Article

Java News Roundup: TornadoVM 8.0, JNoSQL, Endive, JReleaser, JBang, LangChain4j, Quarkus Almanac

This week's Java roundup for October 26th, 2026, features news highlighting: the GA release of TornadoVM 8.0; point releases of JNoSQL, Endive, JBang, JReleaser and LangChain4j; a maintenance release of JobRunr; beta releases of Hibernate ORM and Hibernate Reactive; and introducing the Quarkus Almanac. By Michael Redlich

InfoQ · EN

Google and Meta Open-source TorchTPU to Bring Native PyTorch Support to Google TPUs

TorchTPU is an open-source project developed by Google in collaboration with Meta that provides a native PyTorch backend for Google TPUs. It enables PyTorch workloads to execute on TPU hardware with minimal code modifications, supporting eager and compiled execution, distributed computing, and hardware-specific optimizations. By Sergio De Simone

InfoQ · EN

Presentation: Beyond the Harness: Canvas for AI Agents

Nimisha Asthagiri shares how applying proven product engineering and architecture principles creates a bounded canvas for AI agents. She explains how this model provides agents with bounded autonomy, continuous drift detection, and decision records to scale software development resiliently. By Nimisha Asthagiri

InfoQ · EN

LinkedIn Uses OpenTelemetry to Trace the Member Journey from Tap to Backend

LinkedIn has built an OpenTelemetry-based telemetry platform that connects what members do in its iOS, Android, and web applications with the backend services processing those interactions. By Craig Risi

InfoQ · EN

Vitest 5: Prioritises Performance with a Shared Vite Server, Trace View, and Stricter Test Defaults

Vitest 5.0 focuses on speed, with reported gains of 8 to 25 percent in most setups and up to 53 percent in VM pools. It adds a vitest doctor command, Browser Mode Trace View, and vi.when. Defaults are stricter: clearMocks is true and unawaited async assertions fail. It requires Vite 6.4 and Node.js 22.12 or newer. By Daniel Curtis

InfoQ · EN

Google Launches LiteRT Tensor API for Building, Customizing, and Optimizing ML Models for On-Device

Google has introduced the LiteRT Tensor API, a lightweight C++ API that allows developers to build, customize, and optimize machine learning models directly for on-device execution. According to Google, it combines the flexibility of native model authoring with cross-platform portability. By Sergio De Simone

InfoQ · EN

Meta Sued Over Using People’s Photos for AI and Facial Recognition

There's a new proposed class action lawsuit against Meta that alleges they harvested Facebook and Instagram photographs for biometric information that was used to train image generation models and develop an, as yet, unreleased facial recognition feature called Nametag for smart glasses. Meta says that the lawsuit has misrepresented the situation and notes that Nametag […] The post Meta Sued Over Using People’s Photos for AI and Facial Recognition appeared first on Light Stalking .

Light Stalking · EN

Turning Woe Back To Wow in Photography

I have often said that there are six stages to a photographer’s life. The very first is wow, that moment when you realise that photography is for you, something that is going to consume you for many years to come. The second stage is woe. That’s the defining moment when you realise that there is […] The post Turning Woe Back To Wow in Photography appeared first on Light Stalking .

Light Stalking · EN

Dynamics of Colour Photo Contest Winners

One of the interesting things about the entries in this month's colour theme of “the dynamics of colour” is that so many of the strongest entries chose to use a single colour to draw the reader's interest and I think that says something quite powerful about the use of colour in photography. Simply splashing colour […] The post Dynamics of Colour Photo Contest Winners appeared first on Light Stalking .

Light Stalking · EN

Getty Images Bankrupt!

In staggering news from several sources, the famous Getty Images is applying for Chapter 11 bankruptcy and planning to go private. As a private company, Getty will be controlled by the Getty family affiliates as well as Koch Equity Development and will also be backed by $533 million in new equity. This comes after its […] The post Getty Images Bankrupt! appeared first on Light Stalking .

Light Stalking · EN

September 2026 Photo Contest Winners: Decisive Moments

September's photo competition had submissions ranging from sports, to wildlife, street and simple backyard moments. When choosing the winning photos, we wanted to make sure that the decision process was based on a good interpretation of the theme, followed by other factors like light, composition, story, details, creative vision, etc. First Place: “Clear” by Stefanie Markham The post September 2026 Photo Contest Winners: Decisive Moments appeared first on Light Stalking .

Light Stalking · EN

Drone Photography Tips: Better Composition, Lighting and Angles

There's a common myth in drone photography where users will assume that getting the drone higher automatically produces better photos. And it's easy to send a drone 100 meters into the air, admire the spectacular view and then come back with some surprisingly plain or boring images. But it's exactly at this point that drone […] The post Drone Photography Tips: Better Composition, Lighting and Angles appeared first on Light Stalking .

Light Stalking · EN

Improving performance by prefetching product pages from Etsy Search

Rarely are there opportunities for big, bold, game-changing improvements in web performance. The Speculation Rules API (SRA) is a recent browser development that offers just such an opportunity. This post details a joint effort between the search and the web performance teams at Etsy to implement SRA on Etsy search pages and drastically improve the performance of product listing pages with some metrics seeing 20-24% improvements and some dropping all the way to 0ms values. Prefetching Options There are two main ways to predictively fetch resources for the next page: <link rel="prefetch"> allow

Etsy Engineering | Code as Craft · EN

Reducing experiment duration with predicted control variates

I n 2021, we published a blog post titled “ Increasing experimentation accuracy and speed by using control variates ,” describing how we reduce the variance of metrics using CUPED in our experimentation platform. This is a follow-up on how CUPED has evolved at Etsy since then. Spoiler – It’s changed a lot, decreasing our average experiment duration by 3 days! Etsy’s mission is to Keep Commerce Human. To achieve this, we need to understand the impact each change to our platform has on our buyers' and sellers' experience. Whether that involves changing the color of the “Buy Now” button on the Et

