At the beginning of The Creator a narrator describes AI-powered robots that are "more human than human." From the movie site Looper: It's in reference to the novel "Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" by Philip K. Dick, which was adapted into the seminal sci-fi classic, "Blade Runner." The phrase is used as the slogan for the Tyrell Corporation, which designs the androids that take on lives of their own. The saying perfectly encapsulates the themes of "Blade Runner" and, by proxy, "The Creator." If a machine of sufficient intelligence is indistinguishable from humans, then shouldn't it be considered on equal footing as humanity?
The Huffington Post calls its "the pro-AI movie we don't need right now" — but they also praise it as "one of the most astonishing sci-fi theatrical experiences this year." Variety notes the film was co-written and directed by Gareth Edwards (director of the 2014 version of Godzilla and the Star Wars prequel Rogue One), working with Oscar-winning cinematographer Greig Fraser (Dune) after the two collaborated on Rogue One. But what's unique is the way they filmed it: adding visual effects "almost improvisationally afterward.

"Achieving this meant shooting sumptuous natural landscapes in far-flung locales like Thailand or Tibet and building futuristic temples digitally in post-production..."

IndieWire gushes that "This movie looks fucking incredible. To a degree that shames most blockbusters that cost three times its budget." They call it "a sci-fi epic that should change Hollywood forever." Once audiences see how "The Creator" was shot, they'll be begging Hollywood to close the book on blockbuster cinema's ugliest and least transportive era. And once executives see how much (or how little) "The Creator" was shot for, they'll be scrambling to make good on that request as fast as they possibly can.

Say goodbye to $300 million superhero movies that have been green-screened within an inch of their lives and need to gross the GDP of Grenada just to break even, and say hello — fingers crossed — to a new age of sensibly budgeted multiplex fare that looks worlds better than most of the stuff we've been subjected to over the last 20 years while simultaneously freeing studios to spend money on the smaller features that used to keep them afloat. Can you imagine...? How ironic that such fresh hope for the future of hand-crafted multiplex entertainment should come from a film so bullish and sanguine at the thought of humanity being replaced by A.I [...]

The real reason why "The Creator" is set in Vietnam (and across large swaths of Eurasia) is so that it could be shot in Vietnam. And in Thailand. And in Cambodia, Nepal, Indonesia, and several other beautiful countries that are seldom used as backdrops for futuristic science-fiction stories like this one. This movie was born from the visual possibilities of interpolating "Star Wars"-like tech and "Blade Runner"-esque cyber-depression into primordially expressive landscapes. Greig Fraser and Oren Soffer's dusky and tactile cinematography soaks up every inch of what the Earth has to offer without any concession to motion capture suits or other CGI obstructions, which speaks to the truly revolutionary aspect of this production: Rather than edit the film around its special effects, Edwards reverse-engineered the special effects from a completed edit of his film... Instead of paying a fortune to recreate a flimsy simulacrum of our world on a computer, Edwards was able to shoot the vast majority of his movie on location at a fraction of the price, which lends "The Creator" a palpable sense of place that instantly grounds this story in an emotional truth that only its most derivative moments are able to undo... [D]etails poke holes in the porous border that runs between artifice and reality, and that has an unsurprisingly profound effect on a film so preoccupied with finding ghosts in the shell. Can a robot feel love? Do androids dream of electric sheep? At what point does programming blur into evolution...?

[T]he director has a classic eye for staging action, that he gives his movies room to breathe, and that he knows that the perfect "Kid A" needle-drop (the album, not the song) can do more for a story about the next iteration of "human" life than any of the tracks from Hans Zimmer's score... [T]here's some real cognitive dissonance to seeing a film that effectively asks us to root for a cuter version of ChatGPT. But Edwards and Weitz's script is fascinating for its take on a future in which people have programmed A.I. to maintain the compassion that our own species has lost somewhere along the way; a future in which technology might be a vessel for humanity rather than a replacement for it; a future in which computers might complement our movies rather than replace our cameras.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp spotted a Reddit Ask Me Anything (AMA) this week with the Microsoft engineering team that created Python in Excel, a new feature that makes it possible to natively combine Python and Excel analytics in Excel workbooks. (Copilot integration is coming soon). Redditors expressed a wish to be able to run Python in environments other than the confines of the locked down, price-to-be-determined Microsoft Azure cloud containers employed by Python in Excel.

