Amazon aims to make online car purchases as seamless as getting everyday essentials. But it's not as easy as selling other items. WSJ: Car sales represent Amazon's next bet in e-commerce dominance and come after the Covid-19 pandemic made online car purchases more popular. Amazon executives want to make buying vehicles through its website as simple as purchasing toilet paper or dog food, and the company is looking to strike broad partnerships with carmakers. The company is set to face several challenges in expanding the program beyond a pilot phase for employees starting early next year: One is dealerships, which remain at the center of most new-car sales and depend on service revenue for profit incentives. A second will be trying to get customers who visit its website mainly for lower-priced items to turn to the platform for one of the biggest purchases of their lives. Amazon also will have to navigate different government regulations.

"Customers tell us it's really hard to buy a car," Fan Jin, Amazon's director of vehicle sales, said in an interview. Vehicle-buying software is fragmented, with dealers using a range of software providers. Varying regulations across states also make it difficult. "It's a process that we've heard time and again could use improvement, and we have an opportunity to go and prove it," she said. When the new service launches later next year, Amazon said shoppers will be able to complete every step of the car-buying process through its website. Only new Hyundai vehicles will be available at the start. Consumers will have different financing options, but the company said it is still working through details. Eventually, Amazon wants to expand to trade-in vehicles and used cars. Many dealers might be loath to accept a high volume of online sales because they make a significant amount of money on service and warranty deals that customers agree to when they finance a car purchase.

The Biden administration has spent much of the last two years bracing key U.S. networks and infrastructure against crippling cyberattacks from Russia, Iran and China. But it is following a different playbook as it ramps up its efforts to thwart digital threats from North Korea: Follow the crypto -- and stop it. From a report: Convinced North Korea primarily sees hacking as a way to funnel money back to the cash-strapped Kim Jong Un regime, the White House has focused on blocking the country's ability to launder the cryptocurrency it steals through its cyberattacks. In the last year, the administration has unveiled a flurry of sanctions against North Korean hacking groups, front companies and IT workers, and blacklisted multiple cryptocurrency services they use to launder stolen funds. Earlier this month, national security adviser Jake Sullivan announced a new partnership with Japan and South Korea aimed at cracking down on Pyongyang's crypto bonanza -- thereby choking off money to its nuclear and conventional weapons programs.

"In countering North Korean cyber operations, our first priority has been focusing on their crypto heists," Anne Neuberger, the National Security Council's top cybersecurity official, said in an interview. The stepped-up effort to blunt North Korea's cyber operations is fueled by growing alarm about where the fruits of those attacks are going, Neuberger said. Hacking, she argued, has enabled North Korea to "either evade sanctions or evade the steps the international community has taken to target their weapons proliferation ... their missile regime, and the growth in the number of launches we've seen."

For years, Amazon Web Services' annual Las Vegas trade show functioned as an infomercial for its cloud computing platform, rarely mentioning the competition. The pitch was so successful that AWS pulls in $90 billion per year. Then generative AI emerged, with Microsoft and Google baking it into products their cloud units sell. Suddenly, AWS faced startups building businesses on rivals' AI-powered platforms. So at AWS's 2023 event, AI was ubiquitous -- in presentations, launches, partnerships. AWS announced more models powering AI services and its largest-ever tech investment, $4 billion in generative AI startup Anthropic. AWS aims to show that, despite stiffening competition, it remains the leader in cloud computing. From a report: If Amazon had been caught off guard by the dawn of the generative AI age, here was evidence of a massive, companywide effort to catch up. "This is what last place looks like," analysts with Sanford C. Bernstein quipped in a research note. In the short term, AWS is going to be fine. Slowing sales growth aside, Amazon's servers remain the default starting point for companies looking to modernize old infrastructure or do much of anything online. And though generative AI makes for an impressive demo, the technology is error-prone and expensive. For most companies, it's an experiment, not a necessity.

