I am sympathetic to Naomi Osaka’s mental health-based arguments for skipping press events during the French Open. I am also sympathetic to the French Open’s argument that participation in these press events is a mandatory part of her contract. While I am more sympathetic to Osaka’s position, I think we should all end the charade of bringing up an athlete in front of a media panel to answer for her poor performance or to gloat about her good performance in a match. It is frivolous and adds no value. Didn’t Bill Belichick expose the futility of the sports press conference twenty years ago or more?

I enjoyed Jill Lepore’s recent article on burnout in The New Yorker:

Burnout is a combat metaphor. In the conditions of late capitalism, from the Reagan era forward, work, for many people, has come to feel like a battlefield, and daily life, including politics and life online, like yet more slaughter. People across all walks of life—rich and poor, young and old, caretakers and the cared for, the faithful and the faithless—really are worn down, wiped out, threadbare, on edge, battered, and battle-scarred. Lockdowns, too, are features of war, as if each one of us, amid not only the pandemic but also acts of terrorism and mass shootings and armed insurrections, were now engaged in a Hobbesian battle for existence, civil life having become a war zone.

Lepore argues for cultural and economic origins for burnout, which make for a useful lens through which to study the phenomenon. Personally, I think the burnout really is a manifestation of depression, specifically of high-functioning depression coupled with exhaustion. Lepore touches on this, too.

Burnout still feels like its own thing to me, because I experience the feeling at my desk during the work day. Fortunately, I have learned (or am still learning) to slow down and demand less of myself, and of those around me, when I am feeling burnt out.

Republicans Block Independent Commission on Jan. 6 Riot. It’s shameful. I don’t think we need an independent commission to know and understand what happened, though. It is no secret what happened. It is no secret what went wrong. Everybody knows who is responsible.

Google wants to build a useful quantum computer by 2029. If it does, I’m sure it will cancel the project by 2030.

I hope so. I am a sucker for lossless codecs, even though I probably can’t hear the difference between them and AAC-256.

Napier Lopez reports in The Next Web:

Apple only just released its new iMacs featuring the acclaimed M1 ARM-based processor, but according to a report from Nikkei, the company plans to launch M2 as soon as July.

I don’t know anything in particular about Apple’s plans, but it seems crazy to me to expect a faster chip at this time. What I would expect is more I/O, driven by more cores and supported by more RAM. Of course, I could be wrong. Maybe Apple can overvolt the M1 to get more speed out of it, and will call it by another name.

I am very conservative about cities re-opening too soon, considering the pandemic has not ended. But NYC reopening on July 1 almost seems reasonable to me. Time will tell.

Per Tom Warren In The Verge:

Microsoft is changing its default Office font next year and wants everyone to help pick the new default. While there are more than 700 font options in Word, Microsoft has commissioned five new custom fonts for Office, in a move away from the Calibri font that has been the default in Microsoft Office for nearly 15 years.

I am unusually attached to Calibri so I am not looking forward to this change. Then again, at work I often have to publish using Arial Narrow, which I think is objectively awful in terms of aesthetics and legibility, so it probably won’t affect me too much.

I am unsettled today by yet another mass shooting in my country. It seems like not a day goes by without a New York Times news alert about it. (I plan to turn those alerts off after I finish writing this.) This time, a gunman killed seven people, then himself. This detail about the story jumped out at me: “The shooting likely lasted one or two minutes.”

I think the news media covers mass shootings like they are exciting, like some kind of action movie where bad outcomes only happen to the extras, and the rest of us get to watch. But “one or two minutes” isn’t an action movie. It isn’t something exciting. It’s actually, really, really stupid. That such a thing is even possible, outside a war, is embarrassing and shameful to all of us. I wish it were more widely considered to be.

Tom Warren’s article on The Verge caught my eye:

Microsoft is refreshing its Surface lineup with the Surface Laptop 4 today, which now offers the choice between AMD or Intel processors across both the 13.5- and 15-inch models. Both sizes will ship with Intel’s latest 11th Gen processors or AMD’s Ryzen 4000 series processors. Microsoft is shipping its Surface Laptop 4 on April 15th in the US, Canada, and Japan, starting at $999 for the AMD model and $1,299 for the Intel version — a $300 price gap between the pair.

If I was more of a Windows guy I would probably buy only Microsoft-brand laptops at this point. They don’t always have the best specs, but I like their designs a lot.

