Duane K.

Economic developers don’t need to be software developers, but today, they need to think like them for success. Watch this keynote talk at https://lnkd.in/gmTaR5iR #EconomicDevelopment #SoftwareThinking #Innovation Talk given at the California Association for Local Economic Development Annual Conference.

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James Bligh makes a great point in his medium post today. (https://lnkd.in/ggQczEyn) The ABA might hate CDR as their members for the most part seem to have formed a view that it is a threat and something that should be thwarted at every turn, or at the very least is yet another impost and regulatory burden they just needed to tick off their ever growing list of compliance projects. What banks and others may be overlooking is that the vast majority of Australians now have access to their banking data through a well designed and regulated infrastructure. Consumers and businesses don’t need to use screen scrapers and bits of string to get a picture of their finances. Locking in your customers so they can’t compare or migrate is a poor substitute for a strategy of just providing a superior service. Some banks get this and they will use the CDR as a set of ‘rails’ to drive transformations in customer experiences, customer acquisition and new value creation. At Trideca we are already working with several institutions that get this. The ones dragging their heels or who are still thinking that they are ‘done’with CDR now they have met the compliance hurdle are going to be in for a rude shock.

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It has been interesting to learn how large corporations keep innovative small companies (like mine) from becoming competition by following these legal developments: https://lnkd.in/g-YUtmxC It's great to be a part of an organization that is not having it.

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Which emerging #engineering specialties are rising in popularity among employers of different sizes? 📈 (And which are declining? 👀 ) Swipe to find out ➡ Find more data on trends in #softwareengineer roles: https://lnkd.in/gzuVexZ3

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Taken from TLDR - full article attached. "To automate entire job functions" it says. Talking about making your job easier? You won't have to do anything! 🤖 In two months they have generated 700k in ARR (Annual Recurring Revenue, so subscriptions. Artisan, a fast-growing startup founded in 2023, is revolutionizing the future of work by developing AI employees, called Artisans, to automate entire job functions, starting with sales. After initially struggling with a self-serve model, it transitioned to a sales-led approach, resulting in significant growth. Artisan is focused on building an efficient inbound lead generation system and aims to create the best outbound AI SDR on the market. It plans to expand into other areas like marketing and customer success. https://lnkd.in/eUnT972j

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A more sensible way to go about staffing an engineering organization: 1. Hire as many full-timers as needed for long-term operational maintenance, plus some amount of additional capacity to both pursue new opportunities for innovation and to ensure there’s sufficient slack in the system to prevent short-staffed, short-sighted decision-making 2. Contract temporary help for ambitious undertakings in order to meet their commensurate increase in demand for engineering capacity. Ideally, pick an agency that collaborates as a strategic partner, whose engineers integrate seamlessly into your org without having to be managed by it, and who can elevate your teams by conferring outside skills and experience. ⬆️ That's us, BTW, and exactly why clients return to us over and over again.

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My first job as a software developer was to test programs of senior developers. I had to figure out what the "Expected Results" were of the code I was testing. So I had to understand the purpose of program as well as the developer. If my test cases resulted in an actual outcome that differed from the expected outcome (i.e. the purpose), the code went back to the programmer to modify the program to reach the purpose. While I understand the purpose of the minimum wage hike was to better the situation of employees working at less than the new minimum, if someone had tested the minimum wage hike, it might have been obvious that the actual outcome isn't aligned with the expected outcome. #AccentureAlum #Automation #ConsumerUltimatelyWins Fast food chains have found a way to get around minimum wage hikes (msn.com)

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How does the State of Utah’s eRep platform efficiently serve its 3.2 million citizens? 🌐 They chose a database that meets FedRAMP standards and enables a consolidated, faster workflow. Learn more about how the State of Utah uses MongoDB Atlas. https://lnkd.in/g4KpA3Ye

