In short
Podcast Episode Notes: What is a Tech Bubble Anyway? (News)
Episode Overview
- Podcast Title: The Changelog: Software Development, Open Source
- Episode Release Date: November 24, 2025
- Host: Jared
- Key Topics:
- Analysis of the current AI *maybe-bubble*
- Post-mortem of the Cloudflare outage
- Introduction of a new log viewer tool, "hl"
- Overview of the fantasy computer emulator, Continuum 93
- Reflection on productivity and the concept of "doing the thing"
---
Key Discussions
- Tech Bubble Analysis
- Cedric Chin's Insights:
- Claims that comparing today's AI situation to the dot-com bubble and 2008 financial crisis is overly simplistic.
- Highlights that the 2008 crisis was not a tech bubble; the dot-com bubble had unique aspects not replicated today.
- Emphasizes that the current landscape differs because many successful AI companies are private and not publicly traded.
- Argues that simply labeling the situation as a "bubble" is less important than understanding individual goals and actions.
- Additional Points:
- Cedric provides five actionable bullet points in his post, which are available via a linked newsletter.
- Cloudflare Outage Post-Mortem
- Overview:
- Matthew Prince (Cloudflare CEO) shares a detailed account of the service outage that impacted a significant portion of the internet.
- Key Takeaways:
- Murphy's Law was in effect during the outage.
- A misconception arose that the issues were due to a coordinated attack when it was a coincidence.
- The root cause was traced to a single line of Rust code with the method `Unwrap`, which is known to be risky in its assumptions.
- New Tool Introduction: "hl"
- Description:
- "hl" is a powerful log viewer designed to simplify the viewing and processing of log data.
- Features:
- Converts JSON and logs into human-readable formats.
- Offers quick access to large log files (e.g., opens a 2.3 GB log file in 1.1 seconds).
- Includes functionalities such as paging, filtering, and a follow mode for real-time streaming logs.
- Continuum 93 - Fantasy Computer Emulator
- Concept:
- An emulator for a fictional retro computer designed specifically for retro game programming in assembly code.
- Availability:
- Open-sourced and compatible with various platforms including Windows, Mac, Linux, and Raspberry Pi.
- Productivity Reflection: "Doing the Thing"
- Main Message:
- Acknowledges that simply planning tasks or discussing them does not equate to completing them.
- Key Quote:
- "Making a to-do list for the thing isn't doing the thing. Telling people you're going to do the thing isn't doing the thing."
---
Sponsored News
- Namespace:
- A service that optimizes GitHub Actions for faster builds, reducing long wait times by improving infrastructure and pricing predictability.
---
Classifieds Segment
- A new platform for sharing projects, events, and ideas with the community.
- Examples:
- Shareable code sessions at [aviator.co](http://aviator.co)
- Type-safe composable CSS at [styleframe.dev](http://styleframe.dev)
- AI requirement software at [storywi.se](http://storywi.se)
- Typescript 2D game engine at [excaliburjs.com](http://excaliburjs.com)
---
Conclusion
- Encouragement to subscribe to the Changelog newsletter for more insights and detailed links on various tech topics.
- Teasers for upcoming episodes featuring guest experts.
- Closing remarks on audience engagement and feedback.
---
Additional Notes
- The episode offers a wealth of insights into current tech trends and encourages proactive engagement with technology and productivity.
Written by AI. May contain mistakes. Listen to the episode to check what was said.
Transcript
Automatic transcript. May contain errors.0:05What up nerds? I'm Jared and this is Change Log News for the week of Monday, November 24th, 2025. turns out gen z has a weaker top password choice than every older generation except the 80 plus crowd don't get cocky boomers gen xers and millennials it's pretty rocky for us too according to a new report the most commonly leaked gen z password is one two three four five while the most commonly leaked password for the other age groups is one two three four five six This proves that you can be a winner and a loser at the same time. Okay, let's get into this week's news. What is a tech bubble anyway?
0:53Cedric Chin says, Comparisons of our current AI maybe bubble to the dot-com bubble and the 2008 GFC are limiting. Quote, First, the 2008 crisis wasn't a technology bubble. Second, the dot-com bubble was idiosyncratic for a number of reasons. The biggest one being that going public has since become an order of magnitude more difficult. It shouldn't come as a surprise that the hottest AI companies today are all private companies. Unavailable to the retail investor, that's different enough from 1999 that it should, I think, give you pause. End quote. Cedric also believes that calling this a bubble or not doesn't really matter.
1:33What really matters is, what should I do? And that, of course, depends on who you are and what you are trying to accomplish. But leaving the subjective aside, I'm linking up Cedric's post because he provides five bullet points that lay out a pattern that we can use to see what might come next. Unfortunately, each bullet point is too long to read here and not long enough to summarize in a useful way. So I'm not going to save you a click on this one. Find that link in the newsletter. The Cloudflare outage unwrapped. File this one under stories you most likely already know all about, but I'm telling you about anyways.
