The Phantom of Heilbronn (or how for 16 years the German police hunted a serial killer who didn't exist)

(Thread, non sweary version here: https://t.co/iDOIhaFgIT)

Between the years of 1993 and 2009, police in Heilbronn, Germany were tracking just about the most elusive serial killer since Ted Cruz.

Known as the Phantom of Heilbronn, or occasionally The Woman Without A Face, she was implicated in so many crimes that the police eventually put out a reward of €300,000 for any information leading to her arrest.

The case that brought her to the media's attention and earned her two ridiculously badass nicknames

(honestly, if you don't want people to do murders you're going to have to come up with less glamorous nicknames - what's wrong with Jack Shitshispants or the Zodiac Cuck)

Each year, @freedomhouse publishes "Freedom on the Net," an annual snapshot of internet policy and outcomes in different countries, from #netneutrality to internet shutdowns to domestic surveillance.

This year's report is a grim read.

https://t.co/OVoaYjJz5n

1/

The new report, spanning Jun 2019 to May 2020, tracks the steady (pre- and post-pandemic) march to a locked down internet robbed of its liberatory power and perverted in service to control, censorship and

Even before the pandemic, things were bad, but the pandemic accelerates everything: inequality, monopoly, and internet crackdowns. In the name of epidemiology, the world's governments have criminalized some online speech and then arrested journalists and activists.

3/

These speech restrictions also created a simple pretense for national website blocking and site takedowns, used to remove "unfavorable health statistics, corruption allegations, and other Covid-19-related content."

4/

The Chinese model of tech as an autocrat's dashboard and control panel is surging around the world, and exposure notification apps are a powerful accelerant for the model, with mandatory location tracking, call-record harvesting, even mandatory quarantine "selfie checkins."

5/

does bubble memory count as solid state?
I guess? I mean, it has no moving parts. but it requires preheating and involves movement of magnetic fields across a surface...

it's kinda like a traditional hard drive where you don't spin the disc, you just trick all the bits to migrate off the edge

who called it "bubble memory" and not "lemming bits"

(obligatory "lemmings don't throw themselves off cliffs, that's an urban legend")

(obligatory "the idea that disney invented that urban legend it itself an urban legend, they just helped popularize it")

🙋🏾‍♀️ In 2011, I was hired into my first junior role in tech @Groupon

👩🏾‍💻 By 2020, I was headhunted into a VP role in a global tech company @Brandwatch

🤖 I achieved this progression in less than a decade, without ANY coding skills

🔮 How did I do it?

*a thread*

🤓 I established a track record of results.

💪🏾 No magic formula can replace hard work: do your job well & hit all the targets you are set.

😬 When you're struggling, ask for help so you can stay on track to get results, or collaboratively adjust targets.

🎨 I stayed creative.

🧙🏿‍♀️ When challenges arose I was bold enough to try new solutions. Not everything worked, but constantly trying produced valuable innovations.

🧠 I was proactive in finding new, better ways to get the job done.

🤩 I was a self-promoter. I recorded my achievements & ensured they were mentioned in any performance / compensation reviews.

😎 I put myself forward for any opportunities to gain recognition e.g. speaking opportunities or awards.

👀I actively worked on gaining visibility.

🙂 I was myself. Some say you need to be ruthless to succeed. I don't buy it. I'm a nice person so I'm nice at work, too.

❤️ I didn't fake it. I always acted on my values, and spoke up when something didn't feel right. I showed integrity.

🤗 I was a team player. To everyone.

1) "Dark forces lack a corporeal presence and thus need human vessels to occupy, to do their evil work on earth. The technology deployed over the past decade facilitates their jump from the ether into our physical world."

Dr. X

2) These dark forces are comprised of energy - i.e. certain frequencies.

Humans are receivers & transmitters of a universal energy, which can be "modulated" for either good or evil purposes.

On a simple level, video games, VR, television shows, media & videos all serve as ....

