BC TECH
Saved by @Jacobtldr

Questions are a disruptive technology. A thread. 1/

 We see the most recent wave of disruptive technologies. E-commerce. Smart phones. Ride-sharing. Blockchain. We are often blind to the disruptive technologies and techniques that have been with us for a long, long time, but are still disruptive and disrupting. /2
Ancient but still disruptive tech: music, migration, out-marriage, ink, questions. /3
Questions change lives. They bring people together, tear them apart. They open doors. And minds. They are the seed of adventure. They acknowledge the chaos inside and around us. They are a transfer of power, trusting that the power will come back in time, improved. /4
What is a question? We use them so frequently, so thoughtlessly. It is easy to overlook their strangeness, and the nature of their power. /5
What is a question? (I am not going to share a dictionary definition here.) /6
A question is a marker of mystery, a pointer to the potentially unknown. It is a hand-off from one voice to another. For one, it is a shift from speaking to listening; for another, from listening to speaking. /7
A question is one of the smallest transfers of power that we can manage, or mismanage. /8
When you ask me a question - sincerely - you surrender some control of the conversation, for the time being. Most of us learn at an early age that this is a necessary thing, a good thing, a beautiful thing. That we are enriched by the viewpoints of others. /9
There are the macro ways we that help us live well together with others. Liberal democracy. Freedom of association. Of exchange. Of conscience. Ethically, religiously, or spiritually sourced norms around tolerating, respecting and even loving others. These are grand things. /10
Those are the big harmonizers, bringing our lives into harmony with one another. At the scale of hundreds, thousands, millions. But the little harmonizers matter too. For the scale of ones and twos. Tens and twenties. /11
So what are *you* like in conversation? /12
Too many "conversations" are dueling monologues. Two or more people spouting off in one another's vicinity, grandstanding in close quarters. /13
Questions weave together viewpoints, transforming what would otherwise be two (or more) monologues into a single dialogue. They create opportunities to be surprised, to influence and be influenced, to come into harmony, to co-evolve. /14
You can be "for" the big harmonizers, but lousy at the little harmonizers. That's been me in years past and it's still me at times, so I'll put that in the first person. I can be "for" the big harmonizers, and lousy at the little harmonizers. /15
It's easier to be "for" good things in the abstract, and harder to be a practitioner of good things in the concrete. Easy to love humanity, but hate humans. Easy to have the right yard sign, but harder to be kind. /16
So let's get concrete. Where and how can you use questions more skillfully? /17
#1. You can use questions to develop a better relationship with yourself. A few questions for that. /18
- What's my pattern with this?
- What's the real challenge for me here?
- What progress can I savor or appreciate?
- What does this (hard situation, dark thought or difficult emotion) have to teach me?
- What would a wise, kind elder recommend I do?
- What's my next step?/19
#2. You can use questions to develop a better relationship with family and friends. A questions for that. /20
- What's on your mind, really?
- What do *you* think?
- Where did you learn that skill?
- What's working in your life right now?
- What keeps you up at night these days?
- How can I help? /21
#3. You can use questions to be more effective in your work. /22
For work, use all of the above, plus:
- What assumptions can we relax?
- What would have to be true for this to be the best choice?
- What voice or alternative should we add to the mix?
- If we had to act now, what would we do?
- How can we test this quickly and cheaply? /23
These questions are not error-proof. If you ask them with the wrong intent or the wrong tone, they may not open things up for you. If you ask them with the right intent and tone, but get distracted and fail to listen, that's on you. /24
In the right hands, they have immense power. /25
A shout-out to my friend, Michael Strong (@flowidealism), whose TED talk on Socratic practice as a disruptive technology inspired many of these reflections. I am going to do another thread on what I've learned about Socratic practice, specifically. /26
A shout-out to Mike Rother (@realmikerother), whose book Toyota Kata has inspired and guided the way I use questions to guide problem-solving in business. /27
If you want to get a daily question from me, sign up at https://t.co/hdHbbc6Dqw /28

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So it turns out that Google Chrome was making everything on my computer slow *even when it wasn’t running*, because it installs something called Keystone which is basically malware.

