Category: News

JRuby 9.4.7.0 Released

Posted on by Michael G

The JRuby community is pleased to announce the release of JRuby 9.4.7.0.

JRuby 9.4.x targets Ruby 3.1 compatibility.

Thank you to our contributors this release, you help keep JRuby moving forward! @kares, @ryannevell, @jsvd

Ruby Compatibility

Standard Library

  • jruby-openssl is updated to 0.14.5
  • rdoc is updated to 6.4.1.1
  • Warnings due to method aliasing in the ostruct library have been mitigated. #8200, #8206

JVM Integration

  • Ruby classes that are “reified” into a Java class and later redefined can be “re-reified” to a new Java class with an incrementing version number. #8141, #8185
  • Java objects from other classloaders can pollute the Java:: namespace. This behavior can be disabled now, and will be disabled by default in JRuby 10. #8156, #8208

53 Github Issues resolved for 9.4.7.0

How Machine Learning improved the Chrome address bar on Windows, Mac and ChromeOS

Posted on by Michael G

Used billions of times each day, the Chrome address bar (which we call the “omnibox”) is a powerful tool to make searching the web easier, whether you’re trying to quickly find your tabs or bookmarks, return to a web page you previously visited, or find information.

With the latest release of Chrome (M124), we’re integrating machine learning models to power the Chrome omnibox on desktop, so that web page suggestions are more precise and relevant to you. In the future, these models will also help improve the relevance scoring of search suggestions. Here’s a closer look at some of the important insights that help our team build this integration and where we hope the new model takes us.

How we got here

As the engineering lead for the team responsible for the omnibox, every launch feels special, but this one is truly near and dear to my heart. When I first started working on the Chrome omnibox, I asked around for ideas on how we could make it better for users. The number one answer I heard was, “improve the scoring system.” The issue wasn’t that the scoring was bad. In fact, the omnibox often feels magical in its ability to surface the URL or query you want! The issue was that it was inflexible. A set of hand-built and hand-tuned formulas did the job well, but were difficult to improve or to adapt to new scenarios. As a result, the scoring system went largely untouched for a long time.

For most of that time, an ML-trained scoring model was the obvious path forward. But it took many false starts to finally get here. Our inability to tackle this challenge for so long was due to the difficulty of replacing the core mechanism of a feature used literally billions of times every day. Software engineering projects are sometimes described as “building the plane while flying it.” This project felt more like “replacing all the seats in every plane in the world while they’re all flying.” The scale was enormous and the changes are felt directly by every user.

This ambitious undertaking would not have been possible without the work of such a talented and dedicated team. There were bumps in the road, walls we had to break through, and unanticipated issues that slowed us down, but the team was driven by a sincere belief in the impact of getting this right for our users.

A Surprising Insight

One of the fun things about working with ML systems is that the training considers all the data at a scale that would be difficult to impossible for any individual person or team. And that can lead to surprising insights.

The coolest example of this phenomenon on this project was when we looked at the scoring curve of one particular signal: time since last navigation. The expectation with this signal is that the smaller it is (the more recently you’ve navigated to a particular URL), the bigger the contribution that signal should make towards a higher relevance score.

And that is, in fact, what the model learned. But when we looked closer, we noticed something surprising: when the time since navigation was very low (seconds instead of hours, days or weeks), the model was decreasing the relevance score. It turns out that the training data reflected a pattern where users sometimes navigate to a URL that was not what they really wanted and then immediately return to the Chrome omnibox and try again. In that case, the URL they just navigated to is almost certainly not what they want, so it should receive a low relevance score during this second attempt.

In retrospect, this is obvious. And if we had not launched ML scoring, we definitely would have added a new rule to the old system to reflect this scenario. But before the training system observed and learned from this pattern, it never occurred to anyone that this might be happening.

The Future

With the new ML models, we believe this will open up many new possibilities to improve the user experience by potentially incorporating new signals, like differentiating between time of the day to improve relevance. We want to explore training specialized versions of the model for particular environments: for example, mobile, enterprise or academic users, or perhaps different locales.

Additionally, we observe that the way users interact with the Chrome omnibox changes over time and we believe the relevance scoring should change with them. With the new scoring system, we can now simply collect fresher signals, re-train, evaluate, and deploy new models periodically over time.