Still, "to remain relevant," AWS needs to have a handle on generative AI, according to JB McGinnis, a principal at Deloitte who helps companies use AWS. "If they're not competing, they might lose the cloud game, too." Late in the week of the conference, Amazon invited thousands of attendees with ties to startups to the Las Vegas Raiders' stadium, which it had rented out for the occasion, plying them with drinks and AWS swag and giant versions of bar games. Before a panel discussion on artificial intelligence, Swami Sivasubramanian, the Amazon executive in charge of the company's AI services, declared 2023 the year of generative AI. Nearby, an AWS product leader walked up to the founder of a tiny startup, introduced himself, and asked what Amazon could do better. This was a humbled AWS, one that has to fight for business.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Threads is now available to users in the European Union. "Today we're opening Threads to more countries in Europe," wrote Zuckerberg in a post on the platform. "Welcome everyone." MacRumors reports: The move comes five months after the social media network launched in most markets around the world, but remained unavailable to EU-based users due to regulatory hurdles. [...] In addition to creating a Threads profile for posting, users in the EU can also simply browse Threads without having an Instagram account, an option likely introduced to comply with legislation surrounding online services.

The expansion into a market of 448 million people should see Threads' user numbers get a decent boost. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said on a company earnings call in October that Threads now has "just under" 100 million monthly users. Since its launch earlier this year it has gained a web app, an ability to search for posts, and a post editing feature.

Amazon, which launched its first internet satellites in October, says it will use space lasers to ensure reliable broadband coverage even in the middle of the ocean. From a report: The technology will enable a satellite to deliver data to a cruise ship, say, even if the spacecraft isn't in range of an Amazon ground station connected to the internet. Instead, the laser will pass the request on to another satellite that has a clear view of a ground station.

The two prototype satellites successfully tested the technology, which is officially called optical inter-satellite links, Amazon said on Thursday. "If you're going to serve maritime customers, air customers, you have got to be able to get data up to your satellites," said Rajeev Badyal, who leads Amazon's Project Kuiper internet-from-space initiative. "And in the middle of the ocean, it's difficult if not impossible" to install ground stations.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: A document detailing technical requirements of Italy's Piracy Shield anti-piracy system confirms that ISPs are not alone in being required to block pirate IPTV services. All VPN and open DNS services must also comply with blocking orders, including through accreditation to the Piracy Shield platform. [...] Italy's Piracy Shield anti-piracy system reportedly launched last week, albeit in limited fashion. Whether the platform had any impact on pirate IPTV providers offering the big game last Friday is unclear but plans supporting a full-on assault are pressing ahead.

When lawmakers gave Italy's new blocking regime the green light during the summer, the text made it clear that blocking instructions would not be limited to regular ISPs. The document issued by AGCOM [...] specifically highlights that VPN and DNS providers are no exception. "[A]ll parties in any capacity involved in the accessibility of illegally disseminated content -- and therefore also, by way of example and not limitation -- VPN and open DNS service providers, will have to execute the blocks requested by the Authority [AGCOM] including through accreditation to the Piracy Shield platform or otherwise implementing measures that prevent the user from reaching that content," the notice reads. [...]

The relevant section of the new law is in some ways even more broad when it comes to search engines such as Google. Whether they are directly involved in accessibility or not, they're still required to take action. AGCOM suggests that Google understands its obligations and is also prepared to take things further. The company says it will deindex offending platforms from search and also remove their ability to advertise. "Since this is a dynamic blocking, the search engine therefore undertakes to perform de-indexing of all websites/telematic addresses that are the subject of subsequent reports that can also be communicated by rights holders accredited to the platform," AGCOM writes. "Google has shared a procedural mode for the communication of the blocking list, and the Company has also committed to the timely removal of all advertisements that do not comply with the company's policies, having particular regard to those that invest the promotion of pirate sites referring to protected sporting events."

