Some extreme geometry to start your day...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/120-cell

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"In case you missed it..."

(Seen in discover feed today)

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I hate Myers-Brigg, Colors, all that nonsense. However this framework speaks to my inner Optimizer without going full-on Holocracy.

https://www.alanna.space/fullcircle

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There's an episode of Columbo where the villain uses a photo of a face and a speed camera to establish an alibi.

Columbo enlarges the photos and finds that the shadows are inconsistent. He is able to do this because the photos are ordered by time on a single a roll.

Parallels to blockchains are pretty obvious. Each photo is directly linked to the previous/next photo and there are timestamps involved...

Images from http://columboscreenshots.blogspot.com/2014/03/columbo-58-columbo-and-murder-of-rock.html

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Unintended consequences of Google Image Search.

THE VCE exam body has been left red faced after a doctored artwork depicting a huge robot helping socialist revolutionaries during the Russian Revolution was accidentally included in this year’s year 12 history exam taken by 5700 students.

https://www.theage.com.au/education/history-transformed-in-vce-exam-20121114-29ce7.html

You heard about Young Karl Marx, but have you heard of VI Lenin Evangelion ?

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""All Tech Is Human: San Francisco is an all-day ethical tech summit with 175 technologists, academics, advocates, students, org leaders, artists, designers, policymakers, and YOU. Join us for an impactful mix of lightning talks, topical panels, strategy sessions, tech/humanity art performance, and meeting others in the thoughtful tech movement!"

https://alltechishumansanfrancisco.splashthat.com/

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I joined the http://go/johnhenry team a few weeks ago. Finally getting a chance to post about it after an exciting https://sites.google.com/corp/google.com/societalcontextsummit2019.

Excited to be team building again and really excited about the possibility of bringing systems thinking at scale into Google. Looking forward to how our first partner http://go/delavega uses our Societal Topography and Societal Context Repository to bring ML Fairness to display ads.

So much to learn and many challenges ahead.

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Bootloops? Bad Batteries? September 3rd deadline approaches..

https://www.nexus6psettlement.com

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Great Pyrenees and Maremma chilling at Flour and Water Pizzeria.

Gus is a #doogler but you'll have to see him in SF on Valencia Ave on Saturdays. Too big to sneak onto BART :)

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*** This is Happening Now ***

There will be two great talks tomorrow on the intersection of technology, society, and justice. I highly recommend catching these talks if you are able! Details below:

Livestream link:

http://go/scs-keynote-livestream

Talks:

Ruha Benjamin (9:45 - 10:30am)
Anna Lauren Hoffmann (9:45 - 10:30am)

Speaker bios:

https://www.ruhabenjamin.com/ is an Associate Professor of African American Studies at Princeton University, founder of https://www.thejustdatalab.com/ and the author of two books, https://www.ruhabenjamin.com/peoples-science and https://www.ruhabenjamin.com/race-after-technology. Ruha teaches and speaks widely about the relationship between knowledge and power, race and citizenship, health and justice and at Princeton her main focus is on the social dimensions of science, technology, and medicine.

https://www.annaeveryday.com/about is an Assistant Professor with The Information School at the University of Washington working at the intersections of data, technology, culture and ethics. Anna has written many https://www.annaeveryday.com/publications on issues in information, data and ethics, while especially to the ways discourse, design and uses of information technology work to promote or hinder the pursuit of important human values like respect and justice.

Rooms for livestream:

DUB-1GC-1-Dracula (8)

DUB-1GC-3-Golden Grove (7)

LON-123-1-New Forest (12)

SVL-MOT1-5-Triskelion (8)

NYC-9TH-14-F-324-Uptown Training (16)

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Only 50ish versions behind on this public terminal at the vet...

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The AI for Climate Change talk mentions Jevons' Paradox, which explains why efficiency gains actually increase usage of a resource.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/jiec.12285 describes how one might use intervene. Interesting reading.

It concludes with:

Findings from the modeling highlight the need to implement
a system of interventions that can influence the strength and
direction of each of the feedback loops within the system being
intervened with, if CE are to be more reliably reduced than
they are at present. Single interventions are much less likely to
succeed and are, in fact, less efficient at producing the desired
results. Further, because the system is constantly evolving,
intervening with it requires a responsive, holistic approach, while
maintaining focus on a long-term goal.

