The first CRISPR gene editing treatment for sickle cell disease was approved. An amazing start to what I hope is a future of cures for various genetic diseases.
Dracunculiasis (disease caused by Guinea worm infection in humans) is almost eradicated. We hit a new all-time low for known cases: 13 last year, and now only 3 in the first half of 2023.
It snuck up on me. I love the first game, completed it and the dlc 100%. The first time I heard anything about the sequel was less than a week before launch. I broke the sacred code and preordered. I don't have much time to play, but I'm making my way through the gate puzzles now.
Honestly, AI has been helping me a lot as a student and someone that just likes to research stuff. It's development over the last year has been incredible.
I have been really appreciating open source software this year. I always preferred FOSS over the alternatives (Firefox, Thunderbird, Libre Office etc) but I tried to use it for as much as I could this year, even professionally.
Haven't bootet into my Windows partition with Adobe Cloud for months now, it's almost exclusively Inkscpape, Scribus, Blender and Krita on Fedora and I love it! I'm also slowly, slowly getting into Godot which seems like another piece of amazing software.
Sure there are some (very) rough edges here and there and I will have fire up Illustrator or Unity (🤢) at some point when clients demand it but I'm pretty amazed at how well it's going.
Welp, sending this is totally gonna jinx it but whatevs 😘
2023 was my personal 'year of the Linux desktop' I barely knew anything about FOSS up until 2018 maybe?, And the only reason I used Firefox was because I had been using it since 2010 and didn't wanna change.
Now I'm EXTREMELY grateful for FOSS software and use it over non-free alternatives any chance I get.
The other day I was trying to get an empty vr project to run in unity. After half a day I just gave up. There's just so many options and packages and license agreements. I'm gonna switch to Godot and Steam index. Even if it's a lot of work I know I can share it with others.
Maybe not a breakthrough compared to some of the other comments but home assistant got local voice control this year. For the price of a raspberry pi and a 13 dollar microphone you can have a completely local home automation system controlled by your voice. You can even hook it up to a LLM like chat gpt if you want via a different phrase to do some fun party tricks
For those not aware, Melanomas are not only one of the deadliest and most common cancers, it isn't really very treatable with chemotherapies or radiation. And yes, Fuck cancer - we're coming for you, bitch!