I find, the more I work with git, the less good I seem to be at it! Yes, this seems to be the Dunning–Kruger Effect in action.

Wajahat Ali, writing an op-ed in the New York Times, has given up on Trump supporters:

We cannot help people who refuse to help themselves.

I get it. It was shocking that Trump actually gained in the vote count after four years of doing everything he could to diminish American standing and influence in the world, and the rights and lives of people within his own borders. It is worse to have lived through an era in which the Republican Party went from a political movement with some bad ideas about taxation and social services to a full-on fascist personality cult.

It’s easy to blame Trump. He is a problem. But he is not the only problem. Ali hits at this deep into the article (my emphasis added in bold), stating something that is vital to understanding the predicament we are in:

Trump is an extension of their id, their culture, their values, their greed. He is their defender and savior. He is their blunt instrument. He is their destructive drug of choice.

The thing we should not forget about the Trump supporters is that they empower him—it’s not the other way around. If Trump is a lightning rod, his supporters are the lightning.

You can’t turn your back on those people because they are still here and are not going anywhere. Changing their minds might be a generation’s worth of work, but it is work that has to be done because social institutions are breaking down, and not by accident. The Republican Party transformed itself over the past fifty years into what it is now, through planning, determination, and lots and lots of money. There is no reason that the Democratic Party can’t do the same. It takes a lot of things, but most of all will.

This article has something interesting to say about Ron Howard’s films, but I disagree with its premise that Ron Howard is “typically dismissed as a studio workman rather than an artist.” Who “dismisses” the director of Apollo 13, Frost/Nixon, and A Beautiful Mind?

John Gruber’s suggestion of a progressive, tax-bracket-like system for Apple’s App Store commissions is much smarter than the system Apple announced today. They should just run things like this by him (@gruber) first. 😂

Nick Statt in The Verge reports:

Epic Games and Spotify, united in their fight against Apple, each released statements on Wednesday slamming the iPhone maker following news of its new App Store fee reduction for developers making less than $1 million per year.

File this under “some people are never happy.”

While I don’t love all of Apple’s policies—for example, it is ridiculous that developers have to opt in to the small business program—I believe that, as the owner of their platform (which is not even the majority platform), they do have the right to make and enforce whatever rules they choose.

I found this statistic (emphasis added) in the article very interesting:

The cut should apply to an estimated 98 percent of iOS app developers that generated just 5 percent of the App Store’s revenue last year, according to analytics firm Sensor Tower.

That is a long, long tail. It really makes me think about how insignificant most app developers are to Apple.

Eliza Shapiro reports in The New York Times:

New York City’s entire public school system will shutter on Thursday, Chancellor Richard A. Carranza wrote in an email to school principals, in a worrisome signal that a second wave of the coronavirus has arrived. Schools have been open for in-person instruction for just under eight weeks.

This is no great surprise to me, despite having hear Mayor de Blasio say the contrary just yesterday on the radio.

I very much enjoyed Cal Newport’s rumination on Getting Things Done (GTD), and Merlyn Mann’s contributions to personal productivity culture, in The New Yorker.

Finding Getting Things Done, through Merlyn Mann’s 43 Folders, was transformative for me. It supercharged my productivity, for a while at least, numerous times in my life.

GTD techniques and processes have not fixed the root problems with knowledge work, which Newport points out in the article:

In this context, the shortcomings of personal-productivity systems like G.T.D. become clear. They don’t directly address the fundamental problem: the insidiously haphazard way that work unfolds at the organizational level. They only help individuals cope with its effects. A highly optimized implementation of G.T.D. might have helped Mann organize the hundreds of tasks that arrived haphazardly in his in-box daily, but it could do nothing to reduce the quantity of these requests.

We have a workaholic culture that puts a lot of pressure on the individual worker to be responsible for many, many things that are outside the worker’s control. GTD is both a means of dealing with this pressure, and a personal methodology that prolongs one’s exposure to all this pressure. It increases the number of balls you can keep in the air, but doesn’t address the problem that others keep throwing more and more balls at you that they expect you to juggle.

Gruber’ s review of the M1 Macs is the only one I plan to read closely. I want an M1-based Mac Mini so badly now. In any other year I would have ordered it already.

I don’t know if it is my imagination, or just my desire for a new computer, but Xcode 12 seems so slow on Big Sur.

I have updated my very old MacBook Pro to Big Sur, and am pleased that it actually works and is more-or-less acceptable in appearance, sound, and operating speed. I long for one of the new Mac Minis, though. I bet it would be so much faster and smoother to use.

This is pretty great, isn’t it?

It seems really weird to me that Pfizer’s COVID Vaccine Has to Be Stored at -80°C. How unfortunate. I hope people can work out the logistics of it.

I’m looking forward to watching the next episode of “The Mandalorian.” It is my favorite Star Wars property since the original trilogy, by a long shot. I don’t even consider myself a Star Wars fan anymore, but I like “The Mandalorian” a lot, because it is so different.

None of the Trump flags (huge flags!) in my neighborhood have been taken down yet. All but one of the Biden signs are down. At this point, I’m expecting the Trump flags never to be taken down.

I still don’t fully understand how iOS apps will run on the Mac without a touchscreen. I am very familiar with the iOS Simulator, so I get the basic idea. What I don’t get is how multitouch would work, or how scrolling will be handled (without a touchpad or mouse wheel).

I updated my late 2013 MacBook Pro to the Big Sur release candidate this afternoon. It was an uneventful upgrade, which is a best-case scenario, I think. The new UI will take some getting used to, but all my software appears to be working so far.

Ooh! An Apple Silicon Mac Mini. I am excited to see that!

I very much enjoyed the “His Dark Materials” season 2 premiere last night. I also hope that the producers didn’t blow their entire visual effects budget on that one episode, because it looked absolutely amazing.

As reported in the New York Times (and elsewhere):

The company said that the analysis found that the vaccine was more than 90 percent effective in preventing the disease among trial volunteers who had no evidence of prior coronavirus infection. If the results hold up, that level of protection would put it on par with highly effective childhood vaccines for diseases such as measles. No serious safety concerns have been observed, the company said.

This is the best news I’ve heard about the pandemic in quite some time, and it seems legit this time. (I may be biased in favor of Pfizer, though.) We are all hopeful that a safe and effective vaccine will be found, and distributed widely and equitably, as soon as possible.

Alex Trebek has died. It certainly is the end of an era.

My wife and I watched the Biden-Harris acceptance speeches with our daughter, who has never seen anything like it before. We are feeling excited and hopeful. I am especially eager to follow Kamala Harris’s work as Vice President in the hopes that she will be a transformative figure in the office.

I was at first surprised that Trump gained voters across the board since 2016. But then I recalled that he went from joke candidate in 2016 to the actual President of the United States (who haunts our every waking thought and nightmare) in 2020. The incumbent always has many advantages, but legitimacy may be the most important one.

I am puzzling a lot of things out right now, and trying to focus on physical and mental health.

I wonder if Apple silicon Macs will have good/better/best processor options like the Intel ones always had.

I can’t believe that the Red Sox re-hired Alex Cora.