this. And they're in the, right now they're in the like, software factory

• 22:14Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 22:14Wes Bos?

  type of thing, um, you know, hosted sandboxing. They may very well go that route. I bet they probably are not even too focused on that right now. They're probably just trying to figure out how to make the most badass, kick ass software possible. And then they'll, they'll figure it out at some point.

• 22:36Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. Yeah. Yeah. It's a, oh, somebody says, Super Logical website is built on top of Svelte. Shout out Svelte.

• 22:42Wes Bos?

  Hell, yeah.

• 22:43Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 22:45Wes Bos?

  Now you know it's good.

• 22:46Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. Cool. And you don't have to log in to use it, which was one of the things people are always grumping about. You don't have to log in to use this. You just, you just use it. Yeah.

• 22:55Wes Bos?

  All right, let's talk about Reddit. You guys ready for Reddit?

• 22:59Speaker 02

  Let's do it.

• 23:00Wes Bos?

  Reddit is closing its doors. So let me tell you what we mean by that. Reddit took, I don't know, a couple, about a year ago, Reddit took $60 million from Google to allow Google to use their data in their like, search summaries, right? You search something, you get the little summary that comes up. And as much as I, us like tech guys say, say we hate it, it's actually pretty good. It's pretty good. Like for a lot of quick little queries, it actually is pretty good. And a lot of that data of like, what happens when you do X, Y, and Z? A lot of that comes from Reddit, right? So Reddit took that money. Then they, they don't see people actually click through to Reddit to read it anymore. So their traffic has like, gone quite down.

• 23:44Wes Bos?

  Their stock has dropped 29%. And I think in addition to that, Reddit is just getting absolutely hammered. Like every website with any valuable information, they're getting absolutely hammered by agents just scraping them for data. So that when somebody queries how to do X, Y, and Z, they can use that as context in the, the result. Right? And we're starting to see like, cracks on that is if you search, if you ask Claude to like, solve something, it will not find Reddit threads. And like, at one point I was just like, doing a little bit of Googling myself and asking Claude some questions. And they like, clearly didn't know the answer. And I was just reading a Reddit thread and I was just like, hey, like, this guy says that you can do it this way.

• 24:28Wes Bos?

  I pasted the URLs like, well, I can't access Reddit, you know? And it's making Claude probably significantly worse because it doesn't have access to, to that information. Right? So Reddit is now making everybody sign in. They have this whole thing on, they posted on Reddit about, um, they're making everybody log in. They've done this, like, kind of hard armed you into this for a while now where you visited the website. They want you to make, open the mobile app. But the big one was that the Reddit experience was on desktop on the website was always,

• 25:02Wes Bos?

  it was always available openly and they're going to start closing that. And they posted this big, long thing on Reddit being like, we need to personalize your, your X, Y, and Z, blah, blah, blah. About how you can have a better experience in Reddit when you're, when you're totally logged in. And I think the reality is that they want you to be signed in so they can serve you customized ads. And they want to stop all of these people from some scraping all of the data from it. Because like, the big ones like Claude, they have to like, respect Reddit's. Being like, hey, don't scrape us. If you don't pay us, you can't scrape us, you know? And we're starting to see that on a lot of websites, you know? Amazon doesn't like you using agents. Taobao, another one. You can't use an agent without getting your account locked.

• 25:45Wes Bos?

  A lot of people are starting to like, hey, we're not simply just going to be the fountain of information while our business goes into the ground. We need you guys to pay us. So I don't know. What do you guys think about this?

• 25:58Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Well, it would be, I think that's totally fine. Honestly, I'm never not logged into Reddit. I always have Reddit login. So for me, not being logged in is not a problem. I don't have any, any issues with that personally, uh, just because I've been a user of that site for like,

• 26:13Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 26:14Scott Tolinski?

  a billion and a half years. I will say though, what I hope is that this doesn't kill some of the third party apps, which they have been desperately trying to kill. They've been trying so hard to kill all of the apps, whether that is increasing the API pricing or just now this, you're not going to be able to scrape it or whatever.

• 26:34Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 26:34Scott Tolinski?

  The, the Reddit native mobile app sucks big time. It's, it's not good. And I'm sorry Reddit devs, if you're listening, the, the mobile native app, it's just no good. And so I am using a third party app and I really hope this doesn't end up coming to bite, bite me there.

• 26:53Wes Bos?

  Well, Daniel in the chat, who works on a third party Reddit app. I think he was the guy that initially informed us of the like, React native loophole, where if you sign in with a web view, you can then close that web view and use that as a portal back and forth between that. They, they've been sending emails to a lot of the third party app developers and being like, hey, they want to shake them out of the, the whole situation as well. Partially because like, that's a way for all of this data to leak. And like, I think personally, yes, I don't care if I have to be logged into Reddit to use it. I don't, I don't care. But I do think that the experience on an agent, when you cannot access these websites that are a huge fountain of information. Same thing with like, Facebook groups.

• 27:36Wes Bos?

  There's lots of very good data inside of Facebook groups. And if an agent can't access them, if Google can't access them, then a lot of that data is then lost to time. And, and we saw that when like, forms and like, photo buckets shut down. And I think we're starting to see it again.

• 27:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't like it, but I know it's needed. Because I mean, I'm a long time Reddit user. Like, I'm actually not logged into Reddit in a lot of places, just because like, I don't want the cookie tracking and all of that. And I like, search for something, I find the results and then click into Reddit to read the answer and I'm not logged in. But yeah, I get it. Like, like you said, like, every other app is doing this as well. And it's kind of gotten to the point where you kind of have to, otherwise you don't have a business model. Because if Claude is just the only interface into Reddit, you're never actually going to Reddit. You're never actually seeing their ads or anything else.

• 28:27Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 28:29Speaker 02

  And also, like, the death of third-party apps and APIs, like, that, that also really gets to me. Because I agree, the, like, I've never installed the Reddit mobile app. I always use a third-party one. If you're on Android, Red Reader is a really good one. But I imagine with this new lockdown, we're gonna see apps like that go away as well. So.

• 28:47Wes Bos?

  I think another aspect of this is they need to stop the bots from posting slop on Reddit. You know, because it's ruining. And like, really, the, one of the best ways that you can detect a bot is by analyzing every single mouse move, every single click, everything that it does. And if you're, if somebody's using a third-party application, you're simply just getting like API calls like, list posts, create post, like thing. And you cannot detect bots over API traffic. You must have all of, and people, these companies that try to detect bots do not tell you what they're detecting because they don't want to give away their secrets.

• 29:32Wes Bos?

  But I even find myself now, when I'm doing a captcha, I like, try to move my mouse around a little bit more than I normally would.

• 29:39Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, I do that too, yeah.

• 29:40Wes Bos?

  You know, when you're walking out of a, you're like, walking out of a store when you didn't buy anything? You're like, I am not a shoplifter. Like, you're trying to make it very clear that you're not a shoplifter. I'm doing that now with these websites of captchas being like, I clearly am a human. Look at me second-guess what is a bus in my captcha.

• 30:02Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, oh, is it, is this a bus? Hmm, let me think, let me move over to this one. Yeah, no.

• 30:07Wes Bos?

  Let me slide the puzzle piece. No, I'll go back a little bit.

• 30:10Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:11Scott Tolinski?

  There is a much higher success rate when you do that, so.

• 30:14Wes Bos?

  I think, I think it is true. And it's not to say that you couldn't script that, but it's crazy. You need every single one of these little things. Like, even I, I like, put my Grok bot on Taobao, which most other agents are blocked. Grok, I don't think Grok cares about any of these, like, please do not use me as an agent. But like, my whole account got like locked and I had to like, go through this massive unlocking step priority because it detected that I was programmatically using traffic. And I just wanted it to like, search for me.

• 30:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 30:49Wes Bos?

  So I think we're in for a bad couple, bad couple of months of people blocking agents. Sorry, CJ, go ahead.

• 30:57Speaker 02

  No, it's all good. I think it starts with Reddit, but more people are gonna do it. And it's exactly like you're saying. I mean, people are gonna build bots that are like, using a browser. But there's so much that gets left behind when a user is using a web browser. Like, you've got your cookies, like, all the requests coming through. And if that stuff isn't happening, it's gonna be so much easier to detect that this, this was a bot. Like, the way that I use Reddit will likely be detected as bot traffic because I'm not logged in. I automatically delete my cookies. I only like, click on it through like, search result links. But you're totally right, that is how a bot behaves. And so, but I, I like the idea of getting, making it harder for bots to post, though. That, that's, that's gonna be a nice cleanup. Because over the past couple of years, it's just been inundated.

• 31:41Speaker 02

  You're basically just talking to bots when you're in the comments on most websites these days.

