Hasnain says:

Great read on text algorithms, some fun data structures and algorithms. The complexity analysis was a fun aside. I now have a good example to show now when talking about “who needs to use data structures like this in practice?!”

“Efficient bracket pair colorization was a fun challenge. With the new data structures, we can also solve other problems related to bracket pairs more efficiently, such as general bracket matching or showing colored line scopes.

Even though JavaScript might not be the best language to write high performance code, a lot of speed can be gained by reducing asymptotic algorithmic complexity, especially when dealing with large inputs.”

Hasnain says:

“A sense of obligation to provide for parents and sometimes extended families burdens the finances of many millennials with roots in immigrant communities, said Shellise Rogers, 30, who grew up in Trinidad and New York City and has gone to Score for advice. She now lives in New York and has her own business as an accountant and business coach.”

Hasnain says:

This is some really cool work done by folks in my org.

"MT is designed to be able to scan large mobile codebases and flag potential issues on pull requests before they make it into production. It was built as a result of close collaboration between security and software engineers at Facebook who train MT to look at code and analyze how data flows through it. Analyzing data flows is useful because many security and privacy issues can be modeled as data flowing into a place it shouldn’t."

Hasnain says:

Great read on in house expertise and the value of building vs buying in the right scenario.

“Before the patch, if you profiled our Scala code, you would've seen an unreasonably large amount of time spent in Future/Promise, including in cases where you might naively expect that the compiler would optimize the work away. One reason for this is that Futures use a compare-and-swap (CAS) operation that's opaque to JVM optimization. The patch linked above avoids CAS operations when the Future doesn't escape the scope of the method. This companion patch removes CAS operations in some places that are less amenable to compiler optimization. The two patches combined reduced the cost of typical major Twitter services using idiomatic Scala by 5% to 15%, paying for the JVM team in perpetuity many times over and that wasn't even the biggest win Flavio found that year.

I'm not going to do a team-by-team breakdown of teams that pay for themselves many times over because there are so many of them, even if I limit the scope to "teams that people are surprised that Twitter has".”

Hasnain says:

Well written article highlighting a lot of problems with the academic journal and publication system.

“Whatever happens to Sci-Hub or Elbakyan, the fact that such a site exists is something of a tragedy. Sci-Hub currently fills a niche that should never have existed. Like the black-market medicine purchased by people who cannot afford prescription drugs, its very being indicts the official system that created the conditions of its emergence.

The cost of individually purchasing all the articles required to complete a typical literature review could easily amount to thousands of dollars. Beyond paying for the articles themselves, academics often have to pay steep fees to publish their research. Meanwhile, most peer reviewers and editors charged with assessing, correcting, and formatting papers do not receive compensation for their work.”

Hasnain says:

This was a really interesting bug and analysis.

“Sawtooth up and down graphs aren't THAT interesting...but look at the x-axis. This isn't showing minute by minute or even millisecond by millisecond ups and downs like you may have seen before. This x-axis uses months as its unit of measure. Read that again and drink it in.”

Hasnain says:

Surprised the FT went out swinging

“We could have stayed in the EU and improved pay and conditions in these sectors. We could have left the EU and improved pay and conditions in these sectors. But the government insisted we would “have our cake and eat it” rather than acknowledge trade-offs and plan for them. This has precipitated a crisis which may mean the country ends up reliant on low-paid migrant workers after all — just different ones, who are even more vulnerable to exploitation. If there is any cake left, I don’t know who’s eating it.”

Hasnain says:

This was an interesting and thoughtful analysis.

“Whatever the case, it seems clear that the current state of affairs is making everyone miserable. So today I want to expand my argument: Not only should Facebook commit to doing more research like the Facebook Files, it should release the Facebook Files, period. And not just the Instagram-related ones, as Nick Clegg suggested Monday. Whatever documents the Journal relied on, Facebook should make them publicly available. Redact them as needed to protect users’ privacy, if need be. Add context, where context is missing.

But release them, and soon.

Here’s my rationale.”

Hasnain says:

!!!

I rewatched the whole thing (saw S5 for the first time though) earlier this year and it was so good.

