Here’s a SPAC thread covering some basics for new followers. I will pin this to my profile if you want to share to anyone interested in SPACs.

SPAC timelines consist of these stages:
IPO – SPAC raises cash and begins trading as a unit. The cash is placed in Trust.
Searching phase – After IPO, the SPAC management team looks for a company to merge with. This is typically 24 months but can be shorter depending on the SPAC

LOI/Rumor – A letter of intent is announced publicly or Bloomberg/Reuters etc. breaks news of a rumor that a SPAC is close to a deal with a target.

The LOI/rumor stage does not always happen, most go straight to a definitive agreement. Rumors should only be considered to have value if from a trusted news source, internet rumblings are pure speculation. During this stage, a deal can still fall apart and not be signed.

Definitive agreement (DA) – deal officially inked. The SPAC begins filing paperwork with the SEC to have the merger approved to take the target company public. This process typically takes 4+ months after the DA is announced.

"The engineers on my team just want to code. They don't want to have anything to do with product. They just want specs. What do I do?"

1/n Are you asking them do to X *and* do their "day job" as defined by their managers (and frankly your roadmap) ?

If so, start there...

2/n Do they have a reason to believe that doing X will in any way improve the quality of the product and make their lives easier? Have they ever seen X "work" ?

Show don't tell.

3/n Is there average day/week a quagmire of unnecessary meetings, wading through tech debt, struggling to get *anything* to work ... and jumping through process hoops to prove their worth?

If so...no they will not have bandwidth.

4/n How do incentives work on the engineering team? Maybe they want to help, but their "grade" is determined by something altogether different.

"I'd love to, but I am on the hook to deliver [some project] this quarter to make a good impression..."

Talk to eng management.

5/n Have they had any time to practice?

Or did they get thrown into the deep end the first time they were given a shot ... expected to brainstorm on demand, be as vocal as practiced PdMs and designers, and "participate" !

Make it safe to practice. Reasonable expectations.

The tech scene in Nigeria is shifting towards remote work.

Having worked remotely for 6+ years (3 in Nigeria), here's some things I've learnt.

**Internet**

If you live in Abuja, Lagos etc try and setup fibre optic internet.

They are reliable, not prone to frequent disconnects, ultra low latency, and they're very fast. They usually come bundled with unlimited usage per month.

Although the fibre speeds are not mind blowing gigabit speeds, yet. 200mbps is good enough anywhere.

Your best bet for fibre in Nigeria would be @ipNXTweet. ₦30k setup and internet plans can range from as low as ₦12k - ₦150k monthly.

One dishonourable mention is @explorelegend. They take forever to get setup. Once setup, it's quite good. ₦130k setup, plans range from ₦30k - ₦70k monthly.

Some providers like @Mainoneservice are not worth it for homes, way too expensive. ₦350k for 50mbps a month? Hell no!

Which ever provider you decide to go with, do read the fine print.

The alternative for people without access to fibre optic internet is to get devices like MTN's hynetflex, spectranet and the rest, but good luck with those.

Tonight we are launching our Net Zero Carbon Roadmap for Leeds, which shows a pathway for how Leeds can get to net-zero emissions by the city’s target date of 2030.

Follow the live tweets @LeedsClimateCom #LeedsClimate #PCANcities
1/

We're looking forward to hearing responses to the roadmap's presentation by members of the Leeds Citizens' Jury, Polly Cook of Leeds City Council, @SimonBowens of Friends of the Earth and Elizabeth Edgington of @BITC

#LeedsClimate #PCANcities
2/

Leeds’ carbon footprint has gone down: between 2000-2019 emissions fell by 40% (largely due to national decarbonisation of the grid).

Our share of the global carbon budget in 2020 is 31m tonnes; at ca. 4m tonnes a year, that’s used up by 2029

#LeedsClimate #PCANcities
3/

During lockdown #1, emissions were ca. 43% lower – overall, in 2020, they were ca 13% lower than normal. Sounds encouraging, but this only delays the point we eat up our carbon budget by 2 months!
#LeedsClimate #PCANcities
4/

Following science-based targets, Leeds needs to make 70% reductions by 2025 – which means another 25% reduction in emissions in the next 4-5 years.

We need to accelerate significantly!

#LeedsClimate #PCANcities
5/

man, this tablet project.
so it stopped charging. it was at 23%, I charge it for a couple hours, still 23%
I turn it off and leave it on the charger for 23%, confirm it's charging, and 8 hours later... 21%

so I get on the internet and order a replacement battery.
in the two days it takes it to arrive, the tablet somehow charges to 100%?

it arrives and I'm like "eh, fuck it. I have the battery here, that one is old, I might as well swap 'em.
I try to open up the tablet, following the instructions, and... the digitizer cracks.

it turns out the fact I had to replace the digitizer before meant that the new one wasn't glued in as well as it should be, so when I pried it open, the wrong part came off. Whoops.

that's okay, because of an amazon mix-up long ago, I actually have a spare digitizer on hand for this tablet! I can just replace that after the battery.

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")

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 ....

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.

Tesla posted a new video about their secret Kato Road 4680 cell production lines a couple of days ago, and it contains a couple of technological gems I haven't seen widely mentioned elsewhere yet, so here's an attempt at listing these new disclosures.

1/

2/

The first thing is that there appear to be no human workers/operators whatsoever in the main production process.

To the left is an image of line workers handling finished cells in a traditional facility. To the right is the 100% automated conveyance system Tesla has.