3) programming mechanisms which have the capacity to modulate the (output) frequencies of humankind.

In a more complex sense, #5G and other generated frequencies also have the capacity to actively modulate thought patterns, which alters ....

4) the baseline output (energy/frequency) of humanity - en masse.

The problem is that they are using frequencies to sow chaos (ordo ab chao), violence, confusion, anger and fear.

As a result, the aforementioned baseline output is forced to "harmonize" ....

5) with malignant and negative vibrations.

That in turn facilitates that jump from the ether into human vessels by these dark entities.

The conductors of these operations are several different AI systems strengthened by #DWave and #QBit systems that operate ....

An apostle was addressing his own members
If not for technology, you wouldn't be privy to his discussion with his members
He was sharing with them within the context of their understanding of his message, nature, and personality how he thrived in the middle of a season of casting

down
He mentioned what he achieved and even though it might sound like a boast, he was not boasting to you
He was boasting to his church members and as such, you cannot call it a boast
A father does not need to boast to his children and a shepherd surely does not need to boast to

his sheep
Newspapers needed a scandal and felt the message of the apostle was the right fit in their quest to get eyeballs
You read it and you began to insult the apostle
You, the son of a dog from Abatan refuse dump decided to drag an apostle on Twitter
Do you understand what it

means to be an apostle?
The angels working with an apostle are innumerable, they do not only work at his command, but they also work at his behest!
They are entrusted with the duty of ensuring that the Lordship of his office is respected by both spiritual and mundane entities

In the days of Jesus, many of the Pharisees and religious leaders treated his words and actions the same way many of the gutter bred stone casters with 100 Naira data and stolen or London used phone treated the words of the apostle
Jesus warned them at the time that they were

(1) Since some people laugh at Cardano project and it's peer review aspect, let me share a story from work for all of you
(2) There is company called Databricks and they open sourced recently a technology called: https://t.co/gpZyKKiMVD . This technology is super important

(3) In BigData delta allows one to perform DELETE and MERGE operations contrary to Hadoop + Hive where this is not possible, seeking through many partitions finding customer data to remove and then rewriting it is not only expensive as an operation but also very dangerous

(4) This promising technology is something that many companies, which have big data turn into as they need to be GDPR compliant.
(5) I was always reading and accepting all details from their website as given and the "truth"

(6) There is however an amazing Principal Developer at our company that found some of the claims from their website as dubious, e.g. ACID claims on such a distributed file system
(7) It turns out this is not the first time this company advertises something that is simply not true

(8) on another occasion this company made untrue claims about Cassandra database and this then became source of disputes e.g by dr. @martinkl - my fave expert in distributed systems
(9) All professional developers also know of course famous Jepsen tests ->

The ancient struggle was not having enough.

The modern struggle is having too much.

Too much news, too much sugar, too much of everything at your fingertips..There's only 1 way out.

Let's lay it out:

On one side, you have "Team Dopamine":
* 24/7 news cycle, full of clickbait headlines
* Social Media, friend's pics that disappear in 24 hours
* Endless varieties of sugar & porn

going up against your tiny, 3 pound brain running 20,000 yr old software

Even if you are a smart person who tries their best to stay healthy & happy... you are going up against Fox News, TikTok, PornHub, Robinhood, Instagram

These are weapons of mental destruction.

Thousands of our smartest engineers & data scientists work at these companies.

They run constant experiments. Fighting against each other for every moment of your attention. So you open THEIR app.

It's skinner's box, rats pushing buttons for rewards. But you're the lab rat.

So what do we do?

We have everything. More than any species, at any time period in history. It's wonderful...but also deadly.

Food injected with syrup sugar
Painkillers you can't live without
Video games where you can fly and kill
Porn better than any date you'll ever have

Elastic didn't really relicense ElasticSearch. It forked it.

🧵 A thread.

1/18

There's a lot of talk in the open source community about the cost of forking.

2/18

- "Forking is best avoided."

- "Forking is a last resort option."