But "There were three main reasons behind starting with the cloud (as a GDPR Compliant Microsoft 365 Connected experience) first," MicrosoftExcelTeam explained:

1. Running Python securely on a local machine is a difficult problem. We treat all Python code in the workbook as untrusted, so we execute it in a hypervisor-isolated container on Azure that does not have any outbound network access. Python code and the data that it operates on is sent to be executed in the container. The Microsoft-licensed Python environment in the container is provided by Anaconda and was prepared using their stringent security practices as documented here.

2. Sharing Excel workbooks with others is a really important scenario. We wanted to ensure that the Python code in a workbook you share behaves the same when your teammates open it â" without requiring them to install and manage Python.

3. We need to ensure that the Python in Excel feature always works for our customers. The value of Python is in its ecosystem of libraries, not just in providing a Python interpreter. But managing a local Python environment is challenging even for the most experienced developers. By running on Azure, we remove the need for users or their systems administrators to maintain a local installation of Python on every machine that uses the feature in their organization...


So, how does one balance tradeoffs between increased security and ease-of-maintenance with the loss of functionality and increased costs when it comes to programming language use? Is it okay to just give up on making certain important basic functionality available, as Microsoft is doing here with Python and has done in the past by not supporting Excel VBA in the Cloud and no longer making BASIC available on PCs and Macs?
Microsoft's team added at one point that "For our initial release, we are targeting data analytics scenarios, and bringing the power of Python analytics libraries into Excel.

"We believe the approach weâ(TM)ve taken will appeal to analysts who use both Excel and Python Notebooks in their workflows. Today, these users need to import/export data and have no way of creating a self-contained artifact that can be easily and securely shared with their colleagues."

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Today, there are over 110 million Farsi speakers worldwide," explained tech-backed nonprofit Code.org in Tuesday's announcement of its new multi-year 'Code.org in Farsi' initiative. "While the majority of native speakers live in Iran, Afghanistan, and Tajikistan, there are millions living as immigrants, migrants, and refugees around the world. With the Code.org in Farsi initiative, Farsi-speaking students will have the same access to our curricula that is already available to students in all other major languages of the world."

The announcement closes with a statement regarding Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) compliance considerations: "As a U.S. nonprofit, Code.org is subject to laws regarding sanctions with Iran. After consulting with U.S. legal counsel experienced in the Iranian Sanctions and Translations Regulations (ITSR), Code.org believes that it may fund, prepare, and distribute the Farsi Translations of CS Curriculum in the United States and elsewhere around the world, including within Iran. The ITSR provides an exemption for "information and informational materials" (the IIM Exemption) and Code.org believes that this exemption will fully shield its funding, preparation, and distribution of the Farsi Translations and thus enable its Farsi Translations effort to proceed in full compliance with U.S. economic sanctions requirements.

At the Open Source Summit Europe in Bilbao, Spain, the Linux Foundation this week announced the launch of the Unified Acceleration (UXL) Foundation. The group's mission is to deliver "an open standard accelerator programming model that simplifies development of performant, cross-platform applications." From a report: The foundation's founding members include the likes of Arm, Fujitsu, Google Cloud, Imagination Technologies, Intel, Qualcomm and Samsung. The company most conspicuously missing from this list is Nvidia, which offers its own CUDA programming model for working with its GPUs. At its core, this new foundation is an evolution of the oneAPI initiative, which is also aimed to create a new programming model to make it easier for developers to support a wide range of accelerators, no matter whether they are GPUs, FPGAs or other specialized accelerators. Like with the oneAPI spec, the aim of the new foundation is to ensure that developers can make use of these technologies without having to delve deep into the specifics of the underlying accelerators and the infrastructure they run on.

An anonymous reader shared this report from InfoWorld: JetBrains is previewing a dedicated IDE for the Rust programming language, called RustRover, which combines coding assistance with an integrated Rust toolchain. Available in preview September 13, RustRover is positioned to simplify the Rust coding experience while "unlocking the language's full potential," JetBrains said. Capabilities include real-time feedback, code suggestions, simplified toolchain management, and team collaboration.

