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Featured Articles

Many Python extensions simply provide functions for the code to use. What can a C function return? Answer a Python Object. This extract is from the book by Mike James that helps you combine the speed and power of C with the versatility and ease-of-programming of Python.

Joe Celko has come up with a math puzzle based on a perennial  political hot topic. But let the team from International Storm Door & Software explain the problem of faced by planners who want to introduce policies to reduce segregation and discrimination.

Programming News and Views

News broke on August 5th that Demis Hassabis is stepping down from day-to-day operations at Google DeepMind and that four other Google AI luminaries have also departed to found Discover Loop, a new research-focused startup. Alphabet's stock experienced an immediate drop of around 4%, a loss of some $170 billion in market capitalization, reflecting deep investor concern.

There comes a point where you just have to admit that something that was open source has been maneuvered into something that isn't anything like open. So it is with Android. The latest change makes the Android Open Source Project a joke.

Floci is a high performance, open source AWS service emulator designed for local development and continuous integration environments.

Amazon is adding native vector support to DynamoDB, its managed noSQL database service. The addition does away with the need to use a separate vector database, brings DynamoDB into line with other similar products.

Version 2.0.0 of the C# SDK has been updated to implement the 2026-07-28 Model Context Protocol specification revision.

Next.js 16.3 has been released with new SPA-like navigations, better AI tooling, and a much less memory-hungry dev server.

Engineers at MIT's AURA Lab have designed a robot that can swim underwater, and flap out of the water to continue flying through air, much like a diving bird. Their efforts may help launch a new class of aerial-aquatic drones and vehicles.

There will be a total solar eclipse on 12 August across a strip of the Iberian Peninsula, the first total eclipse in the region for over  120 years. A project in Catalonia, Spain, will analyze the effect of the forthcoming solar eclipse on people wearing health tracking devices such as smartwatches.

Boston Dynamics has embarked on a project testing Spot as a  delivery assistant to tackle what what logistics industry terms the "porch gap", the final 50 feet between a delivery van and a customer's front door.

As of July 30, CISA released a set of guidelines available as
a single file download. We look into its key points.

GNU Binutils has been updated with the addition of RISC-V extensions and linker options, as well as reproducible source archives and more modernization of the GNU toolchain.

Book Watch

This book explores the exciting combo of two revolutionary technologies that are reshaping how we work, code, and solve problems. Authors John C. Shovic and Mary Everett draw on their extensive work in computer science, precision agriculture, and artificial intelligence to walk you through the intersection of Python programming and AI applications, providing hands-on approaches to implementing AI with Python. It moves from foundational concepts to advanced applications, covering essential Python libraries: TensorFlow, PyTorch, OpenCV, and scikit-learn. It also explores essential AI concepts, like neural networks, machine learning models, and natural language processing.

This book is a practical guide to understanding how modern reasoning-oriented LLMs work by building their core methods step by step. Sebastian Raschka tells a clear engineering story: start with a conventional pre-trained LLM, learn how text generation works, build reliable evaluation tools, improve reasoning through inference-time methods, then move into training-based approaches such as reinforcement learning and distillation.

In this book Vivienne Ming helps readers grasp the ugly and the amazing ways that individuals, companies, and societies will respond to the changes that are already taking hold due to the advent of AI. Rather than a textbook on machine learning or a utopian/dystopian screed, Robot-Proof is a book about people, exploring what it means to be human in an increasingly automated world.

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