[Dev Catch Up #20] - Open AI voice engine, LLM Litmus test, NodeJS22, and more.

Bringing devs up to speed on the latest dev news from the trends including, a bunch of exciting developments and articles.

Welcome to the 20th edition of DevShorts, Dev Catch Up!

I write about developer stories and open source, partly from my work and experience interacting with people all over the globe.

Some recent issues from Dev Catch up:

• Observable 2.0, Antithesis launch, sudo in Windows

• GPUs-vs-CPUs, LLMs and programming in 2024

• GigaGPT, Meta audiobox, Business-Intelligence-as-code

• Google's AI accelerator, hypercomputer, Kubernetes v1.29, Duet AI

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Must Read

• With AI being in the forefront in today’s tech world, there is something interesting coming out from OpenAI. In a startling development, OpenAI created a Voice Engine that can create synthetic voices based on 15 seconds-clip of someone’s voice. The text-to-voice generation platform currently has limited access. With fears of being misused, the developers testing the platform are required to get explicit and informed consent from the speakers without having permission to build ways for individual users to create their own AI voices, and disclose to listeners that the voices are AI-generated. More on this model can be found from this article published by the Verge, where detailed analysis along with example clips generated by the Voice Engine are available. 

• As more days are progressing, the number of LLM models bursting into the scene are getting insane. As a user, you need to understand which model is the best for you by comparing it with a number of factors and with models of the similar kind. To address this problem, Sourcegraph introduced a LLM Litmus Test tool that lets you compare different large language models like GPT-4 Turbo, Mixtral 8x22b, and Claude 3 Opus. Apart from comparing LLMs, there is a feature to add a GitHub repository or bunch of repositories and turn on Cody Context. This will search that repository or repositories to find relevant code snippets to pass to an LLM so that the most relevant or accurate answer reaches you smoothly. Learn more about this tool from this article published by the Sourcegraph team where more detail on the tool along with a video explanation is present. 

• AI powered tools are the future for software development and the same can be said for the improvement of enterprise security. Although using “AI” and “Security” in the same sentence brings a negative connotation because of the security risks associated with AI. While there are risks that circle around AI implementation for security reasons, there are opportunities that can flare up values in this segment. Onboarding AI can help in classification and identification of different types of information, anomaly and contextual detection, threat intelligence, and much more. Know all about the possibilities of Enterprise Security improvement with AI implementation from this article published by Mark Strande from Miro where he explained all of the opportunities in great depth.

Now, we will head over to some of the news and articles that will be at a place of interest for developers and the tech community out there.

Good to know

• NodeJS 22 is now out and it came with a bunch of additions and enhancements. Among the notable changes, the new release contains the require()ing ES modules. It adds the require() support for synchronous ESM graphs under the flag “–experimental-require-module”. The latest release comes with the update of V8 JavaScript engine with addition of new features like WebAssembly garbage collection and others. Maglev improves performance of short-lived CLI programs which is now enabled by default on supported architectures. Also, there is the browser compatible implementation of WebSocket. There is much more to uncover in this release which you can find out from this article published by the official Nodejs team in which detailed information about the update is given.

• If you are into observability for a while, you might have heard of the term “cardinality”. It refers to the number of unique values that are in a dataset. This means that it determines the diversity and complexity of the data. The problem with cardinality is that it can increase your cloud costs by a lot if used in the wrong way and hence, cutting down excessive cardinality is a solution. Here is a great article from SREPath that talks about cardinality in detail, its advantages, impact, and provides a solution on cutting down excessive cardinality.

• OpenTelemetry modernizes the art of monitoring and observability and is one of the most trending topics in the cloud-native observability space. It is important to know how OpenTelmetry can help you if you have an application and the way to use it along with the amazingness of the technology. OTel resources are highly essential when using OTel at its full potential and Michele Mancioppi of Dash0 has provided an excellent deepdive on OTel resource attributes in the form of this video, where the usefulness of the resources are discussed in detail.

• Open-source projects add great value to the future of software development and provide pathways for young developers to work on real-world solutions. Celebrating them is our tradition and this week too, we are doing the same. The tool of the week is Pragmatic drag and drop, developed by the tech giant Atlassian. It is a low-level drag and drop toolchain that enables safe and successful usage of browser’s built-in drag and drop functionality. It can be used with any view layer. Although it comes with a design language, you can use your preferred design language while using the toolchain. Check out Pragmatic drag and drop from its GitHub repo here and leave a star if you like it.

Lastly, we will take a look at some of the trending scoops that hold a special mention for the community. 

Notable FYIs

• Generative AI is not just a buzzword nowadays but is actually on the forefront with RAG applications. However, it is lacking in imagination and missing out on its full potential. To tackle this problem, the untapped potential of simulative AI must be explored and this is covered extensively in this latest podcast presented by the Latent Space. 

• We all know that SQL is the backbone of modern data management. With every query run, there is a complex sequence of processes that takes place and allows efficient retrieval, manipulation, and management of information in relational databases. Learn about the inner workings of SQL execution from this article published by the ByteByteGo team where every detail has been explained with a layman perspective. 

• Kafka is one of the most popular distributed event streaming platforms when it comes to building real-time data pipelines and streaming applications. Here is an article from the Newstack covering the top 10 tools for Kafka engineers.

• ThanosCon Europe recently ended and there are a lot of lessons learned from the vast number of talks given on the future of observability and monitoring. Bartek Plotka has penned down a wonderful article summarizing the happenings of the conference that will give you a lot of deep insight on the lectures and talks.

• KubeCon Shanghai is around the corner and calls for proposals are on-going to present your talk at one of the prime Cloud-native events of the year. The last date for submitting a CFP is May 5. Submit yours from the official KubeCon Shanghai website here.

That’s it from us with this edition. We hope you are going away with a ton of new information. Lastly, share this newsletter with your colleagues and pals if you find it valuable and a subscription to the newsletter will be awesome if you are reading for the first time.