Rolandt

Zeit Now v1 to sunset soon: no new deployments from 1st May, total shutdown 7th August

I posted a thread on Twitter with some thoughts. Zeit Now v1 remains the best hosting platform I've ever used given my particular tastes. They've handled the shutdown very responsibly, but I'm sad to see it go.

Meet Now in Skype allows you to easily set up a collaboration space and invite both Skype contacts and friends or family who are not on Skype. Participants can then easily join meetings whether they have an account or not.

This stuff is getting better really quickly now. Has been tested with Insiders for a few months already.

More >

When I was younger I used to find it very strange that my mother was so pessimistic. She wasn’t exactly a ‘prepper‘ but she’d always make sure we had extra tins in the cupboard, and everything to hand in case something bad happened.

A particular phrase she used to use has stuck with me over the years: “if you’re a pessimist, you’re always pleasantly surprised.” I used to think that was no way to live a life, but now I’m approaching forty, I can see where she’s coming from.

Being mentally and physically prepared for things going south is sensible and expedient in a world which assails you from all sides. Whether it’s time ravaging your physical health, or the state of the world taking its toll on your mental health, it’s pragmatic to understand that we all will endure suffering.

That’s why I read books by Stoic thinkers on repeat. For example, one of my favourite quotations is the following, from Marcus Aurelius, who despite being a Roman emperor, suffered like the rest of us:

Men seek for seclusion in the wilderness, by the seashore, or in the mountains – a dream you have cherished only too fondly yourself. But such fancies are wholly unworthy of a philosopher, since at any moment you choose you can retire within yourself. Nowhere can man find a quieter or more untroubled retreat than in his own soul; above all, he who possesses resources in himself, which he need only contemplate to secure immediate ease of mind – the ease that is but another word for a well-ordered spirit. Avail yourself often, then, of this retirement, and so continually renew yourself.

Marcus aurelius (Meditations, book IV)

Other than having an underground doomsday bunker, we couldn’t have been much better prepared for the current crisis. However, this week, despite my mental and physical preparations, I’ve found myself…. stretched.

This week a couple of new books arrived at my house: a collection of Seneca’s Dialogues and Essays and Baltasar Gracián’s A Pocket Mirror for Heroes. I’m looking forward to adding quotations from both to Discours.es. I found the selection from Seneca’s On Anger (about which he wrote three books!) a particularly rich vein for quoting.

Until a while ago, I used to maintain a wiki. Unfortunately, it’s not easy to keep Mediawiki-powered sites working properly, and when my backups didn’t work, I gave up on it. Thankfully, due to some unexpected help, I’ve managed to salvage a few pages which I’ve added to this blog:

• Daily reading
• Collaboration style
• Information environment

My daily reading has remained remarkably consistent over the last few years; there’s something meditative about reading the same books on repeat most mornings.

Talking of reading, I finished Future Histories by Lizzie O’Shea, which comes highly recommended. I loved the history, the deep understanding of technology, and the author’s politics. Great stuff.

I’ve started on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and am about half-way through. It’s dark. So dark, in fact, that when I tried to read it when my son was young, I had to put it down after five pages.

The rationale behind this is that, I think that in times of crisis it’s better to go for either end of the spectrum. Either comedy and light-hearted stuff to raise my spirits, or tragedy and dark content to make me realise that things aren’t really so bad after all.

A glimmer of light this week was OER20, which ALT managed to pivot to being fully-online in the matter of a couple of weeks. I didn’t get to go to more than a couple of sessions, but was impressed by what I experienced, and donated anyway.

One of the sessions I managed to attend was about the domain of one’s own initiative at Coventry University. It led to me asking some questions at the end, which I turned into a blog post entitled Domains, decentralisation, and DNS.

On the work front this week I attempted a new format for our MoodleNet team weekly meetings which worked well. I should write that up, but it’s based on Matt Thompson‘s approach.

I also checked in with Johanna Sprondel‘s MA students who are helping out with the crowdfunding plan we’re working on together. They asked some great questions. Moodle’s also working on a donations strategy, so I’ve been involved in management meetings about that.

On the We Are Open Co-op front, I continued to do some work on our contract with Greenpeace around Planet 4. We’re planning a ‘day of action’ so I put together a short video using Bryan‘s illustrations to explain the why, how, and what.

Although I’ve got enough done, I haven’t felt so productive this week. I think that’s because I’ve had to slow my brain down to stop it racing ahead and thinking of possible futures in which everything I’m currently doing fades into insignificance.

I’m taking a lot of solace in long walks with my family, in nursing a single malt and talking to my wife, and in hanging out with my parents on video chat. I even, with the help of our children, painted the garden fence this morning!

We’re now on ‘Easter holidays’, whatever that means in our current context. I think it means that the kids do a little less work, and that I take a day off from my Moodle work and half a day off from my co-op work. Days and dates have lost their meaning.

Anyway, I’ll keep on keeping on. There’s not much to do otherwise, except perhaps more DIY. And goodness knows I’m no good at that.

Photo from a walk around Morpeth one night this week after I realised I’d only done 647 steps by 21:00...

It’s time we all upped our video chat aesthetics game; designer and filmmaker Tom Ford has some simple advice:

Put the computer up on a stack of books so the camera is slightly higher than your head. Say, about the top of your head. And then point it down into your eyes. Then take a tall lamp and set it next to the computer on the side of your face you feel is best. The lamp should be in line with and slightly behind the computer so the light falls nicely on your face. Then put a piece of white paper or a white tablecloth on the table you are sitting at but make sure it can’t be seen in the frame. It will give you a bit of fill and bounce. And lots of powder, et voilà!

I inherited Catherine’s iPad, and find myself using it more and more: I watch TV, edit photos, browse the web, FaceTime my mother. And I write blog posts, like this one, via email.

I haven’t used an iOS device regularly for a long time, so I’ve become rusty on iPad text editing niceties; this helpful guide from Apple taught me a bunch of things I didn’t know, especially about the different ways to move the cursor (“insertion point” in Applespeak).

I’m on the sixth day of a two-week quarantine after returning from Australia, and, though well-supported by friends and neighbours, I can appreciate the toll that isolation will take – and I’m one of the fortunate ones.   Those more at risk because of mental illness, those impacted by job loss, parents caring for at-risk children, all of us dealing with the fear and reality of sickness and death … these stressors will only become more intense in coming weeks.

Sandro Galea, who studied the impacts of quarantine during the SARS epidemic in Toronto, says isolation can contribute to a range of mental disorders like anxiety and depression, but can also trigger heavier consumption of drugs and alcohol, and even post-traumatic stress disorder.

“We humans are ultimately social. We’re social creatures and we do need interaction — physical and social — with others.

Physical distancing orders will remain in place until at least May.  So how are we to achieve both separation and interaction?  When will we begin to take the first steps towards a safe return to a more normal life.  How, simply, will we find a way to move about, to exercise, to share urban spaces with others.

Sandy James knows how.

From The Sun:

Walking is good for you and is encouraged here by provincial health officer Dr. Bonnie Henry, who observed: “It is important to our health and mental health to get us through this.” …

(But) the standard for new sidewalks varies from 1.2 metres wide to 1.8 metres wide and does not offer enough space for two people to pass each other safely.

One way to offer more space for walkers on downtown commercial streets is to allow pedestrians and rollers to spill into the adjacent metered parking lanes, narrowing the portion of the road surface for vehicles to only two lanes.

Carrall Street Greenway in 2008

Vancouver has over decades repriorized, repurposed and rebuilt urban space for pedestrian and cycling priority, from Seaside to Central Valley, from Hornby to Arbutus.  And it has a long-standing plan to do more.

Sandy:

The thinking behind prioritizing walking on connected streets throughout the city has already been done in Vancouver, where 25 years ago the Urban Landscape Taskforce, which included several landscape architects, came up with the ambitious Greenways Plan.

What they termed “greenways” are actually a network of linked, traffic-calmed “green streets.” There are 140 kilometres of greenways, with a network of 14 city greenways that go boundary to boundary in Vancouver.

Here is the Greenways plan as of 2011:

Probably most municipalities in Metro have their own version of this, or at least a vision of what they’d like.  Even the predecessor to Metro Vancouver had a plan for the region back in the early 1990s:

In this time of previously unimaginable disruption and response, here’s a modest proposal:

Use these greenway plans to repurpose road space, over the complete network, across the city at once.  Start doing it now.  Proclaim that every neighbourhood will have a greenway that connects to every other part of the city. A place where people can both gather and keep separate, because there’s enough space to accommodate each other safely.  And even a few cars.  Each has a name, like Adanac, and each is part of something bigger.

Explain to us how to use the system safely.  (We’re more than ready for instructions and guidance on how to get outside, what to do and where to go.)

The greenway system already exists.  Let’s use it well in a time of need.  Let’s advance by decades what we’ve been aiming for.  Let’s start making moves towards the next stage in this pandemic.

It will be so good for our physical and mental health.

I ventured off-world today to grocery shop for the first time in ten days, proud of my ability to feed myself and Oliver, with little food waste and optimal leftover usage, for as long as I did.

Since I was last at Sobeys, systems were updated: a makeshift border wall has now been constructed out of overturned shopping carts, and we shoppers were guided to line up, 2 metres apart, each of us waiting for one person to leave the store before one person was allowed in. At the entrance we were presented with pre-sanitized shopping carts, and a new iteration of keep-your-distance signage was evident.

