Daily Reading List – December 9, 2024 (#456)

It’s December, but there seems to be no year-end slowdown in tech. Sheesh, there’s a lot going on! Scan through a super-sized reading list below.

[blog] 15 Times to use AI, and 5 Not to. Wrestling with where to apply AI in your org, and where to discourage it? This was a good post with some pragmatic and thoughtful analysis.

[blog] Meet Willow, our state-of-the-art quantum chip. I don’t understand all of this, but it’s hard not to be wow-ed by the rate of innovation right now. And check out the performance benchmark at the bottom of this post. Learn more about our Quantum AI lab.

[blog] Open Policy Agent in Skipper Ingress. This engineering team uses OPA to deliver authorization as a service in Kubernetes. I’m not sure I’ve seen this exact use case before.

[blog] Using PromQL in Google Cloud. It’s understandable that most platforms have a distinct dialect that you have to adapt to. But I like when platforms embrace open, portable APIs like we do here.

[article] Meta unveils a new, more efficient Llama model. Last week was an important one for open models.

[article] Evolving Your Architecture: Essential Steps and Tools for Modernization. Great talk here. Read the transcript or watch the recording to learn about how to plan, execute, and measure an architectural modernization effort.

[blog] Announcing the launch of Vanir: Open-source Security Patch Validation. This looks like a useful project for Android devs who care about security.

[blog] Registration is open for Google Cloud Next 2025. I hope you’ll join me next April at this event. We’re building a terrific program right now.

[blog] Gain Insights into AI Applications with Distributed Tracing on Google Cloud. AI app or not, it’s a good idea to capture tracing data on important apps.

[blog] Open Preference Dataset for Text-to-Image Generation by the 🤗 Community. Looking for a wide range of text-to-image prompts to use when testing models? This new Hugging Face data set looks great.

[blog] Welcome Ron Miller, our new Operating Partner and Head of Editorial, FastForward Launch Day. Here’s a new newsletter to consider subscribing to. Ron’s a seasoned tech journalist, and this effort to help IT leaders with tech strategy is a useful one.

[blog] Test like a developer, develop like a tester. Nice post. Here’s a deeper look at how each of these key roles can better represent the other.

[docs] Infrastructure for a RAG-capable generative AI application using Vertex AI and Vector Search. Whether you’re using Google Cloud or not, you’ll find this architecture guide helpful. It’s for those building out scalable, secure infrastructure for retrieval augmented generation in AI apps.

[blog] Cloud Wars CEO of the Year Is Google Cloud’s Thomas Kurian. There were many examples of great tech leadership in 2024. I see Thomas firsthand, so this seems well deserved.

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