New OpenAI APIs, self-hosting all the things, the Dart Frog project, curl's NuGe...

Changelog

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What up, nerds. I’m Jerod and this is Changelog News for the week of Monday, January 6th 2023. It’s time once again for some Changelog++ shout outs!

Thank you to our new members: Mark, Andy, Lars, Andriy, Matt & Robert. It means so much to us that you choose to support our work with your hard-earned cash. Seriously, thank you.

If Changelog++ is news to you, learn all about it at changelog.com/++. Ditch the ads, get extended episodes, and shout outs from me on this very program. Once again that’s changelog.com/++ Check it out

Ok let’s get into the news.

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The biggest announcement of late is OpenAI’s new ChatGPT and Whisper APIs, which let you integrate these two models with your apps or products. The biggest news of the big news: the price.

Jerry McGuire

Show me the money

The ChatGPT model is priced at $0.002 per 1k tokens, which is 10x cheaper than their existing GPT-3.5 models. That’s $2 per million tokens generated. And the Whisper model is priced at $0.006 per minute, or $.36 per hour of audio.

Now, Whisper is also open source, which means you can run it yourself for the cost of electricity / minute, but it can be difficult to run so they’re aiming for convenience here.

Side note: Georgi Gerganov created Whisper.cpp, a high-performance port of Whisper to C/C++ that is a lot simpler and easier to run than OpenAI’s Python-based tooling. He’s also agreed to come on The Changelog to tell us about it. I’m very excited for that conversation. We have a dog in this hunt: our transcripts

Instead of pointing you to OpenAI’s API announcement post, I’d like to highlight a GitHub repo by user Reorx called awesome-chatgpt-api.

It’s a curated list of apps and tools that not only use the new ChatGPT API, but also allow user to configure their own API keys, enabling free and on-demand usage of their own quota.

There’s also a development section projects and articles to help you get going. That’s where I’d start, if I were digging in.

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In a world where every service wants to put you on a subscription forever, is now the time to start self-hosting your apps instead?

Ernie Smith looks at the landscape in Tedium, a web publication about the dull side of the internet.

Ernie tries outs alternatives in the realms of web analytics, email newsletters, no-code automation, and calendar-booking. He then offers up three options that fit a “Goldilocks model”—too hot, too cold, or just right.

Can open source, self-hosted alterntavies dethrone Google Analytics, MailChimp, Zapier, and Calendly? The short answer is: Yes and no. For the long answer, read Ernie’s analysis.

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Loraine Lawson at the New Stack says “Dart is best known for its use in Flutter and its deployment in mobile apps, but a new framework called Dart Frog allows developers to leverage Dart on the backend. It’s the creation of Very Good Ventures, a consulting firm that specializes in Flutter applications. VGV is best known for the Hamilton app — yes, the musical — which was one of the first commercial apps built with Flutter outside of Google.”

Dart Frog is still a young project, but is stable and working toward a 1.0 release, according to the team behind it. We’ve been asked a few times to discuss Dart on The Changelog, but to be honest I didn’t think the language was going to make it outside Google.

Flutter sure seems to have changed the calculus on that. So, should we do a show on this? And if we do, who would be the best guest for such a conversation? Let us know in the comments.

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When it comes to the open source software supply chain, there’s been many debates about the “supplier” part of the supply chain moniker. A supplier has a contractual agreement with its customers, but open source devs provide their wares for free and without any warranties.

That means they aren’t actually suppliers, just creators and gift givers.

Curl creator/maintainer Daniel Stenberg says it gets even more complicated than all that because there are also intermediates. And tells the story of curl and NuGet.

The TL;DR is that Microsoft hosts the NuGet package registry, and somebody who is neither Daniel nor Microsoft, registered a curl package there that was last updated in 2013. The consequence of this: NuGet has been serving up a version of curl with 68 documented vulnerabilities.

This sent Daniel on a wild goose chase to fix things up. Definitely read his post for the full story.

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Speaking of Daniel, his home office hardware and software setup were recently featured on Hacker Stations: a collection of workspace setups by tech professionals from all over the world.

Whether you are looking for inspiration for your own setup, or just want to see how others design their workspaces for focus and productivity, this website and newsletter is a lot of fun to follow.

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That is the news for now. This week on The Changelog, Adam talks with Marcin Kurc, Founder and CEO at Nobl9 about all things SLOs.

I’ll leave you today with a quote from Joshua Bloch: “Learning the art of programming, like most other disciplines, consists of first learning the rules and then learning when to break them.”

Have a great week, share the show with a friend if you dig it, and we’ll talk to you again real soon.

Changelog

Our transcripts are open source on GitHub. Improvements are welcome. 💚