onfocus

"The most surprising thing I encountered when joining was how manual most processes are. It blew my mind how many business critical processes were managed with excel spreadsheets being shared via email chains. It is incredible how flexible and effective Excel is for such a wide variety of use-cases."

Interesting look inside Amazon’s organization and development processes.

"Already, this surge is pushing their hospitals to the edge. And this is just the beginning. Hospitalizations always lag behind cases by about two weeks, so we’re only starting to see the effects of daily case counts that have tripled in the past 14 days (and are almost certainly underestimates)."

Another important update from Ed Yong. It's worth changing our behavior again to limit covid spread so we can keep our health care system working.

"Yet shortly after the vote, Facebook dissolved the task force and rolled back other intensive enforcement measures. The results of that decision were clear in the data ProPublica and The Post examined: During the nine increasingly tense weeks that led up to Jan. 6, the groups were inundated with posts attacking the legitimacy of Biden’s election while the pace of removals noticeably slowed."

A year later and Facebook has never faced consequences for its role in recruiting and facilitating an attack on our country.

"As more and more of our lives start to be run and dictated by the technology we use, it's a human right to be able to see how that technology works and modify it. It’s as key to freedom as freedom of speech or freedom of religion. So that is what I plan to spend the rest of my life fighting for."

Nice profile of Matt Mullenweg and WordPress—which is still a force on the Web.

"There is no one who could meaningfully tell him no, both because he owns 58 percent of the company’s voting shares and is also the chairman of its board, but also because Facebook is organized such that he effectively has the final say on every decision the company makes; no other company this size invests so much formal or informal power in one person. It’s a terrible thing to say about someone, but Mark Zuckerberg really is Facebook. It shows."

Excellent Zuckerant.

"Last week, Pfizer released updated results that showed the treatment cut the risk of hospitalization or death by 89% if given to high-risk adults within a few days of their first symptoms. If given within the first five days of symptoms, the efficacy was similar: 88%."

A pill is a lot easier for people to swallow (so to speak) so I hope this ramps up quickly as an option.

“If your job does not require you to be in the office in order to do it, please work from elsewhere,” Mr. Zucker said in the memo.

Getting March 2020 vibes from the news.

"Reporters feared for their lives because of authoritarianism from Republicans. But to cover the legislative process, they now must interact with and quote the same people who helped unleash forces that put them — and the country’s democracy — in danger."

How should journalists cover politics when Republicans want to do away with democracy?

"I’ve tried to consider how my actions cascade to affect those with less privilege, immune or otherwise. Instead of asking “What’s my risk?,” I’ve tried to ask “What’s my contribution to everyone’s risk?” I’ve done things that personally inconvenience me to avoid contributing to the much greater societal inconvenience of, say, a collapsed health-care system."

Ed Yong on being thoughtful about risk in a pandemic.

"In my “free time”, I write this blog. It started in March 2020 when my Dean asked me to update students, faculty, and staff on the developments of the pandemic. In 19 months, it’s grown to an audience of 350,000 people and reached over 106,000,000 people in 166 countries."

I don’t think I’ve mentioned YLE here before but you should subscribe! She translates the latest covid science for a general audience. It’s always extremely helpful.

"For now, in this moment, my job is to make lists of the many highlights of the year of 2021 before it ends forever. This is a job I take extremely seriously. Is it because I am the best at this job — this job of making lists? Yes."

Always enjoy these lists that make us think, ah yes, these are things from the past year.