Progressive Gauge

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Jack Vaughan

VP Vance runs AI scrimmage – takes on EU bureaucrats

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JD Vance last month dressed down the Euros at Grand Palis AI Summit. Here, an old tech hand reckons with memories of AI policy efforts. Sees surprising devolution.

By Jack Vaughan

Booted footsteps in the hall at night. Coming closer as in an old radio drama — but real. The steps still resound in corners of Europe.  Where some memories of oppression are hard-wired.

The bootsteps might be KGB, Gestapo or Stasi. These were secret police, compiling dossiers and worse.  The US has had its secret agencies tracking its citizens. [Read more…] about VP Vance runs AI scrimmage – takes on EU bureaucrats

At Dynatrace Perform 2025: Non-breaking break points make their point

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Live Debugger captures key performance data as working code does its work — Giving developers a real-time view into issues.

By Jack Vaughan

[February 4 ] – At Dynatrace’s Perform 2025 user conference in Las Vegas, the observability software company announced Live Debugger, said to enable developers to non-invasively access runtime operations. Founder and CTO Bernd Greifeneder described this more succinctly, as “non-breaking break points.”

That’s succinct – but it borders on the paradoxical, oxymoronic or contradictory. What goes on?

The basic premise of the portfolio update is to allow developers to set a marker without interfering with the runtime. They can capture stack traces, variable values, and process information without the onerous labor of reproduction and redeployment. The new capabilities are supported directly from the Dynatrace platform or by using the company’s native Visual Studio Code and JetBrains IDE plugins. And Dynatrace advises on ways to set breakpoints on interfaced programs where source code is unavailable. [Read more…] about At Dynatrace Perform 2025: Non-breaking break points make their point

China Moon Racing

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This first ran in January on my Medium Blog.

It’s been something of an afterthought since the US Apollo program ended in December of 1972, but the Moon is moving into the public spotlight again.

What’s becoming clear is that a new Moon race is well underway, one with plenty of participants but one most pointedly pitting China against the US.

The competition has a different character than it had in the now distant past — it’s become more a long-running endurance race and less the clearly defined sprint it was in the 1960s, when fear of Sputnik tended to unite sentiment in the US. [Read more…] about China Moon Racing

Brief exploration: Generative AI circa 2025

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Complexities in deploying Gen AI and LLMs dim the light on some initial hype. These are the days of engineering, coordination, and integration.

By Jack Vaughan

The early procession of ‘2025 Outlooks’ seems to start with a lot of looks back. It’s mostly about Generative AI, which has proved to be a stock market mover, stock art maker, and stock item in years in review.

The song remains the same but the tenor may change. ChatGPT is two years old, and its market shaking meteoric rise now feels a bit less meteoric, if only because changing the world requires effort.

[Read more…] about Brief exploration: Generative AI circa 2025

Get a grep

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Details vary in different telling, but all agree that Unix operating system co-creator Ken Thompson developed grep while at Bell Labs. His impetus came from a request by a manager for a program that could search files for patterns.

 

Thompson had written and had been using a program, called ‘s’ (for ‘search’), which he debugged and enhanced overnight, the story goes. They nursed it and rehearsed it and grep sprung forth. “g” stands for “global,” “re” stands for “regular expression, “p” stands for “print.” To get something to display on screen in those days you used “print.” Thompson coming up with a software tool, and sharing it throughout the office, and perhaps beyond; to me that captured a moment in time.

 

I picked up on this based on an assigned mini-series for Data Center Knowledge. Also in this mini-series was a look at the roots of the kill command and the birth of SSH security. [links below].  I knew bits of the early Unix history but had to dig for this one.

[Read more…] about Get a grep