So, yesterday my dad (74) was bored and I was doing a jigsaw puzzle so I said over my shoulder "make a facetime call". He said "How?" like all boomers do when they want YOU to do it, so I said, "Get your iphone and hit facetime". She bought me in the phone and said "Open it how?"

"With your finger!" I said, incredulous. She bought me the phone and we both stared at it. I realised I'd never taught him to use it. Most phones have whatsapp, I felt like a dope. What kind of apocalypse father doesn't teach a boomer how to use facetime?

So I said, "How do you think this works?" he studied it and applied his finger to the phone icon, sideways. He struggled for a while with a big dramatic sigh said "Will you please just open facetime?" Apocalypse son was overjoyed: a Teaching moment just dropped in my lap!

I said, "The little icon is designed to do one thing: facetime. Study the phone, study the icon, figure out what Steve Jobs was thinking when they tried to solve this problem (the facetime icon is also the phone call icon, but I explained that part wasn't relevant)

I went back to my jugsaw puzzle. He was next to me grunting and groaning trying to get the ting. I should say that spatial orientation, process visualisation and order of operations are not things he... intuits, I knew this would be a challenge. But it was a rainy weekend.

Microtest Test-Driven Development is a strategy for *change*. To understand the case, we need to answer two questions: 1) Why have a strategy for change? 2) How does TDD provide one? Let's take up the first question today.

(Before we begin, I remind you of the relative unimportance of geekery to me just now. This is just respite.

Please work for change and support the others who are doing so.

Black lives matter.

Stay safe, stay strong, stay angry, stay kind.)

Why is having a change strategy so urgent?

The TL;DR is dead simple:

Because continuous ongoing change is at the base of all software development, both before and after our software is in the field.

When I read old-school software ideas, or for that matter what is being taught in our colleges for the most part today, I'm struck over and over again by the "timeless" aspect of the material. It is concerned almost entirely with the static and atemporal aspects of software.

In these approaches, applications spring Athena-like from the heads of our pantheon-worthy programmers. The designs emerge in an instant and once emerged they are final. The process looks like 1) Nothing. 2) Everything. 3) Move on.

1/ Read Bloomberg’s autobiography (from ‘97) this weekend. Covers the first 15 years of Bloomberg LP & and how Mike built such a dominant franchise. Written before “lean startup” and modern software startup nomenclature, but lessons sound like something @chetanp would share...

2/ Bloomberg initially focused on a narrow use case: real time yield curve data for bond traders. Today, Bloomberg covers equity & debt markets around the world, offers financials, news, messaging, alternative data & more. But it started with a simple product & seemingly tiny TAM

3/ They “nailed” product/market fit for this use case because they deeply understood their customers. Not only did Mike Bloomberg and the first four employees all come from the industry, but they also built a tight feedback loop w/ their first "lighthouse" customer, Merrill Lynch

4/ When Bloomberg installed the first 22 terminals at Merrill, they embedded themselves with initial users. They visited daily. They had two users who provided constant feedback, helping to rapidly squash bugs and improve the product.

5/ Bloomberg also offered professional services. In fact, their first $100,000 in revenue was from PS. The consulting work helped pay the bills, but more importantly helped the Bloomberg team map their customers' needs and to build relationships across the organization.

Too many Soldiers have made ONE mistake and received a Hug,

instead of an All-Night Fuck.

HOW TO NEVER FALL INTO THE FRIENDZONE EVER AGAIN:

《《 THREAD 》》

The #1 reason guys get friendzoned?

They aren't physical enough.

They act like one of her girlfriends or g@y friends.

Being Physical-

It's an expression of yourself.

You're not trying to accomplish anything.

you're doing it because YOU want to.

When should you be physical?

As soon as possible.

You don't want be another "girlfriend"

You want to be MAN TO WOMAN.

If you're not Physical,

you're not a Sexual Threat.

Women will vibe with you, but in a very platonic way.

You want her girlfriends to go- "Who is this guy!?"

A serious reasoning error that is particularly common among educated people is to argue that if a study hasn't been done on a particular question we have 'no data', and therefore no basis on which to form beliefs or act.

This is incorrect and dangerous. 1/

There is almost always a reference class we can use to make a sensible prediction, and often we can reason about the causal mechanism directly.

To see how this is clearly wrong, consider these two extreme cases: 2/

a. Before a vaccine trial is conducted we have 'no data' on how likely it is to work.

But we can estimate the likelihood just fine! To start with we can just check the base rate of all vaccine trials.

What fraction of all vaccine trials in history have had +ve results? 3/

That gives a much better estimate than pure agnosticism.

b. Imagine now that the vaccine trial results have come back positive. But by chance all the vaccines were given in a blue room.

So, will the vaccine still work if given in a red room? I guess we have 'no data'.

