AWS Snowmobile drives into the sunset
Amazon Web Services (AWS) has slowly and silently phased out its Snowmobile service—an offering launched at its annual AWS re:Invent conference in 2016 to help enterprises move data from their on-premises servers to the cloud provider’s data centers to accelerate their migration to the public cloud. The Snowmobile service, essentially an eighteen-wheel truck and trailer […]
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SAS Viya and the pursuit of trustworthy AI
As the use of ever more powerful AI models continues to grow, ensuring trust and accountability must be at the top of the list of goals, on par with any of AI’s potential benefits. It won’t happen overnight, nor will it result from any single step, such as better code, government regulations, or sincere pledges […]
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ECMAScript 2024 takes shape
ECMAScript 2024, a planned update to ECMA’s standard for JavaScript, is set to include seven new features ranging from array grouping to Unicode strings. The 2024 specification, from ECMA’s Technical Committee 39, is expected to be approved in June. Among the list of finished features cited for publication this year is a proposal for array […]
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Rust gets security fix for Windows vulnerability
The Rust language team has published a point release of Rust to fix a critical vulnerability to the standard library that could benefit an attacker when using Windows. Rust 1.77.2, published on April 9, includes a fix for CVE-2024-24576. Before this release, Rust’s standard library did not properly escape arguments when invoking batch files with […]
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Beyond Git: How version control systems are evolving for devops
Tools that manage changes to source code, programs, documents, or other collections of information are known by a variety of names: version control, revision control, source control, or source code management are all common descriptors. Regardless of what we call them, these systems have become increasingly vital in a world where software and data are essential commodities. Demand […]
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The cloud is benefiting IT, but not business
“The cloud has tremendous business value!” That’s the battle cry chanted by cloud providers and their allies at every cloud computing conference. You will never hear me say that “the cloud” is always the right solution or, for that matter, the wrong solution. In my 20-plus years as a cloud expert, I’ve never blindly followed […]
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Fully local retrieval-augmented generation, step by step
In “Retrieval-augmented generation, step by step,” we walked through a very simple RAG example. Our little application augmented a large language model (LLM) with our own documents, enabling the language model to answer questions about our own content. That example used an embedding model from OpenAI, which meant we had to send our content to OpenAI’s […]
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Go language shines for AI-powered workloads, survey says
The Go programming language is viewed by developers who build AI-powered applications and services as a strong platform for running those workloads. Nevertheless, Python is viewed by Go developers as the language to use when starting AI-powered work, according to a recent survey of Go developers. In the semi-annual Go Developer Survey for 2024, conducted […]
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Google adds Gemini to databases to aid faster code development, migration
Google Cloud is adding capabilities driven by its proprietary large language model, Gemini to its database offerings, which include Bigtable, Spanner, Memorystore for Redis, Firestore, CloudSQL for MySQL, and AlloyDB for PostgreSQL, the company announced at its annual Next conference. The Gemini-driven capabilities, which are currently in public preview, include SQL generation, and AI assistance […]
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Visual Studio update brings smoother Copilot integration
With the third preview of the planned Visual Studio 2022 17.10, Microsoft has “unified” the GitHub Copilot experience in the IDE, combining Copilot and Copilot Chat into a single extension. Introduced April 9, Visual Studio 2022 17.10 Preview 3 combines the features of GitHub Copilot and Copilot Chat into one package, eliminating the need to […]
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