Hasnain says:

I’ve only read the “before” article (this whole piece) so far and it’s a harrowing account of political, intelligence, and legal failures that culminated in the events of Jan 6. Worth reading.

“The memo — like the others before it — was jarringly prescient. But it also betrayed the FBI’s long-running institutional unease with investigating domestic extremism. The document cautioned that the people who had made the threatening posts “have been identified as participating in activities that are protected by the First Amendment. … Their inclusion here is not intended to associate the protected activity with criminality or a threat to national security.”

To some inside the FBI, that cautionary language was a telling example of how the bureau tempered its reaction to threats of violence from White, middle-aged and middle-class Americans.”

Hasnain says:

This (the first comment which has an answer) is a work of art and should be in some hall of fame. I learnt a lot reading through (half of, before I gave up) this

I loved the comment where someone says this should be a thesis and the author responds that this was harder than their MS thesis.

“This program aims for the maximum possible single-threaded performance. In terms of the FizzBuzz calculation itself, it is intended to sustain a performance of 64 bytes of FizzBuzz per 4 clock cycles (and is future-proofed where possible to be able to run faster if the relevant processor bottleneck – L2 cache write speed – is ever removed). This is faster than a number of standard functions. In particular, it's faster than memcpy, which presents interesting challenges when it comes to I/O (if you try to output using write then the copies in write will take up almost all the runtime – replacing the I/O routine here with write causes the performance on my CPU to drop by a factor of 5). As such, I needed to use much more obscure system calls to keep I/O-related copies to a minimum (in particular, the generated FizzBuzz text is only sent to main memory if absolutely necessary; most of the time it's stored in the processor's L2 cache and piped into the target program from there, which is why reading it from a sibling CPU can boost performance – the physical connection to the L2 cache is shorter and higher bandwidth than it would be to a more distant CPU).”

Hasnain says:

This was some really great advice that’s worth internalizing for folks working in infra and/or leading large projects.

“[32] Keep track of every other major project in your space within the company: you should be able to explain their technical design better than their own ICs. Grab any opportunities to debate scope with the leads of other similar projects: you should be able to articulate how your project fits into the larger ecosystem of options. Inter-team competition is healthy and necessary. Make friends with ICs in these projects: they understand your technical challenges better than anyone else in the company.”

Hasnain says:

I’m going to tell myself that one day I shall achieve such a productive workflow. Also goes to show how complex software development still is in this day and age.

“There's a lot more to say about all this, but I'm fairly happy with the workflow I've set up both for work, and for my personal projects. Now I can focus on the code I want to ship, and I can liberate some storage space in my brain, that was previously dedicated to all these manual procedures I had to follow all the time.”

Hasnain says:

This was a great read. Learnt a lot more about how other organizations and the industry at large is starting to think about privacy work.

“The privacy profession is dominated by lawyers—who certainly play a critical role—but privacy engineers are often the real superheros when things go wrong, and essential to preventing privacy disasters. Privacy engineering has emerged as a growing discipline focused on finding practical and often technical solutions to privacy protection. Organizations hire privacy engineers to develop privacy-protective products and services, build tools to promote and monitor privacy compliance throughout their organization, and to detect and remediate privacy problems. Privacy engineers may play a holistic role or focus on specific areas such as front-end, back-end, user experience, product management, or legal compliance.”

Hasnain says:

Chomsky’s interviews are always great. Learnt so much from this one.

“So, in the United States, if you’re a privileged person like Edward Said or me, punishments are not too bad. Maybe vilification, denunciation. Said had to have police protection. He had a buzzer in his apartment so he could call the police in case he was attacked. If you’re Fred Hampton, a Black Panther organizer, you can be assassinated by the national political police. It depends on who you are.”

Hasnain says:

Every single example here is horrifying, holy crap.

“The department does not note what prompted its audit. But in May 2019 — two months earlier — Davis School District drew national attention when the family of a biracial boy who went to school there filed a lawsuit, describing how the boy was purposefully shut in the doors of a school bus by the driver and left dangerously dangling outside as he drove forward.

The report specifically mentions that incident, saying that it was seriously mishandled by the district, which focused on protecting “certain employees from discipline” rather than worrying about the boy being endangered. The district later acknowledged it had received previous complaints about the bus driver’s discriminatory behavior that were brushed aside.”

Hasnain says:

This is a really interesting study. I’ll have to go through and read the paper to understand everything in detail.

“For far too long, U.S. policymakers have exhibited more interest in spending tax dollars on nationally self-destructive punishment systems than on supporting people living in vulnerable circumstances. As a result, the country has allowed unsafe spaces of neglect — from prisons and jails to nursing homes and decrepit schools in poor areas — to grow at the heart of our communities. Where we ought to have built spaces of care, we have instead built epidemic engines.”

