A thread about Eastshade's bike mechanic!

When I originally thought of putting a bicycling in Eastshade, I was pretty sure it wasn't going to work, for the simple fact that if it was easy, we'd see a lot more rideable bikes in games. Well, I was wrong. It took a mere week.

Today we’re going to talk statistics and semantics. I’m going to do so via the medium of one of Twitter’s favourite stats 1.7% (aka “intersex is as common as red heads.”). The statistic comes from Fausto-Sterling’s work, which you can see a review of

To understand the statistic, we have to drill down into what the meaning of the word intersex is. Most people think of hermaphrodites. Let’s stress at the beginning there has been no example ever of a human being with both sets of working reproductive organs.

There is a very tiny percentage of people who are born with both testicular and ovarian tissue (what Fausto-Sterling calls “true hermaphrodites”). And when I say tiny, we’re talking intersex tiny, as in 0.0117/1,000 live births, or one in 1,000,000. These are very complex cases.

So, how do we arrive at 1.7%? What Fausto-Sterling does is apply a wider scope. Instead, she argues that intersex is anything that doesn’t fit into a platonic ideal. The platonic ideal, in this case, being a phenotypically perfect XX female and a phenotypically perfect XY male.

This means that intersex, used in the context of the 1.7% statistic, includes people for whom there is no sexual ambiguity. Take for example Klinefelter syndrome (XXY males). As Fausto-Sterling acknowledges, many males can go their whole life and not realise they are XXY.

Some people really benefit from hearing advice that everyone knows, for the same reason we keep schools open despite every subject in them having been taught before.

In that spirit, here's some quick Things Many People Find Too Obvious To Have Told You Already.

Your idea is not valuable, at all. All value is in the execution. You think you are an exception; you are not. You should not insist on an NDA to talk about it; nobody serious will engage in contract review over an idea, and this will mark you as clueless.

Technologists tend to severely underestimate the difficulty and expense of creating software, especially at companies which do not have fully staffed industry leading engineering teams ("because software is so easy there, amirite guys?")

Charge more. Charge more still. Go on.

The press is a lossy and biased compression of events in the actual world, and is singularly consumed with its own rituals, status games, and incentives. The news necessarily fails to capture almost everything which happened yesterday. What it says is important usually isn't.

Companies find it incredibly hard to reliably staff positions with hard-working generalists who operate autonomously and have high risk tolerances. This is not the modal employee, including at places which are justifiably proud of the skill/diligence/etc of their employees.

It’s underremarked upon that stablecoins accomplish basically all of the original design goals for Bitcoin qua a transactional mechanism (instant free value transfer anywhere), but that nobody cares about this because nobody ever cared about that part of the pitch.

“Why do people care about stablecoins then?”

A mix of “they encourage dollar-denominated liquidity in the cryptocurrency ecosystem and discourage withdrawal of the same” and “they’re good for money laundering.”

“But they make value transfer between exchanges much faster!”

This was a solved problem in traditional finance, too, mostly through the extension of credit. (It doesn’t matter how long settlement takes if there is sufficient trust to enable credit.)

The Bitcoin ecosystem is *positively allergic* to credit, so you have to call it a coin for them to accept it. And after you call it a coin they ignore everything the world has learned about credit, like risk management.

“Stablecoins aren’t credit!”

They’re pretty much exactly credit? A tether is a zero-coupon Bitfinex bond with a non-functioning call option. I

🔥 It's probably common knowledge that Netlify makes deployment incredibly simple- you can connect a repo, pick a build command and 🚀

or just drop a folder in and you're done!

...but here are some other things you might not know about our deploys that are very special 🧵

Netlify has a concept of "atomic" deploys- which means a few things:

- You can preview a deploy when you've or someone else has just put in a PR

- You can roll back to ANY previous state, with one click, in milliseconds

- You always know what state your cache is in!

Netlify allows you to cancel a deploy- did you just put in a change, merge it and then realize you've made a terrible mistake? I've never done that. 😬 er...

No worries. You can cancel that deploy with the click of a button.

You can lock a deploy. Let's say you get everything ready for a big release, code review and tests are complete, it's all ready.

You can lock a deploy in a state to get ready for a major release, so that you know exactly what you're releasing and sleep well the night before. 😴

You can even get notifications about locked deploys via email, outgoing webhook, or Slack. Netlify can notify you when a deploy is either locked or unlocked.