Consumption 12/2020

Keywords: software make, interesting idea, make trading, trading software, chess, article, system, search, author, talk, nextstep, pim, usage, method. Powered by TextRank.

I've decided to write about the articles and other interesting media I have consumed each month. This is the first post in that series and it covers the months of November and December 2020

3 takes aways from Quantopian shutting down

You can't crowd source alpha - The business models was to see if the masses could come up with a way to beat the markets

given the tools. Apparently they couldn't.

If depending on software make sure you pay for it - This is a take from the other perspective, traders that were using Quantopian to make trading decision now have to find another platform
The trading software market favors smaller companies - The reasoning behind this is that there are different markets and each trader has a different strategy and needs. This makes the economics of producing trading/analysis software more beneficial for smaller companies.

Before Mac OSX: What was NeXTSTEP and why did people love it?

This article explains how NeXTSTEP stood out from the competition in the 90s with elegant usage of fonts, icons and visuals and an easy to use object oriented programming API and networking stack. An interesting and fun fact is that the level editors for Quake were programmed for NeXTSTEP because of it's easy API.

Self limitation due to software simplification

PIM expert Karl Voit writes about how users are limiting themselves by not investing the time into learning the full functions of the programs they use. There are 2 interesting references in this article

Bruce Tognazzini talking about how his take on the two approaches of search vs browse and how Apple has tackled this

UX question

Jeff Atwood has a blog post in how he thinks that it's only the mediocre users that matter as they will constitute the highest percentage of people using the program

Dwarf Fortress creator Tarn Adams talks about simulating the most complex magic system ever

That's a long title for an article. Wes Fenlon interviews Tarn and he starts with his vision of a teleportation system and goes on to describe a magic system that evolves with the game progression

My talk at Microsoft - Richard Stallman

I was surprised that RMS would even set foot in a Microsoft campus but apparently he gave a talk to some MS folks. He made a bunch of suggestions that promotes freedom of software (duh). He also defends him self against some allegations made by others because of this talk.

How I collected debt from an unscrupulous merchant

The author shares his story of how a policy with hidden fine print prevented him from collecting his cut from referrals made via his site and the "Organized professional method" he used to implement this.

Digital tools I wish existed - Jonathan Borichevsky

The author summarizes some of the missing things in today's PIM and additions that would make managing the vast of information that we consume today. I like his ideas for a single search platform to search all of the media that you have consumed.

Retrieval of similar chess positions

This is a novel paper that explores the usage of text based information retrieval techniques for a query by example request that fuzzy matches positions. The idea of similarity is rooted in adjusting the score based on the pieces distance from their position in the query and also the connectivity of the pieces expressed by the attacks and defense they provide. I was planning on using this technique to develop a chess bot that plays similar to a chess celebrity.

Hiding messages in chess games - James Stanley

This is an article that describes a method that the author came up with to encode a string in a valid PGN. The main idea is that the possible moves at a given position are used as the base for the next character to be encoded.

Body composition and diabetes risk

This was an article that outlines the risks of being overweight and how they contribute to diabetes mellitus.

Reverse engineering the source code of the BioNTech/Pfeizer SARS-CoV-2 vaccine

A great insight on how the manufactured vaccines RNA sneaks past the immune system to produce DNA for the body to train against. Really interesting things on programming molecules and proteins.

Chess2Vec - Andreas Stockl

A short tutorial on an interesting idea: representing chess moves as vectors to calculate similarity between moves.