By John Gruber
OpenAI, Anthropic, Cursor, and Perplexity chose WorkOS over building it themselves.
Linked List: March 13, 2020
Friday, 13 March 2020
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Simply a must-watch video. It’s impossible to square Trump’s repeated, months-long “it’ll just go away” wishful bullshit with the unprecedented actions states and cities and private companies have been forced to take this week.
Testing kits are essential. The time for the U.S. to have begun stockpiling them was December, early January at the very latest. Now here we are with 11,000 total people in the U.S. having been tested, while South Korea tests 10,000 per day.
- ‘Who Wants Four More Years of This?’ ★
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Charles P. Pierce, writing for Esquire:
Is this enough? Truly, is this enough for the country that looked at itself after eight years of a competent presidency and decided to hand things over to a vulgar talking yam? Are the vacant airports and deserted subways enough? Will the empty arenas and ballparks be enough? Is the plunging stock market enough? When the ambulances start hauling away the old folks down the block, will that be enough? How in god’s name can anyone vote for four more years of this, four more years of a choleric fatburg of a man who calls a press conference about a global health emergency and asks a reporter for Fox News how the ratings were for his last town hall? How does that man carry a precinct, let alone a state, let alone the country? Christ, even Ted Cruz is doing the right thing here.
What is so heartbreaking and frustrating is that this disaster of a response was entirely predictable. What other than this could we expect from an administration that gutted the CDC, is opposed to science, and is led by a president who surrounds himself with obsequious yes-people and is a career con man who thinks he can bullshit his way through anything?
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Dieter Bohn, reporting for The Verge:
More than an hour after Trump’s press conference, a Google communications Twitter account passed along the following statement from Verily, which is a different company inside the Alphabet corporate umbrella:
We are developing a tool to help triage individuals for Covid-19 testing. Verily is in the early stages of development, and planning to roll testing out in the Bay Area, with the hope of expanding more broadly over time. We appreciate the support of government officials and industry partners and thank the Google engineers who have volunteered to be part of this effort.
Carolyn Wang, communications lead for Verily, told The Verge that the “triage website” was initially only going to be made available to health care workers instead of the general public. Now that it has been announced the way it was, however, anybody will be able to visit it, she said. But the tool will only be able to direct people to “pilot sites” for testing in the Bay Area, though Wang says Verily hopes to expand it beyond California “over time.”
Compare that to what Trump claimed:
“I want to thank Google. Google is helping to develop a website. It’s going to be very quickly done — unlike websites of the past — to determine whether a test is warranted and to facilitate testing at a nearby convenient location. We have many, many locations behind us, by the way. We cover this country and large parts of the world, by the way. We’re not going to be talking about the world right now, but we cover very, very strongly our country. Stores in virtually every location. Google has 1,700 engineers working on this right now. They have made tremendous progress.”
Trump’s entire response to the pandemic has been bullshit — and I use that word very carefully, in the sense of Harry G. Frankfurt’s masterful treatise on the subject — but the idea of 1,700 engineers working on a website being a good thing is up there at the top of the list. The entire premise of Fred Brooks’s The Mythical Man-Month (speaking of masterful treatises) is that “adding manpower to a late software project makes it later”.
- The Science of Soap: How It Kills the Coronavirus ★
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Palli Thordarson, chemistry professor at the University of New South Wales, writing for The Guardian:
Viruses can be active outside the body for hours, even days. Disinfectants, liquids, wipes, gels and creams containing alcohol are all useful at getting rid of them — but they are not quite as good as normal soap.
When I shared the information above using Twitter, it went viral. I think I have worked out why. Health authorities have been giving us two messages: once you have the virus there are no drugs that can kill it or help you get rid of it. But also, wash your hands to stop the virus spreading. This seems odd. You can’t, even for a million dollars, get a drug for the coronavirus — but your grandmother’s bar of soap kills the virus.
So why does soap work so well on the Sars-CoV-2, the coronavirus and indeed most viruses? The short story: because the virus is a self-assembled nanoparticle in which the weakest link is the lipid (fatty) bilayer. Soap dissolves the fat membrane and the virus falls apart like a house of cards and dies — or rather, we should say it becomes inactive as viruses aren’t really alive.
I was not aware until this week that good old-fashioned soap is significantly more effective than alcohol-based disinfectants.
- ‘We’re Hustlers’: Amid Coronavirus Fears, This Couple Has Made More Than $100,000 Reselling Lysol Wipes ★
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Douglas Quan, reporting for The Toronto Star:
The couple say they’ve made a bundle in the past three weeks hitting up every Costco store in the region each day, buying up as many Lysol wipes and liquid cleaners as they can — spending thousands of dollars at a time — and then reselling them, mostly on Amazon, to private individuals and companies. […]
Ranga, 38, said one six-pack of wipes that goes for $20 at Costco can fetch four times that online. (A check of Amazon on Thursday showed that a six-pack was going for $89 under their seller name “Violeta & Sons Trading Ltd.”)
I’m all for capitalism and hustle, but now is not the time when it comes to essential products. I get it that buying in bulk is Costco’s game, but they should make an exception and ration some of these hard-to-get products for the time being. It should not be hard to buy hand sanitizer — a product that really does work to halt the spread of coronavirus.
Update: Turns out, stores — including Costco — have been rationing some essential items since last week. It’s not clear why Vancouver-area Costcos were letting this couple buy truckloads of disinfectant at a time.
- Apple: ‘WWDC 2020 Kicks Off in June With an All-New Online Format’ ★
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Apple Newsroom:
“We are delivering WWDC 2020 this June in an innovative way to millions of developers around the world, bringing the entire developer community together with a new experience,” said Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “The current health situation has required that we create a new WWDC 2020 format that delivers a full program with an online keynote and sessions, offering a great learning experience for our entire developer community, all around the world. We will be sharing all of the details in the weeks ahead.”
Very Apple way to put it — not as a cancellation of the in-person conference but as an all-new online format equally accessible to all developers. No mention of “coronavirus” or “COVID-19” in particular — and there doesn’t need to be. Everyone — everyone — knows the “current health situation” that’s prompting this change. More intriguing to me is that there aren’t even any specific dates — just “June”. I would guess that Apple is still planning for the keynote on Monday June 8, or perhaps June 1, but this is all so new that they’re surely figuring out most of the details of how this will actually work.