Hasnain says:

.... and 1/3 of the company (and more coming?) is out. I wonder if we're seeing a future business school case study show up in real time

(I saw a few resignation announcements in the morning, but now this...)

Hasnain says:

Oi. This is not a good look, and I’m quite surprised legal was ok with a VP publishing the original “rebuttal” - which reads like a six year old with a grudge wrote it.

“That tweet was the latest attack on the Intercept’s Mara Hvistendahl, who last week published an exposé detailing how reseller networks in China reportedly funnel Oracle’s tech into the hands of the country’s government. In response, Glueck published roughly 2,700 words worth of rebuttal on the official Oracle blog, helmed by a request for readers to send “any information about Mara or her reporting” to his personal Protonmail email address.”

Hasnain says:

This is an informative analysis of DHH’s recent post but also just a work of art in writing style.

“I'm guessing that is in the strictest legal sense, given that they are lawyers. And sure - it's incredibly hard to prove a legal pattern of discrimination or harassment in the United States. That's…not the point. There's a vast area of conduct that's legal, but still shitty. Some examples:

Using your employees’ past words against them at work
Telling marginalized people they're reading too much into something

Using your name and your status to push for antitrust legislation that benefits your company while simultaneously telling people to stop “being political” at work

Hosting a mayoral candidate's campaign headquarters in your company's office while pretending that work is apolitical

Using transform: rotate(-1deg); on your blog's subscribe card to make it look slightly askew”

Hasnain says:

Conspiracy theory that Basecamp needed a good way to do a layoff intensifies...

(Though I feel this is already way worse than anything they could have done had they just admitted to financial problems causing a layoff)

“Yesterday, we offered everyone at Basecamp an option of a severance package worth up to six months salary for those who've been with the company over three years, and three months salary for those at the company less than that. No hard feelings, no questions asked. For those who cannot see a future at Basecamp under this new direction, we'll help them in every which way we can to land somewhere else. “

Hasnain says:

As more and more information comes out about this it looks worse and worse - a modern day lynching basically.

Hands on the steering wheel, car was parked. And yet shot in the *back of the head* - and multiple other shots.

““These are not the days in the South when we put up with law officials and DAs that are inept, incompetent and incapable,” Barber said at the news conference, repeating the three words to a chorus of church leaders. “Inept! Incompetent! And incapable! Because of that, babies are crying.””

Hasnain says:

This is a really good take on the whole basecamp situation with some additional insider reporting.

The tweet I saw summarized it well, so just quoting:

“So a founder publicly told an employee to shut up, two other employees reported the founder to HR for being disrespectful, and as a result the founders told all employees to shut up forever:”

Hasnain says:

This is the most Florida thing ever.

““It is our policy, to the extent possible, not to employ anyone who has taken the experimental COVID-19 injection until further information is known,” Centner wrote in the email to parents.”

Hasnain says:

"“We’ve all had a year to evaluate if the life we’re living is the one we want to be living,” said Christina Wallace, a senior lecturer at Harvard Business School. “Especially for younger people who have been told to work hard, pay off your loans and someday you’ll get to enjoy your life, a lot of them are questioning that equation. What if they want to be happy right now?”"

Hasnain says:

This was such a good read that it was hard to pick one thing out to quote - I kept changing my decision.

“What goes unsaid in many of these stories is the fact that the jobs are shit jobs, whether because of the unsustainability of the pay, the Covid exposure, or the shit treatment they’ll receive from tourists.

Stick with me here, but what if people weren’t lazy — and instead, for the first time in a long time, were able to say no to exploitative working conditions and poverty-level wages? And what if business owners are scandalized, dismayed, frustrated, or bewildered by this scenario because their pre-pandemic business models were predicated on a steady stream of non-unionized labor with no other options? It’s not the labor force that’s breaking. It’s the economic model.”

Hasnain says:

I think the only good thing I see in this post is them owning this decision. Everything else seems misguided. Companies and work have social impact even if we don’t want them to. People need 360 feedback. You need to revisit decisions when new data pops up. I could go on...

“Who's responsible for these changes? David and I are. Who made the changes? David and I did. These are our calls, and the outcomes and impacts land at our doorstep. Input came from many sources, disagreements were heard, deliberations were had.”

Hasnain says:

I feel like he had started redeeming himself slowly for all the stuff Microsoft did in the 90s/00s, but this is ... right back to that playbook.

"Bill Gates, one of the world's richest men and most powerful philanthropists, was the target of criticism from social justice campaigners on Sunday after arguing that lifting patent protections on COVID-19 vaccine technology and sharing recipes with the world to foster a massive ramp up in manufacturing and distribution — despite a growing international call to do exactly that — is a bad idea.

Directly asked during an interview with Sky News if he thought it "would be helpful" to have vaccine recipes be shared, Gates quickly answered: "No.""

...

"Nick Dearden, executive director of Global Justice Now, one of the lead partner groups in an international coalition calling for WTO patent waivers at a crucial meeting of the world body next month, characterized Gates' remarks — and the ideological framework behind them — as "disgusting.""

