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Want to feel zombies and degenerate villagers attacking you? You’ll need a strong heart to don your virtual reality headset and launch two of the latest productions for Sony’s PSVR 2, Resident Evil Village and The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners chapter 2 Retribution. We managed to achieve moments of pure fear, a little bit of nausea, but also frustration from a still imperfect game mechanic.

Posted at 4:27pm

We often have the impression that we are dealing with prototypes and unfinished experiments in virtual reality. The games there tend to be shorter, the concepts vying for ingenuity, but finished works are rarely offered. This is not the case at all with Resident Evil Village in PSVR2, which takes up the whole scenario of Capcom’s great game released in May 2021 and which we gave 4.5 stars out of 5.

We’re not going to claim to have remade the entire game we completed back then at 9pm in virtual reality. The rhythm to tame such a format is much slower, you can’t spend three or four hours in a row there without getting a serious headache.

No wonder, since the original game triggered this feeling of claustrophobia and danger at every turn. We passed the first three tables of Resident Evil Village PSVR2, where we have no choice to play in first person. It embodies Ethan Winters, who wants to find his baby Rose in a cursed village in Eastern Europe.

Get used to the horror

From the first minutes we are immersed in the horror of dozens of possessed villagers pouncing on us from all sides. With both our hands clearly visible, one of which is mangled, we have to play fast to get our weapons out of our chests. The knife is always at hand, a revolver is accessible on the left side and you can draw your long gun by pulling your arm to your right shoulder. These two weapons, like in any Resident Evil game, are sometimes completely useless when you run out of ammo, which is inevitable.

SCREEN PHOTO

The first few moments of being glued to these bloodthirsty villagers are just traumatic. Their face is getting closer to you, they bite you and you have to fight to escape. After a few struggles, however, you get used to the proposal, which is so over the top that it becomes unreal. An unexpected benefit of the PSVR 2, whose image isn’t as well defined as it is on a TV, is that the note has been forced to emphasize the clues that will help you solve the puzzles. Keys, documents and tools that could easily be overlooked in the classic version are more visible here.

Bloody variants

The Walking Dead: Saints & Sinners – Chapter 2: Retribution continues in over-the-top and very hypocritical horror. However, the story, which can be completed in about fifteen hours, is more tenuous. We embody a tourist who got lost in the city of New Orleans, post-apocalyptic version. We’re stuck between the dead and groups of people at war, with a first-person perspective again, pursued by a man with an ax that nothing seems to stop.

SCREEN PHOTO

A flashlight is always slung from your jacket, a backpack slung over your left shoulder, and a long gun slung over your right shoulder.

Here we had fun offering gory variants to overwhelm our enemies with an axe, a chainsaw or with big hits when we have no choice. We go from the streets of New Orleans to infamous corners, abandoned bars or ruined buildings from which the zombies are rising. And while sometimes you’ll have to rack your brains to get out of trouble, more often it’s about using your ammo and weapons properly. A long tutorial of almost half an hour will prepare you for it.

Here, too, the horror is so rough that it quickly loses its traumatic character.

fascination and reservations

Whether it’s Resident Evil Village or The Walking Dead, we’re dealing with finely crafted games here, with a very nice design, especially for the first game, but the mechanics are very frustrating in both cases: when we manage to use his weapons quickly summarize the classic version, through a few key combinations on the joystick, the exercise in virtual reality is much more complicated. You have to simulate the gesture of getting the gun, which encourages immersion but requires dexterity. Not easy when armies of villains surround you.

The same applies to melee combat: make sure you have enough space because you will constantly bump into the furniture in your room. Make sure no one sees you. Guaranteed to look ridiculous.

Once again we have the demonstration of a prediction losing feathers: no, virtual reality will not replace the screen, at least not with current technology. It’s a perfectly tasty spice that’s impressive to experiment with, but doesn’t make for long hours of adventure. Unless you have an inhuman tolerance for virtual reality.

