JetBrains has updated its Aqua, its test automation product that provides powerful tools, along with a combination of language-specific features from IntelliJ IDEA, PyCharm, and WebStorm, for test automation engineers.

Microsoft has announced that Cosmos DB, its distributed multi-model database, is being improved with more elasticity and support for vector search for MongoDB. 

Need we say more? Python for Artificial Intelligence is a match made in heaven. This free and self-paced course materializes this relationship.

Incensed by a change in Stack Overflow's policy, which effectively leaves moderators unable to combat misleading AI-generated answers, volunteer moderators have gone on strike. While only 13% of the 600 moderators across the whole Stack Exchange network are striking 15 of the 24 Stack Overflow moderators are participating.

Appdome has announced a pre-built integration between its Cyber Defense Automation platform and GitLab as well as a new Build-to-Test option to enable mobile developers to streamline the testing of cybersecurity features in mobile apps.

Reddit's decision to charge apps for API access which come into force in two week's time could see the disappearance many of the mobile apps that have contributed to Reddit's success. By way of protest many popular subreddits will go dark, i.e. be accessible only to members, for 48 hours starting on June 12th.

Google has announced a tool for customizing existing machine learning (ML) models to work with your data and applications. MediaPipe Model Maker provides a faster alternative to building and training a new ML model.

Microsoft has added support for .NET MAUI and Azure Functions to its .NET Upgrade Assistant, The assistant helps Visual Studio 2022 developers upgrade .NET applications to the latest version of .NET.

The shortage of Pis has been a real problem. At the end of last year we were promised that the situation would be easing in the new year, but it didn't noticeably change. Now we have news that you can have ten Pi Zeros and they are in stock! Is the drought about to be over at last?

This video charting the history and development of the MicroMouse competition, together with an explanation of the  strategies for finding the shortest path, opens with footage from the latest All Japan MicroMouse contest. It really deserves its title of "The Fastest Maze-Solving Competition on Earth". Watch and be amazed at the speed of these tiny robots.

This weekly digest is a summary of our news and book coverage plus our latest articles. This week Mike James and Harry Fairhead join forces to overcome a limitation of the Raspberry Pi Pico - lack of internal storage, showing how to add an SD card reader. We also have an updated Programmer's Bookshelf with recommendations for newcomers to JavaScript. 

Microsoft has released a preview version of Dev Home, a new control center for Windows that makes it easy to connect to GitHub and configure cloud development environments like Microsoft Dev Box and GitHub Codespaces.

Udacity has announced a new course every day for the last fortnight. Each one provides you with job ready skills in less than a month and for a limited time you can take advantage of a 50% discount. 

NVIDIA has released open-source software aimed at helping enterprises keep applications built on large language models aligned with their safety and security requirements.

Microsoft has announced Fabric, a new data analytics product that combines elements of Microsoft Power BI, Azure Synapse, and Azure Data Factory into one unified software as a service (SaaS) platform.

... why? This raises so many questions on so many levels it is difficult to know were to start. A lesson or a warning for other countries?

Jumping on the bandwagon of hysteria created by Geoffrey Hinton's recent warning about the existential threat posed to humanity by AI, a "Statement on AI Risk" is being endorsed by researchers and academics in the field of AI.

This Fedora distribution preloaded with Python goodies is perfect for teaching Python in the classroom and also has a lot to offer to developers.