Linked List: April 13, 2021

Tuesday, 13 April 2021

Roku’s New Remotes Have an Apple TV+ Button ★

Chris Welch, writing for The Verge:

In a sign of how far Apple is willing to go to continue raising the profile of Apple TV Plus, the company has worked out a deal with Roku that will give the streaming video service its own shortcut button. This is the first time a branded Apple TV Plus button has appeared on any remote control.

You’ll find it on the new Roku Voice Remote Pro, announced today, which features a rechargeable battery, headphone jack for private listening, and two programmable shortcut buttons. The usual branded buttons include Netflix, Disney Plus, Hulu, and now Apple TV Plus.

There’s only room for four of these buttons on this remote. This is not a small deal.

Amazingly, you can even tell which end is which by feel on this remote.

‘Embrace the Grind’ ★

Jacob Kaplan-Moss:

I often have people newer to the tech industry ask me for secrets to success. There aren’t many, really, but this secret — being willing to do something so terrifically tedious that it appears to be magic — works in tech too.

We’re an industry obsessed with automation, with streamlining, with efficiency. One of the foundational texts of our engineering culture, Larry Wall’s virtues of the programmer, includes laziness:

Laziness: The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful and document what you wrote so you don’t have to answer so many questions about it.

I don’t disagree: being able to offload repetitive tasks to a program is one of the best things about knowing how to code. However, sometimes problems can’t be solved by automation. If you’re willing to embrace the grind you’ll look like a magician.

I greatly enjoyed this piece on its own, but I think it ties in particularly well with the aforelinked item about Ben Thompson’s column on Taylor Swift’s re-recording of an entire hit album just to have a version she owned the rights to. Who would do that? Painstakingly re-create an entire work of art? Someone willing to embrace the grind.

‘Non-Fungible Taylor Swift’ ★

Long story rendered very short, Taylor Swift does not own the rights to her first six albums, and isn’t happy about that. She faithfully re-recorded the entirety of her second album, Fearless, and just released the new version as Fearless: Taylor’s Version. Without breaking any contract or copyright, she effectively rendered the original studio version nearly worthless, because her fans know the deal.

Ben Thompson has a great column on the whole saga, and deftly connects it with Dave Chappelle’s similar direct-to-fans appeal to retake control over the rights to his seminal Chappelle’s Show. Thompson:

This explains what Swift got right in 2014:

A friend of mine, who is an actress, told me that when the casting for her recent movie came down to two actresses, the casting director chose the actress with more Twitter followers. I see this becoming a trend in the music industry. For me, this dates back to 2005 when I walked into my first record-label meetings, explaining to them that I had been communicating directly with my fans on this new site called Myspace. In the future, artists will get record deals because they have fans — not the other way around.

This is the inverse of Swift leveraging her fans to acquire her masters: future artists will wield that power from the beginning (like sovereign writers). It’s not that “art is important and rare”, and thus valuable, but rather that the artists themselves are important and rare, and impute value on whatever they wish.

To put it another way, while we used to pay for plastic discs and thought we were paying for songs (or newspapers/writing or cable/TV stars), empowering distribution over creators, today we pay with both money and attention according to the direction of creators, giving them power over everyone.

Alex Berenson: The Pandemic’s Wrongest Man ★

Derek Thompson, writing for The Atlantic:

To be honest, I initially had serious doubts about publishing this piece. The trap of exposing conspiracy theories is obvious: To demonstrate why a theory is wrong, you have to explain it and, in doing so, incur the risk that some people will be convinced by the very theory you’re trying to debunk. But that horse has left the barn. More than half of Republicans under the age of 50 say they simply won’t get a vaccine. Their hesitancy is being fanned by right-wing hacks, Fox News showboats, and vaccine skeptics like Alex Berenson. The case for the vaccines is built upon a firm foundation of scientific discovery, clinical-trial data, and real-world evidence. The case against the vaccines wobbles because it is built upon a steaming pile of bullshit.

An evisceration for the ages. Keep this bookmarked in case anyone sends you links to Berenson’s anti-J&J vaccine nonsense today.

Programming as Meditation ★

Craig Mod, writing for Wired:

A little over a year ago, as the Covid-19 lockdowns were beginning to fan out across the globe, most folks grasped for toilet paper and canned food. The thing I reached for: a search function.

The purpose of the search function was somewhat irrelevant. I simply needed to code. Code soothes because it can provide control in moments when the world seems to spiral. Reductively, programming consists of little puzzles to be solved. Not just inert jigsaws on living room tables, but puzzles that breathe with an uncanny life force. Puzzles that make things happen, that get things done, that automate tedium or allow for the publishing of words across the world.

I’ve been hacking on personal side projects a lot more over the last year, and the above really explains how it makes me feel. “Puzzles that breathe with an uncanny life force” — that’s it. That’s how programming has felt for me ever since I got my first BASIC program working back when I was a kid. Even when it was just me going up to the Commodore 64 display model at Kmart in the 1980s and typing:

10 PRINT "KMART SUCKS!"
20 GOTO 10
RUN

and then scurrying away with uncontrollable giggles — which I did, religiously, every single time we went to Kmart — I got that thrill.

‘Spring Loaded’ Apple Event Next Tuesday, Just as Siri Predicted ★

Always happy to see homage to the one true Apple logo. As for any meaning to the name or design, my take is that it means nothing and thus means something: that the things getting announced are all mostly unrelated to each other.

