Welcome to issue #20 of the digest.
Yesterday, WebGPU landed in Chrome stable.
I wrote back in March about why this excites me on two fronts: in-browser gaming and pushing ML inference to the edge.
I don’t have much new to say on WebGPU except “yay!”, but here’s a great post from yesterday that provides some historic context for WebGPU and provides a good overview of the current state of things.
Why Chatbots Are Not the Future of Interfaces by Amelia Wattenberger. Strong agree. (PS. this is why we are hosting AI×UX in a few weeks, which has sold out but has a waitlist)
Matt Rickard posits that WebGPU is another step towards browsers being the new operating system.
Sunil Pai hit the publish button on the much-anticipated partykit framework. Partykit improves the developer experience of building WebSocket apps in JavaScript/TypeScript and deploying them to a hosted platform set to go live later this year. The underlying infrastructure is powered Cloudflare, where Sunil used to work on Wrangler, so he knows what he’s doing.
Towards the end of last year, the Whist browser, which I wrote about in issue #4, wound down operations. Co-founder Philippe Noel reflected on what he learned in a thoughtful piece that’s dense with observations about building a company in the browser space.
Until next time,
Paul