Month: December 2022

‘If Aliens Contact Humanity, Who Decides What We Do Next?’

If humankind detects a message from an advanced civilisation, “It would be a transformative event for humankind,” writes the Guardian, “one the world’s nations are surely prepared for.

“Or are they?”
“Look at the mess we made when Covid hit. We’d be ……


KiCad 2022 End-of-Year Recap and 7.0 Preview

KiCad 2022 Year End Recap

[Chris Gammell] moderated the KiCad 2022 End-of-Year Recap with several KiCad developers and librarians. They reviewed what’s been bubbling up in the nightly KiCad 6 builds, what we can expect …read more


Ancient Cats Migrated With Humans All Over the World

Slashdot reader guest reader shares some interesting research from the University of Missouri:

Nearly 10,000 years ago, humans settling in the Fertile Crescent, the areas of the Middle East surrounding the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, made the first ……


Why Making ‘That’ Doctor’s Appointment Should Be Your 2023 Health Goal – CNET

Listen to that nagging voice in your head (or from your family member). It could save your life, now or later….


Other Software Projects Are Now Trying to Replicate ChatGPT

“The first open source equivalent of OpenAI’s ChatGPT has arrived,” writes TechCrunch, “but good luck running it on your laptop — or at all.”

This week, Philip Wang, the developer responsible for reverse-engineering closed-sourced AI systems inc……


MIT’s Newest fMRI Study: ‘This is Your Brain on Code’

Remember when MIT researchers did fMRI brain scans measuring the blood flow through brains to determine which parts were engaged when programmers evaluated code? MIT now says that a new paper (by many of the same authors) delves even deeper:

Whereas t……


Battery-Powered ESP8266 Sensor? Never Been Simpler

Fritzing diagram of connections between the Wemos D1 board, the TP4056 board, the pushbutton and the LiIon battery

Say, you’re starting your electronics journey with a few projects in mind. You have an ESP8266 board like the Wemos D1, a LiIon battery, you want to build a small …read more


Inspired by Amazon, Paid Promotions Spread to Other Online Shopping Sites in 2022

We’re buying more things online, the Washington Post notes. But how we buy may be changing too:

For the first time in years, Google and Meta have grabbed less than half of the digital marketing money spent in the United States in 2022. Amazon, which t……


World Chess Champ Magnus Carlsen Also Wins World Blitz and Rapid Chess Titles

“Rapid chess” grants 15 minutes to each player for all moves (plus 10 seconds per move). “Blitz chess” grants each player three minutes (plus 2 seconds per move).

Now CNN reports that five-time world chess champion Magnus Carlsen “won both the World……


Systemd’s Growth Over 2022

Phoronix checks systemd’s Git activity in 2022 (and compares it to previous years):
If measuring a open-source project’s progress by the commity activity per year, while not the most practical indicator, systemd had a very good year. In 2022 there were……