Take a break and catch up with the latest articles and news posted on this site. This week Mike James discusses Threading in C# which is basic to implementing asychronous code and easy to get started with, but also easy to make a mess of. In "Missing the Point of LLMs" he takes stock of progress towards general artificial intelligence.

Scouting America, the organization formerly known in the U.S.A. as the Boy Scouts, has announced two new merit badges in artificial intelligence (AI) and cybersecurity. The badges are available through the Scouts BSA (Boy Scouts of America) program. 

Microsoft has designed an animated face for Copilot, its ubiquitous AI Assistant. Is Mico, whose name rhymes with "pico", going be a worthy successor to Clippy, the highly annoying paperclip that tried to be helpful, but often came across as an infuriating distraction? Or will we love chatting to it?

IBM has launched Granite 4.0, the next generation of open-source, small but efficient, IBM language models, together with Granite-Docling, the next gen document format converter.

The final release candidate of .NET 10, the platform created from a combination of .NET Framework and .NET Core, has been released. Overall, this release focuses on quality and stabilization, though there are improvements to .NET MAUI, support for Android devices, and Entity Framework. 

Financial pundits are trying to frighten us into thinking that the "AI bubble" is about to burst and even AI researchers are backtracking, casting doubt on LLMs. Both are wrong - the progress towards general artificial intelligence is real, but there's a lot more to be done before we achieve it. 

New options are now available for Jules, Google's coding Agent - a CLI and an API.

Platform Engineering Labs has launched formae, an open-source Infrastructure as Code platform built to replace state-driven systems like Terraform.

DH2i has released DxEnterprise for SQL Server 2025 which brings mission-critical high availability capability for SQL Server 2025-backed AI applications.

At the Hexacon offensive security conference in Paris last week, Ivan Krstić, Apple vice president of security engineering and architecture announced a new maximum payout of $2 million in Apple's Security Bounty Program for a chain of software exploits that could be abused for spyware.

It's been some years since we first looked at Qodana, the solid SAST tool from JetBrains. Let's find out what's new in its latest release, Qodana 2025.2.

Userware has released XAML.io Preview v0.5 with improvements including multi-file project editing. The team says this is an important step toward enabling visual .NET development directly in the browser. 

FashionTech is a field that blends haute couture design and mechatronics engineering. It is also something you can study at  as part of an undergraduate degree at the Eindhoven University of Technology. The students there are taking part in this year's Dutch Design Week with a range of insect-inspired garments.

I Programmer saw a flood of new visitors this week when a post by Mike James, There Are No Programmers In Star Trek, was picked up on Reddit. And, yes, we stand corrected, there is  evidence of programming - just not as we know it with so much that can be achieved by a gesture or a voice command.  Programming is evolving, but the era of programming as we knew it was a golden age.

The United States Mint has now released the designs for the 2026 American Innovation $1 Coin Program, including two related to computing - Steve Jobs and the Cray-1 supercomputer. 

Simply referred to as "LLM Visualization" this web site 
with interactive and intuitable graphics explains how an LLM actually works.