We're in the process of migrating our entire code base over to this new language (One of the big 4 banks) - Keen to add early adopters to our resumes : - )
I would argue that craftsmanship includes a thorough understanding and cognitive model of the code. And, as far as I understand it, these agents are syntactic wonders but can not really understand anything. Which would preclude any sort of craftsmanship, even if what they make happens to be well-built.
So, I respect the entrepeneurship and technical skills to make this. Well done!
That being said, this is insane.
Maintaining your social network is a skill, just like being able to swim, doing math, being able to hold a good conversation, being able to code or cook or do your taxes.
The "promise" and "illusion" of silicon valley is that all problems (including and maybe even especially social ones) can be solved with technology. This is not true.
Having to use your brain to think about things is definitely painful. It also has incredibly good long-term effects -- and also negative short-term effects because it costs energy. It's similar to eating well, regularly exercising and other aspects of taking care of yourself.
Making sure you can remember to think about other people is not a problem -- it's a REALLY valuable skill that is gradually disappearing.
The problem is not remembering other people, it's contacting them. One always has a thousand excuses to not do the right thing. By gamifying it, and setting reminders, it gives a nudge in the right direction.
It's not different to setting reminders to go to the gym, take your medicine, or any other thing you should do regularly.
And by using this clutch you can train your social muscles so you end up not needing it.
I've used something similar in the past, setting up reminders during the day to keep in contact with someone, using them enough so now I can keep in touch with them without needing the reminders (I no longer have them set up).
For some people there are "basic" things that are hard, these kind of tools are for them.
Basically you're telling people to not be ADHD. Well thanks but it doesn't work like that. I wish. Reminders definitely help especially because our minds are so bad at prioritising. Tools like this can definitely help.
The page specifically mentions ADHD and the design is also a bit too quirky for neurotypicals anyway.
I agree completely. When I'm thinking of my friends, I'm quick to contact them. But when life gets busy and I'm heads-down doing stuff for weeks at a time, anything outside my line of sight tends to get forgotten about.
Frankly, "just remember to do X" strikes me like "have you ever tried just not having cancer" in terms of useful advice. And given the number of generalized to-do apps like Reminders, OmniFocus, Todoist, etc., it seems like there's a huge market for people who need an app to remind them of stuff.
It's kind of weird that Romania has done so well, given that amount of turmoil in Romanian politics and Romania in general in the last 20 years.
Basically, it went up for Romania because they got access to the EU market (in terms of both exports and remittances) starting in 2007 and that helped, _despite_ everything else that went on. So.. kind of a win for Romania and the EU, I guess.
Smart young people left for rich EU countries: doctors, engineers, even construction workers left. It took time until the old generation that remained behind retired and now we have the effects of that: better paid jobs.
When I started working as a doctor in 2007, my salary was ~150 euro/month. It is now ~2000 euro/month. Some of it is experience/seniority, but most of it is just jobs competition from richer EU countries.
The generation during the population spike following the communist regime's 1967 Decree 770 (banning aborition and contraception) is up for pensions in about 7 years, which will create a pension crisis and a default of Romania's state pension fund. We'll see its effect on household income per capita, but it will certainly be under pressure. They already have increased labour taxes, thanx to the former goverments' deficit spending.
Idiotic and massively overlooks/underestimates how complex biology is.
What about beneficial and neutral but important bacteria and viruses? "Air" is actually a complex soup of all types of things. This like applying HCl to a skin infection.
I would consider it unlikely that airborne germs form a significant input to our microbiomes.
For example, the gut microbiome is in flux for about the first 3 years of life, and thereafter it's mostly only the relative abundances of different microbes that shift in response to diet, you need something like antibiotics or severe diarrhea to actually induce permanent changes (usually for the worse).
Compared to that, there really aren't many microbes in the air. For children, it could very possibly be bad, but even then I'd expect most of their microbial input to come from their parents, food, and surfaces. Which are already grossly deficient compared to old-school rural settings, but I'm not sure if germicidal UV would make it worse.
I doubt it would be a problem for the microbiome [1] but I would worry about the immune system. Would being inside in sterilized air all the time mean you can't go outside or into a forest without getting really sick?
[1] but who am I, it would still be worthwhile to check obviously
The underlying thought is that outside air (such as a forest) gets UV sterilized by the sun. So this would bring inside air up to the sterilization level of outside air.
I recently read the book "Invisible Friends," and in it, among other things, the author does go on to explain that it's theorised that many skin infections come from a lack of biodiversity in a persons' skin microbiome, because the "good" or neutral microbes compete with the "bad" for resources. Supposedly people who share a house together often have similar gut microbiomes, too.
So yeah, I don't know. I think you have a point here.
Take theater classes. Or join a (team) sports club. Both teach you skills that you most likely will not acquire elsewhere and that are directly applicable to interviews.
Also, having been on both sides, I can tell you that hiring is just a crap shoot. My (anecdotal!) experience is that a lot of hiring is e8ther 50% gut feelings-based or 50% keyword-based. And in the worse case, both.
