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.
The first CRISPR gene editing treatment for sickle cell disease was approved. An amazing start to what I hope is a future of cures for various genetic diseases.
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.
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.
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 😘
Godot is definitely a major highlight. I would love to start using it, but I have too many other things to learn first
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.
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
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
They could have just consulted Dory.
Kissinger’s death primarily.
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.
China’s carbon emissions are now entering structural decline thanks to the massive push in renewables and nuclear https://www.theguardian.com/business/2023/nov/13/chinas-carbon-emissions-set-for-structural-decline-from-next-year
