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Featured Articles

Randomness is more subtle than you might think and it's not easy to define or detect. This is what this extract from Programmer's Guide to Theory is all about.

Co-designer of the Apple computer, Steve Wozniak is one of the computer pioneers who have changed the way we work and play. He is also something much rarer today, an electronics genius. He has just turned 75, so this seems like a good time to look back on his achievements.

Programming News and Views

The results of the 2024 Python Developers Survey, conducted as a collaborative effort between the Python Software Foundation and JetBrains have been published. This was the eighth edition of this survey and reveals that Python encompasses almost all areas of computing.

The problem of security on small devices is a serious one so it is a good job we have the NIST on the case. Its latest effort is to point us in the direction of a new set of cryptographic functions which are "lightweight" enough to be actually used.

Grafana 12.1 has been released, with automated health checks for your Grafana instance, streamlined views in Grafana Alerting, and visualization updates. The release follows the major upgrade to Grafana 12 in May, which introduced a new suite of observability-as-code tools to assist with automating observability workflows.

This is the general availability of the Java's interface to Google's
Agent Development Kit, the toolkit for building smart AI agents.

Go 1.25 has been released with an experimental garbage collector that the team says improves the performance of marking and scanning small objects through better locality and CPU scalability.

Google has introduced an open-source Python library that can be used to programmatically extract information while ensuring the outputs are structured and reliably tied back to their source.

Held from 15 to 17 August, the inaugural World Humanoid Robot Games has taken place in Beijing. Over 500 robots came together to compete in sports like boxing, football and table tennis, perform dance and martial arts and tackle specific challenges such as sorting medicines.

A new robot shop has opened in Beijing to coincide with the World Robot Conference there. With over 100 products from 40 Chinese manufacturers, you can buy everything from mechanical butlers to human-like replicas of Albert Einstein.

Google Summer of Code 1025 is well underway with 1280 contributors from 68 countries coding for 185 mentoring Organizations. Figures from Google show a record level of interest in the program.

MCP has changed the way you interact with your tools overnight. Now it targets your documentation. Wouldn't be great to have the latest and updated code samples and documentation of your favorite framework and libraries ready at your fingertips? Plus, be able to talk to it in natural language?

Google Jules is now generally available, and has had a 'critic' mode added to help reality check the suggestions the tool makes.

Book Watch

This is a hands-on guide for developers who want to master the command line; not just to get around, but to build a fast, flexible, and portable development environment. Dave Kerr says this isn’t a tour of shell commands; it’s a blueprint for creating workflows that scale across machines, teams, and projects. The book goes from keystroke-level efficiency to composing powerful pipelines, writing reliable scripts, and automating common development tasks. Later chapters take it further: managing your configuration with Git, customizing your shell setup, and working seamlessly across remote sessions using tools like Vim and tmux.

With a strong focus on practical engineering applications, in this book Patrick D.T. O’Connor and Andre V. Kleyner offer a balanced blend of reliability theory and real-world applications. This edition has been comprehensively updated to reflect the latest advancements in industry practices and state-of-the-art reliability engineering. Every chapter has been refreshed with new material, and two new chapters ― Repairable Systems and Human Reliability ― have been added.

In this book, subtitled "Write a Native x64 Debugger From Scratch", Sy Brand shows how to master the inner workings of your x64 Linux system and expand your OS expertise by writing your very own debugger using C++. The book covers the entire process of building a debugger for x64 Linux systems using C++. As go from an empty filesystem folder to a fully fledged debugger capable of setting breakpoints, stepping through code, and manipulating variables.

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