• 31:45Wes Bos?

  Same, same with like Reddit as well, or not Reddit, Twitter.

• 31:48Scott Tolinski?

  Twitter, oh, Twitter's the worst, yeah.

• 31:49Wes Bos?

  The replies are, are awful. And like, you gotta think that, I'm very curious to talk to people that are working on this type of stuff. Because you look at it, and you're like, this account has posted 40 times in the last 15 minutes with like, a generic one-line reply. And you can't, you can't detect that? And it's probably harder than we're thinking. But, and also, I think they probably are fine with letting five bots through without accidentally marking one person. Because I posted about it, a couple of people that work at Twitter replied, like, we're working on it. But then all these people that like, were wrongly detected as bots get caught up in it.

• 32:32Wes Bos?

  And they're all like, somebody said, go to like Twitter help on Reddit. And you, I went there and you just see all these people being like, I, I was marked as spam even though I didn't. And it's probably because they've got like, a setup like CJ would, or they have browser extensions, or they're doing some little light automation on top of that. And then, boom, ban hammer.

• 32:52Scott Tolinski?

  Does feel like they aren't trying very hard, though, to get rid of the bots.

• 32:55Wes Bos?

  It does, honestly.

• 32:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 32:58Wes Bos?

  If I can just glance at the first three words of a post and know that it is AI, come on.

• 33:05Scott Tolinski?

  Come on.

• 33:06Speaker 02

  But there, there is some incentive to make it feel like the site has traffic. There, there is that, not to get like, all conspiracy theory, but like.

• 33:13Scott Tolinski?

  I don't think that's a conspiracy, CJ.

• 33:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, it adds to their daily active users. Like, any place you go, it looks like the site has activity. So there's, it's, it's supposed to push and pull in order to decide like, what they actually do about the bot traffic.

• 33:28Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. On that same note, as Reddit closing in that regard, another community on Reddit has also closed. And that is the R Open Source, which is the largest Reddit open-source community, has shut its doors to anybody who even glances at the word AI. They've made it very clear that you can't even use, if you, if you do not speak English well, you cannot even use AI to translate your text. And they suggest that maybe this isn't the community for you if you do not speak English well. They literally say that. I think they've lost their mind over at Open Source. And when you can't even talk about.

• 34:10Speaker 02

  Are you sharing your screen, sorry?

• 34:12Scott Tolinski?

  No, I'm not, I'm just talking in general. If you cannot even talk about the Linux kernel contributions or anything in regards to any of that stuff, you are out of your mind. You, you've, you've taken the exact opposite stance of open source in general and have closed it down. It's, it's crazy to think like, oh, I'm in charge of an open-source community. Let me just make it as least little open as possible. I understand they have a hard problem with inundated with AI slop.

• 34:45Wes Bos?

  I think that's it.

• 34:45Scott Tolinski?

  That's obviously it.

• 34:47Wes Bos?

  Nailed, everybody has everything that's open-source version. And everyone makes a new open-source version of something and then abandons it a week later.

• 34:56Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, that's obviously it. But in the same regard, to say like, oh, if you don't speak English well, you cannot, you're not a welcome member of this community? Like, you gotta look at that at some point and be like, oh, yeah, uh, we're not, we're doing something dumb here. You know, I don't know, it feels like crazy to me that somebody could re, I mean, it's a Reddit moderator, folks.

• 35:19Wes Bos?

  Yeah, Reddit mods, nothing new here.

• 35:20Speaker 02

  Exactly, they're power-hungry, power-hungry mods, also potentially disconnected from the industry or reality. Because like, if you, if you're actually working a job right now, like, you know how much AI there is. There's very few companies at this point that aren't using AI in some way. So they're like, some neckbeard unemployed, just, just on a power trip, I think.

• 35:40Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. Yep, it's wild. This post was nine days ago and it has 3,000 comments and zero upvotes net. So people were not happy about this change.

• 35:52Speaker 02

  I've never seen numbers like that, that's crazy.

• 35:54Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, this, they're like, oh, you could root for these other, all these other open-source communities that will actually allow AI. I'm like, okay. Yep, wild, wild stuff.

• 36:03Wes Bos?

  By the way, little aside, Marco in the X chat says, Hex can stream text now in Labs. So we'll have to try that. I really like the way that.

• 36:14Scott Tolinski?

  Oh, Hex, I was thinking like Rex.

• 36:16Wes Bos?

  Hex, not Rex, Hex. The dictation app, it can stream text now. The one thing I really like about the macOS dictation is that you can like, edit the text and then continue talking. You know, it's kind of, kind of fluid. And they have like, a fancy UI where they underline it with blue. I don't know if that's UIs available via macOS APIs for everybody else. Because I haven't seen any better implementation. The other thing is that the macOS implementation sucks. You've got to think like, the next version of macOS will just Sherlock all of these apps.

• 36:49Scott Tolinski?

  If we get a confirmation in the chat of where the heck that is in the Labs for Hex? Because I see the live text, which is the one that we showed off on stream. And it's not quite, it's not streaming into the input, it's streaming into a, a little top bar.

• 37:06Wes Bos?

  Oh, I see. That's not bad, though, because you can at least see what you're saying.

• 37:11Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:12Wes Bos?

  But yeah, you want it like, you want it stuck directly in, in formatted in the app that you're, you're typing into.

• 37:18Scott Tolinski?

  And I understand why they can't do that, because they have to then go back and edit the text input after the fact.

• 37:24Wes Bos?

  macOS can do it. I bet the APIs are not available. It's like, nobody's done it yet.

• 37:30Speaker 02

  You need some kind of accessibility to like change where the cursor is or whatever else. So yeah.

• 37:34Wes Bos?

  CJ, what do you got for us? Sorry, we've been making CJ push the buttons all day.

• 37:39Speaker 02

  Pushing buttons all day. I am talking about CSS tricks. So CSS tricks has a long history. I think like if you've been in the web dev scene, you know, CSS tricks. And it's changed hands many times. So Jeff Graham is officially the new owner of CSS tricks. Jeff Graham also has a long history with CSS tricks. They posted, created posts for it. But to recap the history of it, it was purchased by Digital Ocean in 2022 from Chris Collier, the famous Chris Collier, who was on Mad CSS, made it pretty far. But it was originally their site. Digital Ocean purchased it and then they didn't do much with it. This, we've talked about this acquisition a lot on Syntax.

• 38:22Speaker 02

  They, it didn't feel like goodwill to the community because they weren't putting a lot of effort into it. Like a lot of, it kind of felt like CSS tricks was dying.

• 38:32Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I think they saw it as like a, like a huge whale of content clicks where the math, math, where they could just buy the whole thing, try to keep it running. Or like somebody, somebody working there like was really passionate about it. And then they moved on and like everybody else was like, why do we, why do we own a CSS blog now?

• 38:54Speaker 02

  Yeah. And I mean, if you think about Digital Ocean, it used to be, I don't know if this is the case. Honestly, I haven't feel like I haven't visited their tutorials in a while because I use AI for a lot of stuff. But it used to be that like, if I was trying to figure out how to do something on Ubuntu, Digital Ocean had the guide for that. So that's definitely the space they were trying to get into. Yeah.

• 39:13Wes Bos?

  Yes.

• 39:14Speaker 02

  But it's good news. So Jeff is, has acquired it. He is now the owner and he's got big plans for it. So he's got the keys to the castle. And yeah, he's gonna, I guess if you didn't know as well, like CSS tricks also, also has the ability for you to submit articles. That's how they get some really high quality content is people that are experts in the community can write an article and then say, hey, CSS tricks, will you publish it? And so it's not necessarily like just staff editors. You get a lot of posts from experts in the community. And I mean, just to mention, like, if you've ever visited this page that tells you about CSS grid, that's CSS tricks or this one about Flexbox. Like for the longest time, this was like my go to page when I was writing CSS.

• 39:58Wes Bos?

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:59Scott Tolinski?

  It's a classic.

• 40:00Speaker 02

  Classic. So yeah, good news over here. And they published their first article since that announcement this morning. It was a bit of a Rick roll. What's important? The final issue on CSS tricks. And then they're like, haha, trick or treat. It was a trick, but also a treat because it's not the final issue.

• 40:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, good news. CSS tricks all around. I'm excited about this.

• 40:23Wes Bos?

  Yeah. I don't know if you said or not, but Jeff, the guy who like is now the owner of it, he's been like, like working there for

• 40:31Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, ever.

• 40:32Wes Bos?

  Like forever, right? And like, he's the one that was, it kept going. And then he posted like a couple of weeks ago, like Digital Ocean is not paying my bills. You know, they had contracted him to keep it up. And, and then they just stopped paying him. He couldn't get in touch with anyone, which is again,

• 40:48Scott Tolinski?

