Archive of posts with tag 'Coronavirus'

Figma and Remote Work →

August 11, 2020 • #

A thoughtful and transparent post from Figma founder Dylan Field on their plans for re-establishing a hybrid / hub / remote model for the future of their teams.

In many ways, we followed our normal design process in revising this policy. We thought about the competitive landscape and ecosystem, collected data, explored different options and then converged on a solution. However, unlike making a product change, this was weirdly emotional for me—small changes in policy sometimes felt like we were leaping between potential worlds. I didn’t feel like I had a framework for the decision until the end of our process and at times it was as if there was nothing to hold onto.

The idea of hybrid sounds attractive to me personally, but I can see the possible risks he describes here in ending up with sort of the worst of both worlds — expensive but oft-deserted office and lack of clarity on who’s in or out each day. We’re unsure what our plan looks like specifically, but there’s no immediate pressure to overcommit on a particular plan just yet. This is interesting food for thought on what others are doing.

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Will COVID Kill the Office? →

July 2, 2020 • #

Rory Sutherland’s latest column for The Spectator:

Covid-19 will change how humanity works. Lockdown has revealed that a large part of the busyness of business is driven by the need to signal commitment (presenteeism), rather than the creation of value. Many people have realised that the most stressful part of working is not the worthwhile work itself but the accompanying worthless bustle. We have seen how commuting is frenetic and often unnecessary. In the future, perhaps people will go into the office when they need to or want to, rather than simply because they must.

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Tour de France to be Raced on Zwift in July →

June 29, 2020 • #

This year’s UCI season was demolished due to COVID-19 like most other sports. All of the big monuments, classics, and at least 1 Grand Tour (Giro) were postponed. Milan—San Remo, Dauphiné, Paris—Roubaix, and a bunch of others all happening in the fall, if at all this year.

Originally the Tour de France was in that bunch. It normally runs around the fourth of July and Bastille Day, but was pushed with the season nominally continuing in August. Now the UCI and race organizers decided to try something new, running the race in Zwift, a cycling fitness game with real tracks and worlds built in a VR-like environment:

The Virtual Tour de France starts on Saturday July 4, running across three consecutive weekends for a total of six stages. Over the course of the race, there’s a range of terrain from sprints to summit finishes, providing options for riders of all abilities.

Stages one and two are to be held on Zwift’s fictional island of Watopia, but with modifications to its appearance as a nod to Nice, the site of this year’s Grand Départ.

I’m glad they’re doing something to try and capture some of the cycling spirit during this hiatus period. Expectations are pretty low that it’ll be that exciting, but as yet another forced experiment in virtualizing the world, we’ll see what happens.

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Florida Beaches, 3 Months Post Lockdown

May 29, 2020 • #

We’re almost to the three-month mark since the lockdown started here in Pinellas. Pretty quickly all of the public beaches were closed, right in the midst of Spring Break season. For a county with so many of its economic drivers tied to tourism and beachgoers, that specific element of the lockdown was unprecedented, but given the unknown around the virus’s possible impacts, it was the right decision.

Earlier in May the county reopened the beaches, and naturally, the first weekend was mayhem. We’ve gone a few times throughout the month, and it’s certainly been busy, but not a ton busier than it’d be during any other May.

We’ve been to Pass-a-Grille, St Pete Beach, and Sunset Beach, each of them is moderately busy during normal time, but the biggest issue right now has been the artificial limiting of crowds by law enforcement, mostly by limiting permitted parking. The beaches themselves are crowded in pockets, but still far safer and more distanced than some parks and trails I’ve been to. There are officers keeping an eye on things at the beach walkways and helicopters patrolling up and down looking for anything overwhelmingly crowded. I’m glad they’ve been able to manage it without it getting out of hand. My anectodal feedback on the national news coverage of “OMG they’re reopening beaches” is that they’re overblowing it. It’s not near as bad as most of the b-roll beach footage would have you believe.

Overall it seems like the county’s done a good job in a tenuous situation. And for the most part residents have been respectful in mask-wearing and distance-keeping — a lot more than I would’ve predicted. Floridians aren’t well known for compliance and good behavior.

It’s looking like we’re completely lifting restrictions on beaches, playgrounds, and pools next week, as well. Hopefully with appropriate distancing behavior we can gradually get comfortable again with at least outdoor activities, while keeping an eye on the case count figures to be cautious.

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SSC Coronavirus Update →

May 19, 2020 • #

A great post on various things coronavirus from Scott Alexander. The utility and tradeoffs of lockdowns, virus transmission, country by country differences, and more.

