Why was @LudwigAhgren's Twitch stream yesterday a masterpiece in creating live content?

Ludwig started off with a high energy intro with background music that sounded like an entrance theme to a WWE wrestler (or a Saturday morning TV show).

He then moved onto a segment where he attempted to break a 'world record' for speedrunning Unban Bingo.

(a trending piece of content right now, with in-jokes with the Twitch community and funny content that can be repurposed for YouTube).

Ludwig follows this up with a 20 slide presentation on 'how to make it big as a streamer'.

He engaged viewers into chat by asking them to vote directly in chat temporarily, which perfectly broke up what could have been a 'boring' presentation (spoiler, it wasn't boring).

He follows this with a Q&A and answers as many questions as he could, again, engaging chat.

THEN.... we get a PogChamp emote tier list of every PogChamp so far.

Been reading up a lot about these jabs, esp as I know they are going to be a condition of a return to normality

Was on a zoom call last evening with a testing company that had some fascinating evidence on protection etc.

I have more reading to do.

I do not want to be coerced into something I don't want, BUT i want normal back as soon as possible.

Basically i'm at the point in my isolation and thinking that I'll take whatever just so this bullshit can end.

That is a desperate mindset, but so is 12 months of being cut off from the world.

All i have is what goes round and round in my head.

There's no one else to help balance it.

So i'm in group 6, and my surgery are doing group 6 right now. And i am at the point i want to do it to get it DONE.

And also to study what happens. Because i have that kind of mind.

I remember Pandemrix.

But we live with risk every day.

I risk my life climbing walls with only a harness around my waist to catch me as i lean back and fall off

And rational risk assessment is at the heart of everything going wrong these last 12 months

1) Let's talk about the question of 'how should we think about Chinese tech'

What do we talk about when we talk about Chinese tech? Who is 'we' here? How do you pronounce Elema?

I've hit 10k in followers and it's time to earn my stripes as a thinkboi.

2) Chinese tech is a loaded term. The very fact that we have to say 'Chinese' tech rather than tech demotes its otherness.

So what does a place of origin signify? The different market conditions, political context and imo most importantly, the development stage of the country.

3) I think @benedictevans and @ToniCowanBrown's podcast on 'How to think about Chinese tech when you know fa about China' (my title, not theirs), lays some of the groundwork here.

China's different market conditions and political context often means a parallel tech world

4) This means a fundamental rethinking of first principals that's hard to stomach for most Western tech folks
- Copy is not wrong, in fact, it shows you've picked a de-risked business model
- There are no unscalable resources, esp when labour is

5) But I think the most important factor that gets overlooked is that China tech demotes something very particular. It is coming from a developing country. The life stage of a country is different from its cultural context.

What happens when a developing country is innovating?

I spent 1.4 lakhs on Zomato alone this year

Once these platforms build a habit, it's hard to leave

Lifetime value of customers is immense, which recover marketing costs and more

These very "loss-making" companies eventually become money-making machines

I love the assumptions people are making here to try to work out how this is possible, but I'll not share the math to just keep this fun.

Few hints: I have excellent cardiovascular fitness, love fine + healthy dining and order with my wife and brother

Guess AOV and order freq

#UX and #design friends, we need to talk about estimating. I'd like to share some advice that's come up 3 times this week, in hopes it's useful. And it's echoed, by the way, in the BUSINESS OF UX course @EliNatoli and I are teaching at my UX 365 Academy (link at the end).

(1/12)

Avoiding wars with clients is a matter of how you structure your engagements, along with how you spell out what you're doing in your proposals/contracts. That starts with estimating.

The biggest 2 rules I follow are these:

(2/12)

1. I do not EVER estimate a project in full from start-to-finish.

2. Once we're past initial Discovery (see below), I estimate in small chunks, e.g. "here's what will take us to the next iteration/review."

(3/12)

NEVER estimate past the point where you may get new information based on a build/test cycle.

Believe me when I say that you'll be wrong every time. Ask me how I know ;-)

(4/12)

So instead, first, I estimate a Consult/Discovery part that details what I think we need to do to get a handle on what's actually wrong here, and how long that will take.

For example...

(5/12)

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.

Its essentially a first person controller with extra momentum, resulting in the the movement direction lagging behind your look direction. Then I used the angle between the look and the movement to dictate camera "bank" and handle bar rotation, and voila! Game changing feature!

The look of the bike was harder than the movement. Bicycles are fairly modern, so it was tricky to fit it to the setting. I took some artistic liberties and settled on a penny farthing (but wooden), ignoring how impossible that would be to ride on the rugged terrain in Eastshade.

Surprisingly, the hardest part was sound. It didn't feel like riding a bike until I found the right sounds and how to trigger them. For a while I was stuck thinking too realistically. A penny farthing is fixed gear, pedaling sounds nothing like a regular modern bike.

Finally I abandoned realism and went with sounds normal people would associate with biking. We're all so used to modern bikes that we strongly associate the distinct ticking of a freewheel mechanism (think of the sound when you stop pedaling and coast on a modern bike).

We're kicking off the Privacy Tech session at #enigma2021 with Mitch Negus speaking about "NO DATA, NO PROBLEM—GIVING NUCLEAR INSPECTORS BETTER TOOLS WITHOUT REVEALING STATE

A nuclear catastrophe hasn't occurred... yet. So we need to stay vigilant. Nuclear inspectors go in according to treaties to check what's going on and check compliance with treaty rules.

But as sophisticated analytics become more common, states will only want to share the minimum amount of information necessary under the treaty.

But perhaps we can use MPC -- secure multi-party computation

Yao's garbled circuits were first demonstrated on the millionaire's problem -- figuring out who's richer without revealing actual amounts.

