Yup, my pronouns are whatever.
I remember my blood oxygen level as low as it was at that time, I was maybe four or five. There was no way I could have survived if I was in a Spartan community, as described by Plutarch.
I remember reading about how Spartan people, throwing their children to the river or something like that. If they swam, they are fit for survival, and if they’re not fit, well, they are not fit for survival.
It builds character.
It builds…
The doctor saying that, if the child grows up, there’s a 50‑50 chance ‑‑ I remember the words, “50‑50” ‑‑ that they will grow up to be fit for a surgery, after which it would be fine. There’s also a 50‑50 chance that that’s not going to happen.
I was, I don’t know, remembering that my grandparents were discussing something with my doctor, a heart surgeon, I think, about the possibility of me surviving long enough to have a heart operation.
Maybe four years old?
Yeah, in five repositories, I created 59 commits in the Mask-Static, Feersum, Ethercalc… That’s why nobody asks me those questions, because these are public knowledge. It’s captured as part of my flow of work.
Sure. You can just look at my GitHub contributions [laughs] and know exactly how many lines…
Strangely, people never really ask about that.
Anybody. I guess nobody ever asked me how many lines of code do I still write every day, [laughs] or about my participation as a just normal civic hacker nowadays.
They’ve never asked me about the weather, either. [laughs] Anyway, more interesting personal questions?
No journalist have ever asked me about the time.
No, that question.
What time is it?
Sure.
In parliament, there’s four different parties, and they each agree on very basic things, like open parliament. For the kind of thing that I’m doing, like the Open Government Partnership agenda and so on, I think pretty much every legislator would agree, which renders party politics a little bit moot ...
No, not at all. It seems people agree with me. There’s more non‑party‑ideologically‑affiliated people nowadays. People don’t seem to frame things in bipartisan, or whatever those terms, go away.
I’m just having fun.
“With”, thank you, but yes.
Here in Taipei, Froggy Chiu. Also, many of the more famous YouTubers, including Brian Tseng and Chih-Chyi Chang, many others, the EyeCTV guy, Retina, are party members too. They are a real party, a real political party.
In Taiwan. They have a city councilor, actually.
No, that particular party, the unstoppable happy party, or literally, the Can’t Stop This Party. It’s a real party.
I’m just encouraging that party, but yes.
Oh, yeah, which is to Can’t Stop This Party, very happy party.
I do say that, if you have an electric one or electric oven, as long as you can heat it to 110 Celsius and for it to rapidly cool down, you can use it to revitalize this as well.
Yeah.
Many other people in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs do that. They know if they have a piece of text they wanted me to say, I will say it.
Yeah. The German…I think it was the Hamburg Ministry of Foreign Affairs…I want to say embassy, but it’s not, right? Consulate. [laughs] That translated my speech to German. They know I can pronounce German even though I don’t understand what I’m saying. They just feed that text to me. I ...
People ask.
Roles. [laughs]
If you add a plural to it, it’s fine.
No, it’s fine.
I didn’t decide on any single thing, but I made sure that all innovators get access to what every other innovators trying to tackling this problem. I am a cultural translator also internally for that, but I’m not in charge and certainly taking too much credit for what has transpired, ...
For example, the Mask 1.0, the map, that was Howard Wu’s idea. As for Mask 2.0, that was Chi‑mai’s idea and implemented by Trade-Van, which was the company that did the tax filing software idea. On the 3.0, that was tested by the Taipei Smart City with Yallvend, the startup ...
I’m in charge of getting people’s attention to focus on important times, but I’m not in charge in any of them. This is my modus operandi.
It’s quite useful.
I can translate programming concepts into human language.
Human language.
Translator. I can speak human language. [laughs]
Of course, I helped communicating the whereabouts of investigation to journalists and things like that, but that’s the extent of it. I can serve as cultural translator, but I’m not a part of the prosecution team. I’m not part of the investigation team. Of course, I’m not party to any ...
No. I’m not part of the National Security Council. I’m not part of the national security team. My work is entirely on the general purpose policies. I don’t know any single case thing.
No. I totally did not. [laughs]
Good to be on the record.
No.
It’s the design thinking symbol, discover, define, develop, deploy, or deliver.
If you go to ASVDA website, they actually show the Startup Island Taiwan as their primary banner. That’s some design work that they have done. For me, it’s great because it exemplify the double diamond. Literally, the logo is a double diamond.
It’s very hard to pronounce, so we don’t say that much anymore.
ASVDA? ASVDA?