Some Perspective on Blood Clot Risk ★

Rebecca Wind, on Twitter:

The risk of blood clots from birth control pills is 1 in 1,000 and is considered a low-risk side effect. The risk from the J&J vaccine is 1 in 1,000,000. #GetVaccinated

That’s arguably understating the long-term risk for women on birth control pills.

You know what’s even worse for causing dangerous blood clots? Getting infected with COVID-19:

“We began to notice a really unusual manifestation of venous and arterial thromboembolism in patients with COVID-19,” said Malas. “In addition to higher instances of blood clots, the mortality for patients hospitalized for COVID-19 and with thromboembolism was much higher, compared to patients without clots. It’s unusual because we have never seen anything like this with other respiratory infections.”

Overall, 20 percent of the COVID-19 patients were found to have blood clots in the veins, and among patients in the intensive care unit, that statistic increased to 31 percent.

Tufekci, Gertz, and Silver on the FDA’s Pause on the J&J Vaccine ★

Zeynep Tufekci, on Twitter:

FDA says the pause is due to “abundance of caution.” I am very much for abundance of caution against tail risk, and a full investigation into rare events. I respect these are difficult decisions. But “caution” isn’t the term for dramatic, forward-leaning and irreversible acts.

I appreciate the people saying “we should feel more confident because they’re investigating”, which is true — it works on me! — but the word “should” is doing a lot of work there. Meanwhile, let’s check in on how this affects dynamics of human cognition, media and social media.

Matt Gertz:

I am extremely skeptical of the ability of public messaging to disaggregate “the J&J vaccine is under review as a precaution” from “the J&J vaccine is not safe and the others may not be either” in the minds of normal people. An incredibly crucial, high-stakes test for the press.

Nate Silver, responding to Gertz:

It’s also a high-stakes test for the FDA, and they failed it, because of course lots of people are going to take away the latter message.

There’s also data on this based on decreased public confidence in the AstraZeneca vaccine in Europe following similar pauses there. So the FDA can’t even use the excuse of flying blind.

[Link]

Also Silver:

If out of the blue one morning Gov. Newsom was like “Shark attacks are extremely rare, but out of an abundance of caution, we’re closing every beach in California until we investigate more”, that’s not likely to get more people to go out to the beach, even once beaches reopen.

‘Do Less Harm’ ★

Paul Kafasis:

The result of this decision is sure to be a lower number of people vaccinated, over a longer period of time. We know that will cause more COVID deaths. By contrast, just one death is currently associated with this vaccine. It’s unpleasant to measure one set of deaths against another, but that’s precisely what must be done in a public health crisis. If we were able to vaccinate all of the US with the J&J vaccine, we would currently expect to see about 330 issues with blood clots. Meanwhile, more than 560,000 Americans have lost their lives to COVID already, with 330 more being killed by COVID every few hours.

The worst part about this is that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine is almost certainly our best vaccine. The efficacy numbers aren’t what matters — the J&J vaccine is way more than effective enough. What matters is that it’s single-dose. The single-dose J&J vaccine is the clearest path to pushing our overall nationwide (and worldwide) vaccinated numbers into herd immunity territory, wiping COVID-19 from the face of the earth. It would be a catastrophic mistake to panic over one-in-a-million blood clots for any of the approved vaccines, but it’s a worst-case scenario to unjustly malign our only highly-effective single-dose vaccine.

U.S. Calls for Pause on Johnson & Johnson Vaccine After One-in-a-Million Blood Clotting Cases ★

Noah Weiland, Sharon LaFraniere, and Carl Zimmer, reporting for The New York Times:

Federal health agencies on Tuesday called for an immediate pause in use of Johnson & Johnson’s single-dose coronavirus vaccine after six recipients in the United States developed a rare disorder involving blood clots within about two weeks of vaccination.

All six recipients were women between the ages of 18 and 48. One woman died and a second woman in Nebraska has been hospitalized in critical condition.

Nearly seven million people in the United States have received Johnson & Johnson shots so far, and roughly nine million more doses have been shipped out to the states, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

After a run of remarkably good news on the COVID vaccination front here in the U.S., this is an utter gut punch, and a horrendously wrong decision. This terrible decision is going to kill tens of thousands of Americans. Six blood clots after 7 million administered Johnson & Johnson vaccines, versus a disease that has a mortality rate of 18,000 per million cases in the U.S., and has killed over 1,700 of every million people.

One death after 7 million J&J vaccinations for these blood clots (which they don’t even know are attributable to the vaccine), versus over 50,000 dead per 7 million cases of COVID in Americans. That’s a ratio of 1 : 50,000. You can fairly argue those mortality numbers are skewed by the fact that COVID has already ripped through our nursing homes, killing a lot of our most vulnerable people, but still, the risk numbers aren’t even in the same ballpark. And mortality numbers don’t include the millions of Americans who suffered or are suffering from severe cases that require hospitalization.

This is criminal innumeracy.

Siri Claims Apple Event Planned for Next Tuesday ★

Sami Fathi, writing for MacRumors:

Upon being asked “When is the next Apple Event,” ‌Siri‌ is currently responding with, “The special event is on Tuesday, April 20, at Apple Park in Cupertino, CA. You can get all the details on Apple.com.”

Works for me on my HomePods, but not when I ask my iPhone or iPad. Others are getting the April 20 answer on their Macs and iPhones — why it varies so much by device, who knows? Tuesday 20 April is exactly the date I was thinking about when I wrote about Apple not wanting to send a top executive to Washington to testify before the Senate antitrust committee next week.