  Great.

• 40:48Wes Bos?

  Digital Ocean, come on. You're so much goodwill. How do you not know? How do you drop the ball like that?

• 40:54Speaker 02

  Drop the bag.

• 40:55Scott Tolinski?

  I just want to say, I am so thankful every single day that I did not take the offer from Digital Ocean on Level Up tutorials. That's all I'll say about that. I'm very thankful all the time that I made that choice. So shout out to me.

• 41:08Speaker 02

  Speaking of, this show is brought to you by Sentry and they're pretty great. We love them. They are the world's best air monitoring platform and we couldn't do what we do without them. So thank you very much to Sentry who bought Syntax and didn't mess it up. So great.

• 41:23Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. Yes, they did not mess it up. Yes, they've done nothing but give us resources. Shout out to Sentry.

• 41:31Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 41:31Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, yes, yes. Hype it up, up, up. Cool. What else we got? We got a ton of stuff to talk about, guys. So.

• 41:37Speaker 02

  What's next?

• 41:38Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 41:38Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 41:38Wes Bos?

  I got one here. This is a, one of these like Twitter videos like where people launch their startup. And this one is kind of hilarious. It's called Sub Vocal, which is a pair of glasses that you can wear. And instead of you dictating or instead of you typing, you'll be able to just mouth the words that you are saying, which like fair problem because like we're talking a lot about how do you do voice dictation in an office space? Right? There's these like, like cones you can put over your mouth that people use in courtrooms, you know? Or you get these tiny little mics and you whisper to them as you're going.

• 42:20Wes Bos?

  So this company has figured out that via electrolysis or not electrolysis, basically they're attaching little things to your face and trying to detect how your mouth is moving as you are silently saying the words. And you are then dictating it. And I was just sitting there being like, Oh, yeah. I don't know if it's because I'm trying to say something, but that seems exhausting to have to like mouth it without actually saying it.

• 42:52Scott Tolinski?

  I actually don't hate it when I was practicing it. Yes.

• 42:55Wes Bos?

  I think it's cool, but so like they raised a little bit of money and they're, they're going to build something out, which is awesome. People are clowning on them because it's, well, I think they did. Hold on, let me, let me show you the actual glasses. I think they did this on purpose. You want to have a really big launch video? Anyone who actually cares about this clearly knows that this is not the end game here. Like this guy looks so goofy with these on. Look at this.

• 43:23Scott Tolinski?

  They picked the goofiest looking guy in the goofiest looking glasses to do a goofy looking project.

• 43:28Wes Bos?

  Because then people are clowning on you and it gets you in front of people that actually know what's going on. Like if you're an investor for this type of thing, you can see past the goofy glasses and be like, yeah, we can make, we can make this look sick.

• 43:41Scott Tolinski?

  The vibes are off.

• 43:43Wes Bos?

  No, I think it was pretty funny. Anyways, all of this to say, I was like, oh man, I bet I could build this. And before I could even get my Amazon cart purchased, two people come out here. So this Joe Blau said, does it with Apple earbuds? Cause there are tons of sensors in your Apple earbuds. Slightly different, but he shows a little proof of concept of using the data inside of the Apple earbuds to do exactly, or not exactly, maybe the same or similar things. Like the idea is that you like train it on what these waves look like and the data looks like. And then you'll be able to detect what word you're saying. And then somebody else came out and did it entirely just with

• 44:28Scott Tolinski?

  Camera?

• 44:29Wes Bos?

  Video with a camera, which is like the Tesla driving of, what is this called? Sub vocal, where you just do it entirely over video, which maybe that could, that could be done. He obviously shows a little demo and it kind of makes sense, but kind of an interesting space of dictating without actually saying words.

• 44:51Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. Yes.

• 44:53Speaker 02

  I'll say for me, this is like something I've always wanted because I, I do not use text to speech in public. I don't have my speaker on in public and it's so, I hate it when like you're in public and someone is talking like to their phone or they're like blasting music. So anything that will get those people to not be loud in public, I'm all here for.

• 45:13Wes Bos?

  I don't know if you're helping those people, man. Those, those people have no concept of the world around them where they're just speaker phone, uncle on the, the chat, just yelling at the phone all day long. Those people are not going to be using these goofy glasses.

• 45:29Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 45:29Speaker 02

  I guess that's true. Yeah.

• 45:32Wes Bos?

  Cause there already is a solution and it's put the phone on your ear.

• 45:37Speaker 02

  Oh, right. Right. We have the technology.

• 45:40Wes Bos?

  Yes. They figured it out.

• 45:42Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. Or, or headphones, folks too. I mean, I guess headphones isn't that much better. Yes. Also, Arc is dead. Folks, the beloved browser, Arc.

• 45:56Wes Bos?

  I'm so glad I never tried it.

• 45:58Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. Unfortunately, this browser was wonderful and it gave us so many years. The biggest bummer about all of this is the fact that the mobile app was actually very good still. So, and Arc hadn't really seen any active development in over a year. And it was just into Dia. And so now Arc is sunsetting, scroll to read more. They're basically, their whole thing is basically that Dia has evolved and is now filling the space that Arc filled. And that most of the best features from Arc are now in Dia. Sadly, Dia sucks. I've used Dia a whole bunch. I'm sorry, Josh. It's very nice that you hand signed your name here. I was a huge fan of Arc and I really wanted to believe in Dia.

• 46:43Scott Tolinski?

  But my gosh, Dia is a bit of a clumsy experience. The AI gets in the way. It's slow. I found a number of Dia things to be constantly being a pain to me. So sadly, Arc is gone and with it is, in my opinion, any, any usage of any of these browsers. So we've talked about this before. I'm currently using Helium. People like Zen, but Zen is kind of like a skin deep version of Arc. It looks like Arc. It has a number of the same features, but it's not Arc. It's also Firefox based, which you can miss me with that. And I just, yeah. Yeah. There isn't a replacement for Arc. There just isn't. I'm sorry, folks.

• 47:25Wes Bos?

  A couple of takes I've seen on these things is like, these like new browsers with AI tacked on to it is not the move. Like the, the new browser is going to be Codex or Claude or Open Code or whatever. Like we're, we keep building these bridges between the browser and our AI agents. And quite honestly, it makes a lot more sense for these just to be the same thing. Maybe not for everything, but I can see a world where Your agent and your browser is just the exact same thing. Even right now, I'm just like, I'm hopping between it. You know, I've got the browser in my codecs. I've got my agent browser. I've got my actual browser to use, and then I got to sign into all of them.

• 48:10Wes Bos?

  And then I have three other computers that I have to do the exact same thing. And I'm just spending my whole day signing in.

• 48:16Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, that is my, my, yeah, I'm not a project manager. I'm a signer in or I'm a authenticator. That is what I'm doing as well. Yes.

• 48:24Speaker 02

  Is Arc the one that brought us vertical tabs? Were they the first to do it?

• 48:27Scott Tolinski?

  They weren't necessarily the first. They perfected it. Vertical tabs in.

• 48:33Wes Bos?

  Vertical tabs suck.

• 48:34Scott Tolinski?

  No, they're so good. And they did it so well that Chrome added it to the vertical tabs.

• 48:41Speaker 02

  Firefox added it too.

• 48:42Scott Tolinski?

  Firefox added it, Edge added it. The, the vertical tabs in Chrome suck too, though. They, they took all the long, wrong lessons from it. They were like, oh, what if we just made them vertical? They didn't like take into account of any of the nice things. Like the Arc vertical tab thing, you could two finger swipe into different profiles and have all of your profiles. And then tabs that are like your bookmarks are essentially pinned to there. If you pin tabs in Chrome, it keeps them active and open all the time. If you pinned a tab in Arc, it was just essentially a bookmark. The command palette in Arc always reopen the tab instead of automatically creating a new tab. So like, there was just so many nice things about Arc. And I just feel sad. Yes.

• 49:24Speaker 02

  Sad news.

• 49:26Scott Tolinski?

  Rest in peace, Arc. You will be missed. Yes.

• 49:30Speaker 02

  Cool. Can I cover a couple of web dev stories?

• 49:32Wes Bos?

  Please.

• 49:34Speaker 02

  Let's do it. It's gonna be a.

• 49:35Scott Tolinski?

  What kind of show do you think this is CJ?

