Happy September Bizarro Heads!

This is a very special issue because I did a very special thing recently - I built my first ever WordPress plugin using ChatGPT! After stumbling across one-too-many YouTube videos and articles claiming you can use GPT to build a plugin in "only minutes," I decided to test it out for myself. The summary is below, but if you’re at all remotely interested in doing it too, then definitely check out my full write up of the process.

With that said, let’s get into it.

• 👨‍💻🔌 How I Used ChatGPT to Build My First WordPress Plugin

• 🏗️💾 3 Harvard Dropouts Have Designed a Game-Changing AI Chip

• 📜💻 IEEE Spectrum Releases Annual List of the Top Programming Languages

📰 From the Newsroom

👨‍💻🔌 How I Used ChatGPT to Build My First WordPress Plugin

Building a plugin for the first time with no formal development experience would have probably taken months before tools like ChatGPT came on the scene. Even with ChatGPT, it still took me a long time. Maybe not months, but also not “only a few minutes” as so many YouTube videos proclaim. While it’s tough to really narrow this down to only three bullet point takeaways, here are some things that stood out:

• From the four stages of knowledge: known knowns, known unknowns, unknown knowns, and unknown unknowns, the last one is the most abundant when doing a project like this. There is so much to learn, and as a first timer, I had no clue about so many important details.

• Unless you tell it otherwise, which is difficult to do when you simply don’t know, ChatGPT will give you what I call “the most minimum viable code.” Basically, it’s code that is aimed at achieving the functionality you want, but it ignores everything else. Coding standards don’t matter and neither do best practices.

• ChatGPT’s ability to code is about as good as its ability to write - meaning, it’s not that great. It gives you some dough to work with, but you still need to knead the dough quite a bit if you want some decent bread out of it. It also makes a lot of mistakes and often times you have to catch those mistakes yourself - which can be challenging, though not impossible.

Perhaps the most surprising thing I learned is that going from zero to functional plugin is a lot faster than going from functional plugin to well coded plugin (that you can submit to the WordPress repository). So if you’re thinking about doing this just for yourself, then you can probably crank something out in a few days. Of course it depends on your existing skill level, motivation, and the complexity of the plugin, but regardless, I encourage you to try it. Also, please join me in the comments at the bottom of the post. I’d love to get your feedback.

🏗️💾 3 Harvard Dropouts Have Designed a Game-Changing AI Chip

While Nvidia is still the undisputed king of processing chips, it’s been steadily losing market share to some of its competitors like Intel and AMD. But those aren’t the only threats to its dominance. Ambitious startups are also gunning for a slice of the processor pie. One of the more interesting ones is called Etched.

• Founded by three Harvard dropouts, Etched has developed Sohu - an AI chip laser-focused on running transformer models, the backbone of today's generative AI revolution.

• In a jaw-dropping claim, Etched boasts that just eight of their Sohu chips could replace a staggering 160 of Nvidia's Hopper GPUs for the same task, potentially reshaping the entire AI hardware landscape.

• With $120 million in fresh funding from tech heavyweights like PayPal's Peter Thiel, Etched is racing to market, already securing multi-million dollar contracts for their first production run later this year.

Some cautious observers have pointed out that if a sudden shift in AI technology renders transformers obsolete, that Etched's hyper-specialized chips could become nothing more than expensive paperweights. Personally, I think that viewpoint is a bit too risk averse. While it could happen, I believe it’s more likely that Etched is going to become a serious industry disrupter when their Sohu chips actually go to market. What do you think?

📜💻 IEEE Spectrum Releases Annual List of the Top Programming Languages

The award-winning technology magazine, IEEE Spectrum, has recently released their annual list of the top programming languages of 2024. They organized the rankings into three categories. The first is geared towards the typical IEEE reader. The second seeks to identify languages that feel the most relevant and exciting to the broader tech community. And the final one measures what employers are looking for.

• Python dominated all three categories, coming in at the top in the first two, and in second place in the “jobs / what employers want” ranking.

• TypeScript, a superset of JavaScript with static typing, has climbed the ranks rapidly, especially in the third category, where it jumped from 11th to 4th place.

• Rust, a memory-safe alternative to C and C++, has also gained traction, boosted by cybersecurity concerns and even a nod from the White House.

With new languages like Apex and Solidity making their first appearances on the list while other languages like Forth have dropped off, it's clear that the programming world is in constant flux. Yet amidst these changes, you still have veterans like Fortran and Cobol - which are about 65 years old - staying on the list. Overall, the rankings are an interesting snapshot in time of the current programming landscape.

⛓️ Ten Must See Links of the Month

• A US man has been sentenced to 81 months in jail for faking his own death by hacking government systems and officially marking himself as deceased.