I can understand this for "small" data, say less than 10 Mb.
In bioinformatics, basically all of the file formats are human-readable/text based. And file sizes range between 1-2Mb and 1 Tb. I regularly encounter 300-600 Gb files.
In this context, human-readable files are ridiculously inefficient, on every axis you can think of (space, parsing, searching, processing, etc.). It's a GD crime against efficiency.
And at that scale, "readable" has no value, since it would take you longer to read the file than 10 lifetimes.
I do not think the argument is that ALL data should be in human readable form, but I think there are far more cases of data being in a binary form when it would be better human readable. Your example of a case where it is human readable when it should be binary is rarer for most of us.
In some cases human readable data is for interchange and it should be processed and queried in other forms - e.g. CSV files to move data between databases.
An awful lot of data is small - and these days I think you can say small is quite a bit bigger than 10Mb.
Quite a lot of data that is extracted from a large system would be small at that point, and would benefit from being human readable.
The benefit of data being human readable is not necessarily that you will read it all, but that it is easier to read bits that matter when you are debugging.
> human-readable files are ridiculously inefficient on every axis you can think of (space, parsing, searching, processing, etc.).
In bioinformatics, most large text files are gzip'd. Decompression is a few times slower than proper file parsing in C/C++/Rust. Some pure python parsers can be "ridiculously inefficient" but that is not the fault of human-readability. Binary files are compressed with existing libraries. Compressed binary files are not noticeably faster to parse than compressed text files. Binary formats can be indeed smaller but space-efficienct formats take years to develop and tend to have more compatibility issues. You can't skip the text format phase.
> And at that scale, "readable" has no value, since it would take you longer to read the file than 10 lifetimes.
You can't read the whole file by eye, but you can (and should often) eyeball small sections in a huge file. For that, you need a human-readable file format. A problem with this field IMHO is that not many people are literally looking at the data by eye.
One of the problems is that a lot of bioinformatics formats nowadays have to hold so much data that most text editors stop working properly. For example, FASTA splits DNA data into lines of 50-80 characters for readability. But in FASTQ, where the '>' and '+' characters collide with the quality scores, as far as I know, DNA and the quality data are always put into one line each. Trying to find a location in a 10k long line gets very awkward. And I'm sure some people can eyeball Phred scores from ASCII, but I think they are a minority, even among researchers.
Similarly, NEXUS files are also human-readable, but it'd be tough to discern the shape of inlined 200 node Newick trees.
When I was asking people who did actual bioinformatics (well, genomics) what some of their annoyances when working with the bioinf software were, having to do a bunch of busywork on files in-between pipeline steps (compressing/uncompressing, indexing) was one of the complaints mentioned.
I think there's a place in bioinformatics for a unified binary format which can take care of compression, indexing, and metadata. But with that list of requirements it'd have to be binary. Data analysis moved from CSVs and Excel files to Parquet, and I think there's a similar transition waiting to happen here
My hypothesis is that bioinformatics favors text files, because open source tools usually start as research code.
That means two things. First, the initial developers are rarely software engineers, and they have limited experience developing software. They use text files, because they are not familiar with the alternatives.
Second, the tools are usually intended to solve research problems. The developers rarely have a good idea what the tools eventually end up doing and what data the files need to store. Text-based formats are a convenient choice, as it's easy extend and change them. By the time anyone understands the problem well enough to write a useful specification, the existing file format may already be popular, and it's difficult to convince people to switch to a new format.
Yes, most bioinformatics tools are the result of research projects.
However, the most common bioinformatics file formats have actually been devised by excellent software engineers (e.g. SAM/BAM, VCF, BED).
I think it is just very convenient to have text-based formats as you don't need any special libraries to read/modify the files and can reach for basic Unix text-processing tools instead. Such modifications are often needed in a research context.
Also, space-efficient file formats (e.g. CRAM) are often within reach once disk space becomes a pressing issue. Now you only need to convince the team to use them. :)
Totally. A good chuck of the formats are just TSV files with some metadata in header. Setting aside the drawbacks, this approach is both straightforward and flexible.
I think we're seeing some change in that regard, though. VCF got BCF and SAM and got BAM
Another thing is human readable is typically synonymous with unindexed, which becomes a problem when you have large files and care about performance. In bioinformatics we often distribute sidecar index files with the actual data, which is janky and inefficient. Why not have a decent format to begin with?
Further, when the file is unindexed it's even harder to read it as a human because you can't easily skip to a particular section. I have this trouble often where my code can efficiently access the data once it's loaded, but a human-eye check is tedious/impossible because you have to scroll through gigabytes to find what you want.
> Another thing is human readable is typically synonymous with unindexed
Indexing is not directly related to binary vs text. Many text formats in bioinformatics are indexed and many binary formats are not when they are not designed with indexing in mind.
> a human-eye check is tedious/impossible because you have to scroll through gigabytes to find what you want.
Yes, indexing is better but without indexing, you can use command line tools to extract the portion you want to look at and then pipe to "more" or "less".
Who the hell is going to use it then? You certainly won't, because you're dependent on AI.