• 49:38Speaker 02

  I don't know. I don't know. I have to ask permission for everything, I guess. But, uh, yeah, first up, pouring out from my boy Pico CSS. And if you're not familiar with this, this is, this was one of the best, like minimal classless CSS frameworks. And so I use this all the time for like prototypes, quick demos. The idea is you add it to the page and then you don't need any CSS classes. It styles everything semantically. So like with this markup down here, the UI would look like what you see above. And so they had semantic styles for everything, like toggles and checkboxes and inputs and all the stuff that you might need. So I use Pico CSS a bunch, but they just announced that it is no longer maintained. Version 2.1.1 is their final release.

• 50:21Speaker 02

  And mainly the reason being AI can just generate this stuff. It doesn't make sense to maintain a library when everyone's just generating their CSS anyways. So sad news. At the same time, they're still going to keep it up. Like a pico css.com stays up. It'll still be on NPM. It'll still be on JS deliver. So sites won't start breaking if they were using the CDN. But again, one, one more casualty to this new era of AI.

• 50:50Speaker 02

  Another bit of news is Tanstack introduced Redact. And so this is something that Tanner talked about, I think even like months ago, but didn't really like release it officially. But it's essentially a reimplementation of React. It's a smaller replacement for it and it is a drop in replacement. So if you have an existing React app, you can just remove the React dependency, add Redact instead, and it is much smaller. So they're showing in their, their stats here that with Tanstack start using React, it was 109 kilobytes, but with Redact, 62 kilobytes. So you're saving 43%. With Veet, you're saving 70%. Vnext, 30, or close to 30%. And NextJS, you're saving 20%. It's actually baffling to me that you can actually replace React in NextJS with Redact. I'm sure there are still some things to be added.

• 51:35Speaker 02

  Not, not absolutely everything works, but.

• 51:38Wes Bos?

  But man.

• 51:39Speaker 02

  They released it. Yeah, like.

• 51:40Wes Bos?

  Like, like NextJS uses all of the low level weird edge case caching suspense APIs. And the fact that you could just swap it out and it's, what, 20% smaller? Is that, am I reading that right?

• 51:56Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's what you're saving almost 36 kilobytes. That adds up a lot if you have lots of users, lots of page loads.

• 52:03Wes Bos?

  That is crazy. I would like, maybe we should have him on the podcast to talk about how he actually built this, because.

• 52:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was in the early days of slop forks, right? They.

• 52:13Wes Bos?

  Can you use it with Vnext?

• 52:16Speaker 02

  You can. Yeah, they have that in the table here too. And you save 28%. Yeah.

• 52:20Wes Bos?

  Wait, where's, what's Vnext doing these days?

• 52:23Speaker 02

  Well, our next story that I have is from Cloudflare and like they're maintaining it. Like the Cloudflare team is dedicated to keeping it, keeping it working. Yeah.

• 52:31Wes Bos?

  Good.

• 52:33Wes Bos?

  I need my vibe coded stuff.

• 52:36Speaker 02

  Yeah. And so leading into that, the Cloudflare team has introduced TSRS, which is a port of TypeScript to Rust. And so if you've kept up to date with the TypeScript news, you know that TSGo was official from the TypeScript team. And it was a go port of the TypeScript compiler officially released in version seven. It's now stable. But some of the people at Cloudflare were like, you know, let's, let's make this thing in Rust. For a lot of different reasons, not necessarily just because of performance or memory safety. One of the nice targets that you have in the world of Rust is WebAssembly. So they talk about the fact that you can compile Rust to a WebAssembly target and then like run it inside the web browser.

• 53:20Speaker 02

  So essentially you have a really fast compiler that now can also run in the web browser. It doesn't have to be necessarily just like a CLI tool. And then they're also talking about, well, and then recently they announced that they're supporting native Rust in, in Cloudflare workers. So instead of creating a worker that is a JavaScript handler, you can now write it with Rust. So they're doing a lot of Rust stuff over on the Cloudflare team.

• 53:44Speaker 02

  And they're keeping it maintained. And this is where I found, I read about this. So they mentioned they're keeping TSRS maintained. And they said, we've seen a lot of success with how we maintain Vnext in sync with its upstream NextJS. So they're keeping Vnext up to date. They're working on this port and I don't think this is any shade to the TypeScript team. I think it's just one more really good option when you want to have a fast compile time. So, yeah.

• 54:10Scott Tolinski?

  The Cloudflare team must have giant hard drives with how much Rust they're doing. It's those build files absolutely just choke your computer out.

• 54:18Wes Bos?

  The entire internet to put it on. It's okay.

• 54:20Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 54:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 54:22Wes Bos?

  That is actually crazy. I just went back and listened or looked at the date on, we had the TypeScript team on to announce TypeScript Go. And at the time, everyone's mind was blown that you could rewrite this thing in another language and it would just like work. And they just went function by function, moving it from TypeScript into Go. And, and we asked them like, why not Rust? And they just, there was a lot of reasons why they could not move it to Rust because of, I, I forget what they were offhand, but I think it had to do with like the memory and several other things. And it was just unbelievable that you could do this. And here we are, 16 months later.

• 55:06Wes Bos?

  And yeah, just, oh yeah, rerouted in Rust. Done.

• 55:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. And like, like I said, there's no shade to the TypeScript team. And Alex Lipter, who works at, who works at Void, who was acquired by Cloudflare, so works at Cloudflare, is mentioning that TSRS is in collab with the TypeScript team. So that makes it quite a different from these like slop forks or whatever else. So it's officially supported. It's going to be maintained. One, one more option in this, this world of fast compiling. Right? That's all I've got for web dev. What'd you?

• 55:36Wes Bos?

  I got another thing. Agent Desktop. This is, it seems like every week we've got something from Versal Labs on this thing, specifically Chris Tate. I actually think he, somebody else built this one. Yeah.

• 55:52Wes Bos?

  Built by MD LaFier. Anyways, this is something called Agent Desktop, which if you don't know, Agent Browser, it also came from Versal Labs. And what this is, is an agent, essentially Agent Browser, where you can programmatically use a browser, but for the entire, your entire computer. So it works with Mac, Windows, Linux. And I think the interesting part about this is that it can use your computer programmatically. It uses the accessibility tree to sort of figure out where to click around to. And that is significantly faster.

• 56:30Wes Bos?

  I'm not going to say better, but that's significantly faster for a lot of things because taking a screenshot, feeding that into an LLM is both slow and extremely expensive. And then another interesting thing is that it implements its own cursors, meaning that it can use all of your applications concurrently in the background. Part of the annoying part of computer use is that it just is constantly popping things open. And if you're doing computer use on your, your computer that you are also using, it's annoying. So this implements its own cursor. So you don't actually have to like bring apps to the forefront and can sort of go through them. So I'm, I'm pretty excited about this type of thing.

• 57:13Scott Tolinski?

  I guess the question for me is how is it different than KuA?

• 57:16Wes Bos?

  KuA?

• 57:17Scott Tolinski?

  CUA.ai. They're kind of the leader in this space. They, they've been around for a while where again, multiplayer with your cursor. You can even give your agents desktops in, in spaces and stuff directly.

• 57:36Wes Bos?

  Well, I'll tell you, it's the pricing.

• 57:40Wes Bos?

  Can you use this thing yourself? Maybe the, I guess their, their product is probably like a hosted version of this. I don't know. I've, I've never, never heard of this before.

• 57:49Scott Tolinski?

  It's free. Yeah.

• 57:50Wes Bos?

  There you go.

• 57:51Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, I have KuA on all my stuff. Yes. Somebody says it's the same. Sounds the same.

• 57:56Wes Bos?

  Is this it? Shoppers search across channels?

• 57:59Scott Tolinski?

  No, CUA.

• 58:00Wes Bos?

  Oh, my Java's popping up to update. CUA. CUA.ai.

• 58:05Scott Tolinski?

  I got it pulled up if we want to.

• 58:07Speaker 02

  I will say though, like I have, I have used, was it, was it Agent Browser? Yeah, Agent Browser.

• 58:13Wes Bos?

  Browser, yeah.

• 58:14Speaker 02

  From Versal and it, and it works really well compared to like Playwright MCP or Chrome MCP in terms of token usage. So it's from a similar team. So I imagine they, they did some stuff right in there as well, but.

• 58:26Wes Bos?

  Yeah. And it has a whole, I didn't even show the whole CLI. I got to open in my Rex here. Let me move to it one sec.

• 58:36Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, KuA.ai is, is the one that I've been using for a while. It's very nice.

• 58:42Wes Bos?

  Does it all work in the, in the background?

• 58:45Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. Multiplayer with your agents. They each get their own cursor. Yes.

• 58:49Wes Bos?

  Oh, I like that.

• 58:50Speaker 02

  I mentioned to Juan in the live chat, this is live. This is happening right now. I see your chat. I see you there. We're live.

• 58:57Wes Bos?

