Mercurial

Mercurial is a distributed revision control tool developed by Matt Mackall on April 19, 2005. It is designed for software developers and supports multiple operating systems, including Microsoft Windows, UNIX-like systems such as FreeBSD, macOS, and Linux. Written primarily in Python, C, and Rust, Mercurial provides a command-line interface and is invoked using the program name “hg.” It offers cross-platform compatibility and enables developers to manage their code repositories efficiently.

Git

Git is a distributed system that tracks changes in source code. It was developed by Linus Torvalds on April 7, 2005. Git supports various operating systems such as Windows, Linux, macOS, and Solaris. It is primarily written in C, Perl, and Python. Git is a free and open-source system that eliminates the need for centralized connectivity. It offers powerful and cost-effective branching with easy merging. Each developer has their own repository and a local copy where they can modify the history. Git supports non-linear development branches and works well with large codebases.

The .git directory structure includes the following components:

• HEAD/: Represents the current branch.
• Config/: Contains configuration settings.
• Description/: Provides a description of your project.
• Logs/: Maintains a record of changes.
• Refs/: Holds local branches.

These elements contribute to the effective functioning of Git, enabling efficient version control and collaboration in software development.

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Git and SVN (Subversion) are both version control systems, but they have some fundamental differences. Here’s a comparison between Git and SVN:

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Git

Git is a distributed version control system designed to track changes in source code during software development. It is a command-line tool that allows developers to create, manage, and merge branches, commit changes, and collaborate with others. Git enables developers to work offline and independently on their local repositories. It provides mechanisms for branching and merging code, resolving conflicts, and reverting changes when necessary. Git operates locally on a developer’s machine and doesn’t require a centralized server.

GitHub

GitHub, on the other hand, is a web-based platform that hosts Git repositories in a centralized manner. It adds a layer of functionality and collaboration features on top of Git. Developers can create remote repositories on GitHub and push their local repositories to these remote repositories. GitHub provides a graphical user interface (GUI) for performing various Git operations like creating pull requests, managing issues, reviewing code changes, and collaborating with other developers through features such as forks and pull requests. It also offers additional tools like project boards, wikis, and actions for continuous integration and deployment.

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Google’s AI teams used the comparatively quiet post-easter days to get ML practitioners up to speed with their latest research in reinforcement learning, natural language processing, and computer vision.

In “An optimistic perspective on offline reinforcement learning”, a team of researchers has looked into ways to use a fixed offline dataset of logged interactions to teach agents how to handle themselves in real world situations. While agents normally learn by getting live feedback from their environment, this approach is meant to be useful in certain robotics use cases or autonomous driving, where enough recorded interaction data is available and other ways of collecting information either seem insufficient or are too expensive to realise.

These are usually seen as tricky to implement, since there’s no real way of knowing how an agent should be rewarded when it takes an action that differs from the dataset provided. To tackle that, Google’s AI team added some supervised learning methods into the mix which helps to improve generalisation and make the whole system more robust. The results are called Ensemble-DQN and Random Ensemble Mixture and can be investigated here.

Meanwhile another team has been busy improving the way objects are detected. The outcome has been dubbed EfficientDet and will be presented at the renowned computer vision conference CVPR in Seattle in June – if COVID refrains from putting a spoke in their wheel. It aims at introducing a “new family of scalable and efficient object detectors” to the computer vision community, building upon earlier work concerning the scaling of neural networks (EfficientNet).

In EfficientDet, EfficientNet is used as a backbone to more effectively extract features from images, while a new bi-directional feature network in combination with a fresh normalised fusion technique is meant to get to image characteristics faster at a lower computation cost.

If you’re more interested in NLP, Google has also been busy setting up a benchmark to make comparing multilingual representations easier. XTREME covers 40 languages from 12 language families and includes nine tasks ranging from sentence classification to question answering to evaluate methods making the most of the shared structures of languages. The project can be found at GitHub.

Git pushes out security updates to stop tricksters

This week, Git maintainer Junio C Hamano has unleashed versions v2.26.1, v2.25.3, v2.24.2, v2.23.2, v2.22.3, v2.21.2, v2.20.3, v2.19.4, v2.18.3, and v2.17.4 of the version control system onto the coding masses. 

Updating is strongly advised, since the security fixes mediate an issue which “allowed a crafted URL to trick a Git client to send credential information for a wrong host to the attacker’s site”. 

Gloo lures admins with new dev portal

Envoy-based API gateway Gloo hit version 1.3 earlier this week, focusing on performance, stability and extensibility improvements. However, the release also includes a developer portal, so that admins have an easier way of controlling who gets access to which APIs.

Once set up, they can select which interfaces should be shared at all and decide which users and groups get to see them once they’ve logged into the portal. The whole apparatus is designed for self-service, with the Gloo team promising easy integration into continuous delivery processes.

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