Why Did Anthropic Buy Bun?

Welcome to Syntax. We got a potluck episode for you today, which is where you bring the questions, we bring the answers. Today, we Scott really good questions on why did anthropic buy BUN? What UI are we using for git? You know, are you using in the terminal? Are you using lazy Git? Are you using the Versus Node GUI? Are GUIs better than the terminal? We're gonna talk about that. Do all web experiences need to be accessible? Somebody was saying, like, I love accessibility, but I I wanna I'm building these, like, crazy experiments, and and not everything is a 100% accessible.

Should I be putting this stuff out there? Another question on how do I block malicious Wes? So, like, bad ASNs. What is an ASN? Well, how JS that different from IP addresses? Really good questions. Keep your questions coming, by the way. Go to syntax.fm.

There's a button that says potluck. Ask us your question, and we'll answer on a future Node, but let's get on into it.

First question from Brett Pirie. Why did Anthropic buy BUN? So if you didn't hear the news, couple weeks ago, Anthropic bought BUN. BUN, the JavaScript runtime. Why would they do that when they can just ask Claude to make a run JavaScript runtime? But this was this JS a pretty interesting move. And the reason that they did this was because the Claude Node SDK runs on BUN, and they want to be able to ship the Claude Code, not gonna say binary, but, like, the app itself, and they want to ship it ideally with the JavaScript runtime. I'm pretty sure that's what they do right now as well. And in order to make that thing as small and as fast as possible and, I'm assuming, get the features in that they they necessarily need, it's great to to bring BUN under their wing and and have them continue developing that. Yeah. It's it was it was interesting to me because it's like BUN is such a unique

case where, everything about BUN feels just a different approach than than, like, whether that is the fact that it's written with Zig or the fact that, they're unapologetically adding features, that JavaScript, Node. Js. Non standard APIs. Yeah. Non standard APIs just because they should be there. I personally I do like using BUN. There are enough mysterious times when I'm using BUN where something isn't working quite right, and I have to go back. But if I'm throwing up a a script here and there, I'm using Pnpm every time.

And I I do feel like, that plays well into their entire beyond the fact that they they use it. I think it plays well into them wanting to be the authority on vibe coding there. Right? Building scripts, building kinds of stuff. It bun is so much less effort to get set up with than these other ones. There's sort of, like, another aspect to this that is probably gonna happen is that when you ask ChatJPT

or or Claude what is it? Just called Claude, their their chat apps. When you ask them to do a lot of stuff, they're literally just running Python scripts, behind the scenes. You know? The AI is just running code and and spitting out the result for you. So if that can be as fast as possible or they can make this amazing little nucleus that you can just throw code into and and have it spit out exactly what you Node. That's probably another use case. Like, there's the, obviously, the cloud code use case where it runs on your machine, but some sort of compute that's running somewhere is is probably the other use case that it will do calculations.

It will do actually running code for the LLM when it's needed.

Yeah. It's it's interesting, nonetheless. You know, I I'm not surprised that someone bought BUN, honestly.

I I don't know if I would have predicted anthropic, but I I I do think it's fascinating.

We had predicted that BUN would put its own hosting competitor together. And, like, that like, the other player in this space is Dino. Dino. Right? And and both of these first came at, like, at Node being, like, we're gonna be a better node.

And the uptake has been good, but, like, not amazing. I think most people are just fine with Node.

So there's this other use case. It's like, oh, well, maybe we can have, like, hosting, or maybe we can have, like, a like, an app that we run. And and those things haven't haven't really picked up for Deno either.

So they're probably looking at it being like, we probably are not gonna, like, crush Vercel or AWS or anything like this.

So our other option to, like obviously, Bun is has been VC funded, and they need to get their money back at some point. The other option is to, like, sell to a larger company who has the cash,

to help them out. Yeah. You know what? I wonder about Dino in all of this. Like, this just seems like crazy to say given how much of a change Dino was when it was first dropped.

But do you think Dino is too much in the mushy middle between Bun or Node. Js to really stand out? Right? Because Deno question.

