My issue got jacked, so I found a new one, and this time it was assigned to me. Seems like an easier issue anyway so we’ll see what happens. I’ve been working on it, and building the project takes a ton of time, which is unfortunate haha. I think it’s mostly because of all the cloning. That’s probably the most challenging part, though there’s also the aspect of trying to install an older version of git in order to properly test this.

I read the System76 article. It seems pretty cool. It’s very interesting to consider that most open-source firmware is pretty rare. I guess that technicaly if the operating system is open source, and the driver is limited in scope by the operating system, proprietary firmware isn’t inherently unsafe but it has the potential to be, and perhaps to exploit vulnerabilities quietly. But open-source firmware is also what Karen Sandler was referring to, it gives people the ability to easily modify hardware for their use cases, and it seems pretty clear that software is much easier to modify than hardware. So this is a pretty cool innovation which could have interesting implications for the future of hardware.

Kevin Fleming from Bloomberg came to speak to us. Bloomberg’s terminal is their biggest product, and it provides an enormous service to the financial industry. He told a story about one time when the system went down, and the UK could not sell bonds that day despite their plans, because people expected to buy bonds on the Bloomberg terminal. The amount of data they handle is insane apparently. And even more impressively, an enormous portion of that data must is handled between 9:30:00 AM, when the stock market opens in NYC, and 9:30:01 AM. They cannot cache the data to handle later, processing must be done in that time. This is very, very impressive that they’re able to minimize latency for processing of billions of data points.

Bloomberg also contributes to the open-source world. Their biggest contribution is probably to the Jupyter Notebook, which they use as part of their platform. They also encourage employees to contribute to open-source projects, and even fly them out sometimes to collaborate with teams. This seems much more active than FactSet.