Rolandt

I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Sam Harris, author and host of the Making Sense podcast, for a wide-ranging conversation. Given the moment we’re currently living through, we naturally touched on the way companies are adapting to a new reality — one where remote work is a model to which they must adapt in a matter of days, rather than years.

As I mentioned to Sam on the podcast, “any company that can enable their people to be fully effective in a distributed fashion, can and should do it far beyond after this current crisis has passed.” It’s a moral imperative. But that doesn’t mean it’s going to be easy, or that the chaotic and stressful first taste some workplaces are getting right now is one that inspires them to keep trying.

To make sense of this journey — from a company’s cautious exploration of remote possibilities to a fully realized distributed experience — I like to think of how it plays out through the concept of levels of distributed work, which I modeled after self-driving car levels of autonomy. I’ve seen some solid recaps of my conversation with Sam from Steve Glaveski and Steve Jurvetson, but here’s my gist of how distributed companies evolve:

0. Level Zero autonomy is a job which cannot be done unless you’re physically there. Imagine construction worker, barista, massage therapist, firefighter… Many companies assumed they had far more of these than it has turned out they really did.
1. The first level is where most colocated businesses are: there’s no deliberate effort to make things remote-friendly, though in the case of many knowledge workers, people can keep things moving for a day or two when there’s an emergency. More often than not, they’ll likely put things off until they’re back in the office. Work happens on company equipment, in company space, on company time. You don’t have any special equipment and may have to use a clunky VPN to access basic work resources like email or your calendar. Larger level one companies often have people in the same building or campus dialing into a meeting. Level one companies were largely unprepared for this crisis.
2. Level two is where many companies have found themselves in the past few weeks with the COVID-19 pandemic. They’ve accepted that work is going to happen at home for a while, but they recreate what they were doing in the office in a “remote” setting, like Marshall McLuhan talked about new media mediums initially copying the generation before. You’re probably able to access information from afar, you’ve adapted to tools like Zoom or Microsoft Teams, but everything is still synchronous, your day is full of interruptions, no real-time meetings have been canceled (yet), and there’s a lot of anxiety in management around productivity — that’s the stage where companies sometimes install surveillance software on laptops. Pro tip: Don’t do that! And also: Don’t stop at level two!
3. At the third level, you’re really starting to benefit from being remote-first, or distributed. That’s when you see people invest in better equipment — from a good desk lamp to solid audio gear — and in more robust asynchronous processes that start to replace meetings. It’s also the point at which you realize just how crucial written communication is for your success, and you start looking for great writers in your hiring. When you are on a Zoom, you often also have a Google Doc up with the other meeting participants so you can take and check real-time notes together. Your company has a zero-trust BeyondCorp security model. In a non-pandemic world you plan meetups so teams can break bread and meet each other in person a week or two a year.
4. Level four is when things go truly asynchronous. You evaluate people’s work on what they produce, not how or when they produce it. Trust emerges as the glue that holds the entire operation together. You begin shifting to better — perhaps slower, but more deliberate — decision-making, and you empower everyone, not just the loudest or most extroverted, to weigh in on major conversations. You tap into the global talent pool, the 99% of the world’s population and intelligence that doesn’t live near one of your legacy physical office locations. Employee retention goes way up, and you invest more in training and coaching. Most employees have home-office setups that would make office workers green with envy. You have a rich social life with people you choose. Real-time meetings are respected and taken seriously, almost always have agendas and pre-work or post-work. If you get good at baton passes work will follow the sun 24/7 around the world. Your organization is truly inclusive because standards are objective and give people agency to accomplish their work their way.
5. Finally, I believe it’s always useful to have an ideal that’s not wholly attainable — and that’s level five, Nirvana! This is when you consistently perform better than any in-person organization could. You’re effortlessly effective. It’s when everyone in the company has time for wellness and mental health, when people bring their best selves and highest levels of creativity to do the best work of their careers, and just have fun.

A highly influential book for me in designing Automattic was Daniel Pink’s Drive, where he eloquently introduces the three things that really matter in motivating people: mastery, purpose, and autonomy. Mastery is the urge to get better skills. Purpose is the desire to do something that has meaning, that’s bigger than yourself. These first two principles physically co-located companies can be great at. But the third, autonomy, is where even the best in-office company can never match a Level 4 or above distributed company.

Autonomy is our desire to be self-directed, to have agency over ourselves and our environment. Close your eyes and imagine everything around you in a physical office: the chair you’re in, the desk, distance from a window, the smells, the temperature, the music, the flooring, what’s in the fridge, the comfort and privacy of the bathrooms, the people (or pets) around you, the lighting. Now imagine an environment where you can choose and control every one of those to your liking — maybe it’s a room in your house, a converted garage, a shared studio, or really anything, the important thing is you’re able to shape the environment fit your personal preferences, not the lowest common denominator of everyone an employer has decided to squish together for 8 hours a day. The micro-interactions of the hundreds of variables of your work environment can charge you and give you creative energy, or make you dependent, infantilized, and a character in someone else’s story. Which do you want to spend half of your waking workday hours in?