Now feels like Bun is kind of the the hyper performant. It is the YOLO, just add SQLite to the thing, you know, kinda thing, where where Deno feels so much more measured and format so much more like Node. Js two point o that maybe it's not

poised to break out as much. I think the the reason why BUN got so popular was because they did nonstandard stuff. And if you're going to use something that's not Node, I think a lot of people sort of looked at that and was like, well, I'm gonna use the thing that has all these, like, weird APIs built in. So, like, if if you're not sure, what we're talking about is, like, bun shipped, like, SQL, database adapter built in. Right? Now Node Node has that as well. They also are, like, competing with Vite in being like a bundler, but then they also have, like, a router. And they can also just import HTML and, like, return it, and it will will serve it up. And, like, that's that's kind of cool. Those are kind of nice APIs for especially for things that are need to get up and running very quickly, which often is these tiny little vibe coded apps.

So I don't know. I don't know what the process is. I was hoping that Deno would go into the space of, like, Wes GPU because, like, so much of this whole data science, ML, AI world is all written in Python scripts. And and a lot of that is because they had some of the really early libraries like PyTorch.

But, also, a lot of it is because, like, this stuff comes out of academia, and and academics love them some Python.

So I was kinda hoping that, like, Deno would go, like, maybe in the model training world with all this GPU stuff. They just released support for for WebGPU in Deno.

So I don't know what the what the move is there. The the whole, like, better standards thing for Deno, unfortunately, is not working out, because they they released JSR, which is the NPM competitor.

That didn't really work all that well. You know? They had several other sort of forays into this this world, but it's just so hard to beat the monolith that is Node.

Yeah. It's actually it's it is it's we're in an interesting situation.

Alright. Next question here from git commit struggler. What do you use to commit your changes on your editor? I have a weird struggle where I am using Vercel terminal to run my commands, but I always use the internal editor to run my git commands, git commit, git push, etcetera.

I am looking for a better way that feels natural. Hey.

I do this as well. I run all of my terminal commands on ghosty, on my terminal, Vercel. Like, no matter what it is, I I'm running all my processes starting up there. I code in my editor, but then I do use my editor and usually just straight up the editor's UI for all Git operations.

Why? I like clicking the button that says track all files, and I like maybe, like, clicking and seeing the diff on the files and kind of browsing it that way. And that was one of the reasons why I didn't move to the Zed editor for a long time because their Git tools weren't there. But Zed actually JS really good, Git diff tools, and and you you can do everything that I was doing in Versus Node before. So me, I'm still using that. And and Versus Code even has, like, using AI to generate commit titles and stuff like that directly in the editor. There there's, like, a lot of nice little features that you can have via the UI Mhmm. That I just prefer to do it that way. Now there is other means to do this.

There was what is that Git? Like, different UIs here. You look it up. I'll I'll tell you Wes I'm at right now because, like, forever, I've been, like, a Git in the CLI guy, and everybody for years has been like, you gotta use a GUI. You gotta use a GUI. And I've been I switched over mostly to using the one that's built into Versus Node, cursor, whatever.

And it's honestly, it's better. Like, having a GUI where you can literally click on and and, like, stage the files so you can you can click on them and see the diffs, it's honestly better for for that. Whether you like the AI commit messages or or not Yeah. I find that to be really, really nice. I'll still, every now and then, use I I I'm so hard Node in the terminal. If I need to do anything, like change an origin or list out all of those things, I'll just write back to it. But the simple adding, committing, pushing, those big three are are happening mostly in my editor these days. And, also, I wanna move a lot of my terminal usage into the editor as well. I just Sanity.

Can't. Can't do it. I just it feels I don't know what it is, but it's just it doesn't feel good. I like the separate terminal.

Well, I mean, that does it might not feel good because did you see that whole drama about the Versus Node terminal over the past? Yeah. Every 50 characters, they're delaying it, what, five milliseconds? Yeah. Yeah. So I which is funny. So by the time you're hearing this, this is old news. Right? This happened in the last year, because we're recording this ahead of time. But there was, like, a race condition that when you pasted text into the term, they would be asleep because of Wes something on Windows, apparently. And because of that, if you were to paste a lot of text into the terminal, it would just take forever.

Now what's Sanity, people are really ragging on this, and I understand why.

But this is a problem that only rears its head in a vibe Node world where we're pasting a ton of stuff into the term. Right? Like, in the past, how how often were you ever pasting in 20 line you know, 30 ESLint, 40 lines in of code into your terminal? You were never doing that ever. No. Yeah. Very rarely ever doing those things because,

like, at most, a curl command that's several 100 characters.

