AI slop

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I’m certainly with you on repairing your own Äktas! Cytiva is useless.

Unfortunately, all these scientific-industrial complex companies love to milk us for every penny. The only scenario I’ve seen open source software is in data processing, not collection. Things like spectral simulation, electron microscopy data processing, etc. Hell, I’ve built and contributed to several of them. Why is this? I think there are a few reasons:

1. IP The big conglomerates buy up any smaller company which competes with them, and are more than happy to blatantly infringe one another’s patents and fight it out in court if they can sell more units. I find it very hard to believe they would even consider respecting the GPL. If a smaller company tries to make open software, the conglomerates will grab their software, ignore the license, and drive them out of business. Also, if you replicate functions of the proprietary software in anything but a cleanroom environment, they are fairly likely to sue you.
2. Money: even if it comes in the instrument “bundle”, the software often carries its own significant fee. This is one more way to nickel and dime you, but it is also a way to fluff out the bundle. The more items are in the bundled price, the less obvious it is that the bundled price is significantly higher than the nominal cost of the instrument.
3. Compute topology: providing an API on the instrument to talk to requires the bulk of the processing (especially the time-sensitve stuff) to be done on the instrument itself, or the exact timing of API requests becomes very important. This makes the API less useful as a general access surface, because very few scientists know how to write very precisely timed software. To do this on-instrument processing requires an additional microcontroller (or more often, because the basic structure of most instruments has not changed since the first version, an archaic CPU). ^[1] The proposition of “spend more money on hardware, to potentially make less money on software” is hard to sell to them.
4. Motivation: It’s just hard to justify to a PI or a funding agency that you’re spending time duplicating the functionality of existing, working software you already have for the sake of opening it up. So, the people who have a good argument for open software are the ones who don’t have access to the proprietary software to work off of, and so are in the worst position to actually do it.

These are the obstacles to open software on proprietary hardware, so I would argue that open hardware enables open software to be practical, and vice versa. And for basic things like the microscopes and bioreactors others have mentioned, that works out well.

However, as I’m sure you know, the components in most instruments can’t exactly be found in a hardware store! So more complex open apparatus has its own challenges, especially the lifetime: when selecting parts, you dont have a contract with the manufacturer, so you have no idea when your components will change slightly, or the product line will be EOL’d by the manufacturer. This could happen while you’re building the first version, but more likely will happen once you publish your open spec. How do you help someone who can’t get an equivalent component?

All of this leads to the status quo: instead of people taking the time to create a reproducible open piece of hardware and software, most home-built instruments are irrelplicable, poorly documented, 1-of-1 creations.

Anyhow, in general I am of course in favor of open hardware and software, but I think its interesting to understand the complex set of factors surrounding them. As a result, I’ve focused a lot of my effort on those data processing packages – if you need one copy of proprietary software to collect the data that’s one thing, but anybody should be able to analyze it after the fact without having to buy that proprietary software. And of course, don’t write your open source software in a proprietary language, people! (ahem ahem, MATLAB)

I’m in the exact same position.

I would say chocolatey and scoop are pretty much interchangeable. I don’t remember why I landed on scoop. Agreed that until recently there have been no package managers on Windows whatsoever.

I mean kinda. You have to use both WinGet and Scoop to cover all the use cases…

Well, in this case I think it’s a remnant of n++ predating any package manager on windows. I do think that an embedded self-updater is better than having to download a new version through the browser.

It wasn’t entirely clear to me if the compromise effects those of us who installed it though scoop/winget, as the package manager should pull directly from the correct source, so the compromised updater shouldnt matter. Reinstalled to be sure.

Yes it’s placed flat, I’m not sure if it’s supposed to turn off but it certainly doesn’t.

I do love my bangle.js 2. i was feeling some nostalgia for my Pebble Time 2, so I pulled it out to try it with the new app, but then I remembered that I hadn’t updated anything on my Bangle in ages (dont generally have chrome enabled ony phone) and the updates made everything so much smoother. No reason to switch back to pebble, especially in its current state.

My only complaint is that there is no way for the watch to tell if it’s on your wrist, and the heart rate monitor and screen can’t be woken up separately. So it can be annoying at night, when unless it’s fully shut off the HRM and screen will light up the room every 10min.

Same for me…wierd.

Okular is the way to go for anything that’s typed, it has a lot more capabilities than Evince. For handwriting, I’ve used Inkscape, and Libreoffice Draw. They’re roughly similar in capabilities.

Sure, but they can’t build Pandoc translation against an experimental format, so no LaTeX anytime soon.

Well, Typst is explicitly a no-go for anyone who has to submit a manuscript, until it they get a damn HTML representation, so Pandoc can get it to LaTeX. There’s practically nowhere I could use Typst except my own notes, and I’ve tried!

Yup. Even for technical writing, markdown with embedded LaTeX is great in most cases, thanks largely to Pandoc and its ability to convert the markdown into pure LaTeX. There are even manuscript-focused Markdown editors, like Zettlr.

Will do! I didn’t make this clear, I did think labplot was a great software for folks who don’t already have the skillset to make plots directly in python – which is the majority of people, and probably the target audience.

Keep up the good work!

Mi was trying out labplot yesterday, and as far as I can tell it can only really plot, not do any sort of transformation or data analysis. The plotting UI itself is pretty nice and the plots look good, but for most of my use cases its worth it to just spin up a Jupyter notebook and work with MatPlotLib directly.

If it could become a general-purpose UI for matplotlib, thatd be fantastic, but its pretty limited in actual usability for me at the moment.

Maybe the graph mode of logseq?

Same question, on vanilla android.

Yeah heliboard is the only one I’ve found that is actually usable on a day to day. Just wish the autocorrect was better, other than that no complaints.

AntennaPod is better than it has any right to be – on a modern device, it’s super smooth.