Lately, I’ve been covering the overengineering and overprovisioning of resources in support of AI, both in the cloud and not in the cloud. AI architects are putting high-powered processors, such as GPUs, on their AI platform shopping lists, not stopping to consider if they will return business value.I’ve found myself in more than a few heated disagreements with other IT architects about using … [Read more...]

Rust has leaped to its highest position ever in the monthly Tiobe index of language popularity, scaling to the 13th spot this month, with placement in the top 10 anticipated in an upcoming edition.Previously, Rust has never gone higher than 17th place in the Tiobe Programming Index. Tiobe CEO Paul Jansen attributed Rust’s ascent in the just-released July index to a February 2024 US White … [Read more...]

In a highly-anticipated federal ruling on July 3, US District Court Judge Ada Brown determined that the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) did not have the authority to issue a nationwide ban of non-compete agreements. Although the judge’s decision was preliminary, employment lawyers watching the case agree that the FTC non-compete move is effectively dead.Brown, of the US District Court for the … [Read more...]

As agents using artificial intelligence have wormed their way into the mainstream for everything from customer service to fixing software code, it’s increasingly important to determine which are the best for a given application, and the criteria to consider when selecting an agent besides its functionality. And that’s where benchmarking comes in.Benchmarks don’t reflect real-world … [Read more...]

Well, that didn’t take long. After all the “this time it’s different” comments about artificial intelligence (We see you, John Chambers!), enterprises are coming to grips with reality. AI isn’t going to take your job. It’s not going to write your code. It’s not going to write all your marketing copy (not unless you’re prepared to hire back the humans to fix it). And, no, it’s nowhere … [Read more...]

In 2007, some of the programmers at Google looked at their options for writing software and didn’t like what they saw. They needed to manage millions of lines of code that would be constantly storing and shipping data for the world wide web. The code would juggle thousands or maybe millions of connections on networks throughout the globe. The data paths were full of challenges from race cases and … [Read more...]

The landscape of cloud computing is changing significantly as enterprises question the value of public cloud solutions. This shift marks a departure from previous years when the public cloud was widely regarded as the panacea for all technology and infrastructure needs. Companies are now reconsidering the efficacy, cost efficiency, and strategic alignment of public cloud computing in their IT … [Read more...]

Oracle celebrated the beginning of July with the general availability of three releases of its open source database, MySQL: MySQL 8.0.38, the first update of its long-term support (LTS) version, MySQL 8.4, and the first major version of its 9.x innovation release, MySQL 9.0.While the v8 releases are bug fixes and security releases only, MySQL 9.0 Innovation is a shiny new version with additional … [Read more...]

One of the key components of Microsoft’s Copilot Runtime edge AI development platform for Windows is a new vector search technology, DiskANN (Disk Accelerated Nearest Neighbors). Building on a long-running Microsoft Research project, DiskANN is a way of building and managing vector indexes inside your applications. It uses a mix of in-memory and disk storage to map an in-memory quantized vector … [Read more...]

The latest update of Visual Studio Code is previewing an alternative visualization of incoming and outgoing changes. The update also includes a new tool that enhances environment discovery for Python installations.Introduced July 3, Visual Studio Code 1.91, also known as the June 2024 release of the editor, can be downloaded for Windows, Linux, and macOS at code.visualstudio.com.The experimental … [Read more...]

Refit is an open-source library for .NET, .NET Core, and Xamarin that makes consuming REST APIs simpler and easier by enabling you to define the API endpoints as C# interfaces, thereby eliminating the need to create HTTP requests and parse HTTP responses manually.In this article we will delve into the Refit library for .NET and see first-hand how it simplifies the development of APIs. To use the … [Read more...]

ECMAScript 2024, the latest version of ECMA International’s standard for JavaScript, has been officially approved, with features including transferring ArrayBuffers and advanced capabilities for working with string sets.The ECMAScript 2024 specification, also generally known as ECMA-262, was approved on June 26. Among the features are added facilities for resizing and transferring ArrayBuffers and … [Read more...]

JetBrains has released an on-premises edition of Qodana, the company’s code quality platform based on the static code analysis engine of JetBrains IDEs. With Qodana Self-Hosted, users can manage and maintain the platform on their own infrastructure.With Qodana Self-Hosted, announced July 3, developers gain complete control over analysis reports, user accounts, and other sensitive data, as well as … [Read more...]

AWS’ new theory on designing an automated RAG evaluation mechanism could not only ease the development of generative AI-based applications but also help enterprises reduce spending on compute infrastructure.RAG or retrieval augmented generation is one of several techniques used to address hallucinations, which are arbitrary or nonsensical responses generated by large language models … [Read more...]

Developed by Facebook and released as an open standard for all to use, GraphQL is intended as an alternative to REST APIs. Like REST, GraphQL provides a way to create and consume web-based APIs, but queries and returned data use formal schemas and a type system to guarantee consistency.In this article, we’ll walk through the basics of designing and implementing a GraphQL API and discuss many of … [Read more...]

The JavaScript language is one of the wonders of the software world. It is incredibly powerful, flexible, and versatile. One limitation of its fundamental design, however, is its single-threaded nature. Traditional JavaScript appears to handle parallel tasks, but that is a trick of syntax. To achieve true parallelism, you need to use modern multithreading approaches like web … [Read more...]

The Rust types team has made significant progress on the next-generation trait solver, according to a June 26 blog post.Work done to stabilize the use of the next-generation trait solver in coherence checking surfaced small behavior regressions and hangs, which caused delays. But the team is close to compiling the standard library and the compiler with the new solver enabled everywhere. They … [Read more...]

There are times when you need to associate metadata, or data that describes data, with classes, methods, or other elements in your Java code. For example, your team might need to identify unfinished classes in a large application. For each unfinished class, the metadata would include the name of the developer responsible for finishing the class and the class’s expected completion date.Before Java … [Read more...]

Open-source vector database provider Qdrant has launched BM42, a vector-based hybrid search algorithm intended to provide more accurate and efficient retrieval for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) applications. BM42 combines the best of traditional text-based search and vector-based search to lower the costs for RAG and AI applications, Qdrant said.Qdrant’s BM42 was announced July 2. … [Read more...]

AI research is hurtling forward, but our ability to assess its capabilities and potential risks appears to be lagging behind. To bridge this critical gap, and recognize the current limitations in third-party evaluation ecosystems, Anthropic has started an initiative to invest in the development of robust, safety-relevant benchmarks to assess advanced AI capabilities and risks.“A robust, … [Read more...]