Huh? Blue books are typically used for essays and are graded whole.
I've never seen anyone attempt blue books for anything else.
I used them in graduate physics courses 2008-2010
Readit Newsrubidium commented on Bring Back the Blue-Book Exam chronicle.com/article/bri... · Posted by u/diodorus
That's a poster child of a casualty of ZIRP. Hard to imagine an industry any longer duration and hungry for cheap risk.
I'm not sure about the thesis that this is primarily fallout from free money and suppressed interest rates though. That was really a '22 story, and even with long and variable lags, that element has been in play for a while now.
Oversupply of talent definitely sounds like a good argument though. I'll posit there has been some disruption by recent developments in the industry. Also, while metaverse and crypto startups may be passe, the AI scene has disgusting amounts of hype and money, and crypto ain't dead either, which brings me back to the earlier point that I do think some disruption is there to fill the gap in the narrative.
For people I talk, it is the end of ZIRP that caused it. ZIRP ended in April 2022.
Even as interest rates went up the VCs still had committed funds to distribute for a year to 18 months. Then the biotechs had runway for 1-2 years from that. Now that’s all gone, and they can’t raise their next series. In the meantime, C> plus synbio is recently having a lower win rate than hoped for.
That plus all the money that is there is all going to AI companies due to the shorter time to return / higher potential roic / hype.
IMO it's far too early for "AI" to have had a meaningful effect on Software company hiring. A more plausible explanation for me is that between roughly 2012 and 2022, there was a tremendous increase in the supply of SWE talent (via undergraduate CS programs massively increasing enrollment, boot camps, immigration, etc), fueled primarily by ZIRP. On the demand side, ZIRPy VC funding primarily went to bullshit Crypto and (to a lesser extent) bullshit Metaverse companies, most of which have not panned out, meaning there is a dearth of late stage and newly public companies to hire said talent.
Biotech is facing a huge downturn right now too.
rubidium commented on Kodak says it might have to cease operations [updated] cnn.com/2025/08/12/busine... · Posted by u/mastry
I would hardly describe a brand licensing agreement as a pivot of the company.
A true pivot of Kodak was moving from just doing chemicals for film to doing chemicals for the pharmaceutical industry. That actually involved employees changing what they do, changing factory equipment, etc.
Fujifilm succeeded at it (before Kodak tried). Interesting case study between the two companies.
rubidium commented on Comparing baseball greats across eras, who comes out on top? phys.org/news/2025-07-bas... · Posted by u/PaulHoule
The overlap of statisticians and baseball fans is high (anecdotal).
Hypothesis 1: statisticians love good data sources, and with its many games, innings, and types of hits / pitches it’s a great source.
Hypothesis 2: makes you seem more interesting at dinner parties
hypothesis 3: a natural overlap of preferences
man! i wish i knew how to do a better job with that. there's just so much stuff. do you have any ideas?
I have no idea why you’re using icons for 13 things. Use words.
They make it seem like a big deal. It’s pretty much how all software used to ship :)
rubidium commented on What's going on with gene therapies? nehalslearnings.substack.... · Posted by u/nehal96
One of the sort of strange things about gene therapy is how cheap a custom solution really is. You can arbitrarily genetically modify a plant or bacteria for a few hundred dollars to the level of arbitrarily picking the letters of a gene sequence (or you know, doing some research and doing something real) and getting the gene modifying tools manufactured very very cheaply.
If you have a slightly different form of a much more common ailment, there probably is good hope that eventually patient specific gene therapy for you will be something of a routine. You may be taking extra risks because of the lack of available research, but I'm sure any patient can become well informed enough to make the choice for themselves. I'm not saying it's commonplace or anything yet, but the tools are there or almost there to fix a slightly incorrect single gene issue (like a single point deletion or letter swap, etc).
Like just look
https://www.idtdna.com/pages/products/crispr-genome-editing/...
obviously this is for research and not in vivo human treatment which takes quite a bit more care and specifics to target whatever tissues / organs / whatever is broken in you...
but the reagents for doing custom sequence edits are priced for research in the hundreds of dollars. sure once an established research program finished and got approved they'd spend tens or hundreds of millions and charge each patient millions
but it's not insane to imagine a biohacker curing you in their garage for $5,000 while only maybe killing you
Given that, I think there's a lot of hope that custom gene therapy will become commonplace and relatively affordable.
You’ve taken a very small slice of the total workflow to develop cas9 crispr edits. Yes some components are “not crazy expensive”, but that’s not therapeutic production levels. And no sequencing. And no bioinformatics. And then zero tissue targeting/ delivery or safety studies.
So $5k is a massive stretch. I do think costs are coming down. But don’t want to oversell current state of “garage hacking” either.
(1) As an engineer, I prefer to be managed and guided by someone who actually knows what I work on, preferably better than I know it.
(2) A manager who actually understands the tech is often better at unblocking the team.
(3) Since senior IC openings tend to grow very thin as you become older, TLM path might be a viable career path for at least some.
Can this role work if we don't expect IC output from the TLM beyond what they themselves take on for their own satisfaction and growth?
As a manager of people who know far more about the things they do than I do, my goal is to assist and ensure in the right place (for them and the org). It’d be foolish for me to hire peons who know less than me.