Tim O’Reilly    Why is it that Google, a company once known for its distinctive Do no evil guideline, is now facing the same charges of surveillance capitalism as Facebook, a company that never made such claims Why is it now subject to the same kind of antitrust complaints once faced by Microsoft, the evil...

Mike Loukides    We’ve been very lucky. A couple of weeks ago, a supply chain attack against the Linux xz Utils package, which includes the liblzma compression library, was discovered just weeks before the compromised version of the library would have been incorporated into the most widely used Linux distributions....

Mike Loukides    A recent article in Fast Company makes the claim Thanks to AI, the Coder is no longer King. All Hail the QA Engineer. It’s worth reading, and its argument is probably correct. Generative AI will be used to create more and more software; AI makes mistakes and it’s difficult to foresee a future in...

Tim O’Reilly    The economic problem of society...is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality. Friedrich A. Hayek, The Use of Knowledge in Society Silicon Valley venture capitalists and many entrepreneurs espouse libertarian values. In practice, they subscribe to...

Mike Loukides    There are lots of new models, including one from Apple, but that’s hardly news. AI news is infiltrating other sections of Trends particularly Programming and Security but that’s also hardly news. NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang has said that AI will replace coding but again, he’s not the first. But what...

Hugo Bowne-Anderson    TL;DR LLMs and other GenAI models can reproduce significant chunks of training data. Specific prompts seem to unlock training data. We have many current and future copyright challenges: training may not infringe copyright, but legal doesn’t mean legitimate we consider the analogy of MegaFace...

Mike Loukides    I’ve had a ham radio license since the late s and observed the transition from vacuum tubes remember them to transistors firsthand. Because we’re allowed to operate high power transmitters , watt output , tubes hang on in our world a lot longer than elsewhere. There’s a good reason...

Mike Loukides    January was a dull month, at least in my opinion. Maybe everyone was recovering from their holidays. February was a short month, but it was far from dull. And I’m not even counting the first shipments of Apple Vision. OpenAI has demoed an impressive text to vision model called Sora; Google has two...

Jon Udell    In SQL: The Universal Solvent for REST APIs we saw how Steampipe’s suite of open source plug ins that translate REST API calls directly into SQL tables. These plug ins were, until recently, tightly bound to the open source engine and to the instance of Postgres that it launches and controls....

Laura Baldwin and Mike Loukides    Since its release in November , almost everyone involved with technology has experimented with ChatGPT: students, faculty, and professionals in almost every discipline. Almost every company has undertaken AI projects, including companies that, at least on the face of it, have no AI policies....

Mike Loukides    Since the New York Times sued OpenAI for infringing its copyrights by using Times content for training, everyone involved with AI has been wondering about the consequences. How will this lawsuit play out And, more importantly, how will the outcome affect the way we train and use large language...

Mike Loukides    started with yet more AI: a small language model from Microsoft, a new but unnamed model from Meta that competes with GPT, and a text to video model from Google that claims to be more realistic than anything yet. Research into security issues has also progressed unfortunately, discovering...

Mike Loukides    This has been a strange year. While we like to talk about how fast technology moves, internet time, and all that, in reality the last major new idea in software architecture was microservices, which dates to roughly . Before that, cloud computing itself took off in roughly AWS was founded...

Philip Guo    ChatGPT was released just over a year ago at the end of November , and countless people have already written about their experiences using it in all sorts of settings. I even contributed my own hot take last year with my O’Reilly Radar article Real Real World Programming with ChatGPT. What...

Mike Loukides    Kevlin Henney and I recently discussed whether automated code generation, using some future version of GitHub Copilot or the like, could ever replace higher level languages. Specifically, could ChatGPT N for large N quit the game of generating code in a high level language like Python and produce...