- "Forking is like a nuclear weapons. It's a defensive threat."

3/18

Forking is seen as impractical and extremely expensive.

And that's a Really Good Thing(tm).

It's a forcing function for figuring out solutions that are broadly acceptable across the community.

4/18

The thing is, the cost of forking is mostly a function of three things:

1⃣ the size of the community that you can bring along with you,
2⃣ whether you need to rename your fork (who owns the trademark), and
3⃣ how much infrastructure you need to rebuild.

5/18

I posted about the Signal messaging application versus Telegram a while ago, and I received a lot of answers about different applications as alternatives. So I'd like to write a thread giving an overview about my perspective on the security of different applications. 1/53

It's very important to remember that this thread is only about messaging applications for mobile phones, and the evaluations are based on my own perspectives and needs. In some cases they will be subjective, and you should investigate before applying the advice to yourself. 2/53

As I've mentioned in previous, when talking about secure messaging applications, it's extremely important to remember that if an application is secure enough, the limitation will not be the security of the application itself, the limitation is the security of the device. 3/53

When talking about security, the weakest link in a chain will be the one an attacker will go after. There are some applications in this thread that are very secure and have great protocols. But if the device is compromised, that will simply not matter. 4/53

So, if you have something very sensitive to discuss, my strong advice is to not trust that information to a mobile device - there are simply too many ways it could be compromised. So, from that perspective, the security of the protocol is not relevant. 5/53

1/ What causes long term sustained performance in an ad account?

🧵featuring real examples 👇🏻

If you explore the source of FB ad growth and subsequently revenue growth for eCom brands it is almost never a function of iterative improvements to ad creative or tactics over time.

2/ More often it is a series of moments that unlock an order of magnitude increase in awareness, engagement, traffic and performance.

These moments can be caused by:

A single ad
A big PR moment
A breakthrough campaign
A change in market dynamics
A new product release
Etc.

3/ The problem is they are very hard to predict and create.

I’ll give you an example of a few that happened for us @QALORing that changed our trajectory (and ad account performance) each time...

4/ The first was @andydalton14 wearing a ring on @HBO hard knocks. It was the peak of the series popularity and they did a :30 piece on the ring he was wearing while playing.

See screenshot

Notice the traffic before and after the peak.

5/ This increased organic traffic let us alter our AdWords strategy, extract more post intent demand from new searchers and pull clips of the show to supplement our ad credibility.

Last weekend, I made a threat on the ongoing #SocialMedia shutdown in Uganda and some implications on the future of #internet & Uganda's #digital agenda.

The thread attracted a lot of engagement and questions. Tonight, I will share some final thoughts on the subject. (1)

Conceptually, social media sites are the largest on-boarding platforms for internet users in Uganda. Notably, Facebook, WhatsApp, Twitter, Instagram & Snapchat attract the highest internet traffic- which drives demand for other platform services e.g Google and Zoom recently.

So- when we talk about an "open internet", we mean the FULL resources of the internet. Any encumberance on selected applications has ripple effects across the entire network thus jeorpadizing standardization of internet/data transmission which is essential for innovation & growth

Furthermore, shutdowns hinder network interoperability (technical ability to plug/link one digital product or service into another product or service). Interoperability is the heart of the "Internet of things" eg business, devices, networks, services, e-govt, integration etc #IoT

Because the internet is a global resource, shutdowns enhance a digital divide (the gap between demographics and regions that have access to modern ICTs, and those that don't or have restricted access). Ironic that 3rd world countries have the highest number of shutdowns globally.

So a weird thing about ultraviolet light, like blacklights and UV-C disinfecting light, is that it's invisible. Kinda. And also Kinda.

See there's a distinctive look to blacklights, they look like this.

But it turns out this isn't the ultraviolet that you're seeing.
See, the light produced by the bulb isn't perfectly monochromatic UV. Blacklights are in the UV-A range, which is 315 - 400 nm. The human vision range is 380-nm to 700nm.

