GoKawiil
Tech News
A study published in Nature by Morales and colleagues presents assembled genomes for 103 bat species, including 42 newly generated for the project, covering representatives of every known bat taxonomic family. The dataset gives scientists a broad genomic view of bat diversity and evolutionary history across the order Chiroptera.
At the UN General Assembly, President Trump said he wants future US government documents to refer to artificial intelligence as 'super intelligence' or 'SI,' arguing the word 'artificial' makes the technology sound fake. He had previously run informal social media polls asking followers to choose between terms like 'superior intelligence' and 'super intelligence,' with 'super' narrowly winning. No formal executive order enacting the change has been issued.
A project called BootLife implements Conway's Game of Life entirely within a 512-byte x86 boot sector, using VGA memory to display the simulation grid. It's shared on GitHub as a Show HN post, built with NASM and runnable via QEMU, with source code and a Makefile provided for building and testing.
A UN scientific panel has released its first major assessment on advanced AI risks, arguing that governments must act to control increasingly capable AI agents before all the risks are fully understood. The report, from the newly formed Independent International Scientific Panel on AI, calls for greater international coordination, resources, and accountability measures even as countries pursue different legal approaches to regulation.
A developer has built ZX Desk, a full graphical desktop environment for the 1982 ZX Spectrum 48K, written entirely in Z80 assembly. It supports overlapping resizable windows with z-ordering, pull-down menus, a file manager, notepad, calendar, clock and settings panel, all running within the machine's 48K memory and real-time frame budget, on actual hardware rather than an emulator.
Scientists led by Asor and colleagues developed a technique to directly observe individual virus-like particles as their protein shells form, publishing the results in Nature. The method allowed them to measure the speed and energy changes of shell assembly, something previously very difficult to track experimentally.
Scientists purified and structurally analyzed SC003-mi3, an engineered virus-like particle derived from i3-01 with cysteine mutations and a SpyCatcher domain for attaching other proteins. Using E. coli expression, ammonium sulfate precipitation and dialysis, they produced pure particles suitable for detailed molecular observation of how the nanoparticle assembles itself.
Wonder, the food delivery company founded by Marc Lore, has rolled out its first automated meal-assembly system after acquiring the underlying robotics technology from Sweetgreen. The system is designed to prepare food with minimal human labor, part of Lore's broader push toward automated kitchens capable of making items like pizza, burgers, chicken and seafood.
A hobbyist inspired by OpenAI's recent Navier-Stokes smoothness breakthrough created two retro MS-DOS style visualizations of fluid dynamics, using palette cycling and real-time particle animation techniques from 1990s demoscene coding. Both assembly programs were optimized to under 1,024 bytes and run authentically in DOSBox, alongside JavaScript versions for modern experimentation with expanded settings.
California's Public Employment Relations Board has officially certified the California Gig Workers Union as the bargaining representative for Uber and Lyft drivers, after at least 30% of active drivers showed support. The certification was enabled by Assembly Bill 1340, which grants independent contractor drivers the right to collectively bargain, making California the third state after Washington and Massachusetts to allow such unionization.
Programmer John Carmack reflected on Musashi's Book of Five Rings, drawing a parallel between the evolution of martial arts from combat necessity to hobby and sport, and the trajectory of manual coding skills as AI increasingly automates programming tasks. He suggests that meticulous hand-written coding is shifting from an essential craft into a ceremonial practice, much like traditional martial arts became after losing battlefield relevance.
A developer released a browser-hosted IDE that supports writing and running assembly programs for four architectures: M68K, MIPS, RISC-V and Z80. The tool includes a virtual screen and terminal, letting programs draw graphics, read mouse and keyboard input, or handle standard text input and output.