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> It’s like forcing car makers to fund radio stations because people might listen to them in the car — and letting the stations set the price.

I wonder if this is a good analogy?

Last month Kevin Buzzard gave an interesting talk "How do you convince mathematicians a theory prover is worth their time?" about how he became involved with LEAN and some of the proofs he formalised with it:

https://youtu.be/8PLrxAfmC_o

Perhaps call it an engineered wood product? I think that's what they call MDF.

I made a typo above when I said glucose provides nitrogen that should be hydrogen.

I'm not sure I agree with your wording, ie use "glucose energy to turn nitrogen into protein". Proteins are made up of amino acids which are made from carbon, hydrogen, oxygen and nitrogen atoms. The glucose not only provides energy to the process but also carbon, oxygen and nitrogen. In fact, this is a very common process in plants.

Note: The comment I originally responded to appears to have changed their wording from "living organism" to animal. Although curiously this might not be correct either. For example, humans synthesize some “nonessential amino acids” from glucose (eg glucose → pyruvate → alanine). It's possible similar amino acid pathways can be combined into a protein completely synthesized by the human body. It also seems very likely that this happens in other animals.

https://www.quora.com/Can-the-human-body-turn-excess-glucose...

In the UK a popular plant based "meat" is Quorn. I believe that is grown by an organism that is fed glucose. The glucose is predigested maize starch. So perhaps not a single organism but two to make it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fusarium_venenatum

What's known about the biological mechanism that degrades vision when looking at computer screens? It seems that eye strain is often mentioned but how does this cause permanent permanent damage to the eyes?

This is my observation too. Compliance varies across different parts of London. I was quite surprised to be the only person wearing a mask in a busy Tesco Local in East London several weeks after they were first mandated. In comparison, in far South East London it's unusual to see someone without a mask shopping.

> Here is my formula for success (in case anyone cares): Enjoy life, try to make the world better, be a good person, go towards your passions (whether for hobby or career) and cultivate relationships because that seems to be the thing people regret most when they die.

A nice mantra. Not dissimilar to the top of PG's to do list. There he also describes "the biggest regrets of the dying"..

"Don't ignore your dreams; don't work too much; say what you think; cultivate friendships; be happy."

http://www.paulgraham.com/todo.html

Would be good if Google just published the stats on their transparency report:

https://transparencyreport.google.com/

I found this quite amusing having read about many tech job interview questions here and around the web.

Back in my junior days programming interviews were more about finding subtle syntax errors in some snippet of code you would never imagine writing. At the time many argued this is what compilers/IDEs are for.

It seems these days it's all about regurgitating computer science algorithms or something similar. Again many argue this is where you'd leverage an existing library. If one didn't exist you'd perhaps spend some time researching + testing your implementation. Quite a different environment to a time constrained interview with someone waiting to see you trip up.

I feel there's also a bit of a catfishing element going on here. If you pass the interview having nailed the inverse binary tree problem; you might expect the role to be just as intellectually challenging; what you find might be very different..

.. or get a HotPlug https://www.cru-inc.com/products/wiebetech/hotplug_field_kit...

Just discovered this now myself. The same company sells mouse jigglers.

There have been perhaps a few. One obvious one is LTCM whose board of directors included the mathematical creators of a highly used option pricing theory..

That was one contributing factor. There have been a lot of high profile scandals and this has led regulators to be far stricter. Eg we're not allowed to have personal phones in the office and must go to special areas in the building to use them. Some organisations confiscate phones (and I hear shoes) on entry; although I think this is more a concern about proprietary information.

I think Bloomberg chat is much less important as a social network these days. It's heavily monitored by compliance departments and any communication that diverges from direct market trading is generally frowned upon.

> but the customer service is incredible. If it breaks or doesn’t do something you need, the company is willing to fix it or build it.

At $20k+ per annum cost I wouldn't expect anything less. That said we Europeans have been asking for non American date format support for years but it's a won't fix. So I guess the fee still isn't large enough.

A big complaint I have is why can't I keep the data I download off the terminal for an exchange if I'm already paying the exchange fees in addition to bloomberg's annual fee? It's like renting data. Also it makes it difficult to switch to a competing product.