There's a little overlap there, between the high UVA and the low end of human vision...
And there's multiple types of ultraviolet lights, but the kinds used in blacklights peak at 370nm or 340nm

so while most of the light coming out of the bulb is in the invisible UV range, some of the light is a bit higher up in the spectrum, which makes it slightly into the visible violet range.

So the light you see from UV lights is either the not-UV light it produces as a side effect, or something else fluorescing.

The old, outdated infiltrated low vibrating 3D system is over. We bring it all down to build a new one. Authorities of prophecies are of divine nature. We're heading in a direction towards conclusion.

It's not too late....

The Cabal has many layers & secretly controls everything on our planet. But, so many on this planet are completely clueless to who they truly are. Humanity is rapidly running out of time to prepare for coming events. The Cabal is a very carefully structured organization,

a hierarchy of non-physical dark matter that feeds off negative energy. This energy has no need for material possessions; only more negative energy which is its life force. 

This energy has consciousness just like non-physical light matter or positive energy which humans

mistakenly refer to as God. Benevolent Galactic beings will teach us in the not too distant future that they consider the God construct mere dogma, superstition for the purpose of control. Love is of the highest frequency, the highest frequency of light which humans interpret as

humans interpret as love & bliss. God is light, extremely high cosmic energy. We are in the process of returning to balance, there must be balance always. We are experiencing this incredible turbulence & chaos on this planet currently because everything is out of balance &

How to make a "Briefcase" icon in @figmadesign.

🧵 thread 👇

In a 24 x 24 pixel artboard, use the rectangle tool (R) to draw a 18 x 10 pixel rectangle positioned horizontally centered and 6 pixels from the top of the artboard.

Using the ellipse tool (O), draw a 96 x 96 pixel circle and align the top to the center/top of the rectangle. Select both shapes and use the boolean tool to intersect the group.

Using the ellipse tool (O), draw a 48 x 48 pixel circle and align the bottom to the center/bottom of the rectangle. Select both shapes and use the boolean tool to intersect the group.

Flatten the shape (command + E) and double click it to make it editable. Select the top left and right points and give them a 2 pixel corner radius. Select the bottom left and right points and give them a 1 pixel corner radius.

EV Battery overview
Batteries are the key differentiator between the various EV manufacturers. The amount of energy stored in the battery determines the range of the EV, thought to be a major limitation on EV sales.

Consumers tend to worry that an EV with a range of 80 to 250 miles on a single charge would be inconvenient for long trips due to the time it takes to recharge the battery. Commercial batteries need to ensure there is quick recharge and less time between charges

The lithium-ion battery is important because it makes EVs expensive than ICEs. Battery costs per kilowatt-hour (kWh) declined from roughly $1,000 per kWh in 2010 to $227 in 2016

Lithium-ion batteries made up 70 percent of the rechargeable battery market in 2016
BNEF projects that global production capacity for lithium-ion batteries will increase from 103 gigawatt-hours (GWh) in the first quarter of 2017 to 273 GWh by 2021.

The battery manufacturing supply chain has three main parts:

cell manufacturing,

module manufacturing, and

pack assembly.

It’s here.

After months of building, the new, revamped, reimagined Generalist is ready. I can’t wait to show you.

Here’s what it means.

https://t.co/4RaadaUjKR

*How did this get started?*

In August of last year, shortly after going full-time, I decided The Generalist needed a permanent home. Something that captured the vision for all the great things I thought would come out of this community.

I set to work.

You can hear more about building the new site in the tweets below. Of course, if you’re excited to jump straight in, and become a member, you can do so

*What was the plan?*

Launch by the end of September. Here’s the email I sent to The Braintrust (the awesome folks that have agreed to give their advice on this little venture).

- 15K subscribers
- New site
- New membership
- New community

*How did you do?*

I failed on all four.

By the end of September, I had +11K subscribers — 15K had been a stretch, so that was good with me. But I also had no site, no membership, and no permanent community home.