Hasnain says:

How is this legal?! More importantly, why is this legal?

“"Johnson & Johnson doesn't have this liability anymore. They pushed all of it into the company they created just to file for bankruptcy," said Lindsey Simon, a bankruptcy expert at the University of Georgia School of Law.

As a result, Simon said, "consumers can't recover [damages] against a big solvent company. They have to recover against this smaller fictional company created [by J&J]."”

Hasnain says:

I wasn’t aware of the stuff going on with the .net community but this is pretty important to read. Not just for the technical content but for understanding open source business models and how they relate to corporate funding. And on keeping trust with developers.

“I am not sure. It takes years to build trust and only a few moments to lose it all. Microsoft is a huge organisation and we as outsiders often get to see only a handful of selected people being tasked to spread a certain message via their huge followings in order to create a public image in favour of Microsoft, but what if those people leave?

Do you trust Microsoft with Open Source or do you actually trust people like Jon Galloway, Scott Hanselman, Scott Hunter, Guido van Rossum, David Fowler, Damian Edwards, Miguel de Icaza and a handful of other OSS champions who have been pushing the OSS message internally from the bottom up? What if these people leave .NET? Will Microsoft continue to play nicely with the community?”

Hasnain says:

This was a great read.

“I’ll close with the slightly cynical observation that I may be entirely overthinking the blue checkmark; it could be that blue checkmarks aren’t really about security, anti-abuse, or mis-/disinformation at all, but rather that they’re just a way to drive more engagement from particular users. Nevertheless, the identity verification problem on social media platforms is real, so I find it interesting to think about how that problem could be defined and solved, regardless of whether social media platforms are tackling it in earnest today.”

Hasnain says:

Great reporting by ProPublica. I learnt a lot more about the NYPD’s past scandals, in particular the ticket fixing scandal I had not heard about (lots of corruption there and some of the officer statements in response are bewildering).

“Jennvine Wong, who heads the organization’s police accountability practice, said that while some might dismiss ticket-fixing as small-bore misbehavior, knowing who is on the full No Fly List is essential to the group’s effort.

“The NYPD made such a big deal about broken windows, how small little infractions can turn into an avalanche of bigger issues with larger, more violent crimes,” she said. “Well, apply that same logic to officer misconduct then.””

Hasnain says:

“One team invoked the lessons learned during QAnon’s moment to warn about permissiveness with anti-vaccine groups and content, which researchers found comprised up to half of all vaccine content impressions on the platform.

“In rapidly-developing situations, we’ve often taken minimal action initially due to a combination of policy and product limitations making it extremely challenging to design, get approval for, and roll out new interventions quickly,” the report said. QAnon was offered as an example of a time when Facebook was “prompted by societal outcry at the resulting harms to implement entity takedowns” for a crisis on which “we initially took limited or no action.””

Hasnain says:

“Changing public perceptions of companies such as Facebook and Google may be wearing on some younger workers, analysts and former workers say.

“A couple years ago if you said you worked for one of those companies, nine out of 10 people are like, ‘Oh, that’s awesome.’ Now it’s five out of 10 people say, ‘That’s awesome,’ and five out of ten people say, ‘Oh really? That company does bad things,” said Brian Kropp, chief of research in Gartner’s human resources practice.”

Hasnain says:

This whole article is worrying. Hopefully a proper investigation can happen and new rules can be put in place.

“There were two misfires on the prop gun on Saturday and one the previous week, the person said, adding “there was a serious lack of safety meetings on this set.””

Hasnain says:

This was a great slide deck on organizational dysfunction and headwinds, and how to keep coordination costs low even as organizations grow and evolve. I found myself nodding along a lot

Hasnain says:

This is some great research (need to read the paper in full) and I hope other studies like this are able to proceed to study the impact of recommendation algorithms on human behavior.

“In six out of seven countries — all but Germany — Tweets posted by accounts from the political right receive more algorithmic amplification than the political left when studied as a group.

Right-leaning news outlets, as defined by the independent organizations listed above, see greater algorithmic amplification on Twitter compared to left-leaning news outlets. However, as highlighted in the paper, these third-party ratings make their own, independent classifications and as such the results of analysis may vary depending on which source is used.”

Hasnain says:

This is some interesting anecdotal evidence on the recent labor market woes and claims. Would be really interesting to see this formalized as a study!

“By the end of September, Holz had sent out 60 applications, received 16 email responses, four follow-up phone calls, and the solitary interview. He shared a pie chart showing his results.”

Hasnain says:

This was an amazing and inspirational story of a man who overcame so much adversity and then generously helped others. I also learnt a lot about the history of north California through this. Including a bit more about the racism that’s sadly still here.

