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.”

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”

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.”

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!”

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.””

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).”

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.”

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”

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.”

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.”

Hasnain says:

I remember visiting Lahore in 2018 (?) when there was a huge outbreak of smog the day after I arrived and ... it was not great. It took a while for my family that wasn't in Lahore to understand how bad it got (since it was the first in a while). This is 10x worse. It'll only get worse.

To contextualize the bad AQI for folks in the bay who may be familiar with AQI numbers -- it's currently >600, and has been recorded at over 1000 (some sources reported 1900). Those numbers are not typos.

Hasnain says:

Lots of useful advice here. Sure one takeaway definitely is “I wish it wasn’t this way” but it is what it is and if you’re operating in such an environment this advice is quite useful.

Beyond the pessimistic quote though - I really liked the author’s advice on knowing what to cut and prioritizing the most stressful/unknown parts first.

“Shipping is a social construct within a company. Concretely, that means that a project is shipped when the important people at your company believe it is shipped. If you deploy your system, but your manager or VP or CEO is very unhappy with it, you did not ship. (Maybe you shipped something, but you didn’t ship the actual project.) You only know you’ve shipped when your company’s leadership acknowledge you’ve shipped.”

Hasnain says:

Harrowing report. Worth a read for the dark times ahead.

“The cost to U.S.-born Americans, in tax dollars spent and in economic output lost, pales in comparison to the devastation that undocumented immigrants and their families would suffer. Uprooted from their homes and communities after decades in the country, they would face an uncertain future and the potential separation of their families, which include millions of U.S.-citizen children who have known only this country as home.

To speak of the enormity of the fiscal and economic costs of mass deportation is not to minimize the importance of this suffering. It is to reinforce just how radical a step a deportation campaign targeting millions of undocumented immigrants, who have been so integral to the U.S. economy and American communities, would be. There is no way to engage in mass deportation without fundamentally changing the federal government, the national economy, and, ultimately, America itself.”

Hasnain says:

Sage advice here - I found myself nodding along a lot. It aligned with some advice I received in the past around being more assertive - “find the edge of your comfort zone, exceed it a little bit - it’s still likely not enough, and you’ll see it’s not the end of the world.”. That helped me a lot in the past.

“Next time you’re feeling some discomfort in a situation, slow down and take a deep breath.

Check in with yourself. Where is your edge? What level of discomfort feels challenging but not overwhelming right now? Can you lean in and try something difficult? Or have you already leaned in too far and need to back off a little? Act accordingly. As the situation progresses, keep checking in with yourself.

Once it’s over, check in again – how did that go? Finally, give yourself some credit, and be aware of the potential for a vulnerability hangover.”

Hasnain says:

“So too with the engineering heuristics. Becoming a better engineer is becoming a better pathfinder in problem space.

There's probably a compelling general theory to be concocted in this space, but that's beyond the scope of this post. Spin up a background thread in your brain and think about it. Maybe you'll find a good path to an answer.”

Hasnain says:

“Listening to the developers’ commentary tracks in the remastered edition of Grim Fandango (who would have imagined in 1998 that games would someday come with commentary tracks?), I was shocked by how little talk there was about the gameplay. It was all lighting and dialog beats and soundtrack stabs and Z-buffers instead — all of which is really, really important in its place, but none of which can yield a great game on its own. Tellingly, when the subject of puzzle design did come up, it always seemed to be in an off-hand, borderline dismissive way. “I don’t know how players are supposed to figure out this puzzle,” says Tim Schafer outright at one point. Such a statement from your lead designer is never a good sign.

But I won’t belabor the issue any further. Suffice to say that Grim Fandango is doomed to remain a promising might-have-been rather than a classic in my book. As a story and a world, it’s kind of amazing. It’s just a shame that the gameplay part of this game isn’t equally inspired.”

Hasnain says:

Sometimes twitter leads me to the most fascinating things. I’ll link to the full paper in the comments. It’s just mind bending to see these case studies in how heart transplants changed people’s personalities to match the donor’s.

“Conclusion: The incidence of recipient awareness of personal changes in cardiac transplant patients is unknown. The effects of the immunosuppressant drugs, stress of the surgery, and statistical coincidence are likely insufficient to explain the findings. The plausibility of cellular memory, possibly systemic memory, is suggested.”

Hasnain says:

“In the meantime, Pak says, it’s clear that mathematicians need to engage in a more active discussion about the nature of mathematical proof. He and his colleagues ultimately didn’t have to rely on controversial computational methods; they were able to disprove the conjecture with total certainty. But as computer- and AI-based lines of attack become more common in mathematics research, some mathematicians are debating whether the field’s norms will eventually have to change. “It’s a philosophical question,” Alon said. “How do we view proofs that are only true with high probability?””

Hasnain says:

“Maybe I’m bad at searching for these things, but these changes to C# seem to have gone completely under the radar in places where you read about memory safety and performance. Maybe it’s just because the language additions have happened super slowly, or maybe the C# and Rust communities have so little overlap that there aren’t enough people who program in both languages to notice the similarities. Maybe there’s something that makes C#’s ref subset so unusable that people just ignore it (I’ll admit to only having played around with it a bit, so far).

