I'm old enough to remember when the Internet wasn't a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.
Tom Eastman
@tveastman
Free speech is amazing here on Twitter, the ONLY website on the internet.
Tom Eastman’s posts
Hot-desking: Having decided that millennials will never own homes. Let's make sure they can't even have their own spaces at work.
If you're an expert, your job is to use your expertise to help other people, not to shit on other people for not being experts.
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Sure but it was also doing that last week as well, and it was fine.
Are you sure the problem isn't that you fired everybody who made it work?
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Terry Pratchett literally wrote a book where the villain was a GC who sided with fascists.
I have a Python program I run every day, it takes 1.5 seconds.
I spent six hours re-writing it in rust, now it takes 0.06 seconds.
That efficiency improvement means I'll make my time back in 41 years, 24 days :-)
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"Nothing ever gets built on schedule or within budget."
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Describe software engineering in three words or less.
The Adobe PGP key leak is a nothingburger.
It was a three day old key.
That's not long enough to even work out how to send a PGP email.
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If someone with a furry avatar says the site is doomed, and someone with an anime avatar says the site is fine, believe me: it's the furry you need to trust.
This is actually the very best ad for cloud computing there is. twitter.com/jessfraz/statu
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Douglas Adams, in 1992, describing the blockchain:
"The major difference between a thing that might go wrong and a thing that cannot possibly go wrong is that when a thing that cannot possibly go wrong goes wrong it usually turns out to be impossible to get at or repair."
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Blocking is time management. You block someone who's spending their time trying to waste yours.
The golden rule: when you block someone on twitter it's because both you AND THEY agree that your time is more valuable than their time.
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If Kanye was Britney he'd be under a conservatorship by now. Weird how that doesn't seem to happen.
Fun fact: since drew this comic approx two hundred thousand Americans have shot each other to death. Great job everybody!
A friend was telling me a story today about how her and her only woman colleague were stuck minding the office while all their male colleagues in the department went to the company International Woman's Day event.
Yesterday, in a functioning democracy. I voted. No lines, no fuss. No intimidation. No voter roll purging. No ID required. No voter intimidation. No insecure voting machine. No "hanging chad". It took three minutes. I was offered a pen and hand sanitizer before & after.
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That's not cancel culture. That's literally democracy.
Hey remember when Duncan Garner said Taika Waititi committed treason by saying that NZ had a racism problem?
What google maps used to be:
- a good map
What google maps is:
- "Hey! how was your breakfast? Wanna review it for me?"
- "Hey! I've just emailed you a list of EVERYWHERE YOU'VE BEEN."
- "Hey! We will LITERALLY DIE if you don't take a picture of the supermarket you're in!"
I like how when the whole country gets a text, we all go to Twitter to tell each other that we got a text we all got.
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Yeah no actually that's fine and the 'multi-million dollar instustry' is actually snake-oil-startup backers like softbank and not a real industry.
twitter.com/TheOfficialACM
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Don't forget the inevitable follow up once it has killed people:
"Now is NOT the time for politics, people have died!"
Referendums requiring a majority are a poor way to decide how we treat minorities.
It was literally the police who shot people. With guns they literally already had.
I'm more impressed that in two weeks you managed to break something built so well that it could do >1000 poorly batched RPCs just to render a home timeline!
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"almost as if" is doing the work of saying "I have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about".
Twenty years. Twenty years since I first started working with Linux and Unix systems, and I still don't get the difference between .bashrc and .bash_profile.
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And again the reminder that "free speech" isn't under threat. "Giving Elon money" is under threat, and he's equating the two.
None of this has anything to do with actual free speech.
Why not just roll back your database?
Oh, you can't.
Crap, you'd better restore from a backup.
Oh, you can't.
Oh man, I guess you're gonna have to log in as an admin and repair it manually.
Oh, you c
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Replying to @etherchain_org
We can confirm that there was a successful 51% attack on the Ethereum Classic (#ETC) network with multiple 100+ block reorganization. We recommend all services to closely monitored the chain and significantly increase required confirmations.
Retweeting so the UK brigade will spit out their morning coffee.
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Replying to @setoacnna
Terry Pratchett literally wrote a book where the villain was a GC who sided with fascists.
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That basically means twice now he's sold kids' personal info to megacorps.
I'm more than happy to pay more tax to live in a better world. What a god damned bargain.
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To be absolutely clear, the code is literally the easiest part of programming (and I don't mean it's easy). Everything *around* the code is much more important.
If someone tells you that it's only the code that matters. They are wishing it were true instead of saying it's true.
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I doubt the man's been physically able to "hop" in 45 years.
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(I hope people are realising that the subtext here is that I was having a great time learning and using an interesting new technology and I'm being tongue-in-cheek about the value proposition and I feel vaguely sad that I even feel compelled to clarify)
Explaining the blockchain:
"imagine a giant excel spreadsheet that everyone has a copy of, and that you can only ADD rows to, never change or delete them".
