IBM completes successful field trials on Fully Homomorphic Encryption →
Large performance penalties, but within the bounds of usefulness for real problems now. This could allow companies to provide you useful information about your data without ever seeing what your data actually is.
Keeping Google Meet ahead of usage demand during COVID-19 →
A great look at the process of scaling Google Meet to handle 30x more traffic due to COVID-19. Many of the same techniques were applied to our work scaling Teams.
Frances Allen, Who Helped Hardware Understand Software, Dies at 88 →
Frances Allen, a computer scientist and researcher who helped create the fundamental ideas that allow practically anyone to build fast, efficient and useful software for computers, smartphones and websites, died on Tuesday, her 88th birthday, in Schenectady, N.Y.
First woman to win the Turing award. What a life.
Code Coverage Best Practices →
Data-driven insights on code coverage metrics from Google. They're pretty in-line with my professional experience as well.'Did I Miss Anything?': A Man Emerges From a 75-Day Silent Retreat →
Daniel Thorson went into a silent retreat in mid-March, meditating through 75 coronavirus news cycles, Boris Johnson's hospitalization, social distancing, and sourdough starter. Now he's catching up.
What an experience.
Graduate Student Solves Decades-Old Conway Knot Problem →
It took Lisa Piccirillo less than a week to answer a long-standing question about a strange knot discovered over half a century ago by the legendary John Conway.
It earned her a tenure-track position from MIT. Remarkable.
Five Lies Our Culture Tells →
It's become clear in the interim that things are not in good shape, that our problems are societal. The whole country is going through some sort of spiritual and emotional crisis.
College mental health facilities are swamped, suicide rates are spiking, the president's repulsive behavior is tolerated or even celebrated by tens of millions of Americans. At the root of it all is the following problem: We've created a culture based on lies.
Here are some of them.
Teams gets a shout-out from LEGO:
me working from home: pic.twitter.com/nJufTy7q2r
— LEGO (@LEGO_Group) April 15, 2020
"Honey, where are my pants?"
Jesus Is Alive
I've worked a lot this month. For some reason, the entire world decided to work from home. All at once. Using Microsoft Teams and Skype (and yes, even Zoom and Slack). To an absurd extent.
When I've been able to log off for a few minutes, I've gotten to see the best of humanity - medical school students taking their oaths early to be deployed into COVID-19 wards, Broadway and opera and classical music made accessible to the entire world, sportscasters narrating people crossing the street, celebrities making childrens' dreams come true, cafeteria workers coming to work to box lunches for underprivileged school children, dear friends leading worship services and prayer nights.
And yes, undoubtedly the world is broken right now. We're now all collectively living the same story of weakness and mortality, rather than our individual ones, which somehow seems bigger and scarier. We long to go back to "normal". But as my pastor said, "The world has always been broken". "Normal" has always included sadness and anxiety and loneliness, cancer and divorce and death. We have always all been weak and worn and wandering.
We know all of this isn't right, that somehow this isn't the way it's "supposed" to be. Because this isn't the world we were made for. God grieves for the brokenness of this world along with us because it isn't yet the one he's making.
And that's the moral of the Easter story. The story is not our collective story of brokenness and anxiety and grief and a longing for "normal". The story is God making brokenness right, weakness strong, anxiety security. It's God bringing generosity and relationships and beauty and joy and peace to a world he's renewing and restoring and remaking. And in the grandest of ironies, he has done it through the weakness and brokenness and death of His son, Jesus Christ.
By far the most touching thing I've seen in all of this is the nightly vigils of clapping for front-line health workers and first responders around the world. It's a moving tribute to the most needed and most generous, some of whom will pay the ultimate price for their selflessness. It's a reminder that even in the darkness, there is hope. In every part of God's story, there is hope.
On this Easter Sunday, I hope you can find that hope in your lives. I hope you can be one to be generous, sing and shout in the night, dance in the midst of darkness. We have the answer to our weariness, a fix for our brokenness, a Savior who has undone death - a risen King who has overcome the world!
Christ is risen! Jesus is alive!
Happy Easter, Parker
So I've been a little busy this month...
To see the full report Microsoft produced on the ways COVID-19 have changed the way work is done, see https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/blog/2020/04/09/remote-work-trend-report-meetings/.
For just a summary of the numbers, hit up https://venturebeat.com/2020/04/09/microsoft-teams-breaks-daily-record-with-2-7-billion-meeting-minutes-tops-mid-march-high-by-200/.
For a detailed engineering look into some of the ways Teams is using AI to make remote meetings better, take a look at https://venturebeat.com/2020/04/09/microsoft-teams-ai-machine-learning-real-time-noise-suppression-typing/.