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Did We Lock Down Some Places Too Early? →

May 14, 2020 • #

As the country is becoming more and more anxious about ending COVID lockdowns (with some states opening while others rein further in), Tyler Cowen had an interesting post about the timing of lockdowns:

Let’s say you have a simple model of political sustainability where Americans will tolerate [???] months of lockdown — shall we say two? — but not much more. (Maybe three months if we had Merkel as president.) Then, if you scare/lock down in parts of the country where the virus is not yet evident, you create economic misery but not many public health gains. Who after all thinks that Seattle should have been locked down last September? Right?

Many parts of America now hate the lockdown, as they see the economic devastation, are not witnessing overloaded hospital systems, and just don’t quite “get it.” And they are now taking off the lockdown, through both legal and informal means, before it is optimal to do so.

We now think we know many details about the virus which in hindsight align pretty closely with what intuition would tell you: outdoor, open air spaces are good, closed, poorly ventilated spaces are bad, masks can help, densely-populated areas are riskier, high traffic points and large gatherings are dangerous (subways, sporting events). What’s interesting to think about here, some of which is water-under-the-bridge at this point, is what could’ve been different with the economic impact and the perceptions around lockdowns if we’d eased into them more reasonably than we did. In areas that at the time hadn’t been impacted yet, what if we’d started by instituting masks, sanitation, and distancing without government-mandated lockdown right out of the gate? Could we have had largely the same curve-bending impact, but waited to start a harder lockdown, therefore extending our patience for the economic and social impacts further into the year?

Many towns began lockdowns in step with what was happening in larger cities, even before there was material presence of the virus. It’s hard to criticize that approach in hindsight as the downside risk of shelter-in-place was much lower than that of continued spread of an unknown pathogen.

I’ll say what everyone else does: I’m not an expert in any of this. I wish more people that say that would then actually stop preaching or promoting one technique or another as if it is the categorically correct response, when it’s been proven time and again over the last 3 months that no one has the answers.

A lesson learned here in how the COVID pandemic has played out is that we need to think more about the sociopolical sustainability of whatever the plan is, assuming there even is a plan, which is another criticism you could level at the situation.

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Widespread Looting →

April 27, 2020 • #

Arnold Kling has been a great follow lately. On the Fed’s stimulus plan for COVID economic shutdown:

I have said all along that the checks being written to households and small businesses were just a fig leaf to cover a massive bailout of large corporations and the financial industry.

If we saw mobs breaking into stores, pulling items from the shelves, and walking out, we would recognize this as looting. But if we define looting as taking property without giving anything of value in return, then it is now widespread.

Tenants are looting landlords by not paying rent and not getting evicted.

Borrowers are looting banks by not paying mortgages or credit card debt.

Shareholders of airlines are looting the rest of us by getting bailout money.

The financial industry is looting us by getting bailout money from the Fed.

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Weekend Reading: COVID Edition

April 25, 2020 • #

⚗️ COVID and Forced Experiments

Benedict Evans looks at what could return to normal after coronavirus, and what else might have accelerated change that was already happening.

“Every time we get a new kind of tool, we start by making the new thing fit the existing ways that we work, but then, over time, we change the work to fit the new tool. You’re used to making your metrics dashboard in PowerPoint, and then the cloud comes along and you can make it in Google Docs and everyone always has the latest version. But one day, you realise that the dashboard could be generated automatically and be a live webpage, and no-one needs to make those slides at all. Today, sometimes doing the meeting as a video call is a poor substitute for human interaction, but sometimes it’s like putting the slides in the cloud.”

📈 COVID-19: What’s wrong with the models?

One of the things continually aggravating about all of the data, models, projections, and analyses about COVID-19 is how little anyone cares to retroactively analyze prior predictions. Over the last two months the predictions have been all over the map, and as time marches on and many are wrong, some are right, there’s no analysis of what assumptions were made that turned out not to be true causing the wide divergence between projection and reality.

Peter Attia calls out here something rarely acknowledged about why projections are wicked:

“Projections only matter if you can hold conditions constant from the moment of your prediction, and even then, it’s not clear if projections and models matter much at all if they are not based on actual, real-world data. In the case of this pandemic, conditions have changed dramatically (e.g., aggressive social distancing), while our data inputs remain guesswork at best.”

💉 The Pandemic Isn’t a Black Swan but a Portent of a More Fragile Global System

Nassim Taleb, making his way into the New Yorker.

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rt.live →

April 21, 2020 • #

Kevin Systrom, founder of Instagram, has been working on this site that gives up-to-date reads on Rt by state, giving a read on how fast the coronavirus is spreading.

