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SE Radio 582: Leo Porter and Daniel Zingaro on Learning to Program with LLMs

Dr. Daniel Zingaro and Dr. Leo Porter, co-authors of the book Learn AI-Assisted Python Programming, speak with host Jeremy Jung about teaching programming with the aid of large language models (LLMs). They discuss writing a book to use in Leo's introductory CS class and explore how GitHub Copilot de-emphasizes syntax errors, reduces the need to memorize APIs, and why they want students to write manual test cases. They also discuss possible ethical concerns of relying on commercial tools, their impact on coursework, and why they aren't worried about students cheating with LLMs.




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SE Radio 583: Lukas Fittl on Postgres Performance

Lukas Fittl of pganalyze discusses the performance of Postgres, one of the world’s most popular database systems. SE Radio host Philip Winston speaks with Fittl about database indexing, queries, maintenance, scaling, and stored procedures. They also discuss some features of pganalyze, such as the index and vacuum advisors.




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SE Radio 596: Maxim Fateev on Durable Execution with Temporal

Maxim Fateev, the CEO of Temporal, speaks with SE Radio's Philip Winston about how Temporal implements durable execution. They explore concepts including workflows, activities, timers, event histories, signals, and queries. Maxim also compares deployment using self-hosted clusters or the Temporal Cloud.




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SE Radio 616: Ori Saporta on the Role of the Software Architect

Ori Saporta, co-founder and Systems Architect at vFunction, joins host Jeff Doolittle for a conversation about the role of the software architect. The episode begins with Ori’s thoughts on what is typically missed or overlooked regarding this role. The conversation then explores aspects of both hard and soft skills required of software architects. Other topics include the relationship of the software architect to other roles, to design and process, and to quality. The show concludes by addressing the importance of dependency management by software architects. Brought to you by IEEE Software magazine and IEEE Computer Society.




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SE Radio 617: Frances Buontempo on Modern C++

Frances Buontempo, author of the new book Learn C++ by Example, discusses the C++ programming language, a widely used general-purpose programming language. Host Philip Winston spoke with Buontempo about where C++ fits into the landscape of existing programming languages and how recent C++ standards have changed things. They talk about specific language features such as lambdas, templates, concurrency, ranges, concepts along with tips for learning and using C++. Brought to you by IEEE Software and IEEE Computer Society.




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SE Radio 629: Emily Bache on Katas and the Importance of Practice

Emily Bache, founder of the Samman Technical Coaching Society and author of several books about technical agile coaching, talks with SE Radio host Sam Taggart about katas and the importance of practice. They discuss how practicing in a safe environment helps developers to learn new skills and build new habits. They also talk about how Samman coaching combines this sort of deliberate practice with applying the lessons learned in practice to the production code base. They also touch briefly on the advantages of working in an ensemble fashion.

Brought to you by IEEE Computer Society and IEEE Software magazine.




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SE Radio 634: Jim Bugwadia on Kubernetes Policy as Code

Jim Bugwadia, CEO of Nirmata and a committer to the Kyverno projects, joins host Robert Blumen for a discussion of policy-as-code and the open source Kyverno project. The discussion covers the nature of policies; policies and security; policies and compliance to standards; security scans that generate reports compared to tools that allow or deny operations at run time; Kyverno as a kubernetes service; the Kyverno helm charts; the components of Kyverno; bootstrapping a kubernetes cluster with Kyverno; installing policies; implementing policies; customizing policies; packaging and installing policies; kubernetes dynamic admission controllers; the Kyverno admission controller; securing Kyverno itself; observability of Kyverno; types of reports and messages available to cluster users.

This episode is sponsored by QA Wolf.




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Polariton condensates show their nonequilibrium side

-- Delivered by Feed43 service




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AMD 5nm Zen 4 EPYC CPUs And Radeon Instinct GPUs To Power El Capitan Supercomput

AMD just announced today a design win in conjunction with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and Hewlett-Packard Enterprise (HPE), win which it will be providing the hardware powering the El Capitan exascale-class supercomputer. What caught our eye about this announcement was not the compute performance -- which will be enormous ... [PCSTATS]




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Orico GV100 1TB Portable NVMe SSD Review

Orico surprises with its GV100 1TB portable NVMe SSD. Join us as we take a look at this new drive and what it's all about."... [PCSTATS]