Hasnain says:

I can’t even imagine how bad this must be given: 1) they pre-emptively declared a state of emergency and 2) 7 officers were placed on leave and 3 others resigned.

Update, as more info comes out. He was in his car, in his driveway, with his hands on the steering wheel, and he was shot in the back of his head?!?!

Hasnain says:

...

“As industry lobbying has escalated in Washington, companies have warned in private meetings with US trade and White House officials that giving up the intellectual property rights could allow China and Russia to exploit platforms such as mRNA, which could be used for other vaccines or even therapeutics for conditions such as cancer and heart problems in the future.”

Hasnain says:

I don’t know who Apple considers a reasonable customer, and now I’m not sure I want to know.

“Apple countered by arguing that “no reasonable consumer would believe” that content purchased through iTunes would be available on the platform indefinitely. But US District Court Judge John Mendez wasn’t buying it, as first noticed by the Hollywood Reporter. He rejected a motion filed by Apple that sought to dismiss the suit. That means the suit can move forward with its claims of false advertising and unfair competition, though it could still be settled before going to trial. “

Hasnain says:

How/why is this a thing? I understand the order was legal, but it seems immoral to put the blame on someone who had nothing to do with the entity the authorities had a beef with.

“"How do I feel? Like I finally got out of prison. I'm finally going to be rejoined with my family. I'm going to see them again."

It marks the end of an ordeal which has taken its toll on Mohammed's physical and mental health. He was, after all, condemned to a life without power, sanitation or company.”

Hasnain says:

Oooof.

“If you were to snitch on the boss for any of these episodes individually, you are “not living up to the core behaviors of the company” at best and you’re excluded, gossiped about, and let go at worst. You might have the fortunate off chance to be in a meeting about an unrelated topic with HR and position a window to bring it up nonchalantly. You might watch as they sit in uncomfortable silence until your two-minute defiant act of bravery is finished and hear “what would you like to do about this?” So you’re saying that she has layered more inane processes for your hiring than she does for your male counterparts? I see how that could be frustrating. Could you be interpreting this the wrong way?

Well Susan, I’ve been asking myself that question my entire life.”

Hasnain says:

“There are legitimate reasons to be in favor of restoring the full deduction, but instead of talking about them, Democratic leaders and pundits have mostly been trying to sell the public on an absurd lie: that a tax break for which only 1 in 10 Americans even qualifies, and overwhelmingly benefits those in the highest-earning percentile, is a “middle-class” benefit. No one seems to mind that this is the same take Democrats blasted when used by Republicans to argue for the Bush tax cuts or the repeal of the estate tax.”

Hasnain says:

COVID is running rampant and the government instead decided to spend their time and energy on this?!

“Twitter has removed more than 50 tweets critical of the Indian government’s handling of the coronavirus pandemic, and did so at the request of the Indian government. First reported by Indian news site MediaNama, the Indian government sent Twitter an emergency order on Friday to censor 52 tweets, according to a disclosure notice on the Lumen database. The censored accounts include a sitting member of India’s Parliament, two filmmakers, an actor, and a West Bengal state minister.”

Hasnain says:

“I’m telling you this because it isn’t easy for us to tell you. It is difficult to say, “I’m sorry I couldn’t make it, I felt a crushing despair that I couldn’t shake,” or “I’d have called, but I was curled up in a ball trying to find a reason to keep going.”

You probably wouldn’t judge us or ridicule us for this admission, but the voice in our heads tells us you would—because that is how it works. Mental illness is an inside job and it knows what buttons to push.”

Hasnain says:

I long for a world where acts like this are also treated with equal severity to mass murder. Because that’s what this effectively becomes.

Hasnain says:

“But recent events, both in the U.S. and overseas, are making this position increasingly untenable. After a long period in which it was difficult for Americans to obtain vaccines, even if they were legally eligible, we’re now rapidly approaching the point—if we haven’t reached it already—where the main obstacle to getting shots into arms isn’t the supply of vaccine but some Americans’ reluctance or indifference to getting them.”

Hasnain says:

Following the VaccinateCA story has been one of the few beacons of hope over the last few months. This is really motivating to see

“Perhaps most importantly, the longer America struggles with covid-19, the later we will make the choice to help others. India is currently dealing with a prompt national healthcare crisis. Lower-income countries are looking at multi-year timelines until they can be vaccinated. Even relatively well-off nations like Japan and much of the EU are months behind the US on the vaccination curve. The faster we accelerate our efforts, the faster the best parts of the US vaccination’s response get to work on saving lives elsewhere.

Every day matters. Every dose matters.”

Hasnain says:

We need to abolish the vaccine patents and and work together, globally, to save lives. I’m not sure it will happen though.

“"I ran pillar to post but every crematorium had some reason ... one said it had run out of wood," said Kumar, wearing a mask and squinting his eyes that were stinging from the smoke blowing from the burning pyres.”

Hasnain says:

This just gets worse and worse and worse as you read it. Especially hit home for me when they mentioned standing N feet away at all times because the phone cord was N-1 feet long so it wouldn’t hurt when he threw it at you.

