gm legends! Welcome back to the Leaderboard. In today's edition we're discussing Sora, OpenAI's video model that is finally available to the public, a Tamagotchi for developers, and a way to avoid those awkward meeting starts. Let's dive in.

Sora: OpenAI's video generation model is now live

Sora — OpenAI’s text-to-video generation model —dropped yesterday to great fanfare and, predictably, great crashes due to overwhelming traffic. There’s lots of interesting stuff to unpack here regarding the underlying tech, the potential political/social implications (prepare for deepfakes galore) but…can we just momentarily marvel at the fact that we now live in a world where, for a relatively small fee, anyone can generate dozens of feature length films by themselves and armed only with a screenplay? What a time to be alive. I hope we still have some screenwriters out there with good taste. I’m ready for a New New Wave

GitAnimals: Nuture a pet through GitHub contributions

Not going to lie, I've been putting off some of my side projects for a bit. But when I saw GitAnimals, I took a few seconds out of my day to get my own little pet on my GitHub page... and well... now 10 commits later I can say the little furrball got me motivated. I didn't want to keep its level at 0 and after every 30 commits I get to adopt a new pet! There's a reason Tamagotchi works well, it's the cuteness combined with nurturing your own little critter that makes you want to put in the extra work, and this might be what gets me to launch more before 2024 ends.

icebreakers: A place to find icebreaker questions for meetings.

I’ve tried several interactive icebreaker apps that supposedly integrate with Zoom, but they are clunky and requires each person on the team to add the app and opt in so have given up on this. Icebreakers is a low friction, clean and minimal design - love that I can just pull it up on the web, instead of having to open it up and log into a separate app. Would be awesome if Zoom or google hangouts would incorporate something like this natively! If you’re looking for a no frills icebreaker webpage to pull up, this works well! But if looking for a more seamless all in one - I’d give Butter a go.