Hasnain says:

“But in the long term, remote work’s promise is more ambivalent. It offers more flexibility, accommodating people who would otherwise give up office work altogether. For many, it offers access to better economic opportunities, regardless of location. But for some it will also introduce more competition. Ultimately, remote work ushers some freelancers and employees into a global arena that seems to promise a higher ceiling, but a lower floor as well.”

Hasnain says:

It’s interesting to see Apple HR supposedly shoot itself in the foot here. Beyond this immediate article though, it seems quite a massive change for Apple employees to be talking about so much stuff more publicly - I wonder if this is a culture shift that will stick.

“The company’s rules for the in-office chat app say that “Slack channels for activities and hobbies not recognized as Apple Employee clubs or Diversity Network Associations (DNAs) aren’t permitted and shouldn’t be created.”

But that rule has not been evenly enforced. Currently, Apple employees have popular Slack channels to discuss fun-dogs (more than 5,000 members), gaming (more than 3,000 members), and dad-jokes (more than 2,000 members). On August 18th, the company approved a channel called community-foosball. The cat and dog channels are not part of official clubs, and all of these channels were specifically created to talk about non-work activities.”

Hasnain says:

It does need to be noted that this is not just 3 hours a week, it’s 3 very specific hours each week (8-9pm on weekends). I was a little happier when I read it was only for online games, but… wow.

“"Teenagers are the future of our motherland," Xinhua quoted an unnamed NPPA spokesperson as saying. "Protecting the physical and mental health of minors is related to the people's vital interests, and relates to the cultivation of the younger generation in the era of national rejuvenation."

Gaming companies will be barred from providing services to minors in any form outside the stipulated hours and must ensure they have put real-name verification systems in place, said the regulator, which oversees the country's video games market.”

Hasnain says:

Really great read on software, productivity, human psychology and work ethics. Also brought back some memories for me as I used to use the app it talks about at the start daily through my college years.

“No matter whose fault it is, we take this stuff personally. American to-do behavior has a deeply puritan streak. Benjamin Franklin was among the first to pioneer to-do lists, creating a checklist of “virtues”—temperance! frugality! moderation!—that he intended to practice every day. That’s what the information scientist Gilly Leshed and computer scientist and cultural theorist Phoebe Sengers, both at Cornell University, found when they talked to people about their to-do lists. “They abide by the norm of ‘We need to be productive citizens of this world,’” Leshed tells me. Doing more is doing good.

To-do lists are, in the American imagination, a curiously moral type of software. Nobody opens Google Docs or PowerPoint thinking “This will make me a better person.” But with to-do apps, that ambition is front and center. “Everyone thinks that, with this system, I’m going to be like the best parent, the best child, the best worker, the most organized, punctual friend,” says Monique Mongeon, a product manager at the book-sales-tracking firm BookNet and a self-admitted serial organizational-app devotee. “When you start using something to organize your life, it’s because you’re hoping to improve it in some way. You’re trying to solve something.””

Hasnain says:

Powerful stuff.

“There were many lessons to be learned from the Iraq war, but this, for me, was the most central: We don’t know what we don’t know, and, even worse, we don’t always know what we think we know. Policymakers are easily fooled by people with seemingly relevant experience or credentials who will tell them what they want to hear or what they already believe. The flow of money, interests, enmities and factions is opaque to outsiders and even to insiders. We do not understand other countries well enough to remake them according to our ideals. We don’t even understand our own country well enough to achieve our ideals.”

Hasnain says:

Reading this chapter was a pretty compelling advert for the book.

“The heuristic here would be to use education in reverse: hire, conditional on equal set of skills, the person with the least label-oriented education. It means that the person had to succeed in spite of the credentialization of his competitors and overcome more serious hurdles. In addition, people who didn’t go to Harvard are easier to deal with in real life.”

Hasnain says:

“The digital divide is only one of many factors driving a shift in who is having children. For most of the 20th century, women with the highest level of education—that is, those with the best career prospects—have had the fewest children. But this inverse relationship between education and female fertility is weakening, and some demographers suspect that it will flatten out or even reverse in the coming decades. In some Nordic countries, it already has. To some extent, this shift simply reflects rising education levels; although it was unusual for women to attend college a century ago, it’s the norm now in high-income countries. But the shift is also spurred by rising economic inequality, in which the digital divide plays a part. “The world seems to be moving toward a situation in which affording to have children is for those who are privileged,” Billari said.”

Hasnain says:

Great read on a bunch of debugging tools.

“These are rough notes for how I debugged it, in case it's useful for someone searching on this topic. I spend many hours documenting advanced debugging stories for books, talks, and blog posts, but many things I never have time to share. I'm experimenting with this "rough notes" format as a way to quickly share things. No editing, spell checking, or comments. Mostly screenshots. Dead ends included.

