Full Description

In a rare turn of events, it was a slightly quieter week in terms of actual web development news, so the hosts round up some technology-adjacent news and drama to share. Jack kicks off the show recounting his experience of being one of four developers in a reality show-type scenario that his friend Jason Lengstorf (host of the YouTube show “Learn with Jason”) put together. The four competitors had about 4 hours to build something unique using a vector database while cameras rolled and producers asked questions in one-on-ones outside the studio. The episode, which is out now, was a blast to participate in, and makes for some quality code viewing. Maybe Jason’s found a new niche in the web development video world: reality TV coding?? Next up is more drama around how AI companies are training their LLMs. Up and coming AI company Perplexity’s getting some heat for ignoring the robots.txt files on websites banning AI companies from crawling the content to teach their models. While there’s no legal ramifications (yet) for companies who ignore these instructions, reputable companies have respected the Robots Exclusion Protocol since they came into use in the ‘90s. And Apple is once more accused of violating the EU’s Digital Markets Act in regards to its lackluster support for alternative iOS marketplaces in Europe. In retaliation, Apple has announced it will delay rolling out some of the cornerstone iOS 18 features to European users due to “interoperability requirements that could undermine user privacy and data security.” Finally, TypeScript 5.5, previously in beta stage (in episode 42), has now reached release candidate stage. It brings with it inferred type predicates, regex syntax checking, and 33% smaller package size.

Links

• TypeScript 5.5 RC
• Don't build another effin' chatbot - Web Dev Challenge S1E1 (Learn with Jason)
• Perplexity AI and robots.txt drama
• Apple is the first company charged with violating the EU's DMA rules
• GitHub Copilot Extensions
• window.ai Chrome proposal
• Chrome AI - Vercel AI SDK
• The Hunting Party book
• Bridgerton on Netflix
• The Paris Apartment book