These are up-to-date values for Rt, a key measure of how fast the virus is growing. It’s the average number of people who become infected by an infectious person. If Rt is above 1.0, the virus will spread quickly. When Rt is below 1.0, the virus will stop spreading.

Tabbing between the time ranges shows how infection rates are changing over the last 4 weeks.

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Building in World 2.0 →

April 20, 2020 • #

Daniel Gross has a good list of things that will change post-coronavirus lockdown — patterns of lifesytle, businesses, real estate, and others:

A few notable ones:

The (temporary) end of cities. We might see a temporary exodus to the suburbs until there’s a vaccine. A few realtors have told me interest in SF apartments is down while suburban homes are up.

Trust. Suddenly all humans are suspect of carrying biological weapons. How do you feel when you see a stranger on the street today? The virus increases trust between smaller groups, decreases it towards strangers.

Public transit is seen as dangerous. World 2.0 doesn’t like human density. And nothing is as dense as a rush-hour subway. Some cities need urban transit to thrive, and in those metros I think we’ll either see very rigid enforcement (Taiwan) or mass infection and subsequent herd immunity (NYC). Maybe this is a boon for Uber.

Schools return, with it supercharged online education. Parents will demand it, rightfully so. It’s quite possible college campuses are the safest way to resume life. You want to centralize all the youth together, away from the elderly, since they are mostly immune to the virus. New digital alternatives should emerge too. It’s extremely unlikely that attending school over Zoom is the best we can do.

Here were my notes from a couple weeks into lockdown.

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Weekend Reading: The State and the Virus, Future of Work, and Stephen Wolfram's Setup

April 18, 2020 • #

🏛 The Individual, the State, and the Virus

I agree with most of Kling’s takes here on the role the state should play in the coronavirus crisis.

👩🏽‍💻 Mapping the Future of Work

A nice comprehensive list of SaaS products for the workplace, across a ton of different categories. Great work by Pietro Invernizzi putting this database together.

⌨️ Stephen Wolfram’s Personal Infrastructure

Mathematician and computer scientist Stephen Wolfram wrote this epic essay on his personal productivity infrastructure.

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A Failure, But Not of Prediction →

April 17, 2020 • #

This is the best piece I’ve seen on the swirling controversy around the coronavirus pandemic response: on experts, the WHO, government response. The problem is not that experts don’t always have the answer (which they clearly don’t), it’s that the mechanics of many institutions, but also individual reasoning methods, are incompatible with responding to data-poor situations.

People were presented with a new idea: a global pandemic might arise and change everything. They waited for proof. The proof didn’t arise, at least at first. I remember hearing people say things like “there’s no reason for panic, there are currently only ten cases in the US”. This should sound like “there’s no reason to panic, the asteroid heading for Earth is still several weeks away”. The only way I can make sense of it is through a mindset where you are not allowed to entertain an idea until you have proof of it. Nobody had incontrovertible evidence that coronavirus was going to be a disaster, so until someone does, you default to the null hypothesis that it won’t be.

Gallant wouldn’t have waited for proof. He would have checked prediction markets and asked top experts for probabilistic judgments. If he heard numbers like 10 or 20 percent, he would have done a cost-benefit analysis and found that putting some tough measures into place, like quarantine and social distancing, would be worthwhile if they had a 10 or 20 percent chance of averting catastrophe.

When we don’t have the luxury of running randomized control trials and building large experimental datasets, we have to work with what we’ve got more rationally than simply checking out completely if a test, response strategy, or piece of medical advice is “unproven.”

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Family Life in Quarantine

April 9, 2020 • #

March 12th was the last time I was at the office. We went full remote starting the next day.

The 13th was Elyse’s last day in person at her school. Spring break was slated for the following week anyway, but she started up “Zoom school” a couple weeks ago. She’s only 4 and in pre-K, so they’re just doing their “circle time” remotely. At least a chance to see her friends on cameras once in a while.

Other than the typical cabin fever of having to be at the house so much, I’m surprised how well the kids are handling it. They’re video calling cousins and friends occasionally, which they enjoy, and haven’t asked too many questions about why we don’t go anywhere anymore. We’ve told Elyse that there’s a sickness going around and we don’t want to get ourselves or others sick, so now when she talks about it she refers to “the sickness” — ”maybe we can go to so-and-so’s house when The Sickness is over.” A biblical way of putting it.

We’ve now been separated for a full month from everyone. It’s surprising how quickly this 4-week period has blazed past, with days smearing together, the same routine more-or-less with kids and work. When every day is almost identical, they’re hard to tell apart. Eugene Wei had a great take on this phenomenon and its possible causes in a recent post:

The reason it feels like driving somewhere takes longer than driving home from that destination, even if both trips take the same amount of time, is that our “attention gate” is wider open on the way there because the directions are unfamiliar to us. We’re looking more carefully at road signs and landmarks to make sure we don’t get lost. On the way back, as we near home, we can flip to autopilot since we’ve done that trip so many times. Our attention gate narrows and our senses absorb less information. The memory of the return trip ends up as a smaller file in our memory banks.