3/

Here's how their 4680 cells are transported in racks of 8x8 cells: 64 cells each.

These standardized racks likely interface into automated pack production machines, made by Tesla Grohmann, or get directly integrated into the die-cast underbody (structural battery pack).

4/

There's an interesting detail in one of the frames: glimpse of a facility worker observing an industrial robot moving a rack.

5/

What is interesting is that:

✅ Cell production facilities are Class 7 clean rooms, while the worker doesn't wear the usual "bunny suit" protective gear.
✅ There's a barrier between the worker and the robot: likely separating clean-room air from unprotected air.

The lesson here is not "OMG big tech is more powerful than the president, this isn't how it's supposed to be!" but "Even the president is not exempt from the rules we all agreed to follow, that is exactly how it's supposed to be."

One segment I have been absolutely upbeat is IT/Tech. Tech has always been the hidden moat for many companies - AP/BFL to name a few. Tech is no longer a vertical in market. It has become horizontal that cuts across every single vertical.

Be it Pharma/API, Finance, Insurance, Manufacturing, Retail, CD, or any other segment, Tech is going to give you edge over peers.

The spend on IT/Tech is going to increase stupendously in coming 4/5 years to levels we haven't even imagined. The investment in tech is going to help big get even bigger and put very hard survival barriers to new entrants.

BFL/HDFC Life from Fin/Insurance segment have one of the best tech platforms. IndiaMart relies on customer data monetization, Dmart has a very small but extremely strong team of data scientists

Even Nestle has very strong data scientist pool, Asian Paints story is well knows to everyone now. Not investing in IT/Tech is going to be your biggest mistake in investing journey.

Incremental rebuild was a feature of the C# compiler which was meant to increase the throughput after an initial build. It worked on the principle that changes in between builds are localized, and that the information gathered by the compiler from previous builds wouldn't be

entirely invalidated; specifically, some of the information and, indeed, the assembly itself could be updated in an incremental fashion resulting in faster builds.

Both the VS 2002 and VS 2003 compilers exposed this option through the /incr switch on the command line, and the ‘Incremental Rebuild’ option in the Advanced tab of Project Properties. In 2002 incremental rebuild was enabled by default for all project types.

After we shipped 2002 we noticed that we started to get a large number of bugs (internal compiler errors - ICEs – the worst kind) which were a direct result of the incremental rebuild feature.

These bugs derived from the complexities involved in correctly implementing incremental rebuild and the problems associated with testing it. Consequently, for 2003 we fixed all known issues with incremental rebuild but subsequently turned it off by default for all projects.

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.

The Discourse on the post-coup tech platform rejection of violent fascism is giving me hives so I just have to get my ~hot take~ in here.

Sorry for the massive thread; Pascal’s apology applies.

Everybody loves to talk about “precedent” when a decision is made like kicking tr*mp off Twitter or pa*ler off of AWS, usually when making some fallacious slippery slope argument about what this “precedent” will mean for some completely non-comparable follow-up situation.

In some narrow colloquial sense, I admit there’s a precedent being set, in that when an analogous situation arises, the decision makers in that situation might do their research and look at this preceding (hence: “precedent”) event, and base some reasoning on it.

But this is a rhetorical trick—maybe one that those making the argument are playing on themselves as much as they’re playing it on you—because they’re trying to get you to consider the word in its legal-jargon sense: that future decision makers *must* consider these events.

This often goes along with the frankly bananas implication that by “setting the precedent” the decision makers (tech platforms or whoever) are arrogating to themselves a power which they did not *already have*, and it is thus dangerous and opens the door for future abuses.

Please read.

Antis + akgaes have been mass creating bot accs recently to trend hashtags that look like they support J/M, but they're spreading misinformation to defame him + make him aware of h@te etc.

This is a thread to report them.

Dm me if you find any.
This is so scary.

Stephen, why are you so critical of Facebook and not the other big tech companies?

A 🧵 for well-intentioned engineers about how to navigate the complexities of big tech.

There's a simple inescapable truth about the distinction in kind between Facebook and the others.

Google could fix its content moderation and stop its military contracts and its business model would still be Google. (1/)

Apple could fix up its supply chain, raises the unit prices on its products for more sustainable and environmentally sound sourcing, and its business model would still be Apple. (2/)

Amazon could treat its workers better and stop self-dealing in adjacent markets with its own products, and its business model would still be Amazon. (3/)

Netflix could ... actually don't really have here to complain about here really. Maybe less Tiger King. (4/)

I have some thoughts re: the responses that @GameMinimalist got yesterday when he expressed his discomfort with history-based conflict games, their Euro-centric nature, and imperialist overtones/undertones. 1/

There are many people who are uncomfortable with wargames (the term I'm going to use as shorthand for "games that attempt to engage seriously with, or to model, some aspect of history in some way"). And that's okay. 2/

If someone is expressing that discomfort, I personally think the first and in some cases only thing one can or should do is *acknowledge* that. Listen to them and their concerns. 3/

If they're misinformed - a lot of folks seem to think that wargames are about gore and violence and bloodlust, that they act as a pressure release for dark impulses, which simply isn't true. I mean, converting numbers to an odds ratio isn't exactly drenched in viscera -- 4/

go ahead and correct that misinformation, while understanding that they might still be uncomfortable with it, and it's perfectly valid for that to be the case.

This reminds me of my grandfather. 5/