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July 2024 was yet another crazy month for the history books that future people will study centuries from now. But the future won't care about the Crowdstrike disaster, bloody ears, or broken intel chips. Instead, they'll ponder the meaning of these strange two words. Hock t'wa. This viral meme forever changed the direction of the world's culture, but it's not the only t'wa that was hocked recently. If you're an Apple fan, you might remember the unofficial Apple website that bears a similar name. This website was so popular that it was acquired by AOL, who of course ruined it and shut it down in 2015. Everyone forgot about it, but then it mysteriously reappeared this month with all the same authors from its early iPhone glory days. But if we look closely, the website is actually a zombie. Apparently some company in Hong Kong squatted on the domain and is now using it to pollute the internet with AI-generated slop. But it's not the only example of this world going down the toilet, and in today's video, we'll look at a ton of other crazy tech stories that you missed this month. It is July 31st, 2024, and you're watching The Code Report. Because this is a positive, inspirational YouTube channel, let's focus on the good news first. Node.js just got TypeScript support thanks to this recently merged pull request. Over the past five years, JavaScript runtime competitors like Deno and Bun have stolen Node's thunder by making TypeScript just work out of the box. But in the near future, you'll be able to write TypeScript in a Node.js file and run it without a compilation step. The trick behind this magic is that it doesn't actually do any type checking, but because TypeScript is a superset of JS, it instead strips the types from the source code and executes the JS parts. In other words, it works like type annotations in Python, to give you better IntelliSense to catch bugs early. Speaking of which, a new blazingly fast game-changing next-generation web framework just dropped, called FastHTML. Before you roll your eyes though, it's not a JavaScript framework this time, but rather a Python framework sprinkled with HTMX, with the intention of scaling down web dev complexity. What makes it unique, compared to say Django or Flask, is that you can author interactive components with straight up Python code. Then you can make those components interactive with HTMX, by leveraging HTML instead of JavaScript. Now while writing this code, you might consider using a new blazingly fast game-changing next-generation editor like Zed. Previously, Zed was only available to macOS users, but now it's also available on Linux. And that's awesome, because Zed is fast, open source, and most importantly, written in Rust. But all that's completely useless if your CPU is broken. We learned recently from game developers and Intel itself, that it's 13th and 14th gen Raptor Lake chips have all kinds of problems. Intel was confused about why their stuff wasn't working, but since then they claim to have figured out the problem. They claim the problem is related to the microcode algorithm that regulates voltage to the chip. The high voltage is creating instability, and likely permanently damaging these chips. Now if you own one and it works fine, all you have to do is make sure your BIOS is up to date, and that you run it with the Intel default settings. But if you have a bad chip, you'll likely need to replace it under warranty. But if you're a fan of money, another thing you should know is that Stripe has acquired its competitor LemonSqueezy. I'm a big fan of Stripe, and even have a Stripe course for Fireship Pro members, but many indie hackers nowadays say LemonSqueezy is better. Well now they're one and the same, because Stripe has gotten so big that instead of competing, it can just buy its competitors out. Maybe it's time to build a Stripe competitor written in Rust, but after looking at the Stack Overflow survey results, I'm not so sure it's a good idea to learn how to code. As a professional developer, you're 50% more likely to be not happy at work than to be happy at work. And what's even more depressing is that nearly 50% of professional developers are just plowing through life in their comfort zone. And speaking of plowing, if you get into farming, you're statistically more likely to enjoy your job than being behind a desk. And that's why I'm pivoting this channel to farming tutorials, like rotolactam milking systems in 100 seconds. But now it's time to shift gear to some weird news. First though, if you want to stay up to date on everything going on in tech, you should be suffering with other developers on daily.dev, the sponsor of today's video created by fellow programmers. It's the only place you can get every blog post, news story, and tutorial curated by your interests and ranked by 500,000 other developers there. If you're into a JavaScript framework like Next.js, there's a squad for that, or if you're just there for drama, join the controversy squad. Most importantly, you can have honest conversations about all the developer content on the internet. And one of my favorite things is that it builds out a