"kay, sounds neat"
"now imagine a bunch of those rows contain child porn"
"um what"
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Somehow you also predicted (and used!) Twitter increasing the maximum tweet length several years ahead of time, too :-D
YES that is the POINT.
I am allowed to eat shit if I choose to so.
But if I'm selling you a meal, it's not ALLOWED to have shit in it.
That's how this WORKS.
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When you read or write the ticket, the github issue, the email thread, the forum, the stack overflow question, the HOWTO, the documentation, or the license, what then?
Reading the code ain't the JOB. Communication is.
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When you read code, the race, religion, politics, gender, and orientation of the author are irrelevant and invisible. The only thing you can tell about the author is their ability to write well organized code. Nothing else matters.
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If a bunch of family-planning doctors join Signal today, every law enforcement agency with their phone number will know, because signal notifies them "Dr Smith has joined signal, say hi!"
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Here is your friendly reminder that we built Signal for private, secure communication. It’s built so you can communicate individually and in groups, through text and calls, without fear of interference or data collection. Free to use and not for profit.
It's even worse than that: because of "American exceptionalism" Americans think that, because it's bad in America, it must naturally be even worse everywhere else. Because if it COULD be better, it would be better in America.
They're trained to be broken. t.co/uVdDo0WZo4
This post is unavailable.
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By now, I feel like is supposed to have contacted me and offered me money to reply to my viral tweet and say "Hey check out my Soundcloud!"
Ita been two years since the first New Zealand case of covid.
Half of all the New Zealanders who have ever caught covid, caught it THIS WEEK.
Since 2018, Secateur has blocked 2,563,881,394 accounts on behalf of 64,044 users.
That's likely to end on Thursday.
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Starting February 9, we will no longer support free access to the Twitter API, both v2 and v1.1. A paid basic tier will be available instead 
Important point: ICE agents will avoid having to deport criminals, criminals fight back.
They're going to target the weak and vulnerable.
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So much awful here.Biggest how pumped ICE agents r to avoid work of getting hardened criminals, focus on law abiding mobile.nytimes.com/2017/02/25/us/
This is getting STUPID.
Restaurants are short-staffed (household isolation requirements), and short-customered (by customer choice).
If they force an end to isolation req's, and make their staff come to work sick, customers will stay away EVEN HARDER.
Today I have compassion for the legions of Americans who are freaking out about New Zealand's gun law change.
My thoughts and prayers are with you.
"but what if a right-winger threw a milkshake at YOU"
As if it's milkshakes we have to worry about.
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#TommyRobinson supporters attack anti-racists with bricks and bottles. Three injured. twitter.com/JoshHalliday/s…
Yes, the CEO of is only doing it because of public pressure.
Reminder: that's literally what public pressure is for.
Hypothesis: every decentralised protocol you invent is simply an invitation for someone bigger than you to centralise it.
- email: centralised by google.
- git: centralised by github
- basically the internet: centralised by Facebook
- blockchains: centralised by early adopters
Presenting, the entire political discourse of NZ.
The Opposition: The government has done an APPALLING job of protecting us all from COVID!
Us: Okay. What would you do differently?
The Opposition: oh, we would let it in IMMEDIATELY.
Us: ...what?
The Opposition: ...what?
Let me get this straight: If NZ announces honorary and irrevocable citizenship to every member of the Australian parliament, they're GONE?!
This is why it's super important you swab your throat as well as your nose. The left is throat then nose, the right is just nose.
I just want to point out that the foreground is Oriental Bay, but the background is the waterfront and Shed 6. Which is like, three kilometres away.
That's how high-powered a telephoto lens they had to use to make it look like people are being irresponsible.
Imagine 1930's :
"Did, did you just publish Schindler's actual list?"
"Yes!"
"...and Anne Frank's address?"
"FREEEEDOM!!!"
As you read about the horrendous racist shit John Banks said, remember he was the Minister of Police while the police said they didn't mistreat Maori.
I'm a New Zealander, and I'm not poor.
It's weird that I'm being told that poor people should starve their kids so I can have a tax cut.
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Word to the wise: Don't get excited about, and pour your money into, technologies where the key feature is the INABILITY to correct mistakes.
The Patreon button is a 2.6 megabyte javascript bundle, instead of a 2.6 kilobyte png.
The web sucks, man.
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Competency looks like black dark magic to incompetent people.
I pay quite a lot in taxes, right now they're saving my girlfriend's life.
Later, they might save yours.
And I won't even get mad about it
I'm using this next time I have to explain social engineering.
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It's useful to remember the gulf between what we 'need to work' and what we 'need to work well'.
Things I most definitely have NOT said to any of my dear friends and colleagues from Intel this week:
"Oh hey! I didn't ex-spectre see you this week!"