Here’s my theory: C# already had an equivalent to all of these things in its “unsafe” subset, so when introduced, ref-safety changes were typically framed as “bringing the performance of safe code closer to that of unsafe code,” which is arguably the opposite perspective of Rust’s “bringing the safety of high-performance code closer to that of high-level languages.” Perhaps that framing makes people miss that although the two languages are pushing in opposite directions, they might actually be getting closer together.”

Hasnain says:

“To physicists such as Carney, however, a mere strong suggestion that gravity is quantized isn’t all that informative. We already have an abundance of strong suggestions that all of reality is quantized, he says. What’s needed is proof — such as experiments that would close the remaining loopholes, no matter how bizarre they might seem.

“We’re so biased to think that everything is quantum that you should really be doing a lawyerly thing,” he said.”

Hasnain says:

It’s a sad day when the most honest “official” reporting I can find is from the daily mail, of all people. Will drop a link in the comments to the sky news report that they have since deleted which said similar things. A courageous 13 year old Dutch kid also did great reporting here.

To be clear - I abhor all violence. People should not be attacked for their religion. But it’s unclear to me if football hooligans going on a drunk rampage and picking a fight (and then the people they are hurting fighting back) is anti semitic, or just another Tuesday when it comes to, well, drunk football fans doing stupid things.

The quote below doesn’t even capture the worst of the videos/behavior seen.

“Videos show dozens of hooded figures dressed fully in black cheering and chanting 'f*** you Palestine' and 'ole' as one climbed halfway up the front of a building and removed a flag on the Rokin, a major street. “

Hasnain says:

“In dozens of emails, Théo said his wager was essentially a bet against the accuracy of polling data. Describing himself as a wealthy Frenchman who had previously worked as a trader for several banks, he told the Journal that he began applying his mathematical know-how to analyze U.S. polls over the summer.

He concluded the polls were overstating support for Vice President Kamala Harris. Unlike most armchair political commentators, he put his money where his mouth was, betting more than $30 million that Trump would win.”

Hasnain says:

This got buried in yesterday’s news. This is outright ethnic cleaning that they are admitting to.

“In a media briefing on Tuesday night, the IDF Brig Gen Itzik Cohen told Israeli reporters that since troops had been forced to enter some areas twice, such as Jabaliya camp, “there is no intention of allowing the residents of the northern Gaza Strip to return to their homes”.

He added that humanitarian aid would be allowed to “regularly” enter the south of the territory but not the north, since there are “no more civilians left”.

International humanitarian law experts have said that such actions would amount to the war crimes of forcible transfer and the use of food as a weapon.”

Hasnain says:

“Their nearly contemporaneous accounts are detailed, corroborated by other witnesses, and consistent with testimony by an Israeli soldier who fought in Gaza, and with interviews collected by Breaking the Silence, an organization that works with troops who have served in the occupied Palestinian territories. They described a practice in which Palestinians are detained, interrogated and ultimately released, indicating the Israeli army did not believe them to be militants. They described events that took place between January and August.

“This wasn’t something that happened just here and there but rather on a large scale throughout a number of different units, at different times, throughout the war and in different places,” said Joel Carmel, advocacy director of Breaking the Silence, an organization that collects and verifies testimonies from troops who have served in the occupied Palestinian territories.”

Hasnain says:

Not even keeping up the pretense anymore.

“The Israeli military has never made any claims of a Hamas presence at al-Awda. When asked what intelligence led troops to besiege and raid the hospital last year, the military spokesman’s office did not reply.”

Hasnain says:

“The development of new product lines for use in service of critical infrastructure or NCFs in a memory-unsafe language (e.g., C or C++) where there are readily available alternative memory-safe languages that could be used is dangerous and significantly elevates risk to national security, national economic security, and national public health and safety.”

Hasnain says:

Yikes

“A precondition for this vulnerability is that the username must be or exceed 52 characters any time a cache key is generated for the user.”

Hasnain says:

“For the team this is a moment of validation and success - finding a vulnerability in a widely-used and well fuzzed open source project is an exciting result! When provided with the right tools, current LLMs can perform vulnerability research.

However, we want to reiterate that these are highly experimental results. The position of the Big Sleep team is that at present, it's likely that a target-specific fuzzer would be at least as effective (at finding vulnerabilities).
We hope that in the future this effort will lead to a significant advantage to defenders - with the potential not only to find crashing testcases, but also to provide high-quality root-cause analysis, triaging and fixing issues could be much cheaper and more effective in the future. We aim to continue sharing our research in this space, keeping the gap between the public state-of-the-art and private state-of-the-art as small as possible.”

Hasnain says:

“The letter also calls on the broadcaster to implement a series of editorial commitments including “reiterating that Israel does not give external journalists access to Gaza; making it clear when there is insufficient evidence to back up Israeli claims; making clear where Israel is the perpetrator in article headlines; including regular historical context predating October 2023; and robustly challenging Israeli government and military representatives in all interviews”.”

Hasnain says:

This is going unquoted because I cannot find a single non horrifying thing to quote.

Hasnain says:

“The false citations do point to how AI misinformation can influence state policy, however — especially if high-level state officials use the technology as a drafting shorthand that causes mistakes that end up in public documents and official resolutions.”