Tested on PSVR 2 with copies from Capcom and Skydance Interactive

Last month, Microsoft introduced new AI-powered products, Bing and Microsoft Edge, which offer better search, comprehensive answers, a new chat experience, and the ability to create content. Microsoft has already seen chat reinvent the way people search, with more than 100 million chats to date. The company has seen people use chat in a variety of ways, whether it’s to refine answers to complex questions, for entertainment, or to find creative inspiration. Now Microsoft is taking the chat experience to the next level by making the new Bing more visual.

Continuing its AI efforts, Microsoft announced Bing Image Creator. Powered by OpenAI’s DALL-E, this tool can be used to generate artificial intelligence images. According to Microsoft, Bing Image Creator will be part of Bing Chat and will accept natural language prompts to create (pretty much) any type of image. The tool will also be available in Microsoft Edge, which the company points out will make it the first and only browser with an integrated artificial intelligence image generator.

In its announcement, Microsoft says, “We’re excited to announce that we’re bringing Bing Image Creator, new AI-powered visual stories, and updated knowledge maps to the new preview for Bing and Edge featuring our OpenAI partners’ DALL∙E model you can use Bing Image Creator to create an image simply by describing in your own words the image you want to see. Now you can generate written and visual content in one place, from the cat”.

Microsoft raises concerns about the use and misuse of such a tool, noting that Bing Image Creator has built-in safeguards.

At Microsoft, our teams are guided by our Responsible AI Principles and Responsible AI Standard to help them develop and deploy AI systems responsibly. To reduce the potential abuse of Image Creator, we are working with our partner OpenAI, who developed DALL∙E, to provide an experience that encourages responsible use of Image Creator. We made sure that OpenAI protections as well as additional protections are built into Image Creator. For example, we have controls in place to limit the generation of harmful or dangerous images.

The company adds: “When our system detects that a potentially dangerous image could be generated by a command prompt, it blocks the prompt and warns the user Bing icon in the bottom left corner of each image to indicate that the image contains Image Creator was created. We continue to work closely with OpenAI to develop, test, and revise metric mitigations for our integrations.”

Bing Image Creator is rolling out to Bing Preview desktop and mobile users. It is also possible to test the system on bing.com/create in English. The tool is also available for Edge users (mobile and desktop) via the Image Creator icon in the sidebar. Microsoft specifies: “We will soon also integrate Image Creator into Edge from the new Bing button in chat mode in the preview version of Edge”.

Create images with your words

Microsoft is excited to announce that it is bringing Bing Image Creator, new AI-powered visual stories, and updated knowledge maps to the new version of Bing and Edge. Bing Image Creator is based on an enhanced version of OpenAI’s DALL∙E model and allows you to create an image by simply describing in your own words the image you want to see. You can now generate written and visual content from chat in one place.

Research has shown that the human brain processes visual information approximately 60,000 times faster than text, making visual tools an essential means of research, creation, and understanding. According to Bing data, images are one of the most searched categories, right after general web search. In the past, searches were limited to images that already existed on the internet. Today there are practically no limits to research and design.

For Bing Preview users, Bing Image Creator will be fully integrated into the Bing Chat experience and initially launched in creative mode. By entering an image description, providing additional context such as location or activity, and choosing an art style, Image Creator creates an image of your own imagination. It’s kind of a creative co-pilot. Just tap draw picture or create a picture as a prompt in chat to create a design for a newsletter to your friends or get inspiration for decorating your living room.

Bing Image Creator preview will also be available in Microsoft Edge, making it the first and only browser with an integrated AI-powered image generator. To use Bing Image Creator in Edge, simply click the Bing Image Creator icon in the sidebar to create your image, or bring it up from Bing Chat in Edge.

At Microsoft, teams are guided by the Responsible AI Principles and the Responsible AI Standard to help them develop and deploy AI systems responsibly. To mitigate potential abuse of Image Creator, Microsoft is working with partner OpenAI, which developed DALL∙E, to provide an experience that encourages responsible use of Image Creator. Microsoft has ensured that OpenAI protections as well as additional protections are built into Image Creator. For example, they have implemented controls to limit the generation of harmful or dangerous images. If the system detects that a potentially dangerous image could be generated by a prompt, it blocks the prompt and warns the user. Microsoft also makes it clear that Image Creator images are AI-generated and includes a modified Bing icon in the lower-left corner of each image to indicate the image was created with Image Creator. Microsoft continues to work closely with OpenAI to develop, test, and revise mitigations for their integrations.