“Original series creator J. Michael Straczynski is onboard to write the project. He will also executive producer under his Studio JMS banner. Warner Bros. Television, which produced the original series, will produce the reboot.”

Hasnain says:

Only read the intro so far and the data is staggering.

“Not only did the pandemic lead to the closure of schools in many countries, often for several weeks, it also accelerated the digitalization of education and amplified the role of parental involvement in supporting the schoolwork of their children. Thus, beyond the specific circumstances of the COVID-19 lockdown, we believe that studying the effects of the pandemic on academic inequalities provides a way to more broadly examine the consequences of school closure and related effects (for example, digitalization of education) on social class inequalities

…

Data from non-Western countries highlight a more general digital divide, showing that developing countries have poorer access to digital equipment. For example, in India in 2018, only 10.7% of households possessed a digital device, while in Pakistan in 2020, 31% of higher-education teachers did not have Internet access and 68.4% did not have a laptop”

Hasnain says:

“The tetraquark now presents theorists with a solid target against which to test their mathematical machinery for approximating the strong force. Honing their approximations represents physicists’ main hope for understanding how quarks behave inside and outside atoms — and for teasing apart the effects of quarks from subtle signs of new fundamental particles that physicists are pursuing.”

Hasnain says:

I mean… yikes. As the article later goes on to say, this may well be securities fraud, raising investment under a clearly false premise.

“A confused Mr. Piper told the Goldman Sachs banker that he had never spoken with her before. Someone else, it seemed, had been playing the part of Mr. Piper on the call with Ozy.

When YouTube learned that someone had apparently impersonated one of their executives at a business meeting, its security team started an investigation, the company confirmed to me. The inquiry didn’t get far before a name emerged: Within days, Mr. Watson had apologized profusely to Goldman Sachs, saying the voice on the call belonged to Samir Rao, the co-founder and chief operating officer of Ozy, according to the four people.”

Hasnain says:

I’m glad more mainstream media outlets are starting to raise awareness of how bad this can get in 2024.

“In 2020, we saw election officials refuse to bow to pressure campaigns from Trump and his associates after the vote ended. Are you confident they would withstand that pressure again in 2024?

If the same people are in place, I’m confident. But I don’t think the same people are going to be in place — that’s what makes me quite worried. I don’t think the people that showed integrity would lose their integrity, but I’m worried that people who didn’t show integrity might now be in positions of power.”

Hasnain says:

This whole thing is really damning. Worth reading in full.

“In response, the CIA and the White House began preparing for a number of scenarios to foil Assange’s Russian departure plans, according to three former officials. Those included potential gun battles with Kremlin operatives on the streets of London, crashing a car into a Russian diplomatic vehicle transporting Assange and then grabbing him, and shooting out the tires of a Russian plane carrying Assange before it could take off for Moscow. (U.S. officials asked their British counterparts to do the shooting if gunfire was required, and the British agreed, according to a former senior administration official.)”

Hasnain says:

“Even as a natural origin remains the most plausible explanation, these discoveries, taken as a whole, demonstrate beyond a reasonable doubt that good-faith investigations of these matters have proceeded in the face of a toxic shroud of secrecy. Vaughn Cooper, who studies pathogen evolution at the University of Pittsburgh, told us that he hasn’t changed his view that SARS-CoV-2 is extremely unlikely to have been created in a lab—but the lack of candor is “really concerning.” The DARPA proposal doesn’t “mean that much for our understanding of the origins of the pandemic,” he said, “but it does diminish the trustworthiness of the research groups involved.””

Hasnain says:

“The question remains: Is taking a week of rest actually effective in addressing burnout?

According to Doug Mennin, a clinical psychology professor at Columbia University, this approach is more of a short-term solution, but he said, "If you're not sleeping, and you're working a lot, and you're strung out from it, being able to recharge can be helpful."”

Hasnain says:

Thought provoking. And I’m glad this wasn’t behind the usual paywall.

“Today’s arguments over the filibuster will seem quaint in three years if the American political system enters a crisis for which the Constitution offers no remedy.

Most Americans — and all but a handful of politicians — have refused to take this possibility seriously enough to try to prevent it.”