Previously, JetBrains offered IntelliJ Rust, an open source Rust plugin for IntelliJ IDEs. But with RustRover, the company aims to provide a dedicated product with enhanced functionality for the growing Rust developer community. JetBrains also has been previewing a multi-language editor and IDE, called JetBrains Fleet, that supports Rust development...

RustRover will have some similarities to JetBrains' other language-specific IDEs including PyCharm for Python, GoLand for Go, and RubyMine for Ruby.
RustRover integrates with version control systems, supporting GitHub and Git.

Today Wired published an opinion piece by software engineer Zeb Larson headlined "ChatGPT Isn't Coming for Your Coding Job." Firing engineers and throwing AI at blocked feature development would probably result in disaster, followed by the rehiring of those engineers in short order.

More reasonable suggestions show that large language models (LLMs) can replace some of the duller work of engineering. They can offer autocomplete suggestions or methods to sort data, if they're prompted correctly. As an engineer, I can imagine using an LLM to "rubber duck" a problem, giving it prompts for potential solutions that I can review. It wouldn't replace conferring with another engineer, because LLMs still don't understand the actual requirements of a feature or the interconnections within a code base, but it would speed up those conversations by getting rid of the busy work...

[C]omputing history has already demonstrated that attempts to reduce the presence of developers or streamline their role only end up adding complexity to the work and making those workers even more necessary. If anything, ChatGPT stands to eliminate the duller work of coding much the same way that compilers ended the drudgery of having to work in binary, which would make it easier for developers to focus more on building out the actual architecture of their creations... We've introduced more and more complexity to computers in the hopes of making them so simple that they don't need to be programmed at all. Unsurprisingly, throwing complexity at complexity has only made it worse, and we're no closer to letting managers cut out the software engineers.

Last week IEEE Spectrum released its 10th annual rankings of the Top Programming Languages. It choose a top language for each of three categories: actively used among typical IEEE members and working software engineers, in demand by employers, or "in the zeitgeist".

The results? This year, Python doesn't just remain No. 1 in our general "Spectrum" ranking — which is weighted to reflect the interests of the typical IEEE member — but it widens its lead.

Python's increased dominance appears to be largely at the expense of smaller, more specialized, languages. It has become the jack-of-all-trades language — and the master of some, such as AI, where powerful and extensive libraries make it ubiquitous. And although Moore's Law is winding down for high-end computing, low-end microcontrollers are still benefiting from performance gains, which means there's now enough computing power available on a US $0.70 CPU to make Python a contender in embedded development, despite the overhead of an interpreter. Python also looks to be solidifying its position for the long term: Many children and teens now program their first game or blink their first LED using Python. They can then move seamlessly into more advanced domains, and even get a job, with the same language.

But Python alone does not make a career. In our "Jobs" ranking, it is SQL that shines at No. 1. Ironically though, you're very unlikely to get a job as a pure SQL programmer. Instead, employers love, love, love, seeing SQL skills in tandem with some other language such as Java or C++. With today's distributed architectures, a lot of business-critical data live in SQL databases...

But don't let Python and SQL's rankings fool you: Programming is still far from becoming a monoculture. Java and the various C-like languages outweigh Python in their combined popularity, especially for high-performance or resource-sensitive tasks where that interpreter overhead of Python's is still too costly (although there are a number of attempts to make Python more competitive on that front). And there are software ecologies that are resistant to being absorbed into Python for other reasons.
The article cites the statistical analysis/visualization language R, as well as Fortran and Cobol, as languages that are hard to port code from or that have accumulated large already-validated codebases. But Python also remains at #1 in their third "Trending" category — with Java in second there and on the general "IEEE Spectrum" list.

JavaScript appears below Python and Java on all three lists. Java is immediately below them on the Trending and "Jobs" list, but two positions further down on the general "Spectrum" list (below C++ and C).

The metrics used for the calculation include the number of hits on Google, recent questions on Stack Overflow, tags on Discord, mentions in IEEE's library of journal articles and its CareerBuilder job site, and language use in starred GitHub repositories and number of new programming books.