Inside the store there were new directional arrows taped to the floor that were only partially adhered to, but everyone kept their distance, and waited patiently for people to move along. Cordiality was in abundance.

I did lose my head a little, what with the “I may never shop again” feeling coursing through the air. Peri peri sauce ended up in my cart why, exactly? Just in case I need to whip up some Portuguese chicken? But otherwise I stocked up on the things we truly need, and I figure we’re good until at least mid-April as long as Purity can keep me in milk and Receiver can keep me in coffee and bread.

I left the reusable bags at home on purpose, opting for paper bags instead (which appear to be free now). Sobeys is on an everyone-bags-for-themselves plan now, and I will be downloading Tetris later today so that I am better at this next time.

I was in and out in about 20 minutes, back on the home planet in 30.

Oliver has declared today Friday Fun Day, so now that the groceries are all packed away, let the hilarity ensue!

Feel like playing this weekend? Don't just want to play canned video games? Then this page is for you - "tiny/weirdo game engines... indie/open source bigger game engines... fantasy consoles... " and much much more. Have fun.

Django Release Cycle

Really nice visual representation of Django's release cycle, built by Jeff Triplett as a remix of the Python release cycle by Dustin Ingram.

Via jefftriplett.com

Today, we’re unveiling an all-new live streaming feature in our latest release of Audio Hijack. With the new Live Stream block in Audio Hijack 3.7, it’s now possible to transmit audio to services using the Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP).

We teased this new functionality in our recent Status Report, with plans to ship it later in the year. However, with people confined to their homes the world over, we received extensive user requests to make live streaming available immediately. In response, we worked to get this out much sooner than planned. We’re now pleased to be able to provide musicians, DJs, and other content creators with another way to share and monetize their work.

Read on to learn more or just download the latest Audio Hijack now.

Live Streaming Made Easy

With Live Stream and Audio Hijack, you can pull audio from any app on your Mac and send it out to an RTMP server. Of course, all of Audio Hijack’s powerful audio handling features work in conjunction with this, making it a snap to create professional quality setups.

With just a few clicks, you can get a free stream up and running with one of the services offered by major platforms, including Periscope, Twitch, and YouTube Live. Live streaming is great for offering a live feed while recording a podcast, or transmitting content like concerts and DJ sets. These live streams are great for listeners as well, since they can tune in right through their browsers, as well as in branded apps.

Setting things up in the Live Stream block is quick and easy:

While RTMP is often used for transmitting camera feeds, the Live Stream block is designed around audio content. Along with the high quality audio, it creates a supplemental video feed automatically, with a variety of options available to customize this video content with automated track title display, audio visualizers, and more. Live Stream will even analyze album artwork and select the perfect complimentary color scheme.

With the new Live Stream block and your streaming platform of choice, you can stream content to people around the globe with ease.

Beta Release; Feedback Requested

Because we’ve sped up the release of this new functionality, Live Stream is not as widely tested as we’d like. As a result, we’ve chosen to apply a “Beta” tag to the block. We welcome you to start streaming with Live Stream, but those with mission-critical use cases may wish to wait. We expect to improve Live Stream further via additional updates.

We’re eager to learn how folks make use of the new Live Stream block, and to hear about any rough edges. Please, get in touch to tell us about how you’re using Live Stream, as well as any problems you run in to.

Download Audio Hijack 3.7 Now

Audio Hijack 3.7 is a free update for all current owners of Audio Hijack 3. Just select “Check for Update” from the Audio Hijack menu to download the latest.

If you’re new to Audio Hijack, you can visit the Audio Hijack page to learn more about our powerful audio recording tool, and to download the free trial.

mkalus shared this story from Charlie's Diary.

So, some years ago I blogged a whole bunch of times about books I wasn't going to write for one reason or another.

Now, thanks to COVID-19, I can add another to the list.

Some of you have been waiting years (is it really a decade? Gosh!) for a third book in the would-be trilogy that began with Halting State and Rule 34. The third Scottish near-future police procedural kept getting put back and back because reality wouldn't sit still and behave itself: it's really hard to write something set 10 years in the future (or even 5) if you don't even know what the country it's set in is going to be called. I named the period starting in 2012 "the Scottish political singularity", because it made all near-future fiction set in Scotland problematic: first we had the referendum on independence from the UK, then a general election, then the Brexit referendum. Back in 2012 I thought things would have settled down by 2016 or so: alas, I was sadly disillusioned.

So around 2016 I hatched a Plan B.

(Had, past tense.)

Plan B was to make my near-future Scottish thriller so hyper-specific that the big political questions wouldn't impinge on the plot at all. And I had a good plot, and even wrote the first thousand or so words of the untitled novel as a story seed. I just needed to clear my desk, finish Invisible Sun (FX: sound of author weeping helplessly) and finish the new space opera ...

Well, you know what happened: delays due to people dying, an apocalyptic drum-beat of bad news in the background, and so on and so forth. But I thought I might finally get time to start writing the Scottish Novel in earnest, starting in mid- to late-2022 ...

Then COVID-19 came along.

You see, the third Scottish crime novel was to be a zombie pandemic novel.

I have several bees in my metaphorical bonnet—in fact, an entire angry swarm of them—when it comes to the standard zombie narrative in post-apocalypse fiction. The zombie myth has roots in Haitian slave plantations: they're fairly transparently about the slaves' fear of being forced to toil endlessly even after their death. Then this narrative got appropriated and transplanted to America, in film, TV, and fiction. Where it hybridized with white settler fear of a slave uprising. The survivors/protagonists of the zombie plague are the viewpoint the audience is intended to empathize with, but their response to the shambling horde is as brutal and violent as any plantation owner's reaction to their slaves rising, and it speaks to a peculiarly American cognitive disorder, elite panic.

Elite panic is the phenomenon by which rich and/or privileged people imagine that in times of chaos all social constraints break down and everyone around them will try to rob, rape, and murder them. To some extent this reflects their own implicit belief that humanity is by nature grasping, avaricious, amoral, and cruel, and that their status depends on power and violence. It's a world-view you'd expect of unreconstructed pre-Enlightenment aristocrats, or maybe a society dominated by a violent slave-owning elite. It's also fundamentally wrong. Usually whenever there's a major disaster, people look after their families ... and then their friends and neighbours, pulling together and trying to help.

It's noteworthy that Zombie Apocalypse fic and Pandemic Dystopia fic overlap considerably, and people get both aspects right and wrong to different degrees. (I'd like to give a shout-out at this point to Seanan McGuire who, as Mira Grant, gave us the Newsflesh trilogy. Her zombies are, well, conventional media zombies (they shamble and they eat brains), but she put a lot of work into making the epidemiology plausible.)

I was planning a pandemic zombie disaster novel in which people behaved like human beings, rather than psychotic, heavily armed doomsday preppers. My zombie plague differs from most: it's a viral encephalitis, possibly an odd strain of influenza, which leaves a percentage of its victims with Cotard's Delusion, also known as walking corpse syndrome. The affected person holds a delusional belief that they're dead, or putrefying, or don't exist, or they're in hell. (It's associated with parietal lobe lesions and can also be induced by some drug metabolites: as a consequence of viral encephalitis it would be weird, but possibly no weirder than Encephalitis lethargica.) How does a society deal with a pandemic that leaves 1% of the population permanently convinced that they're dead? Well ...

I had a plot all worked out. TLDR: deep brain stimulation via implant. Rapidly leading to rental plans—because in our grim meathook privatised-medicine future the medical devices company who are first-to-market realize that charging people a monthly plan to feel like they're alive is a good revenue stream—but this is followed by hackers cracking the DRM on the cryptocoin-funded brain implants. The device manufacturer goes bankrupt, and their intellectual property rights are bought out by a Mafia-like operation who employ stringers to go around uploading malware to the implants of zombies who've stopped paying the rent, permanently bricking them. Our protagonist is a zombie detective: the actual story opens when a murder victim walks into a police station to complain that they've been killed.

And the whole theme of this untitled novel was going to be: this is elite panic, and this is disaster capitalism, and this is what really happens during a zombie epidemic, and these things are not the same—

And then COVID-19 came along and basically rendered the whole thing unneccessary because we are all getting a real world crash-course in how we deal with people suffering from a viral pandemic, and we do not generally deal with them using shotguns and baseball bats even if they're so contagious that contact might kill us.

Because—fuck my life—writing plausible near-future SF in the 21st century wasn't hard enough already.

Anyway, let me leave you with the WARNING very rough, first draft, unpolished only existing fragment of what was intended to be The Lambda Functionary before COVID-19 buried it at the crossroads with a mouthful of garlic and a stake through its heart.

CHAPTER 1: U R DED

You are an ex-zombie.

Most days, most of the time, you can ignore this. As existential states go, being an ex-zombie is a bit like being an ex-skier or an ex-patriate: it's bland, and anodyne, an absence of dread, the mental cavity left behind by a passing toothsome nightmare. The pulse of blood in your veins and the thoughts in your head and the warmth in your loins provide a constant reassurance that you are, in fact, alive and mammalian. Except every once in a while it leaps out from behind a lamp-post and screams death in your face like you're an alcoholic noticing the gaping door to a pub by your shoulder: and suddenly you are dead once more.