I made a website because this shouldn’t

Wired first reported on how bad Keystone was 11 years ago when they put it into Google Earth (they seem to put it in all their popular

The fact that Keystone hides itself in Activity Monitor is bizarre. (The only sign of it was excessive CPU usage of WindowServer which is a system process).

I don’t know if Google was doing something nefarious with Keystone, or a third party figured out how to (which Wired warned about). But either way, I’m not inclined to give Google-the-organization the benefit of the doubt (despite the many good people who work on Chrome)...

...since it's been a decade+ and this still hasn't been "fixed".

There is no reason for auto-update software to need to do what Chrome/Keystone was doing. It also has a long history of crashing Macs.
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foone
foone
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you know how Atari called the Jaguar as a "64bit system", because it had two 32bit CPUs? (or because it had a 64bit bus, but let's not worry about that)
we should apply that logic to the current generation of consoles.
So the Switch is a 256bit console. It's the Nintendo 256.

The Xbox Series X? terrible name.
Better call it the "Xbox 512 Blu-ray".
like the Jaguar CD, the Sega CD... the good old days when consoles had their media type in the name.

Boringly the PS5 is also a Playstation 512 Blu-ray, because both of them are using the same AMD Zen 2 CPU.

The Switch one is weeeird. It's built on an Nvidia Tegra X1, which is an 8 core 64-bit CPU, so that should be 512, right?

Well... no. Four of them can't be used. And later documentation doesn't even mention them.

it's some weird system where the system-on-a-chip has four Cortex-A57 cores and four Cortex-A53 cores but only the A57s are usable?
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Recently, the @CNIL issued a decision regarding the GDPR compliance of an unknown French adtech company named "Vectaury". It may seem like small fry, but the decision has potential wide-ranging impacts for Google, the IAB framework, and today's adtech. It's thread time! 👇

It's all in French, but if you're up for it you can read:
• Their blog post (lacks the most interesting details): https://t.co/PHkDcOT1hy
• Their high-level legal decision: https://t.co/hwpiEvjodt
• The full notification: https://t.co/QQB7rfynha

I've read it so you needn't!

Vectaury was collecting geolocation data in order to create profiles (eg. people who often go to this or that type of shop) so as to power ad targeting. They operate through embedded SDKs and ad bidding, making them invisible to users.

The @CNIL notes that profiling based off of geolocation presents particular risks since it reveals people's movements and habits. As risky, the processing requires consent — this will be the heart of their assessment.

Interesting point: they justify the decision in part because of how many people COULD be targeted in this way (rather than how many have — though they note that too). Because it's on a phone, and many have phones, it is considered large-scale processing no matter what.
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El Sandifer, Rationality Expert to the Stars
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I’m quoted in this, which does about as good a job overviewing the topic as a New York Times profile can be expected to.

Major oversights in it as I see.

First, It does not acknowledge the fact that Yudkowsky is, at heart, a complete crank. This remains, to my mind, crucial to understanding the rationalist community’s influence on the world: they’re sci-fi writers being mistaken for scientists.

You can’t really understand the harmful effects of SSC until you realize that it’s part of a larger movement of bullshit artists serving as cult leaders to the techbros.

Second, and more importantly, it never really explains the harm that’s being done by Scott Siskind and his followers. It comes close, noting that “SJWs” were the only group not welcome in SSC, but it doesn’t capture the harm of that because it doesn’t unpack the term.

What is meant in practice when “SJWs” aren’t welcome in a space is that marginalized people speaking of the harm they experience are silenced.

That’s it. That’s the meaning.
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\U0001f7e2 Ed Guiness
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A long time ago I coded up a feature for SocialCoder which converts a link - any link - to a short URL. I use it all the time for sharing links to volunteer profiles and to volunteer opportunity listings.

The feature doesn't care what the link contains, it just hashes the URL, including any query params, and returns a shortened code.

More recently, around Christmas time, I added another feature where I can click a button to send a template notification to a charity that their new listing has been reviewed and published. I call it a next-steps email.

For the past few weeks, its all been working well. Its nice to keep automating things that previously were done by hand.

Fast forward to today.

A new opportunity listing is posted by a charity.

I review and publish it, tweet about it, then click a button to send the charity an emailed notification of next steps.
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