Yeah. Right? Yeah. So very funny. The the thing that I was thinking of was lazy git. Lazy git, which comes on Omarchy as well as it's like a it's a TUI, a terminal UI for git. And I I'm gonna be honest. I think lazy git, people really seem to love, but to me, this is definitely, like, a weaker experience than what I get out of Versus Node or whatever. And I think it's nice if you're the person who likes the terminal UI, but, ultimately, the learning curve was pretty high on this overall. But it is a terminal based UI if you want kind of to ride that line. Man, I love the terminal, but I I do not support trying to everybody trying to make a UI

for absolutely everything in the terminal, man. You know what is good at making UIs? HTML and CSS or whatever native UI. You know? If you wanna put a button somewhere, you wanna click it, you wanna be able to select text by word by word,

That's that's I wanna be able to resize the the window without everything kind of getting all angry at me all the time.

That's fine. Yeah. Yeah. Some of these these terminal UIs are great, and and I love them for little utility tools, but some stuff is better as a GUI.

Even even the Node folks just released a a GUI for that because they realized, yeah, the terminal is the Bos. But if you want, like, normies and regular people to use your software,

you gotta give them a button. Yes. Yeah. Just Wes a button. Just one button. Yeah.

Frenchie says, I would like to make YouTube videos for code tutorials. I was wondering if you could give us your setup, tools, and software to make good videos with code at an affordable price, if possible. Maybe it's more Randy's expertise right now, but when you guys were already doing a good job, any tips would be appreciated. Yes. What are your tips, Scott?

Oh, yeah. My tips.

So I I think a lot of it will come down to beyond just the software that you're using. The fundamentals here are truly making sure the code is big enough to read, making sure that your windows are are organized that, like, it is pleasant to watch, that you're not making people struggle for it. Mhmm. Making sure that your audio sounds good. You can get a decent Shure microphone that's USB powered for a 150 that's gonna sound endlessly better than what so many people try to use. You got that. You have your code nice and clear, and then you cut out the dead space with editing and stuff like that will get you way further than really, like, futzing around the edges.

So as far as, like, recording goes, if you want the easiest possible setup, I I still think screen something like ScreenFlow is the easiest possible setup because it includes, you can record everything.

You know, you can record any screens or or video that you want, audio, and then edit it right in there. I personally use DaVinci Resolve. It is free.

It is a professional linear editing software, but it it is very Vercel, and it is very free.

So if you don't wanna spend any money and you don't mind a bit of a learning curve and you you can gain a skill, DaVinci Resolve is fantastic. Now if you want my pro setup, the pro setup is to record all of your sources some way. People use OBS. It's a pain. I made my own app, v Framer, that I'll I'll post here. It's not available, but it will be by the time you're hearing this, that records all individual sources. My pro setup is to record all your sources. You drop them into an app called Recut.

Recut then finds all of the blank space where you're not talking, and it makes a cut. You can then go right from Recut to DaVinci Resolve. So I can do a first pass edit with Recut to say, hey. Remove all of the blank space, maybe the umms, the ahs, whatever. Makes it really nice and easy for many layers at once. And then you say from recut Scott to DaVinci, that sends it to DaVinci, and then I just finish it off there where I do all my fit and finish and polish there. So that is my my current flow is v framer to recut to DaVinci.

Yeah.

Recording sources and not screens is something that has been doable in the last, I don't know, couple Yarn, and it's it's a game changer because what I have done previously is you just try to have all of your windows open, and then what I'll duplicate the tracks, and then I'll just cut each one. I'll have Node track terminal, one track for code, one track for the browser. And that's great because Yes.

If you can record the app, if you tab away or you bring over something over top of it, you don't have to show that. And and that's that's sometimes very frustrating when people tab away, and you have to try scrub the video back Right. Where they were or if something is over top of of them or or the really annoying one is, like, when people's face is over top of the part that you want.

Mhmm. Mhmm. Also, think about captions. That's something as well as I try not to put important code in the bottom, like, maybe 20% of it because people who have captions on lots of people everybody watches with captions now. It just covers over top of the the important bits. I'm actually thinking about my course platform JS just moving the captions off the video.

Div underneath the the video player. Wouldn't that that seems like a better idea. I'm probably gonna do that. Yeah. I I I will say what's I gotta get you VFramer because you can just grab as many sources as you want, whatever the sources are. You just put those out as MKV. There's no processing time.

