Articles for category: Software (Tech & Development)

Researchers astonished by tool’s apparent success at revealing AI’s hidden motives

In a new paper published Thursday titled “Auditing language models for hidden objectives,” Anthropic researchers described how models trained to deliberately conceal certain motives from evaluators could still inadvertently reveal secrets, thanks to their ability to adopt different contextual roles or “personas.” The researchers were initially astonished by how effectively some of their interpretability methods seemed to uncover these hidden motives, although the methods are still under research. While the research involved models trained specifically to conceal motives from automated software evaluators called reward models (RMs), the broader purpose of studying hidden objectives is to prevent future scenarios where powerful

VAR Technology Faces Backlash Following Champions League Controversy

A controversial VAR (Video Assistant Referee) decision helped eliminate Atletico Madrid from the Champions League after Julian Alvarez’s penalty was disallowed for a near-microscopic double touch. Despite referee Szymon Marciniak standing just feet away and missing the infraction, VAR officials intervened without the typically required “clear and obvious error” standard. This incident has exemplified the paradox of video review technology in football: introduced to reduce controversies, VAR has instead multiplied them. Technical implementation varies significantly across competitions — some MLS stadiums have fewer cameras available for review than others — creating inconsistent application. The Premier League claims VAR increased correct

Understanding CAG (Cache Augmented Generation): AI’s Conversation Memory With APIpie.ai

Ever noticed how your favorite AI assistant sometimes forgets what you were just talking about? Or how you need to keep reminding it of important context from earlier in your conversation? There’s a solution that’s changing the game: Cache Augmented Generation (CAG). Building on advancements in vector databases and retrieval systems, CAG enhances AI responses by intelligently maintaining conversation context, creating more natural and coherent interactions. What is Cache Augmented Generation (CAG)? Imagine if your AI could remember your entire conversation history and use that context to give you more relevant, personalized responses. That’s essentially what Cache Augmented Generation (CAG)

Visual Studio Devs Share Copilot AI Prompts to Improve Code — Visual Studio Magazine

News Visual Studio Devs Share Copilot AI Prompts to Improve Code Microsoft’s Mads Kristensen took to social media to ask Visual Studio developers to share their favorite prompts to get GitHub Copilot AI to improve their code. Kristensen, a principal product manager working on the Visual Studio team, is known for writing a huge amount of extensions for the Visual Studio IDE that introduce functionality that often gets baked into the IDE’s bits. He is a constant presence on social media to promote new extensions, features, functionality and in this case, ask developers for feedback or tips. He did that

Keeping up with the latest fixes – Computerworld

Long before Taco Tuesday became part of the pop-culture vernacular, Tuesdays were synonymous with security — and for anyone in the tech world, they still are.  Patch Tuesday, as you most likely know, refers to the day each month when Microsoft releases security updates and patches for its software products — everything from Windows to Office to SQL Server, developer tools to browsers. The practice, which happens on the second Tuesday of the month, was initiated to streamline the patch distribution process and make it easier for users and IT system administrators to manage updates.  Like tacos, Patch Tuesday is

Stupendous Python stunts without a net

Fastplotlib: Interactive plotting in Python powered by the GPUCreate snappy, live-updating graphs and plots that can run in a variety of contexts (Jupyter notebooks, PyQt-powered windows, and more). The current release is considered a late alpha, but you’re encouraged to give it a whirl outside production. A map of PythonA highly granular, interactive map of the package dependencies on PyPI, along with details about how to generate the same sort of interactive graph from a similarly sprawling data set. (Caution: Don’t try to plot everything!) An oral history of Bank PythonHow Python has been used, in proprietary forks, by various

How to Exploit the EternalBlue Vulnerability on Windows – A Step-by-Step Guide

If you’ve followed cybersecurity news over the past few years, you’ve likely come across EternalBlue. This critical Windows exploit played a key role in the widespread WannaCry ransomware attack that affected systems in over 150 countries. In this article, we’ll walk through how EternalBlue works, how to scan for it, and how to exploit it using Metasploit. Note*: This is strictly for ethical hacking and penetration testing purposes on systems you own or have explicit permission to test. Do not use these tools on machines where you don’t have permission.* What Is EternalBlue? EternalBlue is a dangerous computer exploit developed

When to Use and How to Avoid Pitfalls

Recently, I delivered a lecture to my colleagues on event sourcing, and I realized that this introductory information could be valuable to a broader audience. This article is useful for those interested in the concept of event sourcing and who want to decide if it’s a good fit for their projects while avoiding common pitfalls. So, let’s dive in. Event sourcing is an approach where, instead of storing the current state of the system, all changes are saved as events, which become the main data source. The approach gained popularity around 2005 after Martin Fowler’s article on the topic. The

Mar 14, 2025: 10 AI updates from the past week – Google releases Gemma 3, OpenAI launches Responses API, Boomi AI Studio now available, and more

Software companies are constantly trying to add more and more AI features to their platforms, and AI companies are constantly releasing new models and features. It can be hard to keep up with it all, so we’ve written this roundup to share 10 notable updates around AI that software developers should know about. Google announces Gemma 3 Gemma 3 is Google’s latest AI model, offering improved math, reasoning, and chat capabilities. It can handle context windows of up to 128k tokens, understand 140 languages, and comes in four sizes: 1B, 4B, 12B, and 27B. It is a multimodal model, and

The School Car Pickup Line Is a National Embarrassment

I teach a lot of international students about the US education system and our schools. Whenever they go into our schools for the first time, one of the things that always shocks them is the school car pickup traffic lines. These lines are ugly, annoying, dirty, and they have become a common mainstay in American schooling. Parents across the country must waste much of their mornings and afternoons in these lines. These lines are so pervasive that an entire subculture has sprung up around them. Mommy bloggers even swap book suggestions to help pass the time. Parents often hate having