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Featured Articles

To work with bit patterns you have to master the mask. Find out what lies behind in this extract from Programmer's Python: Everything is Data .

The spreadsheet was a remarkable  invention and yet the people who pioneered it didn't reap all the rewards they should have. Today we take spreadsheets for granted, but there is fascinating story lurking behind the scenes.

Programming News and Views

In that same way Gemini can produce text, write poetry,  summarize an article, write code, and generate images, it can also generate robot actions with Gemini Robotics. Now, the new Gemini Robotics On-Device model eliminates the need for a network connection, and its full SDK allows roboticists to train robots with new tasks.

Just hot out of the oven, there's a new minor version release of the venerable programming language that is Perl.

Google is introducing Gemini CLI, an open-source AI agent that offers lightweight access to Gemini, Google's conversational chatbot that is based on Google's multimodal large language model (LLM), also called Gemini, from terminals.

With the end of support of Windows 10 just three months away, Windows 11 has finally edged ahead of Windows 10 in terms of  Desktop Windows Version Market Share on a Worldwide Basis. In Europe, however, Windows 10 still stays firmly ahead.

Version 21 of Apache Arrow has been released, including the first official Swift implementation of the platform. Improvements to Arrow 21 include exposing gRPC in the Flight client builder and improvements to Avro read consumers. The Swift implementation has been under development for a couple of years now.

PNG, the Portable Network Graphics specification, has been updated to add support for HDR (High Dynamic Range) images and for animated PNGs.

Four teams of humanoid robots faced off in fully autonomous 3-on-3 soccer matches in the latest event organized to showcase China’s advances in humanoid robot technology. It was the first such competition in China and a preview for the upcoming World Humanoid Robot Games, set to take place in Beijing.

What do you need to make a celebration noteworthy? You may automatically think fireworks, especially for Independence Day, but an increasing number of celebrations are turning to drone shows instead.

Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corporation and designer of Lotus 1-2-3, the "killer application" which made the personal computer ubiquitous in the business world in the 1980s has completed his MSc from MIT's Sloan School of Management, started in 1979.

The tools contradict each other; the first one allows you to write SQL instead of using Mongo's special syntax, while the other allows you to manipulate the database without having to write SQL and by just employing natural language.

The DeepSpeech project started by Mozilla has updated its GitHub page with the message "This project is now discontinued", and a change in the project status to archived.

Books of the Week

If you do make any Amazon purchases via our site, we may earn a few cents through the Amazon Associates program which is a small source of revenue that helps us to continue posting.

Full Review

Author: Nick Morgan
Publisher: No Starch
Date: March 2024
Pages: 376
ISBN: 978-1718502260
Print: 1718502265
Kindle: B09JBF5K9F
Audience: Developers wanting to learn JavaScript
Rating: 4
Reviewer: Ian Elliot
JavaScript is still a very important language, so why not a crash course?

Book Watch

Subtitled "A Python Introduction", this book shows how to build working models for tasks from image analysis to creative writing using Python. Ronald T. Kneusel emphasizes practical skill development and experimentation, building to a case study that incorporates everything covered so far to classify audio recordings. Examples of working code you can easily run and modify are provided, and all code is freely available on GitHub.

This book teaches the art of database design through real-world projects, insightful illustrations, and action-oriented learning. Unlike many beginning database books that focus on the technical details of SQL and formal database theory, in this book Qiang Hao and Michail Tsikerdekis teach how to think about relational database design from the ground up. The authors also explore how generative AI tools such as ChatGPT radically simplify the mundane tasks of database design.

This book introduces the ways that artificial intelligence can make life as a coder easier. Chris Minnick explains the tools that can produce, examine, and fix code for you and looks at how to automate processes like code documentation, debugging, updating, and optimization.

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