““My sole interest is to work with young Black males,” Clay said while CEO of his company, “to encourage them to learn how to do things well.”

But 43 years after Clay feared for his life by Bailey Pond, he faced death threats again due to the color of his skin when he became the first person of color to play golf at San Francisco’s Olympic Club.”

Hasnain says:

This is a pretty decent article on large scale developer mindset shifts and migrations and has some nuggets of interest when thinking about career growth.

I recommend skipping the first bit though. While stories like this seem ok in hindsight - stuff like this is not okay:

“It’s not that Mr. K had read the doc and then hated it; he literally refused to read it at all. He scanned the first page, circled a bunch of things in red ink, and then just gave up. He put the document down, crossed his arms and impatiently checked his email on his phone while others around him awkwardly continued reading it. He then proceeded to berate me in front of a dozen Directors and Principal Engineers about how much he hated it.”

Hasnain says:

A different article confirms the city then went and shut this down. But the fact that this was happening in the first place in SF is nuts.

“Castro resident Chris Vasquez told me that he was walking by the Market Street Safeway in August and saw a tent with a “Free COVID Test” sign on it. He had recently returned from a wedding and decided a test was a good idea.

A technician swabbed his nose, then handed him a piece of paper to sign. It turned out to be a Boudin recall petition.”

Hasnain says:

This phrasing reads like straight up gaslighting.

“This group of employees felt a little betrayed because we’ve created such a great place to work that they forgot that sometimes these challenges will come up, and that’s what I mean about not recognizing that upfront, that folks would be hurt.”

Hasnain says:

I heard about this series - still need to watch it! But this article goes into a lot of detail into what happened from the other side and it’s… interesting. Hard to know fully what the truth is without more digging but the author here seems credible.

“ART+COM’s patent was invalidated in 2017 because another group, Sarnoff Research Center (SRI) in Palo Alto had shown a similar system in 1994, also called “TerraView”, which constituted prior art. In a supreme irony, the people asserting they “invented” Google Earth were bested by an earlier system with essentially the same name and function as theirs”

Hasnain says:

Can someone explain the math here? The way I see it, either the executive was lying about the daily cost, or there’s other long term payroll costs they’re hiding (so the cost of the proposal would be higher), or they’re grossly incompetent and want to harm workers.

My priors bias me towards some form of the latter but I am curious.

“Dan: They said they are prepared to move these production facilities down to Mexico. The main thing that would cost Kellogg’s money is equalization of wages within our ranks. Kellogg’s came out in the media and stated that our proposals would cost the company $60 million. In 2020, during the negotiations, before we started the extension, there was a Kellogg’s executive who stated in negotiations that he’s willing to spend $10 million a day to keep us out on the street. And to get rid of our union essentially. Well, if he’s willing to spend $10 million a day, I’m not a mathematician, but that’s six days out on the street.”

Hasnain says:

“Ultimately, the issue in dispute across these strikes is whether American workers can be muscled back into the punishing labor market conditions of the pandemic and the several decades that preceded Covid-19 that made the pandemic so brutal within the insecure and unequal American workplace. Will nonunion workers settle for low wages and dangerous conditions? Will union workers continue to ratify two-tier contracts with incremental givebacks to employers? When the U.S. worker “goes back” to work, what kind of economy will they be going back to?

This is precisely the same issue as the one roiling Capitol Hill right now: whether Congress’s role is to return us to a pre-pandemic status quo or to intervene on the side of a battered working class.”

Hasnain says:

Really solid set of technical post-mortems here. I find this interesting because it’s not a series of bugs or flaws - these are design decisions that now need to be revisited at scale.

“tl;dr: Our server outages have not been caused by a singular issue; we are solving each problem as they arise, with both mitigating solves and longer-term architectural changes. A small number of players have experienced character progression loss–moving forward, any loss due to a server crash should be limited to several minutes. This is not a complete solve to us, and we are continuing to work on this issue. Our team, with the help of others at Blizzard, are working to bring the game experience to a place that feels good for everyone.”

Hasnain says:

"This blood disorder is the result of a recessive gene, and so requires that both parents of a child have the recessive gene for the disorder to appear in their offspring. Without the Fugate’s intense isolation and inbreeding, this disorder would be incredibly rare in their bloodline."

Hasnain says:

This was some of the toughest stuff I did as a manager, and it was still something I wasn’t great at. I was (thankfully) recognized for it, but to see this play out differently for others is infuriating. What’s the point of doing anything else if the team isn’t healthy and well supported in tough times like this?

