Sr. Content Developer at Microsoft, working remotely in PA, TechBash conference organizer, former Microsoft MVP, Husband, Dad and Geek.
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The latest AI news we announced in December

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Here are Google’s latest AI updates from December 2025
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alvinashcraft
16 minutes ago
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Pennsylvania, USA
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What Jeff Bezos Still Looks for in Hires, Even as AI Reshapes Work

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As AI reshapes hiring and layoffs discourage job seekers, Jeff Bezos and Andy Jassy explain why attitude now matters as much as skills.

The post What Jeff Bezos Still Looks for in Hires, Even as AI Reshapes Work appeared first on TechRepublic.

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alvinashcraft
17 minutes ago
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Pennsylvania, USA
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Job Apocalypse? Not Yet. AI is Creating Brand New Occupations

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The AI industry, for all the anxiety about mass unemployment, is quietly minting entirely new job categories that require distinctly human skills -- empathy, judgment, and the ability to calm down a passenger trapped inside a broken-down robotaxi. Data annotators are no longer just low-paid gig workers tagging images. Experts in finance, law, and medicine now train advanced AI models, earning $90 an hour on average through platforms like Mercor, a startup recently valued at $10 billion, according to CEO Brendan Foody. Forward-deployed engineers, a role pioneered by Palantir, customize AI tools on-site for clients; YCombinator's portfolio companies now have 63 job postings for such roles, up from four last year. The AI Workforce Consortium, a research group led by Cisco that examined 50 IT jobs across wealthy countries, found AI risk-and-governance specialists to be the fastest-growing category -- outpacing even AI programmers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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alvinashcraft
17 minutes ago
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Development Process with AI

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With every update to the various models and tools, AI becomes more capable and in a lot of ways more independent. In much the same way as a junior developer learns over time and can take on more complex tasks, and can carry the tasks out with less supervision, we’ve seen AI mature to the point where you can assign it entire units of work, with relatively little guidance and review. As developers adopt AI into their workflow, it is causing a massive shift in the development process, and in fact the process of creating and shipping software. In this post we’ll look at traditional development workflows and how they are being affected by the use of AI.

In discussing the development process I don’t want to get into the debate over the relative merits of different processes, such as Waterfall, Agile, Scrum, etc. Instead, I’m going to focus our attention on the relatively low-level workflow that a developer might follow when going about their work. Let’s assume that this starts with being assigned, or self-assigning, an issue to work on. The developer would go about doing the necessary investigation, planning, design, coding, tests etc required in order to complete the work. Once they’re done, there’s probably some sort of review process from a peer, or manager, before the work is either merged (if it needs to be combined into an existing code base), or published (if it’s a standalone tool/app/site). This might seem overly simplistic but let’s examine how this looks when we introduce AI.

Again, for the purpose of this discussion, let’s keep our attention on the developer workflow. Of course, AI can be incorporated into many other aspects of the product development lifecycle but for now, let’s look at in the context of the workflow we’ve just described. To start with, let’s start at the point the developer picks up the issue to work on. Normally it would be up to the developer to start investigating the issue in order to work out either the cause of the bug, or what needs to be done to implement a feature. With AI, depending on which tool you’re using, this initial step can either be skipped, or altered.

Some tools, like GitHub and Codex, support the full delegation of an issue, allowing the agent to investigate, plan and complete the implementation. The output is either a branch or a pull request, which can then be reviewed by the human-in-the-loop. This might result in further direction to the agent to continue development. Alternatively, the developer might pick up the work and either complete it, or adjust the work, in order to provide more direction to how the agent should complete the work. This is not too dissimilar to the role of a senior developer delegating work to a more junior developer.

Alternatively, the developer might want to be more involved. Rather than simply assigning the issue to the agent they can pick up the issue themselves. However, again, instead of going at it alone, the developer can interact with AI using chat to ask, plan and even code some of the work, much like when developers pair program.