Note that I don't know anything about Slack internals, and there may be better ways to solve this.”

Hasnain says:

“Caches are based on assumptions. Fundamentally, a cache assumes that there's either some amount of temporal or spatial locality of access (i.e. if Alice is sending work now, she'll probably be sending more work soon, so it's efficient to keep Alice's stuff on deck), or there key distribution isn't uniform (i.e. Bob sends work every second, Alice sends work every day, so it's efficient to keep Bob's stuff on deck and fetch Alice's when we need it). These assumptions don't tend to be rigorous, or enforced in any way. They may change in ways that are invisible to most approaches to monitoring.”

Hasnain says:

Yikes.

“So you can imagine our surprise when we were able to gain complete unrestricted access to the accounts and databases of several thousand Microsoft Azure customers, including many Fortune 500 companies. “

Hasnain says:

Great read.

"A big one, which a lot of people just can't quite believe, is that it enhances motivation. People who are more self-compassionate, when they fail, they're less afraid of failure. There was a study where helping people be more self-compassionate about failure [on a test], later on when they had a chance to study for a second test, they actually studied longer than people who were not told to be self-compassionate. Because, basically, it creates an environment where it's safe to fail, so self-compassionate people are often more likely to try again. They also have more self-confidence, because they aren't cutting themselves down all the time."

Hasnain says:

Amazing read on measurement.

“That's one particular example, but I find that it's generally true that, in areas where no one is publishing measurements/benchmarks of products, the products are generally sub-optimal, often in ways that are relatively straightforward to fix once measured. Here are a few examples”

Hasnain says:

Sage advice. His blogs are always great.

“One final note: there is an important distinction between “working hard” and “maximising the number of hours during which one works”. In particular, forcing oneself to work even when one is tired, unmotivated, unprepared, or distracted with other tasks can end up being counterproductive to one’s long-term work productivity, and there is a saturation point beyond which pushing oneself to work even longer will actually reduce the total amount of work you get done in the long run (due to the additional fatigue, loss of motivation, or increasingly urgent need to attend to non-work tasks that this can cause). Generally speaking, it is better to try to arrange a few hours of high-quality working time, when one is motivated, energetic, prepared, and free from distraction, than to try to cram into one’s schedule a large number of hours of low-quality working time when one or more of the above four factors are not present.”

Hasnain says:

TIL symbol versioning.

“The alpine-glibc project attempts to package the GNU C library (glibc) in such a way that it can be used on Alpine transparently. However, it is conceptually flawed, because it uses system libraries where available, which have been compiled against the musl C library. Combining code built for musl with code built for glibc is like trying to run Windows programs on OS/2: both understand .EXE files to some extent, but they are otherwise very different.”

Hasnain says:

I lost it when I saw the size of the table of contents - one line per failed messaging attempt - and realized it takes more than one full page on my phone.

“Because no single company has ever failed at something this badly, for this long, with this many different products (and because it has barely been a month since the rollout of Google Chat), the time has come to outline the history of Google messaging. Prepare yourselves, dear readers, for a non-stop rollercoaster of new product launches, neglected established products, unexpected shut-downs, and legions of confused, frustrated, and exiled users.”

Hasnain says:

Interesting read on how mortgage lending and the financial systems work, laws around fair housing, and how discrimination just persists throughout the system. The responses from the lenders were borderline gaslighting IMO.

“An investigation by The Markup has found that lenders in 2019 were more likely to deny home loans to people of color than to white people with similar financial characteristics — even when we controlled for newly available financial factors the mortgage industry for years has said would explain racial disparities in lending.”

Hasnain says:

“True, that 54 million Facebook users saw the story is only the latest proof of something we’ve known about the platform for a long time: If you drop poison into Facebook’s content well, it can be extraordinarily effective at spreading it out. That’s a terrible and important reality.

But it’s also true that it only matters if the poison gets dropped in the first place.

There’s no way for mainstream news organizations to keep all the poison out of social media, of course. But is it too much to ask for news outlets to refrain from dropping it in ourselves? Or at least to be a little reflective when it turns out we were the ones doing the poisoning?”

Hasnain says:

A really great read on authentication and API tokens. I learnt a bunch here.

“I continue to believe that boring, trustworthy random tokens are underrated, and that people burn a lot of complexity chasing statelessness they can't achieve and won’t need, because token databases for most systems outside of Facebook aren’t hard to scale.

A couple months ago, I’d have said that Macaroons are underrated in a different way, the way Big Star’s “#1 Record” is. Now I think there's merely underrated like the first Sex Pistols show; everyone who read about them created their own token format. We’re moving forward with Macaroons, and I’m psyched about that, but I’d hesitate to recommend them for a typical CRUD application.

But, don’t use JWT.”