“The concepts of invisible labor and office housework put a spotlight on a societal reluctance to value work that is predominantly done by women. This happens because such work is often conflated with assumptions about what women are naturally good at or interested in. And women are not rewarded for capacities and concerns deemed to be intrinsic. Therefore, when a woman manager provides team members with emotional support during a time of societal crises, it can be overlooked as “caretaking” instead of being recognized as strong crisis management. When a Black woman manager hosts a panel on anti-racism in the wake of racial violence, she can be applauded for her “passion” but not rewarded for her time, leadership, or DEI acumen. Moreover, since recognition and reward are the markers of valuable work, that women leaders’ efforts are going unnoticed and unrewarded effectively renders it low status. Of course, women have always done this work. But in a time of intense social upheaval, amidst a global pandemic and a national reckoning on racism, there is much more of this work to be done. And getting it done matters even more to a company’s prospects.”

Hasnain says:

This is worth internalizing - I found myself nodding along. Working on pure execution speed doesn’t seem worth it, even though it has been one of the most important things I’ve done. The ability to avoid the “death by a thousand papercuts” problem by simply cutting down the time to address any individual one does wonders.

“More generally, Fabian Giesen has noted that this kind of non-linear impact of velocity is common:

There are "phase changes" as you cross certain thresholds (details depend on the problem to some extent) where your entire way of working changes. ... ​​There's a lot of things I could in theory do at any speed but in practice cannot, because as iteration time increases it first becomes so frustrating that I can't do it for long and eventually it takes so long that it literally drops out of my short-term memory, so I need to keep notes or otherwise organize it or I can't do it at all.

“

Hasnain says:

I still find it unconscionable and scary that a lot of the holdup on the bill is supposedly attributed to saving the jobs of some 30k coal workers (whose jobs are already dying a war of attrition) in one state - when so many others globally are suffering. One surprising statistic I learned today: there are more people employed in Broadway theater than all coal workers across the US. We don’t hear about protecting their interests though.

Also relevant: Manchin gets 500k/year from coal companies in WV, primarily from his son’s. But it’s infuriating how this doesn’t get called out more.

“But what have they concretely accomplished? For all its climate-destroying coal plants, China still installs more solar power than any other country, sells more electric vehicles than any other country, and operates a weak but expanding carbon market. Trans-Atlantic strategists worry that the European Union, which also maintains a carbon price, could eventually fuse its system to that of its largest trading partner, China. For the U.S. to fail to follow through after so much blabber would suggest, as China’s leaders reportedly believe, that our democracy is too sclerotic to meet the current crisis. That is a mortifying conclusion for the country, and a potentially dangerous one for the world order. If the U.S. cannot pass one of these policies, cannot bring itself to actually reduce carbon pollution, then it will strengthen the perception that American democracy is fundamentally sick, dying, unable to act on an issue on which its leaders’ credibility and its international stature rides. We will look like a decadent, soul-sick nation, too feeble to govern our basest instincts. And, well, aren’t we?”

Hasnain says:

“Is AppleToo done now that you’ve been fired and Cher is out on medical leave?

I absolutely don’t think so. I think seeing that Apple would rather fire an employee for speaking out and asking the company to do better instead of actually doing better says volumes about the company and its priorities. I hope people see the decision Apple has made and that it is a galvanizing decision. My goal is to make Apple better for everyone. And it seems like Apple is less interested in that than I am.”

Hasnain says:

Not a good look, Netflix.

"“All these white people are going around talking to the press and speaking publicly on Twitter and the only person who gets fired is the Black person who was quiet the entire time,” says a former employee in an interview with The Verge. “That’s absurd, and just further shows that Black trans people are the ones being targeted in this conversation.”

The employee was terminated on suspicion of leaking metrics to the press related to the Dave Chappelle special."

.... from a related article

"The comedian’s popularity comes at a cost. Netflix spent $24.1 million on the “The Closer,” slightly more than the $23.6 million it paid for Chappelle’s 2019 special, “Sticks & Stones.” By comparison, the streaming service spent $3.9 million for “Inside,” Bo Burnham’s recent hour-and-a-half special. The nine-episode “Squid Game,” which delivered the best debut in Netflix history, cost $21.4 million.

By Netflix’s own measurement, “Sticks & Stones” had an “impact value” of $19.4 million, meaning it cost more than the value it generated, according to internal documents reviewed by Bloomberg. The company also evaluates its programs by “efficiency,” which balances a show’s reach with its price-tag. On that scale, Chappelle’s special scored 0.8 — less than the break-even score of 1. By comparison, Burnham’s “Inside” scored 2.8."

