Programmer's Guide To Theory - The Algorithm of Choice

15 Aug | Mike James

The axiom of choice is the most esoteric math concept you are likely to encounter. You might think it has no relevance to computing, but you would be wrong.

Marvin Minsky was one of the best known of the revolutionary thinkers of the early days of AI, robotics and computer science. We revisit his story today to mark the 96th anniversary of his birth on August 9th, 1927.

edX is offering a 20% discount on selected courses and program bundles until August 31st. Instead of "Back To School" it's slogan is "Back To You" since this is online learning that you can do at your own pace.

RT-2 is the new version of what Google calls its vision-language-action (VLA) model and at last we can start to see the potential in general purpose robots. While everyone is hyping AI chatbots, this is where the real revolution is happening.

The software project management platform for agile software teams, Zenhub, has announced a raft of AI-powered facilities that will serve as a co-pilot to help reduce manual updates and improve productivity.

Go 1.21 has been released with improvements including support for built-ins and production-ready support for Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO).

Amazon has announced the general availability of the Lambda Annotations Framework for .NET. The framework provides a natural programming model for .NET developers to create AWS Lambda functions, and Amazon says the model should make the experience of writing Lambda in C# feel more natural for .NET developers by using C# Source Generators.

The new CMake Debugger that was introduced in Visual Studio is now available in VS Code, meaning VS Code developers can debug CMakeLists.txt scripts from VS Code using the CMake Tools Extension.

Researchers at the University of Colorado Boulder and the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems have developed a robotic surface that can change its shape. Watch the video to see it in action.

In this digital age we are collecting data at an unprecedented rate and the career opportunities in this field continue to expand. Nanodegrees and Courses from Udacity's School of Data Science start again on August 16th so time take another look at what's on offer. A new short course on Small Data caught my attention, raising questions about how this differs from big data.

Codecov has announced a change in the licensing model for its all-in-one code coverage reporting platform for test suites.

Avalonia 11 has been released with support for more platforms, automated testing, and Input Method Editor (IME) support for text input.

DataStax has announced support for vector search on Astra DB and DataStax Enterprise, opening the option for storing data as vector embeddings to support uses including generative AI applications like those built on GPT-4.

Author: Steve Klabnik and Carol Nichols
Publisher: No Starch Press
Date: June 2023
Pages: 560
ISBN: 978-1718503106
Audience: Systems programmers
Rating: 4.8
Reviewer: Mike James

There's a new edition of what has become the standard text on Rust. Has it matured along with Rust?

This book, subtitled "Fundamental Algorithms in MATLAB" provides a comprehensive, but tutorial, introduction to robotics, computer vision, and control. Peter Corke, Witold Jachimczyk and Remo Pillat write in a light but informative conversational style, weaving text, figures, mathematics, and lines of code into a cohesive narrative.

This book is a guide to understanding and utilizing PyTorch 2.0 for deep learning applications. Matthew Rosch starts with an introduction to PyTorch, its various advantages over other deep learning frameworks, and its blend with CUDA for GPU acceleration. A substantial portion of the book is dedicated to illustrating how to build simple PyTorch models. This includes uploading and preparing datasets, defining the architecture, training, and predicting. It provides hands-on exercises with a real-world dataset. The book then dives into exploring PyTorch's nn module and gives a detailed comparison of different types of networks like Feedforward, RNN, GRU, CNN, and their combination.

In this book, which is in the "In Easy Steps" series of full-color books aimed at beginners, Mike McGrath shows hows how to create Windows applications using Visual Basic the latest Visual Studio Community programming environment. Now in its 7th edition, the book includes examples with free downloadable code, and is aimed at readers wanting to quickly understand Visual Basic fundamentals and master the key techniques.