Anything exciting going on in your field of work this year? Or breakthroughs in science, new technologies developed, things like that.
The end-of-year numbers aren’t in yet, but 2023 should be the year that wind and solar finally generate more electricity than coal here in the US.
https://www.eia.gov/outlooks/steo/report/BTL/2023/02-genmix/article.phpFor new generation projects coming online in 2023, 86% of the electricity is from non-fossil sources. The generation capacity that was retired in 2023 was all fossil based.
https://www.energy.gov/eere/vehicles/articles/fotw-1304-august-21-2023-2023-non-fossil-fuel-sources-will-account-86-newWow that’s pretty great.
I thought you guys were on par with Australia but in fact you’re making us look bad - that’s great.
Dracunculiasis (disease caused by Guinea worm infection in humans) is almost eradicated. We hit a new all-time low for known cases: 13 last year, and now only 3 in the first half of 2023.
LFG Humanity! We fuckin WIN THESE go TEAM
Humanity was able to experience Baldur’s Gate 3.
More importantly, IMO: The Talos Principle 2
It snuck up on me. I love the first game, completed it and the dlc 100%. The first time I heard anything about the sequel was less than a week before launch. I broke the sacred code and preordered. I don’t have much time to play, but I’m making my way through the gate puzzles now.
I’ve just started it and my party died basically right after getting on land to those brain creatures.
I’m loving it.
I almost died there too on my first playthrough. Those things are tough when you’re level one!
Honestly, AI has been helping me a lot as a student and someone that just likes to research stuff. It’s development over the last year has been incredible.
It has made my work life much easier too, and I have coded stuff that automated my job without knowing anything about code.
It’s incredible.
what kind of work do you do that it’s helped in?
I work in media so at first I didn’t think it could help me much.
But I’ve used ChatGPT to automise exports of PDFs/image files, used it to rename extreme large number of documents at the same time, used it to pull data from Excel into my Adobe Programs, used it to create customised scripts with use of the Adobe Script to match my work flow.
Adobes own generative AI in Photoshop and Illustrator is also very helpful in specific situations.
And then I use DeepL (free) for every translation.
These all genuinely sound like simple search engine searches to me?
Maybe I explained it bad then, because it’s not. It would not be possible without ChatGPT with me.
Are you perchance a genius?
Wait, how?
“I keep getting this bug and I’m not sure about my inputs because it’s a different branch oof my specific field. What does this mean?”
(Long mostly right answer that point me in the right direction)
Thank you for the response. Which AI program do you use to help?
Well I work in cybersecurity so everyday is a new year
Is this a joke about every day being a 0-day?
I’m so tired.
some bro, same
We started deploying malaria vaccines!
Right on!
They could have just consulted Dory.
I have been really appreciating open source software this year. I always preferred FOSS over the alternatives (Firefox, Thunderbird, Libre Office etc) but I tried to use it for as much as I could this year, even professionally.
Haven’t bootet into my Windows partition with Adobe Cloud for months now, it’s almost exclusively Inkscpape, Scribus, Blender and Krita on Fedora and I love it! I’m also slowly, slowly getting into Godot which seems like another piece of amazing software.
Sure there are some (very) rough edges here and there and I will have fire up Illustrator or Unity (🤢) at some point when clients demand it but I’m pretty amazed at how well it’s going.
Welp, sending this is totally gonna jinx it but whatevs 😘
2023 was my personal ‘year of the Linux desktop’ I barely knew anything about FOSS up until 2018 maybe?, And the only reason I used Firefox was because I had been using it since 2010 and didn’t wanna change.
Now I’m EXTREMELY grateful for FOSS software and use it over non-free alternatives any chance I get.
Godot is definitely a major highlight. I would love to start using it, but I have too many other things to learn first
The other day I was trying to get an empty vr project to run in unity. After half a day I just gave up. There’s just so many options and packages and license agreements. I’m gonna switch to Godot and Steam index. Even if it’s a lot of work I know I can share it with others.
John Green and Nerdfighteria was able to pressure Johnson and Johnson to give millions access to life saving tuberculosis medication
I love how war-driven John Green is against tuberculosis
Maybe not a breakthrough compared to some of the other comments but home assistant got local voice control this year. For the price of a raspberry pi and a 13 dollar microphone you can have a completely local home automation system controlled by your voice. You can even hook it up to a LLM like chat gpt if you want via a different phrase to do some fun party tricks
There was a breakthrough in cat medicine research that is showing promising results in doubling the lifespan of cats.
Edit: Sorry for leaving y’all in suspense, I didn’t remember exactly what it was at the time of commenting, but I found it https://www.u-tokyo.ac.jp/focus/en/features/z1304_00039.html
Please elaborate/link, I’d be very interested to read about this.
Yeah, I’m piling up here, with the same request, link OP!
So it prolonges lifespan in cats with kidney disease.
Good for the cats but it’s not prolonging a healthy cats lifespan it seems.
Most cats do die of kidney related issues, so by addressing that very common cause of death with cats, you’re effectively doubling the average lifespan still.
Fair enough. A shame it doesn’t transpose to the human condition.
Like we’re talking from 14-18 to 28-36ish???
That was a super interesting read, thank you for sharing it!
Is that a good thing? 🫣
Yes!
I dunno, I had cats who lived to be like 18-19 years, so almost two decades. I can’t imagine how miserable they’d be if they lived to be 40…
Cats have an average lifespan of about 15 years, so it’s doubling from 15 to 30 on average.
Still, that’s a lot.
A multi-material 3D inkjet printer. Most of the rest of science news too.
We have just set up a fund for poor countries effected by climate change.
We are getting very close to approval of Melanoma vaccines. https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/14/health/moderna-merck-melanoma-vaccine-immunotherapy/index.html
For those not aware, Melanomas are not only one of the deadliest and most common cancers, it isn’t really very treatable with chemotherapies or radiation. And yes, Fuck cancer - we’re coming for you, bitch!