Since the new Bing has been in preview, Microsoft has been testing it with people to get real feedback to learn and improve the experience. People used it in ways the company expected and in ways it didn’t. In this spirit of learning, and to continue to responsibly develop new features, Microsoft is introducing Bing Image Creator in a phased approach, testing it with a group of users before rolling it out to more users. Microsoft is initially including Image Creator in Bing Chat’s Creative mode only, and plans to make it available in Balanced and Accurate modes over time. Microsoft is also working to improve how Image Creator works in multi-round chats. Microsoft remains convinced that the best way to bring these technologies to market is to test them thoroughly and publicly where everyone has a say.

New AI-powered visual stories and knowledge maps

To meet the growing demand for more visual search experiences, Microsoft is also making Stories and Knowledge Cards 2.0 available to all Bing users. Stories provide a more engaging way to find and interact with content by including images and short videos. Also new to Bing users today is Knowledge Maps 2.0, an infographic-inspired, AI-powered experience that provides fun facts and important information at a glance. It has been updated to include interactive and dynamic content such as charts, graphs, timelines, visual stories and more. With these updates and more to come, the goal is to deliver more immersive experiences on Bing and Edge that make finding answers and exploring the web more engaging, useful, and fun.

Availability

Bing Chat, integrated with Bing Image Creator, has been rolling out to Bing Preview users on desktop and mobile since Tuesday 21st. For those who don’t like Bing’s new preview, the Image Creator preview experience is now available in English at bing.com/create for Bing users worldwide. Microsoft will add more languages ​​over time.

Bing Image Creator is also available in Microsoft Edge via the Image Creator icon in the sidebar for desktop and mobile devices for Edge users worldwide in English. Microsoft will also soon integrate Image Creator with Edge via the new Bing button in chat mode in Edge Preview.

Source: microsoft

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See also:

Microsoft announces the availability of new versions of Bing and Microsoft Edge based on an update of ChatGPT, the artificial intelligence that threatens the existence of Google



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Microsoft’s AI-powered chatbot, Bing, is now available without a waitlist, making it exclusive to Edge. Microsoft also encourages the use of its own browser

AI-powered search engine Bing is now available on mobile and Skype, and will soon support voice input, Microsoft says

The Observatory on Success in Higher Education (ORES) marked the official launch of its activities on March 22, 2023, in an event that brought together more than 300 actors and stakeholders from higher education and university environments, in person and virtually, in particular managers, professionals and researchers. The Deputy Minister of the Ministry of Higher Education, Paule De Blois, and the President of the University of Quebec, Alexandre Cloutier, addressed a few words to the audience on the occasion, recalling the importance of the mission of this new observatory, which aims to be a place of convergence to be where we share the most relevant and up-to-date knowledge that will help redefine our college and university environments to better serve the needs of our student population.

“In a society where the problems to be solved are becoming increasingly complex and require in-depth knowledge, we need to encourage our young people to study more than ever. I invite us to continue together this important work around accessibility, perseverance and academic success to support them in their success at the peak of their ambitions,” said the President of UQ, Alexandre Cloutier.

The creation of the observatory is part of the continuity of the Consortium d’animation sur la persistence et lasuccess en enseignement supérieur (CAPRES), an initiative started more than 20 years ago by a network team that could count on the University of Quebec as host institution. The quality of the work done since then and the niche expertise that has been developed have prompted the Quebec government to entrust them with this new mandate. UQ also responded by allowing the observatory to grow within the main office.

“ORES therefore wants to participate in the mission of higher education by serving the whole environment: to contribute to a world where everyone can learn, develop and realize themselves,” explained Julie Gagné, Director of the Observatory for Success in Higher Education.

This was followed by a round table where the panelists could share their own experiences, difficulties and successes during their study trip, as well as their ideas to improve our teaching environments, the comments of which are consistent with the latest thematic file prepared by the Observatory: Equity, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI): at the core of student success. Hosted by Françoise Guénette, we were able to hear Florence Khoriaty (Florence K), Adrian Monthony, Aly Ndiaye (Webster) and Anna-Corine St-Gelais Awashish.