Hasnain says:

Great read.

“At Reem’s, we’ve started to get rid of the notion that I’m the only creator. We are all creators and collaborators. I don’t have to have the vision every day — we can take turns being visionaries and executors. The pandemic has pushed us on a path to worker ownership and more democratic governance, which helps us all be accountable to the collective success of the business. I no longer feel lonely and isolated in this challenging era for restaurants because I struggle with my team rather than on behalf of my team.”

Hasnain says:

“I like to think of this as a puzzle, where we have all the edge pieces and we’re missing the center. We have many different insights about quantum gravity. There are many ways in which people are trying to understand it. Some by constraining it: What are things that it can’t do? Some by trying to construct aspects of it: things that it must do. My personal preferred approach is more to do with the information paradox, because it’s so pivotal; it’s such an acute problem. It’s clearly telling us: Here’s where you messed up. And to me that says, here’s a place where we can begin to fix our pillars, one of which must be wrong, of our understanding of quantum gravity.”

Hasnain says:

Relevant read on writing.

“Classic mistake: Writing about what you find interesting

You already know that QPU movement takes a lot of speed, and it’s incredible that there’s a slope that’s just right for Mario to walk up it for 12 hours building up speed.

But unless your audience is in exactly the right niche, they don’t know what the heck you’re talking about, so they just shrug and don’t read it.”

Hasnain says:

This was such a great read on burnout. I also have a lot of links to follow up on from here.

“I never thought I’d take five months off, without being able to explain to a future employer what I was doing. It felt like too much. But here we are. I hope they’ll be empathetic and understand - and honestly, it’ll be a red flag if they don’t. But I also think that this will become so common, that it’ll be normal. “Oh, you took a few months off in 2021? Me too.” (“Oh you gained 15lbs in 2020? Me too.”) If you have the financial ability to, don’t feel like you can’t quit your job. Your sanity is worth it.”

Hasnain says:

Hard hitting read.

“Through the selective lens of Brewster and others, these atrocities are no big deal. Too many Western journalists and analysts are contemptuous of and insensitive to the people of the country that the U.S. had invaded. Their eyes focus only on the violence of the “other”—the Taliban or ISIS or the broad catchall term “terrorists”— while simultaneously ignoring the bloodshed and violence wrought by a Western occupation. How can the U.S. claim to be morally superior to the terrorists it claims to fight, supposedly accountable to international laws regulating violence?”

Hasnain says:

This is a very well written and thought out piece. Lots of data, and the authors spend a lot of time contextualizing it. It certainly helped reveal some of my own blind spots on these topics.

“We surveyed more than 25,000 HBS graduates altogether; in this article we focus on MBAs, by far the largest proportion. Because we are primarily interested in the experiences of those who are still in the workplace, we report on Baby Boomers (ages 49–67), Generation X (ages 32–48), and Millennials (ages 26–31), also known as Generation Y. What our survey revealed suggests that the conventional wisdom about women’s careers doesn’t always square with reality.”

Hasnain says:

“Producing good data and validating data-sets are the kind of unsexy, undercompensated maintenance work that all infrastructure requires – and, as with other kinds of infrastructure, it is undervalued by journals, academic departments, funders, corporations and governments.

But all technological debts accrue punitive interest. The decision to operate on bad data because good data is in short supply isn't like looking for your car-keys under the lamp-post – it's like driving with untrustworthy brakes and a dirty windscreen.”

Hasnain says:

“The failure to consider only the safety of people inside of vehicles is one likely reason why overall traffic fatalities have been going down for a decade while deaths of people walking have hit levels not seen in 30 years. We simply don’t consider their safety.”

Hasnain says:

“After basic training and advanced individual training, LaGroon was at Fort Polk in Vernon Parish, La. in 2004 when he witnessed a white superior discipline a Latino soldier for being late. A white soldier showed up even more tardy, and received no punishment. LaGroon says that after the incident, other soldiers discussed what they had witnessed and concluded that the junior white soldier was not disciplined because both he and their superior were white.

"Now, whether that's true or not, that's the perception and the perception is the reality," LaGroon says. "It's what I took from it. It's what others around me of different races took from it."”

Hasnain says:

“Race data was only available for 27%, or 89 of the defendants. And of that number, 52% were identified as Black. Of the Black defendants, 91% were identified as male.

"The known proportion of Black defendants compared to the proportion of Black people in the United States, per the latest census data, indicates that Black defendants were dramatically overrepresented," the report stated.”

Hasnain says:

He’s not wrong though?

““Just like you can’t ask toddlers to specify their own lunch, you can’t really have single-family homeowners design a city,” he said at the meeting, advocating for a plan to accommodate concerns from both homeowners and newcomers. “To homeowners out there, I hate to say it, (but) density is coming. But we need to manage the transition.””

