COVID
Victoria has 30 active cases, 25 are in hotel quarantine, so 5 active cases in the community. Victorian government in the news for its double standard of letting in international arrival for the Aus open tennis, but locking out people who are in NSW that live in Victoria. It’s basically about money really, tennis will earn money.
NSW has 122 active cases in the community. The NSW Government is giving advice to avoid sex!
Emirates have now suspended all flights to Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane as they can no longer make money from those routes with the cap of the number of international flights. This will most likely make it harder and more expensive to travel to Europe in the short to mid term.
The world is now at 2,032,750 deaths and 25,143,151 active cases. Norway have reported that pfizer vaccine has caused death in some cases of people in aged health care. A Canadian woman walked her husband on a leash, apparently that’s not allowed in Canada. And when did Canada turn into China?
Eve Branson (Richard Branson’s mum) died of COVID.
This is an interesting article on the 432 year old manual on social distancing.
Finance & Economics.
Financial regulators have warned consumers risk losing all their money in bitcoin, because bitcoin is only trading at $46,300 AUD or $35,500 USD, which is up from the $7,000ish USD this time 1 year ago. And this is the reason why I don’t read take mainstream media seriously, it’s written by journalist fresh out of uni designed to get advertisement clicks for their employer.
The peasant revolution is coming to the US. We have not learned the lessons of John Law in France, printing money will be the destruction.
Tech
If you haven’t noticed Whatsapp has new T&C that you need to accept to share all your data with Facebook by Feb 8th or be kicked off, which has caused a huge uproar. I would probably expect advertisement at some point on that app or that your personal conversations are read, and you see advertisement on Facebook. This has caused a noticeable uptick in Signal users (which I have personally noticed). Even Elon Musk says Use Signal. In terms of functionality Signal is pretty much the same as Whatsapp except it’s more privacy focused. So get on the app store and click download to have the option!
Custom Windows 10 minus all the telemetry.
Stagnation in the machine learning world. I have said, innovation happens at the fringe and doesn’t happen in mainstream environment such as academia.
Other Stuff.
I can’t believe some people still work on their kitchen table. Get out to IKEA or jump of Facebook marketplace and pick up a desk! It makes the world of difference and you don’t really need to spend so much. It doesn’t need to be fancy, or brand spanking new. It just needs to be a space that’s dedicated to working.
Jess was asking me why I have a duck on my desk. And I was trying to explain to her that since I work from home, I talk to the duck and tell the duck my issues. It’s for rubber duck debugging. When a programmers run into issues , they talk to a rubber duck about it and the issues will magically solve themselves. I’m sure you could apply it even if you are not a programmer, and as the website says “In a pinch a coworker might be able to substitute for the duck, however, it is often preferred to confide mistakes to the duck instead of your coworker.”
My duck is not a rubber duck, it’s actually a fève from a “galette des rois”.
The fève is basically a little trinket that is baked into the cake. If you find the trinket in your slice you get to keep it along with getting a crown to be king or queen for the day. Hence why it’s called a King cake. Here’s a homemade one from Jess. The kids decorated the crown made out of cereal box. This particular one ended up at a random act of kindness as Jess gave it away to a random person from Facebook market place.
Here’s a hack that we have in our lives, we have a whiteboard with a magnetic whiteboard marker on the fridge. That way when we run out of something it can be added straight on the list straight away. That way there’s no need for extra brain power to think what do we need when we want to go supermarket.
My motivation song that I have at the moment when I need to get work done is OVERWERK Toccata, which i have on loop. Here it is as background music to a PC being built. The guy in the video has taken it to another level as he has sleeved his own cables.
Anyway enjoy your week!