You're perambulating along the grey cobbled canyon of Hill Street that evening—it's early summer, the nights are drawing short and the tourists are flocking—when you pass a jumble of bony knees and elbows, the bowed bald dome of a skull leaning forward as if about to boak in the gutter. At first you think it's a regular jakey boy, or maybe a beggar: but there's no cup and no weatherbeaten cardboard sign, and that stomach's not held enough food to throw up for weeks now. It takes a few seconds for your stride to clatter to a reluctant stop, by which time you're about five metres past the silent, barely-breathing figure. Coldness wraps its dreicht, despair-stained phalanges around your heart and gives it a squeeze. You shudder and take a breath, remembering Ina and the boys in the happy time before the demic, and for a moment you see yourself there on the edge of the gutter, vomiting vacuum on the stony indifference of the capital's streets as the waste trucks whine past, canned voices braying bring out your dead. You don't want to look round. But you've been here before, and the guilt is suffocating, so you turn and you look.

The lad in the gutter is indeed far gone in the post-viral zombie haze of starvation. He could be anything from seventeen to forty-seven, with the gaunt concentration-camp inmate's cheekbones and sunken eye sockets. His hair's fallen out, of course, his nails are cracked and ragged—clothes a mess, a holed hoodie and jeans that are little better than rags, muddy and shredded cerements fit to be buried in. He's still breathing, and nodding slowly every few seconds—a slow davvening, the prayerful rocking of the undead. Gums drawing back from yellowing teeth, he drools slightly. Behold, the living dead. You want to run away: he makes you cringe, feeling unclean. But instead, you crouch down beside him and, steeling yourself, you lay your right arm across his shoulders. "Hey," you say. The zombie doesn't reply, of course. They never do. But you can feel the jerky rise and fall of his ribs: he's hungry. He broadcasts raw starvation like an old-time radio station with kilowatts of fossil energy to waste, pumping angst out into the ionosphere. Behind him, a boutique's robot window display repeatedly enrobes an anorexic headless mannequin in an hourglass sheath of expensive fabric, then strips it off again to reveal the skeletal ribs of the dressform fabber beneath: but you know voluntarily embraced hunger lacks the killing quality of the starving undead. "When did you last eat?" You murmur in his ear, not expecting any response.

"Nuuuuh ..."

Shock almost makes you let go. He vocalized: that means he's not let go. Lights on, somebody's still home—even if the light's a fading flashlight. You tap your glasses and peel your eyes. "Matt here. Got a responsive shambler in Hill Street Backup, please." Then you hook one hand under his armpit and push yourself up off the floor. "Hey, kid. Let's get some food in you."

"Nuuuurr." He might be trying to say no, but you're not having it. You manage to get yourself up, and he's so light—skin and bones, really—that he comes with, doesn't try to put up a fight. Opposite the posh frock fab you see the frosted window and kitsch logo of a once-trendy pub. It's not your usual dive, but it's still mid-evening and the kitchen will be open, so you shoulder-barge your way through the swing-door with Dead Guy lurching drunkenly athwart behind, and bring him to the nearest empty table. " Ye cannae be bringing the likes of that in here—" The bartender is brassy and indignant, but you smile at her and she blinks and subsides as she kens that you're peeling tonight. "Aye, wheel, if it pukes on the carpet you're paying!"

Luckily there are no other customers cluttering up this end of the hostelry and liable to be discommoded by your Samaritan emergency: just a handful of sour-faced old regulars supping their IPAs by the brightwork at the bar. "I'd like a portion of cheese'n'chips and a bowl of chicken nuggets," I tell her. She looks askance: "soon as I get some protein in him the sooner I can get him out of here and into rehab," I add. "Peeling, ken?"

She nods tightly, face like a furled umbrella, and scoots for the til. The chicken nuggets aren't nuggets and have never been near a bird, but they're easily swallowed: ditto the chips'n'cheese. It's all soft, high carb/high fat sludge that used to get hammered by the sin tax during the war on obesity: now it's back on the menu as pub grub, and it's especially good for shoveling into a zombie who, after all, is dead and therefore utterly uninterested in matters gustatory.

Boney Jim—you've got to call him something, and he's not going to give you a name—sits quietly where you parked him on the bench seat. He's still davvening. The food comes (along with the drink you ordered to still your unquiet nerves) and you pick up a greasy hot chip and push it at his lips. "Eat," you tell him. For a miracle, he opens his mouth. You shove the chip in and get your fingers out of the way just in time. He chews and swallows, and you repeat the process with a nugget of deep-fried freshly printed avian myocites. Then some more chips. He is eating and swallowing what you place in front of his lips, even though his hands don't move and his eyes are a million kilometers away, staring into infinity, pupils fixed and dilated. Boney Jim, Zombie Jim. If you'd left him out there he'd probably have lasted a couple more days before starvation, thirst, or exposure got him. It's going to be necessary to track down whoever dumped him in the street like that: you add it to the to-do spike in your glasses. Eyes Peeled, as they say. You went through this yourself, in an earlier life. There's light at the other end of the tunnel, and it isn't necessarily the white light of eternity if somebody cares enough to get you to a clinic and rehab.

Ina cared enough to do it for you: but you weren't there to do it for her when the time came, and sometimes the shame and the guilt is worse than the disease.

You have been feeding your zombie for about a quarter of an hour when you realize that you're not alone any more. The Principles have sent you aid and comfort in the shape of a couple of Kindness Volunteers who—like yourself—are peeling tonight. She's a rosy-cheeked middle-aged woman in a tweed twin-set and cultured pearls, sensible shoes her only concession: he looks like a painfully earnest Baptist Sunday school teacher from the 1960s, stranded most of a century in his own future—a determinedly retro hipster look. Maybe they're twentieth century cosplayers who've escaped from the convention center for an evening of determined volunteerism. Or maybe they're the real thing. Either way you're grateful. "I found him outside," you explain, pushing another not-chicken not-nugget at Boney Jim's mandible. "Just sitting on the pavement. I think he's stage IVa, maybe IVb, but there's still some reactivity. Might be something they can work with at Greyfriars." They set up a receiving unit for zombies in the former graveyard, at the height of the demic. White dome tents mushrooming among the lichen-encrusted headstones.

mkalus shared this story from Slate Star Codex.

I.

It is a well known fact that the gods hate prophets.

False prophets they punish only with ridicule. It’s the true prophets who have to watch out. The gods find some way to make their words come true in the most ironic way possible, the one where knowing the future just makes things worse. The Oracle of Delphi told Croesus he would destroy a great empire, but when he rode out to battle, the empire he destroyed was his own. Zechariah predicted the Israelites would rebel against God; they did so by killing His prophet Zechariah. Jocasta heard a prediction that she would marry her infant son Oedipus, so she left him to die on a mountainside – ensuring neither of them recognized each other when he came of age.

Unfortunately for him, Oxford philosopher Toby Ord is a true prophet. He spent years writing his magnum opus The Precipice, warning that humankind was unprepared for various global disasters like pandemics and economic collapses. You can guess what happened next. His book came out March 3, 2020, in the middle of a global pandemic and economic collapse. He couldn’t go on tour to promote it, on account of the pandemic. Nobody was buying books anyway, on account of the economic collapse. All the newspapers and journals and so on that would usually cover an exciting new book were busy covering the pandemic and economic collapse instead. The score is still gods one zillion, prophets zero. So Ord’s PR person asked me to help spread the word, and here we are.

Imagine you were sent back in time to inhabit the body of Adam, primordial ancestor of mankind. It turns out the Garden of Eden has motorcycles, and Eve challenges you to a race. You know motorcycles can be dangerous, but you’re an adrenaline junkie, naturally unafraid of death. And it would help take your mind off that ever-so-tempting Tree of Knowledge. Do you go?

Before you do, consider that you’re not just risking your own life. A fatal injury to either of you would snuff out the entire future of humanity. Every song ever composed, every picture ever painted, every book ever written by all the greatest authors of the millennia would die stillborn. Millions of people would never meet their true loves, or get to raise their children. All of the triumphs and tragedies of humanity, from the conquests of Alexander to the moon landings, would come to nothing if you hit a rock and cracked your skull.

So maybe you shouldn’t motorcycle race. Maybe you shouldn’t even go outside. Maybe you and Eve should hide, panicked, in the safest-looking cave you can find.

Ord argues that 21st century humanity is in much the same situation as Adam. The potential future of the human race is vast. We have another five billion years until the sun goes out, and 10^100 until the universe becomes uninhabitable. Even with conservative assumptions, the galaxy could support quintillions of humans. Between Eden and today, the population would have multiplied five billion times; between today and our galactic future, it could easily multiply another five billion. However awed Adam and Eve would have been when they considered the sheer size of the future that depended on them, we should be equally awed.

So maybe we should do the equivalent of not motorcycling. And that would mean taking existential risks (“x-risks”) – disasters that might completely destroy humanity or permanently ruin its potential – very seriously. Even more seriously than we would take them just based on the fact that we don’t want to die. Maybe we should consider all counterbalancing considerations – “sure, global warming might be bad, but we also need to keep the economy strong!” – to be overwhelmed by the crushing weight of the future.