Business Insider reports on "a soaring number of Gen Zers who has decided to skip college altogether.

"Four million fewer teenagers enrolled at a college in 2022 than in 2012." For many, the price tag has simply grown too exorbitant to justify the cost. From 2010 to 2022, college tuition rose an average of 12% a year, while overall inflation only increased an average of 2.6% each year. Today it costs at least $104,108 on average to attend four years of public university — and $223,360 for a private university.

At the same time, the salaries students can expect to earn after graduation haven't kept up with the cost of college. A 2019 report from the Pew Research Center found that earnings for young college-educated workers had remained mostly flat over the past 50 years. Four years after graduating, according to recent data from the Higher Education Authority, a third of students earn less than $40,000 — lower than the average salary of $44,356 that workers with only a high-school diploma earn. Factor in the average student debt of $33,500 that college graduates owe after they leave school, and many graduates will spend years catching up with their degree-less counterparts. This student-debt-driven financial hole is leaving more young graduates with a lower net worth than previous generations.

The widening gap between the value and the cost of college has started to shift Gen Z's attitude toward higher education. A 2022 survey by Morning Consult found that 41% of Gen Zers said they "tend to trust US colleges and universities," the lowest percentage of any generation. It's a significant shift from when millennials were in their shoes a decade ago: A 2014 Pew Research survey found that 63% of millennials valued a college education or planned to get one. And of those who graduated, 41% of that cohort considered their schooling "very useful" in readying them to enter the workforce — that's compared to 45% of Gen Xers and 47% of boomers who felt the same...

The focus now, especially in the midst of so much uncertainty in the economy, is on using college to prepare for a single, overriding goal: getting a good job.
The article argues this is transforming which classes get emphasized by both students and colleges. For example, in 2014 computer programming was only the 7th most popular major at U.C. Berkeley — but now it's #1. And the data science degree Berkeley created five years ago is now already its third most popular.

And meanwhile, "last year only 7% of Harvard freshmen planned to major in the humanities — down from 20% a decade earlier and almost 30% in the 1970s."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader yusing for sharing the article.

An anonymous reader shared this report from InfoWorld: The uses of WebAssembly, aka Wasm, have grown far beyond its initial target of web applications, according to The State of WebAssembly 2023 report. But some developers remain skeptical. Released September 6 by the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF) and SlashData, in collaboration with the Linux Foundation, the report finds mostly optimism among software developers about future adoption of Wasm for web and non-web environments... However, about 22% of participants in the report indicated pessimism about Wasm adoption for either the web or non-web environments. Further, 83% of the respondents reported challenges with Wasm including difficulties with debugging and troubleshooting, different performance between runtimes, lack of consistent developer experiences between runtimes, lack of learning materials, and compatibility issues with certain browsers.

The report finds that respondents are using WebAssembly across a wide range of software projects including data visualization (35%), internet of things (32%, artificial intelligence (30%), games (28%), back-end services (27%), edge computing (25%), and more. While Wasm is still primarily used to develop web applications (58%), this is changing thanks to WASI (WebAssembly System Interface), which provides a modular interface for Wasm...

Other findings of the State of WebAssembly 2023 report:

- When migrating existing applications to Wasm, 30% of respondents experience performance benefits of more than 50%.
- JavaScript is the most popular language used with Wasm applications. But Rust stands out in popularity in Wasm projects compared to other use cases...
The article says WebAssembly developers were attracted by "faster loading times, the ability to explore new use cases and technologies, and the ability to share code between projects. Improved performance over JavaScript and efficient execution of computationally intensive tasks also were cited."

Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson has removed TypeScript from the forthcoming version 8 of the Turbo framework, saying he has "never been a fan," but many Turbo users have protested that the decision was rushed and the change is unwelcome. From a report: A comment on the GitHub pull request that removes TypeScript states that this "is a step back, for both library users and contributors." This comment has -- at the time of writing -- 357 likes and just 8 downvotes, suggesting wide support. Turbo is a framework for delivering HTML pages intended to "dramatically reduce the amount of custom JavaScript," and is sponsored by Hannson's company 37signals, whose products include the Basecamp project management platform and the Hey messaging system. Turbo is the engine of Hotwire, short for "HTML over the wire," because it prefers sending HTML itself rather than JSON data and JavaScript code.

