Linked List: April 18, 2021

Sunday, 18 April 2021

My thanks to Raycast for sponsoring last week at DF. Raycast is a new “Spotlight on steroids” utility for the Mac. I’ve been using it all week and it’s great — very fast, looks cool, and richly extensible through custom script commands.

Raycast can fully replace Spotlight, and it really stands apart with its integrations of third party services. Without leaving the application, you can create an issue in Jira, review pull requests in GitHub, or join a Zoom call. You can personalize your workflows further with the aforementioned scripting interface and an upcoming API. Raycast is a beautiful true Mac app that brings clarity back to your daily work. Download it for free to get started.

Adobe Co-Founder Chuck Geschke Dies at 81 ★

Kim Lyons, reporting for The Verge:

Charles “Chuck” Geschke, a co-founder of Adobe who helped develop the PDF, has died at age 81, the company said in a statement. […]

Geschke earned a doctorate from Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, and then took a job at Xerox Palo Alto Research Center where he met Warnock. The pair left Xerox in 1982 and founded Adobe. Their first product was Adobe PostScript, the programming language that helped boost the desktop publishing industry.

Geschke was chief operating officer of Adobe from December 1986 to July 1994 and president from April 1989 until his retirement in April 2000. He served as chairman of the board with Warnock from September 1997 to January 2017 and was a member of the board until April 2020, when he became emeritus board member.

“I could never have imagined having a better, more likable, or more capable business partner,” Warnock said in a statement. “Not having Chuck in our lives will leave a huge hole and those who knew him will all agree.”

Impossible to overstate how important PostScript was (and remains). What made PostScript so good, so useful, so lasting, is that it’s a full-fledged programming language.

I forgot about this story:

In addition to his contributions to the technology industry, Geschke was also known for surviving a 1992 kidnapping attempt. Two men snatched him as he arrived at work one morning and held him for four days, demanding ransom. He was eventually rescued by the FBI.

‘Do We Really Still Need to Wear Masks Outside?’ ★

Shannon Palus, writing for Slate:

In other words, as the pandemic has progressed, so has our understanding of what safety measures are truly most useful, and which aren’t worth the alcohol wipes. And I would like to calmly suggest that now is the time we should consider no longer wearing masks when we walk around outside.

I am not suggesting this simply because I am very sick of wearing a mask at all times outside my home. When it comes to coronavirus spread, evidence shows that being outdoors is very, very safe. […]

While it’s important to mask in outdoor crowds or if you’re hanging out close to someone in a park, Chagla explains, the main message should be that the outdoors is a safe place to be. He gave me a rough sense of how unlikely outdoor transmission is in the scenario where you’re walking unmasked on the sidewalk and briefly pass someone. First, you or the person you’re passing would have to happen to have an asymptomatic infection, he explained, and then everyone would have to be exhaling and inhaling at just the right moment, and also, exchanging enough particles to actually seed another infection: “You’re talking about a probability of getting hit by a car, and being struck by lightning.”

Is this too soon? I think scientifically, eschewing masks outdoors except for close conversations is perfectly safe. The evidence is overwhelming that COVID spreads almost entirely indoors, through the air. But socially, I’m not sure. Until overall infection rates start dropping as more people are vaccinated, there are social benefits to the “mask up” mantra.

Behind the Scenes in Private Facebook Groups for America Special Forces Vets ★

Carol E. Lee, reporting for NBC News:

They’re the most elite, lethally trained members of the U.S. military, widely considered the best of the best. And yet in secret Facebook groups exclusively for special operations forces that were accessed by NBC News, they share misinformation about a “stolen” 2020 election, disparaging and racist comments about America’s political leadership and even QAnon conspiracy theories.

Among the hundreds of Facebook posts NBC News reviewed from forums for current and former Rangers, Green Berets and other elite warriors: a member of a special forces group lamenting that several aides to former Vice President Mike Pence were part of a “Concerted effort by the thieves and pedophiles walking the hallowed halls of the peoples government” to undermine former President Donald Trump.

“In a just world, they would have already been taken out behind the court house and shot,” another member commented.

Without Facebook these views would still exist, but Facebook is the accelerant that gives these groups critical mass.

Update: Tess Owen, reporting for Vice last June: “The U.S. Military Has a Boogaloo Problem” — all about private Facebook groups. Facebook knows about these groups, and have for years.

‘Extending the Johnson & Johnson Vaccine Pause for a Week Was a Deadly Mistake’ ★

Govind Persad and William F. Parker, in an op-ed for The Washington Post:

Looking at ACIP’s roster helps diagnose its mistake. Its voting members are almost all doctors far more familiar with rare vaccine side effects than with marshaling scarce public health capacity to respond to a surge of infections. The committee lacks comparative effectiveness experts or health economists familiar with weighing inevitable tradeoffs at a population-wide scale. […]

What ACIP must provide, but likely never will, is an estimate of how many of the hundreds of thousands of Americans infected with covid-19 in the coming days could have been protected if J&J vaccines were available. The resulting hospitalizations and deaths, likely concentrated in disadvantaged communities, will happen weeks from now and will probably be ignored by the media. News stories will highlight blood clots following vaccination but not consider whether a one-dose vaccine could have protected a homeless person who arrived at the emergency room deathly ill from covid-19 or prevented an outbreak at her encampment. Without a comparison of the pause’s harms to the vaccine’s side effects, we have every reason to fear that ACIP loudly fiddled while Rome quietly burned.

The authors both have expertise in bioethics, which is the issue at hand.

‘That’s What Makes Bill Very, Very Dangerous’ ★

From Softwar, Matthew Symonds’s 2004 biography of Larry Ellison:

One telephone conversation with Gates in 1993 sticks in Ellison’s mind. “It was the most interesting conversation I’ve ever had with Bill, and the most revealing. It was around eleven o’clock in the morning, and we were on the phone discussing some technical issue, I don’t remember what it was. Anyway, I didn’t agree with him on some point, and I explained my reasoning. Bill says, ‘I’ll have to think about that, I’ll call you back.’ Then I get this call at four in the afternoon and it’s Bill continuing the conversation with ‘Yeah, I think you’re right about that, but what about A and B and C?’ I said, ‘Bill, have you been thinking about this for the last five hours?’ He said, yes, he had, it was an important issue and he wanted to get it right. Now Bill wanted to continue the discussion and analyze the implications of it all. I was just stunned. He had taken the time and effort to think it all through and had decided I was right and he was wrong. Now, most people hate to admit they’re wrong, but it didn’t bother Bill one bit. All he cared about was what was right, not who was right. That’s what makes Bill very, very dangerous.”

I miss Bill Gates at Microsoft.

(Via Zack Kanter.)