I spend most of my computing time using Windows for work. I try to forget that I have a Lenovo laptop by putting it behind a giant monitor and using an external keyboard and trackball to operate it. Lenovo laptops are good, I guess, as long as I don’t have to touch them. I don’t like their keyboards (both in terms of layout and feel) or the pointing devices (the trackpad is too small, and I’m done with using the trackpoint/eraserhead thing). The Surface Laptops keyboards and trackpads have always seemed a lot more sensible to me in how they are designed.

As reported by Lena H. Sun and Lori Aratani in The Washington Post:

Federal health officials gave the green light Friday for fully vaccinated people to resume travel as an estimated 100 million Americans have had at least one dose of coronavirus vaccine, and evidence mounts of the shots’ effectiveness.

That’s good news, but it doesn’t make me want to go out and travel by plane or train anytime soon.

I am fully vaccinated, but my kids are not (because, of course, there is no approved vaccine for children yet), and that dramatically limits my desire to travel, eat in indoor restaurants, or do any indoor activities in public unless they are absolutely necessary. I understand that it is probably quite safe for me to do some of these activities (provided I wear a mask, etc.), but it seems to me that doing so would still be (even more) uncomfortable and unpleasant (than it was before).

My wife and I have been talking every day about what is OK or not OK for us to do now that we are vaccinated. Despite both being vaccinated, we are still not comfortable dining in restaurants or staying in hotels (don’t even talk about flying!), but we have realized that we are way behind our friends and acquaintances in terms of risk taking. We remain concerned about our children being explored to the virus, and about the rising and “extremely high” (per The New York Times) COVID-19 risk level our county is currently at. It just doesn’t make sense for us to change our behavior that much yet—at least not until the local COVID infection numbers go down quite a bit, which won’t happen until after a lot more people get vaccinated.

James Vincent reports in The Verge:

The best-known AI text-generator is OpenAI’s GPT-3, which the company recently announced is now being used in more than 300 different apps, by “tens of thousands” of developers, and producing 4.5 billion words per day. That’s a lot of robot verbiage. This may be an arbitrary milestone for OpenAI to celebrate, but it’s also a useful indicator of the growing scale, impact, and commercial potential of AI text generation.

The obvious industry target for auto-text is journalism. It is already being used there for sports reporting, and could probably be used for local government reporting too. There are other areas it will encroach on that are news-adjacent (think financial news or business book digest services like Blinkist), like education and entertainment.

I’m an auditor, and I think that, eventually, auto-text is going to destroy about 50% of our billable hours. Auditors spend a ton of time writing. We document our procedures. We record our work. We summarize our findings. We write reports for our clients. Making sense of all the work, both for our own understanding and for our client’s, for the sake of writing it down, takes a lot of time. Moreover, the simple act of typing it out and, especially, hyperlinking everything together so we support our conclusions, requires a lot of manual work. Some of this work is communicative, but a lot of it (like the hyperlinking part) is mechanical. Consequently, much of it is ripe for automation.

I think, though, that transforming this laborious and time-consuming writing process into something auto-generated by a bot would produce a lot more information but a lot less knowledge than we had before. You gain a lot more understanding how a company, business process, or control works by writing about it than by reading about it. Why? Because writing is thinking. To write well is mentally strenuous. It requires you to think how you would communicate an idea to someone else, notably someone else with a different perspective and different knowledge than you have. At the end of the writing process, you should understand your subject backwards and forwards and from all sides; you could probably describe it in a number of different ways; and you will likely remember the gist of it, and specific nuances about it, for far longer than you would if you had just read about it in a report.

The world won’t end, and few will shed tears, when AI writes audit reports and work papers. Audits cost money, and businesses mostly don’t think they benefit from them. If it makes the auditors less knowledgeable, however, side effects will develop, and those will be long-lasting. Knowledgable auditors help make good control environments possible, which leads to more stable and more solvent companies. Decreasing the understanding of auditors could make systems and processes more unstable and less trustworthy over time. Additionally, knowledgable auditors often move to the business side and go on to manage well-controlled organizations. While the auditor-to-manager career path will likely continue, such moves would not result in the same level of management quality if the auditors don’t have to think as deeply about what they are auditing as they did before the AI text-bots took over. Neither of these side effects bodes particularly well for the people the auditors and the audited companies (and their fancy AI) serve.

