The free open-source text editor Notepad++ is celebrating its 20th anniversary, the blog OMG! Ubuntu reported this week, “with a new release filled with some neat new features.”

In Notepad++ 8.6 (the 238th release since 2003, for those keeping count) the Windows-based code tool [which can also be used on Linux] adds to its extensive feature set with an improved multi-edit feature.
A few 3rd-party Notepad++ plugins have offered similar functionality for a while, including BetterMultiSelection. And a bug report requesting to ability to “transform the column mode to multi-caret on HOME/END/Arrow keys” led to this native addition.
Their blog post includes an animated GIF of Notepad++ multi-edit in action.

“You can install Notepad++ on Ubuntu straight from the Ubuntu Software/App Center app (it’s a Snap Store). Alternatively, install the Windows build via WINE/CrossOver or, if you got the l33t skillz, build it by hand, from source.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – NotePad++ 20th Anniversary Edition Includes New ‘Multi-Edit’ Feature

“Advent of Code” has begun. New programming puzzles will appear every day until Christmas at AdventOfCode.com — and the annual event (first started in 2015) has grown into a worldwide phenomenon. This year’s first puzzle has been completed by over 150,000 programmers (with another 115,652 completing Day Two’s puzzle). And 108,000 fans have also joined the Advent of Code subReddit.

Contest-related comments are popping up all around the web. Some participants are live streaming their puzzle-solving efforts on Twitch. Self-described computer nerd Gary Grady is tweeting cartoons about each day’s puzzle. JetBrains is even giving away some prizes in their “Advent of Code with Kotlin” event. And JetBrains developer advocate Sebastian Aigner is also hosting daily livestreams about each puzzle.

It’s hard to overstate how big this event has become. This year’s event attracted 60 sponsors, including Kotlin (for the third consecutive year), as well as Spotify, Shopify, and Sony Interactive Entertainment (as well as JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, and American Express). Individual donors can get a special badge next to their name, and there’s also a shop selling coffee mugs and t-shirts. But at its core is real-world developer Eric Wastl (plus a team of loyal beta-testers) sharing his genuine fondness for computer programming. Wastl is also the creator of a satirical web page for the fast, lightweight, cross-platform framework Vanilla JS (“so popular that browsers have been automatically loading it for over a decade”) and also curates a collection of “things in PHP which make me sad”.

And you can find him on X sharing encouraging comments for this year’s participants.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – 150,000 Programmers Tackle ‘Advent of Code’ in Event’s 9th Year

Slashdot reader XXongo writes: Nuclear power plants have historically been built at gigawatt scale. Recently, however, there has been a new dawn seeing multiple projects to build Small Modular Reactors (“SMRs”), both funded by billionaires and by the U.S. Department of Energy.

Recently one of the players farthest ahead in the development, NuScale Power, canceled their headline project, but many other projects continue. In a lengthy analysis, Michael Barnard thinks that’s crazy, and attributes the drive toward small reactors to “a tangled web that includes Bill Gates, Silicon Valley, desperate coal towns, desperate nuclear towns, the inability of the USA to build big infrastructure, the U.S. Department of Energy’s budget, magical thinking and more.” Due to thermal inefficiencies, small reactors are more expensive per unit of power generated, he points out, and the SMR projects ignore most of the field’s history’s lessons about both the scale of reactors for commercial success and the conditions needed for success.

They are relying on Wright’s Law, that each doubling of the number of manufactured items in production manufacturing would bring cost per item down by 20% to 27%, but Barnard points out that the number of reactors needed to achieve enough economy of scale in production to make the reactors make economic sense is unrealistically optimistic. He concludes that only government programs can meet the conditions for successful deployment of nuclear power.

At one point Barnard characters SMRs as “a bunch of lab technologies that have been around for decades that depend on uranium from Russia, that don’t have the physical characteristics for cheap nuclear generation and don’t have the conditions for success for nuclear generation will be the saviours of the nuclear industry and a key wedge in fighting climate change…

“I like nuclear generation. I know it’s safe enough. I’m not concerned about radiation… I just know that it doesn’t have the conditions for success to be built and scaled economically in the 21st Century, and wind, water, solar, transmission and storage do.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – ‘What Drives This Madness On Small Modular Nuclear Reactors?’

