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The UK Cabinet Office is hiring an AI and Innovation Director tasked with building what it calls an AI-first culture across the civil service. The role involves re-imagining the future workforce and persuading public sector employees to embrace artificial intelligence tools — a job that sounds less like a directorship and more like a very ambitious sales position.
On the security front, a coalition called Athena — led by cybersecurity firm Chainguard — is bringing coordinated, AI-assisted defence to open source software. The initiative targets widely-used libraries and containers that underpin everything from web browsers to payment systems, aiming to find and fix vulnerabilities before attackers can get there first. It's a rare case of the industry moving proactively rather than reactively.
And in a small but satisfying story about software bloat, one developer built a fully functional Markdown-to-PDF application weighing just two point three megabytes — because the alternative, bundling Chromium, felt, in their words, absurd. It's a quiet reminder that sometimes the most interesting engineering decision is simply choosing to leave something out.
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