“Hopeless, Starving, and Besieged”
The 154-page report, “‘Hopeless, Starving, and Besieged’: Israel’s Forced Displacement of Palestinians in Gaza,” examines how Israeli authorities’ conduct has led to the displacement of over 90 percent of the population of Gaza—1.9 million Palestinians—and the widespread destruction ...
Hasnain says:
Damning report.
“Israel cannot rely on the security and safety of civilians as a justification for evacuating people if there are no safe areas to which civilians can move. Ultimately, as this report will show, even if Israel can demonstrate that its actions fall within the displacement exception, its lack of adherence to the strict protections required to make an evacuation lawful demonstrates that its orders for people to move were a pretext for forced displacement.”
Posted on 2024-11-17T21:36:28+0000
The US Gave Israel 30 Days to Increase Aid to Gaza. Here’s What It Did Instead
A day-by-day breakdown of how Israel defied the US warning – and made conditions in Gaza worse.
Hasnain says:
… and yesterday they let in 2 aid trucks into northern Gaza - finally - after a month- to be delivered to a school/shelter. And then set it on fire.
“In the 30 days since the Biden administration’s warning, Israel bombed homes and camps sheltering Palestinians the Israeli military has displaced, targeted aid workers and medical staff, and admitted its goal to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza. And that’s not even the half of it”
Posted on 2024-11-17T18:53:07+0000
Battling Infectious Diseases in the 20th Century: The Impact of Vaccines
The number of infected people, measured over 70-some years and across all 50 states and the District of Columbia, generally declined after vaccines were introduced.
Hasnain says:
These maps are so drastic.
“The number of infected people, measured over 70-some years and across all 50 states and the District of Columbia, generally declined after vaccines were introduced.
The heat maps below show number of cases per 100,000 people.”
Posted on 2024-11-16T05:36:22+0000
40 Years Ago, Scientists Dropped Gophers Onto a Volcano. Today, They're Tiny Heroes.
It started as a go-for-broke experiment, but it wound up saving an ecosystem.
Hasnain says:
“Naturally, one takeaway from this paper is, as University of Connecticut mycologist Mia Maltz summarizes, that “we cannot ignore the interdependence of all things in nature, especially the things we cannot see like microbes and fungi.”
But another takeaway is that, when in doubt, and the situation seems grim, just toss a couple of gophers at the problem and see if that does anything. It might just work!”
Posted on 2024-11-16T05:33:50+0000
UN Special Committee finds Israel’s warfare methods in Gaza consistent with genocide, including use of starvation as weapon of war
NEW YORK (14 November 2024) – Israel’s warfare in Gaza is consistent with the characteristics of genocide, with mass civilian casualties and life-threatening conditions intentionally imposed on Palestinians there, the UN Special Committee to investigate Israeli practices* said in a new report re...
Hasnain says:
“The Committee called on all Member States to uphold their legal obligations to prevent and stop Israel’s violations of international law and hold it accountable.
“It is the collective responsibility of every State to stop supporting the assault on Gaza and the apartheid system in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem,” the Committee said.
“Upholding international law and ensuring accountability for violations rests squarely on Member States. A failure to do so weakens the very core of the international legal system and sets a dangerous precedent, allowing atrocities to go unchecked.””
Posted on 2024-11-16T05:31:59+0000
Retrofitting spatial safety to hundreds of millions of lines of C++
Posted by Alex Rebert and Max Shavrick, Security Foundations, and Kinuko Yasuda, Core Developer Attackers regularly exploit spatial mem...
Hasnain says:
“The performance impact of these changes was surprisingly low, despite Google's modern C++ codebase making heavy use of libc++. Hardening libc++ resulted in an average 0.30% performance impact across our services (yes, only a third of a percent).”
Posted on 2024-11-16T00:42:05+0000
Saying Farewell to America's Most Shiteating Grin
In A Sea of Dead-Eyed and Soulless Bureaucrats, Matthew Miller Stands Out as The Most Hatable of All. I Hope He Falls Into An Open Manhole.
Hasnain says:
After being gaslit by all the spokespeople day in day out - KJP, Patel, Kirby, and Miller - I’m happy to see them all leave. They have all been infuriating in their own way but I feel like Miller will be taught in “how to propaganda” for quite a while to come. This was just cathartic to read, including the part where he gets called a wet orc.
“Miller’s reactions belie a person who is so morally untethered from the reality around him that he genuinely seems confused/surprised when the journalists and diplomats he regularly interacts with are horrified by his words and behavior. He just cannot seem to calibrate his face to respond to the topics in question like a regular fucking person, and quickly tries to adjust when it becomes clear that he has just said or done something that has left his audience truly aghast (watch how quickly he goes from “just told a funny joke” face to “no no, this is a serious matter” face on the previously-linked clip). I would call it sociopathic, but sociopaths are generally better at approximating normal human emotions, so I don’t really know what to call Miller’s affliction. Satanic autism? Perhaps he’s a skinwalker from another planet, representing an alien race’s early attempts to colonize earth? The mind reels.”
Posted on 2024-11-13T08:20:07+0000
How We Built a Self-Healing System to Survive a Terrifying Concurrency Bug At Netflix
Our CPUs were dying, the bug was temporarily un-fixable, and we had no viable path forward. Here's how we managed to survive.
Hasnain says:
This was a great read
“I’ve always loved this incident for a few reasons:
This was a rare but brutal example of how writing non-thread-safe code can cripple your systems. There are a lot of problems you haven’t seen before because you’re not working on systems with sufficient volume to generate them.
The solution of automatically terminating random instances felt like a terrible engineering practice. But in the moment, it was the perfect solution to our problem.
Most importantly, we prioritized our own sanity”
Posted on 2024-11-13T08:08:24+0000
Trailblazers and Road builders
Next time you are weighing the pros and cons of product team vs infra, green field projects vs established ones, big tech vs startup, ask yourself… are you a trailblazer or a road builder?
Hasnain says:
This was a great read on various work styles.
“What happens when you put a trailblazer in a road builder role or vice versa? Disaster. Imagine a trailblazer trying to build roads. They’re likely to get impatient, cutting corners and rushing through the process. They might ignore critical planning phases, resulting in a road that’s prone to collapse. Their instinct to "figure it out as we go" doesn’t work in a world where safety and longevity matter.
Now flip it. A road builder, when tasked with blazing a new trail, often freezes. They get stuck in analysis paralysis, overthinking every decision. They’re so focused on finding the "optimal" path that they forget the point of trailblazing is to just start moving. Progress slows to a crawl, and what could’ve been an exciting adventure turns into a frustrating exercise in indecision.
The real magic happens when people are placed in roles that align with their strengths. A good leader can spot who thrives in the unknown and who excels at refinement. And no matter which role you’re in, the key is to keep moving forward. The last thing you want to be is the one standing around, complaining—you’re just wasting everyone’s time.”
Posted on 2024-11-13T07:33:06+0000
Airbnb's Three Biggest Mistakes
This is the perspective of one lowly engineer who cared too much. For context, I spent 6 years at Airbnb from 2016 to 2022, first as a senior engineer, then an engineering manager and finally as a staff engineer.
Hasnain says:
Learnt a lot from this one.
“Looking back at these three mistakes - destroying our culture through rapid growth, fragmenting our architecture with microservices, and outsourcing our core support function - there's a common thread. Each represents choosing short-term scalability over long-term sustainability. We sacrificed what made Airbnb special - its culture, its technical simplicity, and its human touch - in pursuit of rapid growth and cost optimization.”
Posted on 2024-11-13T07:20:08+0000