custom feed while keeping track of what you read and what you haven't. And that's incredibly useful for me personally when producing the code report, but it's especially awesome when learning a new skill. And did I mention that daily.dev is totally free? Use the link on the screen to get my personal invite, and I will see you over there. Now it's time to talk about the Olympics. No, not those Olympics, but the International Mathematical Olympiad. As an American, I was nearly brought to tears when Team USA achieved a rare win over the nearly unstoppable Chinese team. The high school students in this competition are far smarter than anyone watching this channel, but there's a new competitor in town who's able to perform at the top of the silver medal distribution, and its name is Google AlphaProof. It works by combining a large language model like Gemini with a reinforcement network called AlphaZero, a model that taught itself how to master chess and go. It takes a written problem like this and translates it into a formal functional programming language called Lean. Then it proceeds to generate many solution candidates, and then attempts to prove or disprove them in Lean. The good news is that if you're a top .001% math prodigy, you still have an edge over AI, but the bad news is that the rest of us humans are totally cooked. But Google also teamed up with Harvard to cook up something even crazier, an AI model trained on a bunch of rat videos with the goal of creating a virtual rat brain or an algorithm called an inverse dynamics model. Now it's no secret that big tech wants to replace human labor with subscription based robot labor. The problem is that robots have poor dexterity, and their movement is about as smooth as a white person dancing, but someday we might be able to put artificial rat brains in them to fix this. However, before Google can finish this diabolical plan, OpenAI wants to destroy them and just announced a preview of their own search engine called SearchGPT. LLM chatbots are a huge threat to Google's lucrative business model of selling ads, and OpenAI is in a unique position to reimagine the search engine. And someday soon, we might live in an internet dystopia where all web content is written by ChatGPT, then optimized by ChatGPT for the ChatGPT search engine so it can be summarized for you by ChatGPT. The biggest AI news of July was Zuck's new llama, but right as this model was released, another open source leader, Mistral, also released a new model called Mistral Large 2, and its overall performance approaches that of GPT 4.0 and Clod. That's a threat to OpenAI's dominance, unless of course they go bankrupt first. The company's raised over 11 billion dollars, but they're expected to spend at least 7 billion dollars this year, 4 billion of which goes straight to Azure to rent the servers needed to train GPT 5, and the $20 ChatGPT subscription isn't going to pay the bills. But maybe if LLMs haven't actually plateaued, they'll come out of this with a superintelligence that no one can compete with. These models require tons of data, and they often resort to scraping public websites to get that data, and one of the best websites to scrape is Reddit. But Reddit just updated their robots.txt file, and now robots aren't allowed to scrape it unless you pay Reddit. Google is the only search engine that's paid up so far, which means that's the only place you can find the latest depressing content from your favorite pseudo-intellectual cringelords. But what you likely don't realize is that there's a dark underbelly to all this AI stuff, and it comes in the form of mass surveillance from big tech via the Content Authenticity Initiative. It includes big data companies, social media, chip manufacturers, and even camera manufacturers, who are all implementing something called C2PA, which embeds data into different types of media like images to determine where it came from and how it's been altered. They're doing this of course to protect you from disinformation and deepfakes, but the tradeoff they don't tell you about is that it creates a mass surveillance apparatus for all media created on the internet, and this might be coming soon because the government just introduced the Copied Act, which in some cases would make it illegal to remove provenance data from media, and our ability to shitpost offensive memes anonymously on the internet would come to an end. Luckily though, there's already rebels out there trying to combat this with tools like Hydagem, which is designed to counter these watermarking schemes. But once again, because this is a positive, inspirational YouTube channel, I want to finish on a happy note. The biggest story in July was by far the CrowdStrike disaster, which took out 8.5 million Windows machines. Millions of people missed their flights and delayed their vasectomy operations, but if you were affected, you may be entitled to compensation thanks to the incredibly generous offer of a $10 Uber Eats gift card from CrowdStrike, and that's enough to pay for about one third of a Big Mac, so you don't have to finance it on a firm. This has been the Code Report, thanks for watching, and I will see you in the next one.