For a good summary of Dan Pink, check out this animation. The other books I referenced in the podcast are Geoffrey West’s Scale and Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Antifragile.

My talk with Sam covered many other topics, from communicating in distributed companies to the challenges businesses are facing due to COVID-19, so I hope you head over and listen to the rest or stream it on Youtube.

From Dianna:

I’ve given A World Redesigned some thought, and here’s what comes to mind: social distancing and fear of others. I hope this doesn’t become part of our world as we come out of this insanity.

A couple of years ago as a grey-haired lady friend and I slipped and slid along icy Portland sidewalks, almost every person we passed in four or five blocks smiled and said something kind. That’s when I realized that I’m at a point in my life that people acknowledge my presence on the street. Whether it’s because I’m harmless or look like your beloved grandmother, whether it’s compassionate or demeaning, is a topic for another conversation, but there it is … people greeted me.

These days, not so much. Too many times it’s a furtive look before dodging away, very few smiles, and, underlying it all, a sense of fear. I hope this goes away with the lifting of restrictions.

Price Tags welcomes other insights and comments on “A World Redesigned”.

Today Apple announced a special partnership with Google to develop contact tracing technology designed to reduce the spread of COVID-19 in the coming months. The plan involves two steps:

First, in May, both companies will release APIs that enable interoperability between Android and iOS devices using apps from public health authorities. These official apps will be available for users to download via their respective app stores.

Second, in the coming months, Apple and Google will work to enable a broader Bluetooth-based contact tracing platform by building this functionality into the underlying platforms. This is a more robust solution than an API and would allow more individuals to participate, if they choose to opt in, as well as enable interaction with a broader ecosystem of apps and government health authorities. Privacy, transparency, and consent are of utmost importance in this effort, and we look forward to building this functionality in consultation with interested stakeholders. We will openly publish information about our work for others to analyze.

Additionally, Apple has published draft technical documentation covering their joint work with Google.

This marks only the latest of several efforts Apple has developed to help fight the spread of COVID-19. The company developed an app and website, in partnership with the CDC, to help people with symptoms know what they should do. Additionally Tim Cook has been tweeting periodic updates about the masks and face shields the company has sourced and developed to send to first responders. Today’s partnership with Google, however, may be the most significant effort to date.

The World Health Organization explains how contact tracing – which involves keeping track of anyone who has been in contact with an infected person – can help limit the transmission of disease. Although current social distancing policies are a strict form of containment, well-implemented contact tracing could help prevent the need for such drastic measures in the future.

I’m glad that Apple and Google are collaborating on this effort, and that it will be privacy-first and opt-in. Anything that can be done to minimize the spread of COVID-19 is a good thing.

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After more than 125 hours of research and testing, during which we cooked approximately 250 pounds of rice and consulted with experts in Japanese, Thai, and Chinese cuisine, we recommend the Zojirushi Neuro Fuzzy NS-ZCC10 as the best rice cooker for most people. It made the best white rice of any cooker we tested—even when we were intentionally careless with our rice-to-water ratios—and it also turns out great long-grain and brown rice.

PT readers are responding eloquently. John Graham:

I have experienced that too although I am encouraged to find that if I am the person moving out of the way to create the social distance, I am often greeted with a smile or thanks. So I have chosen to be the distancer just to create this response.

It also reminds me of when I would run in the mornings on the West Van seawall: before 8 or so in the morning, everyone would say hello as I passed, as if by being out there in smaller numbers in the early hours created a sense of community. By 9 am it was back to normal; just a glance at best as I ran by.

Perhaps what this all means is that we will find new normals where the initial fear will have given way to respect for proper distancing.

Bob Ransford:

Masked like some furtive bandit, fearful of just being outside the four walls of my home with a compromised immune system, I walk along the waterfront as the sun rises in the early morning, trying to find some solace from weeks of mostly solitary confinement.

There are only a few who disturb their slumber so early on these days that seem like working holidays. How could I not acknowledge those who I pass at an adequate social distance? It’s basic human contact. At very least, it’s an acknowledgement that, if the passerby is not hidden behind a mask, I have nothing really to hide from them. If they, too are masked, a good morning greeting is a kindred-like act, admitting a mutual anxiety, a resignation to a certain desperation to survive. A simple “good morning” or a “have a good day” is a declaration that we are one — we are ALL in this together.

Perhaps it’s also a wishful act. Wishing that we will all continue to be “in this together”, with the “this” being the caring for the planet that we all share. Wishing for a togetherness or mutual resolve to face reality and tackle the big challenges that face us all. A mutual resolve that has long been missing. Could this be the dawn of a new reality?

