Asad Ali's Blogs

 THE Metro Manila Council (MMC), the policy-making body of the Metropolitan Manila Development Authority (MMDA), approved three proposals to counter the expected heavy traffic during the holidays, including lifting the window hours for the number coding scheme. MMDA chairman Romando Artes said that they sought the early approval of the measures so as to have them implemented should the need arise. "There are three resolutions we forwarded and approved by MMC," he said, adding that these "are not yet effective."

  If you give in to the seduction of thinking that AI is a repository of expertise and wisdom that a human couldn’t possibly obtain, you’ll never be able to use AI productively,” Loukides suggests. To effectively use coding tools like AWS CodeWhisperer or Google Codey, you really need to coach them on the output you’re expecting. And to tell the AI, step by step, how to solve your development problems, you first need a deep understanding of the problem and how to prompt the AI to respond. A developer will also need to be able to evaluate when the AI gets it wrong. Again, this requires a certain level of expertise. Yes, we want coding assistants to help us become more ambitious in the projects we take on, as Willison has separately encouraged, but no, they’re simply not going to remove developers’ need to figure out code. Nor should we want them to, which brings me back to Willison’s first point.

 StorPool Storage v21, available today, supports high-performance erasure coding capabilities for scale-out block storage used by mission-critical applications on commodity flash storage among other new capabilities including new integrations with technology partners. Erasure coding is a form of data protection which breaks data into fragments which are spread across redundant storage locations to enable recovery. Block storage demands performance from hardware, said Ray Lucchesi, founder and president of Silverton Consulting. However, it’s difficult to support the performance requirements that erasure coding requires alongside block storage without impacting application performance, he said. Other vendors have tried in the past with the use of custom hardware. “Not a lot [of vendors] have done what they’re doing,” Lucchesi said. “If you want to do erasure coding, you’d got to have some way of maintaining performance parity.”

 The Faculty of Engineering is one of the founding faculties of The University of Hong Kong. Over the past century, the Faculty has continued to be one of the most comprehensive engineering faculties in Hong Kong, spanning across a wide spectrum of engineering disciplines. The Faculty has five departments, specializing in civil engineering, computer science, electrical and electronic engineering, industrial and manufacturing systems engineering, and mechanical engineering. The Faculty has been providing well-rounded curricula and high-quality engineering education in global knowledge-based economy at undergraduate and postgraduate levels, and making significant contributions to Hong Kong and the engineering community world-wide by training top-rated engineers. The Faculty of Engineering continues to attract the best students from around world to Hong Kong to study a range of diverse curricula.

 Greensboro’s iCode computer coding school will launch its latest program Code Queens on Tuesday, November 7. With Code Queens, iCode aims to transform young girls who live in and around the Greater Greensboro area into the women leaders of a digital future – all in the hopes of bridging the gender gap within tech industries. “It is important that women are represented in technology-based careers,” says Mavis Owusu, franchise owner-operator and director of iCode Greensboro.  She adds: “Men are four times more likely to be IT specialists, and we can close that gap by educating our girls about technology and computer programming so that they know these careers are not just for boys.”

  This week, Replit, a developer tooling vendor, has unveiled a set of initiatives aimed at democratizing AI for developers. Replit’s cloud-based software development platform boasts over 20 million users and has steadily been enhancing its generative AI capabilities in the past year. This enhancement includes the introduction of the GhostWriter AI code completion tool and a strategic partnership with Google. So far, access to GhostWriter has been limited to a select group of Replit users, but that’s about to change. Replit’s open source coding LLM is positioned as a competitive alternative to StarCoder LLM, jointly developed by ServiceNow and Hugging Face, as well as Meta’s Llama CodeLlama 7B. Amjad Masad, CEO of Replit, emphasized their mission of providing accessibility during a live-streamed session at the AI Engineer Summit. He stated, “Our mission is to empower the next billion developers, and we didn’t want to create a world where some people have access to GhostWriter while...

 The research seeks to Computer Assisted Coding Market size and future growth potential across various segments, including deployment modes, end users, and geographic locations. The base year used to Computer Assisted Coding Market size ranges from 2023 to 2029. The secondary research component of the study technique utilized to assess and forecast the Computer Assisted Coding Market involved gathering information on important vendor revenues. As part of the market segmentation process, vendor offerings were also taken into account. By using the revenue of the major market participants as a starting point, the bottom-up methodology was used to determine the overall market size of the global market. After determining the overall market size, the market was divided into a number of segments and sub-segments. These segments and sub-segments were then validated through primary research by conducting comprehensive interviews with key individuals, such as CEOs, VPs, directors, and execut...

  Speaking to TOI, additional chief secretary, minority development and Muslim waqf department, Monika S Garg said, “In collaboration with the basic education department, we are organizing an orientation module on AI for teachers of madrassas on Wednesday. The objective is to promote computational thinking by including digital literacy, coding and artificial intelligence in the curriculum of madrassa students.” She said, “A total of 22 videos with the help of subject experts have been prepared, to provide information about Al to madrassa teachers.”

  SOFTWARE ENGINEERS HAVE joined the ranks of copy editors, translators, and others who fear that they’re about to be replaced by generative AI. But it might be surprising to learn that coders have been under threat before. New technologies have long promised to “disrupt” engineering, and these innovations have always failed to get rid of the need for human software developers. If anything, they often made these workers that much more indispensable. To understand where handwringing about the end of programmers comes from—and why it’s overblown—we need to look back at the evolution of coding and computing. Software was an afterthought for many early computing pioneers, who considered hardware and systems architecture the true intellectual pursuits within the field. To the computer scientist John Backus, for instance, calling coders “programmers” or “engineers” was akin to relabeling janitors “custodians,” an attempt at pretending that their menial work was more important than it was...