Kuba Suder, a Mac and iOS developer who writes about Cocoa, AppKit, SwiftUI, the AT Protocol and Bluesky, and made COVID charts.
HN commenters link his coronavirus charts to compare Sweden with neighboring countries, and his posts on Bluesky and the AT Protocol are also shared.
> Nobody is proposing we just let people die.
Agreed, but a lot of people are arguing for the thing that will almost certainly lead to a lot more deaths.
Right now, as I type this, many hospitals in the United States have had all of their excess capacity filled with Covid-19 cases. Not most, but many.
Now, please click this link, then click Logarithmic on the top.
https://mackuba.eu/corona/#united_states
Once large groups of hospitals reach saturation, people who could otherwise be saved will be black tagged and left to die.
Two women my wife is Facebook friends with, after two weeks of a mild fever, malaise and a moderate, unproductive cough, started having a hard time breathing. They went in and were both positive for Covid-19. They were placed on ventilators, and were soon in critical condition. One of them died this morning, the other is clinging on to life.
Neither of these people are old; neither of them have any substantial medical history or other comorbidities.
This bug is dangerous for all of us; it's extremely dangerous for some of us.
It's true that few people are soberly thinking about the mid and long term economic cost of this pandemic. In my opinion, there's a good chance we're facing something on the order of the great depression.
Be that as it may, lives must come first.
> For example, the Dutch and the Swedes have chosen to use it against Covid-19..
Let's check in with Sweden. Currently their graph is not looking great[1].
They're faring worse than their neighbors, and the government is scrambling to get a lockdown going[2].
> As of April 9, Sweden’s rate per capita of confirmed deaths from the coronavirus is higher than the rate of its fellow Scandinavian countries or the US. Hospitals are overcrowded and staff members are overworked, and the military has begun setting up field hospitals in major cities, including Stockholm, the country’s capital and the epicenter of its outbreak. The government is now seeking extraordinary powers to impose further restrictions.
Meanwhile in the Netherlands, they're extending their very real lockdown into June[3].
[1] https://mackuba.eu/corona/#sweden
[2] https://www.vox.com/2020/4/9/21213472/coronavirus-sweden-herd-immunity-cases-death
[3] https://www.nst.com.my/world/world/2020/03/577616/covid-19-netherlands-extends-partial-lockdown-june
The original compiler ran on a platform was heavily resource constrained (very little memory, slow terminals).
If all you have is a 300 baud terminal (a luxury for some early users), writing a 30-letter statement takes about a second. Doubling that speed by using shorter identifiers is worth it (certainly as long as all the people reading the code either wrote it, or have the writer sitting next to them)
That created a culture that persists to today.
There are different cultural streams such as Apple’s one, which originated in Pascal (for the original Mac OS). Consequently (I think), Apple’s C headers later on weren’t afraid to use identifiers with over 40 characters. Next step/Cocoa similarly aren’t afraid of long names (https://mackuba.eu/2010/10/31/the-longest-names-in-cocoa/)
I spent a weekend in Oklahoma last month (October 10-11), and was unable to enjoy myself because so few people were wearing masks, observing anything like distancing, etc.
I saw a Carls Jr. employee wearing a corporate-supplied t-shirt that used "maskhole" to describe anyone not wearing a mask... and he was not wearing a mask, just like all the other employees.
The hotel itself was the only place that seemed to be taking the pandemic seriously, so we retreated there, ate takeout, and left early.
The current spike in Oklahoma[0] does not surprise me at all.
0. https://mackuba.eu/corona/#oklahoma_united_states.daily?trend=7
It's not true that they are similar in all affected countries. The ones in that graph are cherry picked for similarity. If you look at China, Taiwan, Singapore etc there are differences.
eg Fujian https://mackuba.eu/corona/#fujian_china
Taiwan https://mackuba.eu/corona/#taiwan
HK https://mackuba.eu/corona/#hong_kong
Taiwan is impressive in that they had thousands of flights a month to China, have only 30 active cases and no lockdowns. They had people ride on the planes from Wuhan to identify sick passengers during the flight and quarantine them on landing.
As a Brit I'm embarrassed by our performance in comparison.
I’ve skirted around this in the post to keep conceptual clarity but you can always move away from the domain (as a handle) without breaking links. This is because there’s a more persistent identifier that represents your identity (or at least there’s an option of having one, and that’s the default mechanism). Links between records actually use that identifier instead of the domain handle.
For a more technical overview, see “identity” here: https://mackuba.eu/2025/08/20/introduction-to-atproto/