Linked List: May 5, 2020

Tuesday, 5 May 2020

Tim Bray Quit Amazon Over Firing of Whistleblowers 

Tim Bray:

May 1st was my last day as a VP and Distinguished Engineer at Amazon Web Services, after five years and five months of rewarding fun. I quit in dismay at Amazon firing whistleblowers who were making noise about warehouse employees frightened of Covid-19. […]

Management could have objected to the event, or demanded that outsiders be excluded, or that leadership be represented, or any number of other things; there was plenty of time. Instead, they just fired the activists.

At that point I snapped. VPs shouldn’t go publicly rogue, so I escalated through the proper channels and by the book. I’m not at liberty to disclose those discussions, but I made many of the arguments appearing in this essay. I think I made them to the appropriate people.

That done, remaining an Amazon VP would have meant, in effect, signing off on actions I despised. So I resigned.

Bracing, cogent read. Hats off to Bray.

‘The Plan Is to Have No Plan’ 

Jay Rosen, writing at PressThink:

“The plan is to have no plan” is not a strategy, really. Nor would I call it a policy. It has a kind of logic to it, but this is different from saying it has a design — or a designer. Meaning: I do not want to be too conspiratorial about this. To wing it without a plan is merely the best this government can do, given who heads the table. The manufacture of confusion is just the ruins of Trump’s personality meeting the powers of the presidency. There is no genius there, only a damaged human being playing havoc with our lives.

Exactly. There is no there there. Our seemingly inexplicable nationwide dearth of testing capability is in fact explicable: more tests = more confirmed cases, and Trump has told us, straight up, in one of his daily instances of saying aloud what anyone with any shame would never utter in private, let alone in front of the world, that his concern isn’t with the welfare of Americans, but rather with the welfare of “the numbers”. He wanted to leave sick Americans on an infected cruise ship not because it was deemed the best course of action epidemiologically, but because “I don’t need to have the numbers double because of one ship that wasn’t our fault.” That’s why we don’t have tests. That’s not conspiratorial, that’s just listening to what Trump has told us.

Rosen’s piece is so extraordinarily brief — plans are hard to describe, no-plans not so much — that it’s hard not to quote the whole thing. But his opening is worth considering too:

The plan is to have no plan, to let daily deaths between one and three thousand become a normal thing, and then to create massive confusion about who is responsible […]

How could anyone expect or hope that thousands of deaths a day, every day, could ever become normal? you might ask, because you are a caring person with a capacity for empathy. But we allow all sorts of unthinkable things to become normal.

They Might as Well Have Gone the Whole Nine Yards and Put a Red MAGA Hat on Lincoln 

Katie Rogers, reporting for The New York Times:

There was just one catch: While Mr. Trump and many other presidents have hosted inauguration concerts and gatherings on the memorial’s steps, any event meant to draw an audience inside the interior near Daniel Chester French’s sculpture of a seated Lincoln is prohibited. The area beginning with the marble staircase where the columns start constitutes a boundary protected by federal law.

So on Sunday, when the president sat down with two Fox News anchors at Lincoln’s marbled feet during a coronavirus-focused virtual “town hall,” it was because a directive issued by David Bernhardt, the secretary of the interior, had allowed them to do so.

Mr. Bernhardt, a former oil lobbyist whose Senate nomination was contested by Democrats who pointed to multiple accusations of conflicts of interest and ethical violations, ordered the memorial temporarily closed for the event, citing the coronavirus.

“Given the extraordinary crisis that the American people have endured, and the need for the president to exercise a core governmental function to address the nation about an ongoing public-health crisis,” Mr. Bernhardt wrote in an order issued Friday, “I am exercising my authority to facilitate the opportunity for the president to conduct this address within the Lincoln Memorial.”

This was a campaign event, no more, no less. We could argue about it if there had been reporters from even a single legitimate non-state media outlet, but even then we should be opposed — and there were in fact no real reporters. The mere idea of holding this event inside the Lincoln Memorial is disgraceful, let alone that it went through. Our national memorials are sacred ground — not in any religious sense, but in a civic sense. Their symbolism is meaningful.

Washington Post Poll: ‘Americans Widely Oppose Reopening Most Businesses, Despite Easing of Restrictions in Some States’ 

Dan Balz and Emily Guskin, reporting for The Washington Post:

The Post-U. Md. poll asked about the following types of businesses: gun stores, dine-in restaurants, nail salons, barbershops and hair salons, retail establishments such as clothing stores, along with gyms, golf courses and movie theaters.

The most significant opposition is to reopening movie theaters, with 82 percent of Americans saying they should not be allowed to open up in their state. There is also broad opposition to reopening gyms (78 percent opposed), dine-in restaurants and nail salons (both with 74 percent opposed).

Gun stores are next, with 70 percent saying they should not be reopened, followed by barbershops and hair salons (69 percent opposed) and retail shops such as clothing stores (66 percent opposed) and golf courses (59 percent opposed).

These are far larger majorities than we typically see in polls regarding ostensibly controversial issues here in the U.S. These mandates to keep nonessential businesses closed are in fact broadly popular. The nation is not divided on this.

It’s never wise to gauge public opinion solely by looking at protests, but in this particular case it could not possibly be more misleading. By definition, only the people who think these restrictions are nonsense/unnecessary/too broad/whatever are even willing to congregate in large groups. You can’t hold a public rally in support of stay-at-home orders.

Angry incoherent mobs make for good TV, alas. A massive majority of Americans — patiently staying at home, listening to the advice of experts — does not.

Tot and Accessibility 

Craig Hockenberry, writing at The Iconfactory blog:

Luckily we have a tool that let me approximate what Jason was seeing. xScope’s vision defect simulator confirmed that Tot’s colored circles had serious issues. We had a new kind of accessibility problem and one that went to the heart of the app’s visual design. […]

This began an exploration on how Tot’s colorful rings could change, while keeping the existing “dot” metaphor, a strong visual navigation element.

Such a great example of how first-class accessibility and exuberant custom UI design don’t have to be at odds, but in fact can go hand-in-hand.

WWDC 2020 Swift Student Challenge 

New contest for student developers as part of WWDC 2020:

Create an interactive scene in a Swift playground that can be experienced within three minutes. Be creative. If you need inspiration, use the templates in Swift Playgrounds or Xcode for a head start on more advanced creations. Make them your own by adding graphics, audio, and more.

WWDC 2020 Kickoff: June 22 

The memoji developer theme is fun — it emphasizes the unique virtual nature of this year’s WWDC, and each time you reload the page you get a different set of developers.

From the Apple Newsroom announcement:

Developers are encouraged to download the Apple Developer app where additional WWDC20 program information — including keynote and Platforms State of the Union details, session and lab schedules, and more — will be shared in June. Information will also be made available on the Apple Developer website and by email.

No surprise that they’re holding the session schedule close to their vest. I’m still deeply curious how labs will work in an open “everyone is invited” format. WWDC labs get crowded with 5,000 physical attendees; I have no idea how anything similar could work with untold tens of thousands of virtual attendees.

Apple’s official Developer app is available for iPhone, iPad, Apple Watch, and Apple TV — still no app for Mac, despite the fact that every single developer working on Apple platforms uses Xcode, which only works on Mac (well, at the moment, before WWDC). I could have sworn Apple announced some sort of framework that made it super-easy to turn an iPad app into a great Mac app at some point.