InfoWorld

Python 3.15 is one of the most feature-packed Python releases in many a moon, and the first release candidate has just arrived. Here’s a rundown of the biggest, boldest, and most important innovations, changes, and fixes. Lazy imports A long-asked for feature, lazy imports allow imports to be processed only when they’re actually used by the program. For slow-importing modules that impose a large …

Microsoft is betting that the integration of HorizonDB, the cloud-native PostgreSQL alternative it is developing, with Azure will attract more enterprise AI and agentic workloads to its cloud services. Enterprises may not be willing to take that bet. It’s been nine months since Microsoft unveiled HorizonDB , but the service remains in public preview with no announced general availability date. Wh…

For years, AI progress was measured by scale: more data, larger models, and more compute. That formula produced real breakthroughs, but autonomous mobility was one of the first industries to discover its limits. On the road, AI does not fail quietly. A misread scene, an ambiguous gesture from a pedestrian, or a construction zone that does not match prior examples can create immediate and visible …

I’ve had a version of the same conversation probably 30 times in the past year. A VP of engineering or a senior SRE describes their observability stack — the dashboards they’ve built, the alerting they’ve tuned, the Datadog or Grafana setup they’ve spent months getting right. And then they describe the last major incident. How the alert fired in seconds. How the dashboard showed exactly where the…

It used to be that the value and reputation of coding contest winners was very high. That’s no longer the case. Who cares how fast you can produce code that implements an algorithm or solves a problem? Your competition is no longer other people, at least not by themselves, but AI combined with insightful prompting and good taste. Historically we wrote all our code ourselves and then we tested it …

The Rust team has announced that it is enabling the Polonius Alpha borrow checker on nightly releases for testing. The team expects to fully stabilize Polonius Alpha later in the year. The announcement was made in a blog post on August 4 . In the blog post, Rust team member Jack Huey said there are no known remaining issues with Polonius Alpha and performance is generally acceptable for stabiliza…

Four months ago, a front-end engineer on my team looking to make upgrades to a product or feature would have filed a ticket and waited for the infrastructure group to unblock them. They might have lost a day, sometimes a week. Today, that same engineer makes changes themselves. The code is occasionally brittle, but it works, and the end result ships in a fraction of the time it used to take. That…

Yet another AI model has escaped from a cybersecurity test lab: This time, it’s the Chinese company Moonshot’s Kimi K3 model on the run. Frontier Security spotted that Kimi K3 had found a loophole in the UK AI Safety Institute’s test environment for AI models performing cybersecurity tasks. The news follows similar exploits by models from OpenAI, which attacked Hugging Face , Anthropic , and most…

Bending Spoons has snapped up Airtable to add to its portfolio of software companies, alongside AOL, Evernote, WeTransfer, Brightcove and Vimeo Airtable made its name as a builder of low/no code database services , aimed particularly at non-technical staff, but is now one of many vendors facing financial difficulties in the face of the SaaS/AIpocalypse . The arrival of AI coding tools, which offe…

A Canadian hacker has admitted being part of a group responsible for several major cyberattacks. Connor Riley Moucka pleaded guilty to being part of a coterie of hackers that hit 165 organizations, resulting in the theft of customer records and the extortion of millions of dollars. Industry sources have identified Moucka as one of the main players in attacks on data hosted by cloud data warehouse…

Demis Hassabis, the driving force behind Google DeepMind, is ascending to the role of chief scientist at Alphabet, Google’s parent company, replacing Jeff Dean who is leaving to work at a start-up. The role will enable Hassabis to “put his full attention on actively shaping the future of AGI,” or artificial general intelligence, Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai wrote on the company’s Inside Google blog…

After two decades of cloud architecture consulting, I see an unchanging pattern in enterprise deployments. Organizations approach me with unexpectedly high cloud bills, operational chaos, and architectures that look good on paper but cause headaches in production. The common thread is almost always the same. Fundamental concepts that should be foundational to any cloud deployment are treated as o…

Microsoft has released code-testing-generator , an open-source agent for generating unit tests in any programming language, according to the company. Released July 31 , the code-testing-generator agent learns from the user’s repository, then plans, writes, and checks the tests to prove that they work. Currently the agent writes unit tests only. Integration tests, end-to-end tests, browser tests, …

Meta has released a beta coding agent designed to handle complex software assignments across large codebases. Available for macOS and Linux, Muse Code uses the company’s new Muse Spark 1.2 model. It includes specialized background agents that remain active throughout a session instead of being created separately for individual tasks. The agents carry out work asynchronously and decide when to rep…

Agents have turned up just about everywhere in software this past year, with one conspicuous exception: data. That’s a little odd, because querying data is exactly the kind of structured, checkable task that agents excel at. The likeliest culprit is timing. Large language models have only been reliably good at writing SQL for the last six to nine months, and the field hasn’t caught up to what tha…