4/

So can we say nothing about about whether vaccines work in red rooms?

That is plainly ridiculous — we understand the causal mechanism and it doesn't involve room colour, so in fact we can give a near definitive answer to that question. 5/

Hey, fun fact, threatening an elections official with criminal prosecution unless he rigs an election in your favor is not just impeachable but a federal crime

1/ Many federal criminal statutes could come into play here, but here's one: 52 U.S.C § 20511 punishes by up to 5 years in prison "attempting to deprive or defraud the residents of a State of a fair and impartially conducted election process by the procurement or tabulation...

2/ "...of ballots that are known by the person to be materially false, fictitious, or fraudulent under the laws of the State in which the election is held." When the chief elections official of the State of Georgia tells you the votes you want him to "find" would be fictitious...

3/ ...and you persist in not just urging him but threatening him to "find" those "votes" and give them to you, federal law does not allow you to be *willfully ignorant* of the fact that you are urging fictitious votes to be added to the State of Georgia's legally certified tally.

4/ But it's even worse than this for Trump, as he explicitly tells the chief elections official for Georgia that he only "needs" enough votes to win—which is an acknowledgment that he doesn't have a specific actionable complaint but is merely trying to *rig* the election outcome.

A lot of you are going to just breeze past this story without reading it, so let me just break down how absolutely deranged these actions by the president are. He's openly engaging in actual election fraud.

the big flashing red flag here is the president threatening Georgia's secretary of state if he doesn't overturn his defeat in that state.

after Raffensperger (a Republican btw) calls Trump's assertions "debunked conspiracy theories," the president urges him "find 11,780 votes" and suggests "there's nothing wrong with saying" that he's "recalculated."

The president genuinely sounds like he's trying to talk his way out of prison.

Here is the president vaguely threatening Georgia officials that if they don't "find" these ballots that don't exist, they might be "subject to criminal liability." Hard to believe this isn't completely illegal.

One of the sad things we know about abusive parenting is that it often propagates over generations.

I’m very glad my grandfather broke that chain and didn’t become his abusive step-father. Because it turns out that supportive parenting *also* propagates over generations.

About the time I was 9 I was pissed at my parents for something or other, as kids are. And I angrily thought, “When I have kids, I won’t do xxx to them.”
And then it occurred to me that I really liked who and how I was, and their rules had helped make me that.

So I decided I probably *should* parent the way they did.

In retrospect, that was probably a bit too much faith in nurture over nature. I was an only child, so I didn’t have a counter example. Having two kids abused me of *that* theory. :)

But I really value my supportive dad.

My father was *so* supportive of my endeavors, even as an adult, that my first wife’s dad asked her if there was something wrong with me that I needed that much support. (He was the dad she had to actively deceive to study math, and to come to the US).

And it wasn’t just big stuff, it was little things. Like when I had a cloth board for my cosmic wimpout game, and the edges were fraying, he surprised me by sewing a border on it. Or the bunk bed he helped me make for college to fit over my desk. And the stereo cabinet we built.

Window dressing: : the act or an instance of making something appear deceptively attractive or favorable

Tens of thousands of of businesses shut down, economy in shambles, windows showing abandoned stores and restaurant are staring at you ugly when you are passing by. Now the same leftists responsible for this disaster think they found a solution to fix the ugliness they created.

This is the solution our Dem leaders have chosen to remedy the scars they created and the livelihoods they destroyed: apply some make-up. Make art installations in the windows of the abandoned stores and restaurants. Apply propaganda lipstick on the leftist pig and call it "art"

God forbid our leftist betters who run our cities would have thought of stopping this closure madness and helping people go back to work, re-opening stores and restaurants. That's not what they want. They want you to stay at home, afraid and dependent on their hand-outs.

In Socialist Romania during the years of the Ceausescu regime they did pretty much the same thing, only they didn't call it "art". The grocery stores and butcher shops were always empty, there was no food anywhere other that on the black market.

I study kids and help-seeking. I wrote a whole book about it. So I have *a lot* of thoughts about those tweets with the dad and his daughter and the can of beans.

A thread. 1/

On the one hand, when parents swoop in and do everything for their kids, kids learn to fear failure and hard work.

So I get what the dad was trying to do - teach his daughter to work hard for what she wants and not be afraid to fail.

But, I also take issue with his approach. 2/

What's wrong with his approach? Especially given that she was successful in the end? Well, let's consider what the daughter might take away from this interaction, particularly in terms of her confidence in herself and her trust in adults. 3/

First, how might the daughter feel about herself after taking so long to figure it out? Especially if her dad said to her what he said in the tweets (e.g., she's not a "mechanically inclined kid;" "spatial orientation, process visualization... are not things she... intuits"). 4/

My guess - she'll assume it took her so long because there's something wrong with her. When, in reality, it was because her dad refused to give her the scaffolding (info and skills) she needed to succeed with the task. Can you imagine teaching kids math or reading this way?! 5/

"What would you say if I asked you to run away with me?"

