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Nat Torkington Profile picture
Nat Torkington
@gnat
I play banjo in two bands and have a potty mouth. Host of Kiwi Foo, CEO of a 35-person software company, built the first website in New Zealand last millennium.
2 subscribers
Mar 3, 2022 • 22 tweets • 13 min read
@obra @quinnnorton Um, let's see. Strap in, wild ride ahead.

NZ govt workers who had public-facing roles (border, healthcare, police, defence) were required to be vaccinated. This became a focusing cause for Covid deniers, butmahs, and "Covid is killing", plus a few Qs, neonazis, etc.
1/n @obra @quinnnorton Churches played a surprising role. One evangelical give-us-your-money grifter cult was influential (Destiny Church), with a mostly-rich-and-white evangelical church influential but not so visible.

2/n
Nov 17, 2021 • 15 tweets • 3 min read
A 🧵 on dissent, social tension, vaccination, infinite games, and YouTube chucklefucks.

Sorry not sorry, I had to get it off my chest. There are malevolent actors who would divide us: see us fight each other so that violence and hatred are normalised in New Zealand.

They win when you fear or despise others because of their politics, vaccination status, beliefs, or genes.

Kindness matters now more than ever.
Nov 14, 2021 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Me and my shelf of ancient electronics that have been broken for twenty years but I still haven't thrown them out ... Image Me and my wife discussing my shelf of ancient electronics that have been broken for twenty years but I still haven't thrown them out. Image
Mar 9, 2021 • 10 tweets • 5 min read
A thread of interesting things I found on the net lately.

1. Douglas Adams's Hyperland documentary, from when people needed linking explained to them. Features: the inventor of the animated icon. archive.org/details/Dougla… 2. Hans Peter Brøndmo (@brondmo), inventor of the Motion Icon ("micon") and currently some kind of robot necromancer at X. A reminder: everything had to be invented at some point. And not every inventor of ubiquitous things becomes famous.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hans_Pete…
Mar 7, 2021 • 7 tweets • 4 min read
A thread of interesting things I found on the Net lately.

1. latacora.micro.blog/2020/03/12/the… pragmatic tips for SOC2, the security controls audit sometimes required for enterprise sales.

2. theguardian.com/technology/202… Tom Cruise Deep Fakes were done by a vfx artist with an impersonator. 3. Werner Vogels interview with ACM. "AI Vermeulen put a number on the board: the number of objects that we would be storing within six months. We put two additional zeroes at the end of it, just to be safe. We blew through it in the first two months." cacm.acm.org/magazines/2021…
Nov 19, 2020 • 10 tweets • 12 min read
@ChrisKeall @MacnamaraKate @rowansimpson @polemic @timClicks TIN is a marketing Powerpoint. Its numbers have as much statistical validity as "100% Pure NZ". But I'd argue that StatsNZ's numbers miss the point.

The two central questions are: "What's a tech company?" and "What's a NZ company?" Neither has a straightforward useful answer. @ChrisKeall @MacnamaraKate @rowansimpson @polemic @timClicks "Tech company" is a marketing term: if someone thinks it's advantageous to be considered a "tech company" then they describe themselves as such.

A company has a product made by transforming raw materials, and a market. "Tech" might refer to materials, product, or market.
Oct 14, 2020 • 18 tweets • 7 min read
@TraceyMartinMP Apologies for missing your tweet, Tracey.

I believe that I’m a realist not a purist: you can’t weaken the encryption that protects child sex exploiters without weakening the encryption that protects pro-democracy activists, government, media, and all who use Signal and WhatsApp. @TraceyMartinMP “Don’t jump off the Sky Tower without a bungee cord because you'll fall and die” is not being a gravity purist, it’s just describing the consequences of physics.
Jan 5, 2019 • 17 tweets • 4 min read
I've been compiling a set of mental models, approaches, schema, hacks, whatever you call them, as I figure out how the world works. So much of the anguish and torment of my youth was unnecessary and self-inflicted. Changing how I thought about the world let me get to happy. I'd like to share them with y'all and see if they ring true for you. I'm keen to learn what needs explaining vs what is self-evident, what I've missed, any stories of how they worked for you, etc.
Dec 22, 2018 • 19 tweets • 7 min read
It's Saturday night and I'm reading a 1989 interview with Ken Thompson, one of the creators of Unix. I'll tweet the highlights in this thread. Source: princeton.edu/~hos/mike/tran… Straight into it! Ken's talking about the MULTICS influences on Unix (e.g., it's where they stole the idea of a shell from). MULTICS users talked about pipes but they weren't implemented. "A discussion on whether we should go to six or eight bytes", LOL.