Hasnain says:

Well worded rant in ABI compatibility concerns in C++. I learnt a lot about the politics in the standardization process and a lot of technical minutiae at the same time.

“You cannot make me pay my blood for a contract with this insidious, ever-pervasive amalgamation, I was not even alive to bear witness to. I will not sit in every meeting and be endlessly bullied by implementations that do not know how to handle a problem they are the sole controller and proprietor for. It’s absolutely inane that even the most mundane of proposals can suddenly be ran through like a train wreck because the pinnacle of C++ and C experts cannot answer the question “how do I version something”. I will have a good standard library. It will meet my performance requirements. It will be correct. I do not care how many ghosts of the past there are. I do not care how many implementations exist where a person programming for longer than I have been alive made a sub-optimal choice one day and now we just have to live with that, for the rest of eternity. I will not be made to suffer someone else’s mistakes in perpetuity, while they also continue to make the same mistakes in egregiously flagrant fashions now and into the future.

I shouldn’t even be held back by my own mistakes from yesterday, what kind of world do we live in where we settle on a process so fundamentally against the human condition of learning and growing as an individual? Why would we prioritize a working process that at its deepest roots is so fundamentally against the living human being, and happier to dwell with the dead?”

Hasnain says:

Yikes. Given all the similar experiences popping up recently this is not a good look.

“I want to share my frustrating experience participating in Apple Security Bounty program. I've reported four 0-day vulnerabilities this year between March 10 and May 4, as of now three of them are still present in the latest iOS version (15.0) and one was fixed in 14.7, but Apple decided to cover it up and not list it on the security content page. When I confronted them, they apologized, assured me it happened due to a processing issue and promised to list it on the security content page of the next update. There were three releases since then and they broke their promise each time.”

Hasnain says:

The more I read about LiveView the more excited I get - it looks like this solves some of the problems I had faced when working on concurrent multiplayer game servers.

My only gripe is that it's not Rust so now I need to go debate between yak shaving or using the right tool for the job in this case. (/s)

"Today, I work in a language called Elixir. I spend my days building Phoenix, which is Elixir's goto web framework. Unlike Rails, Phoenix is more than just an Elixir web framework. In the process of building Phoenix, I believe we've hit on some new ideas that will change the way we think about building applications in much the same way Rails did for CRUD apps.

That's a big claim. To back it up, I want to talk you through the history of Phoenix, what we were trying to do, and some of the problems we solved along the way."

Hasnain says:

“Even professors who have incorporated directory structure into their courses suspect that they may be clinging to an approach that’s soon to be obsolete. Plavchan has considered offering a separate course on directory structure — but he’s not sure it’s worth it. “I imagine what’s going to happen is our generation of students ... they’re going to grow up and become professors, they’re going to write their own tools, and they’re going to be based on a completely different approach from what we use today.”

His advice to fellow educators: Get ready. “This is not gonna go away,” he says. “You’re not gonna go back to the way things were. You have to accept it. The sooner that you accept that things change, the better.””

Hasnain says:

This has it all: murder mystery, corruption in government, government incompetence, criminal coverups, and a human interest story.

“As the mystery unravelled, Susan and I spent our evenings on the phone sipping Sauvignon Blanc and quietly patting each other on the back. It had been Susan's dedication, persistence and operating skills that had broken the case where all the detectives in Mayfield and the state police had failed, through neglect and inefficiency.

In March 2007, Susan was summoned to Francfort, Kentucky, to receive the first-ever Kentucky Citizenship Award at a public ceremony.

I would like to say the story has a happy ending but that's not the case. I returned to Mayfield in 2011 to work once more with Susan and try and get answers to some outstanding questions, including why the MPD investigation had been so grotesquely ineffective. What we discovered poses troubling questions about the Mayfield police but there is still more to uncover.”

Hasnain says:

“Nothing about the r/HermanCainAward, a dark record of a dark, dark time, is decent or kind or particularly fair. Even using Cain as the model is uncharitable; he was actually among the conservatives who didn’t deny that COVID was real. He advocated following CDC guidelines including social distancing and even masks on his radio show, despite not always adhering to those recommendations himself. I’m not sure that matters; no one could argue that a place where people gather to mock the dead is “moral,” or accuse it of hypocrisy, or of virtue signaling, or of coastal elitism. It is an anti-persuasive venue, a place that dispenses with rational appeals for people to behave better in favor of something much more primal and horrifying. And who knows? Maybe it’s persuading people specifically because it’s not trying to. “

Hasnain says:

Great read on profiling and chasing down every last bit of unexpected memory usage.

