This week Bloomberg explored so-called “zombie viruses” — that is, long-dormant microbes which they call “yet another risk that climate change poses to public health” as ground that’s been frozen for “milleniums” suddenly starts thawing — for example, in the Arctic, which they write is warming “faster than any other area on earth.”

With the planet already 1.2C warmer than pre-industrial times, scientists are predicting the Arctic could be ice-free in summers by 2030s. Concerns that the hotter climate will release trapped greenhouse gases like methane into the atmosphere as the region’s permafrost melts have been well-documented, but dormant pathogens are a lesser explored danger. Last year, virologist Jean-Michel Claverie’s team published research showing they’d extracted multiple ancient viruses from the Siberian permafrost, all of which remained infectious…

Ways in which this could present a threat are still emerging. A heat wave in Siberia in the summer of 2016 activated anthrax spores, leading to dozens of infections, killing a child and thousands of reindeer. In July this year, a separate team of scientists published findings showing that even multicellular organisms could survive permafrost conditions in an inactive metabolic state, called cryptobiosis. They successfully reanimated a 46,000-year-old roundworm from the Siberian permafrost, just by re-hydrating it…

Claverie first showed “live” viruses could be extracted from the Siberian permafrost and successfully revived in 2014. For safety reasons his research focused only on viruses capable of infecting amoebas, which are far enough removed from the human species to avoid any risk of inadvertent contamination. But he felt the scale of the public health threat the findings indicated had been under-appreciated or mistakenly considered a rarity. So, in 2019, his team proceeded to isolate 13 new viruses, including one frozen under a lake more than 48,500 years ago, from seven different ancient Siberian permafrost samples — evidence to their ubiquity. Publishing the findings in a 2022 study, he emphasized that a viral infection from an unknown, ancient pathogen in humans, animals or plants could have potentially “disastrous” effects.
“50,000 years back in time takes us to when Neanderthal disappeared from the region,” he says. “If Neanderthals died of an unknown viral disease and this virus resurfaces, it could be a danger to us.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Long-Dormant Viruses Are Now Waking Up After 50,000 Years as Planet Warms

An anonymous reader shared this article from the Linux blog OMG! Ubuntu:

The System Monitor app Ubuntu comes with does an okay job of letting you monitor system resources and oversee running processes — but it does look dated… [T]he app’s graphs and charts are tiny, compact, and lack the glanceability and granular-detail that similar tools on other systems offer.

Thankfully, there are plenty of ace System Monitor alternatives available on Linux, with the Rust-based Resources being the latest tool to the join the club. And it’s a real looker… Resources shows real-time graphs showing the utilisation of core system components… You can also see a [sortable and searchable] list of running apps and processes, which are separated in this app.

It’s also possible to select a refresh interval “from very slow/slow/normal/fast/very fast (though tempting to select, ‘very fast’ can increase CPU usage).” And selecting an app or process “activates a big red button you can click to ‘end’ the app/process (a submenu has options to kill, halt, or continue the app/process instead)…”

“If you don’t like the ‘Windows-iness’ of Mission Center — which you may have briefly spotted it in my Ubuntu 23.10 release video — then Resources is a solid alternative.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Rust-Based ‘Resources’ is a New, Modern System Monitor for Linux

An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this report from Fortune:
What would Drew Houston, CEO of Silicon Valley software giant Dropbox, say to fellow CEOs — like Google’s Sundar Pichai or Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg — who seem to believe that three days a week in-person is crucial for company culture?

“I’d say, ‘your employees have options,'” Houston told Fortune this past week. “They’re not resources to control.”

While Dropbox used to work near-entirely at its Bay Area headquarters, Houston has completely warmed to a distributed model since the pandemic — and is mystified as to why other leaders haven’t joined him. (Houston founded Dropbox in 2007, the year after he graduated from MIT, and has been its CEO ever since.) “From a product design perspective, customers are our employees. We’ve stitched together this working model based on primary research,” he told Fortune at Dropbox’s WIP Conference — its first in-person event since 2019 — in New York on Tuesday. “We’ve just been handed the keys that unlock this whole future of work, which is actually here.”