Although Turbo itself is not among the most popular frameworks, Ruby on Rails is well-known and used by major web sites including GitHub and Shopify. Hansson posted that TypeScript "pollutes the code with type gymnastics that add ever so little joy to my development experience, and quite frequently considerable grief. Things that should be easy become hard." The community around the open source Turbo project though is for the most part perplexed and disappointed, not only by the change itself, but also by the manner in which it was made.

Microsoft says it will defend buyers of its artificial intelligence products from copyright infringement lawsuits, an effort by the software giant to ease concerns customers might have about using its AI "Copilots" to generate content based on existing work. From a report: The Microsoft Copilot Copyright Commitment will protect customers as long as they've "used the guardrails and content filters we have built into our products" Hossein Nowbar, General Counsel, Corporate Legal Affairs and Corporate Secretary at Microsoft, said in a blog post Thursday. Microsoft also pledged to pay related fines or settlements and said it has taken steps to ensure its Copilots respect copyright.

"We believe in standing behind our customers when they use our products," Nowbar said. "We are charging our commercial customers for our Copilots, and if their use creates legal issues, we should make this our problem rather than our customers' problem." Generative AI applications scoop up existing content such as art, articles and programming code and use it to generate new material that can simplify or automate a range of tasks. Microsoft is baking the technology, developed with partner OpenAI, into many of its biggest products, including Office and Windows, potentially putting customers in legal jeopardy.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Rick Klein and his team have been preserving TV adverts, forgotten tapes, and decades-old TV programming for years. Now operating as a 501(c)(3) non-profit, the Museum of Classic Chicago Television has called YouTube home since 2007. However, copyright notices sent on behalf of Sony, protecting TV shows between 40 and 60 years old, could shut down the project in 48 hours. "Our YouTube channel with 150k subscribers is in danger of being terminated by September 6th if I don't find a way to resolve these copyright claims that Markscan made," Klein told TorrentFreak on Friday. "At this point, I don't even care if they were issued under authorization by Sony or not -- I just need to reach a live human being to try to resolve this without copyright strikes. I am willing to remove the material manually to get the strikes reversed."

Over the weekend Klein shared details of the copyright complaints filed with YouTube. Two of the claims can be seen in the image below and on first view, appear straightforward enough. Two episodes of the TV series Bewitched dated 1964 aired on ABC Network and almost sixty years later, archive copies of those transmissions were removed from YouTube for violating Sony copyrights, with MCCTv receiving a strike. A claim targeting an upload titled Bewitched -- 'Twitch or Treat' -- WPWR Channel 60 (Complete Broadcast, 8/6/1984) follows the same pattern, but what isn't shown are the details added by MCCTv to place the episode (and the included commercials) in historical context. Another takedown target -- Bewitched -- 'Sam in the Moon' (Complete 16mm Network Print, 1/5/1967) is accompanied by even more detail, including references in the episode to then-current events.

Given that copyright law locks content down for decades, Klein understands that can sometimes cause issues, although 16 years on YouTube suggests that the overwhelming majority of rightsholders don't consider his channel a threat. If they did, the option to monetize the recordings can be an option. [...] Klein says MCCTv certainly doesn't set out to hurt copyright holders. However, there's always a balance between preserving "rare pieces of video ephemera" and the likelihood that nobody needs to enforce any rights, versus unusual circumstances like these where unexpected complaints need to be resolved with impossible-to-reach parties. Klein says the team is happy to comply with Sony's wishes and they hope that given a little leeway, the project won't be consigned to history. Perhaps Sony will recall the importance of time-shifting while understanding that time itself is running out for The Museum of Classic Chicago Television.

belmolis writes: Canadian prisons allow prisoners to buy devices such as personal computers and gaming consoles but severely restrict the technology, nominally on security grounds. Modern gaming consoles are forbidden on the grounds that they can connect to the internet, so the typical purchase is a Playstation 1. No version of Microsoft Windows more recent than Windows 98 is allowed. No device that can play MP3 files is allowed. The regulations forbid operating systems other than Microsoft DOS or Windows and any software capable of creating a program, such as a compiler as are "database programs capable of altering or manipulating SQL databases". Although learning job skills is encouraged, programming is evidently not considered appropriate. The relationship of most of these restrictions to security is obscure.