  Yeah, this is not a premiere. Yeah, here's, here's the thing. Snapshot, screenshot, find, collapse, like all the stuff you would be used to. And immediately I'm like, oh, maybe I could build a, are we building um, screen resizing thing on top of this? Scott, didn't you just build a window manager?

• 59:14Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, I love Mr. Space.

• 59:16Wes Bos?

  Probably don't need a agentic window manager, though.

• 59:19Scott Tolinski?

  Mine actually can be driven by agents if you want it to be, but doesn't mean.

• 59:22Wes Bos?

  Be cool. Yeah, cool. This is dope. Check it out. I need to check out Kua now.

• 59:27Speaker 02

  I'll share another post that I, that I saw on um, X of showing how to use uh, agent desktop with a VM. Because uh, the latest macOS supports virtualization, so you can spin up a macOS VM uh, with um, what's the, you, you could definitely use Lima. TART is the other one, or even UTM. But I would recommend that if you're gonna start letting an agent control your desktop. Uh, use a VM and only sign into things that you're okay with losing or letting it know, tell to the world, so.

• 1:00:02Wes Bos?

  And this is like a gooey VM?

• 1:00:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:00:06Speaker 02

  Uh, yeah, so I mean, it basically launches a window that is a macOS desktop.

• 1:00:10Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:10Scott Tolinski?

  Oh.

• 1:00:11Speaker 02

  And so you can do, yeah, you can do that. So TART, uh, Scott talked about it a couple of streams back. You can do it with TART. You can do it with Lima.

• 1:00:17Scott Tolinski?

  You can do it with Kua too.

• 1:00:20Speaker 02

  Oh, it, it does a separate desktop for you?

• 1:00:22Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:23Speaker 02

  Oh, okay. And then so the, in macOS, I think it was 26, they introduced their virtualization framework, which now is a supported way to virtualize macOS on Mac. And so I'm guessing that's how Q Qua does it as well. They just spin it up using the built-in APIs.

• 1:00:39Scott Tolinski?

  Take, uh, I got a couple of things here, folks. One, you can now use your Claude subscription in open code once again. So uh, it's actually been officially approved, as in they got permission from Anthropic and they are fully TOS compliant. It's not using the same way that it used to be done. It is using the agent's SDK, kind of like what I believe something like T3 Code is as well. One of the reasons why they weren't affected by the same ban across Open Claw and uh, Pi and all these things uh, in the past. But this is using the agent's SDK and it, again, it has been officially approved by Anthropic.

• 1:01:21Scott Tolinski?

  And they are compliant, so you will not get unexpectedly uh, banned for using this. So.

• 1:01:28Speaker 02

  Incredible.

• 1:01:29Wes Bos?

  Yeah, this is back.

• 1:01:31Speaker 02

  It's back. Yeah, this is one of the reasons I switched to Codex, because you could use your ChatGPT subscription. And for a while I was using Copilot, but huge news. Love this.

• 1:01:40Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, big news. Um, another thing is the MacBook Pros with Pro LED XDR display were released. We got a touchscreen Mac and uh, I wanted to talk about this really quick. Wes had hinted that he had changed his feelings. This thing has a touchscreen, but I think the most low-key important feature about this is the supreme contrast ratio on this laptop. People are saying that it's wild, the unparalleled, the uh, contrast ratio. And it gets way brighter as well and has better speakers. So it gets way brighter, way better contrast uh, and is an OLED display.

• 1:02:19Scott Tolinski?

  So I think all of those things are really cool. Um, but touchscreen, Wes, were your thoughts about the touchscreen parts of it specifically?

• 1:02:27Wes Bos?

  Everything.

• 1:02:28Scott Tolinski?

  Or just the laptop?

• 1:02:29Wes Bos?

  So I'm sitting here, I've got a M1 Max, 64 gigs, and I've had it for, what, they've been out for maybe five years now? Um, and I think a lot of us developers are like sitting on, if you're wondering like, why are we talking about laptops? Cause like, a lot of web developers are uh, sitting here being like, yeah, I've got this M1 Pro Max. And I, I think I need to upgrade. You're starting to feel the pain of upgrading. And I, and when this came out, we were all together at Gabbin, so I'm like, I'm getting it. I'm doing it. I'm doing it. And after like, I was sitting with it, going through it, I'm like, a couple of things. First, it's like almost a year old chip. It's not the M6, it's the M5, which is like, that kinda sucks. I don't wanna, I'm not,

• 1:03:12Wes Bos?

  if I'm buying something, I'm using it for five years, or three, or however long you have it. I don't wanna buy something that's already a year old. And like, they, they clearly have M6 chips out already. So that's one. Second one, I don't care about touchscreen, I don't think. Okay, I have the Omarchi touchscreen one right here, and I used it a couple of times to like, do little drawings. And it's nice every now and then, you can just touch what you want, but like, maybe two times a day, I, you find that's helpful. And most of my day is I'm seated at my desk, plugged into monitors. So all the benefits of the touchscreen and the beautiful contrast and all of that type of thing kinda goes out the window.

• 1:03:56Wes Bos?

  The things that are nice to me is certainly want that 14 inch, the 16 inch, I'm so over it. It's so heavy. And then also, I think apparently it's a little bit lighter as well, the 14 versus the previous one.

• 1:04:11Scott Tolinski?

  Way lighter. Um, in fact, I, I was looking, I think, if I'm, for me going, cause I did get the 14 inch and I got it really specked down as a not, it's like, it's like bare bone spec, because I really wanna go thin client with it. So for me, looking at this laptop, which weighs, I don't even know how much this thing weighs, like five pounds or something. And then the 14 inch new one weighs three pounds. Um, it's gonna feel like having a little tiny MacBook Air, which my wife's MacBook Air is just so nice. So having like a really nice, light 14 inch machine was really the goal for this thing for me.

• 1:04:45Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:46Scott Tolinski?

  To have something to be able to actually carry around. And uh, like you, yeah, I mean, at my desk, I'll be using my desktop. Um, and that's going to be it. But when I'm out and about, which is quite often, I am lugging this bad boy around and taking it to conferences and flying with it and stuff. And it is just, it's one, it's, it's old, it's slow, it's heavy, it's all those things. It's not that slow, but um, yeah, just I, for me, I don't, I don't have no idea if I'll be using the touchscreen at all. If I do, it's probably gonna be for some goofy demos, cause there's like 10 finger support on it. I think you can have even more than that somehow.

• 1:05:21Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:21Scott Tolinski?

  So like, I, I don't know, maybe there's some fun demos, but like on a day-to-day basis, I don't know if I see myself using it in those regards. Uh, although I did see a demo in Final Cut Pro where they were grabbing multiple clips and putting them in the timeline and thinking, okay, maybe that would be nice. But still, yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:39Wes Bos?

  Yeah. So Scott has a Mac Studio coming, which is just like loaded to the gills, right? Like, that's gonna be your, your workhorse and you're gonna use this as a, a thin client too. So like, most of your agents, most of your processes, all, all of that work is gonna actually happen on your, your beefy machine, right? And you're gonna use something like Rex um, to, to sort of just interface with that, right?

• 1:06:04Scott Tolinski?

  Correct, yes.

• 1:06:05Wes Bos?

  Um, but like, the thing that gets me is that, the biggest problem I have is, yeah, like agents, they're, they use quite a bit of resources. And I could, I could just have like a secondary computer in my office to run those on. But like, video editing, and we're talking about this as well, like you still have to do the video editing on the machine, which is, just eats up your, your RAM and your CPU and it just, just gets at you. So like, if I wanted to do this, I'm looking at like, I probably want the 128 gig version of that. And then that's like a, that's like $10,000 Canadian.

• 1:06:39Scott Tolinski?

  Expensive, which would be more expensive than my Mac Studio, which the, the, I'm gonna be doing all the video editing on the Mac Studio. When I'm sitting down day-to-day to work at my desk, it's gonna be Mac Studio all day.

• 1:06:49Wes Bos?

  Okay.

• 1:06:49Scott Tolinski?

  But I am out enough, whether that is kids' activities, working from my car, like, I still need a laptop. And so like, what I was really like, coming down to it for me was, do I get something like a framework and throw Linux on it? Uh, do I get one of these, these windows and throw Catch iOS on it or something like that? Uh, do I do that, or do I just get a MacBook Air or whatever? And I ended up going with the OLED.

• 1:07:15Wes Bos?

  What's wrong with your M1 that you have right now? Why can't that do your thin client-ness?