Hasnain says:

“Employers have tried a variety of tactics to ease the transition back into offices. Some, like law firm Schwabe, Williamson & Wyatt PC, based in Portland, Ore., have held soft reopenings, giving workers a chance to get accustomed to commuting, wearing dress clothes and interacting with colleagues in person again. “It takes a lot longer” to prepare for work than many may remember, said Graciela Gomez Cowger, the firm’s CEO. “You’re out of practice. Just putting on a good shirt and getting dressed is a thing.””

Hasnain says:

“Yesterday's newsletter detailed how the media is largely overlooking voices that supported Biden's decision to withdraw from Afghanistan. Instead media reports are almost exclusively highlighting criticism of the withdrawal — often from people complicit in two decades of failed policy in Afghanistan.

We have reason to believe that this is not an accident. On Wednesday, Popular Information spoke to a veteran communications professional who has been trying to place prominent voices supportive of the withdrawal on television and in print. The source said that it has been next to impossible”

Hasnain says:

They burned people’s passports?!?!

“Officials at the U.S. Embassy in Kabul had concluded on Friday that they had no choice but to shutter America’s diplomatic outpost. They directed personnel to immediately begin the “emergency destruction” of all sensitive documents and materials.

That included incinerating American flags and other U.S. government logos “which could be misused in propaganda efforts,” according to a memo issued to embassy personnel. And, according to Rep. Andy Kim (D-N.J.), passports of Afghan citizens who had applied for American visas were among the documents burned — making it almost impossible to identify them as they seek to leave the country in the coming days.”

Hasnain says:

“The media tends to bend over backwards to ‘both-sides’ all of their coverage, but they made an exception for this,” said Eric Schultz, a deputy press secretary under President Barack Obama. “They both-sides coverage over masks, and vaccines, and school openings and everything else. Somehow [the Afghanistan withdrawal] created a rush to judgment and a frenzy that we haven’t seen in a long time.””

Hasnain says:

In what world does it make sense to destroy millions of tests in the middle of a pandemic?!

“Abbott’s decisions have ramifications even beyond the United States. Employees in Maine, many of them immigrants from African countries, were upset at having to discard what might have been donated. Other countries probably could have used the materials, according to Dr. Sergio Carmona, chief medical officer of FIND, a nonprofit that promotes access to diagnostics.

“This makes me feel sick,” he said of the destruction, noting that more than a dozen African nations have no domestic funds to buy Covid tests.”

Hasnain says:

“Judge Du is right about the bigotry inherent in our immigration laws, but conservatives like the bigotry and liberals will be afraid that trying to stop it will just piss off the conservatives.

But at least this opinion exists now. It’s out there, and future lawyers and judges can read it and maybe think differently about the core assumptions at the heart of our immigration system. A lone federal judge cannot stop 100 years of bigoted policies, but if you want to know what a truly progressive legal analysis looks like, Judge Du just spelled one out.”

Hasnain says:

“Try thinking about precautions in non-pandemic terms, Kirk Sell advises. Every day, people follow safety rules that might not be personally necessary for them, but that also aren’t onerous enough to be harmful—doing so is simply part of living in a society in which you share norms and risk with those around you. “I can swim, but when I go out kayaking, I still wear a life jacket, because it’s required as a general safety approach,” she explained. “Just because you are safe doesn’t mean you don’t have any rules to follow anymore.” This is, perhaps, somewhat understating it: Before Kirk Sell was a scholar, she was an Olympic-medalist swimmer who held the world record in the 100-meter breaststroke. There are few people on Earth at less personal risk from tipping out of a kayak. So, yes, you can probably find it within yourself to continue to wear a mask at the grocery store if the infection rate is growing in your area. You probably do other stuff on that same logic all the time.”

Hasnain says:

“Weeks later, Ms. Reveillac was abruptly pushed out of the company and locked out of her work accounts. “Team, I didn’t get to say a proper goodbye. I love and miss you,” she tweeted. Ms. Reveillac and Twitter declined to comment on her departure.

In a staff meeting shortly after, two people who attended said, Mr. Davis told employees that they should not assume Ms. Reveillac had left the company because of conflicts with him. But without a clear explanation, employees were left wondering about whether her sudden departure was a response to going to Mr. Dorsey with her concerns”

Hasnain says:

This is such a messed up and horrifying situation. What’s really horrifying is the realization that for some of the perpetrators this is probably just an average day, because as a society we just let this go on unpunished. Despite what people may say, this (by that I mean harassment and worse against women) is the norm and not the exception, and major changes are needed.