Hasnain says:

““California law is highly protective of employees who face retaliation after coming forward to complain about certain issues affecting the workplace, such as discrimination and health & safety matters,” Heath said in a statement. “Our case is still in the investigatory stage, but Ms. Gjovik alleges that Apple used purported violations of its intellectual property agreement as a pretext for retaliating against her while the company was in the process of investigating her complaints about harassment and discrimination.””

Hasnain says:

“Entire organizations have rearranged themselves around Slack. Slack isn’t a backhoe, as Butterfield suggested—it’s a Trojan horse. We installed it on our computers because it was cool, and because it was easy, and because we looked around and everyone else was using it. A generation of workers has bought into this wholly new way of working—one that feels good enough, often enough; one that is interesting and addictive and natural. If companies took Slack away, they’d need to reorient their processes, contend with angry employees, and generally put a great deal of toothpaste back in a pretty big tube.”

Hasnain says:

Viewing the source of a webpage is now hacking, news at 11. I’m glad the reporter did the right thing and hopefully the governor will eventually get educated here. The memes are glorious though!

“In the letter to teachers, Education Commissioner Margie Vandeven said “an individual took the records of at least three educators, unencrypted the source code from the webpage, and viewed the social security number (SSN) of those specific educators.””

Hasnain says:

I mean, just the quotes alone in this article are horrifying. I had to pick just one for brevity and there’s worse in the piece. And there’s video.

I’m glad to hear (wasn’t aware of this before) that the city will vote next month to replace the police force with a new department of public safety.

“The officers’ own body cams record them taking pot shots at largely peaceful protesters, and celebrating their hits with laughter and fist bumps. Cruising in an unmarked cargo van, one officer imitates Elmer Fudd, Bugs Bunny’s cartoon nemesis, saying: “Be vewy vewy quiet. We’re hunting activists.” A police commander used the same language in a recording captured after midnight: “Tonight it was… ‘We’re goin’ out hunting.’ Just a nice change of tempo,” he said, adding: “Fuck these people!’””

Hasnain says:

“All is not lost, and there is still time to reverse the course. The poll revealed that when aspects of Biden’s plan are polled separately, they receive massive support. Nearly 88 percent of Americans approve of lowering the price of prescription drugs, which will save lives in a country where Joe Manchin’s daughter helped jack up the price of an Epipen. Seventy-three percent of Americans support paid family and medical leave in the only industrialized country that does not guarantee paid parental leave. Sixty-seven percent want universal preschool and kindergarten, in a nation that’s only seemed to care about children when they’re in the womb.”

Hasnain says:

“New Capgemini research found that 84% of women and ethnic minority members in technology roles across global organizations recognize this industry-wide representation issue. What’s more, the lack of representation is compounded by a vast perception gap between executive leadership and these marginalized tech team members. In fact, Capgemini research found that 75% of executives believe that women and ethnic minorities feel a sense of belonging in their organizations; however, this belief is only shared by 24% of women and ethnic-minority employees in tech functions.”

Hasnain says:

Harsh but very valid (and IMO warranted) criticism of the conservative Supreme Court.

“The rank dishonesty and arrogance of Alito’s speech at Notre Dame are symptoms of the conservative majority’s unchecked power on the Court, and the entitlement that flows from having no one around you who can tell you what you sound like. It is not simply enough for the right-wing justices to have this power; Alito insists that the peasantry be silent about how they use it, and acquiesce not only to their delusions of impartiality but to their mischaracterization of verifiable facts. These are imperious demands for submission from someone who is meant to be a public servant.”

Hasnain says:

How did literally no one stop the meeting then and there and call this out?

[ rhetorical question, I unfortunately think I know the answer ]

“"If you're a woman in a group and you have a strong opinion..." one woman told me, "like, I have been to meetings where I'm the only woman in the room, and I say 'Hey, I really think we should go this direction, based on my experience', and someone looks at me, and they say, 'You know what, you're just here as a token hire. So I think you should be quiet about this.'”

Hasnain says:

It’s been a while since I’ve shared something that I was involved in writing but now is as good a time as any to change that.

I’m glad I had the opportunity here to talk about how I learnt and used Rust and why it’s quickly becoming my go-to language for writing programs.

All aboard the Rust hype train!

Hasnain says:

The wording here is… not great at all.

“On October 8th, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos responded to the questions in an internal email. “It never feels good when people are hurting, especially our colleagues,” he wrote. “You should also be aware that some talent may join third parties in asking us to remove the show in the coming days, which we are not going to do.”

Sarandos also said that Chappelle’s last special, Sticks & Stones, is Netflix’s “most watched, stickiest, and most award winning stand-up special to date.””

Hasnain says:

If you zoom out a little this was a great read on engineering trade offs and how to approach designing programs and systems.

“As Rich Hickey once said:

Programmers know the benefits of everything and the tradeoffs of nothing.