A simple acknowledgment as we pass by each other.

The New York Times has open-sourced a Vault plugin that generates dynamic secrets.

By Ling Zhang and Shawn Bower

The New York Times has a lot of apps. No, we’re not talking about the apps that you can download from app stores, although we do have a couple of those. We’re talking about the applications and services that we’ve built in-house to power everything from our front-end website to back-end services. It’s a lot to keep track of.

To get all of these apps and services to securely talk to each other, we employ secrets, which are similar to the passwords that online accounts require. Secrets allow our apps to connect and share information, but like any good password, they need to be changed regularly.

For a long time, we statically generated secrets, but this raised some issues and was hard to manage. Static secrets are often shared by multiple applications, which can make it difficult to audit appropriate usage. When they are shared, it can become close to impossible to rotate or even revoke them. Because most applications require secrets to be in a configuration file or injected into an environment, the risk of a static secret unintentionally ending up in an application’s log file is high. A single exposure can have an outsized effect on security.

We needed a better solution, so we decided to shift to dynamic secrets using our secrets management tool, HashiCorp Vault. Dynamic secrets are much safer than static secrets because they can be generated whenever an application requires them, and they can be set to expire after a short period of time.

To best serve Times readers around the world, we use a Content Delivery Network (CDN) that caches static content and delivers it from servers closest to where readers are located. This allows us to send news to our readers as fast as possible. Our current system uses Fastly as our CDN.

For each domain that uses a CDN, we have a separate Fastly service to handle configuration.

Every time we want to make changes to one of those services, we need a dedicated Fastly token for the service so we can authenticate with the Fastly platform.

Rather than wrestle with the Fastly API and Vault every time we need to generate a secret — which would take us farther away from dynamic creation — we created a Vault plugin to do it for us.

We are open-sourcing the plugin, which we’re calling the Vault Fastly Secrets Engine, for anyone to use.

How we designed the plugin

The transition over to dynamic secrets turned out to be less straightforward than we expected. We started digging into the Fastly API to see what it would take to pull this off. Quickly, we realized we had an issue: we use multi-factor authentication (MFA) for a lot of our platforms and our Fastly account is set up to require an MFA for all users. While this might have been fine with static secrets, because we could manually retrieve the special log-in code needed to connect to Fastly, our platforms couldn’t whip out a phone every time they need to log-on. This meant that we needed a way to authenticate with MFA whenever we generated Fastly tokens for the platforms.

We dug into Vault’s open-source code, which already has a TOTP backend and we realized that we could pull the library in and use it to meet the MFA requirement.

We designed the workflow for the plugin to log into Vault and obtain a Vault token. Then the user/application can request a Fastly token from Vault, which will validate the token request with the user/application’s policy. Vault will pass the request to the plugin which generates the Fastly token. The plugin will pass the Fastly token back to Vault which will in turn pass it back to the user/application.

How to set up the plugin

The plugin must be configured in advance with credentials for accessing Fastly’s API; these steps should be completed by a Vault operator or a configuration management tool.

To begin, start your Vault and log-in as a root user.

Register the plugin with the catalog

In order to use the plugin you must first register it with the Vault plugin catalog by providing the SHASUM of the plugin code. The SHASUM acts as a unique fingerprint of the plugin code. When the plugin is loaded for the first time, Vault will calculate the SHASUM of the plugin code it has and compare that with the SHASUM in the plugin catalog. If there is a match, the plugin will be run, if they do not match then Vault will return an error and not run the plugin. This process helps us ensure the plugin code has not been tampered with.

Using the code below will ensure that your registration for the plugin is correct. It will generate the SHASUM for your plugin, and write the SHASUM into the catalog path of Vault. This should be a one-time operation that should be done by your Vault administrator.

$ SHASUM=$(shasum -a 256 vault-fastly-secret-engine | cut -d “ “ -f1)
$ vault write sys/plugins/catalog/vault-fastly-secret-engine sha_256=”$SHASUM” command=”vault-fastly-secret-engine”

After running this, and the commands in the rest of this post, you should expect to see a message saying it was successful.

Enable the plugin

After registering the plugin with Vault, you still need to enable it with the following command:

$ vault secrets enable -path=”fastly” -plugin-name=”vault-fastly-secret-engine” plugin

By default, the secrets engine will mount at the name of the engine (Vault Fastly Secrets Engine). To enable the secrets engine to use a different path, you can use the -path argument. In the example above, we have mounted the engine to the path “/fastly.”

In order for the engine to make API calls to Fastly, we must store a username, password and a one-time code (known as a TOTP code). The username and password can be stored under the “/fastly/config” path.