This is my metaphor, not Ord’s. He uses a different one – the Cuban Missile Crisis. We all remember the Cuban Missile Crisis as a week where humanity teetered on the precipice of destruction, then recovered into a more stable not-immediately-going-to-destroy-itself state. Ord speculates that far-future historians will remember the entire 1900s and 2000s as a sort of centuries-long Cuban Missile Crisis, a crunch time when the world was unusually vulnerable and everyone had to take exactly the right actions to make it through. Or as the namesake precipice, a place where the road to the Glorious Future crosses a narrow rock ledge hanging over a deep abyss.

Ord has other metaphors too, and other arguments. The first sixty pages of Precipice are a series of arguments and thought experiments intended to drive home the idea that everyone dying would be really bad. Some of them were new to me and quite interesting – for example, an argument that we should keep the Earth safe for future generations as a way of “paying it forward” to our ancestors, who kept it safe for us. At times, all these arguments against allowing the destruction of the human race felt kind of excessive – isn’t there widespread agreement on this point? Even when there is disagreement, Ord doesn’t address it here, banishing counterarguments to various appendices – one arguing against time discounting the value of the future, another arguing against ethical theories that deem future lives irrelevant. This part of the book isn’t trying to get into the intellectual weeds. It’s just saying, again and again, that it would be really bad if we all died.

It’s tempting to psychoanalyze Ord here, with help from passages like this one:

I have not always been focused on protecting our longterm future, coming to the topic only reluctantly. I am a philosopher at Oxford University, specialising in ethics. My earlier work was rooted in the more tangible concerns of global health and global poverty – in how we could best help the worst off. When coming to grips with these issues I felt the need to take my work in ethics beyond the ivory tower. I began advising the World Health Organization, World Bank, and UK government on the ethics of global health. And finding that my own money could do hundreds of times as much good for those in poverty as it could do for me, I made a lifelong pledge to donate at least a tenth of all I earn to help them. I founded a society, Giving What We Can, for those who wanted to join me, and was heartened to see thousands of people come together to pledge more than one billion pounds over our lifetimes to the most effective charities we know of, working on the most important causes. Together, we’ve already been able to transform the lives of thousands of people. And because there are many other ways beyond our donations in which we can help fashion a better world, I helped start a wider movement, known as “effective altruism”, in which people aspire to use prudence and reason to do as much good as possible.

We’re in the Garden of Eden, so we should stop worrying about motorcycling and start worrying about protecting our future. But Ord’s equivalent of “motorcycling” was advising governments and NGOs on how best to fight global poverty. I’m familiar with his past work in this area, and he was amazing at it. He stopped because he decided that protecting the long-term future was more important. What must he think of the rest of us, who aren’t stopping our ordinary, non-saving-thousands-of-people-from-poverty day jobs?

In writing about Ord’s colleagues in the effective altruist movement, I quoted Larissa MacFarquahar on Derek Parfit:

When I was interviewing him for the first time, for instance, we were in the middle of a conversation and suddenly he burst into tears. It was completely unexpected, because we were not talking about anything emotional or personal, as I would define those things. I was quite startled, and as he cried I sat there rewinding our conversation in my head, trying to figure out what had upset him. Later, I asked him about it. It turned out that what had made him cry was the idea of suffering. We had been talking about suffering in the abstract. I found that very striking.

Toby Ord was Derek Parfit’s grad student, and I get sort of the same vibe from him – someone whose reason and emotions are unusually closely aligned. Stalin’s maxim that “one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic” accurately describes how most of us think. I am not sure it describes Toby Ord. I can’t say confidently that Toby Ord feels exactly a million times more intense emotions when he considers a million deaths than when he considers one death, but the scaling factor is definitely up there. When he considers ten billion deaths, or the deaths of the trillions of people who might inhabit our galactic future, he – well, he’s reduced to writing sixty pages of arguments and metaphors trying to cram into our heads exactly how bad this would be.

II.

The second part of the book is an analysis of specific risks, how concerned we should be about each, and what we can do to prevent them. Ord stays focused on existential risks here. He is not very interested in an asteroid that will wipe out half of earth’s population; the other half of humanity will survive to realize our potential. He’s not completely uninterested – wiping out half of earth’s population could cause some chaos that makes it harder to prepare for other catastrophes. But his main focus is on things that would kill everybody – or at least leave too few survivors to effectively repopulate the planet.

I expected Ord to be alarmist here. He is writing a book about existential risks, whose thesis is that we should take them extremely seriously. Any other human being alive would use this as an opportunity to play up how dangerous these risks are. Ord is too virtuous. Again and again, he knocks down bad arguments for worrying too much, points out that killing every single human being on earth, including the ones in Antarctic research stations, is actually quite hard, and ends up convincing me to downgrade my risk estimate.

So for example, we can rule out a high risk of destruction by any natural disaster – asteroid, supervolcano, etc – simply because these things haven’t happened before in our species’ 100,000 year-odd history. Dino-killer sized asteroids seem to strike the Earth about once every few hundred million years, bounding the risk per century around the one-in-a-million level. But also, scientists are tracking almost all the large asteroids in the solar system, and when you account for their trajectories, the chance that one slips through and hits us in the next century goes down to less than one in a hundred fifty million. Large supervolcanoes seem to go off about once every 80,000 years, so the risk per century is 1/800. There are similar arguments around nearby supernovae, gamma ray bursts, and a bunch of other things.

I usually give any statistics I read a large penalty for “or maybe you’re a moron”. For example, lots of smart people said in 2016 that the chance of Trump winning was only 1%, or 0.1%, or 0.00001%, or whatever. But also, they were morons. They were using models, and their models were egregiously wrong. If you hear a person say that their model’s estimate of something is 0.00001%, very likely your estimate of the thing should be much higher than that, because maybe they’re a moron. I explain this in more detail here.

Ord is one of a tiny handful of people who doesn’t need this penalty. He explains this entire dynamic to his readers, agrees it is important, and adjusts several of his models appropriately. He is always careful to add a term for unknown unknowns – sometimes he is able to use clever methods to bound this term, other times he just takes his best guess. And he tries to use empirically-based methods that don’t have this problem, list his assumptions explicitly, and justify each assumption, so that you rarely have to rely on arguments shakier than “asteroids will continue to hit our planet at the same rate they did in the past”. I am really impressed with the care he puts into every argument in the book, and happy to accept his statistics at face value. People with no interest in x-risk may enjoy reading this book purely as an example of statistical reasoning done with beautiful lucidity.

When you accept very low numbers at face value, it can have strange implications. For example, should we study how to deflect asteroids? Ord isn’t sure. The base rate of asteroid strikes is so low that it’s outweighed by almost any change in the base rate. If we successfully learn how to deflect asteroids, that not only lets good guys deflect asteroids away from Earth, but also lets bad guys deflect asteroids towards Earth. The chance that an dino-killer asteroid approaches Earth and needs to be deflected away is 1/150 million per century, with small error bars. The chance that malicious actors deflect an asteroid towards Earth is much harder to figure out, but it has wide error bars, and there are a lot of numbers higher than 1/150 million. So probably most of our worry about asteroids over the next century should involve somebody using one as a weapon, and studying asteroid deflection probably makes that worse and not better.

Ord uses similar arguments again and again. Humanity has survived 100,000 years, so its chance of death by natural disaster per century is probably less than 1 / 1,000 (for complicated statistical reasons, he puts it at between 1/10,000 and 1/100,000). But humanity has only had technology (eg nuclear weapons, genetically engineered bioweapons) for a few decades, so there are no such guarantees of its safety. Ord thinks the overwhelming majority of existential risk comes from this source, and singles out four particular technological risks as most concerning.

First, nuclear war. This was one of the places where Ord’s work is cause for optimism. You’ve probably heard that there are enough nuclear weapons to “destroy the world ten times over” or something like that. There aren’t. There are enough nuclear weapons to destroy lots of majors city, kill the majority of people, and cause a very bad nuclear winter for the rest. But there aren’t enough to literally kill every single human being. And because of the way the Earth’s climate works, the negative effects of nuclear winter would probably be concentrated in temperate and inland regions. Tropical islands and a few other distant locales (Ord suggests Australia and New Zealand) would have a good chance of making it through even a large nuclear apocalypse with enough survivors to repopulate the Earth. A lot of things would have to go wrong at once, and a lot of models be flawed in ways they don’t seem to be flawed, for a nuclear war to literally kill everyone. Ord gives the per-century risk of extinction from this cause at 1 in 1,000.

Second, global warming. The current scientific consensus is that global warming will be really bad but not literally kill every single human. Even for implausibly high amounts of global warming, survivors can always flee to a pleasantly balmy Greenland. The main concern from an x-risk point of view is “runaway global warming” based on strong feedback loops. For example, global warming causes permafrost to melt, which releases previously trapped carbon, causing more global warming, causing more permafrost to melt, etc. Or global warming causes the oceans to warm, which makes them release more methane, which causes more global warming, causing the oceans to get warmer, etc. In theory, this could get really bad – something similar seems to have happened on Venus, which now has an average temperature of 900 degrees Fahrenheit. But Ord thinks it probably won’t happen here. His worst-case scenario estimates 13 – 20 degrees C of warming by 2300. This is really bad – summer temperatures in San Francisco would occasionally pass 140F – but still well short of Venus, and compatible with the move-to-Greenland scenario. Also, global temperatures jumped 5 degree C (to 14 degrees above current levels) fifty million years ago, and this didn’t seem to cause Venus-style runaway warming. This isn’t a perfect analogy for the current situation, since the current temperature increase is happening faster than the ancient one did, but it’s still a reason for hope. This is another one that could easily be an apocalyptic tragedy unparalleled in human history but probably not an existential risk; Ord estimates the x-risk per century as 1/1,000.

