Technology

Last month, the Biden administration issued a sweeping executive order focusing on artificial intelligence. The edict particularly focused on privacy concerns and the potential for bias in AI-aided decision-making. Either could potentially violate citizens' civil rights. The executive order was a tangible indication that AI is on the government's regulatory radar.

We spoke to AI practitioners about the order and found they were concerned about both the nature of the proposed regulations and the potential for further restrictions. No industry likes being regulated, of course, but it's worth listening to what those working in the trenches have to say. Their comments highlight the likely pain points of future interactions between the US government and the fast-growing AI industry.

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Love him or hate him, Duckbill Group chief economist and AWS snarkologist Corey Quinn is often right in his assessments of AWS product strategy—but not always.

Sometimes Quinn is completely wrong, like last week when he claimed “AWS is just a fundamentally unserious company when it comes to genAI.” This after the successful launches and customer adoption of Amazon CodeWhisperer (coding assistant), Amazon Bedrock (makes it easier to use a variety of large language models), and more, including the re:Invent mainstage release of Amazon Q (a genAI-powered chatbot).

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It’s been over 10 years since Shannon Lietz introduced the term DevSecOps, aiming to get security a seat at the table with IT developers and operators. The question is, how far has security come since then? Do DevSecOps teams have the culture, practices, and tooling they need to release technology into production faster but also reliably and securely?

The recently published SANS DevSecOps Survey shows significant traction. More organizations are looking to shift-left security to ensure that security is prominent in their development practices. Over 50% of respondents claimed they resolved critical security risks and vulnerabilities in seven days or better. But even though nearly 30% of respondents said they deployed to production weekly, only 20% were assessing or testing for security vulnerabilities at a similar velocity. Additionally, the adoption rate for DevSecOps practices topped out at 61% for automation and 50% for continuous integration (CI). Many organizations are still working toward mature security and continuous deployment.

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The job market for software developers has always been competitive, but we’re about to experience a talent crunch unlike anything we’ve ever seen in this industry.

Generative AI is everywhere, and anyone who works in software is trying to figure it out. While developers experiment with AI, business leaders are grappling with what it means for their teams. Most of the discussion revolves around what and who AI can replace.

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One of the handiest new features included in the Java 18 release (March 2022) was the new Simple Web Server, which makes it easy to spin up and configure an HTTP file server. It also exposes an API that extends the existing httpserver package for building simple use cases. 

The new Simple Web Server is a useful tool that every Java developer should have in their bag of tricks. Let's check it out!

Java's new jwebserver command makes it simple to run a basic web server. It is analogous to the popular SimpleHTTPServer tool in the Python world.

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Continuous integration (CI) and continuous delivery (CD), also known as CI/CD, embodies a culture and set of operating principles and practices that application development teams use to deliver code changes both more frequently and more reliably.

CI/CD is a best practice for devops teams. It is also a best practice in agile methodology. By automating code integration and delivery, CI/CD lets software development teams focus on meeting business requirements while ensuring that software is high in quality and secure.

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Cybertruck is out, ChatGPT turns 1, Black Friday & Cyber Monday, NameDrop

• ChatGPT's 1st birthday and mainstream AI adoption
• Microsoft joins OpenAI's board as a non-voting observer
• Pika raises $55 million for AI video generation tool
• Amazon launches Q chatbot service for companies
• Concerns over Q hallucinating responses and leaking data
• Rethinking reactions to Tesla's Cybertruck design
• Police warn about issues with NameDrop social media app
• Why Apple adding RCS may not resolve green vs blue bubbles
• Apple dropping Goldman Sachs as Apple Card issuer
• Inside Spotify Wrapped's annual personalized listening stats
• Fears over Plex exposing users' viewing habits
• Black Friday online sales hit record $9.8 billion in US
• Cyber Monday sales beat estimates at $12.4 billion
• Extreme complexity in rebuilding an ultimate car pinball machine
• Kiss launches digital avatars for virtual concerts

Host: Jason Howell

Guests: Rich DeMuro, Tim Stevens, and Abrar Al-Heeti

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At AWS' annual re:Invent conference this week, CEO Adam Selipsky and other top executives announced new services and updates to attract burgeoning enterprise interest in generative AI systems and take on rivals including Microsoft, Oracle, Google, and IBM. 

AWS, the largest cloud service provider in terms of market share, is looking to capitalize on growing interest in generative AI. Enterprises are expected to invest $16 billion globally on generative AI and related technologies in 2023, according to a report from market research firm IDC.  

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Okay, I’m going to geek out for this one. The start of my cloud computing career was not using cloud computing services, it was building them. This meant setting up a service that could do complex things, handle many service requesters, and manage to serve many clients simultaneously. To do all this, I had to design and build a multitenant architecture.

Multitenancy is the architectural principle of serving multiple clients or “tenants” from a single instance of a software application. This concept has played a pivotal role in the evolution of public cloud computing services and will continue to do so. That said, it’s not discussed much anymore.