$ vault write fastly/config username=”sam” password=”test” sharedSecret=”123"

The sharedSecret key corresponds to the key produced by Fastly when you configure an MFA login. This key will be used to authenticate with Fastly using Vault TOTP functionality when generating the Fastly tokens. (Note: the username, password and sharedSecret shown here are for illustrative purposes only. Please don’t use this in your app.)

This should be a one-time configuration with your vault. You will not need to repeat this unless you change the Fastly admin account that is used to create tokens.

Access to the plugin can be restricted by using Vault policies, for more detailed information on policies in Vault please refer to the HashiCorp documentation.

How to use the plugin

After you’ve registered the secrets engine and configured it with the proper permissions, the plugin can generate tokens. Here are a few examples of what you can do with the plugin. (Note: the service IDs and tokens used here are for illustrative purposes only and should not be used in your application.)

How to generate a global Fastly token for a specific Fastly service

You can generate a new Fastly token by writing to the “/fastly/generate” endpoint with the scope of the desired token, as well as the service ID.

$ vault write fastly/generate scope=”global” service_id=”Xj64IRZdmTix9gh67U”
Key Value
— — — — -
token d118a65cdfe314202cf969e1fb2e8afc
ttl 5m

The above command returns the token you can use to interact with the fastly API as well as the time to live (TTL) of the token.

How to generate a global Fastly token for multiple Fastly services

You can provide multiple service IDs by using a comma-delimited string.

$ vault write fastly/generate scope=”global” service_id=”Xj64IRZdmTix9gh67U,462345457BT4IRZdf7z”
Key Value
— — — — -
token f2732f475773ab0d0bce1cd371d72b48
ttl 5m

This is helpful if you need to act on a set of services at the same time. The command provides the same information as before, however the only difference is the range of services that it can affect.

How to generate a global Fastly token overriding the default TTL

The default TTL for each token is five minutes, after which, the token will expire. Five minutes is typically enough time for setup, but anyone using this plugin can adjust the expiration using the command below.

$ vault write fastly/generate scope=”global” -ttl 3600 service_id=”Xj64IRZdmTix9gh67U,462345457BT4IRZdf7z”
Key Value
— — — — -
token f2732f475773ab0d0bce1cd371d72b48
ttl 1h

Throughout this process, we learned a lot about how to write a plugin for Vault. By open sourcing this plugin with the developer community, we hope that it will demystify the process for others.

Our team is hiring. Apply to work with us here.

Shawn Bower is a principal engineer with the Delivery Engineering team at The New York Times. Currently, Shawn is Tech Lead on our elections readiness project making sure our systems are resilient and ready for traffic around elections events. When not at work Shawn is busily working on his project farm; this year he is adding bees and chickens!

Ling Zhang joined The New York Times after interning as an engineer on the testing team. Since joining Delivery Engineering in 2017, Ling has been a prolific contributor to code and process related to our Fastly integrations, as well as contributing to general CI and tooling for our cloud platforms. She recently joined the Web Frameworks team to work on monorepo projects, AMP and hybrid projects. Don’t be surprised if you see her climbing a mountain, solving a puzzle or flying drones. Perhaps all at the same time.

We Built a Plugin, but It’s Not a Secret was originally published in NYT Open on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Almost 7 years ago, the CEO of a client told me “he didn’t really care about the value of community, he just wanted a lot of people participating in their community”.

When his company was growing, that worked great.

When the company fell upon hard times, the community was the first thing on the chopping block.

Last week a course participant spoke to her boss about the goals of the community and came back with almost half a dozen items.

Again, doing a bit of everything is great in good times, but it’s terrible in bad times.

To be clear, if you’re not indispensable to a strategic priority right now your job and your community is in imminent danger.

A few things you can do here.

1) Read The Indispensable Community (I wrote this book for times like these).

2) Talk to senior people and determine your community’s true goals (3 is good, 1 might be best).

3) Align everything your community does exclusively to that goal.

Your time is running out.

The thing with Skype, aside from the lossy audio, is that it has always been a pain to use. The interface bounces around a lot, and it feels like they're trying to get you to do a lot of things when all you want to do is make a video call. Zoom was successful precisely because it got rid of all this cruft and simply allowed people to make video calls. Skype's new 'Meet Now' feature enables free conference calls, no sign ups, and (sometimes) no downloads (I tried to start a meeting and it demanded I download Skype, so I assume the web-only version of Skype is only for attendees). Maybe there's a message for the tech industry here, that it is only hurting itself when it prioritizes its own interests over its users. The same lesson could be learned by educational software vendors.

This article backs off on the prediction in the final paragraphs ("video conferencing isn’t enough to get work done") but until that point argues that the way we work and learn will be changed forever. “The new normal is not going to be, like what I thought two weeks ago, that all is clear, go back everybody,” says Spataro. “There will be a new normal that will require us to continue to use these new tools for a long time.” I think we'll keep using the 'new tools' so long as they keep working. And I think that once a lot of the marketing is removed (see the Skype story today) they work just fine.