“Pakistani women deserve better than being made into examples of why women deserve rights. We shouldn't need examples of why we should protect women, it should be a forgone conclusion. How many women will it take for people to realise that we have a big problem in the way we view and treat women? And for our government officials who don't want issues to be highlighted lest we "tarnish" Pakistan's image — our image is being tarnished by the assaulters, not the people crying out for protection for our citizens or the victims.”

Hasnain says:

Some nice little compiler magic here.

“The code is in C++, but the essence of the algorithm is an iterative ascent to the input number from base case 0 (which is even), switching the boolean result at each iteration. It works, but you get a linear time O(n) isEven function compared to the obvious constant time O(1) modulo algorithm.

Surprisingly, Clang/LLVM is able to optimize the iterative algorithm down to the constant time algorithm”

Hasnain says:

I have no words. This is why data privacy is so important - this data is can now be used to identify and harm Afghans who worked with the US.

““I don’t think anyone ever thought about data privacy or what to do in the event the [HIIDE] system fell into the wrong hands,” said Welton Chang, chief technology officer for Human Rights First, himself a former Army intelligence officer. “Moving forward, the U.S. military and diplomatic apparatus should think carefully about whether to deploy these systems again in situations as tenuous as Afghanistan.””

Hasnain says:

““There’s a slightly humorous stereotype about computational complexity that says what we often end up doing is taking a problem that is solved a lot of the time in practice and proving that it’s actually very difficult,” said Goldberg.”

Hasnain says:

The original paper’s authors respond at the end, but this is a really detailed analysis of what does appear to be a fraudulent dataset - invalidating an influential paper. Also really ironic that the paper itself was about studying people’s dishonesty.

“We have worked on enough fraud cases in the last decade to know that scientific fraud is more common than is convenient to believe, and that it does not happen only on the periphery of science. Addressing the problem of scientific fraud should not be left to a few anonymous (and fed up and frightened) whistleblowers and some (fed up and frightened) bloggers to root out. The consequences of fraud are experienced collectively, so eliminating it should be a collective endeavor. What can everyone do?

There will never be a perfect solution, but there is an obvious step to take: Data should be posted. The fabrication in this paper was discovered because the data were posted. If more data were posted, fraud would be easier to catch. And if fraud is easier to catch, some potential fraudsters may be more reluctant to do it. Other disciplines are already doing this. For example, many top economics journals require authors to post their raw data [16]. There is really no excuse. All of our journals should require data posting.”

Hasnain says:

Some fun math and performance optimization tricks here.

“The goal of the article is to both show how trascendental functions are computed, and how to micro-optimize guided by looking at the assembly. However, if you don’t care about how we compute atan2, you can skip the second section while still understanding the optimizations process.

As usual, everything is presented without assuming much previous knowledge — in this case just basic trigonometry and C programming.”

Hasnain says:

I was pretty skeptical when I started reading this - but then recalled that most of my (book) reading is fiction. Rereading this with the intended context in mind, this is quite on point.

“Now, if you’re only reading for fun, or if you don’t want to remember what you read, this article doesn’t apply. Sometimes reading is entertainment, and that’s wonderful. But if you want to get some valuable knowledge out of a book, the first step to getting more out of what you read is being active.”

Hasnain says:

Really good read on roguelikes, a software bug, systems thinking, and human psychology and biases.

“And more than anything, we need more humility from the cognitive decoupling elite. We’re hard at work turning the world into metrics and dashboards and systems, and obviously those of us who are good at systems are happy to have things be more personally legible. But before we get too excited about turning the world into a video game, let’s remember how stupid we all looked when we tried treating a video game like a video game.”

Hasnain says:

Author makes a lot of solid points here, not as enlightening as their recent threads on Twitter however.

“But before we move on, before we head back to the mall, before we resume posting memes, and before we return to bickering with each other about whether we should have to mask up at Starbucks, let us remember that this day came about for one reason, and one reason only.

Because it is what we wanted.”

Hasnain says:

Really great read on burnout and working sustainably. The content was quite relatable, and it's very well written.

"I struggled to see the impact of burnout on my life until my coach held up a mirror and asked me to think honestly about how it was affecting me. There was a level of desperation and frustration in my voice that she had never heard before in the decade we had worked together. Having her reflect the acuteness of my feelings back to me clarified just how much burnout had skewed my thinking.

The burnout thief steals your peace of mind, but it often doesn’t leave obvious tracks. Here is a quick checklist for assessing whether you are experiencing burnout. These were the things I struggled with when I felt burnt out, even though I could hide it from others most days. If you answer “true” to more than half of these, consider finding a path out of where you are. "

Hasnain says:

Just a few days ago the news headlines were saying Afghanistan “could” fall in 90 days. This was… incredibly fast. And the response here also seems out of touch with reality:

“Secretary of State Antony Blinken rejected parallels being made with the rushed U.S. exit from the U.S. embassy in Vietnam in 1975, when staff was evacuated by helicopter from the building’s roof. He said the aim in Afghanistan was to target al Qaeda, which had been achieved.