And I I did my last one of my last videos with it, and it was like you said. You get to then focus on the, when you're trying to record your screen, you're you're doing your your performance, you're speaking, you're talking, you're Node, while trying to manage and move around the windows that a way that makes sense instead of, like, focusing on what you're doing and then assembling it later. So recording the sources, I think, is, like you mentioned, a huge boon. Is boon a good thing or a bad thing? I think it's a good thing. Yeah. Okay. It's it's really good. And, like, audio wise as well,

Scott mentioned this as Wes. Get a decent mic. Figure out how to how to, like, make it work well. Put a freaking t shirt under your keyboard or whatever. Most annoying thing is when you somebody has vibrations in it. Like, understand how sound works, but if you're banging away on your keyboard, not like like mechanical keyboard sounds. A lot of people like that, but they're just like Yeah. You know? Like, just coming into the microphone, that is so obnoxious to hear. And as well as, like, if if you hear people's, like, mouth sounds or whatever Oh, mouth sounds. Though or the like, when they're you're breathing in every single time, those That's me. Are Yeah. I get those. And s's. All of that stuff can be taken out with software or hardware. But don't don't go down the rabbit hole too much of just hardware, software learning video editing as well. Focus on, like, making a good video first. Like, the content is really what matters at the end of the day. Some of my stew like, worst quality videos ever have been been, like, our highest views, and then some of the stuff we spend forever on get no views. So it's it's all about the content. Right?

Yeah. Content and then the eighty twenty stuff, like audio that's not gonna make your

viewers turn away. Yeah. Exactly. Get that stuff just, like, dialed in and then and also make it easy as well so that you could just hit record and go. You know? It's not like, oh, I'm gonna spend some time. Like, I know people that have separate rooms for recording or they have to book a conference room. Oh, okay. Make content if it's that if there's that many hurdles. I'm gonna throw out a mic recommendation here. We just got this mic for Courtney, and it's a Shure MV seven plus. It has USB

c into the microphone, but it also has a like, it has a compressor in the mic. It has a pop filter. It has, like, digital d onboard DSP.

It has all kinds of stuff. So that way, it, like, has, like, gating and and and those types of things. So you'll sound good. Just plug it in USB. Yeah. This microphone is effortly easy. So My wife is sitting outside my door right now and listening to me. She says, she texted me, not you complaining about breathing sounds. Tell them about how you'd had to get a tent when you went camping. Yeah. I went camping. My poor sister has asthma, so she would sit in front of the campfire and have, like, asthma attacks. Oh, no. And then I would get so mad at her for breathing because I cannot stand the sound of someone breathing makes me want to go batty.

That's me for eating in in all the same thing. The mouth sounds when people are eating. Oh. It just oh, it, like, gives me the

Sounds of life.

Yeah.

Sir Jason Yamel three says, how do I go about a disagreement with another developer who's been at the company longer than me? My coworker crashed three of our apps because they did a big database production without telling me and without testing it. They deleted my feature branches, changed deploy settings, which caused more prod downtime. They can they cannot take feedback.

They seem to just do whatever because they've been there so long, and we can't come to an agreement on change of jurisdiction or communication.

They get angry and snippy whenever I bring up major issues like this, and it turns into a back and forth matter of the cause. Oof. That sounds awful.

First of all, you probably shouldn't be in a situation where somebody else can just nuke your entire thing. So I guess, ideally, you'd have have, like, a local implementation of something like that. What do you think, Scott? Like, somebody is this awful. I don't know. I've never never worked with awful people like this.

Yeah. That it is tough. I've never worked with somebody this awful.

But there has to be some kind of so managerally, there has to be some kind of process in place where this isn't just a, like, fighting back and forth kind of thing. Like, oh, don't do that. Do this. Do that. Like, you there needs to be some process in place where you work, whether that's from top down or whether that's from something you're getting agreement upon from your boss. So that way, when these things happen, you have assigned a point at that says you can't do that.

You're not allowed to do that. And then if they're breaching that, then it becomes an on them type of thing. But if this is just kind of ethereal and like, oh, we're just kind of just throwing code at the wall here and there, and, oops, they deleted my thing, then, yes, it sucks, but your amount of actual control over the situation becomes way more immature and way more, like, less process based. So I would push for some kind of actual structure here, whether that is from above. I would talk to their manager and let them know this has been happening and document these things.

Yeah. The one thing that I think always comes in handy in these situations is when they happen, document them very clearly.