Source:
Observatory for Academic Success, March 23, 2023

Dell announces the renewal of some of the flagship products in its line of professional PCs. Among the new features, the Latitude 7340 and 7440 Ultralight compete internally with the XPS 13, the benchmark on the market.

Dell Latitude 7340 Ultralight. Photo credit: Dell

Dell is today unveiling the latest products it showed us in December during a preview presentation it invited us to in New York. Three months after CES 2023, which announced a new repairable computing concept, screens and new gaming laptops, the company is now announcing its new business PCs.

While the new Precision workstations, new OptiPlex desktops, and new Latitude 5000-series laptops all have little appeal to the majority of Frandroid’s readership, one series in particular caught our attention.

Dell Latitude 7340 and 7440 Ultralight: better than an XPS 13?

Dell is effectively introducing an “ultralight” variant of the new generation of Latitude 7000-series laptops, which claim the title of “the world’s smallest and lightest premium 13.3- and 14-inch business laptops”. In some respects they supplant the famous XPS 13, which is often thought of as the Windows equivalent of Apple’s MacBook Air and as such is the benchmark for portable PCs.

The bulk of the Dell Latitude 7340 and 7440 Ultralight “starts” at 982g and 1.06kg, respectively, compared to 1.17kg for a Dell XPS 13 model 9315 and 1.24kg for a 13.6-inch MacBook Air M2 . For this, Dell combines a new mini-LED technology for the keyboard backlight (“up to almost 3 hours of autonomy gain”) with a 38 Wh battery, lighter, with which the two models claim an autonomy of 8 h 46 min and 7 h 45 min (MobileMark 18, keyboard backlight off). Otherwise, it offers a 57 Wh battery, with which the mass increases to 1.04 and 1.12 kg and the autonomy to 12 h 01 min and 12 h 13 min. The Dell XPS 13 and MacBook Air M2 have 51 and 52.6 Wh batteries, respectively, and promise a range of 12 and 18 hours, respectively.

The 13.3-inch model is 299mm wide, 212.90mm deep and 16.67mm thick at the front and 17.60mm at the rear. The 14-inch model measures 313 x 220.2 x 17.15-17.95mm. This makes them slightly larger than an XPS 13 (295.4 x 199.4 x 13.99 mm) or a MacBook Air (304.1 x 215 x 11.3 mm) and relatively thicker.

Intended primarily for businesses, they in turn offer a wider range of connectors, making them more versatile, without the need for adapters. In addition to two USB-C Thunderbolt 4 ports, which the two competing products are content with, they actually offer an HDMI 2.0 output and one or even two USB-A 5 Gb/s ports. It’s very handy while waiting for USB-C to be fully generalized. Only an Ethernet connection is missing.

In addition to Wi-Fi 6E (Intel AX211) and Bluetooth 5.3, these laptops offer a 5G modem option (Intel 5000) that allows you to stay connected to the Internet on the go without the slightest manipulation to enable connection sharing with her smartphone or to connect to a guest WiFi network. Unfortunately, this possibility is too often reserved for ranges intended for companies.

These laptops also feature a 13th Gen Intel Core U-series processor (no AMD configuration), up to 32GB LPDDR5 4800MHz RAM (non-removable), up to 2TB M.2 NVMe SSD, a 5- Megapixel Windows Hello compatible webcam, 2 noise-cancelling microphones and 4 speakers. They don’t ignore the 3.5mm plug. Their screens, in turn, adopt the 16:10 format, with a standard 1920 x 1200 pixel IPS panel “Full HD+”, optional touch on the 7340 or Touch and “QHD+” with 2560 x 1600 pixels on the 7440.

The price and launch date of the Dell Latitude 7340 and 7440 Ultralight are not disclosed.

Dell Latitude 7340, 7440 and 7640 Aluminum

Dell is also renewing the traditional Latitude 7000s. With an aluminum body, the 13.3- and 14-inch Latitude 7340 and 7440 weigh 1.156 and 1.33 kg, respectively. The manufacturer uses the refresh to add a 1.835 kg 16-inch variant limited to a Full HD+ resolution of 1920 x 1200 pixels.