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...then Google said "Let there be iGoogle"; and there was iGoogle. And Google saw that the javascript was good and separated the gadgets from the container origins....

Fast forward over 10 years and this serving system is still the underlying force keeping light from darkness. After a good run in Social it was exiled to an uncertain fate with the ever faithful +111756696344385606909 and other true believers keeping it alive.

Exiting the wilderness between PAs it finally found a new home with +109533200203018540387 and +111563624442337972165 into a reliability reset fueled future.

But Gapi needs your help. Please help it find an L5 so it can grow and thrive as it fully migrates to new infrastructure

https://grow.googleplex.com/jobs/b9f41ecb-c6c5-4129-af30-2e1181d645c9

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Someone's going to eventually make a Google Duplex version of this...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33CIVjvYyEk

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First heard this mentioned this week. Found this earlier reference...

https://opensource.com/article/17/2/hidden-costs-free-software

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Oh no...
https://www.whatmatters.com/stories/higher-education-college-university-okrs

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I'm curious if anyone has mapped the reliability crisis with a System Dynamics Lens. Some of the proposed actions hit some of the archetypes on the nose....

For example a one-size fits all release shepherding process takes resources away from efforts that to address the underlying reliability problem. (Fixes that Fail)

Reliability metrics operate on a delay so you get oscillation of investment and failure (shifting the burden)

If anyone would like to workshop a systems diagram for reliability I'd be interested in workout out the feedback loops.

I highly recommend the book https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/3828902-thinking-in-systems and the image below come from this pdf of https://thesystemsthinker.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/03/Systems-Archetypes-I-TRSA01_pk.pdf.

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I can think of one use for blockchains:

Create TAPchain, MPMchain, PiperChain

- For each day archive TAP results and MPM builds to long-term storage.
- Create a sorted list of hashes of that content, publish it.
- Write the location of that document and it's hash to the blockchain of your choosing.

When the next legal issue arises, we'll be ready.

The same pattern could also be used for provable data for any type of content we process. Maintain side-chain and publish to a permissionless, public blockchain.

Alternate idea is to use trillian and create a certificate transparency like system; but that's not quite as usable for something that needs to stick around for many years, vs triggering warnings/audits for bad behavior.

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Fulton pointed out that generational change, and how it is handled, is often one of the most critical moments in any organization that hopes to last more than a decade or two. In times of generational change, much of the ability for a successful transition comes from the founding DNA and governing systems that were set up at the organization’s inception.

https://medium.com/the-long-now-foundation/long-lived-institutions-205f28330f79

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In honor of the recently departed Google+ community/page here's a recent squirrel eating a strawberry from my neighbor in Montclair Oakland.

They expertly trolled the folks there with the subject "Who's stealing my strawberries!"

cc David Bresbis who I remember being a fan...

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At first I thought this was a menswear catalog and almost tossed it in the recycling bin....

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"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

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I finally made it to the Allyship Fundamentals course. Recommended.

https://sites.google.com/corp/google.com/allyship/home

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I think it's time for a Legal Deposit scheme for Games.

- Game publishers would put their games in Escrow when they publish.  
- Game Services could publish a spec on how to interpret the game contents.
- 'Orphan' games would actually be preserved.- Users that purchased the Game would then be entitled to a copy of the escrowed item, plus the design on how to run them.

This, combined with an export of user-generated data would allow for usability after Stadia or the Game Publisher sunsets the service/game.

And to be honest I'd love to see this extended to all Online "Stores" that don't let you export usable contents.

Barring that Game Services could enter a Ulysses Pact with users if they are serious about the long-haul.. 

 For each purchase a user makes put 10x in a locked escrow fund.  When the service cancels that money can be used to migrate the games to a new provider or payout back the user.

- If a Game Service gets few users it's not a lot of money to exit and actually would increase satisfaction.
- If a Game Service does get popular then there's an explicit feedback loop that reinforces the durability of the system and alignment of interests.

Evernote announced something like this, but never really followed through.   A small company called Forever actually does have a preservation fund that is purpose driven.

[crosspost from industryinfo..]

One thing we at Google could do is advocate for a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_deposit scheme for Games.

- Game publishers would put their games in Escrow when they publish.
- Google could publish a spec on how to interpret the game contents.
- 'Orphan' games would actually be preserved.
- Users that purchased the Game would then be entitled to a copy of the escrowed item, plus the design on how to run them.

