Python in Excel, AI face search, and deep-cloning JavaScript objects natively

Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel:

There is now a reverse image lookup that uses facial recognition to find all images of a person publicly on the web:

Parmigiano-Reggiano are now putting edible microchips into their cheese blocks to fight against knockoffs. The silicon chips, made by p-Chip, use blockchain to allow the cheese to be traced all the way back to the producer of the milk. The market of European food products with EU protected status—also including Greek feta cheese, Champagne, and Italian Parma raw ham—is worth €80 billion annually. These products can be twice the price of similar non-protected products, so there is a huge market—estimated to be also around €80 billion—for knockoffs and incentive for the food producers to prove authenticity.

Here is a thread of what developers have been coming up with for Apple's Vision Pro SDK:

My favourite is real-time subtitles:

For something a bit different, check out this luxury house that has been designed to resemble a yacht integrated into a hill in Greece:

greek ‘villa earth’ emerges from the mediterranean coast like a futuristic yacht

vrantsi’s ‘villa earth’ shaped like a yacht sits along the greek mediterranean coast, fusing organic forms and a futuristic aesthetic.

designboom | architecture & design magazineVRANTSI

Real-time CGI is improving in leaps and bounds:

Midjourney has released a feature that allows you to generate new AI content for a specific part of an image, allowing you to keep the bits you like while regenerating certain other areas of an AI-generated image:

For example, this AI-generated image originally featured a dog but was able to be changed to a variety of cats while preserving the rest of the image:

StabilityAI has released StableCode, a large language model specifically aimed at coding:

Stability AI launches StableCode, an LLM for code generation

StableCode, Stability AI’s code-generating LLM, will be available in a base model, an instruction model, and a long-context-window model.

VentureBeatSean Michael Kerner

“What we would like to do with this kind of model is to do a similar thing as we did for Stable Diffusion, which helped everyone in the world to become an artist,” Christian Laforte, head of research at Stability AI, told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview. “We’d like to do the same thing with the StableCode model: basically allow anyone that has good ideas [and] maybe has a problem, to be able to write a program that would just fix that problem.”

Dev

I keep forgetting about new CSS and JS features that are already available! One such example is structuredClone, which allows you to properly deep clone an object natively in JavaScript:

You can also now use a polyfill for scroll-driven animations.

Chrome is implementing the crossorigin attribute on <image> and <feImage> elements in SVGs. This is currently only available in Firefox 115. It will behave the same as the crossorigin HTML attribute:

SVG attribute: crossorigin - SVG: Scalable Vector Graphics | MDN

The crossorigin attribute, valid on the <image> and <feImage> elements, provides support for configuration of the Cross-Origin Resource Sharing (CORS) requests for the element’s fetched data.

MDN Web Docs

I'm also going to be talking about what's new in CSS in 2023 at Web Directions Summit in October! Check out all the sessions and grab tickets here: https://webdirections.org/summit

That's all for now—have a great weekend!