  • Hard Drives/SSD

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ADATA SE800 Portable SSD 1 TB

The ADATA SE800 is an NVMe based external SSD, which means it offers much better performance than earlier external storage. In our testing we saw speeds up to 1 GB/s, that, paired with 1 TB capacity on the SE800 make it an excellent choice if you want to move a lot of data around.... [PCSTATS]



  • Hard Drives/SSD

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Silicon Power P34A60 PCIe 3x4 M.2 2280 512GB SSD Review

" The mainstream PCIe Gen 3x4 P34A60 mainstream SSD from Silicon Power does offer good all-around performance and does not drop to very slow speeds when the cache fills up completely, as we could notice from the HD Tune Pro write test. When copying large files continuously to the drive, we haven�t seen drops of under 90MB/s, which is great for a TL... [PCSTATS]



  • Hard Drives/SSD

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Lexar Professional SL100 Pro Portable SSD Review

External SSDs are the future when it comes to moving and storing large amounts of data. The Lexar SL100 Pro offers amazing speed and durability in sizes from 500GB up to 1TB.... [PCSTATS]



  • Hard Drives/SSD

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Yahoo Groups Dropped RSS Feed Support

The RSS feeds of the RSS-Public and RSS-Board mailing lists are no longer available. Yahoo Groups used to offer feeds for each of its public lists, but Yahoo dropped support last year. A member of the service's product team said the feature was retired in July 2013.

To read the lists and subscribe to receive them in email, visit the Yahoo Groups pages for RSS-Public and RSS-Board.

We may move the lists to Google Groups, which does offer RSS feeds for each group.




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WordPress Uses RSS as Blog Export Format

If you export your WordPress blog, it is delivered to you as an RSS feed that holds all of the blog's entries, pages and comments. WordPress makes use of five namespaces and calls the format WordPress eXtended RSS (WXR). I'm working on a Java application that converts a WXR file into a set of static HTML pages.




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RSS Enclosure Support in WordPress

One of the biggest challenges for a software developer implementing the RSS 2.0 specification is the issue of enclosures in a feed item. The specification is infamously unclear on whether an item allows one enclosure or multiple enclosures.

The RSS Advisory Board worked on the RSS Best Practices Profile for nearly two years, investigating a lot of RSS readers and feed producers to see how they handled issues like this. We ultimately made the following recommendation for enclosure:

Support for the enclosure element in RSS software varies significantly because of disagreement over whether the specification permits more than one enclosure per item. Although the author intended to permit no more than one enclosure in each item, this limit is not explicit in the specification.

Blogware, Movable Type and WordPress enable publishers to include multiple enclosures in each item of their RSS documents. This works successfully in some aggregators, including BottomFeeder, FeederReader, NewsGator and Safari.

Other software does not support multiple enclosures, including Bloglines, FeedDemon, Google Reader and Microsoft Internet Explorer 7. The first enclosure is downloaded automatically, an aspect of enclosure support relied on in podcasting, and the additional enclosures are either ignored or must be requested manually.

For best support in the widest number of aggregators, an item SHOULD NOT contain more than one enclosure.

Because the profile was completed in 2007, it would be useful to see how current software handles RSS enclosures to evaluate whether any recommendations should be reconsidered. To start this effort the current WordPress was tested, since that massively successful platform publishes 60 million RSS feeds. WordPress enables audio files to be added to a blog post using the Audio icon in the block editor:

When three audio files were added to a blog post in WordPress, the item in the RSS feed contained three enclosure elements:

<enclosure url="http://example.com/Fanfare60.wav" length="2646044" type="audio/wav" />
<enclosure url="http://example.com/CantinaBand60.wav" length="2646044" type="audio/wav" />
<enclosure url="http://example.com/ImperialMarch60.wav" length="2646044" type="audio/wav" />

Follow this blog for more updates on enclosure usage in feeds and feed readers.

As you probably guessed, we have an RSS feed.




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RSS Enclosure Support in Micro.Blog

An effort is underway to examine how feed publishers and feed consumers are handling the lack of clarity in the RSS 2.0 specification about whether an item can contain more than one enclosure. The RSS Best Practices Profile recommends that a feed item should contain no more than one enclosure "for best support in the widest number of aggregators," advice worth testing against current usage.

