Skip to main content

You Should Still Learn To Code, Says GitHub CEO

2 months 1 week ago
You should still learn to code, says GitHub's CEO. And you should start as soon as possible. From a report: "I strongly believe that every kid, every child, should learn coding," Thomas Dohmke said in a recent podcast interview with EO. "We should actually teach them coding in school, in the same way that we teach them physics and geography and literacy and math and what-not." Coding, he added, is one such fundamental skill -- and the only reason it's not part of the curriculum is because it took "us too long to actually realize that." Dohmke, who's been a programmer since the 90s, said he's never seen "anything more exciting" than the current moment in engineering -- the advent of AI, he believes, has made the field that much easier to break into, and is poised to make software more ubiquitous than ever. "It's so much easier to get into software development. You can just write a prompt into Copilot or ChatGPT or similar tools, and it will likely write you a basic webpage, or a small application, a game in Python," Dohmke said. "And so, AI makes software development so much more accessible for anyone who wants to learn coding." AI, Dohmke said, helps to "realize the dream" of bringing an idea to life, meaning that fewer projects will end up dead in the water, and smaller teams of developers will be enabled to tackle larger-scale projects. Dohmke said he believes it makes the overall process of creation more efficient. "You see some of the early signs of that, where very small startups -- sometimes five developers and some of them actually only one developer -- believe they can become million, if not billion dollar businesses by leveraging all the AI agents that are available to them," he added.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

msmash

Tech tariff turmoil continues as Trump admin exempts some electronics, then promises to bring taxes back

2 months 1 week ago
Beijing tries to find an off-ramp but also fights back with export bans

World War Fee  The Trump administration’s strategy to use tariffs on imports as an incentive for businesses to move their manufacturing plants to the USA took a new turn over the weekend after it announced exemptions for some goods, denied the exemptions were new, then said it plans further tariffs on high-tech goods.…

Simon Sharwood

Why wait to build a datacenter when you can just unpack one?

2 months 1 week ago
Prefab SmartRun kit from Vertiv promises 85% faster deployment and fewer plumbing headaches

With rack space at a premium amid unrelenting demand for datacenter capacity, more modular solutions are hitting the market to speed deployment times, even for infrastructure prefabricated for AI training.…

Dan Robinson

China names alleged US snoops over Asian Winter Games attacks

2 months 1 week ago
Beijing claims NSA went for gold in offensive cyber, got caught in the act

China's state-run press has taken its turn in trying to highlight alleged foreign cyber offensives, accusing the US National Security Agency of targeting the 2025 Asian Winter Games.…

Connor Jones

Google DeepMind Is Hiring a 'Post-AGI' Research Scientist

2 months 1 week ago
An anonymous reader shares a report: None of the frontier AI research labs have presented any evidence that they are on the brink of achieving artificial general intelligence, no matter how they define that goal, but Google is already planning for a "Post-AGI" world by hiring a scientist for its DeepMind AI lab to research the "profound impact" that technology will have on society. "Spearhead research projects exploring the influence of AGI on domains such as economics, law, health/wellbeing, AGI to ASI [artificial superintelligence], machine consciousness, and education," Google says in the first item on a list of key responsibilities for the job. Artificial superintelligence refers to a hypothetical form of AI that is smarter than the smartest human in all domains. This is self explanatory, but just to be clear, when Google refers to "machine consciousness" it's referring to the science fiction idea of a sentient machine. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, Elon Musk, and other major and minor players in the AI industry are all working on AGI and have previously talked about the likelihood of humanity achieving AGI, when that might happen, and what the consequences might be, but the Google job listing shows that companies are now taking concrete steps for what comes after, or are at least are continuing to signal that they believe it can be achieved.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

msmash