Hasnain says:

Honestly, there was some useful stuff to ponder after reading this, since I don't think the problems are necessarily limited to super rich people. The goals and meaning of life are issues that hit us all.

Edit to clarify: this made *me* ponder things given I was already thinking about life and everything else going on and what I want to do in my life.

So that takeaway of “money isn’t everything and an ulterior motivation in life is needed” was definitely an apt reminder, regardless of which form it was delivered in.

This specific guy’s midlife crisis is a bit too out of touch - from calling people NPCs to only being in a relationship as long as it benefited him, to, uh, whatever that was with DOGE, and I hope it goes without saying that I hope to never find myself in that situation.

"I know. This is a completely zeroth-world position to be in. The point of this post isn’t to brag or gain sympathy. To be honest, I don’t exactly know what the point of this post is. I tried to manufacture one, but I just felt like a phony. Then I recognized the irony of creating purpose out of a blog post when I don’t currently have much conviction or purpose in life."

Hasnain says:

"There’s an expansionist tendency right now. You would think that this is the time that Israel could conclude that it would expand, it could occupy and it could annex with no serious international repercussions. All of this is strange because Israel is currently facing more international repercussions or threats of international repercussions than ever before in its history, and yet those repercussions haven’t materialized."

Hasnain says:

This is from 1988. What in the world..

(Thank you Twitter for the olfactory ethics discourse that lead me to this)

“Assistant Hesperia Fire Chief Will Wentworth listened incredulously as a caller complained that the noxious black smoke pouring from a nondescript building in the desert carried the sickeningly sweet smell of burning human flesh.

“I don’t think so, it’s a ceramics shop,” Wentworth replied.

“Don’t tell me they’re not burning bodies. I was at the ovens at Auschwitz,” the man said chillingly, Wentworth recalled.”

Hasnain says:

Lots to ponder from this piece. It’s basically the medical history of the stent couched with a human interest story. Makes me think about life and mortality.

“Over the past 17 years, I have kept notes. I try to eat well, walk, and avoid everything that is not good for me – with an occasional exception. I am first to volunteer for new treatments. It is not that I want to live forever, it is just that I want to enjoy life I have – whether it is a day, a decade, or three. Either way, I want to give myself the best chance of doing that.

Lost in my reverie, I realized that one thing I had not thought about even once was the actual technology that set me on the right trajectory – the stent. It is ironic because both as a reporter and as an investor, my first instinct is learning about the who, why, and what of technology. And yet I never took the time to really learn about how a “stent” works, its origin, and how the technology has progressed since December 28, 2007.”

Hasnain says:

"Another low point arrived more than 5,000 miles later when Kato experienced the racism other Africans have faced in Europe.

“The other time I felt like packing it in was in Croatia because I genuinely felt treated as an illegal immigrant. I didn’t feel welcomed or that I belonged in their society.

“The police stopped me at least four times a day. Sometimes, I caught locals taking photos of me and reporting me to the police,” he said.

“This experience, coupled with everything I was processing from my journey in Africa and other personal challenges, made it intensely difficult to keep moving forward.”

Kato wanted his journey to draw attention to the earliest migration of humans from Africa and challenge the racist notion that people should “go back to where they come from”. Viewed as a whole, he said the run had underlined the positive aspects of migration and its potential to “create a more culturally connected and enriched global society”."

Hasnain says:

I liked this migration story a lot (in addition to it just being a Rewrite-it-in-Rust thing). Lots of good tradeoff discussions in addition to gory technical and non-technical details. A few key takeaways for me:

* Motivation really does matter! Even if rust is chosen just because "it's more fun", if that gets you more contributors that's a good thing
* the last 10% is always the last 90%
* incremental migrations are necessary, big-bang rewrites don't work

"The port wasn’t without challenges, and it did not all go entirely as planned. But overall, it went pretty dang well. We’re now left with a codebase that we like a lot more, that has already gained some features that would have been much more annoying to add with C++, with more on the way, and we did it while creating a separate 3.7 release that also included some cool stuff."

Hasnain says:

Thought a lot before sharing this one. On one hand NYT I am glad the NYT is finally reporting truths others have reported and so many know to be evident.

On the other hand they still try to claim it's original reporting, and that this is previously unknown, even though... +972 reported on it months ago (April, IIRC). They can't even claim ignorance - they link to the same piece later on in this one!

a 20:1 ratio of civilian:military deaths being acceptable even for killing a lowly fighter is insane and not what I've seen any respectable modern military do. And there weren't penalties for going over.

On the balance though, given that at least a few more poeple will read this and understand what's going on, I figured I'd share and applaud the NYT reporting this.

"On a few occasions, senior commanders approved strikes on Hamas leaders that they knew would each endanger more than 100 noncombatants — crossing an extraordinary threshold for a contemporary Western military."

Hasnain says:

From the person that brought us Maus. I genuinely do not see how one can hold the horrific facts of the Holocaust in their head, internalize them, say “never again”, and then be okay when they learn what’s going on in Gaza. Disagree on scale however you want, but I’d want to be in opposition even if it gets anywhere near “1% holocaust” and I feel like this is far past that. I take solace and learn from scholars of genocide and the holocaust when they share some of the parallels they’ve seen. I wish the rest of the world will listen (and in particular leadership)

“After the documentary’s premiere, Spiegelman told the sold-out audience in a Q&A session that his next comic will be about Gaza, in collaboration with Joe Sacco. He was wary of providing any details on a project that he thinks will struggle to find a publisher in the United States.

“I’ll finish this thing or die trying. I’ve never had a bigger wrestling match inside my head,” he said. “My superego says, ‘You must do this if you’re going to live with yourself’,” and my id says, ‘Who wants the grief [of] being canceled by everyone on the planet?’””

Hasnain says:

Great read on mental models and thoughts around software engineering

“Do you feel it? Not only do you have to jump all over the article to get the meaning (shallow modules!), but the paragraph in general is difficult to understand. We have just created an unnecessary cognitive load in your head. Do not do this to your colleagues.

We should reduce any cognitive load above and beyond what is intrinsic to the work we do.”

Hasnain says:

178GB -> 5GB is insane

“If you work in a large-ish scale monorepo, and you have CHANGELOG.md or really any file that has a relatively long-ish name (>16 characters) which repeatedly gets updated, you may want to keep your eyes on this path walk stuff.”