Well, “no big Paxlovid bounce” remains true, but last week was certainly a small one. I tested positive again on Friday and the weekend was pretty much no fun; no huge symptoms but I’ve just been tired and a bit fuzzy. Testing negative again today, which hopefully will continue. S. is still fine. We’re masking diligently, we have house zones we keep to, and we have air purifiers running.
Movies reviewed this week: The Long Good Friday, Billy Liar, Picnic, The Servant, Annette, and The Hard Way.
Phew. No big Paxlovid bounce, thankfully. This is what I thought of when I heard about Tesla engineers coming over to validate Twitter code. It’s both true that the author seems pretty savvy and that the culture over at Tesla is focused on velocity over anything. Good times. Let’s get all the Twitter stuff out of the way! Evelyn Douek has smart things to say about Twitter’s regulatory challenges. Not just in the US, not just in the EU – India’s going to be a huge headache. This layoff guide for Twitter employees is worth reading for anyone who’s nervous about their job. Or anyone, really. Use your work laptop in a way which will enable you to execute on those precautions quickly. One billion dollars in infrastructure cuts? This is already working out badly (original). Sympathies to the guy who just went on call for a bunch of systems he doesn’t know. Gergley has a good thread on the problems ahead. Here’s another SRE still employed by Twitter, and he thinks it’s gonna be ugly. Rakyll is a well-respected principal engineer in the reliability biz; she’s pessimistic (original) and thinks people are leaving. Tangentially related: Starlink is inevitably having to throttle bandwidth. Some math: Starlink wants $5K/month for 2 terminals with a total of 350 Mbps download. That’s cheap and cool but the existing mobile solutions can deliver bandwidth in the Gbps range. OK, that’s enough horrified observation of the train wreck. Mastodon is treating me OK so far. ...
I got access to Lex, one of those AI writing assistants, so I tried to do the inevitable. Bold text is mine. I’m not sure this is entirely useful.
Capturing this for my own reference and in case reading about the mechanics of health care are useful to anyone. I had not previously had covid to the best of my knowledge.
Movies reviewed this week: Wendell & Wild, Emily the Criminal, Anna and the Apocalypse, Good Morning, Tom Jones, Interceptor, Barbarian, and Gomorrah.
Still got covid but thanks to Paxlovid or my natural recuperative energies or something, I’m feeling much better than I did on Tuesday. Let’s see how this goes. The report described severe staffing challenges that included large numbers of unfilled positions on its Site Integrity team, one of three business units responsible for policing misinformation. It also highlighted a lack of language capabilities so severe that many content moderators resorted to Google Translate to fill the gaps. In one of the most startling parts of the report, a head count chart said Site Integrity had just two full-time people working on misinformation in 2021, and four working full-time to counter foreign influence operations from operatives based in places like Iran, Russia and China. ...
Only one actor who appears in more than one of these movies, just sayin'. (My new posting habit has been interrupted by a case of covid. Doing fine, just not too bright right now.)
It’s reasonably well known that one path to a hospitable online community is charging people a fee to register. See Metafilter for the best case. They charge $5 to register and it cuts way down on drive-by assholes. The less good case is Something Awful, which charges $10 to register and is often a pit. But that’s because they don’t moderate all that hard. (Something Awful is also the only pro wrestling discussion forum I know of where you’ll get raked through the coals for saying things like “Unfortunately abadon as an attractive woman would have a lot more success if her gimmick didn’t involve making herself extremely unattractive”. It’s a pit of contradictions. Anyhow.) ...
Movies reviewed this week: The L-Shaped Room, M. Butterfly, The Hidden, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, and A Kind of Loving.