Gene Simmons is 74 years old. But as the singer for the classic rock band KISS left the stage after their final show, USA Today reports there was a surprise:
in the most on-brand KISS move even by KISS standards, before the quartet likely hit their dressing rooms after disappearing on stage in the blizzard of smoke and confetti that accompanied the set-closing “Rock and Roll All Nite,” a message blasted on the video screens: “A new KISS era starts now.”
Digital avatars of the band followed, playing their anthem, “God Gave Rock and Roll To You.”

ABC News reports:
The avatars were created by George Lucas’ special-effects company, Industrial Light & Magic, in partnership with Pophouse Entertainment Group, the latter of which was co-founded by ABBA’s Björn Ulvaeus. The two companies recently teamed up for the “ABBA Voyage” show in London, in which fans could attend a full concert by the Swedish band — as performed by their digital avatars. Per Sundin, CEO of Pophouse Entertainment, says this new technology allows Kiss to continue their legacy for “eternity.” He says the band wasn’t on stage during virtual performance because “that’s the key thing,” of the future-seeking technology. “Kiss could have a concert in three cities in the same night across three different continents. That’s what you could do with this.”

In order to create their digital avatars, who are depicted as a kind of superhero version of the band, Kiss performed in motion capture suits.

Experimentation with this kind of technology has become increasingly common in certain sections of the music industry. In October K-pop star Mark Tuan partnered with Soul Machines to create an autonomously automated “digital twin” called “Digital Mark.” In doing so, Tuan became the first celebrity to attach their likeness to OpenAI’s GPT integration, artificial intelligence technology that allows fans to engage in one-on-one conversations with Tuan’s avatar. Aespa, the K-pop girl group, frequently perform alongside their digital avatars — the quartet is meant to be viewed as an octet with digital twins. Another girl group, Eternity, is made up entirely of virtual characters — no humans necessary.

Kiss frontman Paul Stanley told ABC News that “The band deserves to live on because the band is bigger than we are.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – After KISS’s Final Show, They’ll Become Digital Avatars From Industrial Light & Magic

Today is the 20th anniversary of its last flight of the supersonic Concorde aircraft. It was faster than the speed of sound, travelling at speeds of 1,350 mph (2,170 km/h).

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shared an article from the Telegraph:
As the space race raged and dominated headlines, the U.S. and the Soviet Union were equally competitive about being the first post-war superpower to create a commercial jetliner that could travel faster than the speed of sound.” Both started work on secret projects, at the same time that Britain and France — who were less hell-bent on imprinting their superiority on geopolitics, but blessed with many of the world’s finest engineering minds — were in pursuit of the same goal.

It has been known for decades that the three-horse race wasn’t run entirely fairly. While the Americans, with their colossal and largely pointless Boeing 2707, never got close to getting airborne (they scrapped the project in 1971), the Soviet-built Tupolev Tu-144 won the race in 1968. When it did, though, its design similarities to Concorde appeared to confirm suspicions that the blueprints might have been leaked by espionage. In the late 1990s, it was revealed that an aeronautical engineer codenamed Agent Ace was one such spy. Recruited in 1967, he allegedly handed over some 90,000 pages of detailed technical specifications on new aircraft — including Concorde, the Super VC-10 and Lockheed L-1011 — to the KGB, the foreign intelligence and domestic security agency of the Soviet Union.
The identity of Agent Ace is revealed in Concorde: The Race for Supersonic, a new two-part documentary by the UK public broadcasting station Channel 4.

The Telegraph adds:
With the rich benefit of hindsight, John Britton isn’t entirely surprised there was a Soviet mole in the factory. It was a long time ago, 1965, but something — or someone — at Filton Aerodrome seemed fishy. “We had dozens, maybe hundreds of people working on the project, and we didn’t have enough permanent staff so we took on contractors, all sorts of characters,” Britton says. At the time he was a 19-year-old apprentice engineer, working for British Aeroplane Company (BAC) in the design office for a supersonic, passenger-carrying aircraft. An aircraft that would, ideally, fly before the Soviet Union’s competing effort did.
“There was one chap working there… He used to stay behind, he’d do a lot of overtime in the drawing library, taking prints off the microfilms of designs…” Britton, who is now 76, initially assumed the man — he thinks his name was George — was merely conscientious and needed copies for his work. He can titter at the memory now. “It was only afterwards, when the Soviet aircraft came out and it looked remarkably like Concorde, when we thought… ‘Ah’.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – How the Concorde Plans Were Secretly Given To the Russians

For circuit-based quantum computations, the achievable circuit complexity is limited by the quality of timekeeping. That’s according to a new analysis published in the journal Physical Review Letters exploring “the effect of imperfect timekeeping on controlled quantum dynamics.”

