Ben Walton

What’s ahead for 2024? Elections in some of the most influential countries in the world including the US, India, Venezuela, Russia, South Africa, Taiwan, China and the UK. And yet we have zero handle on the use of generative AI, by legitimate or illegitimate players, in manipulating the electorates in how they will vote. That’s terrifying. In a small effort to equip myself with some strategies and frameworks for how to think through the use of AI in digital product design I took this course. It’s only a start but it’s an important one. Center for Humane Technology (CHT) remind us that it is possible, and economically viable, to develop products that help humanity rather just driving engagement. To anyone who is applying AI to products that will be out in our world, I recommend looking into the work of Tristan Harris, Randima Fernando and colleagues at CHT. So, that’s my hot take for the new calendar year. What’s shaping your thinking around AI?

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Amazon SES feedback events can now be sent to EventBridge 🌟 🚀 This is such a cool and convenient feature and was on the AWS wishlist for a long time 👏 If you worked with SES, you know the struggle filtering from the dozen or so feedback events you can receive for every email sent to Firehose or SNS. The EventBridge option now makes it easy to have filters for the different types of events and perform downstream analytics and suppression lists. https://lnkd.in/eineVREt #AWS #serverless #SES #email #EventBridge #eventdriven

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Check out this AWS blog about how Rufus build an LLM application at scale with high scalability, availability, throughput and low latency. It’s a combination of great technologies in infrastructure, software and hardware. We use AWS ECS as deployment and serving infrastructure, NVIDIA #Triton as server layer, #vLLM as inference engine, #Neuron SDK as inference backend, and #Trainium #Inferentia chips for compute developed by #Annapurnalabs. This is made possible by the Rufus team members and our great Amazon partners from AWS and #Annapurnalabs.

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/*********Mentorship**************/ I was watching today Andy Jassy's video (https://lnkd.in/gRV2mGPr) on career advice. He shared one of the very important thing on Mentor's. Mentor's overall objective is too help you grow. They let you do things which you even think you can not do and then give support if needed. They give honest feedback on areas of growth.

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🚀 Ever felt overwhelmed by the sheer number of tech tools out there? 😅 You’re not alone! I have been getting a lot of questions about how I approach learning new technologies, and I realized it’s time to share my insights! ✍️ In my latest article, I outlined my personal strategies for mastering new tech tools efficiently. 💡 https://lnkd.in/dxDTwA-C Whether you are a seasoned developer or just starting out, these tips can help streamline your learning process and boost your productivity. 📈Curious about my journey? 🌟 Check it out and let’s discuss how you tackle learning in this fast-paced tech world! 🤔💬 #Learning #TechTools #DeveloperJourney 

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My manager recently shared this gem of a blog post about the dance between Engineering Management and Software Engineering roles (turns out it's quite a popular read!). https://lnkd.in/d2fE-vNh While it's seven years old now, the insights are timeless and have been incredibly valuable both for my own career journey and in supporting others. 🌱 For those interested in diving deeper, Charity just recorded a comprehensive talk that adds some fantastic context to the original post: https://lnkd.in/d9xSfhqT Key takeaways that really resonated with me: 💡 🔄 The best technical leaders often swing between both roles - like a pendulum 👉 "Management is not a promotion, management is a change of profession" 🧠 Moving to EM? Be ready to miss that dopamine hit from solving technical problems! ⚡ The hybrid manager + tech lead role is trickier than it seems - your engineering context naturally fades over time Would love to hear your thoughts on this! Have you experienced the engineering-management pendulum in your career? #SoftwareEngineering #Leadership #Engineering #EngineeringManagement