The same is true for other environmental disasters, of which Ord discusses a long list. Overpopulation? No, fertility rates have crashed and the population is barely expanding anymore (also, it’s hard for overpopulation to cause human extinction). Resource depletion? New discovery seems to be faster than depletion for now, and society could route around most plausible resources shortages. Honeybee collapse? Despite what you’ve heard, losing all pollinators would only cause a 3 – 8% decrease in global crop production. He gives all of these combined plus environmental unknown unknowns an additional 1/1,000, just in case.

Third, pandemics. Even though pathogens are natural, Ord classifies pandemics as technological disasters for two reasons. First, natural pandemics are probably getting worse because our technology is making cities denser, linking countries closer together, and bringing humans into more contact with the animal vectors of zoonotic disease (in one of the book’s more prophetic passages, Ord mentions the risk of a disease crossing from bats to humans). But second, bioengineered pandemics may be especially bad. These could be either accidental (surprisingly many biologists alter diseases to make them worse as part of apparently legitimate scientific research) or deliberate (bioweapons). There are enough unknown unknowns here that Ord is uncomfortable assigning relatively precise and low risk levels like he did in earlier categories, and this section generally feels kind of rushed, but he estimates the per-century x-risk from natural pandemics as 1/10,000 and from engineered pandemics as 1/30.

The fourth major technological risk is AI. You’ve all read about this one by now, so I won’t go into the details, but it fits the profile of a genuinely dangerous risk. It’s related to technological advance, so our long and illustrious history of not dying from it thus far offers no consolation. And because it could be actively trying to eliminate humanity, isolated populations on islands or in Antarctica or wherever offer less consolation than usual. Using the same arguments and sources we’ve seen every other time this topic gets brought up, Ord assigns this a 1/10 risk per century, the highest of any of the scenarios he examines, writing:

In my view, the greatest risk to humanity’s potential in the next hundred years comes from unaligned artificial intelligence, which I put at 1 in 10. One might be surprised to see such a high number for such a speculative risk, so it warrants some explanation.

A common approach to estimating the chance of an unprecedented event with earth-shaking consequences is to take a sceptical stance: to start with an extremely small probability and only raise it from there when a large amount of hard evidence is presented. But I disagree. Instead, I think that the right method is to start with a probability that reflects our overall impressions, then adjust this in light of the scientific evidence. When there is a lot of evidence, these approaches converge. But when there isn’t, the starting point can matter.

In the case of artificial intelligence, everyone agrees the evidence and arguments are far from watertight, but the question is where does this leave us? Very roughly, my approach is to start with the overall view of the expert community that there is something like a 1 in 2 chance that AI agents capable of outperforming humans in almost every task will be developed in the coming century. And conditional on that happening, we shouldn’t be shocked if these agents that outperform us across the board were to inherit our future.

The book also addresses a few more complicated situations. There are ways humankind could fail to realize its potential even without being destroyed. For example, if it got trapped in some kind of dystopia that it was impossible to escape. Or if it lost so many of its values that we no longer recognized it as human. Ord doesn’t have too much to say about these situations besides acknowledging that they would be bad and need further research. Or a series of disasters could each precipitate one another, or a minor disaster could leave people unprepared for a major disaster, or something along those lines.

Here, too, Ord is more optimistic than some other sources I have read. For example, some people say that if civilization ever collapses, it will never be able to rebuild, because we’ve already used up all easily-accessible sources of eg fossil fuels, and an infant civilization won’t be able to skip straight from waterwheels to nuclear. Ord is more sanguine:

Even if civilization did collapse, it is likely that it could be re-established. As we have seen, civilization has already been independently established at least seven times by isolated peoples. While one might think resources depletion could make this harder, it is more likely that it has become substantially easier. Most dissasters short of human extinction would leave our domesticated animals and plants, as well as copious material resources in the ruins of our cities – it is much easier to re-forge iron from old railings than to smelt it from ore. Even expendable resources such as coal would be much easier to access, via abandoned reserves and mines, than they ever were in the eighteenth century. Moreover, evidence that civilisation is possible, and the tools and knowledge to help rebuild, would be scattered across the world.

III.

Still, these risks are real, and humanity will under-respond to them for predictable reasons.

First, free-rider problems. If some people invest resources into fighting these risks and others don’t, both sets of people will benefit equally. So all else being equal everyone would prefer that someone else do it. We’ve already seen this play out with international treaties on climate change.

Second, scope insensitivity. A million deaths, a billion deaths, and complete destruction of humanity all sound like such unimaginable catastrophes that they’re hardly worth differentiating. But plausibly we should put 1000x more resources into preventing a billion deaths than a million, and some further very large scaling factor into preventing human extinction. People probably won’t think that way, which will further degrade our existential risk readiness.

Third, availability bias. Existential risks have never happened before. Even their weaker non-omnicidal counterparts have mostly faded into legend – the Black Death, the Tunguska Event. The current pandemic is a perfect example. Big pandemics happen once every few decades – the Spanish flu of 1918 and the Hong Kong Flu of 1968 are the most salient recent examples. Most countries put some effort into preparing for the next one. But the preparation wasn’t very impressive. After this year, I bet we’ll put impressive effort into preparing for respiratory pandemics the next decade or two, while continuing to ignore other risks like solar flares or megadroughts that are equally predictable. People feel weird putting a lot of energy into preparing for something that has never happened before, and their value of “never” is usually “in a generation or two”. Getting them to care about things that have literally never happened before, like climate change, nuclear winter, or AI risk, is an even taller order.

And even when people seem to care about distant risks, it can feel like a half-hearted effort. During a Berkeley meeting of the Manhattan Project, Edward Teller brought up the basic idea behind the hydrogen bomb. You would use a nuclear bomb to ignite a self-sustaining fusion reaction in some other substance, which would produce a bigger explosion than the nuke itself. The scientists got to work figuring out what substances could support such reactions, and found that they couldn’t rule out nitrogen-14. The air is 79% nitrogen-14. If a nuclear bomb produced nitrogen-14 fusion, it would ignite the atmosphere and turn the Earth into a miniature sun, killing everyone. They hurriedly convened a task force to work on the problem, and it reported back that neither nitrogen-14 nor a second candidate isotope, lithium-7, could support a self-sustaining fusion reaction.

They seem to have been moderately confident in these calculations. But there was enough uncertainty that, when the Trinity test produced a brighter fireball than expected, Manhattan Project administrator James Conant was “overcome with dread”, believing that atmospheric ignition had happened after all and the Earth had only seconds left. And later, the US detonated a bomb whose fuel was contaminated with lithium-7, the explosion was much bigger than expected, and some bystanders were killed. It turned out atomic bombs could initiate lithium-7 fusion after all! As Ord puts it, “of the two major thermonuclear calculations made that summer at Berkeley, they got one right and one wrong”. This doesn’t really seem like the kind of crazy anecdote you could tell in a civilization that was taking existential risk seriously enough.

So what should we do? That depends who you mean by “we”.

Ordinary people should follow the standard advice of effective altruism. If they feel like their talents are suited for a career in this area, they should check out 80,000 Hours and similar resources and try to pursue it. Relevant careers include science (developing helpful technologies to eg capture carbon or understand AI), politics and policy (helping push countries to take risk-minimizing actions), and general thinkers and influencers (philosophers to remind us of our ethical duties, journalists to help keep important issues fresh in people’s minds). But also, anything else that generally strengthens and stabilizes the world. Diplomats who help bring countries closer together, since international peace reduces the risk of nuclear war and bioweapons and makes cooperation against other threats more likely. Economists who help keep the market stable, since a prosperous country is more likely to have resources to devote to the future. Even teachers are helping train the next generation of people who can help in the effort, although Ord warns against going too meta – most people willing to help with this will still be best off working on causes that affect existential risk directly. If they don’t feel like their talents lie in any of these areas, they can keep earning money at ordinary jobs and donate some of it (traditionally 10%) to x-risk related charities.

Rich people, charitable foundations, and governments should fund anti-x-risk work more than they’re already doing. Did you know that the Biological Weapons Convention, a key international agreement banning biological warfare, has a budget lower than the average McDonald’s restaurant (not total McDonald corporate profits, a single restaurant)? Or that total world spending on preventing x-risk is less than total world spending on ice cream? Ord suggests a target of between 0.1% and 1% of gross world product for anti-x-risk efforts.

And finally, Ord has a laundry list of requests for sympathetic policy-makers (Appendix F). Most of them are to put more research and funding into things, but the actionable specific ones are: restart various nuclear disarmament treaties, take ICBMs off “hair-trigger alert”, have the US rejoin the Paris Agreement on climate change, fund the Biological Weapons Convention better, and mandate that DNA synthesis companies screen consumer requests for dangerous sequences so that terrorists can’t order a batch of smallpox virus (80% of companies currently do this screening, but 20% don’t). The actual appendix is six pages long, there are a lot of requests to put more research and funding into things.