“While the results we achieved are not as good as a complete rewrite in a language that lets us account for every byte, they are a huge improvement over the previous behavior. We feel that careful attention to memory usage is an important skill for systems programming, even in garbage-collected languages.”

Hasnain says:

“Conversations with 11 former and current ERG members, a union organizer and a labor lawyer paint a complex picture of ERGs — one that shows how these groups can sometimes function as a safe space for employees with similar backgrounds but can also do little to effect real change in the workplace. And, in some cases, workers say companies can use ERGs against them and ultimately undermine union efforts.”

Hasnain says:

“Yet Ms. Holmes is also exceptional for the basic fact that she is a woman. Time and again, we see that the boys’ club that is the tech industry supports and protects its own — even when the costs are huge. And when the door cracks open ever so slightly to let a woman in, the same rules don’t apply. Indeed, as Ms. Holmes’s trial for fraud continues in San Jose, Calif., it’s clear that two things can be true. She should be held accountable for her actions as chief executive of Theranos. And it can be sexist to hold her accountable for alleged serious wrongdoing and not hold an array of men accountable for reports of wrongdoing or bad judgment.”

Hasnain says:

I have never heard of a policy before this where people were willing to pay extra taxes for it by this large a margin. I’m sure they exist but this is the first I’ve seen.

More leave is sorely needed for all workers IMO.

“It’s difficult in these divided times to find issues that Americans overwhelmingly agree on, but paid leave is one of them. Seventy-five percent of U.S. voters across party lines support a national paid family and medical leave policy, according to a survey conducted by Invest in America and Data for Progress. That includes 64% of Republicans and 91% of Democrats. In another survey, by the Global Strategy Group, 69% of likely voters across seven battleground states told pollsters they’d even be willing to pay more in taxes in exchange for the protection of a national law.”

Hasnain says:

I kept bouncing between how this is such a well written parody of tech and the realizations that a lot of this hit too close to home.

"“More engineers” will usually *not* solve your problems. Because the real problem is often a strategy problem, culture problem, interpersonal problem, trust problem, creativity problem, or market problem. More engineers *will* solve your “I don’t have enough engineers” problem."

Hasnain says:

“Dockworkers refused to unload containers that had McDonalds equipment in it. Printers refused to supply printed materials to the stores, such as menus and cups. Construction workers refused to build McDonalds stores and even stopped construction on a store that was already in progress but not yet complete. The typographers union refused to place McDonalds advertisements in publications, which eliminated the company’s print advertisement presence. Truckers refused to deliver food and beer to McDonalds. Food and beverage workers that worked at facilities that prepared food for the stores refused to work on McDonalds products.”

Hasnain says:

This was a great read.

“Beyond that, there are specific – and highly sought after - cybersecurity skills that neurodiverse people seem to excel in, such as cryptography, data analytics, and reverse malware engineering. Their different ways of processing information enable them to see patterns neurotypical people like me do not. “

Hasnain says:

This was really hard to read - and I must leave it with a trigger warning.

“A few weeks after Henkel’s death, the sense of being haunted began to recede. “The freedom came slowly,” Marco told me. “It was like a hunger that grows stronger and stronger. I don’t know how to say it, but it was the first time that I figured out that I am living a life with a billion different possibilities. I could have been anything. My inner voice became stronger, my intuition that I don’t have to live my life the way he taught me, that I can keep going.””

Hasnain says:

To think this was all preventable. I don’t even know where to begin with this.

“Here’s an even scarier statement, from the Idaho Department of Health and Welfare’s strategies during crisis standards of care:

“Universal DNR Order: Adult patients hospitalized during a public health emergency, when crisis standards of care have been declared, should receive aggressive interventions; however, they should receive NO attempts at resuscitation (compressions, shocks or intubation if not yet intubated) in the event of cardiac arrest. The likelihood of survival after a cardiac arrest is extremely low for adult patients. As well, resuscitation poses significant risk to healthcare workers due to aerosolization of body fluids and uses large quantities of scarce resources such as staff time, personal protective equipment, and lifesaving medications, with minimal opportunity for benefit.””

