Month: April 2021

Absurdist France

perhaps the extreme bureaucracy nonsense of the french will finally catch up with them?

With the announcement of the third Paris lockdown last month to try to control the spread of Covid-19, an apotheosis of the absurd was reached.

A dense, 2-page version of the notorious “attestation,” a government form to be completed anytime one leaves home, was so convoluted that it tied the Interior Minister’s spokeswoman in verbal knots trying to explain it. The document had metastasized with each lockdown into an ever more ungainly monster.

Which of 15 boxes to check? That you planned to walk 1 kilometer with your dog, the maximum allowed, or up to 10 kilometers with your children? Would you be allowed 11 kilometers if you took the kids and the pet? What if Fido wanted to walk 10 kilometers and little Mathilde none?

Expert COVID-19 long-haulers

Most of the other treatments haven’t had the funds for extensive trials, and without proper research, some drugs run the risk of getting overhyped based on limited information. “The early bets financially were made on investing in vaccine trials and investing in monoclonal antibodies. What received relatively less funding and attention were drugs that were already FDA-approved that could be repurposed for COVID.” his goal with COVIDSalon is to provide a dedicated hub of treatment information so people don’t have to sift through a barrage of old articles. A large segment of COVIDSalon aims to help COVID long-haulers. At the moment, only a small number of trials are focusing on long-haulers. James also highlights drugs like fluvoxamine that have alleviated long-term symptoms in a test of COVID-19 patients, plus others such as the nutritional supplement GlyNAC, which is worth watching but is still in very early-stage trials. The way that long-haulers have organized throughout the pandemic—discussing their symptoms in Facebook and Slack groups, and pushing medical professionals to pay attention to their ailments—echoes the patient advocacy that James helped popularize during the AIDS epidemic. Through publications such as ATN, many people with AIDS knew as much about the latest niche medical findings as licensed doctors did. “I think that’s the same with the long-haulers. Everyone is learning about the long-term consequences of this in real time.”

Tetris revolution

The improvements have added up. To qualify for the 2020 C.T.W.C., players had to achieve a near max-out within 2 hours. This standard of play left behind veterans who had qualified in each of the previous 10 years. Jonas, with his 1 max-out in qualification, entered the tournament ranked 31th among 64. Joseph, having scored a world-record 12 max-outs, came in as the No. 1 seed. By the quarter-final, the entire old guard had vanished. The remaining players were all of the YouTube generation, with many explicitly crediting its algorithm for introducing them to classic Tetris.

We made oxygen on Mars

An experiment on board the Mars Perseverance rover designed to produce breathable oxygen from carbon dioxide has been switched on and is working! On April 20 it produced 5 grams of oxygen — not a huge amount, but it’s designed to make as much as 10 grams per hour, and this is the very first time oxygen has been converted from native air on another planet. MOXIE by itself can’t produce that much, but again it’s not designed to actually do that, it’s just to make sure the tech works. Still, just 4 MOXIEs could keep a human breathing on Mars. That first amount it made, 5 grams, is enough for ~10 minutes worth of breathing for a single person.

Crew Dragon reuse

Both Booster and Dragon spacecraft are flight proven for today’s Crew-2 flight to the ISS. NΛSΛ chooses flight-proven spacecraft and booster for its most precious missions. Dragon Pilot Megan McArthur is sitting in the very same seat that her husband Bob Behnken sat for the SpaceX DM-2 mission 11 months ago. Thank you for helping humanity raise its aspirations and dreams!

P.S. many years ago, when reusable boosters were an audacious dream, I heard them described as “used”, as in a used car. No, no, we should call them “flight proven” and I wagered that the long term data would show them to be safer than a first flight. “Would you want to be on the very first flight of a new airplane coming off the line?” I asked. The moniker became a meme.

Destroying Cellebrite

By a truly unbelievable coincidence, I was recently out for a walk when I saw a small package fall off a truck ahead of me. As I got closer, the dull enterprise typeface slowly came into focus: Cellebrite. Inside, we found the latest versions of the Cellebrite software, a hardware dongle designed to prevent piracy (tells you something about their customers I guess!), and a bizarrely large number of cable adapters.

By including a specially formatted but otherwise innocuous file in an app on a device that is then scanned by Cellebrite, it’s possible to execute code that modifies not just the Cellebrite report being created in that scan, but also all previous and future generated Cellebrite reports from all previously scanned devices and all future scanned devices in any arbitrary way (inserting or removing text, email, photos, contacts, files, or any other data), with no detectable timestamp changes or checksum failures. This could even be done at random, and would seriously call the data integrity of Cellebrite’s reports into question.

Any app could contain such a file, and until Cellebrite is able to accurately repair all vulnerabilities in its software with extremely high confidence, the only remedy a Cellebrite user has is to not scan devices. In completely unrelated news, upcoming versions of Signal will be periodically fetching files to place in app storage. These files are never used for anything inside Signal and never interact with Signal software or data, but they look nice, and aesthetics are important in software. Files will only be returned for accounts that have been active installs for some time already, and only probabilistically in low % based on phone number sharding. We have a few different versions of files that we think are aesthetically pleasing, and will iterate through those slowly over time. There is no other significance to these files.

Amazon Workers Spoke

Workers at Amazon’s warehouse in Bessemer, Alabama, voted by a margin of more than 2 to 1 not to join a union. It’s a heavy blow for the Retail, Wholesale and Department Store Union, for the wider labor movement, and for the many politicians and activists who wanted the union’s push to succeed. But the workers have spoken — and all of the groups on the other side should be listening to the message. Instead, many rejected the result and attacked the process, almost as though an election is to be respected only if you win. When Republicans did that after the presidential election, they were rightly condemned. The idea that the overwhelming majority of workers in Bessemer were intimidated or bamboozled into voting against their interests — as unionization proponents have suggested — is not only implausible; it’s insulting, as though workers couldn’t possibly be so foolish to have voted against it, so they must have been coerced or tricked. Nonsense.

Real vs deal friends

These are what some social scientists call “expedient friendships”—with people we might call “deal friends”—and they are probably the most common type most of us have. The average adult has 16 people they would classify as friends. Of these, 3 are “friends for life,” and 5 are people they really like. The other 8 are not people they would hang out with 1-on-1. We can logically infer that these friendships are not an end in themselves but are instrumental to some other goal, such as furthering one’s career or easing a social dynamic. Expedient friendships might be a pleasant—and certainly useful—part of life, but they don’t usually bring lasting joy and comfort. If you find that your social life is leaving you feeling a little empty and unfulfilled, it might just be that you have too many deal friends, and not enough real friends.