Assorted links for Monday, March 31:
- In S3 simplicity is table stakes
Today, on Pi Day (S3’s 19th birthday), I’m sharing a post from Andy Warfield, VP and Distinguished Engineer of S3. Andy takes us through S3’s evolution from simple object store to sophisticated data platform, illustrating how customer feedback has shaped every aspect of the service. It’s a fascinating look at how we maintain simplicity even as systems scale to handle hundreds of trillions of objects.
- The xz attack shell script
- Context is all you need: Better AI results with custom instructions
Earlier this month, we announced the general availability of custom instructions in Visual Studio Code. Custom instructions are how you give Copilot specific context about your team’s workflow, your particular style preferences, libraries the model may not know about, etc.
In this post we’ll dive into what custom instructions are, how you can use them today to drastically improve your results with GitHub Copilot, and even a brand new preview feature called “prompt files” that you can try today.
- OpenAI adopts rival Anthropic’s standard for connecting AI models to data
In a post on X on Wednesday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said that OpenAI will add support for Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol, or MCP, across its products, including the desktop app for ChatGPT. MCP is an open source standard that helps AI models produce better, more relevant responses to certain queries.
- Microsoft announces security AI agents to help overwhelmed humans
Microsoft’s six security agents will be available in preview next month, and are designed to do things like triage and process phishing and data loss alerts, prioritize critical incidents, and monitor for vulnerabilities.