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Issue 318: The year of the AI developer

Happy New Year! We’ve just entered the year of the Fire Horse on the Lunar calendar. Now, not everything needs to be a metaphor for the AI revolution, but if the Lunar forecast is correct, the year of the Fire Horse will bring rapid transformation and intense energy—and it sure does feel like a Fire Horse year to us. On the pod, we’re joined by Shireesh Thota from Microsoft to chat all things Azure databases including how the architecture will change with AI. Wikimedia Deutschland’s Philippe Saade sat down with us to discuss how they vectorized 30 million entries during their Wikidata Embedding Project to fight scraping and meet AI need—a very Fire Horse move. To prove we’re not just horsing around about scraping, we’ve got an episode of Leaders of Code with Cloudflare’s Will Allen that dives into how we partnered with Cloudflare to launch a pay-per-crawl model.

And it’s not just us feeling the heat from the Fire Horse. From the web, we have the story of a FitBit and a sleepless dev who realized AI is transforming how we interact with interfaces. Even the ancient art of mathematics is feeling a change—one PhD mathematician/programmer is learning Lean to keep up with theoretical mathematic’s shifts because of AI. One thing will always stay the same, though: developers love to solve problems the hard way—at least that’s what the story on creating a solver for a Wordle variant sounds like to us.

But even in the year of the Fire Horse, we know you’re looking to us for trusted answers. And actually, the AI trust gap is a big problem for developers; we have the deep dive on the blog. So, we’re going to take a page out of the Metal Ox, known for honesty and dependability, and end this Overflow with our trusty and dependable Q&A. What does it mean for something to be “natural”? Is it wrong to ask math people to pick a lane? Are there quokkas in space? Is it just cope to pretend you know Gen Alpha slang? We’ll try to meet your astrological expectations of us in issue 318—luckily, things with the number 3 bring good fortune for the Fire Horse. That good fortune must be starting already because auspiciously for you, we’ve got all those links and more ready below.

From the blog

Even GenAI uses Wikipedia as a source

Ryan is joined by Philippe Saade, the AI project lead at Wikimedia Deutschland, to dive into the Wikidata Embedding Project and how their team vectorized 30 million of Wikidata’s 119 million entries for semantic search.

Why Stack Overflow and Cloudflare launched a pay-per-crawl model

Inside the pay-per-crawl model colaunched by Stack Overflow and Cloudflare.

Mind the gap: Closing the AI trust gap for developers

Developer trust is synonymous with a willingness to deploy AI-generated code to production systems with minimal human review, as well as assurance that AI tools aren’t introducing unacceptable risks and technical debt that will burden you down the line.

Data is the new oil, and your database is the only way to extract it

Ryan sits down with Shireesh Thota, CVP of Azure Databases at Microsoft, to discuss the evolution of databases at Microsoft; Azure’s comprehensive portfolio that includes SQL Server, CosmosDB, and Postgres; and the challenges that come with database architecture, from the importance of cost governance and multi-cloud strategies to the future of databases when it comes to AI.

Interesting questions

Was "cope" as a single-word response commonly used to mean "deal with it" pre-internet?

The irony is that asking this question is, as the kids say, "cope."

Why would an extraterrestrial ecosystem without predators have evolved?

They're the quokkas of space.

What do philosophers consider to be natural?

You must consider both Plato's Cave and Chester Cheetos' Cave to answer this one.

How do we incentivize breadth in mathematics? Should we?

Even advanced mathematics must uphold this universal truth: Sometimes, you have to pick a lane.

Links from around the web

AI makes interfaces disposable

Maybe the UI was really the agentic friends we made along the way.

Semantle solver

Ask yourself—is it more work to create a Wordle solver than to just solve the Wordle?

What every experimenter must know about randomization

Your randomization is not so random after all.

Learning Lean: Part 1

The sequel of the beloved "If You Give a Mouse a Cookie" is called "If You Give a Mathematician an IDE.”

Looking for the tools, technologies, and skills your team needs to evolve in the AI era? Stack Overflow's Industry Guide to AI has your answers.