“This is not Saigon,” said Mr. Blinken, speaking to CNN on Sunday. “We went to Afghanistan 20 years ago with one mission, and that mission was to deal with the folks who attacked us on 9/11. And we succeeded in that mission.””

Hasnain says:

““Renormalization helps us simplify the problem,” said Nathan Seiberg, a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. But “it also hides what happens at short distances. You can’t have it both ways.””

Hasnain says:

Solid read on observability and database design.

“Putting those capabilities together is what lets you dig through billions of rows of data, searching for that hidden needle in your haystack, getting answers to questions you could have never predicted asking in advance. That’s the experience that sets observability apart. “

Hasnain says:

This is written by an American war veteran.

“But if Cowboy is dead then he died a long time ago, and if Cowboy is dead it’s our fault for going there in the first place, giving his family the option of trusting us when we are the least trustworthy people on the planet.

We use people up and throw them away like it’s nothing.”

Hasnain says:

“The pandemic has given us all a taste of what large changes for which we were unprepared can feel like, but the planetary crisis is about to deliver a feast of them to our doorsteps.

Sooner, rather than later—and far sooner than most of us are used to imagining—we’re going to live through a set of apparently sudden tectonic lurches in how our nations, institutions and communities work, in their fundamental material structures. That upheaval may take a year to arrive, it may take two decades—but it’s coming. And while it’s true that the longer it takes, the worse the prospects for billions of people become, it’s also true that the longer it takes, the more powerfully it will shake the systems around us. When that tension slips its restraints, empires will fall.”

Hasnain says:

This was such a good read, mixing human interest stories with context on supply chain logistics, economics, and import regulations.

“This year, the Chaunsas in particular were sugary bombs of caramel, citrus, and grassy flavors, with a hint of rose that lingered on the tongue. My father, honestly not a big food lover, was praising God upon eating them. If the Mexican mangoes were a night out at a dinky jazz club, the Pakistani ones were a full-on Beyoncé concert, capable of changing your whole life.”

Hasnain says:

“It is especially unusual for the head of a site like Snopes to write stories using both his own byline and a pseudonym, potentially implicating Mikkelson in the same kind of deceptive behavior that the site has spent more than 25 years interrogating. The situation has left Snopes’ current staffers mortified.”

Hasnain says:

This starts off with a bang and continues from there. Some hard hitting journalism.

“On the contrary, exploring LAPD’s use of the neighborhood as a backdrop allows for questions to be raised about how the eagerness to make this event a spectacle opened the door to such spectacular negligence.

Because if, as Chief Michel Moore stated during the July 19 briefing, LAPD was convinced the explosive materials found posed imminent danger, “not just to those bomb techs but to the citizenry and community,” then very little of what transpired over the course of that day makes any sense.”

Hasnain says:

This was a pretty solid read. Sage advice.

“I will admit, I am still a big fan of being right all the time, and of having people agree with me. What’s changed over the years though is first, an enhanced understanding that I in fact am not right all the time. But also that even when I am right, it isn’t always a guarantee that others will follow my advice, and if they do not, that it’s still OK.”

Hasnain says:

This is pretty exciting. I don’t know why this is getting so much hate on the orange site.

I’ll admit I was also a Luddite here and stuck to single, specific customized machines for quite a while - but with FB’s internal version of this I am now a believer. Being able to quickly spin up a working environment in a minute to debug something without context switching from what I was otherwise doing has let me put up a lot of small changes here and there or help people when I normally would have just dropped it and moved on.

“Engineers can spin off new codespaces for parallel workstreams with no overhead. When an environment falls apart—maybe it’s too far behind, or the test data broke something—our engineers can quickly create a new environment and move on with their day.”

Hasnain says:

“New facts surfaced about just how close America came to a coup in 2020.

And, meanwhile, a growing chorus of on-the-ground reporters and writers and scholars began sounding the alarm about 2024.

Their message? If present trends continue, and if nothing is done, the next presidential election could be stolen. Legally stolen.

These are not the cries of extremely online provocateurs. They are fact-based warnings about what is actually happening right now in states across this country.”

Hasnain says:

One of the most moving, eloquent and well written pieces I have read in a long time. A deeply personal look into one family’s experience with trauma, how they all coped with it, both in time and afterwards. And a reconstruction of one person’s life through their writings and family

This really has it all, from love, to trauma, to rage, hatred, and conspiracy theories. Engaging, and - at the same time - makes you think and ponder about life and your own situation. Highly recommend reading.

“He says he almost wishes sometimes that he could trade his current well-being for the suffering he felt 20 years ago, because Bobby was so much easier to conjure back then, the sense-memories of him still within reach. “No matter how painful September 11 was,” he explains, “I had just seen him on September 6.”

