AI might not steal your job, but it could change it
People whose jobs deal with language could, unsurprisingly, be particularly
affected by large language models like ChatGPT and GPT-4. Let’s take one
example: lawyers. I’ve spent time over the past two weeks looking at the legal
industry and how it’s likely to be affected by new AI models, and what I found
is as much cause for optimism as for concern. The antiquated, slow-moving legal
industry has been a candidate for technological disruption for some time. In an
industry with a labor shortage and a need to deal with reams of complex
documents, a technology that can quickly understand and summarize texts could be
immensely useful. So how should we think about the impact these AI models might
have on the legal industry? ... AI in law isn’t a new trend, though. It has
already been used to review contracts and predict legal outcomes, and
researchers have recently explored how AI might help get laws passed. Recently,
consumer rights company DoNotPay considered arguing a case in court using an
argument written by AI, known as the “robot lawyer,” delivered through an
earpiece.
Microservice Architecture Key Concepts
Generally, you can use a message broker for asynchronous communication between
services, though it’s important to use one that doesn’t add complexity to your
system and possible latency if it doesn’t scale as the messages grow. Version
your APIs: Keep an ongoing record of the attributes and changes you make to each
of your services. “Whether you’re using REST API, gRPC, messaging…” wrote Sylvia
Fronczak for OpsLevel, “the schema will change, and you need to be ready for
that change.” A typical pattern is to embed the API (application programming
interface) version into your data/schema and gracefully deprecate older data
models. For example, for your service product information, the requestor can ask
for a specific version, and that version will be indicated in the data returned
as well. Less chit-chat, more performance: Synchronous communications create a
lot of back and forth between services. If synchronous communication is really
needed, this will work okay for a handful of microservices, but when dozens or
even hundreds of microservices are in play, synchronous communication can bring
scaling to a grinding halt.
'Silent Success': How to master the art of quiet hiring for your business
“Ironically, quiet hiring is neither ‘quiet’ nor is any ‘hiring’ involved in it
in the traditional sense,” says Bensely Zachariah, Global Head of Human
Resources at Fulcrum Digital, a business platform and digital engineering
services company. Quiet hiring entails companies upskilling their existing
employees and moving them to new roles or new sets of responsibilities, on a
temporary or in some cases, permanent basis to meet the ever-evolving demands of
the business environment. Zachariah says: “Quiet hiring is essentially the
opposite of ‘quite quitting’, a buzzword during 2022, which, in simple words,
means doing the bare minimum for what it takes to keep your job. The concept
behind quiet hiring is rewarding high-performing individuals with more
challenging roles, pay rises, bonuses, or promotions. This is not a new concept
per se, in fact it is an age-old practice which was referred to as ‘facilitated
talent mobility’ or ‘career advancement’ where organisations have spent
considerable time and resources to facilitate upskilling/cross-skilling
employees to give them new roles/avenues for work.”
AI and privacy concerns go hand in hand
Whether personal information is publicly available or not, its collection and
use is still subject to the Privacy Act. While it’s on businesses to operate
within the law, it pays for the public to upskill themselves and be savvy about
what information they’re posting, and where. We know that criminals are becoming
an even greater threat online because cybersecurity breaches are increasing and
result in costly hacks of personal information. AI can be used to supercharge
these criminals, leading to more privacy breaches, and making it even harder for
cybersecurity systems to protect your information or for post-breach measures
such as injunctions to protect stolen data that criminals may make available
online. Powerful AI can aggregate data to a much greater degree, much more
swiftly than humans can, meaning AI can potentially identify people that would
otherwise not be identifiable through more time-intensive methods. Even
seemingly benign online interactions could reveal more about you than you ever
intended.
The Benefits of a Streaming Database
Experienced engineers understand that no software stack or tooling is perfect
and comes with a series of trade-offs for each specific use case. With that in
mind, let’s examine the particular trade-offs inherent to streaming databases to
understand better the use cases they align best with. Incrementally updated
materialized views – Streaming databases build on different dataflow paradigms
that shift limitations elsewhere and efficiently handle incremental view
maintenance on a broader SQL vocabulary. Other databases like Oracle, SQLServer
and Redshift have varying levels of support for incrementally updating a
materialized view. They could expand support, but will hit walls on fundamental
issues of consistency and throughput. True streaming inputs – Because they are
built on stream processors, streaming databases are optimized to individually
process continuous streams of input data (e.g., messages from Kafka). Scaling
streaming inputs involves batching them into larger transactions, slowing down
data and losing granularity. In traditional databases (especially OLAP data
warehouses), larger, less frequent batch updates are more performant.