NotebookLM, Google's experimental AI-powered note-taking app unveiled at Google I/O earlier this year (formerly referred to as Project Tailwind), is now widely available in the United States. "It's also getting several new features and is 'starting' to use Google's Gemini Pro AI model 'to help with document understanding and reasoning,'" reports The Verge. From the report: NotebookLM can already do things like summarize the documents you import into the app, come up with key points, and even answer questions about your note-taking sources. But now, Google is adding a way to transform your notes into other types of documents, too. Once you select all the notes you want to include, NotebookLM will automatically suggest formats, such as an outline or study guide. However, Google notes that you can also tell NotebookLM to transform your notes into a format of your choosing, like an email, script outline, newsletter, and more.

Additionally, NotebookLM will now start providing suggested actions based on what you're doing in the app. As an example, Google says if you're writing a note, NotebookLM may automatically "offer tools to polish or refine your prose, or suggest related ideas from your sources based on what you've just written." Some other handy features coming to the app include a way to save helpful responses from NotebookLM as notes, share your notes with others, and focus NotebookLM's AI on select sources when chatting with it. Google is expanding some of NotebookLM's limitations as well. You can now include up to 20 sources in your notebook, each with up to 200,000 words.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: Meta Platforms, the parent company of Facebook, Instagram, Whatsapp and Quest VR headsets and creator of leading open source large language model Llama 2 -- is getting into the text-to-image AI generator game. Actually, to clarify: Meta was already in that game via a text-to-image and text-to-sticker generator that was launched within Facebook and Instagram Messengers earlier this year. However, as of this week, the company has launched a standalone text-to-image AI generator service, "Imagine" outside of its messaging platforms. Meta's Imagine now a website you can simply visit and begin generating images from: imagine.meta.com. You'll still need to log in with your Meta or Facebook/Instagram account (I tried Facebook, and it forced me to create a new "Meta account," but hey -- it still worked). [...]

Meta's Imagine service was built on its own AI model called Emu, which was trained on 1.1 billion Facebook and Instagram user photos, as noted by Ars Technica and disclosed in the Emu research paper published by Meta engineers back in September. An earlier report by Reuters noted that Meta excluded private messages and images that were not shared publicly on its services.

When developing Emu, Meta's researchers also fine-tuned it around quality metrics. As they wrote in their paper: "Our key insight is that to effectively perform quality tuning, a surprisingly small amount -- a couple of thousand -- exceptionally high-quality images and associated text is enough to make a significant impact on the aesthetics of the generated images without compromising the generality of the model in terms of visual concepts that can be generated. " Interestingly, despite Meta's vocal support for open source AI, neither Emu nor the Imagine by Meta AI service appear to be open source.

Apple has released MLX, a free and open-source machine learning framework for Apple Silicon. Computerworld reports: The idea is that it streamlines training and deployment of ML models for researchers who use Apple hardware. MLX is a NumPy-like array framework designed for efficient and flexible machine learning on Apple's processors. This isn't a consumer-facing tool; it equips developers with what appears to be a powerful environment within which to build ML models. The company also seems to have worked to embrace the languages developers want to use, rather than force a language on them -- and it apparently invented powerful LLM tools in the process.

MLX design is inspired by existing frameworks such as PyTorch, Jax, and ArrayFire. However, MLX adds support for a unified memory model, which means arrays live in shared memory and operations can be performed on any of the supported device types without performing data copies. The team explains: "The Python API closely follows NumPy with a few exceptions. MLX also has a fully featured C++ API which closely follows the Python API."

Apple has provided a collection of examples of what MLX can do. These appear to confirm the company now has a highly-efficient language model, powerful tools for image generation using Stable Diffusion, and highly accurate speech recognition. This tallies with claims earlier this year, and some speculation concerning infinite virtual world creation for future Vision Pro experiences. Ultimately, Apple seems to want to democratize machine learning. "MLX is designed by machine learning researchers for machine learning researchers," the team explains.