Used for other things like cryptocurrency these days.

Can we use this for nuclear inspection?

MPC can be used to compute anything computed by a computer [but it's expensive!]

The other day we shared a thread on the 5 types of work a Hotspot can perform to mine $HNT. Today we take a look at the work of a Challenger in Proof-of-Coverage (PoC).

Challenges are used by PoC to validate wireless coverage. As a Challenger, your Hotspot is chosen by the network to create a challenge, or encrypted multi-layer packet, over the Internet.

The challenge process begins with the Challenger selecting an initial target Hotspot, followed by a group of Hotspots known by the @helium blockchain to be within range of each other as a result of RF witnessing.

These Hotspots are given a multi-layer packet (think an “envelope of envelopes”) that only they can decrypt to prove they are providing legitimate wireless coverage.

The Challenger could be anywhere in the world and does not need to be co-located near other Hotspots. Challenge requests occur every 120 blocks, and if the consensus group accepts the challenge transaction as being valid, the challenge proceeds.

Last up in Privacy Tech for #enigma2021, @xchatty speaking about "IMPLEMENTING DIFFERENTIAL PRIVACY FOR THE 2020

Differential privacy was invented in 2006. Seems like a long time but it's not a long time since a fundamental scientific invention. It took longer than that between the invention of public key cryptography and even the first version of SSL.

But even in 2020, we still can't meet user expectations.
* Data users expect consistent data releases
* Some people call synthetic data "fake data" like
"fake news"
* It's not clear what "quality assurance" and "data exploration" means in a DP framework

We just did the 2020 US census
* required to collect it by the constitution
* but required to maintain privacy by law

But that's hard! What if there were 10 people on the block and all the same sex and age? If you posted something like that, then you would know what everyone's sex and age was on the block.

It’s here.

After months of building, the new, revamped, reimagined Generalist is ready. I can’t wait to show you.

Here’s what it means.

https://t.co/4RaadaUjKR

*How did this get started?*

In August of last year, shortly after going full-time, I decided The Generalist needed a permanent home. Something that captured the vision for all the great things I thought would come out of this community.

I set to work.

You can hear more about building the new site in the tweets below. Of course, if you’re excited to jump straight in, and become a member, you can do so

*What was the plan?*

Launch by the end of September. Here’s the email I sent to The Braintrust (the awesome folks that have agreed to give their advice on this little venture).

- 15K subscribers
- New site
- New membership
- New community

*How did you do?*

I failed on all four.

By the end of September, I had +11K subscribers — 15K had been a stretch, so that was good with me. But I also had no site, no membership, and no permanent community home.

1/ What causes long term sustained performance in an ad account?

🧵featuring real examples 👇🏻

If you explore the source of FB ad growth and subsequently revenue growth for eCom brands it is almost never a function of iterative improvements to ad creative or tactics over time.

2/ More often it is a series of moments that unlock an order of magnitude increase in awareness, engagement, traffic and performance.

These moments can be caused by:

A single ad
A big PR moment
A breakthrough campaign
A change in market dynamics
A new product release
Etc.

3/ The problem is they are very hard to predict and create.

I’ll give you an example of a few that happened for us @QALORing that changed our trajectory (and ad account performance) each time...

4/ The first was @andydalton14 wearing a ring on @HBO hard knocks. It was the peak of the series popularity and they did a :30 piece on the ring he was wearing while playing.

See screenshot

Notice the traffic before and after the peak.

5/ This increased organic traffic let us alter our AdWords strategy, extract more post intent demand from new searchers and pull clips of the show to supplement our ad credibility.

X : Are you interested in container technology?
Me : No. I'm interested in the practices that emerge from industrialiation of technology. It's the practice that actually define the future, not the technology.
X : So, what are you interesting in?
Me : ... long list ...

1. SWARMING (of people and machines)

2. DISTRIBUTED AND INDIRECT LEARNING

3. DISTRIBUTION OF PROVISION (not power but provision)

4. ACCEPTANCE OF STANDARDS (identification and adoption of)

5. INCENTIVES & FUNDING MODELS (worth based / outcome based models)

6. FOCUS ON INTENT (long term goals)

7. MANAGEMENT OF CONSTRAINTS (including enabling constraints)

8. FOCUS ON PRINCIPLES (over beliefs)

9. SUPPLY CHAIN MANAGEMENT

10. IMMERSION

11. RESOURCE MANAGEMENT

12. SUSTAINABILITY (not just tickboxes in a CSR)

13. REUSABILITY (of components including exaptation)

14. MANAGING INERTIA (models for identifying and managing)

15. RESILIENCE (both engineering and ecological)

16. MOBILISATION (of people and resources)

17. MANIPULATION (of perceptions and defense against)

18. SITUATIONAL AWARENESS

19. AUGMENTED INTELLIGENCE (not replacement of human capital but addition to)

20. REDUCTION OF WASTE

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.

Elastic didn't really relicense ElasticSearch. It forked it.

🧵 A thread.

1/18

There's a lot of talk in the open source community about the cost of forking.

2/18

- "Forking is best avoided."

- "Forking is a last resort option."

- "Forking is like a nuclear weapons. It's a defensive threat."

3/18

Forking is seen as impractical and extremely expensive.

And that's a Really Good Thing(tm).

It's a forcing function for figuring out solutions that are broadly acceptable across the community.

4/18

The thing is, the cost of forking is mostly a function of three things:

1⃣ the size of the community that you can bring along with you,
2⃣ whether you need to rename your fork (who owns the trademark), and
3⃣ how much infrastructure you need to rebuild.

5/18