6 steps to measure the business value of IT
A challenge for determining the value contribution is the selection of suitable
key figures. According to the study, IT departments today primarily use
technical and IT-related metrics. That is legitimate, but in this way, there’s
no direct connection to the business. Plus, there’s often a lack of affinity for
meaningful KPIs, both in IT and in the specialist departments, says Jürgen
Stoffel, CIO at global reinsurer Hannover Re. Therefore, in practice, only a few
metrics suitable for both sides would be found, and the result is the IT value
proposition is often unseen. “A consistent portfolio of metrics coordinated with
the business would be helpful,” says Thomas Kleine, CIO of Pfizer Germany, and
Held from the University of Regensburg adds: “Companies have to get away from
purely technical key figures and develop both quantitative and qualitative
metrics with a business connection.” In order to make progress along this path,
the consultants developed a process model with several development and
evaluation phases, using current scientific findings and speaking to CIOs.
Strategic risk analysis is key to ensure customer trust in product, customer-facing app security
Assessing risk requires identifying baseline security criteria around key
elements such as customer contracts and regulatory requirements, Neil Lappage,
partner at LeadingEdgeCyber and ISACA member, tells CSO. “From the start, you've
got things you’re committed to such as requirements in customer contracts and
regulatory requirements and you have to work within those parameters. And you
need to understand who your interested parties are, the stakes they've got in
the game, and the security objectives.” The process of defining the risk profile
of an organization also requires strong collaboration among IT, cybersecurity,
and risk professionals. “How the organization knows the risk profile of the
organization involves the cybersecurity team working with the IT and reporting
to the business so these three things — cyber, IT and risk — work in unison,” he
says. “If cyber sits isolated from the rest of the business, if it doesn't
understand the business, the risk is not optimized.”
FBI Seizes Genesis Cybercriminal Marketplace in 'Operation Cookie Monster'
The seizure of Genesis was a collaborative effort between international law
enforcement agencies and the private sector, according to the notice, which
included the logos of European law enforcement agency Europol; Guardia Civil in
Spain; Polisen, the police force in Sweden; and the Canadian government. The FBI
also is seeking to speak those who've been active on the Genesis Market or who
are in touch with administrators of the forum, offering an email address for
people to contact the agency. ... Indeed, Genesis demonstrated the "growing
professionalization and specialization of the cybercrime sphere," with the site
earning money by gaining and maintaining access to victim systems until
administrators could sell that access to other criminals, according to Sophos.
The various tasks that the Genesis Market bots could undertake included
large-scale infection of consumer devices to steal digital fingerprints,
cookies, saved logins, and autofill-form data stored on them. The marketplace
would package up that data and list it for sale, with prices ranging from less
than $1 to $370, depending on the amount of embedded data that the packages
contained.
Beyond Hype: How Quantum Computing Will Change Enterprise IT
“If you have a problem that can be put into an algorithm that leverages the
parallelism of quantum computers, that’s where you can get a very dramatic
potential speed up,” Lucero says. “If you have a problem that for every
additional variable, you add to the problem, and doubles the computational
complexity -- that is probably a good candidate to be adapted into a quantum
computational problem.” The so-called “traveling salesperson problem,” for
example, would be a fitting problem for a quantum computer. The algorithm asks
the following: “Given a list of cities and the distances between each pair of
cities, what is the shortest possible route that visits each city exactly once
and returns to the origin city.” This and other combinatorial optimization
problems are important to theoretical computer science because of the complexity
of variations involved. Used as a benchmark, the algorithm can be applied to
planning, logistics, microchip manufacturing and even DNA sequencing. In theory,
a quantum computer could make quick work of this complicated algorithm and
provide greater efficiency for programming.
How to build next-gen applications with serverless infrastructure
When explaining the benefits of serverless infrastructure and containers, I'm
often asked why you need containers at all. Don't instances already provide
isolation from underlying hardware? Yes, but containers provide other important
benefits. Containers allow users to fully utilize virtual machine (VM) resources
by hosting multiple applications (on distinct ports) on the same instance. As a
result, engineering teams get portable runtime application environments with
platform-independent capabilities. This allows engineers to build an application
once and then deploy it anywhere, regardless of the underlying operating system.
... Implementing event-driven architecture (EDA) can work for serverless
infrastructure through either a publisher/subscriber (pub/sub) model or an
event-stream model. With the pub/sub model, notifications go out to all
subscribers when events are published. Each subscriber can respond according to
whatever data processing requirements are in place. On the event-stream model
side, engineers set up consumers to read from a continuous flow of events from a
producer.
Quote for the day:
"When I finally got a management
position, I found out how hard it is to lead and manage people." --
Guy Kawasaki
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