“Even after The Hollywood Reporter published a piece earlier this month going into greater detail, Hollywood and Broadway largely remained silent.

Meanwhile, the whisper network has become a chorus, with thinly veiled tweets and Instagram posts from former assistants lighting up social media. As detailed in a 2005 Wall Street Journal profile titled “Boss-zilla!,” Rudin, by his own estimation, burned through 119 assistants over five years — or, as one former assistant describes it, “an absurd revolving door of disposable, interchangeable, bright young people whose purpose is to be the target and outlet for his anger.””

Hasnain says:

I do think Q3 will bring about an upheaval in the US as the pandemic (hopefully) subsides here. Hoping the equivalent can happen worldwide soon.

“I’ll be honest: of all of the tips I provide in this newsletter, this is the only one that I think might help chip away at your teammates’ burnout. Burnout isn’t just about having too many things to do or not enough time to do them; it’s about lack of resources, support, and progress. A bit more vacation time, company-wide mandatory days, etc. won’t actually help most folks address their burnout. It hopefully will help you retain more folks in the long term, because it can demonstrate you recognize their very real human needs.”

Hasnain says:

The best defense is offense. This is amazing, from the discovery to the many clap backs here. Masterfully played too, with the bugs found, the exploits they’re going to “innocently” place, and also for highlighting violations of apple’s terms of service and putting the legality of evidence gathered this way into question.

“We are of course willing to responsibly disclose the specific vulnerabilities we know about to Cellebrite if they do the same for all the vulnerabilities they use in their physical extraction and other services to their respective vendors, now and in the future.”

Hasnain says:

Whew. The justice system did something right, for once. This is by no means anywhere close to justice for George Floyd and so many other victims of police brutality, but it's a good first start.

Next step: end qualified immunity?

(I doubt we will get abolishment anytime soon, even though that seems the most preferable outcome to me at this time, so settling for ending qualified immunity is a start)

"“However, we should not mistake a guilty verdict in this case as evidence that the persistent problem of police misconduct has been solved or that the divide between law enforcement and so many of the communities they serve has been bridged,” Schumer said. “We must remain diligent in our efforts to bring meaningful change to police departments across the country.”"

Hasnain says:

“What’s clear, though, is that both methods will blow past traditional solvers. And for phenomena where there are no established PDEs, learning neural operators may be the only way to model such systems. Consider the problem of traffic flow: Writing a PDE that accurately captures the dynamics of traffic is near impossible. But there’s plenty of data to learn from. “Instead of writing the PDEs, given data, you can use this neural operator to just learn the mapping,” said Azizzadenesheli.”

Hasnain says:

“Almost always, the conversation veered toward a universal theme: our relationship to work is broken. Generally speaking, our attitude toward our jobs is toxic, our demands on individuals are too great, and work’s rewards are not commensurate with the time spent. Most of us lack the support we need to balance our careers with any life outside the workplace. According to a 2019 Gallup Report on the State of the Global Workforce, 71 percent of adults say they’re not engaged at work, and 19 percent say they’re actively disengaged. Bleak.

Here, the pandemic has been clarifying. American work/office culture feels unsustainable. It’s not sustainable for the individuals who are burning out. As our pandemic workdays grow longer, it’s clear that this is not sustainable for our families. Profits might be steady, even soaring, but the workforce, like the communities and our lived environments, are collapsing. “

Hasnain says:

Eye opening take and some hard hitting journalism investigating failures in the media rooms at the Times and why it’s so hard to get quality journalism these days.

“Three Times journalists who cover the Middle East, who all asked to speak anonymously so as not to risk their jobs, told me that they and several of their colleagues had raised concerns with senior editors about Callimachi’s methods beginning with her first stories for the paper in 2014. They were ignored or intimidated into silence.

“Senior editors doubled down on the narratives that they wanted her to produce,” one correspondent told me, “and also doubled down on their own decision to make Rukmini a star. Anything that challenged that, they wanted to disregard or discredit.” In the aftermath of Caliphate’s disgrace, this reporter continued, some of them have “owned up to it privately, but not publicly. The Times has not been transparent.” From the start, according to the Times reporters I spoke to, Callimachi was encouraged to write blockbuster stories without any of the institutional checks that should have gone with the brief. (The New York Times did not respond to a request for comment.)”

Hasnain says:

I really really wish big tech employers would stop with the dual class employment system at some point in our lives.

“Then she got angry about the big things: All of her coworkers had back problems, Googlers were making double the salary for half the physical labor and she was warned that she might be fired for talking about COVID-related emergency hazard pay that Google had promised but not yet paid (the company eventually followed through with payment). She posted an angry discussion of working conditions and salary on her personal Facebook page.