And when you speak to your manager, when you speak to somebody, the best advice I got was, like, be honest.

Don't pull any punches.

Be honest. This is how it is. This is how it's been going. These are the things that have happened, and it's not acceptable to me. Like, what what's the path forward here? But if you're just like, it's been bad. This person's been a jerk to me, then the resolution's just not going to happen. There's a pretty clear

way forward here is the fact that they crashed the app three times and caused Yeah.

Almost, like, what is like, it's hurting the business. Right? I think you just go forward and be like, look. We need to put processes in place so that this does not happen again and that we don't we don't have even more expensive loss of data or something like this. It's it's pretty you go whoever is his manager be like, look. I'm trying to fig to make it so that we don't have this anymore.

We don't crash our apps and have prod going downtime and and me wasting a week of my work. This is what I would like to implement, and I can't get this guy to come on board. So how do we fix this?

Yeah. Right. And if you want to see all of the errors in your application, you'll want to check out Sentry at sentry.io/syntax.

You don't want a production application out there that, well, you have no visibility into in case something is blowing up, and you might not even know it. So head on over to century.io/syntax.

Again, we've been using this tool for a long time, and it totally rules. Alright.

Alright. Next question here from Sarah. I'm an experienced web dev specializing in design systems and accessibility for the last six ish years. I feel like I've been typecast as an accessibility engineer, and I'm struggling with an identity crisis on how to portray myself on my personal website.

Lately, I've developed a strong passion for more experimental and creative coding projects. I'd love to showcase this side of my work, WebGL, game dev interactive art, generative projects on my personal site and attract new opportunities to break out of my role that I find myself stuck in. The problem is creative coding often includes visual experimental projects that are not and sometimes cannot be easily 100% accessible. My professional work, however, is deeply rooted in promoting and implementing accessible web experiences.

My question is, am I fundamentally jeopardizing my professional reputation in design systems by pursuing and sharing inaccessible creative projects? How can I showcase my wider skill set and passion for experimental coding without undermining my credibility I've built as an accessibility expert? You know, this one, is so fascinating to me. I think it's all in how you package it. I think if you're labeling things like this is a creative exploration, this is a creative project, I don't think people are expecting a a WebGL visualizer to be accessible to the blind folks, you know, vision impaired folks. Right? That's actually something that bothers me with, some Scott all all accessibility folks, but some accessibility folks will look at any experience and be like, oh, you made a you made a music player? Well, what about hearing impaired folks? They can't use it. Yeah. You hate blind people? Yeah. Yeah. Like so, like, that drives me nuts. Not every experience can be the exact same for all abled or disabled people. Just straight up. It can't be. So I think it's all about how you package those explorations and works. And by all means, I think this is a cool avenue for you, and I think you should, lean into it. But just label your stuff. Say this is accessibility work. This is creative coding. This is that. This is this. And and just make that very clear. I don't think if you put a creative coding project and and label it JS, like, this is a creative exploration or whatever on your site, I don't think anybody's gonna care about that. I think that is a a kickass way to get a new job because I'll tell you Yeah. I'll tell you what. As someone who's hired several people, you know what the Slack room looks like when people are going through resumes?

Check out this sick website. That's all it is is if there somebody's portfolio has a list of really cool things or check out this tweet of somebody that built this wild thing.

And, also, I think the accessibility stuff can be, like, a bit of a Trojan horse into the company because you can, like, win them over with all the interactive, all the the artistic, all of the next level JavaScript stuff you've been building, and then, bam, guess what? Also care about accessibility once you you get into the the company. So I don't think I think I think absolutely go for it. This is, like, a great way to expand your career, especially right now. We said it on our predictions.

2026 is the year of WebGL. It's a year of three d. Everybody is going to care a lot more about the design and the, like, wow experience of a website

because every single website currently looks exactly the same, and we're all sick of it. Yeah. Right. Just think about, like, the Lando Norris Sanity, people saying that's not accessible. That's like an art piece. That, Shopify's thing, that's an art piece. And, like, those types of experiences are so stinking cool. And if you can get in on some of that territory right now, I think it's a great time to do so. By the way, Scott, I can hear you typing. Your your JS going into your microphone. You need Node I'm trying to shock mount. I'm trying to get this the it's actually my microphone's way over here on a shock mount. My computer's right here. I think it's just the clickies are too close to where the microphone Oh, I see. I I need to move it over here a little bit more. I was talking to Cillian who works on

Polypane. That's a browser for web development. It was amazing if you want to check out building responsive and accessible and everything.