"Wow, aren't we all just Melt'ndown in this heat?"
New Zealand: when someone tells you that "people are de-masking" and "things are going back to normal overseas" they are *lyyyyiiinnnnggggg* to you.
I'm not a UX designer or expert by any means, but I assert that if you force people to use a date picker to write in their birthday, you're a jerk.
People don't need to 'find' their birthday. They know it. Let us just type it in.
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New followers: When I'm not ruining my reputation on Twitter I play with computers a lot and I talk about Python a lot. Here's my keynote address for 2018 in Sydney:
Seniority as a software engineer is learning to determine when to be an actual computer scientist, and when to just write the hack.
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They're literally publicizing what you said and believe. That's the opposite of 'cancelling'. Isn't it *good* that people know what you believe?
"DevOps" is having to constantly Google what Debian package has "host" and "ping" so you can exec into your container and install them to work out why they can't talk to your other containers.
PLEASE I am literally begging you on my knees to stop letting this dude steer the entire conversation. There are other voices, some of them KNOW THINGS.
Why does this ONE dude have the entire platform at his disposal?
NFTs are not new.
IPv4 addresses are NFTs.
Domain names are NFTs.
Phone numbers and Social Security Numbers are NFTs.
The only innovation in this new formulation of NFTs has been to ensure they they are utterly useless.
Hey, you know how AWS says that S3 traffic is free* from within the same region?
Well, let's just say you'd better make damn sure you know what that * means before you do 20tb of traffic.
Honest answer: you should never debate bad ideas.
A debate has two participants, and therefore the worst idea in the world gets promoted to "second place" for free.
Never debate bad ideas, only debate two almost-equally-good ideas.
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Genuine question, what is to be gained from shutting them out and reinforcing their views? Why not debate them?
Yesterday I realised that all computer terminals in video games are fake computers running on the actual computer. So they're all essentially Docker containers.
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Expert I may be, I never cease to be surprised when they start talking back.
I want people to think of AI like a three year old.
You can put a three year old in charge of your moderating decisions, and you're not going to get good decisions, but the real reason you're doing it is so that you can blame the three year old when people complain.
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Facebook's "#AI" filtering didn't block the #ChristchurchMosqueShooting video because it didn't have enough training data available for such situations.
An AI is really quite stupid. Unlike a human, its statistical model wouldn't know when something "doesn't feel right".
Bitcoin is 10 years old.
It made a couple nice people rich, a bunch of complete assholes rich, fostered a new ecosystem for international crime and ransomware, and has otherwise made the world directly, *measurably* worse.
Your regular reminder that "smart contracts" are neither "smart", nor "contracts".
I'm not just being glib: here's what those words actually mean in this context:
- "smart" just means "written in code".
- "contract" just means "can't be fixed".
Code that can't be fixed.
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Automated
Replying to @web3isgreat
[UPDATE] "Some have questioned whether the BuildFinance incident can properly be described as an 'attack' or 'hostile takeover': everything worked exactly as it was supposed to in a 'code is law' sort of way."
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There is a Penis Museum in Iceland.
New Zealand is, oddly enough, banned from its website.
I guess you could say, we're geocockblocked.
Vaccinated, bored editorial staff shouldn't choose the future of the country.
Between this and the totally weird patterns you see YouTube creators do to try to follow "the algorithm", I wonder if Google realises just how much it's destroyed human creativity.
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I never thought I'd post this for something happening in New Zealand. Stay safe.
Hey you know how millennials apparently keep "destroying" industries that depend on people have large amounts of spare disposable income?
Weird, that.
Also: CEO paid himself 14 million dollars, his millennial employees didn't even get severance.
Weird, that.
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Toys R Us says millennials not having kids hurt the company — and it could be because of a looming ‘demographic time bomb’ read.bi/2DEu3oE
Your occasional reminder that Wilson's Parking also run the Australian Concentration Camps on Nauru and Manus Island.
Now they want you to bail them out.
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Car park operators are losing tens of millions of dollars every day and say they'll need to recover costs after the pandemic. @Fi_Willan #9News
2:09
This. Do Americans understand just how bizarre it is to everyone in the world that making sick people beg is an every-day occurence?
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I swear to God, the sight of people with deadly diseases crowdfunding their health care is the most dystopian thing about America right now.
This product is a perfect physical metaphor for all of modern software architecture.
amazon.com/dp/B01BU2ALGO
Since this slide was published the electrical overhead of the Bitcoin network has TRIPLED. It's using three times the electricity now as it was then.
The maximum number of transactions per second the bitcoin network can handle has not. grown. at. all.
Not at all.
Holy crap.
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Update: three websites.
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I'm old enough to remember when the Internet wasn't a group of five websites, each consisting of screenshots of text from the other four.