There’s an old, not very funny joke about the two hardest things in computer science being cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors.

But I’d like to add that the real hardest thing is taking complicated concepts and explaining them in simple language so that even non-computer-people can comprehend them. And that’s something Nicky Case is great at. Along with security & privacy researcher Carmela Troncoso and epidemiologist Marcel Salathé, Nicky came up an explanation of how DP-3T works that is so great, so understandable that I’d feel comfortable showing it to my mother so she could make sense of it.

The reason I’m linking to it, besides it being a great example of how to do explainers like this properly, is that this is kiiiinda like the model proposed by both Google and Apple for their contact tracing protocol, and that’s probably something that’s going to become incredibly important over the next few months so it’s important people understand it.