These aluminum versions are otherwise identical to the magnesium versions, except they offer less high-end configurations with less bright screens, Full HD webcams, or 4G modems.

The Dell Latitude 7340, 7440 and 7640 in aluminum are available immediately from 1529, 1509 and 1599 euros without VAT.

Dell Latitude 9440: The XPS 13 for CEOs

Finally, Dell launches the Latitude 9440, which succeeds the 9340 and can be presented as the corporate counterpart to the XPS 13 Plus. It inherits the monolithic design and edge-to-edge design of its keyboard, but doesn’t inherit the controversial array of capacitive touch function keys.

It is, however, with its 14-inch QHD+ touchscreen and 2-in-1 design, better camera, microphones and speakers, dedicated function keys for Microsoft Teams and Zoom built into its haptic touchpad, or even the 5G one Possibility of step higher positioned.

Compared to its predecessor, the Latitude 9340, it further increases the screen-to-body ratio, so it is a bit more compact with the same screen size and goes from the 12th to the 13th generation of the Intel Core processor. And compared to its predecessor, as well as the aforementioned Latitude 7X40s, it houses a second fan that allows its processor to draw up to 20W.

The Dell Latitude 9440 will go on sale on March 28 for an undisclosed price.

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During a seminar organized by the Kremlin for domestic officials ahead of the upcoming Russian presidential election, Sergei Kiriyenko, deputy director of the presidential administration, urged officials to swap their phones for iPhone owners, according to Kommersant daily, quoted by Portal agency.

“The iPhone is over: we either throw it away or we give it to the kids,” one of the managers explained during the meeting.

The Russian business newspaper specifies that the Kremlin bases it on security considerations because these devices are more susceptible to hacking and espionage by Western specialists than other smartphones. This official measure therefore applies to all officials in the country involved in the preparations for the 2024 Russian presidential election.

The members of the presidential administration responsible for domestic politics in Russia have less than two weeks to part with their iPhone. Officials must switch phones before April 1 in favor of a Chinese or Russian Android smartphone.

The Kremlin could provide other devices with a different operating system to replace iPhones. In order to be completely independent, you should know that Russia has decided to create its own smartphone operating system called Aurora. The goal of this operating system “Made in Russia” is to create state technological sovereignty through a secure mobile environment.

The issue of communications security has become a real priority in the world of Russian political power, so it is very important to pay attention to the equipment used, especially if it is from the United States.

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We’re committing $30 million to building Mozilla.ai: a startup and community building a trusted, independent, and open-source AI ecosystem.

We’re only in the third month of 2023 and it’s already clear that one of the biggest stories of the year is AI. AI has captured public attention like Netscape in 1994 and the iPhone in 2007.

New tools like Stable Diffusion and the recently released GPT-4 are changing not only how we think about the Internet, but also about communication, creativity and society as a whole. At the same time, relatively old AI tools, like the recommendation engines that power YouTube, TikTok, and other social apps, are becoming even more powerful and continue to impact billions of lives.

This new wave of AI has generated excitement, but also a lot of concern. We not only ask ourselves what is possible and how people can benefit from it. We also wonder what could go wrong and how to fix it. Two decades of social media, smartphones and their consequences have made us suspicious.

Mozilla has been asking these questions about AI for a while – to outline a vision for trustworthy AI, mobilize our community to document what’s broken, and invest in startups trying to build more responsible AI.

We have learned that this new AI wave (like the previous one) has tremendous potential to enrich people’s lives. But that’s only possible if we design technology very differently – if we put human agency and user interests at the center and if we prioritize transparency and accountability. The AI ​​tipping point we are currently at presents a real opportunity to develop technology with different values, new incentives and a better ownership model.

The good news: we’ve met thousands of founders, engineers, scientists, designers, artists, and activists who are taking this approach to AI. Smart, dedicated people are building open-source AI technologies, testing new audit approaches, and figuring out how to embed “trust” in real-world AI.

The bad news: The big tech and cloud computing companies that have the most power and influence aren’t doing the same thing. Meanwhile, these companies continue to tighten their grip on the market.

In short, some people start things differently, but the most important work (and investment) is still done the same way. We want to change that.