Responding to Alex Usher's argument from a few days ago George Veletsianos argues that instead of creating a whole bunch of digital content, we should be providing professional development. Which sounds like a good idea, but when you look at his proposal, it's just more content. "Develop a teaching and learning online curriculum," he writes. "Create a 4-week common online course." Ot's a course that will get complex in a hurry: "while there may be some centralization in the design of the course, this needs to encompasses smaller-scale work and collaboration." Veletsianos's one course would fail for the same reason Usher's many courses would fail, and for the same reasons. There's no shortage of content - we don't need a new online course.

Ian Young, Vancouver columnist with the South China Morning Post, wrote a widely circulated piece which credited some of B.C.’s success at flattening the Covid curve to the early actions of the Chinese community.

Virologist Dr Jason Kindrachuk, Canada research chair in new and re-emerging viruses at the University of Manitoba, attributed BC’s “phenomenal” results to … the early behaviour of BC’s sizeable Chinese community …

“What you have in BC is a Chinese community that was seeing the impacts across Asia [and] had been through Sars … and there may have been a grass roots movement in that community to start with the physical distancing,” said Kindrachuk.  …

The local Chinese community was also an early adopter of face masks, which Canada’s chief medical officer Dr Theresa Tam only this week acknowledged as a way for the general public to help prevent the spread of Covid-19. “In Asian communities there is more comfort and a relationship with these things [masks] in public …

Ah, the mask.

Kindrachuk: (The BC Chinese community’s reaction to the outbreak at its early stages) “needs to be examined as we try to work out what things helped in different communities that we can all think about whether to adopt as time goes on.”

Will the mask now be another indicator of ‘West Pacific’ – a culture that combines habits and traditions in a blend of the new normal?

Until recently, whenever I saw someone wearing a mask over their mouth, I assumed they had been brought up in Asia.  An indicator of the immigrant, still wearing local dress, taking a precaution from a more-crowded culture.  I don’t see it that way anymore.

Of course, it will be appropriately redesigned:

Billie Eilish at the Grammy Awards, in January, wearing a Gucci face mask. Photo: AFP

After building a first database structure for my Linqurator experiment, I want to import my Delicious bookmark archive into it. That will give me 3900 or so bookmarks in the database structure to play with. Delicious exported as an HTML file with data like url, title, tags, private status, and timestamp added as attributes of a DT statement, with any remarks in a separate DD tag. I now converted that HTML file into CSV. In itself trivial to do with a handful of search and replace actions using ; as separators (not commas as they are separators already between tags, and I need those later too). However there were linefeeds in some of the DD remarks. So I had to hunt those down and delete them, as they otherwise introduce additional lines in the CSV result. I also had to remove quotation marks. Now on to writing the script that adds the bookmarks into the database.

I noticed some of the bookmarks pointed to my own site. A quick search told me I bookmarked my own postings 65 times.

A portable laptop charger is the ideal companion if you want to charge your laptop while traveling, working remotely, or in an emergency. And it’s not just for laptops: With its built-in AC outlet, it can power other small devices as well, from vibrators and video projectors to breast pumps and baby monitors. We spent 21 hours researching and 60 hours testing eight top models, and we’re confident that the Mophie Powerstation AC is the best option. It can keep up with MacBook Pros and other high-powered laptops, it’s compact and lightweight, and it charges via USB-C—an increasingly ubiquitous standard.

Like Matt Webb, my childhood featured a bomb that would make the people disappear, but leave everything else intact:

I grew at the tail end of the Cold War. My unquestioned assumption was that I would probably live out my life in a nuclear wasteland.

One of the things we’d talk about was the neutron bomb. This type of bomb would leave cities buildings intact, and it had very little fallout so the city would be safe to occupy after it was dropped, but the people would all go. Not die, that wasn’t the myth of it, but somehow vapourised — raptured up to heaven, really. It was called the “clean” bomb. The mental image was of an urban Mary Celeste.

This wasn’t science fiction for me: I remember the stories on the news making it seem a very real possibility.

Webb goes on to ruminate on “key workers” and the “key economy”—what we call essential workers and essential services—and how they have been separated from the economy in a way that renders then distinct and as we could never see them before.

I’ve been wondering about what the long-term effects on those deemed non-essential of being furloughed will be: it’s bracing to be told that your role in society is a “nice to have” not a “need to have.”

It’s near the height of cherry blossom season, there are only so many beautiful springs in one’s life, and we really need this one now.

To safely use the glorious green spaces of Vancouver (this weekend with pink!) Vancouverites want to know how to space themselves.  Greenways are ideal – those streets where vehicle traffic is so minimal that runners with watches, parents with baby carriages, skateboarders with small electric motors, grandparents with walkers, kids with their first bikes, dogs with leashes, and everyone with a camera, i.e. everyone, can all sort themselves out with sufficient distance and politeness that everyone feels they are getting the most out of a beautiful spring day without endangering themselves or others.