That's when Modis took her badge and told her to go home. (Modis did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) "They said I was a security risk, that I might have violated the non-disclosure agreement that I signed by complaining about working conditions. “

Hasnain says:

“India is in now in the grips of a public health emergency. Social media feeds are full with videos of Covid funerals at crowded cemeteries, wailing relatives of the dead outside hospitals, long queues of ambulances carrying gasping patients, mortuaries overflowing with the dead, and patients, sometimes two to a bed, in corridors and lobbies of hospitals. There are frantic calls for help for beds, medicines, oxygen, essential drugs and tests. Drugs are being sold on the black market, and test results are taking days. "They didn't tell me for three hours that my child is dead," a dazed mother says in one video, sitting outside an ICU. Wails of another person outside the intensive care punctuate the silences.”

Hasnain says:

““What they try to do is spin it and say ‘Look at how unlawful protesters are as is evidenced by all of these arrests that we’ve made,’” he said. “Then they hope people have stopped paying attention after six, 10, 12 months when prosecutors say, ‘Hey, we’ve got to drop these charges because these people shouldn’t have been arrested.’””

Hasnain says:

This was a pretty great read on tech and incentive structures.

“Much has been written about that tragic fall (see link above), but that is not the cautionary tale I’m planning to tell here. This one is about what happens when money becomes your only motivator, and how the expectation of money can make you do irrational things.”

Hasnain says:

This is a generally decent article except for one really fatal flaw - could they have not asked anyone who’s ever taken an introductory stats course about Bayes’ theorem? I would hope they’d immediately learn it wasn’t that obscure.

“It’s not. And that’s because of a fascinating little mathematical anomaly known as Bayes’s theorem, named after the Rev Thomas Bayes, an 18th-century clergyman and maths nerd.

Bayes’s theorem is written, in mathematical notation, as P(A|B) = (P(B|A)P(A))/P(B). It looks complicated. But you don’t need to worry about what all those symbols mean: it’s fairly easy to understand when you think of an example.”

Hasnain says:

Oooof

“Detective Maurice Ward, who's already pleaded guilty to corruption charges, testified that he and his partners were told to carry the replicas and BB guns "in case we accidentally hit somebody or got into a shootout, so we could plant them." The directive allegedly came from the team's sergeant, Wayne Jenkins, the Washington Post reports. Though Ward didn't say whether or not the tactic was ever used, Detective Marcus Taylor—another cop swept up in the scandal—was carrying a fake gun almost identical to his service weapon when he was arrested last year, according to the Sun.”

Hasnain says:

“You might think that any reporter would be happy when a government official answers a question, rather than ducks it. But political reporters operate in a different world, ruled by optics. Indeed, political reporters do a lot of ducking themselves — no more so, recently, than when covering the issue of voter suppression, which they obfuscate to avoid the appearance of “taking sides.”

Taking sides is the ultimate sin for political reporters — even when one side is the truth. We saw that with their coverage of the Trump presidency. We saw that with their coverage of the COVID pandemic. Most fatally, we saw that with their coverage of the intersection of Trump and the pandemic.”

Hasnain says:

“Boston Police hid from the public their own evidence in 1995 that one of their officers had sexually assaulted a 12-year-old child. He kept his badge, worked on child sexual assault cases, and became union president. He allegedly went on to molest five other children.

A 2015 study in the U.S. found that, over a 10 year period, an officer was caught in a case of sexual misconduct every five days. “

Hasnain says:

Good read on memory and error handling in Go and Rust.

“And the second is that, without a lot of context, this sentence is utter nonsense if you don't have a working knowledge of Rust. As a Java developer, you may be wondering if we're trying to turn numbers into objects (we are not). In fact, even as a Rust developer, you may have just accepted that boxing is just a fact of life.”

Hasnain says:

“If a person can’t get out of bed, something is making them exhausted. If a student isn’t writing papers, there’s some aspect of the assignment that they can’t do without help. If an employee misses deadlines constantly, something is making organization and deadline-meeting difficult. Even if a person is actively choosing to self-sabotage, there’s a reason for it — some fear they’re working through, some need not being met, a lack of self-esteem being expressed.

People do not choose to fail or disappoint. No one wants to feel incapable, apathetic, or ineffective. If you look at a person’s action (or inaction) and see only laziness, you are missing key details. There is always an explanation. There are always barriers. Just because you can’t see them, or don’t view them as legitimate, doesn’t mean they’re not there. Look harder.”

Hasnain says:

Oof.

“Dan’s story is not uncommon. Many people with high-pressure jobs find themselves unhappy with their careers, despite working hard their whole lives to get to their current position. Hating your job is one thing — but what happens if you identify so closely with your work that hating your job means hating yourself?”

Hasnain says:

“This tendency to lie pervades all police work, not just high-profile violence, and it has the power to ruin lives. Law enforcement officers lie so frequently—in affidavits, on post-incident paperwork, on the witness stand—that officers have coined a word for it: testilying. Judges and juries generally trust police officers, especially in the absence of footage disproving their testimony. As courts reopen and convene juries, many of the same officers now confronting protesters in the street will get back on the stand.

