Digital Dispatch #45
Happy New Year fellow tech enthusiasts :-) Today we have a very exciting lineup, including Prism UI, a toolkit to hack into react internals, and the power of datalists!
Introducing Prism UI
Prism UI is a new UI library built on top of shadcn/ui to create beautiful pages. As with any other UI library, you can expect to find cards, panels, badges, carousels, as well as other animation effects powered by motion. 100% free and open source—for now and according to the author, at least.
State of JavaScript 2024
It’s that time of year again when the JavaScript community gathers to interpret a survey and predict a bright (?) future (?) for (?) their (?) favorite (?) framework (?). Enjoy (?)!
Node.js Now Supports TypeScript By Default
…and by “now” we actually mean “soon.” In Node 23, the --experimental-strip-types flag will be removed, enabling TypeScript support out of the box. This means you don’t need to transpile your TS code into JS for your server-side app anymore (though Matt Pocock still recommends doing so for serverless platforms, where getting a good cold start matters more).
You don't need Next.js
BennyKok and their team started ComfyDeploy as an open-source project – a full stack app with Next.js doing all the heavy lifting for both frontend and backend. All went well until they realized Vercel wasn’t exactly cheap and Next.js’s build wasn’t exactly carried by Hermes's winged sandals, among other problems, so they switched the heck back to plain React. Read their full story here, and let’s play a drink game: every time you say “duh,” take a sip.
bippy is a toolkit to hack into react internals
By default, you cannot access React internals, and for good reasons: we should only rely on and interact with public, agreed-upon interfaces. bippy bypasses this by "pretending" to be React devtools, giving you access to the fiber tree and other internals. Because some people just want to watch the world burn, I guess.
Rolldown is one step closer
Rolldown, the Rust-based next-gen JavaScript bundler currently under heavy development by Evan You’s new company VoidZero published v1.0.0-beta.1 after over a year of hard work. Promised (and proven by far in benchmarks) to be the fastest bundler to ever exist, Rolldown deserves a spot on this year’s hype train.
datalists are more powerful than you think
You may have heard of (and used) the datalist element, which offers suggested choices for its associated input field, but have you tried combining it with less common field types like color and date? If you haven’t and are now intrigued, Alexis Degryse got you covered.
Mixbox is a practical library for paint-like color mixing
If you’re a graphic designer, you might have been aware that colors in painting software like Adobe Photoshop or Procreate don’t act like real pigments. To put it simply, they don’t mix like how they would naturally: mixing blue and yellow in Photoshop, for example, won’t yield yellow. Mixbox is a library that manages to fix this issue. If you’re interested in the how, the authors have published a quite sophisticated paper.
Non-English Variable, Function, and Symbol Names in Code
It’s almost a rule (sometimes written, sometimes not) in software engineering to explicitly use (Amercian) English for everything code. In this article, however, Markus Oberlehner argues that it doesn’t always have to be the case. Give it a read and then, maybe, reach for your pitchfork.
Things we learned about LLMs in 2024
Now that 2024 is over and we’re all one step closer to our last breath, let’s take a look back at the world of Large Language Models, something created to drag us ten steps closer to our last breath. A blog by Simon Willison.
Ghostty Is Out
After some long development and intense private beta testing, Ghostty, the much-awaited modern terminal has finally been released to the public to critical acclaim. You can download and start using it, and if text-based configuration isn’t your cup of tea, someone even created a sleek UI to configure Ghostty to your needs.
Meta filling its social platforms with AI-generated bots
After the marvelous success of their metaverse concept (bold capital /S right here people), Meta announced that they will fill Facebook and Instagram with AI profiles—I wish I were kidding. These profiles will have fake biographies and avatars, share “content” generated by AI models, and interact with real users (if any). Like this.
The premise trap
What are the capabilities of AI in regards to programming and what should we use it for? This article argues that currently, AI runs into the premise trap, which is where “the fundamental assumptions baked into the first draft of the code aren't questioned until you've already spent far too long improving the implementation.”
Phan fact
A librocubicularist is someone who reads in bed. If you happen to 1. read Latin and 2. still be alive and kicking, this fancy word is a combination of liber (book, like “library” hello?) and cubiculum (bedroom, like “cubicle” hello?) The word is considered a coinage by American writer Christopher Morley in his novel The Haunted Bookshop, published in 1919.