In April 2021, right when most of the country became eligible for vaccines and people began reconvening again across the globe, Dropbox encouraged the opposite. It officially announced its intent to go Virtual First, which meant employees were free to work remotely 90% of the time, only commuting in for the occasional meeting or happy hour… Granted, not everyone got to appreciate the perks. In April, Dropbox laid off 500 employees — 16% of its staff — due to “slowing growth” and “the A.I. era” requiring a reallocation of resources….

Houston and his team have found, in practice, a handful of two- or three-day offsites per quarter — 10% of the year — works best for their people. Crucially, it provides that oft-referenced cultural connect and brainstorming time that pro-office zealots insist upon, without exhausting workers out with a commute grind or needless hours in drab conference rooms.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Dropbox CEO Defends 90% Remote-Work Model, Says ‘Future of Work’ is Here

Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again — two novellas based on Toho’s first two Godzilla movies — were finally published in an English translation this month.

Both were written by science fiction author Shigeru Kayama, “who also penned the original scenarios from which the films in question were based,” according to Our Culture magazine. And the book’s translator calls Kayama both “a figure who is a little bit like Philip K. Dick in this country” and “the key person who developed the contours of the Godzilla story. I think it is no exaggeration to say that he perhaps the closest to being Godzilla’s real father than anyone else. Without him, the monster we have today wouldn’t exist.”

The original Godzilla film is a deeply powerful, mournful film that isn’t just about a big monster stomping on buildings. It is a serious reflection on Japan’s nuclear fears during the Cold War, which left it caught between heavily armed superpowers. Japan recognized that radioactive weapons of mass destruction being developed by the U.S. and U.S.S.R were threats that had the power to suddenly emerge and destroy its citizens and cities at any moment — like Godzilla. We should remember that in the film, it was hydrogen bomb testing in the Pacific that disturbed Godzilla, who then took revenge for his destroyed habitat by trampling Tokyo and blasting it with atomic rays…

Interestingly, in the novellas that I’ve translated, Kayama sometimes restored elements that the director and his assistants removed in the moviemaking process. Perhaps the most noticeable one is that in the scenario, Kayama wanted to begin with a long voice-over that talks directly about the horrors of atomic and hydrogen bombs. He envisioned that as the voice was speaking, the screen would show images from historical footage of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as well as images of the tremendously unlucky (and ironically named) fishing vessel Lucky Dragon No. 5, which accidentally found itself in the path of an H-bomb test in the South Pacific in early 1954. (The horrific fate of this boat directly inspired the producer at Toho Studios to make the film.)

However, the director of the film, IshirÅ Honda, and his assistant who helped with the screenplay both felt that this kind of direct commentary was too direct for a popular film, and so they toned down the “protest” element in the story. It’s clear that they, like Kayama, wanted Godzilla to serve as a monstrous embodiment of radiation and all of the destruction that it could bring, but they also didn’t point fingers at the U.S. military which had dropped the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki and was busily developing even more horrifying weapons. After all, the U.S.S.R. had built its own arsenal, and so nuclear weapons no longer belonged to a single country — the threat was broader than that. Plus, protest films rarely attracted a big, popular following. So, Honda and his crew toned down the outspoken language and imagery, but there was still imagery left enough for viewers in 1954 to recall Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and the Lucky Dragon. Interestingly, when Kayama published the novellas, he included an author preface that talks about the anti-nuclear movement and encourages readers to read Godzilla and Godzilla Raids Again as his contribution to that movement.

Next the translator hopes to create an English translation of the novel The Luminous Fairies and Mothra.