Defense attorneys around the country believe the practice is ubiquitous; while that belief might seem self-serving, it is borne out by footage captured on smartphones and surveillance cameras. Yet those best positioned to crack down on testilying, police chiefs and prosecutors, have done little or nothing to stop it in most of the country. Prosecutors rely on officer testimony, true or not, to secure convictions, and merely acknowledging the problem would require the government to admit that there is almost never real punishment for police perjury.”

Hasnain says:

All aboard the rust fanboy train.

Jokes aside though this matched a lot of my experience learning Rust, poking around with it for multiple side projects and then shipping production code in it.

“I strongly feel that I am a better programmer overall after learning Rust because I find myself applying the [best] practices that Rust enforces on me when programming in other languages. For this reason, even if you don't plan to use Rust in any serious capacity, I encourage people to learn Rust because exposure to its ideas will likely transform the ways you think about programming for the better.”

Hasnain says:

“Once Gardam releases the details of his algorithm, it will be open season for other mathematicians to explore the Hantzsche-Wendt group and potentially other groups. “The hope is that we will learn something new — a new trick which will allow us to build examples,” Kielak said.

Already, knowing that the conjecture is false has changed the mindsets of many mathematicians. “Psychologically, this is a very big difference,” Kielak said. “Probably in a year’s time, we’re going to have infinitely many” counterexamples.”

Hasnain says:

I'm really curious to see how this plays out - are they targeting a market similar to podcasts? Wondering if writers will be expected to produce at a consistent pace or something.

Hasnain says:

This is so depressing. A man died, succumbing to injuries due to an unsafe workplace, and all it took was a meager payment and a promise - not even realized - to build HQ2 in Indiana for the state to drop the investigation and blame the man for his own death. Horrifying.

Also.. even Pakistani politicians would charge more than $1000 for this I feel?

“The same day Stallone sent his whistleblower email, Amazon’s corporate offices in Seattle gave a $1,000 campaign contribution to Indiana’s governor. It was years before Holcomb would next face reelection, and Amazon hasn’t donated to him before or since.

A year after Terry’s death, Indiana officials quietly signed an agreement with Amazon to delete all the safety citations and fines. The agreement said Amazon had met the requirements of an “unpreventable employee misconduct defense.” The official record now essentially blames Terry for his own death.”

Hasnain says:

Solid journalism.

“The Times sent DeSantis’ office samples of his signatures along with a summary of the opinions from experts interviewed for this story. His spokespeople did not respond to a request for comment on the analysis nor did they say why this change in law is needed.”

Hasnain says:

“The companies suing Mandela had devised TRIPS as a long-term strategic response to the south-based generics industry that arose in the 1960s. They had come too far to be set back by the needs of a pandemic in sub-Saharan Africa. U.S. and industry officials paired old standby arguments about patents driving innovation with claims that Africans posed a public health menace because they couldn’t keep time: Since they could not be relied on to take their medicines on a schedule, giving Africans access to the drugs would allow for the emergence of drug-resistant HIV variants, according to industry and its government and media allies.*”

...

“*Among journalists echoing this argument was former New Republic editor Andrew Sullivan. When The New York Times reported Sullivan was defending the companies’ lawsuit while taking undisclosed funding from PhRma, the industry trade association, Sullivan remained defiant in the face of evidence-based accusations that he was an unethical journalist. “It behooves me to say I see absolutely no problems with [drug industry sponsorship],” he told Salon. “In fact, I am extremely proud to get some support from a great industry.” It later turned out that Africans adhered more closely to the twice-daily pill regimens than patient populations in rich countries.”

Hasnain says:

I don’t even know where to begin with this.

“I didn’t really think about it when I signed on. I thought that I’d make a little bit from an IPO, maybe $200,000. You don’t think much about $200,000; it’s not life-changing.”

Hasnain says:

So many hard hitting quotes here, it’s hard to pick just one.

“But it quickly became clear that no one was interested in taking responsibility for policing the abuses of the president of a poor nation with just 4.5m Facebook users. The message she received from all corners – including from threat intelligence, the small and elite team of investigators responsible for uncovering CIB campaigns – was that the abuses were bad, but resources were tight, and, absent any external pressure, Honduras was simply not a priority.”

Hasnain says:

This is so damning.

“I love tech. But watching it intersect with a Hindu nationalist government trying to crush dissent, choke a free press, and destroy a nation’s secular ethos doesn’t feel like something I bought a ticket to. Writing about technology from India now feels like having a front-row seat to the country’s rapid slide into authoritarianism. “It’s like watching a train wreck while you’re inside the train,” I Slacked my boss in November.”

Hasnain says:

“This is a consistent problem - we didn’t know why the FTC refused to bring a case against Google in 2012 until a leak this year, and the information would have been incredibly useful had the FTC and Google not engaged in a decade-long cover-up. a posture is ridiculous and obnoxious, so I find it immensely pleasurable when the antitrust fancy world screws up and accidentally reveal information the public should know. And that just happened.

In a response to the complaint of a group of state attorney generals, Google’s lawyers - Paul Yetter at Yetter Coleman - filed a response, but accidentally forgot to redact critical information.”

Hasnain says:

Google’s words consistently fail to match what they actually do.

