Author: Infoworld

Java developers would gain an easier way to create records, and more streamlined code for declaring record classes, through derived record creation, a preview language feature being considered by the OpenJDK community.Derived record creation would allow developers to create new records from existing records, specifying only the components that are different. Goals of the proposal include providing a concise means to create new record values from existing ones and streamlining the declaration of record classes by eliminating the need to provide explicit wither methods, which are the immutable analogue of setter methods.Underlying the proposal is the notion that immutability is…

Google is integrating its Gemini 1.0 Pro large language model with its AI and machine learning platform, Vertex AI, to help enterprises unlock new capabilities of large language models (LLMs), including analysis of text, image and video.The Gemini API, which has been made generally available, can also be used in Google’s data warehouse, BigQuery, to develop generative AI-based analytical applications.“The Gemini 1.0 Pro model is designed for higher input-output scale and better result quality across a wide range of tasks like text summarization and sentiment analysis. You can now access it using simple SQL statements or BigQuery’s embedded DataFrame API from right inside…

Google Cloud on Thursday said it is adding vector support and integrating LangChain with all of its database offerings in an effort to outdo rival cloud service providers, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft, and Oracle.Cloud service providers have been locked in a race to add generative AI and AI-related capabilities to their database offerings to have the first mover advantage in order to garner a bigger pie of the growing AI and generative AI market.The new updates to database offerings include the addition of vector support for relational, key value, document, and in-memory databases such as CloudSQL, Spanner,…

Visual Studio Code 1.87, the February 2024 release of Microsoft’s popular code editor, brings voice dictation, multi-cursor inline suggestions, and support for smarter Python imports and GitHub Copilot-powered symbol renaming.Published February 28, Visual Studio Code 1.87 can be downloaded at the Visual Studio website for Windows, Linux, and Mac platforms.With the new release, developers now can use their voices to dictate directly into the editor, provided they have installed the VS Code Speech extension, which enables speech-to-text capabilities. Developers can select from one of the 26 supported languages in VS Code Speech by using the accessibility.voice.speechLanguage setting.Microsoft also is gradually…

One of Microsoft’s goals for recent releases of Windows was to improve the developer experience, with the aim of making it the preferred platform for modern application development. That goal has led to the release of the Windows Subsystems for Linux and Android, resilient Dev Drive storage based on the ReFS file system, the WinGet package manager, and the Dev Home control panel.These tools help address many of the key issues that developers face, no matter what operating system they use. Together they support cross-platform development by helping you protect your code, manage your toolchain, and keep track of the…

With the growth of sophisticated attacks against critical software and infrastructure systems, multi-factor authentication (MFA) has emerged as a critical layer of defense against unauthorized access. An increasing number of enterprise and developer-facing technology applications and platforms, from GitHub to Salesforce to Amazon Web Services, are making MFA mandatory for users.That said, we are all used to passwords, and many people like the status quo. Not surprisingly, the introduction of MFA has added friction to the login process. This can negatively impact the user experience.A newer technology that can provide even greater security benefits than MFA is now becoming more…

Nearly three-quarters of codebases assessed for risk by Synopsis in 2023 contained open source components with high-risk vulnerabilities, according to a just-released report from the company, a provider of application security testing tools.While the number of codebases with at least one open source vulnerability remained consistent year over year at 84%, Synopsis said, the number that contained high-risk vulnerabilities increased dramatically, from 48% in 2022 to 74% in 2023. Synopsis defines high-risk vulnerabilities as vulnerabilities that have been exploited, or have documented proof-of-concept exploits, or have been classified as remote code execution vulnerabilities.These findings were included in the company’s ninth…

ServiceNow, Hugging Face, and Nvidia have released StarCoder2, the next generation of their open-access and royalty-free large language model (LLM) trained to generate code, in an effort to take on AI-based programming tools including Microsoft-owned GitHub Copilot, Google’s Bard AI, and Amazon CodeWhisperer.StarCoder2 is in fact a family of three LLMs: a 3-billion-parameter model trained by ServiceNow, a 7-billion-parameter model trained by Hugging Face, and a 15-billion-parameter model built by Nvidia with the help of its NeMo framework.The three different model sizes will enable enterprises to save on compute costs by using less performant models where resources are an issue.Developers can use…

Neural networks are the foundation of modern machine learning and AI. They are the most essential component in understanding what AI is and how it works. In this article, you’ll learn the basics of neural networks, and then we’ll delve into some of the most common variants, like the feedforward and recurrent networks, which drive everything from large language models like ChatGPT and Bard to image generation with stable diffusion.The perceptronAll neural networks share one basic characteristic: they are interrelated groups of nodes. More technically, they are graphs. The attributes of the nodes and the ways the edges are connected vary widely. The very simplest…

By and large, people use Python because it’s convenient and programmer-friendly, not because it’s fast. The plethora of third-party libraries and the breadth of industry support for Python compensate heavily for its not having the raw performance of Java or C. Speed of development takes precedence over speed of execution.But in many cases, it doesn’t have to be an either/or proposition. Properly optimized, Python applications can run with surprising speed—perhaps not as fast as Java or C, but fast enough for web applications, data analysis, management and automation tools, and most other purposes. With the right optimizations, you might not…