Chiam Gartenberg reports in The Verge:

At the company’s “Engineering the Future” announcement today, Gelsinger announced plans to outsource more of Intel’s chip production to third-party foundries; a $20 billion investment into two new fabs in Arizona; and a new branch of the company called Intel Foundry Services, which will see Intel’s foundries produce chips for other companies.

Intel has had an awful decade, having missed out on smartphone chips and having stalled out at their 14nm process for years. Still, it is a strategically important company for my country, and I have to ill will toward it, even if I don’t prefer their products right now. I would love to see them become competitive again.

The idea of Intel fabbing chips for other companies is a big deal. Intel has never done that before. It seems to me like it could be the first step of spinning off that part of the business into its own company, and focusing on process shrinks in ways that the fully integrated Intel could not before.

Josh Berlinger of CNN reports today that the Colorado attack is the 7th mass shooting in 7 days in the US.

It seemed like there were periods in recent years in which we had a deadly mass shooting in the national news at least every week, if not several times each week. There has been something of a pause due to COVID, for understandable reasons. Unfortunately, we seem to be un-pausing now. Sadly, mass shooting rates in the U.S. seem to be getting back to normal.

But what is “normal?” It is actually hard to know what is normal for gun violence in the U.S. Here’s an interesting factoid from the article about my country’s gun problem:

It’s unclear how this number of mass shootings compares to an average week in the US.

Though some official gun violence data is available, the US federal government does not have a centralized system or database to track firearm incidents and mass shootings nationwide. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, which tracks some gun violence data, nearly 40,000 people were killed in incidents involving firearms in 2019.

The article omits the reason for this: There are actually laws against government agencies, such as the CDC, accurately tracking gun violence. That’s just stupid and self-defeating. While dying due to gun violence is incredibly unlikely, statistically speaking, it is also completely unnecessary. We should treat all gun deaths as preventable and unacceptable. Only then can we have the mental and moral clarity to do something about it.

As Anya Kamenetz, Cory Turner, and Allison Aubrey report on the NPR website today:

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has updated its guidance for schools. On Friday, the agency announced it “now recommends that, with universal masking, students should maintain a distance of at least 3 feet in classroom settings.”

Previously the guidance stated, “Physical distancing (at least 6 feet) should be maximized to the greatest extent possible.” The new guidelines still call for 6 feet of distance between adults and students as well as in common areas, such as auditoriums, and when masks are off, such as while eating. And the 6-foot distancing rule still applies for the general public in settings such as grocery stores.

This news is causing a good deal of consternation in my family. COVID cases are going up in our local schools right now. There has been an extremely high risk level in the community for several weeks, and in-person instruction is expanding anyway. Our school systems have been flatly stating that they will open even though they cannot conform with some of the requirements. This change in CDC requirements makes it easier for them to comply.

I think the changing of, and complexity in, the distancing rules makes them seem suspect and less likely to be followed at all. This concern is counterbalanced, however, by my belief that distancing helps very little in the classroom, because every classroom I have seen has poor ventilation. My wife and I are keeping our kids remote until the end of the school year. We are still hopeful enough to consider September as the right time to send them back to in-person learning.

Corinne Reichert and Stephen Shankland report in CNET:

Apple will launch a series of new iPads in April, a report Wednesday said. The new iPad Pros will come with Apple’s homemade M1 chips, a Thunderbolt port, and better cameras and screens, according to Bloomberg. They will reportedly come in 11- and 12.9-inch display sizes.

That’s cool. Maybe I’m not a “Pro” but the iPad Air 4 is just about perfect for me. From my layman’s perspective, the A14-based chip in the iPad Air 4 is very similar to the M1, minus some of the cores. The 2020 iPad Pro’s chip (an A12Z) is a generation or two behind that, though it has more cores than the A14 does. Apple obviously needs to remedy that to help justify the iPad Pro’s greater price.

I am thinking that the “Thunderbolt” port is merely following the direction that everything with a USB-C connector is going in: USB 4 compatibility. That, plus more processor cores, sounds good for videographers, podcasters, photographers, and (I guess) gamers. Unfortunately, if Apple doesn’t fix some problems with the Files app (just try transferring a gigabyte-sized file off your iPad to a network share—I’ll wait…for it to fail), these performance boosts will be hamstrung.

