Mayday | Senior backend engineer (Python) | Paris, France | Onsite | Full time

Mayday is an early stage SaaS B2B startup that hosts knowledge bases for customer service professionals. We are well funded and already have many well known domestic customers (both entreprise and medium sized businesses).

We're hiring a python backend engineer at a senior level (with 4-6 years of experience). The position is part of the data science team (1 lead -- me, 1 junior data scientist and 1 data engineer).

The role entails a maintaining microservices written in python (including a search engine that runs on elasticsearch, machine learning models, genAI features), as well as the many asynchronous processes that enrich our clients' documents.

We're looking for someone with a strong experience with asynchronous processes (we use rabbitMQ, redis, sometimes through celery) and interaction with elasticsearch. The candidate will be expected to uphold good coding practices in Python within the team, and maintain microservices (we use fastAPI) and their deployment.

Reach out to me here or directly on the posting: https://www.welcometothejungle.com/fr/companies/mayday/jobs/...

I built a Python code metering library to track the execution time of bits of Python code.

You can create clocks anywhere as so:

  from ticktock import tick

  clock = tick()
  # do some work
  clock.tock()

Any encountered clock is registered and its timing measured, aggregated and printed periodically.

The output consists in one line per clock:

  [some_file.py:4-6] 43us count=21
  [lib.py:44-68] 500ms count=5034

(continuously updated as clocks are stepped through more times)

I find this convenient for quick-and-dirty Python profiling, especially for code that runs many times over.

I am happy to take any feedback or issues. There are a couple of known bugs (tqdm progress bars for a start), but it mostly does the job!

Well, you are not the first one

https://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/jo...

Neuroscientist here. I have personally implanted many animals of different species with similar apparatus as the ones described by neuralink, and published numerous papers in the field, including theoretical papers on neural activity coding and modeling. Here are my two cents about this. Sorry if it’s long, I m hoping that this will help provide perspective on the topic at hand.

As a scientist, the first thing that is striking is that this is another example of science by press conference. It’s probably why there is a lot of eye rolling in the field. No data has been released (including in the single author elon musk paper published a couple of years ago), and it is therefore impossible to judge the results independently, let alone have a scientific discussion about it.

First off, it should be noted that not much here is completely new. Chronic implantation of multielectrode arrays, with wireless recordings have been around for roughly 15 years. These arrays are able to record and stimulate. This is usually done in mice, in which space is even more limited than the pig. The number of contacts (i.e recording points) of 1000 is also on par with the current state of the art (see, e.g the neuropixel implants). The fact that neuralink managed to reproduce this seemingly from scratch is an impressive feat, but in no way is it novel. Dozens of labs around the world do this every day.

The issues with electrode recordings are to get close enough to each cell without damanging anything. If the contact is too far, the recording is polluted by other neurons, and one has to rely on blind signal separation to make out each cell. As a result in typical experiments, each electrode is manually positioned In the close vicinity of the neuron (think micrometers). This is a challenge with large arrays because each contact is not independant which reduces the yield. This likely happens here.

Another important problem arises with chronic implantantion. When you insert something in the brain, make it as thin as you wish the brain will not like it. There is going to be pushing and shoving of cells, and when the brain reset in position (within minutes) it will have moved. This requires fine tuning of each electrode’s position to keep it close to the neurons. More importantly, it will create a scar. Cells will die around it, the organism will try and isolate the foreign object. This takes weeks. This is the reason why, roughly speaking, no single cell has been recorded from for more than weeks (the record i believe is around 3 months): after a while the electrode is simply too isolated from the actual neurons to pick up a signal. There are endeavors around this, With other electrode materials, etc but neuralink does not do that. (Another really cool way to do chronic implant is with calcium imaging with small implanted confocal microscopes)

In addition, this is likely bad for the organism, and possibly not something you would want happen in your brain. BTW I believe that (in addition to size constraints) this is why they are doing studies on pigs now (although their neural activity is not well documented as opposed to mice/rats or primates): it is commonly used as a model for human injuries.

