What is a tech bubble anyway? (Changelog News #171)

Our old friend Lars Wikman returns to the show to discuss Linux distro hopping, Elixir, Nerves, embedded systems, home automation with Home Assistant, karate, and more.

Let's hear how Wikipedia actually works from long-time Wikipedian, Bill Beutler! Bill has been heavily involved with this "8th wonder of the modern world" for two decades and even built a career on it, founding Beutler Ink –a digital agency known for its pioneering work in Wikipedia public relations. We discuss: the official (and not so official) rules, the editor cabal (which isn't one), the business model (which really isn't one), how an edit sticks (or not), how AI chatbots threaten the future of the site (or don't), and a whole lot more.

Cedric Chin says comparisons of our current AI *maybe-bubble* to the dot-com bubble and the 2008 GFC are limiting, Matthew Prince does a post-mortem on last week's Cloudflare outage, "hl" is a fast / powerful log viewer for humans, Enthusiast Guy's Continuum 93 is a fantasy computer emulator, and a list of things that aren't doing the thing.

Practical AI co-host, Chris Benson, joins us to discuss the latest advancements in AI, drones, home automation, and robotic swarming tech. Chris defines "swarm" with detail/precision and it turns out that what most people are calling a swarm today is NOT a swarm!

Spencer Chang caught our attention with the alive internet theory website, but he creates all kinds of computery things to bring people together around play, connection, and creation. Spencer's experiments with computing-infused objects inspired him to create an entire line of internet sculptures and real-world computing shrines that will hopefully inspire all of us to keep the internet alive and flourishing for years to come.

Nilo Stolte explains why Zig is "a totally new way to write programs", George Mack gives twelve actionable ways to be more creative, Mario Zechner shares his findings on using MCP vs Bash tools, Josh Collinsworth compares creating AI art to medieval alchemy, LibrePods unlocks AirPods features for Android, and our first ever Changelog News Classifieds.

Do you like director's commentaries and extended cuts? This episode is like that, but for this week's News. We go deep on the alive internet theory, Meshtastic mesh networks, Zstandard compression, the FDE job explosion, React's seemingly perpetual dominance, and more.

Prolific software blogger, Sean Goedecke, joins us to discuss why he believes software engineers need to be involved in the politics of their organization, how to avoid worry driven development, what is "good taste" in software engineering, where agentic coding will take our industry, why getting the main thing right is so important, and how to get your blog to the top of Hacker News.

A new AI-led tech role has emerged with a massive increase of job postings, Corey Quinn explains why younger devs won't tolerate pain in the AWS, Thomas Ptacek makes the case that you should write an agent, Paul Kinlan goes deeper on his dead framework theory, and Andrew Gallagher says to stop vibe coding your unit tests.

On this seventh iteration of our award-worthy game show filled with obscure jargon, fake definitions, and expert tomfoolery: past winners battle to determine the champion of champions. (Also, Adam.)