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Featured Articles

The Uno Q has a small LED matrix that could be really useful if it could display text. It can and Harry Fairhead shows you how.  - This is an extract from his book on the Uno Q, due to be published in February.

It is almost folklore that the JavaScript equality operator == is evil and you should always use the strict equality operator === but sometimes it just makes things easier to get JavaScript to do all of the conversions for you. In this puzzle the temptation leads to a real problem.

Programming News and Views

or not? There is no denying that the change to object-oriented programming was one of the biggest shifts since we started to use high-level languages - but was it a good move? Given how pervasive the methodology is, the answer has to be "Yes".

Google has announced a way to write SQL queries using natural language in BigQuery. They describe it as making 'vibe querying' a reality.

Django 6.0 has been released with new features including native Content Security Policy support, a built-in background tasks framework,  and improvements to templates for component-based development.

OpenSilver 3.3 has been released with the ability to embed any Blazor component directly inside XAML applications. The new release also adds .NET 10 support, substantial WPF compatibility improvements, and a new Responsive markup extension for adaptive layouts.

Wouldn't it be great to have an interface that could work with any AI agent? Toad is Python's answer to a unified front-end for the many AI coding agents out there.

The GitHub Copilot SDK has entered tech preview. The SDK can be used to build the orchestration layer for agentic workflows, handling  planning, tool/MCP calls, state and streaming.

A full-scale replica of ENIAC, the world's first general-purpose computer, has been built to mark its 80th anniversary next month. Although not functional, the 500 square foot model visually simulates the original and is impressive in its sheer size and attention to detail.

Recognizing the importance of AI Agents, industry stakeholders have decided to establish a Foundation that fosters common open standards and collaboration .

Amazon has announced a new AI PhD Fellowship program for PhD students in the area of AI research trhat will support  PhD students at nine universities in the USA.

Fjall, the Rust-based key-value store, has a new release. Version 3 features better performance for large data sets, improved memory usage, more extensive configuration, and a new disk format made for longevity and forwards compatibility, along with fully revamped APIs.

Microsoft has released the Copilot Studio extension for Visual Studio Code on the Visual Studio Marketplace. Copilot Studio is a graphical, low-code tool for building agents and agent flows.

Book Watch

This book begins with a seven-chapter crash course that teaches the basics of React development. Mary Delamater explains how to use JSX, props, state, and hooks to develop a React component that gets its data from a web API. After the first seven chapters, the modular design of this book lets you jump to any other chapter to learn new skills as you need them. These skills include creating a single-page app (SPA), styling with CSS modules, styling with Tailwind, managing complex state, improving performance with memorization, validating props with TypeScript, unit testing with Jest, and server-side rendering (SSR) with Next.js.

This book is a hands-on, practical guide showing how to use the newly integrated Python capabilities within Microsoft Excel, mapping familiar Excel concepts to Python foundations. Liam Bastick and Kathryn Newitt cover topics such as Python syntax, data structures, data analysis with pandas, visualization, and the use of complementary tools such as Power Query and Copilot. Readers will gain the ability to perform advanced forecasting, build predictive models, and streamline workflows, making you more efficient and competitive in today’s data-driven workplace.

In this book, subtitled "Why Superhuman AI Would Kill Us All", Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares argue that sufficiently smart AIs will develop goals of their own that put them in conflict with us—and that if it comes to conflict, an artificial superintelligence would crush us. The contest wouldn't even be close. Yudkowsky and Soares walk through the theory and the evidence, present one possible extinction scenario, and explain what it would take for humanity to survive.

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