But, I tweeted something out about, like you know, like, if you look at the Chrome DevTools, if you put, like, white text on a red background, it'll be like, that's not accessible. And you're just, like, looking at it being like, that's extremely easy to read. Why are these accessibility contrasts algorithms so crappy? You know? And it turns out we talked to Jen Simmons from Apple JS well. We talked about the color contrast function, why that's not going on. He was telling me this whole world of there's, like, this new color contrast algorithm that's being worked on that is way more I I don't wanna say permissible, but it's, like, it's better. You know? It's like you look at something where, like, I can read that. I think most people could read that. It's a lot better. But he was telling me about all the, like, drama going on in the accessibility world as to if this is good or Scott, and it's it's cool. So I'll I'll tell you right now is, like, the the rules are still like, the color contrast stuff is still still sucks, and a lot of people still have to follow those because they their company will get sued. But, hopefully, soon, we will have better algorithms for calculating color contrast.

There's a really good blog post from Lea Veru on this talking all about, some of these different strategies, but also outlining, how to be using modern CSS. And it's funny. I actually took some of her work, and, I'll I'll share my code as well. I took some of her work and, like, reapplied that with some clamps and some light dark functions and have what I think is a pretty dang good, like, 90% of the time, auto color contrast CSS Wes you can just do, like, auto contrast on this. And it works with transparent backgrounds.

It works with any colors. And, I'll I'll share the the code for this thing, but, like, I think it we're getting closer to being able to, like I I think that's, like, one of the big things, especially with with automatic color contrasting in the browser JS that, like, you're not gonna be able to usually apply a blanket function right now that just takes care of all situations.

But if you can if you can fix 99 of situations and then, like, do the rest by hand, that gets you a law a decent way. Yeah. Killian actually has a website, colorcontrast.app,

and there's, like, three levels of color contrast. Right? There's w c two. Mhmm. And you can you either have to be AA or AAA compliant.

And those are the ones that are like, oh, you can't put white on red button. That's that's annoying. And the new one, which is is not a standard yet, but it's what they're working on, JS called the APCA.

Mhmm. That one seems to be a lot more per Vercel. So check out color contrast dot app from Killian.

Yes. The APCA.

Yes. And the APCA is also, talked about quite a bit in the Slavoroo

blog post. So you can Perfect. Put some of that up too. John Ray says, what are you using for your smart home? I have an old open HAB, open HAB 2.4 from 2018, but I really need to migrate to something newer. I'm on Node Assistant running it on my Synology. I've talked about that in the past, but you don't need a lot of heavy hardware to run this stuff. It's it's it's just handling MQTT streams and and setting variables across the the world. So that is a very good one. I also run Google Home as well just because I love having the screens all over the house and being able to just talk to it. But for most of my, like, scheduling automation, I use Home Assistant.

Yeah. I use Home Assistant as well. I have it running on a Home Assistant OS that just runs on a Raspberry Pi that I just always have on over there. Plugged into that, I have, like, a ZigBee adapter into that directly, and that's what I run. I like it a lot. I actually just recently just wrote a little automation the other day that automatically turns on my bathroom exhaust fan when the humidity gets too high in the primary bathroom. It was nice and easy, took no time at all in home assistant, and that's just the kind of stuff you want with a smart home. Right? It's like, yeah.

I think Node don't gotta turn on the exhaust. I could just put it

Node assistant is not for the the faint of heart. I think they need to figure out some better It's gotten a little bit better. UI and some better like, what happens with Node assistant is you add, like like, a light bulb, and then it'll be like, here's 600 sensors that this light bulb can do. You know? And it's just you get to a point where you add like, I have I have probably forty, fifty smart things in my house, and then each of them have seven or eight different things. You have to spend some time really culling it down and getting it to JS simple as you want. So, hopefully I don't know. I don't know what it it that's the thing with any of these Swiss army tools. You let people do literally anything, and then it gets to be a little bit overwhelming.

That's your assistant dashboard?