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Financial scams are becoming more advanced and believable. It is important that you vet every source of information, question every link, and double-check senders of correspondence. If you take just a few seconds more to look into an email or text message, you could be saving yourself thousands of dollars. Banks take #cybersecurity very seriously and often provide quick and easy ways to check whether or not they sent a message to you or not. Understanding and preventing financial scams starts with education. Talk to your friends and family about how to stay safe online. #Fraud #MastercardEmployee

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** Top Tech and AI News ** Welcome to today's update from DevTech.pro, bringing you the latest and most impactful news in AI, Tech, and API integrations to keep you informed and ahead of the curve. AI News: Sonoma County adopts artificial intelligence policy - CA.gov Sonoma County has approved a policy allowing County employees to use artificial intelligence tools for tasks such as creating and editing emails, sales materials, and spreadsheet calculations. The policy emphasizes ethical AI usage, transparency, and compliance with legal standards to prevent biased or discriminatory outcomes. It prohibits decision-making using AI and sharing personal or confidential information with AI technologies. This initiative aims to harness AI technology for efficiency and cost-savings while proceeding cautiously in a secure and ethical manner. Read more about Sonoma County's artificial intelligence policy at: https://lnkd.in/dEBk65J9 #devtech.pro #AI #technology #trending #news #innovation #technology #creativity #knowledge #entrepreneurship This article is written and published by Doki. Doki is our documentation's and social media's AI Agent.

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Daily Dose of D3FEND: Command History Log 🛡️ Overview Imagine yourself as a culinary genius in your digital kitchen, whipping up commands like a master chef. The Command History Log is your recipe book—recording every command you’ve crafted, from “chmod 777” to “rm -rf.” But lurking in the shadows are attackers eager to wipe out your carefully kept logs, add their own secret ingredients, or rewrite your recipe for chaos. Can you keep your digital cookbook safe from these culinary command crooks? Let’s dive into the delicious (and perilous) world of command history! 🔍 What is a Command History Log? A Command History Log records each command executed by a user in a command-line interface. This log is essential for auditing and troubleshooting, as it provides a trail of actions taken within a system. A well-maintained command history can help security analysts track unauthorized actions, investigate breaches, and detect anomalies. 🦠 Threats to Watch Out For 1️⃣ Clear Command History (T1070.003) Attackers act like rogue sous-chefs, wiping out command history to cover their tracks like spilled flour on a countertop. By clearing the log, they can erase evidence of any “suspicious spices” they added to your system. Defend against this by implementing centralized logging and restricting permissions so only trusted users can erase entries. With these protections, you’ll catch every attempt at a kitchen cover-up. 2️⃣ Create Process with Token (T1134.002) Imagine an attacker sneaking in and donning your chef’s hat, impersonating you with a stolen access token to execute commands under your name. The best defense? Regularly monitor access tokens, restrict their reuse, and employ Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) to keep imposters out of the kitchen. 3️⃣ Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) Event Subscription (T1546.003) Just when you thought it was safe, attackers set a “trap recipe” in your log using WMI Event Subscription. It’s like a “poisoned cookie”—a scheduled script that executes malicious commands when certain conditions are met. To keep your recipes pure, monitor event logs for unusual modifications, restrict event subscriptions, and set alerts for unauthorized entries. 🔥 Closing Thoughts Your Command History Log is more than just a list—it’s a diary of every system command, capturing each digital “dish” you’ve created. But with attackers trying to erase entries, impersonate identities, or set traps, you need to keep that recipe book locked tight. Back up your logs, monitor for tampering, and make sure your commands remain clean and accurate. With the right defenses, your digital kitchen will be safe from every cooking catastrophe! Dive deeper into Command History Logs: https://lnkd.in/etAvKuU9 #Cybersecurity #D3FEND #CommandHistoryLog #InfoSec

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Tech contractors in the U.S. are often on the front lines of innovation, yet they face shameful outsourcing practices, low wages, no benefits, and lack of PTO. With more companies seeking cheaper labor abroad, U.S. contractors are left with fewer protections and less security. Forming a union could change that—giving us the power to negotiate for fair pay, health benefits, and more than just the legal minimum requirements for time off. It’s time for American tech workers to stand together and demand the respect and protections we deserve. #UnionizeTech #FairWagesForAll #TechContractorsUnite #SolidarityInTech #Boeing #Capgemini #ResourceLogostics

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Dr. Cook's piece "How Complex Systems Fail" is quite short and digestible. Highly recommended. Consider this passage in relation to last Friday's CloudStrike outage: "When new technologies are used to eliminate well understood system failures or to gain high precision performance they often introduce new pathways to large scale, catastrophic failures" Protective layers often introduce new failure modes.