By Justin Donnelly, Chrome software engineer

JMP: this week’s sponsor

Posted on by Michael G
JMP is a fully FOSS service providing a way to get a real phone number that operates over the internet using XMPP. They provide numbers in the USA and Canada with everything you need to access SMS/MMS/etc. and voice calls using your XMPP (or SIP) clients of choice across all your devices. They are committed to growing the use of open communications technology such as XMPP, ultimately working to help people move their communication off the unencrypted telephone network and onto the federated, encrypted, and diverse Jabber network. We thank JMP for sponsoring OSNews this week, and they even offer a discount code for OSNews readers who sign up for the service. Use the code OSNEWS for one free month after paying for your account initially.

Boost Your Career with Open Agile Architecture Certification!

Posted on by Michael G
Ready to supercharge your career? Join our certification course in Open Agile Architecture! Based on The Open Group’s 2020 standards, this course equips practitioners with the knowledge of agile architecture best practices and techniques.

What will you gain from this course?
– Ace your certification exam with comprehensive preparation.
– Learn to scale Agile smoothly.
– Master the latest techniques in Agile architecture.
– Drive digital transformation with ease.
– Communicate effectively with enterprise architects and agilists.

What’s included in the course?
– Two days of hands-on training with certified experts.
– A free exam voucher.
– Modern online training platform

Who should join?
If you’re an AGILIST, DIGITAL ARCHITECT, SOLUTION ARCHITECT, SECURITY ARCHITECT, ENTERPRISE ARCHITECT, SOFTWARE ARCHITECT, or BUSINESS MANAGER aiming high, this course is designed for you!

Don’t miss out on this opportunity to take your career to the next level. Enroll today and join the agile architecture revolution!

Sign up now and start your journey in Agile Architecture!
https://www.advisedskills.com/courses/enterprise-architecture/open-agile-architecture/open-agile-architecture-practitioner

#AgileArchitecture #OpenGroup #Certification #CareerDevelopment #DigitalTransformation

Moodle Showcase Shorts: Moodle LMS 4.4 is here and we are already focused on what’s coming next!

Posted on by Michael G
by Marie Achour.  

Hello Moodlers,

Welcome to this edition of ‘Showcase Shorts’.

Moodle LMS 4.4 is here!

Delivered right on schedule and as smoothly as can be, our newest version of Moodle is now available for you all to enjoy. Please read our launch announcement to learn about all the benefits of our new features. For those of you who want to dig into all the details, you will find them in our release notes.

The next big release on our list is Moodle Workplace 4.4, scheduled for the 21st of May. This release will introduce our new Course Catalogue. See how we’ve optimised the search across the catalogue in the video – one of the final touches we implemented for this new feature.

We will also release the 4.4 version of the Moodle LMS Mobile App in a few weeks. Watch the video to see how this release will improve the Mobile experience with H5P, support offline blog posting, and embed the new Ordering Question Type plugin. 

As for Moodle LMS, our journey to create the world’s best open-source learning management solution continues.

Thanks to our ecosystem of plugins, you can already leverage the power of AI with Moodle. Now it’s time to take the next step: getting that power into core! Find out how we plan to do so and see some early mock-ups of our ideas by watching the following.

We will also be working on improvements to the Assignment Activity, continuing to optimise our course page interface, reimagining SMS notifications, and much, much more; stay tuned for more details in upcoming notes.

Our dedication to improving support for our Moodle Community Developers continues with ongoing updates to our developer experience and a renewed focus on plugin reviews. 

On that note, we would like to take a moment to say a Moodle-sized thank you to one of our most dedicated supporters, Dan Marsden, who makes the world of Moodle plugins turn. Thank you, Dan, for all you do for the Moodle Community. We are forever grateful for it.

We finish this edition with an invitation to join us for MoodleMoot Global 2024, which will be held from 22 to 24 October in Mérida, México! 

Visit www.moodlemoot.org to learn how to get discounted early-bird tickets, submit an abstract to become a speaker, or sponsor the event. Get in there quickly; some of our activities have limited places!

That’s it for this edition of our ‘Showcase Shorts’; we hope you’ve enjoyed the updates.

Until Next Sprint!

The Moodle Product Team

mandclu: Getting Smart Date Dialed Up to 11

Posted on by Michael G
Getting Smart Date Dialed Up to 11

mandclu: Getting Smart Date Dialed Up to 11

I just tagged the first stable release for Smart Date 4.1, a year (almost to the day) since the first stable release of Smart Date 4.0. A lot of work went into this new release, but I’m thankful beyond words to the many people who helped shape it into what it is today.

mandclu

Mon, 04/29/2024 – 06:14

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