That’s why today we’re announcing Mozilla.ai: a startup – and community – that will build an independent, trusted, open-source AI ecosystem. Mozilla will make an initial investment of $30 million in the company.

Mozilla.ai’s vision is to make it easier to build reliable AI products. We will build things and hire/work with people who share our vision: AI is about agency, accountability, transparency and openness. Mozilla.ai will be a space outside of big tech and academia to bring together like-minded founders, developers, scientists, product managers and developers. We believe that this group of people, working together, can turn the tide and create an independent, decentralized and trusted AI ecosystem – a true counterbalance to the status quo.

The original goal of Mozilla.ai? Tools that make generative AI safer and more transparent. And human-centric recommendation systems that don’t misinform or harm our well-being. We’ll be talking more about this – and what we’re building – in the coming months.

This new company will be led by Managing Director Moez Draief. Moez has spent more than a decade working on the practical applications of cutting-edge AI as an academic at Imperial College and LSE, and as a senior scientist in industry. Karim Lakhani from Harvard, Navrina Singh from Credo and I will form the first board of Mozilla.ai. Throughout the year we will announce more initiatives, partners and events where people can get involved.

As we celebrated Water Day yesterday, UNESCO and UN-Water are warning of an impending global water crisis. Therefore, it seemed interesting to us to present you in a little more detail the Swot satellite, one of whose mission is to better understand the water cycle and its impact on climate by focusing on oceanography, hydrology and the coast that never existed did. Commentary by Annick Sylvestre-Baron, Cnes manager of the Swot program and Philippe Maisongrandre, Cnes manager of the Continental Surfaces program.

Launched in December 2022 on board a SpaceX Falcon 9 launch vehicle, the Swot satellite will revolutionize hydrology by carrying an altimeter at an altitude of 891 kilometers, capable of monitoring our planet’s rivers and lakes. Swot will be the first mission to almost completely inventory and monitor the evolution of water resources on the Earth’s surface, improving the understanding of the freshwater cycle and its impact on climate. While Unesco and UN-Water warn of an impending global water crisis for some 3 billion people on earth, this mission is much more necessary and interesting than it seems.

Annick Sylvestre-Baron, Cnes manager of the Swot program, explains to us all the importance of this mission, which will “revolutionize our knowledge of the water cycle on the planet” and why there will be “a before and an after swot”. By focusing on oceanography, continental and coastal hydrology, Swot aims to “improve our knowledge of the hydrological cycle, a cycle intimately linked to climate and its changes.” In fact, it is “the first altimetric imaging mission to observe fresh and salt water levels on the planet” to “nearly completely monitor water supplies in lakes, reservoirs and even wetlands”.

4,000 km2 of valuable wetlands have disappeared in 20 years

Understanding the behavior of the continental water cycle

Thus, Swot will complete the range of observations by accurately measuring new parameters essential for monitoring resources, such as “heights, dips that allow the flow of the main rivers to be assessed, a fundamental piece of data that is currently lacking” , says Annick Sylvestre-Baron. From its orbit, Swot will access all water surfaces, including hard-to-reach areas such as the many lakes in Canada or Siberia, which make up a significant portion of the Earth’s freshwater volume, this or blue, which will become more and more sought after.

To understand Swot’s keen interest, Philippe Maisongrandre, Cnes manager of the Continental Surfaces program, reminds us that “Fresh water available in the liquid state accounts for less than 1% of all water on Earth. Therefore, it is important to be able to estimate the availability of this water on the continents and its temporal and spatial development.” However, current altimetric observations “do not cover all continents as regularly”. Swot will correct this bias.

Why is the Swot satellite a revolution?

Combined with other spatial data (optical, thermal, passive microwave, gravimetric, etc.), swot data will allow us to “better understand and know the water cycle on a global scale, as it is currently poorly understood”. You should know that if the total amount of water on Earth has been unchanged and constant for millions of years, “the distribution between the oceans, continental surfaces, and the atmosphere is in constant flux.”