• 1:07:19Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, well, there's actually, my, my screen is kinda going west. I don't know about how, how yours is doing. But my screen has all these dark splotches on various sides of it. I, I mean, it could just be the backlight. But yeah, no, I mean, it's fine. And the computer is certainly uh, fairly powerful at this point. But it is, it's just a heavy beast and I'm carrying it around so much all the time. And, and I don't know, like, I, it's just like, I, I needed this, the beefiest computer possible. But now if the point of it is to be able to move it around easily or whatever, you go super light. I think for me, the argument was, do I go with a MacBook Air or not?

• 1:07:57Wes Bos?

  Oh, yeah, yeah. That makes sense. Cool. Well, I'm, I'm excited to see what people think. I'm still on the, I, I really need to upgrade. But I just, I, I just, I'm always this way with MacBooks, where I'm just like, I wait for the next one. And next one will probably be better. Where's the, just give me what I want and don't screw me on the RAM upgrade. Like, watch the RAM upgrade here. Let me, let me do it real quick. So where do you change there? Here we go. The amount of RAM, right? Comes with 48 gigs. If you wanna go up to 128, it's another three grand.

• 1:08:30Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:31Wes Bos?

  Whoa.

• 1:08:31Scott Tolinski?

  Yes.

• 1:08:32Wes Bos?

  Wow.

• 1:08:33Scott Tolinski?

  Woof.

• 1:08:33Wes Bos?

  Insane, yeah.

• 1:08:36Speaker 02

  And I'm just gonna, so I got an M1, I don't even know if it's the Macs in 2021. And it works great. It only has 16GB of RAM. I'm talking about my personal machine. I don't see myself replacing it anytime soon. I used a-

• 1:08:52Scott Tolinski?

  16? That's crazy.

• 1:08:54Wes Bos?

  Raspberry Pi?

• 1:08:56Speaker 02

  Basically, but I've done the same video edit exports on it and it works totally fine. Like even with like animations and everything else, like it works about as good as the M3 Max that I have. And so I used a 2015 MacBook Pro for at least eight years. And it really didn't start to break a sweat until all these apps started using more and more RAM and everything else. But I like my M1. I'll stick with it for a while unless I find a really good deal, but-

• 1:09:24Wes Bos?

  I'm sitting at right now 55 of 64 gigs used and I don't even know what I'm doing. Oh, it's Photoshop.

• 1:09:33Speaker 02

  Photoshop?

• 1:09:35Speaker 02

  Close Photoshop.

• 1:09:36Wes Bos?

  Yeah, I made the thumb. Yeah, I gotta close it. I don't wanna have to, I don't wanna have to manage it, you know?

• 1:09:42Speaker 02

  I guess that's true. Yeah.

• 1:09:43Wes Bos?

  Yeah. Alright, closing it.

• 1:09:45Scott Tolinski?

  And how's your battery doing? Cause I just checked my battery and it says that your battery is capacity is significantly reduced and you should get it serviced.

• 1:09:53Wes Bos?

  After five years, I can still get probably, it depends on obviously what you're doing. But if I'm, if I don't have like a ton of stuff chugging, not a lot of GPU, I can probably get about five hours out of it. Maybe four or five hours depending on what you're doing, which it previously used to be like 16. You could, you could run that thing all day. Yeah, I used to, I used to not bring my charger anywhere with me because it's just, it's fine.

• 1:10:23Scott Tolinski?

  I heard a scratching at the door.

• 1:10:24Wes Bos?

  Uh oh.

• 1:10:25Scott Tolinski?

  My dog.

• 1:10:26Speaker 02

  Look at that.

• 1:10:26Scott Tolinski?

  She's soaking wet. It's raining.

• 1:10:28Speaker 02

  Oh no, it's covered in leaves.

• 1:10:29Wes Bos?

  Oh my gosh, she's covered in leaves.

• 1:10:31Scott Tolinski?

  She's covered in-

• 1:10:32Wes Bos?

  That's AI.

• 1:10:33Scott Tolinski?

  Oh yeah, look at her little paws covered in leaves. She always comes in with like ants and stuff on her, but no, she is soaking wet. I don't know why she, because we, the door's, there's no way she was stuck outside, but it's just pouring out there. Girl. Oh. Oh my God. This dog, when she gets wet, you gotta like wring her out like a towel. That's the only way to get her dry. Oh my God.

• 1:10:59Wes Bos?

  That seems like a tough life.

• 1:11:02Scott Tolinski?

  It's a bit of a tough life.

• 1:11:03Wes Bos?

  Rely on humans to dry you off.

• 1:11:05Scott Tolinski?

  Yes, bit of a tough life, yes.

• 1:11:10Wes Bos?

  Alright, what else do we have next? Anybody else got more items here? I think CJ does.

• 1:11:14Speaker 02

  I got a few stories. I think I have so much more. I'm gonna, I'm gonna make it quick. We won't be long, for too much longer. But first up, Discord is now making their content discoverable. So I've talked about this problem in the past where like you have all these community Discord servers that pop up. And people are answering questions, like the good conversation is happening, but there's no way, it's not very discoverable. The only way to find it is if you're actually in those Discord servers. And one answer to this was a project called Answer Overflow. They actually index public Discord servers. So if you go to answeroverflow.com, you can see what servers are there. But essentially they find question and answers that are happening and then make them available on the public web.

• 1:11:57Speaker 02

  But this is like a third party thing. But now it's, it's official from Discord that they're gonna make content discoverable. Now, they do have some caveats, like your server has to have at least 1,000 members. And then the admins will choose that if it's server discoverable. But it's cool to see that this is now gonna be built in where essentially you'll be able to see this stuff on the web without having to log into that server. This will be really good for agents as well. So if like questions and answers are happening in public Discord servers. And agents can search them, they'll be able to find their answers there. So this could be a bit of a replacement or at least supplement the idea that agents were getting results from Reddit and things like that.

• 1:12:39Wes Bos?

  Yeah. This is huge.

• 1:12:41Speaker 02

  Cool news.

• 1:12:41Wes Bos?

  Yeah, cause like it's always sucks that good information goes somewhere and gets lost. Where you cannot help someone and it, there's so much good information in Discord. Where like if you have a problem, you have to go in and search for what you want. This is huge. Yeah, checkmate Reddit. You know, you're closing the doors, Discord's opening it up. I'm posting my memes and like plumbing questions to Discord now.

• 1:13:10Speaker 02

  Nice. Yeah, I mean, this, this is good news for me just because there is just so much information behind. I say closed doors because a lot of these servers are public, like technically you can join them. But then you have a sidebar with like 30 different servers that you never check anyways. So this is huge. I'm excited about this.

• 1:13:29Wes Bos?

  Yeah, my, my Discord is a disaster.

• 1:13:33Scott Tolinski?

  Disaster.

• 1:13:34Wes Bos?

  I've, I probably have like 50 servers and like a million DMs. I just, I can't even, I can't even go into it anymore.

• 1:13:40Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. I'm sorry folks, if you've ever DM'd me on Discord. Is that, I can't keep up with that. I got too many DM. I need a DM aggregator from Twitter to Discord to even just Apple Messages. My God, I need something to manage. No.

• 1:13:57Wes Bos?

  Can I, can I tell you about my DOT? So me and Randy were sitting at the airport, waiting for our flight. And I got, I'm not lying. So I have a flight coming up. I get a notification from my email. I have two email clients. So I get two notifications that my flight is now starting. Then I also have it in two different calendar apps that I have. So I get two notifications there. Then my DOT tells me that I have it. Then my Grok bot tells me that my flight is there. Then my, I didn't even know I had like a Google agent, whatever the like Google equivalent to DOT is. Told me that my flight was now boarding. So I'm just sitting there. I got like nine notifications about my one flight boarding.

• 1:14:40Wes Bos?

  And I know, I obviously shouldn't be using all of them. I'm just, just testing them.

• 1:14:45Scott Tolinski?

  A hell of your own making, yes.

• 1:14:47Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:48Speaker 02

  Yeah. Nice. So next up, I just have some security news. So we haven't been live for I guess almost two weeks at this point. And while we were gone, the world was just on fire, basically.

• 1:15:01Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:02Speaker 02

  And you probably heard about it on the news, probably read it on Reddit.

• 1:15:06Speaker 02

  But there's a couple of places you can go to get info on this. The first one is pwnwatch, P W N dot watch. This is by Kitsy. Wes likes to call him kitten, but it gives you a, it gives you a site that it's, it's all of the vulnerabilities that are happening. And whether or not a patch is available for them. And so I'm also gonna take a step back because I also wanna describe and tell you what CVE is. Because some of you might not be familiar with what it even means. You're hearing about it all the time now. But CVE is Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures. It's essentially a way for the world to say, this piece of software is vulnerable in this way.