Santiago Valdarrama teaches machine learning. He posted this week on Twitter and LinkedIn that "Scrum is a cancer." Some highlights: I've been writing software for 25 years, and nothing renders a software team useless like Scrum does... We spent more time talking than doing... We spent more time estimating story points than writing software... Imagine having a manager, a scrum master, a product owner, and a tech lead. You had to answer to all of them and none simultaneously...

I believe in Agile, but this ain't agile... The result was always the same: It didn't work. Scrum is a cancer that will eat your development team. Scrum is not for developers; it's another tool for managers to feel they are in control.
DevOps.com shares some reactions, including the developer who calls Scrum "a life-sucking batch of meetings that are good for one thing: Taking developers who can't or don't want to see the overall business/architecture picture and getting useful work out of them."

But later in the week, Valdarrama revisited the issue with a follow-up post. "After 3,400 replies, I learned a few things." First, the most common jobs among the people who told me I was wrong were "Agile Coach" and "Scrum Master...."

Second, Scrum can't fail because Scrum is whatever you want Scrum to be. There's no right way to do Scrum, so if it doesn't work for you, you aren't as bright as you thought you were.

Third, Scrum isn't agile, except when it is. But it's much better than Waterfall, except when it isn't. And it's better than nothing and everything at the same time.

Fourth, many people got triggered by my comparison of Scrum and communism...

Finally, by far, most people hate Scrum with passion.
Thanks to Slashdot reader RUs1729 for sharing the link.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: An unknown hacker gained administrative control of Sourcegraph, an AI-driven service used by developers at Uber, Reddit, Dropbox, and other companies, and used it to provide free access to resources that normally would have required payment. In the process, the hacker(s) may have accessed personal information belonging to Sourcegraph users, Diego Comas, Sourcegraph's head of security, said in a post on Wednesday. For paid users, the information exposed included license keys and the names and email addresses of license key holders. For non-paying users, it was limited to email addresses associated with their accounts. Private code, emails, passwords, usernames, or other personal information were inaccessible.

The hacker gained administrative access by obtaining an authentication key a Sourcegraph developer accidentally included in a code published to a public Sourcegraph instance hosted on Sourcegraph.com. After creating a normal user Sourcegraph account, the hacker used the token to elevate the account privileges to those of an administrator. The access token appeared in a pull request posted on July 14, the user account was created on August 28, and the elevation to admin occurred on August 30. "The malicious user, or someone connected to them, created a proxy app allowing users to directly call Sourcegraph's APIs and leverage the underlying LLM [large language model]," Comas wrote. "Users were instructed to create free Sourcegraph.com accounts, generate access tokens, and then request the malicious user to greatly increase their rate limit. On August 30 (2023-08-30 13:25:54 UTC), the Sourcegraph security team identified the malicious site-admin user, revoked their access, and kicked off an internal investigation for both mitigation and next steps."

The resource free-for-all generated a spike in calls to Sourcegraph programming interfaces, which are normally rate-limited for free accounts. "The promise of free access to Sourcegraph API prompted many to create accounts and start using the proxy app," Comas wrote. "The app and instructions on how to use it quickly made its way across the web, generating close to 2 million views. As more users discovered the proxy app, they created free Sourcegraph.com accounts, adding their access tokens, and accessing Sourcegraph APIs illegitimately." [...] While most data was available for all paid and community users, the number of license keys exposed was limited to 20.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Companies increasingly see the value in mining their data for deeper insights. According to a NewVantage survey, 97.6% of major worldwide organizations are focusing investments into big data and AI. But challenges stand in the way of executing big data analytics. One recent poll found that 65% of organizations feel they have "too much" data to analyze. Google's proposed solution is BigQuery Studio, a new service within BigQuery, its fully managed serverless data warehouse, that provides a single experience to edit programming languages including SQL, Python and Spark to run analytics and machine learning workloads at "petabyte scale." BigQuery Studio is available in preview as of this week.