An announcement from the Vienna University of Technology explains its significance. “The research team was able to show that since no clock has an infinite amount of energy available (or generates an infinite amount of entropy), it can never have perfect resolution and perfect precision at the same time. This sets fundamental limits to the possibilities of quantum computers.”

ScienceAlert writes:
While the issue isn’t exactly pressing, our ability to grow systems based on quantum operations from backroom prototypes into practical number-crunching behemoths will depend on how well we can reliably dissect the days into ever finer portions. This is a feat the researchers say will become increasingly more challenging…

“Time measurement always has to do with entropy,” says senior author Marcus Huber, a systems engineer who leads a research group in the intersection of Quantum Information and Quantum Thermodynamics at the Vienna University of Technology. In their recently published theorem, Huber and his team lay out the logic that connects entropy as a thermodynamic phenomenon with resolution, demonstrating that unless you’ve got infinite energy at your fingertips, your fast-ticking clock will eventually run into precision problems. Or as the study’s first author, theoretical physicist Florian Meier puts it, “That means: Either the clock works quickly or it works precisely — both are not possible at the same time….”

[F]or technologies like quantum computing, which rely on the temperamental nature of particles hovering on the edge of existence, timing is everything. This isn’t a big problem when the number of particles is small. As they increase in number, the risk any one of them could be knocked out of their quantum critical state rises, leaving less and less time to carry out the necessary computations… This appears to be the first time researchers have looked at the physics of timekeeping itself as a potential obstacle. “Currently, the accuracy of quantum computers is still limited by other factors, for example the precision of the components used or electromagnetic fields,” says Huber. “But our calculations also show that today we are not far from the regime in which the fundamental limits of time measurement play the decisive role.”

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Physicists May Have Found a Hard Limit on The Performance of Large Quantum Computers

The Atlantic writes:

Failing a CAPTCHA isn’t just annoying — it keeps people from navigating the internet. Older people can take considerably more time to solve different kinds of CAPTCHAs, according to the UC Irvine researchers, and other research has found that the same is true for non-native English speakers. The annoyance can lead a significant chunk of users to just give up.

But is it all also just a big waste of time? The article notes there’s now even CAPTCHA-solving services you can hire. (“2Captcha will solve a thousand CAPTCHAs for a dollar, using human workers paid as low as 50 cents an hour. Newer companies, such as Capsolver, claim to instead be using AI and charge roughly the same price.”)

And they also write that this summer saw more discouraging news:

In a recent study from researchers at UC Irvine and Microsoft:
– most of the 1,400 human participants took 15 to 26 seconds to solve a CAPTCHA with a grid of images, with 81% accuracy.

– A bot tested in March 2020, meanwhile, was shown to solve similar puzzles in an average of 19.9 seconds, with 83% accuracy.

The article ultimately argues that for roughly 20 years, “CAPTCHAs have been engaged in an arms race against the machines,” and that now “The burden is on CAPTCHAs to keep up” — which they’re doing by evolving.

The most popular type, Google’s reCAPTCHA v3, should mostly be okay. It typically ascertains your humanity by monitoring your activity on websites before you even click the checkbox, comparing it with models of “organic human interaction,” Jess Leroy, a senior director of product management at Google Cloud, the division that includes reCAPTCHA, told me.

But the automotive site Motor Biscuit speculates something else could also be happening. “Have you noticed it likes to ask about cars, buses, crosswalks, and other vehicle-related images lately?”
Google has not confirmed that it uses the reCAPTCHA system for autonomous vehicles, but here are a few reasons why I think that could be the case. Self-driving cars from Waymo and other brands are improving every day, but the process requires a lot of critical technology and data to improve continuously.

According to an old Google Security Blog, using reCAPTCHA and Street View to make locations on Maps more accurate was happening way back in 2014… [I]t would ask users to find the street numbers found on Google Street View and confirm the numbers matched. Previously, it would use distorted text or letters. Using this data, Google could correlate the numbers with addresses and help pinpoint the location on Google Maps…

Medium reports that more than 60 million CAPTCHAs are being solved every day, which saves around 160,000 human hours of work. If these were helping locate addresses, why not also help identify other objects? Help differentiate a bus from a car and even choose a crosswalk over a light pole.

Thanks to Slashdot reader rikfarrow for suggesting the topic.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Source: Slashdot – Are CAPTCHAs More Than Just Annoying?