This, combined with an export of user-generated data would allow for usability after Stadia or the Game Publisher sunsets the service/game.

And TBH I'd love to see this extended to all Online "Stores" that don't let you export usable contents.

Barring something like that Google could enter a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ulysses_pact with our users if we're serious about the long-haul.. For each purchase a user makes put 10x in a locked escrow fund. When the service cancels that money can be used to migrate the games to a new provider or payout back the user.

- If Stadia gets few users it's not a lot of money to exit and actually would increase satisfaction.
- If Stadia does get popular then there's an explicit feedback loop that reinforces the durability of the system and alignment of interests.

Evernote announced something like this, but never really followed through. A small company called https://www.forever.com/guarantee actually does have a preservation fund that is purpose driven.

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And yes some of these games are lost forever...

But one good idea is the magazine to build community.

https://twitter.com/retrohistories/status/1138020709320613888

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Happy to see this project. Looking into ways to support it, because they face a steep climb.

Inspired by the folk hero John Henry....Because, despite intelligence, physical strength and an incredible will, (1) he lacked a complete understanding of the system he was challenging, (2) he struggled alone, and (3) he struggled with outdated technology.

https://sites.google.com/corp/google.com/project-john-henry/home

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https://twitter.com/TeamYouTube/status/1136341801109843968

This is at least a graduated response, wonder what changed in the last 12 hours?

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Today I attended the "Designing for At Risk Users" course. I find it incredibly galling to hear what Youtube did today given the targeted harassment and doxing.

It flies in the face of what was taught and own standards about giving targets the means to "make it stop".

https://standards.google/guidelines/google-material/usability/at-risk-users.html#user-identities

While anyone can experience a privacy or security event, at-risk users face a variety of life circumstances that might put them at unusually greater risk:

.....

Who they are: Anyone could be targeted at some point in their lives simply based on a personal characteristic such as age, gender, ethnicity, reputation, financial stability, sexual orientation, or education.

.....

Active Event

Where possible, users should be able to quickly and easily access practical guidance as they experience a privacy or security event, such as cyberstalking, online impersonation, surveillance, spear-phishing, or account hijacking. Users will likely want to understand what is happening and take steps to respond. They are likely to feel high levels of stress in this state, so easy-to-use designs will be especially helpful.

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state of denial

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Updated to latest MacOS. Yay!

Repeated prompts to "unlock keychain". oh no!

I was determined to not reset my login keychain, because then you lose the TouchID gnubby and have to reimage the whole laptop. (May only apply to santa exceptions, maybe not..)

I finally got lucky and found a way to work around it. (and yes, I've let Techstop know about it)

1) Open Keychain app.
2) Click on login item in left pane.
3) Right click on login item, select 'Change settings for Keychain "login"'
4) In my case the Lock After setting was checked and had a large number
5) Change the timeout value and save.

You'll need to enter your keychain password a few times. But once you're done the keychain will possibly be updated and uncorrupted.

To verify you can run the gcert command in your terminal. You should not be prompted to unlock the keychain and touchid should be requested.

Theory: changing the expiration setting forces the keychain app to rewrite the keychain data structures fresh.

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BRB ... bringing Enron style accounting to the resource economy...

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Interesting:

https://wicg.github.io/ad-click-attribution/index.html

Of course you have to trust your User Agent (Browser) to keep your browsing secret..

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One of the better public Postmortems I've seen.

Keep those SSH keys safe!

https://matrix.org/blog/2019/05/08/post-mortem-and-remediations-for-apr-11-security-incident/

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[actually it's the exploded wiring cabinet for my neighborhood that's transitioning to AT&T fiber...]

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Would be nice if all of our products supported Alt text as well as Mastodon does...

And if sharing with Louis Gray I'd say "Image of a rack mount server with long fsck times"

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Red Hat turns 20 so they asked former folks for their memories. Here's something I dug up that might be of interest to folks 'round these parts..

... I never got a response on this email; but that might be because Red Hat was always late paying Google Invoices..

Looks like Joan is still here. Ray does not show up in Epitaphs.

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"stories" from. "GitHub"

In the developer ecosystem, branch conflicts are considered especially heinous.