What's next for Windows? Microsoft plans next-gen Windows AI release in 2024, plus details on recent changes to the Windows roadmap. From a report: According to my sources, the new Windows bosses are now returning to an annual release cycle for major versions of the Windows platform, meaning Windows is going back to having just one big feature update a year instead of multiple smaller ones throughout. Microsoft may still use Moment updates sparingly, but they will no longer be the primary delivery vehicle for new features going forward.

These changes are said to take effect after Hudson Valley launches in 2024, so I'm still expecting at least one more Moment update for the current version of Windows 11, which sources say will ship in the February or March time frame early next year. [...] According to my sources, Microsoft's blockbuster new feature will be the introduction of an AI-powered Windows Shell, enhanced with an "advanced Copilot," that's able to constantly work in the background to enhance search, jumpstart projects or workflows, understand context, and much more.

Sources say these AI features will be "groundbreaking." The company is working on a new history/timeline feature that will let users scroll back in time through all the apps and websites that Copilot has remembered, which can be filtered based on a user's specific search criteria. For example, you could type "FY24 earnings" and every instance where that term was on-screen will reappear for you to see and open. AI will also enhance search in Windows, with the ability to use natural language to find things that you've previously opened or seen on your PC.

An anonymous reader writes: Amazon just inked a deal with chief competitor and Elon Musk-helmed SpaceX to launch internet-beaming satellites -- a move that comes even as Amazon founder Jeff Bezos pursues his own space dreams with his own rocket company, Blue Origin, and as SpaceX builds its own internet constellation.

While Musk and Bezos have notoriously been publicly competitive and have a history of openly sparring on social media, with Musk regularly making crude jokes about Bezos and Blue Origin, it is not uncommon for business rivals to team up in the world of rocket launches. Some Amazon satellites will still ride on a large rocket made by Blue Origin, dubbed the New Glenn. But it's been delayed for years and will make its launch debut next year at the earliest.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from UploadVR: Valve just launched a free official Steam Link app on Meta Quest. The app, which is on the official Quest Store and approved by Meta, lets you wirelessly play SteamVR games like Half-Life: Alyx on your Quest 2, Quest Pro, or Quest 3 by streaming from your gaming PC over your home Wi-Fi network. You can also play your traditional non-VR Steam games on a giant virtual screen.

"The cornerstone of the open-source philosophy is that the recipients of technology should have access to all its building blocks..." writes the European Organization for Nuclear Research, "in order to study it, modify it and redistribute it to others." This includes mechanical designs, schematics for electronics, and software code. Ever since releasing the World Wide Web software under an open-source model in 1994, CERN has continuously been a pioneer in this field, supporting open-source hardware (with the CERN Open Hardware Licence), open access (with the Sponsoring Consortium for Open Access Publishing in Particle Physics — SCOAP3) and open data (with the Open Data Portal for the LHC experiments).

The CERN Open Data portal is a testimony to CERN's policy of Open Access and Open Data. The portal allows the LHC experiments to share their data with a double focus: for the scientific community, including researchers outside the CERN experimental teams, as well as citizen scientists, and for the purposes of training and education through specially curated resources. The first papers based on data from the CERN Open Data portal have been published. Several CERN technologies are being developed with open access in mind. Invenio is an open-source library management package, now benefiting from international contributions from collaborating institutes, typically used for digital libraries. Indico is another open-source tool developed at CERN for conference and event management and used by more than 200 sites worldwide, including the United Nations. INSPIRE, the High Energy Physics information system, is another example of open source software developed by CERN together with DESY, Fermilab and SLAC.
And on Wednesday the European Organization for Nuclear Research launches its new Open Source Program Office "to help you with all issues relating to the release of your software and hardware designs." Sharing your work with collaborators in research and industry has many advantages, but it may also present some questions and challenges... The OSPO will support you, whether you are a member of the personnel or a user, to find the best solution by giving you access to a set of best practices, tools and recommendations. With representatives from all sectors at CERN, it brings together a broad range of expertise on open source practices... As well as supporting the CERN internal community, the OSPO will engage with external partners to strengthen CERN's role as a promoter of open source.