Etsy Engineering | Code as Craft · EN

How Etsy Uses LLMs to Improve Search Relevance

Ever searched for something specific, only to be met with results that are close, but not quite ? On Etsy’s Search Relevance team, that frustration is exactly what we are tackling. Our goal is simple yet ambitious: to help buyers find exactly what they’re looking for, and to help sellers reach the people seeking their special products. Search plays a central role in that mission. Historically, Etsy’s search models have relied heavily on engagement signals – such as clicks, add-to-carts, and purchases – as proxies for relevance. These signals are objective, but they can also be biased: popular

Etsy Engineering | Code as Craft · EN

Migrating Etsy’s database sharding to Vitess

Etsy has maintained a sharded MySQL architecture since around 2010. This database cluster contains most of Etsy’s online data and is made up of ~1,000 tables distributed across ~1,000 shards. Over the last 16 years, it has grown significantly: combined, these tables have over 425 TB of data and receive roughly 1.7 million requests per second. Etsy engineers access our MySQL data through a proprietary object-relational mapping (ORM). The ORM has a corresponding model for each MySQL table. When a table is sharded, its rows are partitioned among different databases known as shards. Each shard has

Etsy Engineering | Code as Craft · EN

Making Ads Count: Using MMoE and Auxiliary Tasks to Better Connect Buyers & Sellers

When buyers search on Etsy, they need to quickly and easily find the perfect item. At the same time, sellers need to be confident their unique products are being seen by the right customers. Our Ads Search ranking model, which is built on a multitask learning foundation, is the critical link in this connection. Recently, we identified an opportunity to drive more meaningful buyer engagement by enhancing our model’s ability to predict purchase intent. We achieved this via a dual-pronged improvement: introducing Multigate Mixture of Experts (MMoE) to our model architecture and leveraging add-to-

Etsy Engineering | Code as Craft · EN

Shaping Product Understanding with Contrastive Reinforcement Learning

Etsy’s marketplace is defined by the creativity and craftsmanship of our sellers and the hundreds of millions of highly diverse products they offer. You can find silversmiths who cold-forge recycled sterling silver, weavers who dye raw fleece with indigo and black walnut, and ceramicists who throw stoneware on a kick wheel. These details define each product and often determine whether it matches a buyer’s taste, style, and interests. Sometimes buyers know exactly what they want, searching for “hand-thrown ceramic mug” or “vegetable-tanned leather wallet.” Other times, especially in recommendat

Etsy Engineering | Code as Craft · EN

Kafka App? There’s a Skill for That

Etsy is home to over 100 million listings from 5.6 million active sellers. Because the items for sale are unique and creative, there is no standard product catalog that tells us what they are. When someone searches for “light linen dress for summer,” our models must infer what the shopper means and what the listings contain. They do that using data from user visits and Etsy listings. We use Kafka for streaming data. These data streams provide fresh features and embeddings that power our machine learning models. If a shopper favorites a hand-painted ceramic mug, that action can shape their reco

Etsy Engineering | Code as Craft · EN

That Which We CAN Do: Sustainability in a World of AI

As computing use grows, so does its environmental footprint. While hardware and software have become significantly more efficient, AI demand is growing even faster, outpacing those efficiency gains and increasing the overall environmental impact of computing. What’s more, measurement standards are still playing catch up, making it difficult for companies to measure and reduce their environmental impact. We’ve grappled with this challenge for years (starting with cloud computing and now AI), and we know we’re not alone. Environmental impact has been growing exponentially as computational power

Etsy Engineering | Code as Craft · EN

GitLab Critical Patch Release: 19.5.1, 19.4.3, 19.3.6, 19.2.9, 19.1.9, 19.0.10, 18.11.13

GitLab

PHP2Shell: GitLab helps find and remediate critical PHP flaws

GitLab is not affected by PHP2Shell (CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619). The GitLab application is not written in PHP and does not run it to serve web requests, and our Security team has found no evidence of impact to GitLab-managed infrastructure. GitLab.com, GitLab Self-Managed, and GitLab Dedicated are not impacted. PHP is a widely used programming language that runs on web servers and powers popular platforms like WordPress, Drupal, and Magento, so a flaw in PHP itself can affect many websites and applications. On October 21, 2026, the PHP project fixed two critical remote code execution

GitLab · EN

Pillow CVE-2026-112900: How to find and fix it with GitLab

GitLab is not affected by CVE-2026-112900 or the other vulnerabilities fixed in Pillow 13.0.0. GitLab products do not include the Pillow library, and our Security team has found no evidence of impact to GitLab-managed infrastructure. GitLab.com, GitLab Self-Managed, and GitLab Dedicated are not impacted. Pillow is one of the most widely used image libraries in the Python ecosystem. It often sits several layers down in a dependency tree, pulled in by a web framework, a thumbnailing service or an ML toolkit that nobody chose it for directly. On October 16, 2026, the Pillow project released versi

GitLab · EN

Extend GitLab Duo Agent Platform into your business systems

Developers mostly use GitLab Duo Agent Platform where they already work: the IDE, merge requests, and issues. But DevSecOps teams also support the business systems the rest of the company runs on, and those systems break too. In Salesforce, for example, when a validation fails, a callout times out, or a null slips through a trigger, the error gets logged, but the log doesn’t explain the cause. An engineer still has to read the stack trace, find the class in the repository, check what changed recently, and decide whether this is a one-off or a regression. Meanwhile, the business user who hit th

GitLab · EN