2:12Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince posted an excellently transparent post-mortem of their significant failures to deliver core network traffic last week, which brought much of the internet to its knees and took our AI agents with it. The details are fascinating. Murphy's Law was in full effect that day. Quote, Throwing us off and making us believe this might have been an attack was another apparent symptom we observed. Cloudflare's status page went down. The status page is hosted completely off Cloudflare's infrastructure with no dependencies on Cloudflare. While it turned out to be a coincidence, it led some of the team, diagnosing the issue, to believe that an attacker might be targeting both of our systems as well as our status page.
2:57End quote. The smoking gun at the end of this murder mystery was a single line of rust code which executes a single method, Unwrap. It just so happens that Unwrap, which assumes an operation succeeded and extracts data from its inner value, is considered by many rustations to be one of the language's few foot guns. Cloudflare Engineering shot themselves with it and the internet felt the pain. A high-performance log viewer for humans. HL is a fast, powerful log viewer slash processor that converts JSON and log thumped logs into a clear, human-readable format before we do our own parsing and analysis.
3:38It has paging built in, can handle streaming logs, lets you filter by fields, log levels or timestamps, includes a follow mode, and more. This isn't the first log viewer for humans on the block, but it does stand out from the crowd in their provided benchmark. Comparing HL to alternatives on a 2.3 gigabyte log file, HL opened the 6 million line log in about 1.1 seconds compared to HLogF, which did it in 8.7 seconds. Hewn Log, clocking in at about 79 seconds, and FB Log, which took 34 seconds. It's now time for sponsored news. Give your GitHub Actions a serious speed boost Your current GitHub Actions setup is doing the job, but it's also taking way longer than it should Every time you push code, you're watching the spinner on 10 plus minute builds, not fun Namespace flips the script by giving you infrastructure designed from the ground up for fast builds All you have to do is point your existing workflows at Namespace runners instead of the default GitHub hosted runners And instantly those 10 plus minute builds drop to minutes Behind the scenes, Namespace is handling incremental caching, parallel execution of independent jobs, and optimized Docker layer caching.
4:53The cost difference is also dramatic. Namespace's model gives you predictable pricing and they're built for teams that ship constantly. Instead of watching spinners, they're shipping features. Head to namespace.so. Stop watching spinners, get faster builds, and get more of your time back for real work. Once again, that's namespace.so. Continuum 93 This is kind of insane Quote Continuum 93 is an emulator of a classic retro computer That never existed before And is designed for retro games programming In native assembly code End quote Yes, I read that correctly This is a fantasy computer emulator Which means it has emulated a computer that never was But certainly could have been And perhaps should have been But again, it was not but now it is and my head hurts.
5:45Continuum 93 was recently open sourced, runs on Windows, Mac, Linux, all 64-bit Raspberry Pis and Steam Deck. It's also created by a guy whose online handle is Enthusiast Guy, which is so apropos, my headache went away. Things that aren't doing the thing. The only thing that is doing the thing is doing the thing. You already know that. I already know that, but sometimes we need a reminder, don't we? Well, here's your reminder. Quote, making a to-do list for the thing isn't doing the thing. Telling people you're going to do the thing isn't doing the thing. And fantasizing about all the adoration you'll receive once you do the thing isn't doing the thing.
6:27End quote. You get the point, but if you want to drill it in your head by reading even more things that aren't the thing, click through or stop listening to Changelog News and just go do the thing. Changelog News Classifieds. This is our new segment, creating opportunity to share your startup, passion project, opinion, big idea, upcoming event, etc. With your fellow 25 ,000 plus readers and 30 ,000 plus listeners, feedback is welcome. Here's this week's Classifieds. shareable clod code sessions at aviator.co styleframe type safe composable css at styleframe.dev ai requirement software that just works battle proven at storywise that's storywi.se and Excalibur your friendly typescript 2d game engine for the web at excaliburjs.com all those links are in your newsletter including an additional link that you can use to book your own classified ad 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 building a simple search engine that actually works 300 plus npm packages and 27 000 plus repos have been infected via a fake bun runtime and android can now airdrop to iphones get in on the newsletter at changelog.news last week on the pod spencer chang from the alive internet theory and internet sculptures joined me for an interview and practical ai's chris benson was on changelog and friends explaining to us what is and what is not a swarm.
8:13Find those in your feed and stay tuned because we have some great episodes coming up this week. On Wednesday, we are joined by Bill Buehler, a real-life Wikipedia expert to figuratively gaze upon the eighth wonder of the world. And on Friday, our old friend Lash Vickman joins us from the west coast of Sweden. Have yourself a great week, like, subscribe, and leave us a five-star review if you dig the show, and I'll talk to you again real soon.
8:43chanon
From the publisher
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.

