hubie writes:Social media addiction can reduce grey matter, shorten attention spans, weaken memory, and distort core cognitive functions, according to recent research:
ElizabethGreene writes:Eric Raymond has a lovely essay here: http://www.catb.org/esr/structure-packing/ that describes some non-intuitive behavior in how compilers assemble structures in memory. The default is to pad structures out with empty bytes to align data types around arbitrary byte boundaries for similarly non-intuitive reasons.If you don't immediately understand why this struct is 12 or 16 bytes long, it's worth reading.struct Foo {
looorg writes:https://www.tomshardware.com/desktops/indiana-bakery-still-using-commodore-64s-originally-released-in-1982-as-point-of-sale-terminalsThese things pop up every now and then. The last one I recall now was some car-autorepair-shop in Poland that still used one for some function.
upstart [soylentnews.org] writes:Autism Prevalence Reaches 61.8 Million Globally, Study Shows:[Editor's Note - See disclosure that several authors have ties the to pharmaceutical industry--JR]
fliptop writes:Chinese crime rings already dominate the illegal marijuana trade in the U.S. and launder cocaine and heroin profits. Now a federal task force is investigating their role in a burgeoning form of gift card fraud:
upstart writes:A review of 3,000 studies indicates that these microscopic plastic particles in the air could be contributing to male and female infertility:
canopic jug writes:The videos are online from the 38 Chaos Communication Congress (38C3). It took place in Hamburg, from Friday the 27 through Monday the 30 2024. The conference is organized every year by the Chaos Computer Club e. V. (CCC) which is Europe's largest association of hackers. The CCC also organizes campaigns, events, lobbying, publications, anonymizing services, communication infrastructure and even hackerspaces.The Congress is always interesting, so picking semi-randomly from the English subset of talks at the 38C3 highlights include:
upstart writes:The research demonstrated that participants could detect faces quicker under surveillance without being consciously aware of this enhanced perception:
As Kiribati (and in particular the island of Kiritimati) is now beginning 2025 I think that this is as good a time as any to wish everyone a very Happy New Yearand all the very Best Wishes for 2025.Read more of this story at SoylentNews.
upstart writes:The hype is fading, and people are asking what generative artificial intelligence is really good for. So far, no one has a decent answer: