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Featured Articles

Objects seem to emerge as something almost natural, but what advantages are there in making use of them? This is an extract from my book Trick of the Mind which explores what it is to be a programmer.

The name Cray is synonoymous with "Supercomputer". We look at the life and achievements of Seymour Cray, regarded as the father of the supercomputer and a continuing influence on high performance computing systems.

Programming News and Views

Google is pushing ahead with its unpopular attempt at developer verification and has recently outlined why it's not so objectionable. Is verification desirable or just another way of tightening Google's grip on software distribution?

90% of professional developers now use AI at work, up 14% from 2024, spending a median of two hours per day working with AI tools. Nearly two-thirds rely on AI for at least half their workflow, and for one in twelve development work is now almost entirely AI-mediated.

Code-named Apertus, it's open-source and multilingual trained on trillions of tokens. What makes it different?

.NET Aspire 9.5 has been released with a number of improvements to the dashboard. It also adds targeted CLI and tooling updates, channel-aware templating, and a preview of infrastructure for .NET 10's new file-based apps feature.

Google has revealed more details of its plans to release a version of Android for PCs. The information came during the keynote session at the recent Qualcomm Snapdragon Summit that took place in Maui, Hawaii, September 23-25.

JetBrains is hosting JavaScript Day on October 2nd with all presentations being streamed live on You Tube, where they will remain available after the event. And anyone interested in the JavaScript ecosystem should take the time to complete the 2025 State Of JS survey from Devographics which has opened earlier than usual this year.

Today we celebrate the 100th anniversary of the birth of Seymour Cray, regarded as the father of the supercomputer. One of the most original computer designers the world has ever seen his Cray 1 remains as an icon of computer design.

Deno has started a GoFundMe campaign to raise $200k to help support its formal Cancellation Petition with the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) to get "JavaScript" converted from a trademark to public domain.

Meta has announced a developer preview of the Meta Wearables Device Access Toolkit, which will be made available later this year. The toolkit lets developers create apps to work with Meta's smart glasses.

Who said that Perl can't do AI? And to prove it here's LocalCode, a Perl AI coding agent for local Ollama models.

Amazon Corretto 25, a Long Term Support (LTS) version, is now generally available. This release brings Corretto into line with JDK 25 with support for compact object headers, ahead-of-time-caching support, and CPU‑time sampling, cooperative sampling and method‑trace events for low‑overhead production profiling in JDK Flight Recorder.

Book Watch

How do you know what might have happened, had you done things differently? I this book, Robert Osazuwa Ness gives insights on how to make predictions and control outcomes based on causal relationships instead of pure correlation, so you can make precise and timely interventions. Ness' clear, code-first approach explains essential details of causal machine learning that are hidden in academic papers, and provides a practical introduction to building AI models that can reason about causality.

In this book Anil Ananthaswamy explains the fundamental math behind machine learning-powered AI, including linear algebra and calculus, the stuff of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century mathematics. Ananthaswamy goes on to suggest intriguing links between artificial and natural intelligence. Might the same math underpin them both? He also investigates the transformer architecture that makes large language models like ChatGPT possible and points to groundbreaking future directions enabled by the technology.

From the creator of Dilbert, this is an updated second edition of Scott Adam's guidebook to spotting and avoiding loserthink - the  sneaky mental habits trapping victims in their own bubbles of reality. The premise of the book is that if you've been on social media lately, or turned on your TV, you may have noticed a lot of dumb ideas floating around, such as "We can tell the difference between evidence and coincidences," and "The simplest explanation is usually true."

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