“In keeping with Google’s reporting guidelines, Glasson filed a complaint with human resources alleging pregnancy discrimination against her colleague. Shortly after, she says, the director began to retaliate against her over the report, interviewing other people to replace Glasson in her role. Glasson said HR acknowledged the retaliation but refused to stop it. She asked at the company how to face her boss when the ongoing investigation was making their relationship tense and was told multiple times to find a therapist.”

Hasnain says:

“Ian explains everything in full detail in his post, but in general we should not think of C/C++ code as defensible. If an attacker is able to get at C/C++ attack surface, we must assume they can win.”

Hasnain says:

Might have to actually get Disney+ now, I really loved this as a kid.

“The OJ Simpson trial meant we were constantly being preempted for trial coverage, because we were on syndicated stations, and syndicated stations still primarily lived off local news in the 1990s. Every day it ran, we were being preempted, and in any given city, people were missing episodes of Gargoyles, and falling out of the habit of watching it.”

Hasnain says:

Missed calls used to be so ubiquitous. I did not realize they became such a booming business in India. This was a good little history of a mostly bygone era.

“The move effectively terminated ZipDial’s operations. But by 2016, tech in India — already changing at warp speed as its online population expanded, given steadily falling data rates — was set to undergo a transformation. “I would not have built that same company again in 2016 that I built in 2009,” Wagoner said. The company’s founders could not have been able to predict just how swiftly India would move past the missed call.”

Hasnain says:

“It’s not a good moment when a prominent scientist—who was, along with others, evidence-based, correct and prescient on a topic of great importance within his expertise—feels the need to look up “gaslighting” because he is lacking the word to otherwise describe his experience.”

Hasnain says:

“What they're saying: “This analysis shows that despite the general vaccine enthusiasm we are seeing now in the United States, things are going to get really difficult really soon,” said Sema Sgaier, Surgo's CEO.”

Hasnain says:

This is so incredibly messed up.

““Realizing that they had acted illegally,” the lawsuit says, the officers told Nazario that if he “would chill and let this go,” they would release him without filing any charges. But if he fought it, which Gutierrez acknowledged he had the right to do, Nazario would be charged and would have “to go to court and notify his command.”

Afterwards, the two officers filed reports with “near identical” misstatements, the lawsuit says.”

Hasnain says:

Very interesting study and it does reinforce some behaviors I’ve seen.

“we propose that the bias towards additive solutions might be further compounded by the fact that subtractive solutions are also less likely to be appreciated. People might expect to receive less credit for subtractive solutions than for additive ones. A proposal to get rid of something might feel less creative than would coming up with something new to add, and it could also have negative social or political consequences — suggesting that an academic department be disbanded might not be appreciated by those who work in it, for instance. Moreover, people could assume that existing features are there for a reason, and so looking for additions would be more effective. Finally, sunk-cost bias (a tendency to continue an endeavour once an investment in money, effort or time has been made) and waste aversion could lead people to shy away from removing existing features2, particularly if those features took effort to create in the first place.”

Hasnain says:

Interesting read on llvm and codegen optimizations

“Despite all of this though, it does show how versatile LLVM truly is; relatively simple changes can have significant results.”

Hasnain says:

This quote really hits it home, sadly.

“HR already has a process in place for romantic relationships that could create potential workplace problems. They should use that same process. Alphabet has stricter polices around consensual relationships than they do for harassment.”

Hasnain says:

“So, that's about half the idea behind Fly.io. We run server hardware in racks around the world; those servers are tied together with an orchestration system that plugs into our API. Our CLI, flyctl, uses Docker's tooling to push OCI images to us. Our orchestration system sends messages to servers to convert those OCI images to VMs. It's all pretty neato, but I hope also kind of easy to get your head wrapped around.”

Hasnain says:

This whole situation is so messed up.

“In 2021, a woman deciding to engage in consensual sexual activity is somehow a mark against her morality, but a man sharing images of women without their consent on the House floor is not grounds for his immediate removal from office or resignation. (Gaetz has denied all allegations and has said he will not resign, and there have been no calls from leading members of the Republican Party for him to resign.) In 2021, a woman agreeing to taking private nude or explicit photos that are then used against her is insight into her character, but a man sharing those images is still invited to speak at a conservative women’s rally as a “fearless leader.” “

Hasnain says:

This was a really exciting take on some new physics! Well written and super accessible.

"Thus the mystery swirling around muons might lead the way past the Standard Model to a more complete account of the universe after all. However things turn out, it’s safe to say that today’s news — both the result from Fermilab, as well as the publication of the BMW calculation in Nature — is not the end for particle physics."

Also, in accessible comic form from the creator of PhD comics: https://physics.aps.org/articles/v14/47

Hasnain says:

Found myself generally nodding along to this.

"Because build systems are more generic than CI systems (I think a sufficiently advanced build system can do a superset of the things that a sufficiently complex CI system can do), that means that CI systems are redundant with sufficiently advanced build systems. So going beyond the section title: CI systems aren't too complex: they shouldn't need to exist. Your CI functionality should be an extension of the build system."