On Github, the dedicated developers who resolve these vicious conflicts are members of an elite squad known as the Special Merge Unit.

These are their stories.

Dun Dun

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https://googleblog.blogspot.com/2014/03/introducing-auto-awesome-photobombs.html

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""What we found was that the majority of news outlets had not given any thought to even basic strategies for preserving their digital content, and not one was properly saving a holistic record of what it produces.""

https://www.cjr.org/tow_center_reports/the-dire-state-of-news-archiving-in-the-digital-age.php

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Before we bury G+ it might be worthwhile to collect some memorabilia...

Marc Weber from the Computer History Museum asked if we wanted to contribute Google+ artifacts to CHM. They don't care about swag, but I could think of a few things that they might be interested in:

- The Obama + Dalai Lama framed print.
- The Buffalo? (Too big?)
- The Emerald Sea painting (did anyone save it?)

Open to suggestions....

[Too bad the Apiary whiteboard is long gone....]

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So I thought I'd write an apps-script macro to help find Twitter profiles of my G+ circled people. [I'm assuming these contacts will go away on April 2nd, right Greg Wolfe ?]

Code works, but App Script barfs on the Twitter javascript used to render the follow buttons. So I just grabbed the html output and stuck it on a server and clicked the follow bu
tton...

If someone wants to poke at it and/or publish it (I have no time for either) have at it...

You can access it here:

https://script.google.com/macros/s/AKfycbz8RJl6qIS6x1PTQss_O1Xz69l1_bp1QcyJPoxnW9qITvFYTEI/exec

And the xss-riddled code looks like this:

function doGet() {
var html = '<!DOCTYPE html>';

do {
var pageToken;

var connections = People.People.Connections.list('people/me', {
pageSize: 100,
personFields: 'names,urls',
pageToken: pageToken
});

connections.connections.forEach(function(person) {
// Skip people without URLs in their profile.
if (!person.urls) {
return;
}
person.urls.forEach(function(url) {
if (url.value && url.value.match(/twitter.com/)) {
var name = url.value;
if (person.names && person.names.length > 0) {
name = person.names[0].displayName;
}
html += '\n<br><a class="twitter-follow-button" href="' + url.value + '">';
html += 'Follow ' + name + '</a>\n';
}
});
});
pageToken = connections.nextPageToken;
} while (pageToken);

html += '\n<script async src="https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js" charset="utf-8"></script>'
var output = HtmlService.createHtmlOutput(html);
output.setTitle('Google+ Follower Finder');
return output;
}

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Whatever happened to the Orkut Community Archive?

+116817942633187704506 ?

http://web.archive.org/web/20160413222454/http://orkut.google.com/en.html

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Anyone up for an HIRL before consumer G+ is gone for good?

This ceremony allows one last interaction with the corpse, providing a time for the living to express their emotions and beliefs about death with the deceased.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wake_(ceremony)

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CW: health, cancer, stuff like that.

So yeah, I've spent the past 5 days living at Kaiser Hospital in Oakland. I spent my waking hours caring for my wife's basic needs as she recovers from an infection and progression of bone mets that caused much pain and suffering. We have a plan forward and are headed home today.

But that's neither here nor there. I don't want sympathy or anything like that; I post these updates to normalize and make visible the caretaker role that we all assume. Please use your sick leave, vacation, vacation donation time and finally short-term/long-term disability to care for your loved ones. You've earned it (and in the case of disability you're even paying premiums for it.)

I'll have a few more stories to share later on once I get caught-up. But for now behold the disco-light aesthetic of the Stanley Healthcare Bed-Check®. (It's basically a bed sensor and an alarm used to prevent people from falling). I highly doubt that it uses a cloud based TensorFlow prediction model.

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Tired: Wipeout
Wired: Confidential Waste

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The human body is more varied and complex than even the largest metro cell.

This Philips IntelliVue MP50 has graphs that are butterfly smooth, multi layer alerts, trending, color coded heads up display and much more. Whatever is the latest replacement for BorgMon would do well to learn from this adjacent field ..

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#lol

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Just a reminder that if you're faced with the task of caring for a loved one at Google I am available to talk.

Also I signed up to donate my excess vacation but I've yet to participate.

https://sites.google.com/a/google.com/us-benefits/time-off/vacation/overview--emergency-vacation-don...

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