• Git is one of the most widely used collaboration tools in software development but many developers only have a surface-level appreciation of all that Git has to offer. Check out these top ten tips to level up your Git game.

• A professional writer with no technical background shares a personal story of how he got into coding in his 50s and what it taught him about the modern world.

• North Korean hackers have been publishing malicious packages to the NPM registry, indicating coordinated efforts to target developers.

• Last Friday, Brazil's highest court mandated an immediate nationwide suspension of the X platform following an extended legal dispute with Elon Musk.

• Over half a billion blogs are set to be migrated from Tumblr to WordPress.com in the coming days. According to the parent company’s press release, it’s going to be “one of the largest technical migrations in internet history.”

• The U.S. government’s Federal Trade Commission announced that it will start combating fake online reviews and testimonials by prohibiting them and punishing perpetrators with civil penalties.

• 📽️🎞️ In this 7 minute video, business storyteller Peace Itimi takes you inside Nigeria’s booming tech scene, where she highlights the trailblazing entrepreneurs and startups reshaping Nigeria's economy through innovation and ambition.

• “Gutenberg is UI hell. Gutenberg is incredibly hostile, it is a vicious attack on humanity, and cruel to users of WordPress.” - One of over 340 opinions about the WordPress block editor gathered by my colleague to analyze what people really think about it.

• If you’ve ever toyed with the idea of creating your own NPM package but you weren’t exactly sure how to go about it, check out this very thorough guide from Matt Pocock, founder of Total TypeScript.

🎤 It’s How They Said It

"Coding is just kind of like the language that we talk to computers. It's not necessarily the skill in and of itself. The skill in and of itself is like, how do I innovate? How do I go build something that's interesting for my end users to use?…Being a developer in 2025 may be different than what it was as a developer in 2020."

– Matt Garman, CEO of AWS (Amazon Web Services)

🧮 The Numbers Game

• 1,200 Klarna employees lost their jobs in the past year, as the Swedish buy-now, pay-later firm replaced a significant part of its workforce with AI. The company anticipates additional layoffs that will further decrease its workforce by nearly 2,000 positions.

• About 2,600,000,000 people around the world do not use the internet. Part of that number has to do with sheer lack of access. Roughly 5% of the Earth’s population lives in places that don’t even have a mobile network. Another part of it has to do with money. An entry-level mobile plan that includes internet costs about 9% of the average income in a low-income nation. That’s 20 times more than in high-income nations.

• 200,000,000 people use ChatGPT on a weekly basis, according to an announcement by OpenAI last week. This is double the amount of users they had last year in November. In addition, OpenAI revealed that 92% of Fortune 500 companies are using its products, and since the release of GPT-4o mini in July, usage of its automated API has doubled as well.

⚒️ Tools and Resources

Cursor: This AI-powered coding tool features an intelligent code editor with predictive autocomplete, multi-line suggestions, and automatic error correction. There’s also an integrated AI chat that can answer questions about your codebase, generate new code, and provide up-to-date programming information. In short, using Cursor will significantly boost your coding speed and efficiency.

https://www.cursor.com/

NodeJS Toolbox: This comprehensive resource categorizes and lists actively maintained and popular libraries within the Node.js ecosystem. It offers a structured overview of open-source tools available for various tasks, from authentication and testing to database management and web scraping. It’s also on GitHub and welcomes contributions.

https://nodejstoolbox.com/

🖼️ What Am I Looking At?

Every six months, venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz takes a close look at user data to rank the top 50 AI-first web products (by unique monthly visits) and the top 50 AI-first mobile apps (by monthly active users). Compared to their previous report in March, nearly 30% of the companies on the latest list are new.

I’ll be honest here: the list surprised me to some extent. Although I was expecting ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity to all rank highly (which they do), I had never even heard of character.ai or JanitorAI before - yet they are in the top ten. I’m also a big fan of PIXLR and use it regularly, but I didn’t think it would be on the list.

What about you? Are you surprised by any of these? Let me know in the comments.

💬 What’s the Word?

"Desenrascançao" (Portuguese) is the ability to improvise a solution to a problem using whatever resources are available. This word really resonates at the moment because I definitely feel like I had to use some desenrascançao to make it through the process of building my first plugin. But I think it’s naturally something that almost every developer possesses to some degree.

📊 Results of Last Month’s Polls

For those of you who are new here and didn’t catch the last issue, this was about how scientists are using nanoparticles to control mice brains.

It seems like the results were fairly evenly split with the slight edge going to negative, which is what I also leaned towards. But I’m sure that some good might come of it as well.

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– Martin