We see the amazing benchmarks that some NoSQL databases provide, and we say “wow, they are so much faster/better/scalable than relational databases.” But we don’t ask ourselves why.

Instead of asking “how are they so much better?” we should be asking “what are they giving up?””

Hasnain says:

Really great read on how the COVID pandemic affected various families and worsened pre-existing inequalities, causing harm.

“In the U.S., most of us aren’t taught to use our sociological imaginations. We’re not taught to think about social problems as structural problems. We’re not taught to see the forces that operate beyond our control – forces like capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. And we’re not taught to see how those forces create many of the challenges we face in our lives and constrain our ability to make choices that could help us overcome those challenges.

Instead, we — especially women and people from other systematically marginalized groups — are taught to self-help-book our way out of structural problems. To believe that all our problems would go away if only we were to strictly follow some seventeen-step plan.

Another part of this I can’t stop thinking about is how our lack of a social safety net is putting women’s health and relationships at risk. So much of the public conversation has focused on the women who are dropping out of the workforce. Those stories are important, but to me they signal the centrality of capitalism in all of our public concerns.”

Hasnain says:

“TikTok is not the only platform that tries to avoid scrutiny by quietly backing into a hedge while Facebook takes the heat—YouTube is the undisputed master of this strategy. But TikTok has the dubious privilege of being one of the few platforms that, according to polls, people dislike and distrust even more than Facebook. Maybe reports of Facebook’s imminent death are greatly exaggerated, but reports of TikTok’s rise certainly aren’t. If lawmakers want to address the problems that social-media platforms cause for young people, they should care about the platforms young people care about.”

Hasnain says:

“Could managers be correct in their assessment that women at the company are excellent performers in their current roles but lack the skills to be successful at a higher level? To the contrary, the researchers found that managers consistently underestimate women’s ability to perform in the future. They identified women and men with similar performance and potential scores for a given evaluation period, then looked forward to the next period and found that women tended to have higher performance scores than men, whether or not they been promoted into a more senior role.”

Hasnain says:

“The eight-hour workday was among the first fights taken up by the American unionized labor movement. Today’s fight over hours may be the one on which workers rebuild the movement.

“As much as I love my job, I’m realizing that it’s not worth my life,” Mr. Palacios said. “It’s unhealthy when your whole life is tied to a waged job. You don’t realize how bad that is until it’s too late.””

Hasnain says:

“Workers gave clear reasons for leaving the industry. Well over half of workers, 62%, reported receiving emotional abuse and disrespect from customers, and 49% reported abuse from managers, according to the Black Box Intelligence survey. Of workers surveyed, 15% left the restaurant industry in the last year, and another 33% said that they hope to.”

Hasnain says:

Clearly need to move to Portland

“I work for a company that makes beer taste like pine needles that have been soaking in a vat of apple cider vinegar for thirty years. Our logo is a Sasquatch wearing a trucker hat. I make $40,000 per year, but fortunately, Portland is super affordable probably.”

Hasnain says:

“Cunningham also credited the huge support system of people ready to organize climate actions alongside her. When she sent an emotional plea to Amazon employees asking them to sign on a shareholder resolution to require Amazon to release a climate plan, 8,700 obliged. When Cunningham and Costa were threatened with termination for speaking publicly about Amazon, 400 other workers spoke publicly about the company’s role in the climate crisis in protest. When Cunningham and Costa were terminated, Tim Bray – a respected engineer and the former vice-president of Amazon’s cloud computing group – resigned in protest.”

Hasnain says:

This was a great read on org design. I like how it focused on the thought processes and did not try to prescribe “the one true way to do things” - which it acknowledges cannot exist.

“The final implication of this essay is that stories of organisational processes are more important than descriptive how-tos of the process. A novice would read Working Backwards or Netflix’s No Rules Rules as “Ahh, here are a handful of mechanisms these successful organisations used to become successful! If I adopt them in my org, I, too, will be successful.”

But this is naive.

An experienced org designer would read them for the stories of how those companies got to those mechanisms in the first place. The story of the iterative process is more revealing than a simple description of the mechanisms, because it tells us the context. Understanding the context is usually key to understanding if the processes have a shot at working when applied to your company.”

Hasnain says:

Great interview that touches on education, politics, society, and economics. And it opened my eyes to a new perspective that any new labor movement also needs to be concerned with putting healthcare costs under control.

“But the big story, which is what Anne and I write about in our book, is the incredible cost of healthcare coupled with the way it’s funded. One dollar in five in America goes to supporting this obscenely swollen industry. And then we’re financing most of it off less-educated workers. That premium per family is now over $20,000 a year. If you take that over a 2,000-hour work year, it’s $10 an hour that has to be met by the firm. And it either has to come out of profits or out of wages. And that destroys jobs.”