It would be nice to have a poster which shows the appropriate distances and etiquette.  But I don’t think the City or health authorities quite know what that is.  They’re waiting to see what people actually do before they make decisions about how they should do it.  When it comes to designating road space, with a few exceptions, the City seems a bit paralyzed.  At least they’re not indicating so far they that they have any intentions.

So it looks like we will just do it:

Chilco Greenway, April 9, 4:10 pm

Five different users: cyclist, runner, observer, dog walker, kid with bike, daddy.  All spaced and sorted in a 66-foot right-of way, a standard West End Street.  There’s not a psychological no-go barrier at the curb for those not in cars.  But there is room for a car if it moves slowly and yields to other users.

My guess: This weekend and on, Vancouverites are going to pour out of their sequestered spaces.  They will take the space they need, as they should, to enjoy the city and maintain their health.  And not spread a virus.

Then the City can respond.

mkalus shared this story from Slate Star Codex.

At the beginning of every year, I make predictions. At the end of every year, I score them (this year I’m very late). Here are 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, and 2018.

And here are the predictions I made for 2019. Strikethrough’d are false. Intact are true. Italicized are getting thrown out because I can’t decide if they’re true or not. All of these judgments were as of December 31 2019, not as of now.

Please don’t complain that 50% predictions don’t mean anything; I know this is true but there are some things I’m genuinely 50-50 unsure of. Some predictions are redacted because they involve my private life or the lives of people close to me. A few that started off redacted stopped being secret; I’ve put those in [brackets].

US
1. Donald Trump remains President: 90%
2. Donald Trump is impeached by the House: 40%
3. Kamala Harris leads the Democratic field: 20%
4. Bernie Sanders leads the Democratic field: 20%
5. Joe Biden leads the Democratic field: 20%
6. Beto O’Rourke leads the Democratic field: 20%
7. Trump is still leading in prediction markets to be Republican nominee: 70%
8. Polls show more people support the leading Democrat than the leading Republican: 80%
9. Trump’s approval rating below 50: 90%
10. Trump’s approval rating below 40: 50%
11. Current government shutdown ends before Feb 1: 40%
12. Current government shutdown ends before Mar 1: 80%
13. Current government shutdown ends before Apr 1: 95%
14. Trump gets at least half the wall funding he wants from current shutdown: 20%
15. Ginsberg still alive: 50%

ECON AND TECH
16. Bitcoin above 1000: 90%
17. Bitcoin above 3000: 50%
18. Bitcoin above 5000: 20%
19. Bitcoin above Ethereum: 95%
20. Dow above current value of 25000: 80%
21. SpaceX successfully launches and returns crewed spacecraft: 90%
22. SpaceX Starship reaches orbit: 10%
23. No city where a member of the general public can ride self-driving car without attendant: 90%
24. I can buy an Impossible Burger at a grocery store within a 30 minute walk from my house: 70%
25. Pregabalin successfully goes generic and costs less than $100/month on GoodRx.com: 50%
26. No further CRISPR-edited babies born: 80%

WORLD
27. Britain out of EU: 60%
28. Britain holds second Brexit referendum: 20%
29. No other EU country announces plan to leave: 80%
30. China does not manage to avert economic crisis (subjective): 50%
31. Xi still in power: 95%
32. MbS still in power: 95%
33. May still in power: 70%
34. Nothing more embarassing than Vigano memo happens to Pope Francis: 80%

SURVEY
35. …finds birth order effect is significantly affected by age gap: 40%
36. …finds fluoxetine has significantly less discontinuation issues than average: 60%
37. …finds STEM jobs do not have significantly more perceived gender bias than non-STEM: 60%
38. …finds gender-essentialism vs. food-essentialism correlation greater than 0.075: 30%

PERSONAL – INTERNET
39. SSC gets fewer hits than last year: 70%
40. I finish and post [New Atheism: The Godlessness That Failed]: 90%
41. I finish and post [Structures Of Paranoia]: 50%
42. I finish and post [a sequence based on Secret Of Our Success]: 50%
43. [New Atheism] post gets at least 40,000 hits: 40%
44. [The Proverbial Murder Mystery] post gets at least 40,000 hits: 20%
45. New co-blogger with more than 3 posts: 20%
46. Repeat adversarial collaboration contest with at least 5 entries: 60%
47. [Culture War thread successfully removed from subreddit]: 90%
48. [Culture War new version getting at least 500 comments per week]: 70%
49. I start using Twitter again (5+ tweets in any month): 60%
50. I start using Facebook again (following at least 5 people): 30%