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Okay, I’m going to geek out for this one. The start of my cloud computing career was not using cloud computing services, it was building them. This meant setting up a service that could do complex things, handle many service requesters, and manage to serve many clients simultaneously. To do all this, I had to design and build a multitenant architecture.

Multitenancy is the architectural principle of serving multiple clients or “tenants” from a single instance of a software application. This concept has played a pivotal role in the evolution of public cloud computing services and will continue to do so. That said, it’s not discussed much anymore.

To read this article in full, please click here

PostgreSQL 16, the latest major release of your favorite open source RDBMS, set new standards for database management, data replication, system monitoring, and performance optimization. Like clockwork, EnterpriseDB (EDB), a leading contributor to PostgreSQL code and leading provider of the Postgres database to enterprises, has unveiled its latest portfolio release for Postgres 16.1.

The milestone EDB Postgres 16 portolio release integrates the core advancements of PostgreSQL 16, reaffirming EDB’s dedication to the Postgres community and driving innovation in this technology. Let’s take a look at the key features added to the EDB Postgres 16 portolio release.

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Of all the reasons Python is a hit with developers, one of the biggest is its broad and ever-expanding selection of third-party packages. Convenient toolkits for everything from ingesting and formatting data to high-speed math and machine learning are just an import or pip install away.

But what happens when those packages don’t play nice with each other? What do you do when different Python projects need competing or incompatible versions of the same add-ons? That’s where Python virtual environments come into play.

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Amazon Web Services (AWS) has made its AWS SDK for Rust generally available, for developing and deploying applications on the AWS cloud using the Rust programming language.

Announced November 28, the AWS SDK for Rust simplifies the use of AWS services by providing libraries familiar to Rust developers. Developers can get started with the SDK at the AWS website, with the SDK accessible through crates.io.

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Chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude.ai, and phind can be quite helpful, but you might not always want your questions or sensitive data handled by an external application. That's especially true on platforms where your interactions may be reviewed by humans and otherwise used to help train future models.

One solution is to download a large language model (LLM) and run it on your own machine. That way, an outside company never has access to your data. This is also a quick option to try some new specialty models such as Meta's recently announced Code Llama family of models, which are tuned for coding, and SeamlessM4T, aimed at text-to-speech and language translations.

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AWS is planning to update its collaborative data-sharing service, dubbed AWS Clean Rooms, with machine learning capabilities.

The new machine learning capabilities will allow enterprises and their partners to apply machine learning to shared or collective datasets to generate predictive insights without having to share raw data with each other, the company said. 

This is achieved by creating lookalike segments of data, which is similar to the original raw dataset.

“With AWS Clean Rooms ML lookalike modeling, you can train your own custom model using your data, and invite your partners to bring a small sample of their records to a collaboration to generate an expanded set of similar records while protecting you and your partner’s underlying data,” Swami Sivasubramanian, vice president of data and AI at AWS, said during his keynote address at AWS re:Invent.

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Deno Land, the developers of the Deno TypeScript/JavaScript runtime, have introduced Deno Cron, a feature the company describes as an easy way to create scheduled jobs.

Announced November 29 and available behind the --unstable flag in Deno 1.38, Deno.cron() is a function that takes three parameters: the name of the scheduled job, the schedule, and the handler, the latter being the function executed on the schedule provided. Deno Cron’s schedule uses the Unix cron format and the UTC time zone. Deno Cron handlers can perform actions such as updating state in Deno KV, pinging a website, sending email, initiating a database backup, and calling an API at regular intervals.

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The recent drama at OpenAI highlighted one thing: the enormous bet Microsoft has made on GPT and its derivatives, using them to power its growing family of Copilots. The generative AI capabilities of GPT and similar large language models (LLMs) are key components of these natural language interfaces, providing language understanding and summaries, as well producing user-centric text outputs that can be tuned to user needs and preferences.

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When building your .NET applications, you will often need to generate API documentation. To do this, you might use Swagger, a toolkit that makes it simple to provide a graphical representation of your API. You can test the API methods within the Swagger UI once the API documentation is available.

If you could use an introduction to Swagger, I provided one in an earlier article. In this article, I’ll discuss how we can implement basic authentication for Swagger. To work with the code examples provided in this article, you should have Visual Studio 2022 installed in your system. If you don’t already have a copy, you can download Visual Studio 2022 here.

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At its ongoing re:Invent 2023 conference, AWS unveiled several updates to its SageMaker, Bedrock and database services in order to boost its generative AI offerings.

Taking to the stage on Wednesday, AWS vice president of data and AI, Swami Sivasubramanian, unveiled updates to existing foundation models inside its generative AI application-building service, Amazon Bedrock.

The updated models added to Bedrock include Anthropic’s Claude 2.1 and Meta Llama 2 70B, both of which have been made generally available. Amazon also has added its proprietary Titan Text Lite and Titan Text Express foundation models to Bedrock.

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