I'm going to tell you a little bit how we work on features at GitHub. It's simple, but very powerful in my opinion. At GitHub we have a high performance culture.

Another long thread. Bear with me till the end please. These are my views, and not necessarily of those associated with me. Though those associated with me have been incredibly supportive. I thank everyone who messaged me. I thank @databoydg for inspiring me to say this next. 1/n

First, @databoydg: I hope this makes justice to what you've tried to teach me. I'm sorry if I'm a slow student. In this second part of the story, I'm a privileged academic having a drink in Montreal after a #neurips conference with @sindero 2/n

Simon says to me: I feel we need to do something about this (stark lack of minority representation in ML). We agree we'll do something about it, but it feels like we're at the bottom of Everest and have to climb it without any gear 3/n

Time goes by and with the creation of the @turinginst I suggest in the first meeting that we should use it as a public platform to improve the numbers of Black people in UK universities. I encounter a lot of resistance (to be honest, it felt aggressive) and defensiveness 4/n

I was told that was an Oxford and Cambridge problem only by another academic. I felt silenced. Ironically, by both men and women. 5/n

Today WhatsApp wished it's users good morning. Accept the updated terms and conditions or say goodbye. (Thread 1/n) It is effective from Feb 8, 2021.

There are seperate hyperlinks for terms and privacy policies. Both these hyperlinks lead to multiple pages of contracts written in a very jargonised language. A few things I noted :

The information 'we' provide to #WhatsApp include our messages. Also WhatsApp claims that it is end to end encrypted BUT,

BUT if your friend / enemy / boyfriend / family or anyone is offline and your message sent to him cannot be delivered #immediately, it will be saved on #WhatsApp servers for 30 days.

Also: When you forward media msg in #WhatsApp that media is stored temporarily in encrypted form on it's servers to aid in more efficient delivery of additional forwards. Tada! (Consider a thousand times before sending any images; news anchors can officially read your chats.)

In my quest to write a fast IPv4+6 parser, I have written a slow-but-I-think-correct parser, to use as a base of comparison.

In doing so, I have discovered more cursed IP address representations that I was previously unaware of.

A thread!

We start out simple, with IPv4 and IPv6 in what I'll call their "canonical form":

192.168.0.1
1:2:3:4:5:6:7:8

Various specs call these "dotted quad", dot-separated fields each representing 1 byte; and "colon-hex", colon-separated fields each representing 2 bytes.

The first bits of complexity come from IPv6. In canonical form, common addresses would end up with long runs of zeros in the middle. So, "::" allows you to elide 1 or more 16-bit blocks of zeros:

1:2::3:4 means 1:2:0:0:0:0:3:4

Next up, for cursed historical reasons, IPv6 permits you to write the final 32 bits of the address in dotted quad form. Effectively, you can splat an IPv4 address onto the end of IPv6 addresses!

1:2:3:4:5:6:77.77.88.88 means 1:2:3:4:5:6:7777:8888

And of course, you can combine the two!

fe80::1.2.3.4 means fe80:0:0:0:0:0:102:304

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.

Years before Andy Grove was attributed with the phrase:

"Whatever can be done, will be done"

A lot of us technologists assumed this was the case anyway.

It's a truism.

What if we could track every person on the planet in real time?

Or at least everyone in a major city

🤔🔮

So, given someone has this idea.

Then the only question is can it be done.

Well, we're already installing all the tech to do this for autonomous vehicles, drones and smart city infrastructure.

It really wouldn't be a huge leap to do that for people.

But how might that be possible 🤔

Sure we can already do it with phones right, but not everyone has a phone and sometimes the batteries die blah blah.

Could we do it in a way that it was difficult to circumvent, and always active?

Well, maybe we could if we put our thinking caps on about the problem.

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Now I'm going to enter the wild world of wild speculative futurism, so take everything else with a pinch of salt 🧂

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Turns out cell phone towers pinpoint the location of your phone as part of how they work.

And then as you move around you switch from one tower to another.

I think most people get this.

Something like the image below