PERSONAL – HEALTH
51. I get the blood tests I should be getting this year: 90%
52. I try one biohacking project per month x at least 10 months: 30%
53. I continue taking sceletium regularly: 70%
54. I switch from [Zembrin to Tristill] for at least 3 months: 20%
55. I find at least one new supplement I take or expect to take regularly x 3 months: 20%
56. Minoxidil use produces obvious progress: 50%
57. I restart [redacted]: 20%
58. I spend one month at least substantially more vegetarian than my current compromise: 20%
59. I spend one month at least substantially less vegetarian than my current compromise: 30%
60. I weigh more than 195 lbs at year end: 80%
61. I meditate at least 30 minutes/day more than half of days this year: 30%
62. I use marijuana at least once this year: 20%

PERSONAL – PROJECTS
63. I finish at least 10% more of [redacted]: 20%
64. I completely finish [redacted]: 10%
65. I finish and post [redacted]: 5%
66. I write at least ten pages of something I intend to turn into a full-length book this year: 20%
67. I practice calligraphy at least seven days in the last quarter of 2019: 40%
68. I finish at least one page of the [redacted] calligraphy project this year: 30%
69. I finish the entire [redacted] calligraphy project this year: 10%
70. I finish some other at-least-one-page calligraphy project this year: 80%

PERSONAL – PROFESSIONAL
71. I attend the APA Meeting: 80%
72. [redacted]: 50%
73. [redacted]: 40%
74. I still work in SF with no plans to leave it: 60%
75. I still only do telepsychiatry one day with no plans to increase it: 60%
76. I still work the current number of hours per week: 60%
77. I have not started (= formally see first patient) my own practice: 80%
78. I lease another version of the same car I have now: 90%

PERSONAL – HOUSE
79. I still live in my current house with no specific plans to leave: 80%
80. I set up a decent home library: 60%
81. We got a second trash can: 90%
82. The gate is fixed with no problems at all: 50%
83. The ugly paint spot on my wall gets fixed: 30%
84. There is some kind of nice garden: 60%
85. …and I am at least half responsible: 20%
86. I get my own washing machine: 20%
87. There is another baby in my house: 60%
88. No other non-baby resident (expected 6+ month) in my house who doesn’t live there now: 70%
89. No existing resident moves away (except the one I already know about): 80%
90. No other long-term (expected 6+ month) resident of my subunit who doesn’t live there now: 80%
91. [Decision Tree House] is widely considered a success: 70%
92. …with plans (vague okay) to create a second one: 20%

PERSONAL – ROMANCE
93. I find a primary partner: 30%
94. I go on at least one date with someone who doesn’t already have a primary partner: 90%
95. I remake an account on OKCupid: 80%
96. [redacted]: 10%
97. [redacted]: 20%
98. [redacted]: 20%
99. [redacted]: 20%
100. [redacted]: 20%
101. [redacted]: 30%
102. [redacted]: 10%
103. [redacted]: 30%
104. [I go on at least three dates with someone I have not yet met]: 50%
105. [redacted]: 10%
106. [redacted]: 50%

PERSONAL – FRIENDS
107. I am still playing D&D: 60%
108. I go on a trip to Guatemala: 90%
109. I go on at least one other international trip: 30%
110. I go to at least one Solstice outside the Bay: 40%
111. I go to at least one city just for an SSC meetup: 30%
112. [redacted] is in a relationship: 40%
113. [redacted] still has their current partner: 50%
114. [redacted] is at their current job: 20%
115. [redacted] is still at their current job: 80%
116. I hang out with [redacted] at least once: 60%
117. I hang out with [redacted] at least once: 60%
118. I am in [redacted] Discord server: 80%

Calibration chart. The red line represents perfect calibration, the blue my predictions. The closer they are, the better I am doing.

Of 11 predictions at 50%, I got 4 wrong and 7 right, for an average of 64%
Of 22 predictions at 60%, I got 7 wrong and 15 right, for an average of 68%
Of 17 predictions at 70%, I got 5 wrong and 12 right, for an average of 71%
Of 37 predictions at 80%, I got 6 wrong and 31 right, for an average of 83%
Of 17 predictions at 90%, I got 1 wrong and 16 right, for an average of 94%
Of 5 predictions at 95%, I got 0 wrong and 5 right, for an average of 100%

50% predictions are technically meaningless since I could have written them either way. I’ve lightened them on the chart to indicate they can be ignored.

It was another good year for me. Unlike past years, where I erred about evenly in both directions, this year I was about 4% underconfident across the board. I’m not sure how much I should adjust and become more confident. In past years I’ve been burned by major black swan events that affect multiple predictions and made me look overconfident. In 2019 I tried to leave a cushion for that, but nothing too unexpected happened and I ended up playing it too safe. My worst failures were underestimating Bitcoin (but who didn’t?) and overestimating SpaceX’s ability to launch their crew on schedule. I didn’t check formally, but there doesn’t seem to be much difference in my calibration about world affairs vs. my personal life.