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking for later reference

Hasnain says:

Great read on understanding some native attack surface and walking through an exploitation chain.

Also shows how coordinating disclosure is still quite hard.

"The path from starting with zero knowledge to uncovering three vulnerabilities in the Bluetooth HCI protocol was strange and unexpected. When I first found the BadVibes vulnerability, I thought it was only triggerable by vulnerable/malicious Bluetooth chips, as the bug seemed too obvious. Since I did not have two programmable devices with Bluetooth 5, I could not verify if receiving such a large advertisement was even possible. Only after comparing the Linux Bluetooth stack with other implementations and reading the specifications, did I come to the conclusion that I had actually discovered my first RCE vulnerability, and I immediately went out to purchase another laptop (surprisingly, there are no trustworthy BT5 dongles on the market). Analyzing the overflow, it was soon clear that an additional information leak vulnerability was needed. Much faster than I thought it would take, I discovered BadChoice after just two days. While trying to trigger it, I uncovered the BadKarma vulnerability which I first deemed to be an unfortunate bug that would prevent the BadChoice vulnerability. It turned out that it was quite easy to bypass and that the bug was in truth yet another high severity security vulnerability."

Hasnain says:

Lots of insightful points here, I learned a lot about things I didn't expect to be slow, and more in depth lessons for things I knew to be slow.

The compression one in particular was quite enlightening for me.

"I'm titling this post Surprisingly Slow because the slowness was either surprising to me or the sub-optimal practices leading to slowness are prevalent enough that I think many programmers would be surprised by their existence."

Hasnain says:

Infuriating, maddening, but at the same time depressing as I realize that this isn't surprising.

"The few people who’d worked at other companies reminded us that there was nowhere better. I believed them, even when my technical lead — not my manager, but the man in charge of my day-to-day work — addressed me as “beautiful” and “gorgeous,” even after I asked him to stop. (Finally, I agreed that he could call me “my queen.”) He used many of our one-on-one meetings to ask me to set him up with friends, then said he wanted “A blonde. A tall blonde.” Someone who looked like me."

...

"Eventually, the investigators corroborated my claims and found my tech lead violated the Code of Conduct and the policy against harassment. My harasser still sat next to me. My manager told me H.R. wouldn’t even make him change his desk, let alone work from home or go on leave. He also told me that my harasser received a consequence that was severe and that I would feel better if I could know what it was, but it sure seemed like nothing happened."

Hasnain says:

“The Erdős-Faber-Lovász conjecture started as a question that seemed as if it could be asked and answered within the span of a single party. In the years that followed, mathematicians realized the conjecture was not as simple as it sounded, which is maybe what the three mathematicians would have wanted anyway. One of the only things better than solving a math problem over tea is coming up with one that ends up inspiring decades of mathematical innovation on the way to its final resolution.”

Hasnain says:

Today I learnt about this triangle of doom, which was pretty cool!

“Most of our memory bugs occur in new or recently modified code, with about 50% being less than a year old.

The comparative rarity of older memory bugs may come as a surprise to some, but we’ve found that old code is not where we most urgently need improvement. Software bugs are found and fixed over time, so we would expect the number of bugs in code that is being maintained but not actively developed to go down over time. Just as reducing the number and density of bugs improves the effectiveness of sandboxing, it also improves the effectiveness of bug detection.”

Hasnain says:

“Trillium and Open MIC organized a similar proposal in 2020 but were shot down. At the time, the board said it believed Google’s current policies were adequate.

“Our argument this year is basically the proof is in the pudding,” says Kron. “A year ago you said everything was hunky dory and in the meantime we‘ve seen what happened with Dr. Gebru and ongoing protests by Google employees, which suggests that things aren’t working well, that there are these red flags that indicate something needs to change.””

Hasnain says:

“Now, I could try to find some other site that would accept the patch, but there are some downsides to that. The patch that I made was only good for the current Steam version of CK3, on my operating system, with my cpu architecture. But I can give something more portable than that: knowledge!

So without further ado, lets go through a step-by-step guide to see how anyone with a bit of technical know-how can reverse engineer a game like Crusader Kings 3.”

Hasnain says:

I don’t see how this system can be reformed. Even after finding clear signs of terrible abuse, they’re refusing to prosecute the prosecutors who let it happen?

“Unlike Katz, some lawmakers are not buying the line that the trial prosecutors’ misconduct in this case was “inadvertent.” Like the judge who released the men, they believe this was deliberate, and was almost certainly not isolated. Now they want a review of all the cases handled by Leventhal and Testagrossa. But Katz, who kept on numerous veterans including Leventhal, has thus far refused to commit to such a review because her office did not find intentional misconduct took place.

Rachel Barkow, an NYU Law Professor, said this refusal to probe the trial prosecutors’ other cases is a “major red flag,” an indication that some in the DA’s Office are concerned about what else might be found.”

Hasnain says:

I... uh... umm...

