Linked List: November 13, 2020

Friday, 13 November 2020

White House Press Secretary Kayleigh McEnany Still Pretending Trump Won 

Ten days after Trump was defeated in a historic landslide — by his own oft-repeated standard — his whole crew of idiot lickspittles are still talking nonsense. They’re just making fools of themselves at this point. It’s not a coup. It’s just really, really weird.

I mean, I dare you to make sense of this tweet, in which the president himself simultaneously agrees that this election was the most secure the country has ever held and that it was “rigged”.

Al Qaeda’s No. 2, Accused in U.S. Embassy Attacks, Is Secretly Killed in Iran 

Adam Goldman, Eric Schmitt, Farnaz Fassihi, and Ronen Bergman, reporting for The New York Times:

American intelligence officials say that Mr. al-Masri had been in Iran’s “custody” since 2003, but that he had been living freely in the Pasdaran district of Tehran, an upscale suburb, since at least 2015. Around 9:00 on a warm summer night, he was driving his white Renault L90 sedan with his daughter near his home when two gunmen on a motorcycle drew up beside him. Five shots were fired from a pistol fitted with a silencer. Four bullets entered the car through the driver’s side and a fifth hit a nearby car.

As news of the shooting broke, Iran’s official news media identified the victims as Habib Daoud, a Lebanese history professor, and his 27-year-old daughter Maryam. The Lebanese news channel MTV and social media accounts affiliated with Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps reported that Mr. Daoud was a member of Hezbollah, the Iranian-backed militant organization in Lebanon.

It seemed plausible. […]

In fact, there was no Habib Daoud.

Wild story, like something right out of a movie.

Petulant Wingnuts Push Parler 

Mike Isaac and Kellen Browning, reporting for The New York Times:

But Mr. Levin, Ms. Bartiromo and others did not stop there. They directed their followers to other social media apps and news sites that have positioned themselves as alternatives to Facebook and Twitter. The beneficiaries are Parler, a Twitter-like app that describes itself as the world’s “premier free speech social network,” the right-wing media app Newsmax, and other social sites like MeWe and Rumble, which have purposely welcomed conservatives.

Over the weekend, Parler shot to the top of Apple’s App Store in downloads. As of Monday, it had eight million members, nearly double the 4.5 million it had last week. Rumble said it projected 75 million to 90 million people will watch a video on its site this month, up from 60.5 million last month. And Newsmax said more than 3 million people watched its election night coverage and that its app has recently been in the top-10 daily apps downloaded from Apple’s App Store.

This is what puts the lie to claims that Twitter and Facebook moderating and labeling content is an infringement on free speech. Don’t like Twitter or Facebook’s rules? Use something else.

That said, I have my doubts that Parler, in particular, is going to work very well. I signed up and poked around a few weeks ago, and while it looks and works much like Twitter, conceptually, the content felt like something out of a wingnut-flavored Idiocracy. It wasn’t about the content having a wingnut Trumpian slant, it was that the content all seemed to be generated by crude content managment systems, not by people. It wasn’t people writing tweet-like posts. It was all just auto-posted stuff pushing me to read articles on rightwing sites. I don’t see it taking off.

Then there’s the issue of namespace. Facebook is undeniably dominant, but one aspect of social networking it missed out on is user names. Instagram has user names, too, but when I just see “@username”, I, along with most people, presume it’s a Twitter account. Parler has Twitter-style user names, but there’s no way anyone is going to assume “@username” is a Parler account without explicitly saying it’s a Parler account every single time you mention it.

Here’s Fox News host Maria Bartiromo screwing this up in a tweet as she’s trying to promote her own move to Parler:

This is the same group who abused power in 2016. I will be leaving soon and going to Parler. Please open an account on @parler right away.

@parler, on Twitter, is just some rando who only ever tweeted once, eight years ago. He does have 5,400+ followers now, though.

Super-Spreader Wedding Party Shows COVID Holiday Dangers 

Karen Kaplan, science and medicine editor for The L.A. Times:

If you want to know why public health officials are so nervous about how much worse the COVID-19 pandemic will get as the holiday season unfolds, consider what happened after a single, smallish wedding reception that took place this summer in rural Maine.

Only 55 people attended the Aug. 7 reception at the Big Moose Inn in Millinocket. But one of those guests arrived with a coronavirus infection. Over the next 38 days, the virus spread to 176 other people. Seven of them died.

None of the victims who lost their lives had attended the party.

It sounds cold, but the attendees of that wedding killed those people. If you’re planning a “small” family get-together for Thanksgiving, it’s every bit as irresponsible as planning a “short” drunk drive.

Apple’s M1 Compared to 1985’s ARM1 

Ken Shirriff, on Twitter:

With Apple’s recent announcement of the ARM-based M1 processor, I figured it would be interesting to compare it to the first ARM processor, created by Acorn Computers in 1985 for the BBC Micro computer. Designers were Sophie Wilson and Steve Furber.

Here are the two dies at the same scale. The M1 is over twice as large physically as the ARM1. It has 16 billion transistors vs 25,000 for the ARM1. If you built the ARM1 using the same technology, it would be a pixel-sized speck.

Lots of fun details in the thread.