But for this book, he struggled with how to assign a gender to Godzilla. “Some people feel very viscerally, like the people at Toho studios feel very strongly that Godzilla is an ‘it’ and not a ‘he’ or ‘she’ or ‘they,'” he told MovieWeb. “I kind of give my rationale for that choice in the afterward — Kayama thought about Godzilla as a stand-in for the nuclear bomb, and it was men in America who were developing the hydrogen bombs that frightened Japan so much in 1954. So maybe it’s perhaps not inappropriate to call Godzilla ‘he.'”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Two ‘Godzilla’ Scifi Novellas Finally Get English Translations, Capturing 1950s Horror at Nuclear Weapons

ZDNet’s senior contributing editor also maintains software, and recently tested ChatGPT on two fixes for bugs reported by users, and a new piece of code to add a new feature, It’s a “real-world” coding test, “about pulling another customer support ticket off the stack and working through what made the user’s experience go south.” First…

please rewrite the following code to change it from allowing only integers to allowing dollars and cents (in other words, a decimal point and up to two digits after the decimal point).

ChatGPT responded by explaining a two-step fix, posting the modified code, and then explaining the changes. “I dropped ChatGPT’s code into my function, and it worked. Instead of about two-to-four hours of hair-pulling, it took about five minutes to come up with the prompt and get an answer from ChatGPT.”
Next up was reformatting an array. I like doing array code, but it’s also tedious. So, I once again tried ChatGPT. This time the result was a total failure. By the time I was done, I probably fed it 10 different prompts. Some responses looked promising, but when I tried to run the code, it errored out. Some code crashed; some code generated error codes. And some code ran, but didn’t do what I wanted. After about an hour, I gave up and went back to my normal technique of digging through GitHub and StackExchange to see if there were any examples of what I was trying to do, and then writing my own code.

Then he posted the code for a function handling a WordPress filter, along with the question: “I get the following error. Why?”
Within seconds, ChatGPT responded… Just as it suggested, I updated the fourth parameter of the add_filter() function to 2, and it worked!

ChatGPT took segments of code, analyzed those segments, and provided me with a diagnosis. To be clear, in order for it to make its recommendation, it needed to understand the internals of how WordPress handles hooks (that’s what the add_filter function does), and how that functionality translates to the behavior of the calling and the execution of lines of code. I have to mark that achievement as incredible — undeniably ‘living in the future’ incredible…

As a test, I also tried asking ChatGPT to diagnose my problem in a prompt where I didn’t include the handler line, and it wasn’t able to help. So, there are very definite limitations to what ChatGPT can do for debugging right now, in 2023…

Could I have fixed the bug on my own? Of course. I’ve never had a bug I couldn’t fix. But whether it would have taken two hours or two days (plus pizza, profanity, and lots of caffeine), while enduring many interruptions, that’s something I don’t know. I can tell you ChatGPT fixed it in minutes, saving me untold time and frustration.

The article does include a warning. “AI is essentially a black box, you’re not able to see what process the AI undertakes to come to its conclusions. As such, you’re not really able to check its work… If it turns out there is a problem in the AI-generated code, the cost and time it takes to fix may prove to be far greater than if a human coder had done the full task by hand.”

But it also ends with this prediction. “I see a very interesting future, where it will be possible to feed ChatGPT all 153,000 lines of code and ask it to tell you what to fix… I can definitely see a future where programmers can simply ask ChatGPT (or a Microsoft-branded equivalent) to find and fix bugs in entire projects.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – ‘OK, So ChatGPT Just Debugged My Code. For Real’

“A recent analysis accounting for nearly 1.2 million open source software projects primarily across four major ecosystems found that only about 11% of projects were actively maintained,” reports InfoWorld:

In its 9th Annual State of the Software Supply Chain report, published October 3, software supply chain management company Sonatype assessed 1,176,407 projects and reported an 18% decline this year in actively maintained projects. Just 11% of projects — 118,028 — were receiving active maintenance.

The report also found some new projects, unmaintained in 2022, now being maintained.

The four ecosystems included JavaScript, via NPM; Java, via the Maven project management tool; Python, via the PyPI package index; and .NET, through the NuGet gallery. Some Go projects also were included. According to the report, 18.6% of Java and JavaScript projects that were being maintained in 2022 are no longer being maintained today.
Other interesting findings:

Nearly 10% reported security breaches due to open source vulnerabilities in the past 12 months.
Use of AI and machine learning software components within corporate environments surged 135% over the last year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Report Finds Few Open Source Projects are Actively Maintained