In the last section, Ord explains that all of this is just the first step. After we’ve conquered existential risk (and all our other problems), we’ll have another task: to contemplate how we want to guide the future. Before we spread out into the galaxy, we might want to take a few centuries to sit back and think about what our obligations are to each other, the universe, and the trillions of people who may one day exist. We cannot take infinite time for this; the universe is expanding, and for each year we spend not doing interstellar colonization, three galaxies cross the cosmological event horizon and become forever unreachable, and all the potential human civilizations that might have flourished there come to nothing. Ord expects us to be concerned about this, and tries to reassure us that it will be okay (the relative loss each year is only one five-billionth of the universe). So he thinks taking a few centuries to reflect before beginning our interstellar colonization is worthwhile on net. But for now, he thinks this process should take a back seat to safeguarding the world from x-risk. Deal with the Cuban Missile Crisis we’re perpetually in the middle of, and then we’ll have time for normal philosophy.

IV.

In the spirit of highly-uncertain-estimates being better than no estimates at all, Ord offers this as a draft of where the existential risk community is right now (“they are not in any way the final word, but are a concise summary of all I know about the risk landscape”):

Again, the most interesting thing for me is how low most of the numbers are. It’s a strange sight in a book whose thesis could be summarized as “we need to care more about existential risk”. I think most people paying attention will be delighted to learn there’s a 5 in 6 chance the human race will survive until 2120.

This is where I turn to my psychoanalysis of Toby Ord again. I think he, God help him, sees a number like that and responds appropriately. He multiplies 1/6th by 10 billion deaths and gets 1.6 billion deaths. Then he multiplies 1/6th by the hundreds of trillions of people it will prevent from ever existing, and gets tens of trillions of people. Then he considers that the centuries just keep adding up, until by 2X00 the risk is arbitrarily high. At that point, the difference between a 1/6 chance of humanity dying per century vs. a 5/6 chance of humanity dying may have psychological impact. But the overall takeaway from both is “Holy @!#$, we better put a lot of work into dealing with this.”

There’s an old joke about a science lecture. The professor says that the sun will explode in five billion years, and sees a student visibly freaking out. She asks the student what’s so scary about the sun exploding in five billion years. The student sighs with relief: “Oh, thank God! I thought you’d said five million years!”

We can imagine the opposite joke. A professor says the sun will explode in five minutes, sees a student visibly freaking out, and repeats her claim. The student, visibly relieved: “Oh, thank God! I thought you’d said five seconds.”

When read carefully, The Precipice is the book-length version of the second joke. Things may not be quite as disastrous as you expected. But relief may not quite be the appropriate emotion, and there’s still a lot of work to be done.

Ever notice how people stick a bit of tape over the webcam on their laptop? It’s a simple way to ensure no one can snoop on you without you knowing it. However, tape over the webcam won’t stop people from snooping on you with your computer’s microphone.

The 2020 iPad Pro solves this problem by disabling the microphone at a hardware level when you close the case. It’s a feature borrowed directly from Apple’s MacBook line, which disables the mic when users close the lid. That feature was introduced in 2018, and it’s one not many people know about.

Of course, the iPad Pro doesn’t have a lid like a MacBook. Instead, the iPad Pro activates the mic shut-off whenever users close the case. Unfortunately, the feature only works with Apple-certified ‘Made for iPad’ cases. That means it should work with Apple’s Smart Folio and Smart Keyboard Folio cases, as well as the upcoming Magic Keyboard due out later this year. The feature should also work with some third-party cases as long as they sport the certification.

9to5Mac spotted the feature in the latest version of Apple’s Platform Security guide. The guide highlights that the mic shut-off means that no software can utilize the microphone when the lid is closed, even if the OS is compromised.

Ultimately, it’s an excellent addition and one I wish more companies added to their products. Many PC makers have added physical webcam shutters to their laptops so customers don’t need to tape up their computers. It’d be nice if there was a physical disconnect for microphones as well.

As for the iPad Pro, I’d prefer if Apple had a disconnect method that didn’t rely on a case. Chances are most iPad owners will get a case anyway, but I’d rather see security features like that baked into the hardware and not dependent on accessories.

Source: 9to5Mac Via: The Verge

The post 2020 iPad Pro disconnects mic hardware when you close the case appeared first on MobileSyrup.

Yesterday Twitter announced that for Firefox users data such as direct messages (DMs) might be left sitting on their computers even if they logged out. In this post I’ll try to help sort out what’s going on here.

First, it’s important to understand the risk: what we’re talking about is “cached” data. All web browsers store local copies of data they get from servers so that they can avoid downloading the same data over the internet repeatedly. This makes a huge performance difference because websites are full of large files that change infrequently. Ordinarily this is what you want, but if you share a computer with other people, then they might be able to see that cached data, even if you have logged out of Twitter. It’s important to know that this data is just stored locally, so if you don’t share a computer this isn’t a problem for you. If you do share a computer, you can make sure all of your Twitter data is deleted by following the instructions here. If you do nothing, the data will be automatically deleted after 7 days the next time you run Firefox.

Second, why is this just Firefox? The technical details are complicated but the high level is pretty simple: caching is complicated and each browser behaves somewhat differently; with the particular way that Twitter had their site set up, Chrome, Safari, and Edge don’t cache this data but Firefox will. It’s not that we’re right and they’re wrong. It’s just a normal difference in browser behavior. There is a standard way to ensure that data isn’t cached, but until recently Twitter didn’t use it, so they were just dependent on non-standard behavior on some browsers.

As a software developer myself, I know that this kind of thing is easy to do: the web is complicated and it’s hard to know everything about it. However, it’s also a good reminder of how important it is to have web standards rather than just relying on whatever one particular browser happens to do.

The post What you need to know about Twitter on Firefox appeared first on The Mozilla Blog.

mkalus shared this story from Ulysses Blog.

Ten years ago today, the first iPad was released to the public. As much as I wanted to have one, I had to wait almost two more months until it became available here in Germany. But a few developer friends of mine flew to the US just to get an iPad on the very first day. It seems crazy to travel intercontinentally, just to buy some piece of tech a few weeks earlier than everybody else. To me, it shows just how much excitement there was about this novel device.

The iPad gave a new dimension to the technological revolution that started with the iPhone. If the iPhone showed us that touch is the most natural way to use phones, the iPad was a promise that this concept could be also applied to professional use cases as well. Professional uses like… writing books.

During the past few days, I had the opportunity to reflect about the iPad, how it became a crucial stepping stone in the development of Ulysses. It taught us many lessons, way too many to list here, but I thought you might find a few little anecdotes as interesting to read as I enjoyed recalling them.

The iPad felt so right. We wanted to do a writing app for it.

The first iPad was announced long before the modern Ulysses existed. We had been making the original Ulysses for Mac for years. We knew our field, and we were immediately intrigued by the iPad’s form, concept and usability, and we wanted to bring our beloved Ulysses to the new world. However, our initial technical exploration revealed that the first generation was technically way too limited to run a fully-featured Ulysses.

But the iPad felt so right. We wanted to do a writing app for it. We just needed a different concept. A new approach. Not having to bring over the old cruft was definitely freeing though. We wanted go all-in with this new, exciting, gesture-based, real-world-mimicking way of interacting with an app. During the first few weeks of owning an iPad, Marcus came up with this idea of visually working with “stacks” of “sheets”. The idea was to navigate them like you would in the real world: Opening a stack was similar to spreading out its sheets next to each other on your table. Switching between sheets was like turning a page. Of course, there was an unlimited number of sheets, and a new sheet got added for you automatically once you reached the end of the stack. Plus, sheets would not end at the bottom of the screen but could have any length. Navigation and interaction was purely gesture-based: pinch, zoom, drag and swipe, and the UI was non-technical — no lists, no buttons, no disclosure triangles... And it worked! It felt great. We called the app Daedalus Touch. The teaser trailer I made for it at the time gives a sense of how it all came together:

Through Daedalus, the iPad taught us that not everything needed to be organized in hierarchies and folders. It taught us that lists and tables are not necessarily the best way of organization, especially not for creative processes like writing. Daedalus made the case that an app can be really useful even without all bells and whistles. It gave a new essence to an idea we had since the very beginning – a world without files and folders.

We realized that, like a real sheet of paper, a virtual sheet should not need to have a name or a title. Neither should it need to be filed away. In the physical world, you can just take a piece of paper, scribble something onto it and drop it somewhere. Of course you’d never find it again, neither could you search its contents – but that’s what digital tools are there for. Yet in our digital technocracy we had lost a lot of the ease and simplicity of real world things. The iPad made this case boldly, and Daedalus followed suit.

Over the years, however, we started hitting the boundaries of this “lets emulate the real world but make it better” concept. New features became increasingly harder to add as everything had to fit into that one tight metaphor of sheets and stacks. Just to give you an idea: Some users had a lot of stacks, often multiple ones for the same project. They were asking for another layer of organization – and we asked ourselves what that could be? Folders of stacks? Registers? How should they look and feel? Even if we solved that, how would we preserve the elegance and simplicity of the app? We tried to be fancy and smart, but we got stuck with Daedalus, on iPad.