The artisanal small-batch blogging service Micro.blog is a platform for sharing short posts like Twitter, but in a way designed to be less viral, more low key and less prone to provocation, attention seeking and clout chasing. There are no follower counts, public likes or trending topics. Founder Manton Reese explained why in his book Indie Microblogging:

Big social networks like Instagram are designed to amplify accounts that gain traction, whether they are fake or not.

Micro.blog limits search and avoids public likes and reposts so that the snowball starts small and stays small. Instead of going viral and becoming a major problem, fake accounts can be spotted early and shut down if necessary.

Since being funded by a Kickstarter campaign in 2017 that hit its goal in one day, Micro.blog has attracted a dedicated following. One of the options available to premium subscribers is to host a podcast. An audio button appears below the post editing window to choose a media file.

Choosing a podcast file to add to a post

Micro.blog sites have a primary RSS feed and a separate podcast feed. The latter contains enclosure elements. Because the Micro.blog editing window does not allow more than one podcast to be added to a post, the RSS item for a post contains only one enclosure:

<item>
  <title>RSS Enclosure Test</title>
  <link>https://rcade.micro.blog/2023/07/02/rss-enclosure-test.html</link>
  <pubDate>Sun, 02 Jul 2023 21:39:52 -0400</pubDate>
  <guid isPermaLink="true">https://rcade.micro.blog/2023/07/02/rss-enclosure-test.html</guid>
  <description><p>I’m trying out Micro.blog’s support for podcasting to see how it handles enclosures in RSS feeds. This MP3 was released by David Byrne under Creative Commons Sampling Plus:</p> <p><a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/sampling+/1.0/.">creativecommons.org/licenses/…</a></p> <audio controls="controls" src="https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/67258/2023/my-fair-lady-david-byrne.mp3" preload="metadata"> </description>
  <itunes:subtitle><p>I’m trying out Micro.blog’s support for podcasting to see how it handles enclosures in RSS feeds. This MP3 was released by David Byrne under Creative Commons Sampling Plus:</p> <p><a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/sampling+/1.0/.">creativecommons.org/licenses/…</a></p> <audio controls="controls" src="https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/67258/2023/my-fair-lady-david-byrne.mp3" preload="metadata"> </itunes:subtitle>
  <itunes:summary><p>I’m trying out Micro.blog’s support for podcasting to see how it handles enclosures in RSS feeds. This MP3 was released by David Byrne under Creative Commons Sampling Plus:</p> <p><a href="https://creativecommons.org/licenses/sampling+/1.0/.">creativecommons.org/licenses/…</a></p> <audio controls="controls" src="https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/67258/2023/my-fair-lady-david-byrne.mp3" preload="metadata"> </itunes:summary>
  <enclosure url="https://rcade.micro.blog/uploads/2023/my-fair-lady-david-byrne.mp3" type="audio/mpeg" length="3394751"/>  <itunes:duration>212</itunes:duration>
</item>

Micro.blog's commitment to being small extends to podcasts, where its Wavelength app for iPhone can be used to record, edit and publish a short-form podcast.




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Downloading 50,000 Podcast Feeds to Analyze Their RSS

The software developer Niko Abeler has crawled 51,165 podcast feeds to study what RSS elements they contain. His comprehensive Podcast Feed Standard report looks at the usage of core RSS elements and namespace elements from Apple iTunes, Atom, Content, Podcast 2.0 and Simple Chapters. He writes:

In the world of podcasting, there is a great deal of freedom when it comes to the format and content of a podcast. Creators are free to choose their own audio format and feed content, giving them the flexibility to create something truly unique. However, when it comes to distributing a podcast, certain standards must be followed in order to be added to an aggregator such as Apple Podcasts. Additionally, the podcasting community has come to agree upon certain conventions that can be used to add additional features to a podcast, such as chapters, enhanced audio, and more. These conventions allow for a more immersive and engaging listening experience for the audience.

This website is dedicated to providing guidance and information on the conventions and standards used in podcasting.

There's a lot of interesting data in the RSS 2.0 report, which finds that these are the six least popular elements in an RSS feed's channel:

Element Usage
docs 8.3%
cloud 0.0%
rating 0.0%
skipDays 0.0%
skipHours 0.0%
textInput 0.0%

Over 99 percent of feeds contain the optional channel element language and the optional item elements enclosure, guid, pubDate and title. Only 0.2% of feeds contain a source element in an item.

