New from me, & my final piece of 2020:

In 2020, a false message board conspiracy theory harmed the pandemic response, significantly impacted our political process, & destroyed lives & families.

A deep dive into how QAnon's breakout year harmed us all:

Chess may be a good analogy for explaining the difference between a descriptive model of reality and a generative model of reality.

A descriptive model of chess will describe the rules (i.e. initial setup, allowed moves, points per piece, objectives). This tells you how a chessboard might evolve and also narrows the combinations of realistic chess positions.

In contrast, a generative model involves the actual gameplay between competing players that follow the rules. It generates new styles and patterns. It establishes new strategies and tactics. It generates new openings, middle gameplay, and end game tactics.

A generative model is an evolutionary model that leads to emergent behavior. As a consequence, a master of chess is able to recall the layout of chess positions in a real game in an instant, yet is unable to remember pieces placed in random positions.

That is because causality is present in the movements of pieces in a chessboard. An intuitive system like the human mind is able to capture that causality as a means to understanding and recall.

Let's be clear about what @Google, @Apple & @amazon instantly destroying #Parler's ability to be the free-speech version of Twitter is. At its core, this is about the ability to freely communicate one’s thoughts to others — once considered a hallmark of "The American Way." 1/13

What Big Tech is doing is as if Ma Bell in 1973 (ask grandpa) decided what you're saying to a friend on a landline phone was “dangerous." So they cut off the line in the middle of the talk and then sent someone over to physically cut your phone line. That's Stasi shit. 2/13

I realize that a personal conversation is not the same as a public tweet, but the principle is the same. The company that "owns the wires" for your speec — and has special govt rules protecting them due to their position — cuts off your call due to what you are saying. 3/13

If this analogy doesn't work for you, imagine someone tackling and punching you for speaking on a soap box in a public park and then setting your soap box on fire. And the govt being OK with that in a country that has a First Amendment. Moving on ... 4/13

Big Tech shadow banned people for years to just do it "halfway." That way, they could continue to paint an increasingly thin patina on their original govt-protected pledge to promote the free exchange of thought. #freespeech 5/13

WHO STOLE MY DISK SECTOR

what

this is a different disk.

did two disks on my desk go bad at the same time? or is this USB drive A USELESS FAILURE?

ok I'm trying a third disk and if this fails this drive is going right in the lake

it wrote successfully! now I can install some MS-DOS 6.22

dang it. after all that time installing it, it can't boot.
it doesn't even fail to boot, it just hangs at boot

some stupid problem with partitioning/mbr, probably

I was on @alexandermats show on ET Now yesterday, to discuss Facebook and Google vs Australia when it comes to News content, and how they've taken different approaches.

The key question: can this happen in India?

A thread 👇

1/

1. What's going on?
A proposed News Media Bargaining Code released by the Australian competition watchdog forces Google and Facebook to enter into arbitration with news publishers to decide a price for News on their platforms.

Price for Google to surface news. For users to share on FB.

2. Power imbalance: Australian competition commission believes there's a power imbalance between News publishers and social media platforms. This is true.

3. Google has done a deal with Rupert Murdoch's News corp

3/

and is now offering it “significant payments” for featuring it's publications in its News Showcase. This is a bad precedent in my opinion. Microsoft waded into this debate and supported what Australia was doing.

Why is this bad?
4/

4. There's no compulsion: Google doesn't need to index news. Users want news and Google prioritises news on search results anyway, but publishers can prevent Google from indexing using their robots.txt exclusions. No one is forcing publications from being indexed.

5/

X : Can you apply pace layers to maps?
Me : You can but what is where evolves. However, same rules apply to things, practices, data, knowledge and ethical values. All are forms of evolving capital. In the mapping world, we refer to this with pioneers, settlers and town planners.

X : What's the robot for?
Me : Image from an older presentation slide, don't worry it has no relevance.
X : Is this linked to diffusion?
Me : Not simply. Evolution of a single component can consist of many hundreds of diffusion curves i.e. a virus diffuses but it also evolves.

X : Why have you got DevOps in legacy? We haven't even started yet.
Me : That's not my problem. I would take a look at serverless.
X : DevOps is serverless.
Me : Some of the practices maybe co-opted (see ITIL vs DevOps) but the new faction will decide what it is or isn't.

X : I also disagree with your methods graphic.
Me : Do you mean this? As applied to the following map?
X : Yes. Lean is suitable for innovation.
Me : Ah, that depends upon what you mean by innovation. If you mean Genesis then lightweight XP has it beat.

X : I disagree.
Me : Well, I've had 15 years of people telling me that Agile works everywhere or Lean works everywhere or Six Sigma works everywhere and why all the competing methods don't. I have no interest in the conversation. Use appropriate methods based upon context.