The reason you might look back on a long and monotonous stretch of repetitive workdays and feel like it was just a blur is that our brain can run an efficient version of some compression algorithm on what is a very consistent daily routine of going to the office and sitting at your desk, the way a JPEG algorithm can do wonders with an image that consists of large blocks of the same color.

The similarity between days, even ones on the weekend, provides no clear boundaries or breakpoints. We’ve had a few days where we went on longer walks or bike rides, but other than that it’s the same on repeat.

One thing we have that many don’t have the luxury of is one another, so the 4 of us spend time together. I feel for people that have to be alone during this period (certainly a trade-off, since “incessant” would be a gracious way to describe kids in quarantine).

At this point it doesn’t seem like things will change anytime soon. I think everyone’s still waiting for the curve-bending to show real downward trends so we can loosen this situation a bit over the next month or so.

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An Empty New York City →

April 2, 2020 • #

Amazing photos of New York by day, streets abandoned in the throes of quarantine due to COVID-19.

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Bill Gates on Coronavirus

March 29, 2020 • #

A solid interview with Bill Gates with his thoughts on the COVID response. There aren’t many folks outside of the medical field more versed in this topic based on empirical experience than Gates. Interesting to hear his take.

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Weekend Reading: Cloud Services, Cities After the Virus, and Corona Care Map

March 28, 2020 • #

☁️ Value of Cloud Based Services in Times of Crisis

Bryan wrote this post about how Fulcrum is supporting the COVID response efforts.

🏙 Cities After Coronavirus

I speculated a bit about this sort of thing earlier this week. How might urban design change?

One of the most pressing questions that urban planners will face is the apparent tension between densification – the push towards cities becoming more concentrated, which is seen as essential to improving environmental sustainability – and disaggregation, the separating out of populations, which is one of the key tools currently being used to hold back infection transmission.

🗺 COVID Care Map

Some colleagues in the geo community are working on this project to map health care resources by region and facility. All of the code and work is in the open on GitHub.

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LessWrong Coronavirus Links Database →

March 26, 2020 • #

A great resource for data, research, papers, articles, and more.

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Face Masks: More Than You Wanted to Know →

March 24, 2020 • #

There’s been non-stop discussion lately on Twitter about protective equipment: efficacy, supply chains, costs, you name it.

Scott Alexander has the definitive analysis of N95 face masks. The title says it all.

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Under Quarantine

March 18, 2020 • #

It’s a weird time right now across the globe. People all over are quarantined, either because of government mandate or self-isolation from others to try and stop the spread of the coronavirus.

I don’t think the world needs more sideline expertise or prognostication about what the virus is doing, how this period will end, or how the economy recovers. There’s already plenty of that out online and in the media — probably way too much.

But I wanted to write something down about this as a personal note for future me to read in the archives.

We’re on day 5 of a self-imposed quarantine, with the family here at home limiting our time out and about, and me working from the house. We’ve been out to the store a couple of times, but mostly we’re spending time here, in the backyard pool, or doing bike rides around the block. All things considered, it hasn’t been too bad. Work is different, but the whole team being remote hasn’t changed that much in productivity levels that I can tell yet.

There doesn’t seem to be a turnaround point hit yet in the rate of new infections. We’ll probably be holed up another few weeks, minimum.

We’re still sane so far, but we’ll see what 2 or 3 more weeks alone in the house with kids does to us.

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Dan Wang's COVID Observations from Beijing →

March 10, 2020 • #

An interesting post from China analyst Dan Wang, who lives in Beijing, on the current state of the city in the throes of response to the coronavirus response and containment:

I see quarantine enforcement. One day in early February, a uniformed municipal employee set up a tent and a table outside my apartment compound, taking the temperatures of everyone leaving and entering. The next day, he gave me a paper slip, saying that I needed to display it every time I came in. It was a good thing that I received that entry card when I did, because I would have to go through a gauntlet of tests to be issued one today. These guards have been the chief enforcers of the quarantines, making sure that those who return from overseas or other provinces have to stay indoors. Given that everyone lives in big apartment compounds, it’s more or less possible to make sure that only approved people are allowed in or out of every residence. From where these enforcers emerged is a mystery. The source of their legal authority to regulate my entry is unclear to me; sometimes the entrance is staffed by volunteers, whom I assume are retired Party members.

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