Ninjazzon

In early February, Mark Zuckerberg added $28 billion to his wealth in a matter of hours as Meta’s shares soared after the company announced its first dividend payout.

This follows a banner year for the Facebook founder, who saw his wealth surge 173% in 2023. Like Zuckerberg, many tech billionaires added huge sums to their wealth as the stock market rebounded.

This graphic, from Preyash Shah, shows the biggest winners and losers in billionaire wealth in 2023.

Nauru is the “world’s richest little isle,” the New York Times proclaimed in 1982, the result of a decadeslong mining rush for the island’s phosphate bounty. But once the mining boom went bust, so too did the money—setting Nauru on a quest for cash that has seen it launder money for the Russian mafia; effectively imprison refugees seeking asylum in Australia; and, most recently, abandon its long-standing Taiwan ties for Beijing.

None has quite done the trick. Now, Nauru is making one of its most controversial bets yet: mining the seafloor for the mineral treasures powering the global energy transition. It’s a move that has sparked alarm and suspicion, given the island’s checkered history. Yet the many contradictions of Nauru’s path here are as much a twisted tale of exploitation and extraction as they are a story of what one nation will do to survive.

The first reason bird legs look strangely thin is that the rest of their body is mostly covered by feathers, which can dramatically magnify its apparent size, says Julia Clarke, a paleontologist who studies bird evolution at the University of Texas at Austin. Birds’ relatively meatier thighs are tucked underneath their feathers, and most birds have scaly lower legs, Clarke says, which makes these limbs look oddly small and naked. Birds that have feathers down to their toes—such as owls and some domestic chickens—appear to have thicker shins than their bare-legged cousins.

But it’s not just a visual illusion: bird legs have some genuine differences from legs of other living animals.

Ubuntu's popularity often makes it the default choice for new Linux users. But there are tons of other Linux operating systems that deserve your attention. As such, I've highlighted some Ubuntu alternatives so you can choose based on your needs and requirements—because conformity is boring.

If you have a passing interest in film and animation, you've likely heard of Coyote Vs. Acme, a feature film in the Roger Rabbit tradition of blending 2D animation with live action focusing on characters from Warner Brothers' Roadrunner cartoons. The film would have focused on Wile E. Coyote suing the ubiquitous Acme corporation after decades of selling him faulty products, and by all accounts appeared to be a passion project from everyone involved. The movie was, in fact, complete and ready for release- only for Warner Brothers to kill it at the last possible second in the name of a multi-million dollar tax writeoff.

A set of aerial images has revealed work progressing on The Line megacity, Oxagon port and Sindalah resort, which are being built as part of Neom in Saudi Arabia.

The images, shared by The Line's chief operating officer Giles Pendleton on LinkedIn, show construction underway on the controversial project.

Pendleton's images include aerial photos, that appear to be taken from a helicopter, of the excavations for The Line, which is planned to stretch 170 kilometres across the country.

He also shared aerial shots of hotels under construction at the Sindalah island resort and preparation works at Oxagon development.

Steven James at the University of the Witwatersrand in South Africa and his colleagues developed a benchmark test within Minecraft to measure the general intelligence of AI models. MinePlanner assesses an AI’s ability to ignore unimportant details while solving a complex problem with multiple steps.

Lots of AI training “cheats” by giving a model all the data it needs to learn how to do a job and nothing extraneous, says James. That is a fruitful approach if you want create software to accomplish a specific task – such as predicting the weather or folding proteins – but not if you are attempting to create artificial general intelligence, or AGI.

James says that future AI models will need to tackle messy problems, and he hopes that MinePlanner will guide that research. AI working to solve a problem in the game will see the landscape, extraneous objects and other detail that isn’t necessarily needed to solve a problem and must be ignored. It will have to survey its surroundings and work out by itself what is and is not needed.

Version 1.19 of F-Droid finally introduces support for the API introduced in Android 12, as spotted by Mishaal Rahman on X. This makes it possible to install updates fully in the background, without any user interaction required. Naturally, this only works for apps originally installed via F-Droid. With this change in place, F-Droid can be an even more viable alternative to the Play Store and other pre-installed apps for people who want to rely on the best open source Android apps.

In the past, F-Droid had to rely on a helper app with root access to install updates in the background without disturbing the user, the F-Droid Privileged Extension. With the app now using the unattended updates API, this is no longer necessary.

How long is “forever”? When it comes to digital media, forever could be as close as a couple of months away.

Funimation, a Sony-owned streaming service for anime, recently announced that subscribers' digital libraries on the platform will be unavailable after April 2. For years, Funimation had been telling subscribers that they could keep streaming these digital copies of purchased movies and shows, but qualifying it: “forever, but there are some restrictions.”

Oculi Mundi is a digital heritage destination: the home of The Sunderland Collection of world maps, celestial maps, atlases, globes and books of knowledge.

The Collection was built out of a personal passion for travel, history, and the imagination. We seek to make it as accessible as possible — for study or for pure joy.

Oculi Mundi takes a fresh, innovative approach to presenting antique material online. We have tried to exploit the full potential of the digital environment and the best of current technology. As tech evolves, so will we!

A Japanese research team said Thursday that it has become the world's first to create miniaturized organs closely resembling the human placenta in structure and functions.

The team, including researchers of Tokyo Medical and Dental University, expects that the human placenta organoids, the miniature version, can be applied to research to understand how viruses infect the placenta and to develop safe new drugs.

The team's research results were published in the online edition of the British journal Nature Communications.

Ladybird is an ongoing project to build an independent web browser from scratch.

It is being developed as part of the SerenityOS/serenity project on GitHub.

There are no downloadable binaries yet, as the project is still very unstable. You can follow the build instructions to build it for yourself.

This page is not fancy because we are focusing on building the browser. :^)

Since Ladybird is part of the SerenityOS project, development is coordinated on the SerenityOS discord server.