Open source is a key pillar of open science. By promoting open source practices, the OSPO thus seeks to address one of CERN's core ambitions: sharing our knowledge with the world. Ultimately, the aim is to increase the reach of open source projects from CERN to maximise their benefits for the scientific community, industry and society at large.
For Wednesday's launch event "We will host distinguished open source experts and advocates from Nvidia, the World Health Organization and the Open Source Hardware Association to discuss the impact and future of open source." There will be a live webcast of the event.

NASA selected Blue Origin in February to launch the Escape and Plasma Acceleration and Dynamics Explorers (ESCAPADE) mission, a pair of smallsats that will study the interaction of the solar wind with the magnetosphere of Mars. The space agency now expects the mission will be on the first launch of Blue Origin's New Glenn launch vehicle next year. SpaceNews reports: Neither Blue Origin nor NASA disclosed exactly where in the manifest of New Glenn launches ESCAPADE would take place. "It will be an early New Glenn mission and we're going to be ready," one Blue Origin executive, Ariane Cornell, said at the Satellite 2023 conference in March. At a Nov. 20 meeting of the NASA Advisory Council's human exploration and operations committee, Bradley Smith, director of NASA's Launch Services Office, said he was "incredibly excited" about the ESCAPADE launch, which he said was scheduled for about one year. His charts, though, and past presentations, listed an August 2024 launch for ESCAPADE.

"It's an incredibly ambitious first launch for New Glenn and we really appreciate the partnership," he said. Later in the committee meeting, he confirmed that NASA expected ESCAPADE to be on the inaugural New Glenn launch. "We will very likely be the very first launch of New Glenn," he said. That is acceptable, Smith said, since ESCAPADE is what NASA characterizes as a "class D" mission with a higher tolerance for risk. "We're willing to take a little bit of risk with a price tag and a mission assurance model that reflects that risk."

Besides the inherent technical risks in the first launch of a new rocket, there are also schedule risks. New Glenn development is years behind the original schedule Blue Origin put forward. The company has not provided recent updates about progress towards a first launch of the rocket, although Jarrett Jones, senior vice president for New Glenn at Blue Origin, said at World Satellite Business Week in September that the first flight vehicle would arrive at a Florida integration facility by the end of the year, with the company planning "multiple" launches of New Glenn in 2024.

An anonymous reader shared this report from CNBC: Central bank digital currencies have the potential to replace cash, but adoption could take time, said Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the International Monetary Fund on Wednesday.

"CBDCs can replace cash which is costly to distribute in island economies," she said Wednesday at the Singapore FinTech Festival. "They can offer resilience in more advanced economies. And they can improve financial inclusion where few hold bank accounts." [...] "CBDCs would offer a safe and low-cost alternative [to cash]. They would also offer a bridge to go between private monies and a yardstick to measure their value, just like cash today which we can withdraw from our banks," the IMF chief said.

The IMF has said that more than 100 countries are exploring CBDCs — or approximately 60% of countries in the world. "The level of global interest in CBDCs is unprecedented. Several central banks have already launched pilots or even issued a CBDC," the IMF said in a September report. According to a 2022 survey conducted by the Bank for International Settlements, of the 86 central banks surveyed, 93% said they were exploring CBDCs, while 58% said they were likely to or may possibly issue a retail CBDC in either the short or medium term. But as of June, only 11 countries have adopted CBDCs, with an additional 53 in advanced planning stages and 46 researching the topic, according to data from the Atlantic Council...

On Wednesday, the fund launched a CBDC handbook as a reference guide for policymakers around the world...

Georgieva also said that artificial intelligence "could amplify some of the benefits of CBDCs" by providing accurate credit scoring and personalized support.

CNN reports SpaceX made a second attempt to successfully launch Starship, the most powerful rocket ever constructed. The uncrewed rocket took off just after 7 a.m. CT (8 a.m. ET). The rocket took off as intended, making it roughly 8 minutes into flight before SpaceX confirmed it had to intentionally explode the Starship spacecraft as it flew over the ocean...