“The police say they did not mislead the public about the incident. “To the best of my knowledge we did not make any statements that the dog was shot by the suspect or was shot by the officers until we were very comfortable,””

Hasnain says:

““Surveys of those who identify with Christian nationalist beliefs consistently show that this group feels that they are subject to more discrimination and marginalization than any other group in society, including Islamic people, Black people, atheists, [and] Jewish people,” Gill said.

“They are experiencing their loss of prominence in American culture as an unacceptable attack on their beliefs -- and this is driving much of the efforts we are seeing to cling onto power, undermine democracy, and fight for ‘religious freedom’ protections that apply only to them.””

Hasnain says:

“To those of us hoping that the fall of Trump would herald massive updates and upgrades to the anachronistic political reporting algorithms that served the public so poorly during his rise and rule, it is certainly disappointing that the first admission of fault from a senior newsroom leader amounts to little more than a “whatever.””

Hasnain says:

“So we now have a networked world dominated by an industry that oozes tech-bro arrogance and affluence combined with a profound ignorance of what life is like for most people. The tech elites who create the products and services are unlikely to have experienced social exclusion, racism, misogyny, poverty or physical abuse. And in particular they have little idea of what life is like for women, although, given the scandals about sexual harassment in tech companies, you’d have thought they’d have some idea by now. In those circumstances, it’s hardly surprising that the people who are likely to be the industry’s most perceptive critics would be smart and well-educated women.”

Hasnain says:

“Scholars agree that one of the reasons a full history of Asian Americans has not been incorporated into core U.S. History curricula in K-12 schools is because it doesn’t portray America in a positive light.

“K-12 American history texts reinforce the narrative that Asian immigrants and refugees are fortunate to have been ‘helped’ and ‘saved’ by the U.S.,” Jean Wu, who has taught Asian American Studies for more than 50 years and is a senior lecturer emerita at Tufts University, said in an email to TIME. “The story does not begin with U.S. imperialist wars that were waged to take Asian wealth and resources and the resulting violence, rupture and displacement in relation to Asian lives. Few realize that there is an Asian diaspora here in the U.S. because the U.S. went to Asia first.””

Hasnain says:

This is amazing.

“According to the organisations, the vaccine successfully stimulated the production of the rare immune cells needed to generate antibodies against HIV in 97 percent of participants.”

Hasnain says:

“Still, lamb has been saddled with a bad rap in the U.S. ever since World War II, when returning servicemen wanted nothing to do with it after years of canned mutton. “We’re still a niche protein when compared to beef, pork or chicken,” said Anders Hemphill, vice president of marketing at Superior Farms based in Sacramento, California. Typically, he said, “Americans eat 60 pounds of beef, 100 pounds of chicken, 50 pounds of pork—and 1.1 pounds of lamb.”
“

Hasnain says:

I’m not quoting this because it’s full of spin and a non apology. At least they tried, though?

Hasnain says:

“ But when your argument is “you should work hours you don’t want to work and do it for the equivalent of $2/hour to help increase the profits of a business owner who won’t give you anything additional for your effort” … why would she? Why should she? There’s no inherent virtue in helping someone else make money (and especially when she herself makes less!). If you want her to do more, you’ll have to offer something that will make it worth it to her (and even then, she gets to decline).”

Hasnain says:

So well written. And so depressing.

“Yet, all my life, America has told me that I’m overreacting. That it is still O.K. to laugh at Asian names, still O.K. to make fun of Asian people—those weird foreigners who all look the same and have those hilarious, ugly accents. I know that it’s still O.K. because it keeps happening, in media and in real life. And, when it does, and Asian people express anger about it, they are countered with “you’re too sensitive; it’s just a joke.” I get it—the joke is more important than our existence.”

Hasnain says:

This is why we need Medicare for all. And universal healthcare worldwide.

“”Essentially we showed there is a big jump in cancer diagnoses as people turn 65 and are thus Medicare-eligible,” said Shrager, the senior author of the study. The study’s lead author is Deven Patel, MD, a surgical resident at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles who spent a year as a research fellow at Stanford. “This suggests that many people are delaying their care for financial reasons until they get health insurance through Medicare.””

Hasnain says:

Interesting math here!

“Motivated by Erdős’ and Tao’s work, Filaseta wondered what would happen if you included an infinite string of leading zeros as part of the prime number. The numbers 53 and …0000000053 have the same value, after all; would changing any one of those infinite zeros tacked on to a digitally delicate prime automatically make it composite?”

Hasnain says:

This was a very good article. A solid investigation into this new phenomenon; discovering some of the scumminess under the hood while looking into some interesting human interest stories. And a discussion of business models and the pandemic to boot.

This also explains some of the confusion we had on DoorDash the other day.

“A few hours later, I got a call back from Ziad Lobbad, the owner of Devil’s Pizzeria in Durham. He confirmed that the brands I had traced back to his restaurant were part of a collaboration with Future Foods, and walked me through how it worked. In a nutshell, Future Foods takes different kinds of offerings on a restaurant’s existing menu and markets them as separate restaurants; in a crowded delivery marketplace, there’s a better chance you’ll cut through the noise if you show up eight times instead of once. “