With iPad taking us nowhere, our attention shifted back to the Mac. Motivated by Apple redesigning Mac OS Lion with interface elements from iOS, we started to imagine how a modern Ulysses might look like. And even though we would build it Mac-only at first, we tried to come up with a concept that should also work on iPad, should it one day become capable enough.

The plan was to build a fusion of the original Ulysses’ vision and ideals, the then-new three-column Mac design, the all-in-one (shoebox) approach of iPad apps, and the sheets from Daedalus. Everything would sync through iCloud, ready for you to pick up writing at any device (well… Mac, at that time). It would have a hierarchical organization with effortlessly organized sheets. No files, but with groups, folders and filters. Our aim was to make powerful app simple to use. To no surprise, this took much longer to build than we had hoped and was way more complicated than we’d ever imagined. But in the end, we shipped Ulysses III:

Funnily enough, only a few months later Apple moved from their textured, real-world interface on iPad (skeuomorphism) to a flat, abstract look. In one big sweep, the era of “realistic” interfaces had come to an end. And we sadly had to  realize that Daedalus’ stacks of sheets had failed. On the plus side, we were already one step ahead with the new Ulysses. iOS 7 shipped the new abstract interface design and added technologies which allowed us to bring a fully-featured experience to the iPad. We finally had all that we needed to get going and were quick to draw up a few early sketches of Ulysses for iPad:

It all seemed pretty straightforward at the time, but it would become yet another challenge. From those sketches, it would take us one and a half years until the app would actually ship. The technology was fine, but not everything that worked on the Mac would also work on iPad. A lot of the interface revolved around detachable mini windows (popovers) that weren’t available on iPad and that we needed to replace. Some features were quite easy to adapt, but some we had to re-imagine. Take the sheet attachments as an example: On Mac, they used to reside in a bar at the top of a sheet. On iPad, we tried a lot of variations, but ultimately had to move them into a new sidebar. Although the change was  only needed there, the feature was then so different that we decided to incorporate the new layout on the Mac as well. While we initially thought it would be mostly more consistent, we soon saw that attachments had become much more useful on the desktop as well.

Although this is only just one example, the entire process of bringing our Mac app to iPad went on like this. The limited space on those smaller screens forced us to think and to experiment a lot. We had to keep changing flows, arrangements and complete parts of the UI until they felt right. We thought we had a well-structured and simple concept already, but learned that everything needed to be more structured and even simpler for iPad. The extra rounds were rewarded with many of the revelations also being applied to the Mac, where they made for a simpler, better interface as well. Ulysses on the desktop became better, because we made an iPad version of it.

We thought we had a well-structured and simple concept, but it needed to be more structured and even simpler for iPad.

Interestingly, similar stories could be told about the iPhone version, which we made a year later. The need for simplicity and clarity holds true even more there. I’d like to focus on the iPad’s crucial mediator role in realizing this “super-mobile” version though. When we started working on the iPhone version, the iPhone had already been around for the better part of a decade. Of course we had often talked about how Ulysses might look on it, but never saw how we could fit all the features onto such a small device. If we built a mobile version at all, then as a feature-reduced companion, or so we thought. In fact, we once even had a working prototype of one for the original Ulysses. (That did not play out for technical reasons.) It wasn’t until we had Ulysses running on iPad, that we realized we wouldn’t have to compromise. Before that we could just not imagine how that would ever work. Seeing it and working with it in practice on the iPad made it obvious that the full Ulysses on iPhone would, in fact, work.

This post here was written, reviewed and edited on a Mac, an iPad and an iPhone. A huge part of this unified experience is thanks to the iPad. Given how much has changed over the past ten years, I can’t wait to see what technology will look like after the next ten.

PS: It happens that today, April 3rd, is also Ulysses III’s eighth birthday! 🥳 Here’s to the next year, dear friend. It’s definitely going to be exciting…

On Exponent, the weekly podcast I host with James Allworth, we discuss Unmasking Twitter.

Listen to it here.

The discourse around masks is changing at lightning speed. You might have read on Wirecutter that you don’t need a face mask to protect yourself from the coronavirus, and that health-care workers need one more than you do. Perhaps you’ve read other articles that suggest wearing a mask is better than nothing. If you’re feeling confused, you’re not alone.

This year’s spring releases of Safari 13.1 for macOS Catalina, iPadOS, iOS, and watchOS bring a tremendous number of WebKit improvements for the web across Apple’s platforms. All of this with many more updates for improved privacy, performance, and a host of new tools for web developers.

Here’s a quick look at the new WebKit enhancements available with these releases.

Pointer and Mouse Events on iPadOS

The latest iPadOS 13.4 brings desktop-class pointer and mouse event support to Safari and WebKit. To ensure the best experience, web developers can use feature detection and adopt Pointer Events. Since a mouse or trackpad won’t send touch events, web content should not depend on touch events. Pointer Events will specify whether a mouse/trackpad or touch generated the event.

Web Animations API

These releases ship with support for the Web Animations API, a web standard offering developers a JavaScript API to create, query, and control animations, including direct control of CSS Animations and CSS Transitions. It offers a convenient unified model for programmatic animations, CSS Animations and Transitions. They can all now be directly controlled to pause, resume, seek, or change speed and direction, with less manual calculation. In addition, Web Inspector has been updated to show entries for them in the Media and Animations timeline.

Read more about Web Animations in WebKit and Web Animations in Safari 13.1.

Async Clipboard API

WebKit brings the Async Clipboard API to this release of Safari. It provides access to the system clipboard and clipboard operations while keeping the webpage responsive. This API is much more flexible than DataTransfer, allowing developers to write multiple items with multiple types per item. Additionally, it brings programmatic paste to all websites on macOS and iOS.

The implementation is available through the navigator.clipboard API which must be called within user gesture event handlers like pointerdown or pointerup, and only works for content served in a secure context (e.g. https://). Instead of a permissions-based model for reading from the clipboard, a native UI is displayed when the page calls into the clipboard API; the clipboard can only be accessed if the user then explicitly interacts with the platform UI.

For more details see the original API specifications.

JavaScript Improvements

These releases include new JavaScript support for the replaceAll() method for strings and the new nullish coalescing operator (??).

The String.prototype.replaceAll() method does exactly what it suggests, replacing all occurrences of a given value in the string with a replacement string.

"too good to be true".replaceAll(" ", "-");
// too-good-to-be-true

Learn more from the String.prototype.replaceAll Proposal.

The nullish coalesing operator (??) is a new operator that only evaluates and returns the expression on the right of the ?? if the result of the expression on the left of the ?? is null or undefined.

const nullValue = null;
const resultWithNull = nullValue ?? "default";        // "default"

const nonNullValue = 0;
const resultWithNonNull = nonNullValue ?? "default";  // 0

For more details see the Nullish Coalescing for JavaScript proposal.

ResizeObserver

The addition of ResizeObserver in WebKit enables developers to design components that are responsive to the container instead of just the viewport. This allows more flexible responsive designs, where containers can react to window size changes, orientation changes, and additions of new elements to the layout. The JavaScript API avoids the circular dependencies of trying to use media queries for element sizes in CSS. ResizeObserver addresses the problem by providing a means to observe changes in the layout size of elements.

For more read about ResizeObserver in WebKit.

HTML enterkeyhint Attribute

On iOS, WebKit supports the enterkeyhint attribute that allows a content author to provide a label for the enter key on virtual keyboards with values for: enter, done, go, next, previous, search, and send.

See the HTML Standard for more information.

CSS Shadow Parts

New support for CSS Shadow Parts allows web authors to style parts of web components without the need to understand how they are constructed. This provides a mechanism to define author-defined style parts akin to input element’s pseudo elements in WebKit.

See the CSS Shadow Parts specification for more information.

More CSS Additions

There are a number of new CSS additions in WebKit. New font keywords are available for using platform-specific fonts including ui-serif, ui-sans-serif, ui-monospace, and ui-rounded . WebKit also supports the line-break: anywhere value that adds a soft wrap opportunity around each character unit, including around any punctuation or preserved white spaces, in the middle of words, even ignoring limits against line breaks. Finally, WebKit includes support for the dynamic-range media query allowing authors to create styles specific to display capabilities.

@media (dynamic-range: standard) {
    .example {
        /* Styles for displays not capable of HDR. */
        color: rgb(255, 0, 0);
    }
}

@media (dynamic-range: high) {
    .example {
        /* Styles for displays capable of HDR. */
        color: color(display-p3 1 0 0);
    }
}

Media APIs

Safari was the first to ship a picture-in-picture feature and has long supported the ability to specify a playback target for AirPlay. Safari for iOS and macOS now supports the standardizations of these features with the Picture-in-Picture API and Remote Playback API. There is also new support for HLS date-range metadata in DataCue.

Subtitles and Captions

WebKit is introducing enhancements to TextTrackCue for programmatic subtitle and caption presentation. This enables video publishers to continue storing captions in legacy or custom formats, and deliver them programmatically and still maintain the ability for users to control the presence and style of captions with system accessibility settings.

For more detail, see the WebKit TextTracks Explainer.

