I've pitched Blender to NSF Review panels and the higher ups that come by those to visit as the way science should do software. Would love to know of others as successful as this, particularly as it crosses boundries to industry.
Can you elaborate on how Blender exemplifies “the way science should do software”? Are you talking specifically about some aspect like community governance, user experience, code quality, etc.?
If the only two examples that are presented are "SpaceX" and "Latin America" can we not dismiss any further importance on the conflict-of-interest aspect alone? A completely failed experiment, and a company that can create millions simply by tweeting- who buys this?
Very hard to escape biology unless you invest in understanding it. Ticks, mosquito-born diseases, agricultural pests, they don't care about AI, politics, or space-races or geo political boundaries. We, on the other hand, require life to go on, it's asynchronous.
This is why natural history collections, and taxonomists are going to be more critical than ever, at some point we'll need to re-invest in knowing what's out there, and, more importantly how and why it's different than what we knew before. Biodiversity is vast, this isn't easy.
Companies that anticipate this (we know we're going to get a billion requests for "what's this fly", how can we monitize this?), and also actully understand that species are literally invaluable lab experiments running millions of years, are bound to benefit. In a not so distance Scifi future will we see big pharma, defense, etc. protecting areas and their environments because they finally grok this?
I highly doubt big pharma will intervene. Humans only care about the foreseeable future. Our interest and actions regarding climate change shows that openly to each and everyone of us.
Big pharma will intervene when they realize that life is one big chemistry experiment, and it's running longer than any lab has. AI to predict, nature to produce, then you need to figure out how nature produced. Understanding the pathways in nature -> quicker time to product.
Child comment is probably right, "asymmetrical" was likely going through my mind, or some chimera of both. I mean to say that whatever humans do, their actions ("requests"), don't get a response from "nature" immediately, the "response" is unpredictable, particularly as to when it will come back. If we get a break down SS, we get no response. Request(s) -> nature impacted -> some time passes -> response comes back, but not all nice and linear, nor always what we expected. "Promises" only coming with deep understanding.
But yet I lurked longer than many of other product pages I land on to think about what might be going on thanks to the nature of graphics and the non-standard non-bootstrap template approach.
Sometimes providing TLDR means you are providing a way for people to instantly ignore you without further thought. Maybe there is a desire to engage people who think.
"To ensure consistent data interpretation and enable robust aggregation across experiments, metadata were standardized using established ontologies."
Can't emphasize enough about how DNA requires human data curation to make things work, even from day one alignments models were driven based on biological observations. Glad to see UBERON, which represents a massive amount of human insight and data curation of what is for all intents and purposes a semantic-web product (OWL based RDF at the heart) playing a significant role.
On a "price awareness vein" - I've thought that a killer app would be a phone app that runs in a grocery store, it detects costs, brands, and sizes, and overlays two things 1) the option that is cheaper per mass and 2) whether there are cheaper options in other stores. Bonus for "this no-name is the same as that brand-name".
Imagine waving your phone, or having on your VR glasses and getting this feedback "instantly".
Plus, you can sell what you learned to sellers so they can out-compete one-another (and drive prices down for consumers).
In a sci-fi world this would turn grocery stores into Faraday cages quickly.
Maybe not useful for the Doordash generation, but the majority of human life can't afford such.
The discovery part is anything but. I was trained to recognize scams in grocery stores (the on sale smaller is never cheaper then the bulk item... until rarely it is) early on by my parents. Few people recognize just how bad this is. Educating folks with somethign that does it for them first is a first step.
But yah, completely with you on the "sales is hell" part, that bit was for the startup bros.
The solar system is the Trojan horse. The real business is the financial relationship with 40 million customers."
Soooo... they have a good thing going, there is an opportunity to fsk them over? Like more centralized fees?