Matthew Panzarino of TechCrunch reports:

Apple has discontinued its original HomePod after four years. It says that it will continue to produce and focus on the HomePod mini, introduced last year.

I, like many audiophiles, passed on the original HomePod due to its high price and lack of connectivity. I’m sure I would have enjoyed how it sounded, and its size is just right for me, but I would likely have had to buy two of them to be fully satisfied (stereo separation is important to me). At $349 each, that was too expensive.

The smaller, cheaper HomePod mini holds little appeal to me, and seems to be a far less interesting product for the audio engineers at Apple to work on. For all I know, though, it sells in huge numbers, which makes it interesting in and of itself. Maybe a HomePod mini max (ha!) will be released someday, at around $150, which will hit the price/performance sweet spot I am looking for.

I guess, based on the occurrence of a President Biden speech, that this week marks the one-year anniversary of COVID-19 in the United States. To me, the baleful presence of COVID-19 has been around for what feels like much, much longer—so long that I can’t even remember it clearly.

My COVID panic started in early January, when we thought the disease was only in Wuhan. In America, for a couple weeks at least, it still seemed likely that the disease would never leave China, much like H1N1 and SARS never made a big impact here. For almost three months my mental state caromed between what I think of now as irrational fear and rational fear. I could see the whole year of 2020 play out in my imagination, way before my friends and family could see what was coming, but I could do nothing to stop it, and I could do almost nothing to protect my family from it. All those feelings felt very real and very debilitating, even when almost no one else around me was feeling them.

I had about two months of angst about COVID before it actually hit around here. The last time I went out with friends and family was, I think, on March 14, 2020. We went to see a musical and when out to eat at a crowded restaurant afterward. It was really hard for me to feel comfortable the entire time, but I didn’t want to let everybody down because I was concerned about a pandemic that hadn’t hit our area yet. Less than a week later, my entire family was on lockdown.

Back in January, February, and early March 2020, it didn’t help me at all to have known about the scope and length and shape of prior pandemics, like the Spanish Flu, which I know, from reading family letters, killed a bunch of people in my extended family about a hundred years ago. It didn’t help me at all to know what I should do and buy to prepare for it. It didn’t help me at all that I am smart enough to think for myself and to scrutinize, with a pretty good understanding of the relevant science and statistics, the information and advice experts were providing to us. All of these things just made me feel more uncertain and more cynical about what was going on.

A year later, I am feeling more hopeful. I have the vaccine after all, and am probably (but not definitely) immune to COVID 18. But my county is still at extremely high risk level. The numbers are still higher than they were last year when all of us were in a panic. Despite that, all the states, even blue states like mine, are reopening rapidly and throwing caution to the wind, when it would be more prudent to do so more gradually. It makes me nervous that we are giving the virus a chance to circulate long enough to adapt resistance to our vaccines.

I was early in being scared of COVID, and I may be late in getting over that fear. I just hope that, when I look forward from today, whatever fear I feel is merely anxiety over things that will not play out, rather than the accurate foresight into the future that I had late last winter.

There was a brush fire yesterday not too far from where I live. Brush fires are incredibly rare where I live, so this is a curiosity to me. We have had dry, windy weather for about two weeks now, which makes wildfire conditions rife. My family was outside yesterday but fortunately we didn’t notice it; we must have been upwind.

Matthew S. Schwartz reports for NPR:

To millions of people around the world, the young poet Amanda Gorman represents hope, change and the promise of a better America.

But to a security guard on Friday night, the young African American woman represented a potential threat to public safety.

This is a sad story. My first thought was that Amanda Gorman could legitimately have been harmed in a situation like this. Then I thought, she should have a bodyguard or an entourage with her at all times for protection. Then I thought, she should not need to! That could ruin her life.

Amanda Gorman is a strong and bold speaker, and deserves the last word on the matter:

“In a sense, he was right,” the former National Youth Poet Laureate added. “I AM A THREAT: a threat to injustice, to inequality, to ignorance. Anyone who speaks the truth and walks with hope is an obvious and fatal danger to the powers that be.”

Per Mark Sweeney in The Guardian:

“Why would a music streaming company and a financial services company join forces?!,” Dorsey posted on Twitter, posing the obvious question as he announced the news. “It comes down to a simple idea: finding new ways for artists to support their work. New ideas are found at intersections, and we believe there is a compelling one between music and the economy.”