WebRTC Legacy Audio and Proxy Support

WebRTC support in WebKit has been updated so it can work in more places, with more systems. Support for DTMF allows WebKit to interact with legacy audio services. WebRTC Proxy support allows WebRTC to work in enterprise networks where firewalls may forbid UDP and require TCP to go through a dedicated proxy.

Performance Improvements

WebKit continues to deliver performance gains on benchmarks in these releases while also optimizing memory use. This release includes an 8-10% improvement on the Jetstream 2 benchmark. JavaScript Promises in particular showed a 2× improvement in the async-fs benchmark on JetStream 2. IndexedDB showed an improvement of 1.3× to 5× faster than before for most operations. There’s also faster Service Worker startup and more efficient CSS media query updates. Improved back-forward responsiveness helps history navigations feel snappier. Plus, a new Web Assembly interpreter dramatically improves startup time by around 8× for large WASM apps.

Security Improvements

WebKit has continued to harden security by fixing a number of bugs found through a process known as fuzzing. Following our announcement of deprecating TLS 1.0 and TLS 1.1 connections, this release now adds a “Not Secure” warning when connecting to a site where any resource is using either of these deprecated encryption protocols.

Intelligent Tracking Prevention Updates

There are several new enhancements to Intelligent Tracking Prevention including full third-party cookie blocking, cross-site document.referrers downgraded to their origins, and an expiry on non-cookie website data after seven days of Safari use and no user interaction on the website.

Read the “Full Third-Party Cookie Blocking and More” blog post for details.

Web Platform Quality Improvements

Areas of improved standards compliance and browser interoperability include more compatible gradient and position parsing, color component rounding, new support for the Q unit, and better calc() computed styles.

Web Inspector Updates

Web Inspector in Safari 13.1 includes new debugging experiences and adds several new tools to help web developers test functionality or identify issues.

Sources Tab

A new Sources Tab combines the Resources Tab and Debugger Tab into a single view, keeping more critical information in one place without the need to switch back and forth. Among the improvements, it includes improved support for debugging workers and has new JavaScript breakpoints, such as pausing on All Events or on All Microtasks.

Also new in the Sources Tab, developers can create use the “+” button in the lower left of the navigation sidebar to add an Inspector Bootstrap Script or Local Override. The Inspector Bootstrap Scripts is a snippet of JavaScript that is guaranteed to be the first script evaluated after any new global object is created in any page or sub-frame, regardless of URL, so long as Web Inspector is open. A Local Override can be added to override any resource loaded into the page, giving developers the ability to change files and preview those the changes on pages that they might ordinarily not be able to change.

Both the Sources Tab and the Network Tab also benefit from improved displaying of HTML and XML content, including being able to pretty print or viewing any request/response data as a simulated DOM tree.

Layers Tab

The Layers Tab is also newly available in this release. It provides a 3D visualization and complete list of the rendering layers used to display the page. It also includes information like layer count and the memory cost of all the layers, both of which can help point developers to potential performance problems.

Read the “Visualizing Layers in Web Inspector” blog post for details.

Script Blackboxing

Script Blackboxing is another powerful tool, focused on helping developers debug behaviors built on top of a JavaScript library or framework. By setting up a blackbox for any library or framework script, the debugger will ignore any pauses that would have happened in that script, instead deferring the pause until JavaScript execution continues to a statement outside of the blackboxed script.

Redesigned Color Picker

Other additions to Web Inspector give content authors more insight for design and user experience. A redesigned color picker uses a square design for more precise color selection and includes support for wide-gamut colors with a white guide line that shows the edge of sRGB to Display-P3 color space.

Learn more from the “Wide Gamut Color in CSS with Display-P3” blog post.

Customized AR QuickLook

In Safari on iOS 13.3 or later, users can launch an AR experience from the web where content authors can customize a banner that overlays the AR view. It’s possible to customize:

• Apple Pay button styles
• Action button label
• An item title
• Item subtitle
• Price

Or, authors can create an entirely custom banner with HTML:

https://example.com/example.usdz#custom=https://example.com/customBanner.html

For more information, read about Adding an Apple Pay Button or a Custom Action in AR Quick Look.

Feedback

These improvements are available to users running watchOS 6.2, iOS and iPadOS 13.4, macOS Catalina 10.15.4, macOS Mojave 10.14.6 and macOS High Sierra 10.13.6. These features were also available to web developers with Safari Technology Preview releases. Changes in this release of Safari were included in the following Safari Technology Preview releases: 90, 91, 92, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98. Download the latest Safari Technology Preview release to stay on the forefront of future web platform and Web Inspector features. You can also use the WebKit Feature Status page to watch for changes to your favorite web platform features.

Send a tweet to @webkit or @jonathandavis to share your thoughts on this release.. If you run into any issues, we welcome your bug reports for Safari, or WebKit bugs for web content issues.

For Reuters, Chris Canipe looks at social distancing from the perspective of household income:

Anonymized smartphone data in the United States shows some interesting trends. People in larger cities and urban corridors were more likely to change their travel habits, especially in early March. By the end of the month, most U.S. residents were traveling dramatically less than they did in February, but social and demographic differences were strong predictors of how much that changed.

The above shows median change in distance traveled against median household income by county. Note the downwards trend showing counties with lower median incomes with less change in travel.

For many, it’s not possible to work from home or it isn’t safe to stay at home. Don’t be too quick to judge.

An aside: There are bigger things to concentrate on right now, but after this is all done, I feel like we need to think more about who has access to our location via cellphone. Clearly the data has its uses, but that’s not always going to be the case.

Tags: Chris Canipe, coronavirus, income, Reuters, social distancing

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Jitsi nutzt WebRTC als Protokoll und funktioniert in Chrome und Chromium. Da nicht jeder so einen Browser hat, kann man Jitsi auf dem Desktop auch in einer Electron App nutzen, die den Browser eingebaut hat:

Projekt auf Github: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet-electron/
Downloads für Mac und Windows: https://github.com/jitsi/jitsi-meet-electron/releases/tag/v1.1.1

I started keeping a journal when I was a girl, on vacation with my family in Key West. My mother told me to, said we had such an unusual family that I should write everything I observed. She instructed me to pay attention to the details.

• Ted Chiang Explains the Disaster Novel We All Suddenly Live In – Electric Literature
  "While there has been plenty of fiction written about pandemics, I think the biggest difference between those scenarios and our reality is how poorly our government has handled it. If your goal is to dramatize the threat posed by an unknown virus, there’s no advantage in depicting the officials responding as incompetent, because that minimizes the threat; it leads the reader to conclude that the virus wouldn’t be dangerous if competent people were on the job. A pandemic story like that would be similar to what’s known as an “idiot plot,” a plot that would be resolved very quickly if your protagonist weren’t an idiot. What we’re living through is only partly a disaster novel; it’s also—and perhaps mostly—a grotesque political satire." Ted Chiang on what stories about change and revolution do (and what _actual_ change and revolution also do).
  (tags: writing interview sf sciencefiction tedchiang )

Google has released the statistics for the mobility and location data they gather a.o. from all the mobile devices that share their location with them. Below are the results for our region.

It shows nicely the beginning of the soft lock-down, starting with the announcement on March 12th, that from the 13th working from home was the default, and from the evening of March 15th the closure of all restaurants, schools etc. You see the enormous decline in use of transit, the drop in general retail and recreation, the drop in workplace presence due to skiing holidays and then the work from home measure, and the peak in grocery and pharmacy visits right after when the lock-down measures came into force, resulting in empty shelves in the super markets. This type of data is probably not extremely useful on a day to day basis, but it is useful to get a general feeling for how well people are complying with measures, as well as to detect the moment when things get back to their regular patterns. I know e.g. debet and credit card transactions similarly can be and are being used to determine e.g. if a community has returned to normal after for instance a hurricane or another emergency.

As we all try to work from home, Zoom videoconferencing has become the hottest company on the planet. It’s also at the center of a firestorm of criticism on privacy and security. Yesterday, CEO Eric S. Yuan tried to address the problem. His post is a good first step, but now Zoom has to follow … Continued

The post Zoom CEO Eric Yuan takes a step in the right direction on privacy appeared first on without bullshit.

Canada has signed an agreement with Amazon Canada to manage medical equipment distribution, according to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau.

“Our government has signed an agreement with Amazon Canada to manage the distribution of this equipment to the provinces and territories,” Trudeau said during an April 3rd news briefing outside his Ottawa home.

The agreement would see Amazon manage the distribution of medical equipment across the country, according to Reuters. This includes distributing personal protective equipment (PPE) and other supplies purchased by the government to the provinces and territories. Further, Amazon will provide the services “at cost, without profit.”

However, Trudeau did not provide additional details on the value of the contract.

In an email statement sent to MobileSyrup, Amazon’s country manager, Mike Strauch, said:

“The Amazon Canada team is proud to partner with the Government of Canada by leveraging our fulfillment network and delivery service partners to ship critical supplies to front-line medical professionals across the country.”

Further, Amazon will work with Canada Post, Purolator and other local delivery services to get medical supplies to the provinces and territories.

The Globe and Mail notes that the federal government has been working with manufacturers to increase the production of medical equipment in high demand. This includes face shields, masks, gloves, ventilators, gowns and test kits.

Source: Federal government Via: Reuters, Globe and Mail

The post Canada signs agreement with Amazon to distribute medical equipment appeared first on MobileSyrup.