Stop Using char in Java. And Code Points It’s a can of worms, when you start messing with chars, code points, and you’re likely going to get it wrong in the end. As much as possible, stay away from chars and code points, and instead, use as much as possible the String methods like indexOf() / substring(), and some regex when you really need to find grapheme clusters. Paul King shared his presentations on Why use Groovy in 2023 and an update on the Groovy 5 roadmapIt’s interesting to see how and where Groovy goes beyond what is offered by Java, sometimes thanks to its dynamic nature, sometimes because of its compile-time transformation capabilities. Read more...

Generative AI exists because of the transformer I confess I rarely read the Financial Times, but they have a really neat articles with animations on how large language models work, thanks to the transformer neural network architecture, an architecture invented by Google in 2017. They talk about text vector embeddings, how the self-attention makes LLM understand the relationship between words and the surrounding context, and also doesn’t forget to mention hallucinations, how “grounding” and RLHF (Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback) can help mitigate them to some extent. Read more...