Finally, do be aware that some humans are already implanted chronically in the brain with electrodes: - For parkinsons, in a specific, non cortical area. These electrodes can record and stimulate to alleviate crises - For hearing, it’s not stricto sensu in the brain (in the cochlear cavities) but it stimulates neurons - On the surface of the brain, with ecog electrodes mostly used during surgery but sometimes chronically for epilepsy diagnosis

In addition to these technical issues (which are serious enough, by the way), the claims made here are just sort of outlandish. Even in very well controlled laboratory conditions, there is very little evidence that it is remotely possible to “record” memories (let alone replay them). For the most part it is because we have _strictly no idea_ how _anything is encoded_ in the brain (there is even raging debate as to whether it “encodes” anything). (Sorry to my neuroscientist friends and colleagues, but we are not close to anything the layperson would qualify as “understanding what the brain does”, by a long stretch.) In addition, some of the less outlandish claims (e.g. controlling robotic limbs, etc) made by neuralink are things on which neuroscientists have been working on for decades. It’s not impossible for sure (as many of us argue in their grant proposals), but it is hard. And the plan presented by neuralink (more electrodes) is in no way innovative to an insider in the field. In fact, I doubt that it would get NIH funding.

TLDR there are many well documented issues with this endeavor that many people have been working on for decades. It’s frustrating that the general public be exposed to the uninteresting sugar coated sci fi version of an otherwise complex, nuanced and thus interesting field of science.

It’s routine for labs to insert threads into brains? It’s routine for non-rigid, fine threads to be inserted via robot? I’m just being honest, your comment is not very convincing. And it skims over important details like the fact that all electrode solutions before were not sub-dermal.

I did not really say that any of this is routine. Nor did I try to be particularly convincing.

But implantation of ultra flexible and thin electrodes is not new (and it is promising, sure), several groups have been working on « mesh electrodes ». As of now it has not really proved safe enough for chronic use in humans.

The subdermal aspect is also certainly a nice advance, but relatively useless in a lab setting (and impossible in rodents).

The robotization is not really impressive, all electrophysiological apparati are robotized, for obvious reasons: nobody can reproducibly place electrodes with micrometer precision by hand.

But hey, let’s wait for some papers to be out and we’ll judge then.

Ok so I looked it up and it appears that this concept of very thin and light electrodes is basically taking off right now with multiple implementations. In this context, Neuralink is basically competing against other products for a share of the neuro-implant market, which will be big at some point. Why doesn’t your comment mention any of this? Or the relative merits of each competitor? It’s not clear that neuralink was the first or the last to do any of this. Why should their effort to find an electrode material that prevents loss of signal be minimized? Shouldn’t they be encouraged to find a solution like the other people trying to find a solution in academia?

And I know you won’t answer this because nobody ever answers questions that aren’t inflammatory or insulting... but how could information not be encoded in the brain? When you dream, your brain could not possibly be generating the raw sensory signals... the only way to explain lucid dreams is heavy encoding of information and a really powerful guessing system to fill in gaps where signal decoding was weak or didn’t happen.

Sorry if I did not make that clear but I fully agree that their endeavor towards better electrodes should be encouraged, and maybe even saluted when they provide evidence of improvement over the state of the art.

The question of information in the brain, including whether it is encoded is a really hard one. Of course we can easily find some areas of the brain whose response is _correlated_ with aspects of the outside world. But what does it mean? Who (or what) is decoding it, why? Many different metaphora and analogies can be (and are) readily applied to the brain. As of now, it is safe to say that a comprehensive theory of neural processing has not really been able to answer all of these questions. It’s just all very complex.

With a ton of respect for your work and field, the tone I am picking up here is that Neuralink getting too much attention, unfairly, compared to other good and important work.

What would be the downside to another organisation in the field? Putting fairness aside, if it means even a chance someone with a disability can have an improved quality of life within the next 20 years, is this not a good thing?

Thanks for this. I know absolutely nothing about neuroscience, but I was very skeptical when he claimed that memories could be saved and replayed. The idea of encoding and the actual mechanism of our memories is really intruiging though.