Yeah. It's pretty nicely tuned. And one thing that I like about mine is on this Node page. Like, the home page, I have, like, a bunch of just, like, presets where it's, like, what, watching a movie Yeah. Eating dinner or whatever. And a lot of those are on timers, but at any given point, I can enable one. And then on any given room, I just have all the individual lights and whatever set up. Or, like, my office is a little bit different because it's my office where I can have, like, master toggles with everything in there and all of my studio lights at once. One for my office as well. I have it hooked up to my Stream Deck as well. I can turn the lights on and off. Yeah. Love that. I really wanna build some sort of, like, family hub.

And on marketplace the other day, somebody had one of those Samsung fridges with the TV in it. Yeah. And it was had, like, a blown compressor, and I was like, oh, I could take the screen out of the door.

But he wanted, like, $500 for it. So That's an absurd

you could just buy a little tablet for, like, $70.

Yeah. Yeah. I I'm waiting for him to like, it that thing's trash. Nobody wants your broken fridge. You know? I'm just waiting for him to come down and realize that, and I'll give him a $100 for the the door or something like that.

Instead of buying instead of buying a $50 tablet that works just No way. What $50 tablet? I want a I don't want a tiny tablet. I want a huge ass screen

that has all of our appointments, all of our buttons, everything. You know? The problem for me is I know where to power that. Like so what? Like, you're running power through the wall and then Oh, yeah.

Easy.

And and this stuff runs on on low voltage, so you can you can probably even do it over PoE.

Probably. I don't know. Maybe not. TypeScript those screens are pretty hungry. We'll see. Solazu says, I'm listening to potluck nine forty six, and Wes mentions he blocks a large number of ISPs for bad hosts from all of the sites. Where does such a list come from that he curated himself? So there's a GitHub repo called bad ASN list. So an ASN is you can go deep into what an ASN is. It stands for autonomous system. But, typically, a hosting provider or an ISP, which which a hosting provider is, they'll all have their, a unique number that's attached to it. You know? Comcast is 7922.

DigitalOcean is +1 4061.

And depending on the type of site that you're operating from, it makes sense to simply just block all people that are coming from or all requests, not even people. So, like, if you're getting Wes to your website from, like, a shady ISP in Russia that warp, like, what this is not people's homes. You know? This is not like a cell phone network. This is like somebody is making Wes from a data center somewhere.

And if that's why is that the case? Either somebody's on a VPN trying to hide something or or somebody's running some sort of bot Yarn, and they're they're sending, requests your way. So instead of blocking individual IPs or or or blocks of IPs, you can simply just say, requests from these ASNs are going to be either totally blocked or you could throw a CAPTCHA at them. I think that's what I do right now because it's like there is a case where somebody would be using a VPN, that's running on one of these. But in my case, I've never heard from a single customer saying, hey.

Your website's blocked. That's never been the case. It's it's it's only blocked shady people and shady bots. And the same thing with, like, the way that you implement it is you go into your CloudFlare and you can create a rule. It's just this massive rule where he says, if the ASN is x y z, you can block it. But you can also block, like, countries as well, which you probably shouldn't block countries, but you can block everybody who is from the XX country or the I think the tour country. And anybody who's who's visiting your website via tour is probably doing shady stuff as Wes, trying to hide their tails, so you can you can hide those. Alright. Next question from Sadiq.

Hey, guys. Big fan. I really enjoy the podcast. In my daily job, I work with modern web technologies.

But over the last year, due to a new direction in our company, I've had to start learning SAP UI five.

It's basically a web world inside SAP.

Have you ever come across this technology? I'm still surprised how big the ecosystem of languages and frameworks is inside of larger enterprises and how little it's talked about. It feels like a hidden world with a lot of potential. Wes, I'm gonna say I have zero clue.

I have no clue. Nothing.

Yeah. I thought this was an interesting question because when I was in school, a big thing that we had to learn was called ERP.

And they're, like, these large companies who do accounting and inventory, sourcing products. Like, I remember the one example we had to do for SAP was somebody was making granola, and you had 18 vendors from around the world to get all of the pieces to make your granola. You know? You had to get almonds from Mexico, and you had to get, I don't know, other chips from Node. And, like, they all had different prices, and they all have different lead times.

And in order to make a simple granola, it was a very complex thing, and then you had, accounts payable, ledgers, all of that stuff sort of built into it. And these huge companies are built on SAP. SAP is a massive, massive company. And I remember hating my life doing this because it was a Java app where it was just looked awful, and you never knew where to click, and and that nothing ever worked, and it was errors out the wazoo, and you had to do it on a desktop. And I Wes thinking about that there. I was like, I wonder where SAP is at. You know? So this guy says that SAP and I just looked it up. There's this thing called SAP UI five. It looks like they moved everything over to their own custom MVC JavaScript framework.