Hasnain says:

“The measures represent nothing short of a revolution in the way salaries are negotiated, especially in white-collar jobs. Study after study shows that greater transparency narrows pay inequities based on race and gender. That on its own is an outcome worth celebrating. But I think these new laws could end up doing even more. If enough states enact pay transparency, it could forge a new national norm — one in which companies are as upfront about salaries as they are about prices. Think about it: Every business, from tiny boutiques to online giants like Amazon, tell you exactly how much each of their items costs. Why shouldn't it be the same when we're shopping for a job? “

Hasnain says:

Very well researched piece on society and economics. The estimated GDP losses from not building more housing was staggering - $16k per person in America (almost double the GDP loss caused by COVID). Too many data points to quote, so I’ll leave with the kicker:

“But whether this or another approach is the best solution is not the key question. What matters is that housing shortages may be the biggest problem facing our era, and solving it needs to become everyone’s highest priority. And as important as it is, we should be wary of letting it become politically tribalised: the disastrous politicisation of Covid vaccines in the United States highlights the danger of that. Some kind of creative, below-the-radar solution that turns this zero-sum game into a positive-sum one is likely to have a better chance. In a tug of war, it’s often surprising how far you can go if you tug the rope sideways.

If we’re right about this, it means that fixing this one problem could make everyone’s lives much better than almost anyone realises – not just by making houses cheaper, but giving people better jobs, a better quality of life, more cohesive communities, bigger families and healthier lives. It could even give renewed reasons to be optimistic about the future of the West.”

Hasnain says:

This was really interesting and matches stories of successes I’ve seen in my career.

“As all of these pieces came together, app teams outside Studio took notice. For a typical paved road application with no unusual security complications, a team could go from “git init” to a production-ready, fully authenticated, internet accessible application in a little less than 10 minutes. The automation of the infrastructure setup, combined with reducing risk enough to streamline security review saves developers days, if not weeks, on each application. Developers didn’t necessarily care that the original motivating factor was about security: what they saw in practice was that apps using Wall-E could get in front of users sooner, and iterate faster.”

Hasnain says:

I learnt a lot about processes, management, and business from this one.

The most interesting quote, here, though, is where the article quotes one of the Stripe cofounders:

"When we started, a lot of people told us that payments is a scale business. You'll never make it son. And only the very large companies can survive. We were like, No, you don't realize things are different." Now, that we've gotten a chance to actually become familiar in our operating. We're like, "Wow, this really is a scale business." In that, as you look at what's required in operating, payments is a business where you make literally pennies on a per transaction basis and you have to have an enormous number of them to actually be able to operate with any modicum of profitability. And you would not believe, I mean, it's fairly obvious that it's a fixed cost business and then you need to get enough business flowing through you to make the economics work. I think what's interesting is as things have moved online, the fixed costs have gone way up compared to what was needed to run a domestic only payments business. If we think about just again, going back to your "invest like the best premium model" where you got access to exclusive content, for smart people, the Patrick interviews are only available on the paid product. And so as we think about that business, and again, just Stripe to do to unlock the payment system for that. We have engineers who are based in Singapore. They have built custom integrations with the local Malaysian bank transfer system. And they actually are now friends with the people, the engineers at the local Malaysian bank transfer system, because it's still work in flies itself. And so they're kind of working with them on some of the functionality that's needed. And so that way, if you have someone, a listener who's from Malaysia, they can pay the way that they're used to doing so, not just with a credit card, but with a bank account in Malaysia. Stripe has engineers in Ireland who are similarly a French local card switch is actually different to visa Mastercards and you need to be able to support that, to be able to properly serve French customers.

And so we've just been shocked, the degree to which, if you want to be able to reach every global customer, there really are very large economies of scale with that."

Hasnain says:

This was written *before* the judge's ruling in the Apple v Epic case. But I think most of the arguments still apply and it will just be more relevant than ever.

