Of course, this only made sense when Apple was more of an underdog to IBM, and Ciro Santilli greatly admires their defiance of the norm.

As of 2020 however, Apple is kind of on the top of the mobile world, and Think different simply makes no sense anymore, notably because it relies on closed source offline software used by millions.

it's Popular Now It Sucks comes to mind.

This is a trap every company that prides itself on it's "alternative culture" sets for itself. If they succeed, they could become the norm.

Because Ciro's a software engineer, and he's done enough staring in computers for a lifetime already, and he believes in the power of Git, he didn't pay much attention to this part ;-)

According to the eLife paper, the code appears to have been uploaded to: github.com/d-j-k/puntseq. TODO at least mention the key algorithms used more precisely.

Ciro can however see that it does present interesting problems!

Because it was necessary to wait for 2 days to get our data, the workshop first reused sample data from previous collections done earlier in the year to illustrate the software.

First there is some signal processing/machine learning required to do the base calling, which is not trivial in the Oxford Nanopore, since neighbouring bases can affect the signal of each other. This is mostly handled by Oxford Nanopore itself, or by hardcore programmers in the field however.

After the base calling was done, the data was analyzed using computer programs that match the sequenced 16S sequences to a database of known sequenced species.

This is of course not just a simple direct string matching problem, since like any in experiment, the DNA reads have some errors, so the program has to find the best match even though it is not exact.

The PuntSeq team would later upload the data to well known open databases so that it will be preserved forever! When ready, a link to the data would be uploaded to: www.puntseq.co.uk/data

All companies with investors are evil, make no mistake.

They may have nice looking save the world charity campaigns, but once you get even close to affecting their revenue stream, the axe falls. The charity is only a publicity stunt to reduce wages.

Some level of government intervention is needed to control investor's greed.

It is just a question of business model: some business models are eviler than others. Making people pay for operating systems being possible the most evil of all.

One thing must be said however. You can learn a lot by working in a good company, because it ends up putting you in contact with practical real problems that you wouldn't otherwise see by just doing your own random low-tech startup. This is especially valuable if said company is also enlightened enough to use and contribute back to open source software, thus improving the world and paying back the moral debt of using other people's work for free.

Another important point to consider is who in the company is evil. In a sane tech company, the lowly engineers are going to be non-evil. And then the more you go up the management chain, the more aligned you have to be with investors, and thus the more and more evil you get. HR is just evil from the bottom though, it's just the nature of their job.