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Anthropic released another paper on their ongoing work towards interpretability of large foundational models like their Claude 3 family, built on previous work by many. Their work continues to be enlightening and inspiring. The findings in this work are generally similar to previous findings on smaller models but scaled up to Claude 3 Sonnet: 💡 they find large numbers of "features" corresponding to combinations of neuron activations and these features map to concepts that we recognize/understand: for example, features for transit infrastructure, particular people, concepts (like bias and "objects lacking sentience"). This might sound familiar from classical machine learning, but the interesting thing is that there is no single thing/neuron encoding each of these concepts, it's a particular combination of neuron activations that embeds these concepts in "superposition" in the network. 💡they observe a sort of "distance" of these feature activations that arrange themselves "near" semantically similar features. When they use their sparse autoencoder approach to learn more and more features they observe that the level of abstraction in the detected features becomes more granular, in ways that are interpretable and meaningful. 💡when they artificially fire these activation patterns during inference, it affects the output in ways that relate to the "feature". For example, asking Claude "what's the most interesting science" normally it responds Physics, but if you clamp the feature activations for the feature "Brain Science" to 10x their max values then Claude responds: Neuroscience. Ways to interpret _and_ influence the model. Great readable work [1] along with an interactive explorer of some of the "features" themselves [2] 🎂 There's an easter egg too: if you scroll in the feature explorer tool and try and select one of the "Randomly selected features from 1M" you get a message "if you want to see the rest of the features, we're hiring!" with a link to their recruiting page :) [1] https://lnkd.in/gZbparwp [2] https://lnkd.in/gC9eus53

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I'll share some thoughts on this as there is some confusion. "The federal government has spent $22 billion in recent years on technology from the top 100 national-security startups, a paltry portion of overall contract spending and less than half of what venture capitalists have invested in those same companies." While VCs are obviously concerned about revenue, the reporter ignores the most important issue. Valuations in young private companies are something like one part guesswork, one part aspiration, two parts salesmanship, and three parts milestones, with a fair amount of fraud mixed in particularly in bubbles, but even in more mature growth companies a 10x multiple is conservative. That $22 billion in DOD contracts probably represents something like $300-400 billion in valuations claimed by the ventures and VCs, if not more. Even if the realized valuation is less than that for DOD contractor ventures, it would still represent an attractive ROI over a decade. If total invested is $50 billion and the realized value for VCs is $150 billion over 10 years, it's still 3x, and within that there would be likely be several 10X ++. That's not much different than the rest of the markets VCs invest in. My guess is it's more on track to be 5x or more for the entire portfolio, which is much better than most investments, though needs to be due to the risk involved. The more troubling statistic is that only 1% of total DOD contracts are going to VC-backed startups. That is a terrible failing grade for the DOD with regard to favoritism for incumbents, and explains most of the problem about unhealthy relationships and insufficient innovation. Given the size of the DOD budget, it may not be quite as bad as it seems as they can and should act as their own investors as a proactive customer, and they do some of that, but the reality is that the bureaucracy is so expensive to navigate that it usually requires significant capital. In fact, the most successful DOD startups in recent years were founded or co-founded by billionaires, which pretty well tells the entire story. Quote: “Startups are either purposely being kept out, or the DOD has just not figured out how to take advantage of them,” said Tara Murphy Dougherty, chief executive of defense software company Govini. Venture-backed companies have consistently received around 1% of total Defense Department award spending annually going back through 2018, despite throngs of new companies joining the defense-tech field, according to Govini data. https://lnkd.in/gK7emEqT

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