Asahi stills, the tip of his pencil hovering over his notebook, and looks up at Nishinoya seated across the table from him.

Nishinoya is staring out the window, chin propped in his right palm as he idly stirs the soda in

front of him with his left hand.

The question takes Asahi by surprise.

Noya had never asked anything like that before.

"What?"

Noya turns his head away from the water droplets streaking the glass window to fully look at Asahi. "If I said "Hey, Asahi-san, let's run away,"

what would you say?" Noya rephrases.

He's joking.

He's got to be.

After all, they're here right now helping Yuu study for his entrance exams in three months. They'll be in different courses, but Yuu is aiming for the same college as Asahi. Asahi's already been cleaning out

his spare room so Noya can move in with him until he finds a place in Tokyo.

Plans for the future have already been made, so Noya /must/ be joking.

But with the way Noya's watching him, waiting patiently for an answer, it doesn't feel like a joke.

"...I would say... that you

need to stop joking around and focus on your entrance exams." Asahi smiles, but it feels awkward, forced. "If you don't work a little harder on your math, you won't make it into the same college as me."

Noya watches him for another minute, and Asahi swallows, anxiety tying his

Why promoting yourself/your business/your ideas feels uncomfortable:

You must repeat things that are obvious to you until they become obvious to others.

This is why most people hire marketers or outsource the amplification of their message.

The problem with that is no one is an invested as you are, and no one knows your message like you do.

And why those who break through their discomfort reach an escape velocity that eludes most.

This is a difficult and unnatural process, hence the upside on the other side.

Another way to think about it is the famous shelf analogy:

No one wants a drill they want a hole, no one wants a hole they want a shelf, no one wants a shelf they want to a place to put books to look smart, etc.

People care about the 2nd, 3rd, 4th order effects of your work.

Let Uncle Ralph educate you
Synthetic Viral Genomics:
Risks and Benefits for Science and Society

"Alternatively, “No See’m” sites can be used to insert foreign genes into viral, eukaryotic, or microbial genome or vector, simultaneously removing all evidence of the restriction sites that were used in the recombinant DNA manipulation"

By orientating the restriction sites as “No See’m”, the sites are removed during reassembly, leaving only the desired mutation in the final DNA product.

The dual properties of strand specificity & a variable end overhang that can be tailored to match any sequence allow for Esp3I sites to be engineered as “universal connectors” that can be joined with any other four nucleotide restriction site overhangs (e.g. EcoRI, PstX1, BamH1)

Seamless assembly (also called No See’m Sites (85)) cascades have been used to assemble full length cDNAs of the coronaviruses mouse hepatitis virus, transmissible gastroenteritis virus, infectious bronchitis virus and SARS-CoV (Refs: 85,86,87)

I entered this conversation thinking that I already knew the story, in a way. Dr Wodarg had succeeded in preventing the WHO from creating a fake pandemic in 2009. He thought the world wasn't silly enough to be fooled twice, but he'd been wrong. 1/9

He'd previously had ready access to mainstream media and found this suddenly cut off when he opened his mouth to voice his concern about the hysterical mania of Covid. The comically corrupt whom he'd vanquished all those years ago had been waiting for him. 2/9

All sorts of web entries about his courageous and humane career in public health and politics had morphed into caricatures that painted him as a freak; a "denier", as the post-modern parlance goes, with no means of redress. 3/9

This much I knew before I even started asking questions. What I hadn't expected was to find political correspondence with him, & we found that all of a sudden towards the end of the interview. He calls himself a socialist, I call myself scale dependent, & stop there. But ... 4/9

... it turned out we'd kindled the same central concept—subsidiarity. Subsidiarity is a principle in social organisation holding that functions which are performed effectively by local organisations belong more properly to them than to a dominant central one. 5/9

Alright, time to stop ignoring the J6 discourse...

It is necessary to confront the Proud Boys because the Proud Boys are only coming to DC to fight "antifa," and if there are no antifascists there, they will simply assault whoever they determine is "antifa."

Because the Proud Boys are racist, sexist homophobes, this generally ends up being racial, ethnic, or sexual minorities.

This happens and the police allow this to happen. Some form of pushback is necessary.

The Proud Boys exist only to create violence. They are not a drinking club, they are a militant political wing of the Republican Party, and their mission is to generate a cultural notion of right wing immunity.

This is the violent obverse of the same coin that has the Republican Party's other immunities on the reverse: the ability to tamper with elections, engage in financial fraud, ignore the Constitution, and in general participate in corruption.

However, while the Proud Boys must be confronted, we must also recognize that their entire raison d'être is that antifa also shows up to face this confrontation.