Surprisingly, there is enough water on earth

In absolute terms, “there is enough fresh water on earth, but there is a problem of balancing the needs of the population with the spatio-temporal distribution of the resource”. Certain regions on the continents are affected by the lack of rain, the massive drying out of the soil and the sinking of the groundwater level. In other regions, the rain episodes are intensifying due to the increase in temperature, which increases the precipitating power of the clouds, leading to more frequent floods. For example, in early 2023, some French regions have just experienced consecutive weeks without rain. “Climate change amplifies these phenomena by increasing their frequency and intensity.” Swot will allow to better diagnose and better understand these changes in order to anticipate and better manage them.

“There is enough fresh water on earth, but there is a problem of balancing the needs of the population with the spatio-temporal distribution of the resource”

Swot is therefore timely in the context of population growth and climate change. Its data will help “facilitate water management decisions and will also provide new information about its global cycle.” In fact, measuring the flow of rivers and predicting the water level has a strong application potential in many fields such as “management of drinking water resources, irrigation of crops, river navigation, forecasting of floods and floods, or production of hydroelectric power and nuclear energy (thermoregulated by river water)” , Philippe Maisongrandre would like to tell us.

As a result of major technological innovations, Swot data will therefore not only be of interest to the scientific community. Thanks to the Aval program from which Swot benefited, the data from this satellite will be useful for many concrete applications in everyday life.

Good to know

If you want to know more about the Swot mission, we interviewed Sophie Coutin-Faye, head of altimetry department at Cnes, and Nicolas Picot, Swot downstream project manager, who explain to us why this is an unprecedented, spectacular and scientific one revolution is. We also interviewed Christophe Duplay, Swot program manager for Thales Alenia Space, who built the satellite.

Are you developing on GitHub? You can continue to use GitHub, but use this tool to quickly and easily automatically sync your GitHub versions to SourceForge, giving your projects one location and making your project available to nearly 30 million SourceForge users monthly. It takes less than a minute.

Microsoft’s GitHub unit created one of the first mass-deployed programs using OpenAI’s language generation tools: an application called Copilot that helps software developers write computer code. Today, GitHub is adding a chat and voice feature that programmers can use to ask how specific coding tasks should be performed. Excerpt from a report:
The new release announced Wednesday is called Copilot X. Thomas Dohmke, managing director of GitHub, said he showed one of his kids how to code a snake game in Python. The chat window can provide explanations about the role of code segments, create ways to test code, and offer fixes for bugs. Developers can also provide instructions or ask questions using their voice.

GitHub previewed Copilot in 2021 and gave it wide distribution last year. The original product included a completion tool that suggested code snippets as the developer typed. It attracted hundreds of thousands of developers in November, and its product name has become an acronym for Microsoft’s strategy of using such assistive technologies in a wide range of its products, from office software to security programs. With OpenAI’s ChatGPT chatbot making a name for itself in popular culture, companies are trying to follow Microsoft by incorporating the research lab’s tools into their products and business strategies. At the same time, competitors like Google (Alphabet) are launching competing chatbots.

GitHub Copilot is evolving to provide chat and voice interfaces, support pull requests, answer questions about documents, and adopt OpenAI’s GPT-4 for a more personalized experience for developers.

Thomas Dohmke says:

Our mission at GitHub has always been to innovate and give developers everything they need to be happier and more productive in a software-driven world. When we started experimenting with large language models a few years ago, it quickly became clear that generative AI is the future of software development. We’ve partnered with OpenAI to create GitHub Copilot, the world’s first generative AI development tool built using OpenAI’s Codex model, a descendant of GPT-3.

GitHub Copilot ushered in a new era in software development as an AI-powered programmer that keeps developers flowing with autocompletion of comments and code. Less than two years after its launch, GitHub Copilot is already writing 46% of the code, helping developers code up to 55% faster.

But AI-powered autocomplete is just the beginning. Our GitHub Next R&D team worked to go beyond the editor and evolve GitHub Copilot into an easily accessible AI assistant throughout the development cycle. This is GitHub Copilot X, our vision for the future of AI-powered software development. Not only are we adopting OpenAI’s new GPT-4 model, we’re introducing chat and voice to Copilot, and we’re making Copilot fetch requests, the command line, and documentation to answer questions about your projects.