"BigQuery Studio is a new experience that really puts people who are working on data on the one side and people working on AI on the other side in a common environment," Gerrit Kazmaier, VP and GM of data and analytics at Google, told TechCrunch in a phone interview. "It basically provides access to all of the services that those people need to work -- there's an element of simplification on the user experience side." BigQuery Studio is designed to enable users to discover, explore, analyze and predict data. Users can start in a programming notebook to validate and prep data, then open that notebook in other services, including Vertex AI, Google's managed machine learning platform, to continue their work with more specialized AI infrastructure and tooling.

With BigQuery Studio, teams can directly access data wherever they're working, Kazmaier says. And they have added controls for "enterprise-level" governance, regulation and compliance. "[BigQuery Studio shows] how data is being generated to how it's being processed and how it's being used in AI models, which sounds technical, but it's really important," he added. "You can push down code for machine learning models directly into BigQuery as infrastructure, and that means that you can evaluate it at scale."

According to CNBC, Google is planning to license new sets of mapping data to companies building solar products, and is hoping to generate up to $100 million in its first year. From the report: The company plans to sell access to new APIs (application programming interfaces) with solar and energy information and air quality, according to materials viewed by CNBC. Among the new offerings will be a Solar API, which could be used by solar installers like SunRun and Tesla Energy and solar design companies like Aurora Solar, according to a list of example customers viewed by CNBC. Google also sees customer opportunities with real estate companies like Zillow, Redfin, hospitality companies like Marriott Bonvoy, and utilities like PG&E.

Some of the data from the Solar API will come from a consumer-focused pilot called Project Sunroof, a solar savings calculator that originally launched in 2015. The program allows users to enter their address and to receive estimated solar costs such as electric bill savings and the size of the solar installation they'll need. It also offers 3D modeling of the roofs of buildings and nearby trees based on Google Maps data. Google plans to sell API access to individual building data, as well as aggregated data for all buildings in a particular city or county, one document states. The company says it has data for over 350 million buildings, according to documents, up significantly from the 60 million buildings it cited for Project Sunroof in 2017.

One internal document estimates the company's solar APIs will generate revenue between $90 and $100 million in the first year after launch. There's also a potential to connect with Google Cloud products down the line, documents state. As part of the planned launch, the company is also planning to announce an Air Quality API that will let customers request air quality data, such as pollutants and health-based recommendations for specific locations. It'll also include digital heat maps of the data and hourly air quality information, as well as air quality history of up to 30 days.

This month the official Rust blog announced: For the 6th year in a row, the Rust Project conducted a survey on the Rust programming language, with participation from project maintainers, contributors, and those generally interested in the future of Rust. This edition of the annual State of Rust Survey opened for submissions on December 5 and ran until December 22, 2022... [W]e had 9,433 total survey completions and an increased survey completion rate of 82% vs. 76% in 2021...

- More people are using Rust than ever before! Over 90% of survey respondents identified as Rust users, and of those using Rust, 47% do so on a daily basis — an increase of 4% from the previous year.

- 30% of Rust user respondents can write simple programs in Rust, 27% can write production-ready code, and 42% consider themselves productive using Rust. Of the former Rust users who completed the survey, 30% cited difficulty as the primary reason for giving up while nearly 47% cited factors outside of their control.

- The growing maturation of Rust can be seen through the increased number of different organizations utilizing the language in 2022. In fact, 29.7% of respondents stated that they use Rust for the majority of their coding work at their workplace, which is a 51.8% increase compared to the previous year.

- There are numerous reasons why we are seeing increased use of Rust in professional environments. Top reasons cited for the use of Rust include the perceived ability to write "bug-free software" (86%), Rust's performance characteristics (84%), and Rust's security and safety guarantees (69%). We were also pleased to find that 76% of respondents continue to use Rust simply because they found it fun and enjoyable. (Respondents could select more than one option here, so the numbers don't add up to 100%.)

- Of those respondents that used Rust at work, 72% reported that it helped their team achieve its goals (a 4% increase from the previous year) and 75% have plans to continue using it on their teams in the future.

- But like any language being applied in the workplace, Rust's learning curve is an important consideration; 39% of respondents using Rust in a professional capacity reported the process as "challenging" and 9% of respondents said that adopting Rust at work has "slowed down their team". However, 60% of productive users felt Rust was worth the cost of adoption overall...