And that's cool because, like, obviously, this stuff needs to be able to run everywhere. This is why you should bet on the web. This, like, massive company, which was built on Java, is now Yeah.

The entire UI is all done in JavaScript. I went to the docs, and I thought it was hilarious because they have a a chart of, like, how things work together.

And that chart is done in a PNG that's probably exported from some Photoshop or something. So I just thought it was so funny. Like, these big companies are just, like they can't even make labels in boxes with text. Right. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You have to export

right. Yeah. Why why does this have to be an image? What in the world?

But it's it I kinda they built their own. Like, it's not built on React or Angular or Svelte or anything. They made their own MVC framework. Probably makes sense for how big of a piece of software this is, but that is certainly an area where you can I remember in school, everyone's like, you can make a bank if you know SAP? Similar to, like, SharePoint as well, you know, where it's just like, I'm specializing in this odd thing, and I know I guess React is the same way. I know all the ins and outs of this thing, and I'm gonna make bank charging these massive companies who just wanna make granola on how to implement it.

Yeah. Crazy. Yeah. This is a whole world where I am just completely out to lunch on. Cool. Well, now JS the part of the show where we get into sick picks and shameless plugs. Sick picks, for those of you who don't know, are the things that we just like and enjoy in this world, stuff that we've been feeling. And Wes know what? Before we do this, we don't ask people to like and subscribe. Like and subscribe to Syntax, y'all. If you're listening to this, you enjoyed this show, like and subscribe. Hit that button. Bos know? Do all that stuff for us. That'd be great. We we love, a little subscriptions here and there. I am going to sick pick a YouTube channel, and this is a YouTube channel that I just found out about last night. You know, there's always, like, when you're, like, discover a YouTube channel, and you're like, wow. This is really high quality information.

I wonder how long they've been doing this. And then you go and you see it's like, oh, they have a video that's twelve years old. They've been doing it for a long time. And this channel has 45,000 subscribers, and they've been it it was really, really good. This is called Inside Archaeology, and it was just really nice archaeology information. Sometimes it's like new archaeological discoveries in October 2025.

Fascinating, burials, you know, the hunt for queen, Cleopatra's lost tomb. And, like, the hardest thing with this kind of content on YouTube is that so many of the accounts that blow up is like this, like, hyperbolic, like, was the pyramids built on giant tubes underground? Like Yeah. Like, just idiotic Node Rogan brain kind of stuff instead of, like, actual information. So, Inside Archaeology, really great channel, and, it it just no nonsense real stuff. So, check it out if you are like that. If you like history or archaeology or any of that kind of stuff, this is my ideal type of YouTube, honestly. I'm gonna

sick pick a YouTube channel as Wes, and this is a guy called Professor Boots. And this guy makes three d printed, like, RC Yarn.

And it's just the most beautiful thing to watch because he goes through the, like, the the the three d modeling of these RC cars. Like, he's he makes, like, a a skid steer and a bulldozer and a log truck and a what else? Basically, any any vehicle that is in, like, heavy equipment. He's building it. He's modeling it, three d printing it. Then he's he's making the electronics to make it work with, like, an ESP 32, and then he writes the software to control it. And then he puts them all into these very, like, digestible, fun to watch YouTube videos.

And then he also has, like, a, like, a workshop. You can subscribe for $15 a month, and you can get access to all the guides on how to build them. And I was like, over Christmas, I am gonna be building I'm gonna be building a bulldozer or something fun like that because I have experience with all of these things. You know? I can three d design. I can code. I can do hardware, and I would love to make, like, a custom

syntax bulldozer or something like that. Wow. What a a five year old brained, sentence. Oh, I got it. Syntax to a bulldozer.

And the other thing is that, like, I watch it with my kids, and they're just like, we gotta do that. You know? Yeah. Like, they actually work. You know? They can you could pick things up and push it around. Pretty dope. Yeah. So Yeah. I'm into on YouTube.

Alright. I'll try this out. Sick. Heck, yeah. Cool. Shameless plugs. Check us out on YouTube. Syntax.

YouTube. Check us out. We're doing all kinds of stuff on there. We're we're doing crazy stuff. So, as always, we'll catch you in the next one. Peace.