This mission comes after months of back-and-forth with federal regulators as SpaceX has awaited a launch license. The company is also grappling with pushback from environmentalists...

After separating from the Super Heavy rocket booster, the Starship spacecraft soared to an altitude of approximately 93 miles (150 kilometers) before SpaceX lost contact, according to a statement issued by the company. For context, the U.S. government considers 50 miles (80 kilometers) above Earth's surface the edge of outer space...

SpaceX is OK with rockets exploding in the early stages of development. That's because the company uses a completely different approach to rocket design than, say, NASA. The space agency focuses on building one rocket and strenuously designing and testing it on the ground before its first flight — taking years but all but guaranteeing success on the first launch. SpaceX, however, rapidly builds new prototypes and is willing to test them to their breaking point because there's usually a spare nearby. During a drive by the company's facilities on Friday — four Starship spacecraft and at least two Super Heavy boosters could be seen from public roadways.
CNN reminds readers that "so far in 2023 alone, the Falcon 9 has launched more than 70 spaceflights...

"Elon Musk described Starship as the vehicle that underpins SpaceX's founding purpose: sending humans to Mars for the first time. NASA has its own plans for the rocket."

The FAA has cleared SpaceX to launch its second spaceflight attempt of its Starship rocket. CNBC reports: SpaceX posted on the social media platform X shortly after the greenlight that it was "targeting Friday, November 17 for Starship's second flight test." A two-hour launch window will begin at 8 a.m. ET. SpaceX plans to livestream the Starship launch, with a webcast beginning about 30 minutes before lift off. Starship first launched in April, achieving flight for a few minutes before exploding mid-air, severely damaging the ground infrastructure and raising environmental concerns. The FAA in coordination with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service launched a safety review prior to issuing a new flight license for the second attempt.

FWS determined that the rocket launch and subsequent damage to the pad infrastructure had no long-term negative effects on the surrounding ecology, according to an agency report released Wednesday. Still, SpaceX will help mitigate damage to the area by reducing sound waves and vibrations, assisting in fire suppression, and providing launch pad protection, the agency said. As a result, "the FAA determined SpaceX met all safety, environmental, policy and financial responsibility requirements," the agency said in a statement Wednesday.

Microsoft is officially launching its Notion-like productivity and collaboration app called Loop. From a report: Loop lets you use flexible, collaborative workspaces and pages to make it easier to cooperate on work. If you're familiar with Notion's interface at all, Loop looks and feels remarkably similar -- right down to the ability to easily access a bunch of tools and formatting options by typing the forward slash key (which pulls up what Microsoft calls the "insert menu"). But because Loop is built by Microsoft, that means it has some useful integrations with other Microsoft software.

This week GitHub announced the approaching general availability of the GPT-4-powered GitHub Copilot Chat in December "as part of your existing GitHub Copilot subscription" (and "available at no cost to verified teachers, students, and maintainers of popular open source projects.")

And this "code-aware guidance and code generation" will also be integrated directly into github.com, "so developers can dig into code, pull requests, documentation, and general coding questions with Copilot Chat providing suggestions, summaries, analysis, and answers." With GitHub Copilot Chat we're enabling the rise of natural language as the new universal programming language for every developer on the planet. Whether it's finding an error, writing unit tests, or helping debug code, Copilot Chat is your AI companion through it all, allowing you to write and understand code using whatever language you speak...

Copilot Chat uses your code as context, and is able to explain complex concepts, suggest code based on your open files and windows, help detect security vulnerabilities, and help with finding and fixing errors in code, terminal, and debugger...

With the new inline Copilot Chat, developers can chat about specific lines of code, directly within the flow of their code and editor.
InfoWorld notes it will chat in "whatever language a developer speaks." (And that Copilot Chat will also be available in GitHub's mobile app.) But why wait until December? GitHub's blog post says that Copilot Chat "will come to the JetBrains suite of IDEs, available in preview today."