This is great news if you’re Jay-Z. He will cash out cash out with a tidy profit for his also-ran music service. I was surprised to learn that Tidal’s value appreciated so much since he bought it.

It sure seems like a bad deal for Square, though, who accepts a ton of business risk without much benefit. I probably don’t know what Tidal’s cultural cache is—I had assumed that most people had never heard of it—so I can’t appreciate its value. Still, even if the acquisition sounds like a bad idea, $300 million is play money to the Jay-Zs and Jack Dorseys of the world, so who cares?

Sam Schechner and Keach Hagey report in The Wall Street Journal:

Google plans to stop selling ads based on individuals’ browsing across multiple websites, a change that could hasten upheaval in the digital advertising industry.

I don’t even know what to make of this, unless it is a flex of Google’s monopoly power in search, maps, and video (YouTube). Who needs to track users across websites when every browser tab starts at or ends at a Google-owned website?

Ella Nilson at vox.com reports:

But much of Tanden’s résumé was overshadowed by her proliferous online posting — at least 1,000 tweets raking both Republicans and leftist Democrats over the coals — that Tanden quietly started deleting in November 2020.

I haven’t been following this story, but my interest was piqued when I learned that Neera Tanden’s nomination chances were in jeopardy because of her tweets from the past. People keep getting in trouble for what they post to Twitter. (“Social media” in these cases always is Twitter, too. That is probably just because it is public facing, though it is also a popular place for broadcasting, calling out, and grandstanding.)

It will soon be the conventional wisdom that those who seek high offices—in public service or in private industry—should have no public social media presence, no blog—certainly no Twitter account—maybe no public online presence at all. That bothers me because I think there is value in publishing one’s thoughts to the world, in a blog, vlog, podcast, or whatever other medium I can’t even conceive of yet. People have an urge to share and should not feel that they will be punished for it, especially years after they tap the “post” button.

I understand that some people are deliberately awful on social media, and that is a problem, but isn’t it also a problem that “the Internet never forgets?” The right to be forgotten is at both ridiculous to ask for and essential for people to get along with each other after a certain point. How should we evaluate a person based on what she posted online? Does it matter how long ago a thought was posted? What is fair? I think we are at a cultural crossroads regarding these questions, and may be stuck at that crossroads for a long, long time.

Joon Lee of ESPN reports:

Boston Red Sox second baseman Dustin Pedroia, who hasn’t played since 2019 because of a knee injury suffered two seasons earlier, announced his retirement Monday.

“Could it have ended better and I finished my career the right way? Yeah of course,” Pedroia said on a Zoom call with the media. “But there was a reason I was the first one dressed at 5:30 for a 7 o’clock game. I always tell my teammates that you never know if the game is going to start early. My biggest thing in my mind was that this could be my last game and you don’t know. That’s the best way I approached it from Little League on. I had the best time playing.”

As a Red Sox fan, Pedroia’s retirement is no surprise. He hasn’t been physically able to play for years, since he got injured by a Manny Machado slide at second base. It is sad nonetheless. In his prime, he was fun and exciting to watch, and embodied the quality I enjoy seeing the most as a fan: “the love of the game.”

Kim Lyons reports in The Verge:

“The contention that social media as an industry censors conservatives is now, as we speak, becoming part of an even broader disinformation campaign from the right, that conservatives are being silenced all across American society,” the report’s lead researcher Paul Barrett said in an interview with The Verge. “This is the obvious post-Trump theme, we’re seeing it on Fox News, hearing it from Trump lieutenants, and I think it will continue indefinitely. Rather than any of this going away with Trump leaving Washington, it’s only getting more intense.”

This is one of those studies that may help future historians sort through the mess we are living through now. It is pretty obvious to me that there is a conservative bias on social media rather than a liberal one. The shocking election in 2016 of a mendacious “conservative” social media gasbag is enough proof. That he wasn’t deplatformed until he lost the 2020 election, despite sowing devision and inciting violence on social media platforms, is further proof of it.

I bristle now at hearing or seeing the word “conservative” describe the people running a disinformation campaign against their fellow citizens. There’s nothing “conservative” about this influential and dangerous wing of the Republican Party, which is undermining the basic traditions and institutions of society. I identify strongly as a political progressive, but I am also quite conservative in how I think that people should behave publicly and how ethically and transparently political institutions should be run.