- Of those respondents who shared their main worries for the future of Rust, 26% have concerns that the developers and maintainers behind Rust are not properly supported — a decrease of more than 30% from the previous year's findings. One area of focus in the future may be to see how the Project in conjunction with the Rust Foundation can continue to push that number towards 0%.

- While 38% have concerns about Rust "becoming too complex", only a small number of respondents were concerned about documentation, corporate oversight, or speed of evolution. 34% of respondents are not worried about the future of Rust at all.

This year's survey reflects a 21% decrease in fears about Rust's usage in the industry since the last survey.

The creators of four programming languages will appear together onstage for a historic conversation on September 19th.

- Adele Goldberg — Smalltalk
- Guido Van Rossum — Python
- Anders Hejlsberg — Turbo Pascal, C#, TypeScript
- James Gosling — Java

The announcement describes it as "a conversation about programming language design." The charity event brings together this unique group of computer science pioneers, unlike any event held before. These great minds come together for what will surely be a fantastic night of discussion as the panel delves into the past and future of programming language creation.
It's a fundraiser for two groups. NumFOCUS is a nonprofit charity sponsoring nearly all the major tools in the Python data science stack (including jupyter, numpy, pandas, and matplotlib), and it's also the group behind PyData conferences on open source data tools. And the Last Mile Education Fund offers financial support for low-income underrepresented students. It's being billed as the "inaugural charity event" of PyData Seattle.

This happened once before in 2019, when Puget Sound Programming Python arranged a four-way discussion with Python creator Guido van Rossum, Java creator James Gosling, Perl creator Larry Wall, and Anders Hejlsberg (Turbo Pascal, C#, TypeScript). They held a 90-minute discussion about "language design, the universe, and everything" as a benefit for CSforALL (a group promoting computer science classes at every grade level). During that discussion Gosling shared how Java "started out as kind of 'Do a better C', and it got out of control. The rest of the project really ended up just providing the context." And Anders Hejlsberg told the audience that TypeScript was inspired by massive "write-only" JavaScript code bases.

In their discussion on variable typing and its use in IDEs, Gosling mocked what he called the "real men use vi" mentality, leading to a lively back and forth. Perl's Larry Wall later acknowledged the importance of types and the careful consideration that went into implementing them for Perl 6, but also shared his unique perspective as a long-time designer of programming languages. "I think IDEs make language developers lazy."

At the end of the event, they all agreed that the most rewarding part of language design was the people — the excitement, the gratitude, and to see that community helping others in its community.

"Amazon launches cloud service to help non-coders build apps," read the 2020 headline at CNBC — both mobile and web applications.

But long-time Slashdot reader theodp has the rest of the story: Customers have told us that the need for custom applications far outstrips the capacity of developers to create them," Amazon Web Services explained as it jumped on the low-code and no-code bandwagon in 2020...

But just three years later, Amazon posted a "Dear Valued Customer" letter announcing it's pulling the plug on Honeycode at the end of February: "To our valued customers: Thank you for participating in the Amazon Honeycode beta program... After careful consideration, we have made the decision to end the beta service, effective February 29, 2024. Starting today, we are no longer accepting new customer sign-ups to the Honeycode beta. However, as an existing customer, you will be able to use Honeycode and your Honeycode apps as normal (and add team members to your existing account) until February 29, 2024, when the service will be discontinued. After this date, you will no longer be able to use Honeycode or any of the apps you created in Honeycode."

Amazon advises the "valued customers" it's leaving stranded to use Honeycode's "Export Data" option ("a handy way to get your info organized into a CSV file(s)", although "formulas will not export"). They also warn that "We will retain your data until April 29, 2024. If you do not take any action, your data will be deleted on April 30, 2024."

Amazon adds that the spirit of Honeycode (RIP, 2020-2024) will live on in its other products: "We are incorporating lessons from the Amazon Honeycode beta into current services, and remain committed to supporting no/low code services including Amazon SageMaker Canvas (2021-?), AWS Amplify Studio (2021-?), and AWS AppFabric (2023-?).