I forgot to make predictions for 2020 until now, which in retrospect was the best prediction I’ve ever made. I’ll probably come up with some later this month.

run-on sentences suck

The past 28 days have felt like one long run-on sentence moving ahead relentlessly without pause without respite without the punctuating moments of life like commutes and in-person meetings and breakfasts and lunches and dinners in restaurants and parties with friends and discovering new bars and ordering a new cocktail you’ve never tried or seeing a show like that one favorite band of yours that you’ve already seen a dozen times and were looking forward to seeing again or getting on a plane and flying to a different city and seeing people you don’t get to see in person very often and catching up and sharing stories and giving them hugs and kisses goodbye instead it’s wake up do some exercise open the laptop fire up zoom talk to pixels type in slack draw pictures take a break make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich go back to the screen write more in slack talk to more pixels draw more pictures then close the laptop make dinner watch a show go to bed repeat repeat repeat repeat repeat repeat repeat repeat repeat repeat.

run-on sentences suck. was originally published in Stating the Obvious on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Rands HQ continues to experience unprecedented usage. We’re in week five of shelter in place and the home office is poppin’. As described earlier, I did an intense clean of the office two weekends back and am happy to report that the tidiness remains primarily because there’s a night 15-minute cleaning window where all things are returned to their proper place.

There is still a cable situation.

The horror.

The plan for the weekend is to address this cable situation and a lesser cable situation at the standing desk. You can see some of the long-abandoned attempts at cable entropy reduction in the prior photos including cable wraps and additional power strips, but I am certain there are other clever cable hacks I don’t know. I need help. There are modern power strips as well as UPS box en-route, but I am also interested in:

• Suggestions for wrapping/grouping cables, but still leaving flexibility for stuff to change.
• Power strip deployment recommendations.
• What to do with base stations and routers? Where to put them and how to secure them?

Help, please.

With such a tiny study it's hard to generalize on the conclusion, but the article may be useful as an anecdote describing methods and approaches to creating a sense of belonging in an online class. It's a good article, but the authors, however, were unable to resist the urge to generalize, arguing "Online learners in a new and potentially alienating environment, remote from the physical campus and separated physically from their peers, seem to be especially in need of a sense of belonging." Maybe that's true, but they haven't shown that, and a proper assessment of their research should present it as a design study, not empirical data. See also a very similar but more theoretical study from last year by the two lead authors. And this course toolkit on the same tropic.

The coronavirus is going to wreck the academic job market. And not just for philosophers. "The landscape of higher education will be unrecognizable at best and decimated at worst. Philosophy departments will stop hiring. Universities will receive less funding from states and lower yields from endowments. Enrollments will shrink at an even faster rate. Driven by the necessity to teach at scale, colleges will increasingly shift classes online. One by one, non-elite liberal arts colleges will shut their doors. And all but the most elite graduate students will feel the pain of the contraction." But on the other hand: "Who needs you more: an academic insiders' club that tells you, over and over again, that you're not wanted; or the diverse and vulnerable world outside the ivory tower?"

Yelp has laid off 1,000 of its workers and furloughed an additional 1,100 as it grapples with reduced spending from restaurants amid the COVID-19 pandemic.

Yelp’s co-founder and CEO Jeremy Stoppelman sent an email to the company’s employees outlining the repercussions that COVID-19 has had on its business. Beyond just people losing their jobs, the remaining employees are being asked to work fewer hours.

High-level executives are also taking a 20 to 30 percent pay cut to help keep the company afloat through these difficult times.

It may seem odd that an internet-based business like Yelp would need to cut its workforce, but it relies on the restaurant industry to make its money. Since the restaurant industry has been hit so hard, it’s been unable to pay Yelp for advertising. This is how the company generally earns its income, so it’s not fairing well during the COVID-19 pandemic.

The company also told The Verge it took drastic measures to try and avoid these layoffs, but that it was eventually left with no other choice.

What’s most intriguing about this story is that it shows how smaller internet staples like Yelp can easily experience financial difficulties, causing concern for other internet businesses that rely on real-world face-to-face interactions for income.

Source: The Verge

The post Yelp lays off 1,000 people during the COVID-19 pandemic appeared first on MobileSyrup.

I didn't descend deeply into existentialist angst the way some philosophy students do, but I did experience its outer fringes in reading works like Albert Camus's The Plague (which I read around the same time as Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death. I'm a pretty serious person, but these books remind me of the limits of that. Josh Jones  writes, "The recognition of finitude, of failure, ignorance, and repetition—what philosopher Miguel de Unamuno called “the tragic sense of life”—can instead cure us of the behaviors Camus abhorred: a hardness of heart, an obsession with status, a refusal of joy and gratitude, a tendency to moralize and judge. Whatever else The Plague is about, Camus shows that in a struggle for survival, these attitudes can prove worse than useless and can be the first to go."