"This improves the margin on currency purchaes from about 70% to about 85%, at a stroke, which is an incredible 20% lift for one engineering sprint.

Genshin Impact has transacted more than a billion dollars through app stores to date. Imagine that you are the PM of revenue for it. Not implementing this costs millions of dollars per week you delay.

I predict, with over 90% confidence, that games are going to implement experiences like this within 6 weeks. Genshin Impact will almost certainly roll it out by October."

Hasnain says:

Incredible chronicling of the US response to 9/11, how the government approached the situation and how things played out in hindsight.

“In fact, the OLC lawyers rely on assurances from the CIA itself to endorse such powers. In a second memo from August 2002, the lawyers ruminate on the use of cramped confinement boxes. “We have no information from the medical experts you have consulted that the limited duration for which the individual is kept in the boxes causes any substantial physical pain,” the memo states. Waterboarding likewise gets a pass. “You have informed us that this procedure does not inflict actual physical harm,” the memo states. “Based on your research . . . you do not anticipate that any prolonged mental harm would result from the use of the waterboard.”

You have informed us. Experts you have consulted. Based on your research. You do not anticipate. Such hand-washing words appear throughout the memos. The Justice Department relies on information provided by the CIA to reach its conclusions; the CIA then has the cover of the Justice Department to proceed with its interrogations. It’s a perfect circle of trust.”

Hasnain says:

This is quite scary.

(Trigger warning, for obvious reasons)

“The final act of the U.S. war in Afghanistan was a drone strike in Kabul that killed 10 people. Our latest investigation shows how a man the military saw as an "imminent threat" and "ISIS facilitator" was actually an aid worker returning to his family”

Hasnain says:

Worth reflecting upon. As a non-American I learnt more about the reaction to 9/11 than I knew before.

“The answer, unfortunately, will be simple: We are confronting the current crisis with little of the hope, goodwill, and unity that 9/11 initially created, and that reality is inseparable from the fear and suspicion that came to dominate America’s reaction to the 2001 attacks—and yielded a long succession of tragic consequences, cynical choices, and poisonous politics. Looking back after two decades, I can’t escape the conclusion that the enemy we ended up fighting after 9/11 was ourselves.”

Hasnain says:

I am curious to see how the ramifications of this will play out over time. Lots of ways this could go

The judge made a very informed ruling - better than a lot of tech journalism I’ve seen - it’s worth reading.

“Apple and Epic Games have been at odds for years over the transaction fee system in the iOS App Store, which Apple sees as a necessary operating cost but Epic sees as a monopolistic tax. The fight came to a head in August 2020 when Epic installed an alternative payment system in Fortnite to circumvent the App Store’s transaction fees. Apple responded by removing Fortnite from the App Store, which sparked an immediate legal complaint from Epic.”

Hasnain says:

Yikes.

"Though executives in Google’s xWS department were aware by May 2019 that the company was failing to comply with the law and underpaying workers, the company did not move quickly to correct the rates and provide back wages to those who were owed them.

Instead, it spent at least two years continuing to pay out-of-date rates while it debated internally how to come back into legal compliance without admitting what had happened, documents and emails show.

Leaders of the xWS team appeared keenly aware that admitting the problem would damage its reputation within Google by causing headaches for departments whose budgets would be effected, as well as with the staffing agencies that are liable for providing pay parity. They also expressed interest in preventing existing and former temp workers from knowing they had been underpaid, in order to prevent claims for back pay."

Hasnain says:

“The book serves an instrumental purpose within the field of mathematics, maybe even an essential one. But the editors say that they were motivated by more than practical ends to see the long project through. When they started the work, Freedman’s proof was beautiful, but hidden. Now, at last, it’s on full display.”

Hasnain says:

“So, I wrote a play about three generations of Pakistani Muslim Americans. My intention was to not only entertain, but also forge connections with other communities that had experienced the joys and sorrows of living in a country that didn’t love them back. (After all, Italians and Irish Catholics and Jews weren’t considered “white” back in the day; they were also called invaders.) But bridging divides is easier said than done. The tastemakers in the theater industry told me “the mainstream” wouldn’t care about the stories of “ethnic characters.” They told me to add white characters, remove all the Urdu and Arabic dialogue, and introduce terrorism plots. One producer even suggested I cast the actor Ted Danson as the middle-aged Pakistani immigrant father.”

