Willis Gibson, 13, closed out 2023 by becoming the first person to officially beat the original Nintendo version of Tetris. Here’s how he did it.

Want to understand the code that caused the ultimate killscreen? Watch this great explainer from HydrantDude.

The 2023 film Tetris is based on the true story of the legal battle to license the game.

Is the era of the robot butler upon us? Mobile ALOHA is a low-cost and whole-body teleoperation system for data collection. Check out some of what it can do.

Explore the questions and answers on the Mathematics Stack Exchange.

Will AI fundamentally change software development or just add some efficiencies around the edges?  Surveys from Stack Overflow and Github find north of 70% have probably already tried using it and many incorporate it into their daily work through a helper in the IDE. 

It's also worth reflecting a bit on the technology sectors that didn't have as great a 2023: crypto, VR, and quantum computing still seem far from mainstream adoption. 

We dive a little into the half-life of skills, which seem to be shrinking, especially in IT. Got any resolutions to learn something new this year?

And what about the data we use for training? We highlight a comment from Kian Katanforoosh, a lecturer who helped create Stanford's Deep Learning course with Andrew Ng, who says we'll run out of high quality data as soon as 2030.

A big thanks and congrats to Stack Overflow user  Corn3lius for helping to answer a question and being awarded a life boat badge: How can I create spoiler text?

Along with his work at Stanford, Katanforoosh is a founding member of deeplearning.ai and co-created the Deep Learning Specialization on Coursera. 

He believes the rapidly expanding capabilities of AI will mean that humans, and especially programmers, will need to learn new skills faster than ever. This doesn't mean machines are going to take our jobs. Rather, with the assistance of AI, humans will become far more capable, learning faster and mastering more domains. 

Not surprisingly, Katanforoosh has built his business with the goal of addressing this issue. Workera aims to help companies identify where their employees lack skills and provide them with personalized instruction that can quickly bring them up to the next level.

You can find Kian on Twitter, LinkedIn, and Stanford's website. 

Thanks to Stack Overflow user PaxDiablo, who was awarded a Life Boat badge for providing a great answer to the question: Given  a month in numeric form, how do you find the first month of its respective quarter? 

Biilmann says we can't ignore the impact GenAI is having on developer productivity.  One of their engineers created a  GPT that automatically generates stories for React + TypeScript components, and after seeing how successful it was internally, Netlify made it open source for the public.

We also chat over the results of their recent State of Web Development survey. The key takeaway is below: 

The 80% of developers that have integrated AI into their workflow are quickly reaping the benefits. Seventy percent report using AI to automate manual and repetitive tasks and 42% are using it to improve internal knowledge sharing and increase productivity, freeing up more time for impactful work and enabling faster launch times. Over 50% of developers also realized new opportunities that AI created, such as generating new web projects with a single prompt or reading API documentation.

However, AI experimentation is not without its own unique challenges. Developers are concerned about receiving incorrect answers and information (65%), security issues and leaking confidential information (52%), a lack of regulation (48%), and a decrease in code quality (45%).

So much opportunity, but plenty of risk as well. 

Last but not least, Biilmann tells us what he's looking forward to in the near future, specifically apps that can reformat their UI on the fly to be more customized to each user. He calls this UI 2.0, and it sounds a bit like what Google showed off in its recent Gemini demo. 

Congrats to our lifeboat winner of the week, Petrus Theron, who answered the question: How can I make a public struct where all fields are public without repeating `pub` for every field?

The broken nose in jail scam is on the rise. With AI improvements, it’ll get harder to spot. 

OWASP, a non-profit dedicated to software security, tracks the top ten security risks for LLMs.

We’ve spoken with DoiT on the podcast before about LLM hallucinations. 

DoiT’s sales pitch is simple: they provide technology and expertise to clients who want to use the cloud, free of charge, with the big cloud providers paying the bills.

On today’s home team episode, Ben and Ryan discuss the implications of a lapse in section 174 of the tax code. Here’s a great explainer on how it’s affecting startups and software firms, threatening jobs and potentially bankrupting some struggling companies. 

Video game employees are exploring a union and Microsoft recently announced it will stay neutral in the process. 

What’s the difference between a bad game, a low effort developer, and shovelware? Our game development Stack Exchange has some thoughts.

Today’s lifeboat badge winner is “that_other_guy”, who explained: What is the difference between kill and kill -9? Hint, you want to terminate your process, not brutally murder it, ok! 

Does ChatGPT have seasonal depression?

AIs aren’t building apps on their own, at least not yet—but they are helping developers build them. Read Isaac Lyman’s article about the three types of AI-assisted programmers.

ICYMI: Listen to our interview with linguist Gašper Beguš, director of the Berkeley Speech and Computation Lab, about how LLMs and humans acquire language. 

Shoutout to Stack Overflow user nhgrif, who earned a Lifeboat badge by rescuing Store only date without time in a database from the ash heap of history.

While FireHydrant is mostly known for their incident management software, they’re introducing Signals to modernize alerting and consolidate it with incident management. 

FireHydrant was born out of an incident where a database was dropped at 5:30pm on a Friday right before network maintenance started. It also led to Robert’s social media handle, Bobby Tables. 

This one time…at band camp…Robert got paged in the middle of trumpet practice…on his sabbatical.

Congrats to Great Question badge winner timdim for asking How can I flush GPU memory using CUDA (physical reset is unavailable)?. 100 people thought it was worth voting for.

Gemini, Google’s new AI model, is great at competitive programming, among other things.

AI Explained is a YouTube channel that covers the latest developments in AI.

One problem with regulating AI is that the technology evolves (much) faster than regulators can.

Wikifunctions is an open repository of code that anyone can use or contribute to.

Did we need another study to tell us that longer commutes are bad for mental health? Probably not, but here’s one anyway.

Are governments spying on you through push notifications? Sounds like it! In fact, push notifications are a privacy nightmare.

CommandBar is a user assistance platform (UAP). Their flagship product, Copilot, is an embedded user assistant agent that companies can configure to help their users with on-demand help, including interactive walkthroughs and personalized responses. 

Read James’s article about why CommandBar built Copilot, then get started with their docs.

Follow James on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Follow CommandBar on LinkedIn and Twitter.

If you’ve ever wondered Why "Yarn 2" is Yarn 3.0.1, Lifeboat badge winner Ilias Karim has your answer.