• 1:15:50Speaker 02

  And basically go public about it so that people know that that's out there. And then very often a CVE is paired with a patch. So the CVE will come out and it says, hey, Linux is vulnerable to this remote code execution thing in the kernel. We're labeling it this, but also if you patch to version 7.1, whatever, you will no longer be vulnerable to that. So there's a database of CVE IDs that basically keep track of all of these vulnerabilities that are found. And it's also part of responsible disclosure or coordinated vulnerability disclosure. Where the good guys, the white hackers are doing pin testing and fuzzing and finding vulnerabilities.

• 1:16:34Speaker 02

  And not telling the world about them first. They essentially find them. They then reach out to the software vendor, whether it's a company or an open source project. And then they say, hey, we found this. You need to patch it. Pretty often they'll do this as part of a bug bounty program. So maybe they'll get paid for it. But then eventually, once they know a patch has been released, then they'll mention, hey, here's the CVE, please go patch it.

• 1:16:55Wes Bos?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:56Speaker 02

  And so over the past two weeks, that's basically what we're seeing a lot of. But the issue is some of those CVEs were released before even a patch was available. And this is a site, it's called CVE Tracker. And so this is just the number of CVEs that have come out since 2004. And you can see like even over the past few years, there has been a bump, but all of a sudden here in, in 2026. We have, I think like over 1,700 CVEs reported just in October alone.

• 1:17:29Speaker 02

  And so this is good and bad, right? Because like, so because this is responsible disclosure, a lot of them. Because we're knowing about them before they're getting patched, it's not necessarily like the whole world is just getting hacked. The issue is the CVE is announced, the patch is released, and then people aren't patching fast enough. That's, that's issue number one. Then issue number two is some of these CVEs come out before the patches are available. And so this, I believe the, if you look at the timing of the PHP one, so just to give you a rundown of, of what actually happened. So PHP had a remote code execution vulnerability that went back to like to really old versions. And basically affected anyone running PHP.

• 1:18:12Speaker 02

  And so that happened. There's also the Bratley library, which is a compression library. There's a vulnerability in it. And because so many other languages use it, so Node, Go, Python, they all use Bratley under the hood. They became vulnerable as well. There was an RCE in the Linux kernel. There was one about the TCP stack. So if even your server was exposing like an HTTP server, it could be hacked. There were several CVEs just from GitLab itself. And so like public GitLab instances got hacked.

• 1:18:47Speaker 02

  And a few other ones here, but what I do wanna show you is the case of the Linux kernel. Because there are public channels and private channels for talking about the Linux kernel. And the private channel is so that maintainers that are trusted can work on these found vulnerabilities before the public knows about them, so that they can actually patch them up. But on October 22nd, someone posted in the public channel about these upcoming CVEs that was supposed to go into the private channel. And so this was also an issue here. So one of them had a score of nine. So CVEs have a score between 1 and 10. 9 and 10 are like really, really bad. You need to patch this.

• 1:19:32Speaker 02

  If you don't, like a remote hacker is going to get in. But yeah, one of them was for the SMB direct remote code execution. So SMB is like file storage, like Samba. I use it on my home network for like sharing drives between Linux machines. And then there's a few others as well. So it's all been happening over the past couple of weeks. And I guess the main advice I can give you is patch your stuff. Also, if you have servers exposed to the public and they don't need to be like, don't expose them to the public, put them on a tail scale net. And if you're running any of the stuff that has been or that has released patches for it, do everything you can to patch it, sick agents at it.

• 1:20:14Speaker 02

  I think it's going to get a lot worse before it gets better. Because agents are getting better at discovering vulnerabilities and getting better and better at exploiting vulnerabilities. But this is just the classic case of like good guys versus bad guys. Like the bad guys will start attacking, the good guys will patch. And ideally, there's more good guys than bad guys out there. And we can get to a point where all the holes and everything has gotten patched more. Cause that's the other crazy thing.

• 1:20:40Wes Bos?

  That's gonna be until we start like find all the holes. How many holes are there?

• 1:20:45Speaker 02

  There's so many, that's the thing.

• 1:20:47Scott Tolinski?

  How many?

• 1:20:48Speaker 02

  Like when you think in the grand scheme of things, like, like software is messy. Like, we can't think of everything all the time. And so there's holes and stuff. But the crazy thing is like for some of these, they have been vulnerabilities for years. Like, let me get the exact numbers on the PHP one. But one of the Linux vulnerabilities has existed for 15 years. So like if, if nobody had told anyone about it, you better believe that there are some like nation state hackers out there that potentially knew about it and would be using it.

• 1:21:19Wes Bos?

  So like they've known about them for 15 years, but just have never fixed them because there's too many trade offs?

• 1:21:27Speaker 02

  No, the code that introduced the vulnerability was written 15 years ago. Or 10 years ago. And so that means like until now, somebody could have been sitting on this, like a nation state or like a hacker could have known about this and had been using it to exploit these systems. But now they're getting patched. But how many other pieces of code and in older software isn't as vetted and looked at that potentially has vulnerabilities in it as well?

• 1:21:56Scott Tolinski?

  I think endlessly, yes.

• 1:21:58Wes Bos?

  And people that are discovering these things, there has been some examples of somebody who was just like find, they just find bugs in PHP and then they found the vulnerability. But a lot of these are like malicious and like you can't even hack the photo frame with claw at half the time right now. So are they, are they using what we're going to say the word obliterated models? Or are they just using deep seek or something like that?

• 1:22:27Speaker 02

  It's probably a little bit of both, right? So like, I think the, the maintainers of these projects have gotten access to like project daybreak, which is from OpenAI that gives them access to the models that aren't as nerfed and can do cybersecurity work. Like I'm betting Linus Torvalds has access to that because he works on the Linux kernel. So some of these bigger projects are going to have access to that and they're not going to get the denials. But for smaller maintainers, then they likely have to use maybe an obliterated model or an open model that doesn't have refusals. And then the bad guys, the ones that are maybe not reporting these and finding them themselves, they're going to be using either a deep seek or a GLM 5.3 or a model that has been obliterated.

• 1:23:11Speaker 02

  Where essentially like the weights have been updated to make it so that it doesn't refuse when you're trying to do cybersecurity things. So it's a little bit of both, but the obliterated models are definitely how the bad guys can do it without getting refusals or without some company knowing that they're using their AI to do these things. Yeah. So it's scary out there. Make sure you patch.

• 1:23:35Wes Bos?

  Update your stuff.

• 1:23:37Speaker 02

  Update your stuff.

• 1:23:38Wes Bos?

  Unless, actually the cert one is kind of interesting because like,

• 1:23:41Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:23:43Wes Bos?

  We had the photo frame and like somebody sent a pull request in to update the photo frame to distrust that cert that was like number four. And then I was like, oh, good. And then I was a little later, I was like, maybe we will, maybe we could have used that, you know? Kind of like, it's kind of, maybe, maybe we're in for a whole new thing of hardware hacking of like loading custom firmware on. Cause often that's how these firmers will work. They'll only trust certain URLs. And if you can spoof that URL.

• 1:24:14Scott Tolinski?

  People talking directly about that in regards to the TV hacking stuff, whether or not it's just people talking and saying they did it. I did hear people claiming that they, they used the, the four certificate as a hack.

• 1:24:30Wes Bos?

  That Marahah?

• 1:24:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'll talk about it for a second. So, and again, there's a little bit of back, back information here. When you use the web and you see that little lock in the browser, that's because your web browser trusts a certain set of certificate authorities. A certificate authority is a company that will issue certificates, but they have the secret keys. They are the only ones that can issue keys from their certificate authority. And the entire internet is based on this trust. So every operating system has those certificate authority, public keys that can be used to verify their private key, like installed in the operating system. It's in Linux, it's in macOS, it's on Android, it's iOS, it's everywhere. And it's literally just a set of certificates that say, we trust these people that work at these companies.

• 1:25:17Speaker 02

  And so one of those certificate authorities was eMudra, they were based in India. And they generated a private key that was the number four. And someone found, figured this out. And what that means is like, if you know what the private key is, that means you can sign certificates as that company. And so because the eMudra was trusted in every single web browser and every single operating system for a certain amount of time, anybody could issue certificates from them. That means you could issue a certificate that belongs to google.com, but sign it. And that means you could basically intercept HTTPS traffic to google.com. Because the way the CA's work, it's not necessarily domains are tied to specific CA's.

