I'm currently reading Nation by Terry Pratchett. I have previously read all of the Discworld novels and thoroughly enjoyed them. Then last year I read the Terry Pratchett biography (also worth a read, IMO!), where it is mentioned that Terry himself thought Nation was probably his best book. Had to give it a read after that! So far it's pretty good, but I do miss the characters from the Discworld universe to be honest.

I haven't read Nation but I till now Guards! Guards! Guards! has been my favorite. Its been a while since I read Discworld, will have to pick up nation

I was part of developing the Lumin-i variant of this (working for Smart Eye)! Working with the Smartbox team was a pleasure :).

The solution actually works pretty well, especially when calibrated to a single individual.

I think they do kind of answer that under the "Why not use (possibly restricted) Python syntax?".

I understand their reasoning to be that it would require other tools to know how to parse python. Which is much more difficult than parsing toml

Ah okay, I read this but I've understood it in another way. I thought they meant using multiple variables could become a problem. But I guess it makes some sense to not parse the python ast tree but to parse with a regex.

During the first part of the pandemic I watched the lectures for the Introductory Biology course [1] from MIT OpenCourseWare. I cannot recommend those highly enough!

Almost every lecture brought up and highlighted something really cool and fascinating. Like how RNA sequencing over the last couple of years has gone from expensive to almost free, and what its uses are. Or time-lapse of bacteria adapting to antibiotics. Or just the first lecture showing a video of someone sticking a syringe into a cell. There were even some labs that could be done via a normal web browser.

For me this was so much more engaging than the biology I was thought in high school, where we mostly learned things from outdated books.

[1]: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/7-016-introductory-biology-fall-...

> [...] where we mostly learned things from outdated books

I can recommend 3 really good books, SICP-level good:

1. Biological Sequence Analysis by Durbin et al.

How to model DNA, RNA and proteins as probabilistic languages / generative models. There is also a companion book with all exercises solved.

2. Physical Biology of the Cell by Phillips et al.

A massive amount of quantitative cell biology models that use simple undergrad physics.

Originated from a Caltech course. After reading this book, all other intro to biology books look like a bag of tricks.

3. An Introduction to Systems Biology: Design Principles of Biological Circuits by Alon.

Bacterial circuits from the perspective of an electrical engineer.

Sadly, NSF discontinued funding for a totally epic Cold Spring Harbor Summer school for postdocs that taught [2,3].

A shame, we need more quantitative biology and less bags of tricks.

What are the prerequisites to handling these books? Would they be good for someone who never took Bio in college or even AP Bio in high school? Or would some remedial work be needed first?

They are self-contained. [1] discusses very little biology, it is mostly about biological sequences as formal languages. [2] is meant as an introduction to biology. [3] is self-contained, but to appreciate its content probably it would help to skim through Molecular Biology of the Gene by Watson et al.

Anything with Dr. Eric Lander from MIT (e.g. https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-to-biology-the-secre...). Hands down the best lecturer I've ever encountered.

To anyone who watches these, watch the basic chemistry series and organic chemistry lectures if you can find them. Follow that up with biochemistry to get a deeper understanding of the mechanisms of life

I agree! The graphics is what made me read the rest of the article.

This article has "interactive" in the URL. Note sure, but I think this is some special articles they do with a focus on just that? I believe there have been some other examples posted here previously, like this one: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2015/07/03/upshot/a-quic...

There was a talk at gophercon that I belive goes into more detail about how this works and the cryptography behind it (I only skimmed it so far) https://youtu.be/KqTySYYhPUE

That ci infrastructure of theirs always seems super cool. Not sure if this is common when working on graphics related projects but must be extremely helpful to get a picture diff of the output.

I belive this is the result for the commit that fixed the simspon game (for some reason they never provide the link in the post): https://fifoci.dolphin-emu.org/version/58e12395c242a839ce561...

relevant render comparison: https://fifoci.dolphin-emu.org/compare/4891635-4889700/

As far as I know, yes they do. The mobile version (https://m.xkcd.com) makes the alt text readable on mobile via click instead of hover btw!