Linked List: April 17, 2020

Friday, 17 April 2020

A comeback of sorts, and, well, the funniest stand-up special I’ve seen in years. Religion, racism, sexual misconduct — you know, good clean family fun. And, yes, he talks about the whole you-know-what. $8 direct purchase gets you a no-DRM download and streaming (AirPlay supported).

Update: Where by “you-know-what” I of course mean C.K.’s own sexual misconduct, alleged in comedy circles for years, erupted into much-publicized and career-halting scandal in November 2017 when reported by The New York Times, and fully acknowledged by C.K. days later in a statement and apology that began with “These stories are true,” and ended with “I have spent my long and lucky career talking and saying anything I want. I will now step back and take a long time to listen.”

The brevity of my original blurb was in no way intended to convey flippancy regarding his misconduct. My intention was only to praise the special — which, again, I found so enjoyable, thoughtful, and thought-provoking as to warrant directing your attention to despite the potential minefield of controversy — not in any way to minimize his misconduct. The art is not the artist; the artist is not the art. And because his actions are not in dispute, were spectacularly publicized, and by his own admission indefensible, I thought it sufficient to comment only on the merits of the special itself, and allow C.K. to speak for himself on the matter of his behavior.

Right-Wing Nuts Turn Against Bill Gates and Anti-Vaxxers Dig In ★

Daisuke Wakabayashi, Davey Alba and Marc Tracy, reporting for The New York Times:

In a 2015 speech, Bill Gates warned that the greatest risk to humanity was not nuclear war but an infectious virus that could threaten the lives of millions of people.

That speech has resurfaced in recent weeks with 25 million new views on YouTube — but not in the way that Mr. Gates probably intended. Anti-vaccinators, members of the conspiracy group QAnon and right-wing pundits have instead seized on the video as evidence that one of the world’s richest men planned to use a pandemic to wrest control of the global health system.

Mr. Gates, 64, the Microsoft co-founder turned philanthropist, has now become the star of an explosion of conspiracy theories about the coronavirus outbreak. In posts on YouTube, Facebook and Twitter, he is being falsely portrayed as the creator of Covid-19, as a profiteer from a virus vaccine, and as part of a dastardly plot to use the illness to cull or surveil the global population.

Those of us on the sane side of the aisle have been angrily frustrated for years by the anti-vaccination nutters and the soap boxes they’ve carved out online and even on TV. It was bad enough when their unfounded anti-science nonsense brought back small outbreaks of measles. There have been real consequences from the anti-vaccine movement to date, but they’ve largely been abstract. Now it’s real — there’s an out-of-control pandemic and we’re desperately in need of a vaccine for it.

It seems inevitable that anti-vaxxer bullshit is going to depress the number of people who will get an eventual COVID-19 vaccination, and that is both incredibly frustrating and terrifying.

These are the same type of lunatics who, pre-internet, would yank out their own dental fillings and wrap their heads in aluminum foil to “block“ mind-control radio transmissions sent by The Trilateral Commission. Now they think Bill Gates wants to put population-control “microchips” in vaccines. And they’re going to hurt us all. Social media platforms should treat anti-vaccination rhetoric as a hate crime and ban it. It’s every bit as dangerous as an incitement to violence. You can’t reason with anti-vaxxers any more than you can reason with Nazis. What works is shame — shame them.

Fun With Charts: Today’s iPhone Price Spread ★

Jason Snell:

Apple’s got a pretty solid spread of prices slots, but that gap between the iPhone 11 and iPhone 11 Pro really sticks out. Apple’s prices mean you can make no mistake about which portion of the product line is the cutting-edge, premium, spared-no-expense part.

That is quite a gap, and it jibes with what I’ve been saying ever since the iPhone X launched — it’s not that Apple raised the price of high-end iPhones, it’s that Apple added a new premium tier. There’s a continuum in price points among all regular iPhones, from the 64 GB SE to the 256 GB 11. The one and only gap is the $150 that separates the top-of-the-regular-tier 256 GB iPhone 11 ($850) and the bottom-of-the-premium-tier 64 GB iPhone 11 Pro ($1000).

Details on the 2020 iPad Pro Camera and Lidar System ★

Sebastiaan de With has a great write-up on the new iPad Pro camera system for the Halide blog. One interesting note: the wide-angle camera (the main rear-facing lens) is most comparable to the iPhone 8’s, not the iPhone XR’s. Even in the Pro models, iPad cameras remain a few years behind the state of the art for iPhones.

De With links to this neat video from iFixit, which uses footage from an infrared camera to illustrate how sparse the iPad Pro lidar sensor’s projected dot grid is compared to the front-facing Face ID sensor on iPhones.

The Guardian: ‘NHS in Standoff With Apple and Google Over Coronavirus Tracing’ ★

Alex Hern, writing for The Guardian:

Apple and Google are encouraging health services worldwide to build contact-tracing apps that operate in a decentralised way, allowing individuals to know when they’ve been in contact with an infected person but preventing governments from using that data to build a picture of population movements in aggregate. But the policies, unveiled last week, apply only to apps that don’t result in the creation of a centralised database of contacts. That means that if the NHS goes ahead with its original plans, its app would face severe limitations on its operation.

The app would not work if the phone’s screen was turned off or if an app other than the contact tracer was being used at the same time. It would require the screen to be active all the time, rapidly running down battery life, and would leave users’ personal data at risk if their phone was lost or stolen while the app was in use.

It’s early days on this — Apple and Google only announced their joint project a week ago. But what Hern describes above is unfeasible. Any idea that requires an app to be frontmost, with the screen on, is completely and utterly preposterous. That’s so obvious that I don’t even understand how this got printed. Anything that might actually prove effective for using phones for contact tracing must run in the background as an operating system service, and that means Apple and Google are in charge.

Whether that’s the way it should be — ethically, democratically, scientifically — is up for debate. But that’s the way it is, so it’s pointless to act otherwise.