1038: OpenAI Releases GPT 6 Astra

Wes Bos (0:00)

What's up, everybody? Welcome to the Syntax livestream. We've got lots of talk about today. GPT‑6 Astra is here, and a lot of people are saying, this is AGI. We made the thumbnail for today's livestream with Astra, and it's fantastic, if I don't say so myself. The rise of rovo ducks and micro ducks are here.

DaVinci Resolve released an MCP. We're gonna be talking about, like, is AI actually good at editing video? 30 years ago, JScript was released, Vitest 5, whole bunch of really interesting stuff happened in the last seven days. We're ready to rock. What's up, CJ?

CJ (0:40)

Not much. I'm doing good. Scott's out today, by the way. He's in Switzerland. Is that?

Wes Bos (0:45)

Yes.

CJ (0:46)

Zurich, Zurich JS. Yeah. But we're gonna have a good time without him.

Wes Bos (0:49)

Let's get into the first one. What do you got for us there, CJ?

CJ (0:53)

So 30 years ago, not today, maybe like this week, 30 years ago this week, JScript was released in Internet Explorer.

And so if you're not familiar with all this, I'm gonna give you a little bit of background on the history of it. But also, if you're not following Web Design Museum on X or Blue Sky, give them a follow.

Wes Bos (1:14)

Lots of cool posts.

CJ (1:16)

Yeah, it's like, yeah, it's the museum of the web. They post screenshots from 20, 30 years ago, what the web used to look like.

It's pretty sick. But if you were unfamiliar, Netscape Navigator was a web browser. Brandon Icke created JavaScript while working on the Netscape Navigator browser. This happened back in 95, I believe. It basically gave us scripting on the web. The classic story was created in 10 days. But at the time, Netscape Navigator was the only browser to support JavaScript.

And there was also a press release when it happened with Oracle. Because it was originally named, I think it was MochaScript, I think Livescript was thrown around. But a few months after it was created, there was a partnership between Netscape Navigator and Oracle to rebrand the language as JavaScript. Because Oracle has the Java trademark, and this was a ploy to get people interested in it. It has nothing to do with Java. I even have the docs open for the Mozilla 2 handbook on the JavaScript language, and it talks about how JavaScript and Java are not the same. They have some things in common, but the name came from Java and Oracle. So what do you do if you're Microsoft and you're working on Internet Explorer? You can't just add JavaScript to your browser because there's a trademark on it. So they created JScript, which was essentially like a reverse-engineered version of JavaScript. Because if you think about it at the time, let's say a website adds JavaScript to itself. If you're running in any other web browser beside Netscape Navigator, the website is going to be broken. So Internet Explorer had to figure this out and be like, okay, we want to support these websites as well. So they essentially created their own version of JavaScript called JScript, which was basically a reimplementation, so that if you visited a website and it had JavaScript on it, it would still potentially work most of the time inside of Internet Explorer. So fascinating stuff. Since then, there have been standards committees. ECMAScript came out and standardized the language, and then all the other browsers started to implement it as well. But what's also interesting is the trademark is still there.

We've been talking about this for a couple of years now because Ryan Dahl, creator of Node.js, created a petition to remove the trademark that Oracle has on JavaScript. So if you go to JavaScript.tm, it's all about this.

There have been multiple motions. Oracle is trying to fight it.

Wes Bos (3:52)

He's been going back and forth with lawyers for years on this, basically trying to get the JavaScript trademark given back to the community.

I think he's trying to prove that they are not actively using it. Therefore, it should be released.

CJ (4:11)

Exactly. Yeah. That's part of the whole trademark. It's like there's this idea of an abandoned trademark where you don't have anything anymore that basically says you own the thing, so it should be released to the world, and that's what Ryan Dahl is basically proving.

Wes and Scott were actually on the letter to Oracle. This came out, I think, two years ago. It was like, I think over 6,000 developers signed it as well, but you can see Wes and Scott's name right here on the signature to remove the trademark from JavaScript.