Hasnain says:

Even the mob needs good management, like any large organization. And just like any old organization, they need to adapt to how millennials and the younger generations work. Though maybe they should skip out on demanding protection money via text.

“Mr. Curtis said the top-level micromanaging in the Colombo case reflected concerns about the incompetence of lower-level members.

A new generation of wiseguys didn’t properly learn the business, according to former government investigators. Older members complain that the millennials—who grew up in the suburbs instead of city streets—are softer, dumber and not as loyal as mobsters of the past. Plus, they’re always texting.”

Hasnain says:

Pretty reasonable tips in here.

“Every system eventually sucks, get over it

Bjarne Stroustrup has a quote that goes “There are only two kinds of languages: the ones people complain about and the ones nobody uses”. This can be extended to large systems as well. There is no “right” architecture, you’ll never pay down all of your technical debt, you’ll never design the perfect interface, your tests will always be too slow. This isn’t an excuse to never make things better, but instead a way to give you perspective. Worry less about elegance and perfection; instead strive for continuous improvement and creating a livable system that your team enjoys working in and sustainably delivers value.”

Hasnain says:

This was oh so depressing. I wonder why there isn’t a system that flags severe outliers like this just from the data - so people can investigate to see what’s going on. A county where 48% of juvenile cases end up with a jail sentence compared to the state average of 5% deserves at least an initial investigation.

“What happened on that Friday and in the days after, when police rounded up even more kids, would expose an ugly and unsettling culture in Rutherford County, one spanning decades. In the wake of these mass arrests, lawyers would see inside a secretive legal system that’s supposed to protect kids, but in this county did the opposite. Officials flouted the law by wrongfully arresting and jailing children. One of their worst practices was stopped following the events at Hobgood, but the conditions that allowed the lawlessness remain. The adults in charge failed. Yet they’re still in charge. Tennessee’s systems for protecting children failed. Yet they haven’t been fixed.”

Hasnain says:

“Forde-Mazrui, who said the Supreme Court has long protected speech that’s racist in nature, wondered whether the racial epithets and sounds could be classified as “fighting words” — a category of speech not protected by the First Amendment that can “inflict injury or tend to incite an immediate breach of the peace.” The law professor questioned whether there was a societal double standard as to which victims were protected by authorities.

“Without speaking directly to the motives of Virginia Beach or its police department, would authorities be willing to intervene if a White family was being subjected to this kind of thing in the privacy of their own home and on their own home property with language that would be as insulting?” he asked. “This will seem like an anecdote of a bad apple to a lot of people, but incidents like this happen every day in America.””

Hasnain says:

“To summarize, we drove a magnitude change in our CI infrastructure spend by using three ideas:

Adaptive capacity to decrease the cost of each test by changing the infrastructure runtime.

Circuit breakers to decrease the number of tests by changing the infrastructure workflow.

Pipeline changes to decrease the number of tests by changing our user workflows.”

Hasnain says:

…

“Body camera footage of Minneapolis police officers' response to the protests in the days after George Floyd's death reveals officers talking about "hunting" people as part of a response to quell the unrest.”

Hasnain says:

This was a great lesson.

“This childish game of “Nuh-uh/Yuh-huh!” went on while the user sat there dumbfounded and helpless, watching the icon for their .XYZ files flicker back and forth between the two programs, both of whom egotistically believed they were doing the user a “favor” by insisting on being the program that runs .XYZ files.”

Hasnain says:

I am so glad this passed. This has been the result of years of hard work from these women that were unjustly discriminated against - working so no one else would suffer the same way and holding employers accountable for the harm they do.

“Emphasizing the need for SB 331, two Black women recently raised gender and race discrimination claims against a company where “they were underpaid, faced racist comments from their manager and were subject to retaliation.” (1) While the company initially dismissed their claims, the women’s stories generated tremendous media interest and inspired other women to speak openly about their own experiences. The women eventually settled their claims and were protected by the STAND Act, though only for their gender-based claims. Though they can speak about their experience involving gender discrimination, they cannot speak about their experience involving race discrimination. As harassment or discrimination claims are oftentimes intersectional (e.g., based on gender and race or age and sexual orientation), SB 331 will resolve a situation where the NDA covers only one aspect of the worker’s experience and claim.”

Hasnain says:

“She admits that the findings are probably not unique to Tetris. Traumatic memories are often highly sensory: Sights and sounds of a trauma can flash back in horrifying detail. Holmes believes that any highly visual activity that stimulates the brain's sensory centers might prevent graphic recollections from forming in the first place. The colors, shapes and constant movement of Tetris may do just that, but based on Holmes' past research, activities like digital pub quizzes and counting exercises do not. She plans to study other visually engaging interventions like drawing and the video game Candy Crush in the near future.”

