What up nerds? I'm Jared and this is changelog news for the week of Monday November 17th, 2025 as a longtime fan of all things Legend of Zelda. I am both excited and terrified of the upcoming live-action movie today Nintendo released the first official pictures of Link and Zelda my first impression Not bad, but is that Hyrule or Middle-Earth? Okay, let's get into this week's news Why is zig so cool? Nilo Stolte begins this article all about zig's cool parts with some seriously high praise Quote, I can't think of any other language in my 45 years long career that surprised me more than zig I can easily say that zig is not only a new programming language, but it's a totally new way to write programs in my opinion to say It's merely a language to replace C or C++. It's a huge understatement
End quote Nilo enumerates the features that he found most alluring in a language But he sticks to the simplest ones to keep the article approachable for him It all starts with a compiler quote probably the most incredible virtue of zig compiler is its ability to compile c code This associated with the ability to cross compile code to be run in another architecture different than the machine where it was originally compiled is already something Quite different and unique end quote he goes on to give a bird's-eye view of the zig language shows how to build programs and test modules Then provides a deeper view on how low-level programming can be done in zig a must read for the zig curious How to be creative without taking drugs George Mac who has done a lot to reify my thoughts around agency takes on creativity in his Classically distilled form quote the mistake people make is treating creativity like productivity They try to work harder and expect creativity to appear instead sprinkle in new inputs and watch new outputs appear end quote What follows are 12 easily acted upon inputs to help increase your creativity?
I'll share just one with you to wet your creative appetite number five increase time in the bathroom Aaron Sorkin the rider behind a Few good men and the West Wing takes six to eight hot showers per day when he's writing another hack is to be slightly over hydrated You may only have shower thoughts once per day, but you can increase your bathroom thoughts by drinking more water What if you don't need mcp at all devs have been experimenting with mcp servers long enough now to start forming opinions and conclusions about them Mario Zeckner shares his findings quote after months of a gentic coding frenzy Twitter is still ablaze With discussions about mcp servers. I previously did some very light benchmarking to see if bash tools or mcp servers are better suited for a specific task The TLDR both can be efficient if you take care end quote Mario lists a few of the mcp downsides like they're often inefficient for a specific task They're hard to extend and they aren't composable quote. I'm a simple boy So I like simple things agents can run bash and write code well bash and code are composable So what's simpler than having your agent just invoke see light tools and write code this is nothing new We've all been doing this since the beginning
I just like to convince you that in many situations you don't need or even want an mcp server end quote follow the link in the Newsletter if you're ready willing and able to be convinced it's now time for sponsor news Buildkit makes Docker builds faster But how depot just published a comprehensive tear down of build kit the engine that powers every Docker build that you run despite millions of developers Relying on it daily build kit has remained surprisingly undocumented depot steam spent years reverse engineering it and now they're sharing what they learned The key insight build kit is essentially a compiler for containers It converts your Docker file into an intermediate representation called an LLB or low level build Which is a directed a cyclic graph that models dependencies between build steps this enables parallel execution of independent stages and smarter layer caching That doesn't invalidate your entire build when one thing changes this post from Kyle covers front ends back ends and every LLB operation type They even built a free Docker file explorer that visualizes your Docker file as LLB operations in real time This is useful for understanding exactly what your build is doing under the hood read the full breakdown at depot.dev or follow the directly in the newsletter
On alchemy and ai art Josh Collins worth compares creating ai art to mid evil alchemists attempt to transmute lead into goal Quote the materials are different But the idea is the same if the owners of AI can bypass the intensive process of procuring art or music or video or any other sort of creative content Then they can in a way create their own gold except it won't work that way and quote so far This is correct He goes on quote the public reaction to ai-generated art of every kind might have been aw or joy at first But the longer time goes on and the more of this newly cheap materials flood the figurative market the more the reaction becomes decidedly negative The output of generative AI is novel to be sure and it can't even be enjoyable at times But what it isn't any longer is valuable in quote Josh concludes that generative AI is incapable of creating figurative gold because gold is rare and difficult to come by And most of its value is due to that rarity I agree with his premise, but Josh also says this quote an ever-growing segment of the population can now sniff out ai art It's obvious when you know what to look for it sticks out
It's glaring it's immediately off putting people actively avoid it when they can and instantly devalue everything associated with it End quote he's right as long as and only as long as we humans can still easily sniff out ai art That's true today, but I fear it's a truth that teeters on a spinning plate a top-along stick balanced on a clown's finger And no that sentence was not a generated even though it was kind of lame AirPods liberated from apples ecosystem LibrePods is a program that unlocks apples exclusive airPods features for Android and Linux systems quote get access to noise control modes adaptive transparency ear detection Hearing aid customized transparency mode Battery status and more all the premium features you paid for but Apple locked to their ecosystem and quote pretty cool stuff But download or beware as of now there's a bug in Android's bluetooth stack that requires you to have rooted the device to get it all working I'm sure you can manage that But I'm not sure that you want to manage that if and when Google fixes the bug LibrePods will be much more approachable to your average Android user Change log news classifieds. This is a new and experimental segment creating opportunity to share your startup passion project opinion big idea upcoming event
Etc with your fellow 25,000 readers and 30,000 listeners feedback welcome We have two classifieds for you in our inaugural batch number one web tools weekly a newsletter for web developers at webtools weekly calm And number two media masher in open source browser based video editor you can find at masher media Both those links are in your newsletter where you'll also find another link to book your own classified out That's the news for now But go and subscribe to the change log newsletter for the full scoop of links worth clicking on such as the fate of small open source fully automatic censorship removal for language models and I think nobody wants AI and Firefox Mozilla yet in on newsletter at change log.news Last week on the pod prolific software blogger Sean Geddicki on an episode called do repeat yourself and a change log news director's commentary was Adam and myself titled retreat to attack find those in your feed and stay tuned for what's coming up this week because on Wednesday I'm joined by Spencer Chang creator of the alive Internet theory and on Friday Chris Benson from Practical AI stops by to tell us all about his work
Orchestrating fleets of autonomous drones have a great week Like subscribe and five-star review us if you take the show and I'll talk to you again real soon