onfocus

Go here for classic beats to relax/study to but with several channels you can flip through. Pro tip: hit L on your keyboard to tell the interface to relax a bit.

"We talked to pharmaceutical companies and venture capitalists. No one cared,” Dr. Weissman said. “We were screaming a lot, but no one would listen."

Amazing story of one person’s perseverance and belief in science that delivered the mRNA vaccines.

"The exposed data includes the personal information of over 533 million Facebook users from 106 countries, including over 32 million records on users in the US, 11 million on users in the UK, and 6 million on users in India. It includes their phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, bios, and, in some cases, email addresses."

Is this even considered news anymore?

"Yahoo Answers, one of the longest-running and most storied web Q&A platforms in the history of the internet, is shutting down on May 4th. That’s the day the Yahoo Answers website will start redirecting to the Yahoo homepage, and all of the platform’s archives will apparently cease to exist. The platform has been operating since 2005."

Corporations continue to be bad at hosting our conversations and managing our data.

"They also began raising concerns about safety in Amazon’s warehouses at the start of the pandemic. Amazon fired Ms. Costa and Ms. Cunningham last April, not long after their group had announced an internal event for warehouse workers to speak to tech employees about their workplace conditions."

This is powerful. When employees speak to each other it can lead to realizing that they have common interests--even when they work in different parts of the organization that don't normally interact. Firing people advocating for safety during a pandemic is a bad look.

This documentary uses firsthand video from people who were on the Diamond Princess cruise in February 2020. It’s quite a record of the early pandemic and a reminder of how little we knew and how poorly we handled it in the early days.

"Over the past decade, the blockchain has become a refuge for people who need another place to rest their assets. For global tycoons, it’s just an alternative to parking their money in some real estate they would never visit."

Anil Dash (father of the NFT?!) on its origin and the current state of his problem child.

"The good news is that this one is different. We now have an unparalleled supply of astonishingly efficacious vaccines being administered at an incredible clip. If we act quickly, this surge could be merely a blip for the United States. But if we move too slowly, more people will become infected by this terrible new variant, which is acutely dangerous to those who are not yet vaccinated."

Excellent snapshot of where we are with covid-19 and some good information about where we're headed, like this:

"Herd immunity is sometimes treated as a binary threshold: We’re all safe once we cross it, and all unsafe before that. In reality, herd immunity isn’t a switch that provides individual protection, just a dynamic that makes it hard for epidemics to sustain themselves in a population over the long term. Even if 75 percent of the country has some level of immunity because of vaccination or past infection, the remaining 25 percent remains just as susceptible, individually, to getting infected."

tl;dr: lots of light at the end of the tunnel but we're still in the tunnel.

"Small and quick decisions done back then, that would later make a serious impact on and shape my life. curl has been one of my main hobbies ever since – and of course also a full-time job since a few years back now."

curl is one of those ubiquitous tools that all developers use. It's just part of the water we swim in and I forget that tools don't just spring from Earth fully-formed. This is a fun look at where curl came from and where it's going. These hobbyists, amirite?