How to test large language models
There’s significant buzz and excitement around using AI copilots to reduce manual work, improving software developer productivity with code generators, and innovating with generative AI. The business opportunities are driving many development teams to build knowledge bases with vector databases and embed large language models (LLMs) into their applications. Some general use cases for building […]
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Microsoft’s Azure AI Search updated with increased storage, vector index size
Microsoft has updated its Azure AI Search service to increase storage capacity and vector index size at no additional cost, a move it said will make it more economical for enterprises to run generative AI-based applications. Formerly known as Azure Cognitive Search, the Azure AI Search service connects external data stores containing un-indexed data with […]
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OpenTofu may be showing us the wrong way to fork
OpenTofu’s founders had a mission. Upset by HashiCorp licensing changes in August 2023 to its popular Terraform infrastructure-as-code tool, OpenTofu set out to be the “open source successor to the MPLv2-licensed Terraform,” further promising that it “will be community-driven, impartial, layered and modular, and backward-compatible.” Hugely promising, but extraordinarily difficult to pull off. So difficult […]
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JDK 23: The new features in Java 23
Java Development Kit (JDK) 23, the next planned version of standard Java, is off and running, with two features now scheduled for the release. Due September 19, JDK 23 has just added a second preview of a class-file API, providing a standard API for parsing, generating, and transforming Java class files. This feature was previously […]
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Using Microsoft’s Retina to monitor Kubernetes networks
Kubernetes plays an important role at Microsoft. The container management system is a foundational piece of the company’s many clouds, from Microsoft 365 and Xbox, to Azure, to partners like OpenAI that use Microsoft’s Kubernetes to host their own services. As a result, Microsoft has invented many of its own Kubernetes management tools. These include […]
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The dawn of eco-friendly systems development
In December 2023, delegates from almost 200 countries met in Dubai for the UN’s climate-change conference, COP28, to discuss the pressing need to reduce emissions, as reported by IEEE in this article. According to the website sustainability scoring tool Ecograder, and as the authors are quick to point out, the COP28 website produces 3.69 grams of […]
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Steampipe dashboards and benchmarks for your data
In Steampipe unbundled we showed how its plugins, which originally worked only with the foreign data wrapper loaded into Steampipe’s batteries-included Postgres, are now also available as stand-alone distributions that you can load into your own instances of Postgres or SQLite. Now Steampipe itself is unbundled: its dashboard server and benchmark runner have migrated to […]
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JetBrains IntelliJ IDE to add K2 compiler mode
JetBrains’ IntelliJ IDEA 2024.1, a release of the integrated development environment (IDE) due on April 4, will feature an optional K2 compiler mode, enabling developers to use K2 for faster and more robust Kotlin code analysis, the company said. With this planned release, the IDE for Kotlin and Java will have two modes. The class […]
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Microsoft unveils Copilot for Azure SQL Database
Microsoft has announced a private preview of Copilot in Azure SQL Database, an AI assistant that improves productivity in the Azure portal by offering natural language to SQL conversion, along with self-help for database administration. Microsoft announced the preview on March 21. To sign up for the preview, users can request access. Copilot in Azure […]
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Databricks acquires Lilac AI to boost data quality for LLM training
Data lakehouse provider Databricks said it is acquiring Boston-based Lilac AI to help enterprises explore and use their unstructured data for building generative AI-based applications. “Today, we are thrilled to announce that Lilac is joining Databricks. Lilac is a scalable, user-friendly tool for data scientists to search, cluster, and analyze any kind of text dataset with […]
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