AI Has an Uber Problem
Learn faster. Dig deeper. See farther. “The economic problem of society…is a problem of the utilization of knowledge which is not given to anyone in its totality.” —Friedrich A. Hayek,…
Vacuum Tubes and Transistors
I’ve had a ham radio license since the late 1960s and observed the transition from vacuum tubes (remember them?) to transistors firsthand. Because we’re allowed to operate high-power transmitters (1,500-watt…
Universal API Access from Postgres and SQLite
In “SQL: The Universal Solvent for REST APIs” we saw how Steampipe’s suite of open source plug-ins that translate REST API calls directly into SQL tables. These plug-ins were, until recently, tightly…
Technology Trends for 2024
This has been a strange year. While we like to talk about how fast technology moves, internet time, and all that, in reality the last major new idea in software…
Generative AI in the Enterprise
Generative AI has been the biggest technology story of 2023. Almost everybody’s played with ChatGPT, Stable Diffusion, GitHub Copilot, or Midjourney. A few have even tried out Bard or Claude,…
Model Collapse: An Experiment
Ever since the current craze for AI-generated everything took hold, I’ve wondered: what will happen when the world is so full of AI-generated stuff (text, software, pictures, music) that our…
The next generation of developer productivity
To follow up on our previous survey about low-code and no-code tools, we decided to run another short survey about tools specifically for software developers—including, but not limited to, GitHub…
Teaching Programming in the Age of ChatGPT
Imagine for a minute that you’re a programming instructor who’s spent many hours making creative homework problems to introduce your students to the world of programming. One day, a colleague…
AI’s Opaque Box Is Actually a Supply Chain
Understanding AI’s mysterious “opaque box” is paramount to creating explainable AI. This can be simplified by considering that AI, like all other technology, has a supply chain. Knowing what makes…
Technology Trends for 2023
This year’s report on the O’Reilly learning platform takes a detailed look at how our customers used the platform. Our goal is to find out what they’re interested in now and how…