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Today was, personally, the culmination of over 10 years of waiting to attend #GoogleIO. There is no other event which brings the engineering workforce across the world together this way, and for me it was nothing less than a fan moment to be invited to Shoreline, and be a part of and interact with the pool of talent from Founders, CxOs, Engineers and all other leaders from startups to large scale organizations across all the verticals. My overall thoughts on the 2-day Google I/O: 1. AI dominated every announcement, from Search to #Android, Photos, YouTube, the web, and developer tools. Google’s hold over the mobile and web space makes this significant. 2. Gemini was the star of the show, especially the nano, flash variants and the 1.5 Pro with its increased 2M context window token limit—a big deal. The in-person demos of offline, on-device Gemma model inference using MediaPipe on Android were impressive and displayed a faster performance than I expected. On-device AI models are getting better and faster, but the openness of this ecosystem on Android remains to be seen. 3. Project Astra hints at a universal assistant future, as Demis Hassabis said. But a day prior to the Google IO, OpenAI stole some thunder with multimodal GPT-4o and its Apple partnership. My personal ick is—asking random things to your phone with your camera pointing things in public feels awkward haha, but maybe that’s just the introvert in me. 4. The keynote was really nice but at point felt like a series of Gemini's summarization demos. I wanted more on Android, which was largely missing. Innovation in Android seems to have plateaued for a while. 5. My first visit to the Bay Area was memorable. Google 's beautiful campus deserves a mention! The event was well-organized, with 1:1s with Googlers (what a brilliant idea) and open lunch tables fostering great discussions. 6. OpenAI is giving Google serious competition in innovation. OpenAI's models still produce higher-quality outputs, and many organizations, including Esper, prefer their API-accessed models for the quality and simplicity. Google, however, has a strong hold on the mobile and web ecosystems, allowing it more time to catch up. Google's deep AI integration across its product line demonstrates its capability to embed AI into daily life, something OpenAI can't match alone, as evidenced by its partnership with Apple. Final thoughts: Google I/O was everything that I expected it to be, and more. The live stream version really does not do justice in describing on how awesome things are in person. If you get a chance to go, please do! Definitely looking forward to be back next year!

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We just published a new interactive roadmap for learning Terraform. Learning resources and details are to be added shortly. Check it out https://lnkd.in/dtZfGWU7

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How good are Trainium and Inference clusters for online serving of production traffic? Check this blog from Trishul Chilimbi on how Rufus responses are powered with high throughput and resiliency. #Trainium #Neuron #AWS Amazon Web Services (AWS)

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The savings of Valkey based ElastiCache are too good to ignore. Considering that every single AWS customer has a cache of some sort, the discount will drive adoption and migration.

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Fun little thing I discovered. Using CLI to Change npm package.json "type" to "module" or "commonjs" https://lnkd.in/esT4Js9W

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Our customers can now create Route53 Alias records for their Amazon OpenSearch custom endpoints and gain faster DNS resolutions while saving on additional CNAME costs. Good job on the launch Sachet Alva and team - https://lnkd.in/g_aaUp7S. #aws #opensearch #route53

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+1. The only goal for engineering productivity measurement should be to help improve developer happiness by identifying pain points and fixing them.

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"Legacy is just a decision made in the past with or without your participation" 🎯 Mais um belo artigo do Italo Santos trazendo algumas verdades!

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📢 Did you know? Google Spanner supports NoSQL workloads too! 🚀 This means Spanner supports best of both worlds: the strong consistency and reliability of a relational database, plus the flexibility and scalability of a non-relational database. 🤯 If you're working with large amounts of unstructured or semi-structured data, this could be a game-changer for you. 🙌 Check out the article for more details: https://lnkd.in/g5QxYFA9 #Spanner #GoogleCloud #NoSQL #Database #Data #TechNews

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Rust, memes and stickers! Great time listening to 🦁 Luciano Mammino talk and getting to chat with him after! Really looking forward to seeing the book that he and James Eastham are writing on Rust! AWS Community Nordics #AWSNordics #AWSCommunity #Rust

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Besides showing off Momento, this is also a nice example of how to write a simple, modern, Rust-based AWS Lambda function, including the setup with CDK. Check it out. This has been a rapidly evolving space and many of the examples you'll find out there are outdated or missing key pieces.

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With SLMs demonstrating capabilities at the size of 7/8B, 2B is the next one, targeting on-device use cases.

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Missed one aspect of writing the TLA+ spec yesterday. How to gain confidence it is correct. https://lnkd.in/dQn2VUUq

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