With AI available at every stage, we can fundamentally redefine developer productivity. We reduce repetitive and manual tasks and facilitate complex work throughout the developer lifecycle. In this way, we enable every developer to focus all their creativity on what matters most: developing tomorrow’s innovation and accelerating human progress today.

A new development experience powered by AI

A ChatGPT-like experience in your editor with GitHub Copilot Chat: The editor has a chat interface focused on development scenarios and natively integrates with VS Code and Visual Studio. This interface does much more than just suggest code. GitHub Copilot Chat isn’t just a chat window. It recognizes developer-entered code, displays error messages, and is deeply integrated into the IDE. A developer can get detailed analysis and explanations of what blocks of code are supposed to do, generate unit tests, and even get suggested fixes.

GitHub Copilot Chat builds on OpenAI and Microsoft’s work with ChatGPT and the new Bing. It will also join the previously introduced extension of voice-to-code AI technology, now called GitHub Copilot Voice, which allows developers to give natural language instructions orally.

Co-pilot for pull requests : You can now subscribe to a technical preview of the first AI-generated descriptions for pull requests on GitHub. This new capability is based on OpenAI’s new GPT-4 model and adds support for AI-powered tags in pull request descriptions via a GitHub application that organization admins and individual vault owners can install. These tags are automatically populated by GitHub Copilot based on the changed code. Developers can then review or change the proposed description.

This is just the first step in rethinking how download requests work on GitHub. New functionalities are tested internally. GitHub Copilot automatically suggests sentences and paragraphs when developers create pull requests by dynamically incorporating information about code changes.

Additionally, a new feature is in the works: GitHub Copilot will automatically notify developers when they’re missing tests for a pull request and suggest potential tests that can be edited, accepted, or rejected based on the developer’s needs.

This complements efforts with GitHub Copilot Chat, where developers can ask GitHub Copilot to generate tests directly from their publisher—so if a developer doesn’t have sufficient test coverage, GitHub Copilot will notify them as soon as they submit a pull request. It also helps project managers define testing guidelines and supports developers in complying with those guidelines.

Get AI-generated answers on documentation : GitHub Copilot for Docs is an experimental tool that uses a chat interface to give users AI-generated answers to documentation questions, including questions developers have about the languages, frameworks, and technologies they use. For starters, the documentation for React is Azure Docs and MDN, making it easy to learn and grow quickly with developers and users of these projects.

This functionality also applies to repositories and internal documentation of each organization. Thus, any developer can ask questions about the documentation, idiomatic code or internal software of his organization via a ChatGPT-like interface and get answers immediately.

Recognizing that the benefits of a conversational interface are immense, GitHub is working on a semantic understanding of GitHub across public and private knowledge bases to better personalize GitHub Copilot answers for organizations, teams, companies, and individual developers based on their code and documentation.

In the future, new ways will be explored to index resources beyond documentation, such as: B. Issues, Enhancement Requests, Discussions, and Wikis to give developers everything they need to answer their technical questions.

Powered by the new OpenAI GPT-4 model

Work on redesigning pull requests and documentation is powered by OpenAI’s new GPT-4 AI model.

Although this model has only just been published, there are already significant advances in reasoning and code generation. With GPT-4, the state of AI is beginning to catch up with the ambition to create an AI-enabled programmer to assist with any development task at any stage of the developer’s experience.

Additionally, it helps GitHub Copilot better understand a developer’s code base to offer more personalized suggestions in PRs and better documentation summaries.

Co-driver for Command Line Interface (CLI)

After the editor and the pull request, the terminal is where developers spend most of their time. But even the most experienced developer has to dig through many pages to remember the exact syntax of many commands. That’s why we launch GitHub Copilot CLI. It can create commands and loops and set obscure search flags to fulfill your request.

Source: GitHub

And you ?

What do you think of GitHub Copilot X?

Do you think an AI-powered program will greatly improve the developer experience?

Are you planning to use this type of tool?

See also:

Microsoft 365 Copilot: The omniscient version of Clippy boosts AI, automates data analysis in Excel, writes documents in Word based on other files, and more

AI-supported programming assistants are driving a rethink in computer science education, researchers say

Copilot, GitHub’s commercial AI tool, faces criticism from the open source software community,
For his blind reproduction of blocks of code