• 1:26:00Speaker 02

  It's just that these CA's are trusted and can create SSL or TLS certificates for any domain. So for a while, anybody could craft a private key and then intercept traffic. And to you, you would still see that lock in your browser bar. It would look like you're getting traffic served from Google or any other website. But there could have been some man in the middle that was using a spoofed key because they knew what the private key was. And the, the reason it was the number four is actually hilarious. So when you're generating a private key, you should be choosing a random 384 bit

• 1:26:37Speaker 02

  number, which is 2 to the 238, 2 to the 384th possibilities or roughly 10 to the 115th power possibilities. So that means if you were just trying to guess these private keys, it would take until the end of the universe, if not more, because there's so many possibilities of what the private key could be. But what had happened was instead of picking a random number between 0 and 10 to the 115th, they picked a random number between 0 and 384. So they didn't raise 2 to the power. And so that, that gives them, that gave them the number four. And that means like,

• 1:27:16Wes Bos?

  Did nobody just try four until now? Like, how long ago did this happen?

• 1:27:22Speaker 02

  I'm trying to find exactly when it was released, but I will say the reason someone was, had suspected it was because you can see it in the entropy of the key. And so they noticed that the entropy was a little bit off. And so they, I think they just brute forced it with starting at zero and instantly found four.

• 1:27:41Wes Bos?

  Took five tries.

• 1:27:43Speaker 02

  Exactly, like zero, one, two, three, oh, now you can create a certificate signed by them. So yeah, so that, that was horrible. And actually eMudra has gotten out of the business. They are no longer a certificate authority. They, they handle like internet infrastructure and stuff like that in India, but they're like, this is, this is too big of a mess up. We can't, we can't do this anymore.

• 1:28:04Wes Bos?

  They backed out. The most interesting part is that they have, when you have new certificates, it's a certificate ceremony or a key ceremony. Beautiful.

• 1:28:15Scott Tolinski?

  It's all right.

• 1:28:16Wes Bos?

  Key.

• 1:28:17Scott Tolinski?

  How was the ceremony? Oh, it was lovely. Yes.

• 1:28:20Speaker 02

  Lovely ceremony.

• 1:28:22Speaker 02

  This was also released recently that macOS 27.2, I think, rolled back the fixes for the CA. So if you're using the built-in Git, curl, or Python on macOS 27.2, it actually still trusts eMudra. But if you're using Brew, you can install the latest version of Git, curl, and Python, and just make sure that you're using those versions so that the eMudra CA is not trusted. And I'll share this website, but you can, they have a specific spot that you can go to that will tell you if you're vulnerable. So if you run a curl against this URL, I'll share it in the show notes.

• 1:29:05Speaker 02

  If it throws back an error, then that means your curl is not trusting that CA. But if it, if it works, then that means it's trusting that CA. You should be, you should upgrade. And one more, one more funny thing. So MITM Proxy, man in the middle proxy, is a very popular proxy that people use in pen testing and also hacking, where essentially they can spin up a server that intercepts traffic for their network. Or let's say, yeah, you might get on the same network as somebody and then get in the middle, so that way, whenever they make a request somewhere, it goes through your server. But because of TLS, you couldn't fake certificates.

• 1:29:44Speaker 02

  But they now have a dash dash eMudra option where it uses that, that CA with the private key of four to create HTTPS certificates. So if you're trying to man in the middle somebody that hasn't been updated, you can just instantly do it with man in the middle proxy. So that's fun as well.

• 1:30:03Wes Bos?

  That is awesome.

• 1:30:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:06Wes Bos?

  Wow. Big, big week. Well, hopefully we have a bit of a better week, because that, also like, shout out to anybody who works in this stuff, where like, you're just on your tail, going 24/7 to figure out, how can we patch all these things? And then some jagoff tweets the, before you're, you're used to, or before you're ready, right? So frustrating. Like, even just like, the railway had a hack as well, and the, the people that had large applications on railway had very, very bad days.

• 1:30:42Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. How many, every single key compromised? Yeah.

• 1:30:46Speaker 02

  And GitLab. And it's crazy that all of this, all of this was happening at the same time, because a lot of these CVs had nothing to do with the hacks. It just so happened that there's so much agentic hacking, hacking happening out there that, yeah, railway, GitLab, we saw even open code was being attacked like three weeks ago.

• 1:31:01Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah, massively.

• 1:31:02Speaker 02

  So, yeah, stay safe out there. I got one more, or two more little fun sites for you. Have you guys seen the 404 page on Apple Music?

• 1:31:12Scott Tolinski?

  I have only because it was making the rounds.

• 1:31:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, so it takes you to this little iPod, and it actually behaves like a iPod Classic. And you can go in, you can choose songs.

• 1:31:26Wes Bos?

  That's cool.

• 1:31:26Speaker 02

  Artists, and then it plays like the, the 30-second previews that you get like in Apple Music.

• 1:31:33Scott Tolinski?

  Yeah. I loved my iPod.

• 1:31:35Wes Bos?

  You use Apple Music, CJ? Oh, no, we've, we've talked about this. CJ uses some weird self-hosted rip CDs.

• 1:31:43Scott Tolinski?

  For music. Yeah.

• 1:31:46Speaker 02

  I use Jellyfin for, Jellyfin serves up music albums, just like they do movies. So, yeah. I miss what you guys were saying, because the music was too loud on live.

• 1:31:55Scott Tolinski?

  I'm still on Spotify. Spotify added some crazy weird AI assistant thing, and it was like, chat with your, your mute, but it was in a totally separate app. And like, one of their first examples was like, ask it to, to examine your music taste for something, and I did that, and then it returned like, I'm having a hard time seeing your music, or I'm like, all right, this is gone, get out of here. The very first, you got one chance to show me that this was actually anything interesting at all, and you blew it. So, you're gone.

• 1:32:26Wes Bos?

  I have a problem with Spotify where it thinks I'm super into plane crashes, because one time, one time, I, I listened to a podcast, there was, there was somebody who unfortunately had passed away in a plane crash, and they were part of both the hardcore music scene and the development scene. So I was like, interested in, in what had happened there. So I listened to a podcast about it. That was like, two years ago, and even right now, I'm on my Spotify homepage, and there's just, hey, planes? You interested in planes? No, not at all. Not at all. And like, I wish these algorithms, you could just like, nuke something, and say, never, never am I going to be interested in this. Same with watches. All these algorithms think that I'm reaching the age where I'm just going to be super

• 1:33:11Wes Bos?

  into like, watches and Rolexes and things like that. No, thanks. Zero interest.

• 1:33:16Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:33:17Scott Tolinski?

  Yes. CJ, you got something about toilets?

• 1:33:21Speaker 02

  One more about toilets to end it all out. So this is on the Visit Norway website. It's like an ad for tourism, travel. And it's like, are these the world's best outhouses? And it's just this wonderful cinematic footage of basically like viewpoints that you can, very, in the US, we have like rest areas where you can park, there's like a scenic viewpoint. This is like that, but, but they have some of the most interesting architecture. Like, this one's completely made out of stone. This one has like a completely glass floor, and you can see the river below you. They're incredible. This is just like a fun, it looks like the, the highway is actually jetting off, in,

• 1:34:04Speaker 02

  off a cliff, but it's just like an overlook that you can stand on. But then the, like, the outhouses themselves have like, just very modern design. This one has like an interesting cement curve with like, like, almost see-through glass, but not like, incredible. Yeah, so this is just a fun way to.

• 1:34:24Wes Bos?

  We would never be able to have something like this in Canada. It would be destroyed.

• 1:34:27Scott Tolinski?

  Destroyed.

• 1:34:28Wes Bos?

  Destroyed in like, three days. Somebody would be sleeping in it.

• 1:34:32Scott Tolinski?

  The every single outhouse in any national park in the United States, or, or rest stop or whatever, is the very last place you'd ever want to be. Yeah. No, thank you.

• 1:34:42Speaker 02

  I agree. I mean, yeah, so if you're ever in like, the national forests or anything in Colorado, they have outhouses, they, they smell horrible. I mean, they do their best to upkeep them, but people are just so rough on them.

• 1:34:52Scott Tolinski?

  No, they're too rough with it. Yes, they're too rough with it.

• 1:34:55Wes Bos?

  Guilty as charged.

• 1:34:59Speaker 02

  So, yeah, this is a fun, and also their site was really cool. As you scroll, it's like fading between these outhouses. Yeah, yeah, check it out.

• 1:35:04Scott Tolinski?

  Very fun. What a perfect way to end this, CJ. Thank you so much. And also, we didn't mention, we're presented by Sentry. Check us out at Sentry.io. Sentry's the best. They are, they're just there to make your websites better all the time, and I think that's becoming more and more relevant. So, it's always been relevant, but it's even more relevant. So, check it out. Guys, you have anything else to say before we get out of here?

• 1:35:29Wes Bos?

  That's all. Thanks for tuning in. Peace.

• 1:35:31Scott Tolinski?

  Peace.