It’s the damnedest thing: The dead abandon you; then, with the passage of time, you abandon the dead.”

Hasnain says:

“Scarlett says Apple’s response to the surveys has only made employees more suspicious: “I don’t think anyone is going into this saying there for sure is a wage gap, whether that’s gender or race or disability. But it is concerning to everyone that every single time someone tries to create more transparency, Apple shuts it down. It makes it feel like maybe there is a problem, and they’re already aware of it.””

Hasnain says:

It was a good run while it lasted, folks.

“Prof Carolina Vera, vice-chair of the working group that produced the document, said: "The report clearly shows that we are already living the consequences of climate change everywhere. But we will experience further and concurrent changes that increase with every additional beat of warming."”

Hasnain says:

This data is really scary - especially when combined with multiple reports of schools having to close down / quarantine because of tens to hundreds of COVID cases within their first week of reopening.

“The odds of transmitting the Delta variant are more than 1.6 times higher than for the Alpha variant, which fueled the prior wave. A study by Imperial College London found that Covid-19 test positivity among UK children five to 12 years was two- to six-fold higher than for persons 45 and older. As of Wednesday, one in 10 Covid-19 test results for US children five to 11 years are positive, and the week-over-week rise in test positivity is climbing fastest for this age group. Covid-19 test positivity among US children 12-17 (12.3%) is higher than for any other age group.

A published report of Scottish data noted that the Delta variant doubles the risk of Covid-19 hospitalization, regardless of age. The number of US children in the hospital due to Covid-19 doubled between 30 June and 31 July. On Thursday, US hospitals reported 249 pediatric admissions due to Covid-19, which is four admissions shy of the all-time single-day record (253). On a population-adjusted basis, the weekly average of US children admitted to hospitals with Covid-19 is rising faster than any other age group (as of Wednesday).”

Hasnain says:

Great analysis of various remote work strategies.

“Instead of directing a rah-rah return to the office, leaders would be wise to focus on deeper listening and meeting their workforces where they are today. It will be important for leaders to acknowledge, for instance, that they don't have all the answers—as their companies transition to hybrid working models, they will still be trying to discover what the right longer-term working model (the one that works for most employees) will be. It will also be important for leaders to signal that they hope to make their employees partners in designing the future of how their companies work.”

Hasnain says:

Some more insight on perceptual hashes in light of the recent Apple announcement.

“It shouldn’t come as a surprise that these algorithms will fail sometimes. But in the context of 100 million photos, they do fail quite often. And they don’t fail in acceptable ways: It’s easy to see that the general composition of these two images is similar (beige background with dark accents in the top right center). But their content is completely different. The collisions encountered with other hashing algorithms look different, often in unexpected ways, but collisions exist for all of them.”

Hasnain says:

““Almost every woman I know of at Blizzard has a story of either actual, literal sexual assault that they were afraid to go to HR about, or a man with power over her, undermining her and taking credit for her work, dismissing her, talking over her, being the last person to get promoted, despite being eminently capable,” said Jennifer Klasing, a former World of Warcraft quest designer who left the company in October 2020. “Almost every single woman I know that’s been there longer than a year has at least one of these stories.””

Hasnain says:

“Pro-Trump conservatives like Carlson, meanwhile, once more find themselves on the outside looking in, Trump’s political project having failed, unable to successfully manipulate the system in order to overturn last November’s election result. American conservatism is a hollowed, clapped-out venture in search of an idea, a movement completely consumed and its ideas subsumed by the all-encompassing culture war. To be “hated by all the right people,” as Carlson supposedly said of Orbán’s Hungary the other night, is not an ideology but rather a siege mentality. Pull back the curtain and there is nothing there save white rage and an unabashed admiration of those willing to channel it.”

Hasnain says:

“UKG, a payroll and time-management firm, found that shifts among hourly workers in those states grew at about half the rate as states that continued the benefit — the opposite trend of what one might expect.”

Hasnain says:

Wait so Apple has a way to disable encryption remotely?

“According to people briefed on the plans, every photo uploaded to iCloud in the US will be given a “safety voucher” saying whether it is suspect or not. Once a certain number of photos are marked as suspect, Apple will enable all the suspect photos to be decrypted and, if apparently illegal, passed on to the relevant authorities.”

Hasnain says:

“In effect, media coverage has run with the same reductive orientalist cliché peddled by the Congee Queen: that congee, just like Chinese culture itself, is rigidly traditional, exotic, and unfamiliar to America; that it is steeped in history; and that any change or adjustment is to be regarded as blasphemy. In propagating a narrative that slow-cooked rice and water is considered sacred by Asians, while leaving out the more colorful and trendy aspects of congee’s culinary identity, media coverage does a disservice to readers by failing to shine a light on how inaccurate Karen Taylor’s portrayal of Chinese congee really is, while also failing to explain the more insidious essence of cultural appropriation.