Another mild annoyance is the left field approach their reps have about the tech that is visible when they make their regular visits to your office. Your company might have invested in developing data screens ,(outside of Bloomberg) and some months later those views mysteriously become available as new functionality for all users. It's even worse if you use their API; eg, you might write a private back-testing indicator specific to your market and within a day or two it appears in their public indicator list.

Something I've come to rediscover is how good vi/vim is on a slow network connection. Our sharp networking team route me from London to Sydney so I can remote back to my London PC.

Seeing what you type several seconds after you typed it is reminiscent of the 90s and dial up connections.

Having familiar vi keybindings in so many applications these days has been a productivity saver.

> I'm rather suspicious of this article. It smells a bit like a meat industry funded piece.

The authors of these BBC articles (Worklife/Future) are quite independent. They are typically asked to research and write about a specific topic. Some times they can't help but bring their own bias to the discussion.

Some more info here:

https://silq.ethz.ch/

You can buy FFAs

Doh! Copy paste fail sorry

A mouse model for human autism is contrived at best.

The cynic in me feels that some researchers are running out of ideas. The only experimental apparatus are poor knockout mice.

Arguably an analogy is trying to fix a compiled binary with a hex editor and replacing all your 0x11s with 0x0a. Then claiming the segfault is a good model of how another binary crashes (due to a null pointer exception or whatever really).

From their website it says "cloud infrastructure services and all the tools developers need to create, collaborate, test, and deploy solutions to production".

Basically, a python cloud-based IDE that includes a batch scheduler and object persistence backed by some no-sql database. Also has a tightly coupled DAG (think pyungo). Built on top of docker it seems.

They're geared towards insurance companies, hedge funds and banks. The system has similarities to systems used in other banks eg SecDB at GS, Athena at JPM and Quartz at BAML.

Any one have any experience with Beacon or have any views? Are there any open source alternatives out there that do something similar? Just curious.

Perhaps for those situations I mentioned one could argue that human guidance had a hand. However, there many other examples of cross species altruism where humans play no role (other than observational).

As an alien observer from a far one might wonder how humans might want to exploit my knowledge, technology or even the flavour of my flesh (if I have any). That's assuming that alien has mostly inquisitive intentions.

Alternatively, aliens with more exploitative intentions might be just as bad as some humans are. Perhaps, because we are still in our technological infancy we have little to take advantage of for now. Even less to warrant the work/energy expenditure required to plan a visit to our neck of the galaxy.

I think there are a few counter examples. Many pet owners have posted videos of their dogs and cats being protective of their (human) babies. In fact, Koko the gorilla was very affectionate towards her kittens.

Interesting that the authors concluded there's no strong causal relationship between unit test coverage and the number of defects or perceived code quality.

I felt that perhaps defects detected by tests during original coverage might have been overlooked. It seems they were examining the defects detected by only increasing coverage.

Maybe some of the code coverage they studied were simple smoke tests without much granularity.

Code quality perception is probably very subjective.

After contacting Feitian it seems their devices aren't that expensive after all and they also offer NFC programmable tokens as well as bespoke optical configurable ones too. They appear very helpful.

Thanks for your suggestion.

I've considered building a custom solution as you suggest with a pi-zero. I'd need to 3d print cases and attach a simple LCD display. The option is also more versatile as one could add potentially NTP sync time via WiFi and perhaps add richer display.

That said, I'm looking something pre-canned and low powered. Developing a pi-based system would be a bit costly (time + money) for me at this stage.

I have seen a device that ticks a few boxes. Although seems a bit pricey and appears to require proprietary hardware to configure the devices:

https://www.ftsafe.com/onlinestore/product?id=9

Looks extensive and I'll likely try using the module at some point.

One thing, why not stash all the function methods under a "ring" or "cache" attribute, eg

  @ring.lru()
  def foo()
    ..

  foo.cache.update()
  foo.cache.delete() 
  ..

This might be less likely to clash with any existing function attributes (if you're wrapping a 3rd party function say).