Hasnain says:

This is some really amazing news.

“Malaria is caused by a parasite which is far more insidious and sophisticated than the virus that causes Covid. Comparing them is like comparing a person and a cabbage.

The malaria parasite has evolved to evade our immune system. That's why you have to catch malaria time and time again before starting to get even limited protection.”

Hasnain says:

“Officials with Dubai and the UAE, a close ally of the United States, did not respond to requests for comment but have previously declined, saying the episodes are family matters. The sheikh has argued that the assault on the Nostromo rescued his daughter from a high-ransom kidnapping, though Latifa had prerecorded a video explaining that she’d chosen to run because of years of oppression and abuse.”

Hasnain says:

“This routine source bias in criminal justice reporting must stop. It leads to the false conception that police are the only experts on crime and ignores the critical perspectives such as those of public defenders, social workers, and individuals and communities directly impacted by the criminal legal system. It also presents a singular, skewed interpretation of the news, imbuing coverage with a pro-police bias—an assumption that police solve crime and make the public safer.

Every time there is a “rise in homicides,” instead of journalists using the occasion to question the efficacy of policing, police are allowed to use their failures to demand more resources, more funding, more support.”

Hasnain says:

“The tension surrounding the Safer crisis is generated as much by different calibrations of time as by different assessments of risk. In an instant, a leak, a crack, or a spark could cause a disaster, and even in the best-case scenario any solution would take months to execute. If the U.N. were given permission to inspect the vessel tomorrow, it would need up to eight weeks to assemble a team and to reach the Safer. As for the military, commercial, or Iranian solutions, who knows how long they’d require? A spare supertanker cannot be summoned like a taxi. Unexpected things can happen in a war zone. Because of all these conflicting scenarios with unclear time frames, the Safer crisis feels at once urgent and endless. Each passing day seems like proof to one side that the worries about the ship are overblown, and to the other that one more inch on a bomb’s fuse has burned. The crisis unfolds at the speed of rust.”

Hasnain says:

Just straight reporting of facts, no editorializing. This is great. And the Kellogg worker strike started today too it seems.

“Tens of thousands of workers around the US could go on strike in the coming weeks in what would be the largest wave of labor unrest since a series of teacher strikes in 2018 and 2019, which won major victories and gave the American labor movement a significant boost.”

Hasnain says:

I usually enjoy human interest stories to learn more about different perspectives and upbringings; and they usually touch upon a novel piece of knowledge for me.

This is none of these things - it just goes into someone being terrible and I’m honestly not sure I would have read it if I wasn’t in a car waiting for a while. Lots of mixed feelings here. You have been warned.

“But there also was something clarifying about it. Now more than ever, she believes that “The Kindest” was personal. “I think she wanted me to read her story,” Dorland said, “and for me and possibly no one else to recognize my letter.”

Larson, naturally, finds this outrageous. “Did I feel some criticism toward the way that Dawn was posting about her kidney donation?” she said. “Yes. But am I trying to write a takedown of Dawn? No. I don’t care about Dawn.””

Hasnain says:

Some details on the outage yesterday.

“We’ve done extensive work hardening our systems to prevent unauthorized access, and it was interesting to see how that hardening slowed us down as we tried to recover from an outage caused not by malicious activity, but an error of our own making. I believe a tradeoff like this is worth it — greatly increased day-to-day security vs. a slower recovery from a hopefully rare event like this.”

Hasnain says:

Interesting read on the history of airborne disease transmission and the perception in the medical community. This quote, though, is the clincher.

“Policymakers and politicians also have a natural bias against the idea that diseases may be airborne, says Professor Jimenez.

“Droplets on surfaces is very convenient for people in power - all of the responsibility is on the individual,” he said. “On the other hand, if you admit it is airborne, institutions, governments and companies have to do something.””

Hasnain says:

Really interesting read on white collar crime, the penal system, and a set of human interest stories about white collar criminals trying to whitewash their past crimes. Thankfully the author does a good job at not immediately biasing one way or the other.

“Not long after Whitney’s fall, the sociologist Edwin Sutherland devised the term “white-collar crime,” to describe wrongdoing committed “by a person of respectability and high social status in the course of his occupation.” Since then, each cycle of boom and bust has delivered new iterations of rapacious self-dealing, often indelibly linked to time or place, like schools of painting—the naked fraud of a Savings & Loan, the whimsical math of an Arthur Andersen. In 2001, following the accounting scandals at Enron and other companies, a publication called CFO Magazine quietly abandoned its annual Excellence Awards, because winners from each of the previous three years had gone to prison.”