Viewed another way, the flattened story allowed defenders of Taylor to portray her critics as an “Asian mob” canceling a white entrepreneur in a case of overblown cultural gatekeeping.”

Hasnain says:

“State and federal officials should maintain the momentum by requiring vaccination to enter more public facilities and helping the private sector do the same by easing vaccination verification. Yes, some share of the population will never get vaccinated, but many merely need their apathy or hesitancy to become more inconvenient than getting a shot.

Bay Area officials also continued to take the lead Monday on another precaution by mandating masks indoors, which is appropriate until surging infections abate and vaccination rates increase. It’s also become clear that dropping most restrictions on gatherings, as California did in June, was a mistake. While lockdowns aren’t warranted or feasible, limiting indoor crowding would be wise in places where unvaccinated people are or might be present. Pretending the pandemic is over is no substitute for making it so.”

Hasnain says:

This is so terribly scary. They hosted some articles (rightly) critical of the CEO and suddenly eBay contractors were harassing them (sending bloody pigs heads and other deliveries), threatening them (tagging their fence, various tweets) and stalking them (flew to the area and drove by, tried to install a tracker on the car). Whew.

“In June 2020, federal prosecutors announced criminal charges against six former eBay employees and a contractor. The company apologized to the Steiners, and in a lengthy statement said it had conducted its own investigation that had resulted in terminating all of the employees charged by the government plus communications chief Wymer, who has not been charged.

The investigation also found that former CEO Wenig had made “inappropriate communications” but did not have advance knowledge of the harassment and stalking. Wenig, who was not charged, was allowed to resign in September 2019 with a compensation package worth $57 million; the Steiner scandal was a “consideration” in his departure, the company has said.”

Hasnain says:

This was a pretty insightful read on what the TPM role is and how they can help in large organizations. The article is great despite leaning into a lot of buzzwords (my mind glossed over all the synergies)

“The mission I set for my TPM team at DoorDash is to drive complex, cross-functional engineering initiatives. Their primary contributions include effective program management, lightweight and appropriate process definition, and ensuring program success metrics are understood and achieved. All of this is driven through the lens of a strong technical perspective, which allows the TPM to contribute directly to the program’s successful definition and execution by uncovering and solving for gaps rather than simply reporting progress given by engineers who are working on the program. A strong TPM will enable proactive and timely strategic decisions, clear alignment across teams and stakeholders, accountability and ownership, and successful execution of the program’s objectives.”

Hasnain says:

I’m just gonna steal this description I saw on Twitter because it’s quite apt. A lot of this is already bordering on slave labor, and, oof.

“1) let eviction moratorium expire in the middle of a surging pandemic & economic crisis
2) criminalize homelessness
3) put now homeless, newly incarcerated people to work for thirty cents an hour
4) PROFIT 💰💰💰”

Hasnain says:

“On Sunday, Tsimanouskaya reposted a statement from the Belarus Olympic Committee saying she had been removed from competition due to her “emotional and psychological state.”

“This is a lie,” she wrote.

Tsimanouskaya told Belarusian sports news outlet Tribuna that a senior coach in Minsk and another official had called to tell her to delete her earlier video from Instagram if she wanted to continue her athletic career. And she said the head coach of the national team, Yuri Moisevich, had suggested she should claim an injury and bow out of her race and the Games, as she was interfering with the team’s performance.”

Hasnain says:

Really good read on performance optimizations, and some cool data structure work on CRDTs

“A decade ago Google Wave really needed a good quality list CRDT. I got super excited when the papers for CRDTs started to emerge. LOGOOT and WOOT seemed like a big deal! But that excitement died when I realised the algorithms were too slow and inefficient to be practically useful. And I made a big mistake - I assumed if the academics couldn't make them fast, nobody could.

But sometimes the best work comes out of a collaboration between people with different skills. I'm terrible at academic papers, I'm pretty good at making code run fast. And yet here, in my own field, I didn't even try to help. The researchers were doing their part to make P2P collaborative editing work. And I just thumbed my nose at them all and kept working on Operational Transform. If I helped out, maybe we would have had fast, workable CRDTs for text editing a decade ago. Oops! It turned out collaborative editing needed a collaboration between all of us. How ironic! Who could have guessed?!

“

Hasnain says:

“We have lionized the founders, CEOs, and disruptors who nevertheless have intra-office reputations as abrasive geniuses who treat their workers as eminently replaceable. Because most private companies don’t share revenue, we frequently tie headcount and real estate to success. Removing the physical office forces modern businesses to start justifying themselves through annoying things such as “profit and loss” and “paying customers.””