In either of these two augmented workflows the developer is leveraging AI to both increase their productivity as well as their effectiveness. The developer is moving away from being a day-coder, into more of an orchestrator role.

In this post we’ve briefly examined one area where AI is making a difference in the development process. What’s becoming clear is that whilst there’s currently no clear guidlines for developers to follow when using AI, developers need to become familiar with the evolving world of AI agents and tools. Understanding when to delegate steps in the process to AI will become a key skill required to be a successful developer in the world of AI engineering.

The post Development Process with AI appeared first on Nick's .NET Travels.

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alvinashcraft
17 minutes ago
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Pennsylvania, USA
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Real Time Monitoring with Real-life Use Cases using Database Watcher

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From: VisualStudio
Duration: 1:08:23
Views: 182

In this recorded Live! 360 session, Daniel Taylor demonstrates how Azure Database Watcher enables real-time monitoring for Azure SQL Database and Azure SQL Managed Instance, helping DBAs, developers, and operations teams move from reactive firefighting to proactive performance management.

Through extended demos and a real-world troubleshooting story, Daniel shows how Database Watcher leverages Azure Data Explorer (ADX) and Microsoft Fabric Real-Time Intelligence to surface low-latency insights, trigger alerts, and quickly identify bottlenecks. You’ll follow an end-to-end investigation where the root cause wasn’t CPU or query plans—but a storage throughput constraint—and see how the issue was validated and resolved.

🔑 What You’ll Learn
• What Azure Database Watcher monitors (Azure SQL DB, Hyperscale, Managed Instance)
• How real-time monitoring supports proactive Database Administrator (DBA) workflows
• How Database Watcher collects telemetry using least-privilege access (including managed identities)
• When to use Azure Data Explorer vs Fabric Real-Time Intelligence
• How to configure out-of-the-box alerts and custom dashboard-based alerting
• How to investigate CPU, waits, blocking, sessions, queries, backups, and storage
• How to identify and resolve IOPS and throughput bottlenecks in Azure SQL

⏱️ Chapters
00:00 Why real-time monitoring matters
03:20 What Azure Database Watcher is (and what it monitors)
07:30 Security model: identity + least privilege
10:19 Architecture overview
15:10 ADX vs RTI
17:07 Dataset categories
17:28 Using Kusto for SQL monitoring data
21:25 Dashboard walkthrough, customizations, and live metrics
34:54 Demo: Use-case troubleshooting scenario
38:18 Investigating CPU, waits, sessions, and queries
50:00 Root cause: storage throughput limits
55:32 Fix and validation
58:20 Cost model, feedback, and roadmap

👤 Speakers: Daniel Taylor, Bradley Ball (@SQLBalls), Thomas LaRock

🔗 Links
• Learn more about Database Watcher: aka.ms/dbwatcher
• Watch Tales From the Field: https://www.youtube.com/@Tales-from-the-Field
• Explore more Live! 360 sessions: https://aka.ms/L360Orlando25
• Join upcoming VS Live! events: https://aka.ms/VSLiveEvents

#AzureSQL #DatabaseWatcher #SQLServer

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alvinashcraft
17 minutes ago
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Why 2026 is the Year of the AI Builder with Lovable CEO Anton Osika

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From: AIDailyBrief
Duration: 30:02
Views: 98

Lovable CEO Anton Osika joins the AI Daily Brief to unpack how AI-assisted coding evolved from early GitHub experiments into load-bearing infrastructure inside companies, why 2025 marked the inflection point for vibe coding, and why 2026 will belong to builders who can think, plan, and ship with AI end to end. The conversation covers the shift from prototypes to production, how enterprises are rethinking workflows and SaaS, the rise of personal and ephemeral software, and what skills will actually matter as AI takes on more of the mechanics of building.

The AI Daily Brief helps you understand the most important news and discussions in AI.
Subscribe to the podcast version of The AI Daily Brief wherever you listen: https://pod.link/1680633614
Get it ad free at
Join our Discord: https://bit.ly/aibreakdown

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alvinashcraft
18 minutes ago
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