The iTunes namespace report shows a lot of variation in support. The required element itunes:explicit is only present in 18 percent of feeds and four optional elements have less than 20 percent: itunes:new-feed-url, itunes:block, itunes:complete and itunes:title. One namespace in the report, Podcast 2.0, has been proposed by Podcastindex "to provide a solution for problems which previously have been solved by multiple competing standards" and is still under development.

The report also analyzes the audio files enclosed in the podcast feeds to determine their format, bitrate, channel and loudness. The report finds that 95.6 percent use MP3 and 4.4 percent AAC/M4A. People who like an alternative open source format will be oggravated that its sliver of the pie graph is so small it can't be seen.

If Abeler isn't tired of crunching numbers, one thing that would be useful for the RSS Advisory Board to learn is how many of the feeds contain more than one enclosure element within a single item.







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Political Violence Is Not Violence Against Politicians

Indigenous communities have long resisted the false narratives of imperialist nations and are experts at countering the political violence of white supremacy.




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Why Protest Works—Even When It’s Unpopular

High-profile, disruptive protests can lead to increased polarization—but often still yield increased public support for the protest’s goals, even if the tactics are criticized.





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Here’s How to Respond to Crime, Not React to It

A new ballot measure in California would reverse progress on reducing mass incarceration. Here's what our regular correspondent Dortell Williams has to say about it.




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An Abolitionist Response to Project 2025

Project 2025, created by the extremist right-wing Heritage Foundation, fortifies the racist impact of policing by empowering the Department of Justice to focus on violent crime, despite the fact that









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Our Power Goes Beyond the Ballot Box

There’s no denying the terror of this moment. But we will get through it with a love-filled movement focused on safety, security, and stability.




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Can the FTC Break Up Amazon’s Monopoly?

The FTC thinks Amazon hurts small businesses and consumers. Ron Knox of The Institute for Local Self-Reliance agrees.




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CEOs Aren’t Earning Their Pay, New Report Finds

The shareholder advocacy group As You Sow has a new report listing obscene CEO pay. Here's what the data reveals



  • Wealth and inequality
  • Jobs
  • Economy
  • YES! Presents: Rising Up with Sonali
  • As You Sow
  • Wage Theft
  • Rosanna Landis Weaver

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Can the DOJ Break Up Live Nation’s Monopoly?

A new DOJ lawsuit is challenging Live Nation and Ticketmaster’s monopoly power over artist performances, venues, and concert-goers.



  • Economy
  • Wealth and inequality
  • Department of Justice
  • YES! Presents: Rising Up with Sonali
  • Live Nation


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Cultivating Dragon Fruit’s Political Power in Ecuador

Amid ongoing colonization, the Indigenous Shuar people are taking back control of their economic and political futures.




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How to End Childhood Poverty

Childhood poverty continues to plague the U.S., though simple solutions exist to address it. Will the next administration implement them?




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How Three Young Women of Color Took on Power

Journalist Sonali Kohli’s new book centers the life and work of three young women of color who refused to let powerful elites shape their lives and communities.






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adrienne maree brown’s “Loving Corrections” to Build Collective Power

Best-selling author adrienne maree brown’s new book offers tools to navigate the difficult conversations and dynamics of organizing and belonging.




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Cómo Apoyar a Las Personas Que Enfrentan el Duelo a Larga Distancia

Para los inmigrantes que enfrentan pérdidas desde lejos, el apoyo puede provenir de la comunidad, nuevos rituales y mejores políticas.




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Raw Milk Institute | The voice of responsible leadership for the growing raw milk market.

I've contributed... won't you?




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Nature&#39;s Whole Food Deport, Sonora, CA

a great little store that we just visited for the first time today




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Bacon and Apple Stuffed Pork Chops | Paleo Parents

We made this a few nights ago and it kicked ass.




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Which Harry Potter spell would you be?

Take our quiz to find out which Harry Potter spell you would be.




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Quiz: The world's most powerful queens

Take our quiz and see how much you know about some of the most powerful women the world has ever seen.




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'I opened Latitude festival with my poem'

Anna, aged eleven, won a competition to open Latitude Festival with her poem, The Mother Tree. She told Newsround about her experience.




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Quiz: Can you spot the fake news stories from the US election?

Find out which viral news stories from the US election are real or fake with this quiz.