GitHub also plans to introduce "slash commands and context variables" for GitHub Copilot, "so fixing or improving code is as simple as entering /fix and generating tests now starts with /tests."

"With Copilot in the code editor, in the CLI, and now Copilot Chat on github.com and in our mobile app, we are making Copilot ubiquitous throughout the software development lifecycle and always available in all of GitHub's surface areas..."

CNBC adds that "Microsoft-owned GitHub" also plans to introduce "a more expensive Copilot assistant" in February "for developers inside companies that can explain and provide recommendations about internal source code."

Wednesday's blog post announcing these updates was written by GitHub's CEO, who seemed to be predicting an evolutionary leap into a new future. "Just as GitHub was founded on Git, today we are re-founded on Copilot." He promised they'd built on their vision of a future "where AI infuses every step of the developer lifecycle." Open source and Git have fundamentally transformed how we build software. It is now evident that AI is ushering in the same sweeping change, and at an exponential pace... We are certain this foundational transformation of the GitHub platform, and categorically new way of software development, is necessary in a world dependent on software. Every day, the world's developers balance an unsustainable demand to both modernize the legacy code of yesterday and build our digital tomorrow. It is our guiding conviction to make it easier for developers to do it all, from the creative spark to the commit, pull request, code review, and deploy — and to do it all with GitHub Copilot deeply integrated into the developer experience.
And if you're worried about the security of AI-generated code... Today, GitHub Copilot applies an LLM-based vulnerability prevention system that blocks insecure coding patterns in real-time to make GitHub Copilot's suggestions more secure. Our model targets the most common vulnerable coding patterns, including hardcoded credentials, SQL injections, and path injections. GitHub Copilot Chat can also help identify security vulnerabilities in the IDE, explain the mechanics of a vulnerability with its natural language capabilities, and suggest a specific fix for the highlighted code.
But for Enterprise accounts paying for GitHub Advanced Security, there's also an upgrade coming: "new AI-powered application security testing features designed to detect and remediate vulnerabilities and secrets in your code." (It's already available in preview mode.)

GitHub even announced plans for a new AI assistant in 2024 that generates a step-by-step plan for responding to GitHub issues. (GitHub describes it as "like a pair programming session with a partner that knows about every inch of the project, and can follow your lead to make repository-wide changes from the issue to the pull request with the power of AI.")

CNBC notes that AI-powered coding assistants "are still nascent, though, with less than 10% enterprise adoption, according to Gartner, a technology industry research firm."

But last month Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella told analysts GitHub Copilot already had one million paying users...

And GitHub's blog post concludes, "And we're just getting started."

According to Nikkei Asia (paywalled), Indonesia has officially launched Southeast Asia's largest floating solar plant. It covers an area of over 250 hectares (2.5 km^2) and should be able to produce enough renewable energy to power 50,000 homes. Interesting Engineering reports: "Today is a historical day because our big dream of building a large-scale renewable energy plant is finally achieved. We managed to build the largest floating solar plant in Southeast Asia, and the third biggest in the world," Widodo is reported to have said at the opening ceremony. "The Cirata floating solar panel is the largest floating solar panel in Southeast Asia, and also the third largest in the world," he added.

China's PowerChina Huadong Engineering Corporation Limited constructed the power plant with Indonesia's state electricity corporation PLN and the United Arab Emirates energy company Masdar. The project had an investment of $145 million. More than 340,000 solar panels cover the reservoir surface, generating 192 MW of electricity annually, complementing existing hydropower at the site. The project had experienced significant delays before construction finally commenced in December 2020. [...]

PLN and Masdar are discussing plans to expand the facility and increase its power generation capacity to 500 MW. The plant occupies only 4% of the dam's reservoir surface, and according to the Indonesian government, solar panels can occupy up to 20% of the surface of a lake or dam, making it an efficient use of space.