Hasnain says:

Not sure how I missed this one earlier. Bookmarking for later use.

“In particular the last point is what sets axum apart from existing frameworks. axum doesn't have its own middleware system but instead uses tower::Service. This means axum gets timeouts, tracing, compression, authorization, and more, for free. It also enables you to share middleware with applications written using hyper or tonic.”

Hasnain says:

What is going on I don’t even know how to parse this statement

“To begin, Google is adding the ability to “ring” another Google user with Google Meet — but inside the Gmail mobile app, not inside the Meet app. When the feature rolls out and turns on, your Gmail app will be able to be called just like any other VOIP app (in addition to being able to join Google Meet meetings). Google says the standalone Meet app will get the same ability to place calls, not just create group meetings, at some point in the future.”

Hasnain says:

“Although they didn't set out to find such an important comet, both Bernardinelli and Bernstein said that their unexpected discovery this summer has given them a new appreciation for the dirty iceballs rattling around the outer solar system.

"I will still have my day job, I think, of cosmology," Bernstein said. But still, "it's been enjoyable, I've really learned a lot about comets."”

Hasnain says:

“Yeah… yeah. I am reluctantly suggesting that the move is sometimes to just yolo decide. There is a real risk here, but if you’ve built yourself a formidable mental block, you’re wasting precious time swirling around your head and it’s time to make forward progress.”

Hasnain says:

Interesting bit of human interest story and scientific history.

“In early May, the CDC made similar changes to its Covid-19 guidance, now placing the inhalation of aerosols at the top of its list of how the disease spreads. Again though, no news conference, no press release. But Marr, of course, noticed. That evening, she got in her car to pick up her daughter from gymnastics. She was alone with her thoughts for the first time all day. As she waited at a red light, she suddenly burst into tears. Not sobbing, but unable to stop the hot stream of tears pouring down her face. Tears of exhaustion, and relief, but also triumph. Finally, she thought, they’re getting it right, because of what we’ve done.”

Hasnain says:

“An active culture of talent mobility can help minimize complacency and create an environment of healthy change — and with it an agile environment that can handle the unexpected. If you are interested in improving agility, it’s time to include some healthy internal mobility and create more talent magnets throughout your organization.”

Hasnain says:

Zoe’s recent reporting on Apple has been quite interesting. Here is a recap of all the stuff that has happened, primarily over the last month. While this is focused on Apple, I’ve been taking away a lot of lessons as they relate to other companies too.

“I think that this is a real thing. I think there’s this feeling internally now that the executives are a little out of touch. The executives are saying, “Oh, come back to the office,” and the lower-level employees are like, “Well yeah, because you live five minutes from the office in this absolute mansion, and you’ve had this commute for 20 years, and you love it. We’re not in the same boat. We live an hour and a half outside of Cupertino. We’re not trying to go back to that life.” They feel like executives want things to go back to the way things always were, but the world has changed, and Apple can’t get back.”

Hasnain says:

If you read one article this month, read this. It’s a heartbreaking story of the human cost of the Afghan war - as told by various locals in the rural areas, with life events and history spanning back 20+ years. People fight and debate over who’s right and wrong and discuss various complex issues while forgetting the real and actual human toll this takes on people. One of the best pieces I’ve read in a long time, and I have a lot to think about and ponder.

There were too many quotes to pick out, including some absolutely rage inducing mistakes made by various governments, but I’ll leave with this one near the end:

“The Taliban takeover has restored order to the conservative countryside while plunging the comparatively liberal streets of Kabul into fear and hopelessness. This reversal of fates brings to light the unspoken premise of the past two decades: if U.S. troops kept battling the Taliban in the countryside, then life in the cities could blossom. This may have been a sustainable project—the Taliban were unable to capture cities in the face of U.S. airpower. But was it just? Can the rights of one community depend, in perpetuity, on the deprivation of rights in another? In Sangin, whenever I brought up the question of gender, village women reacted with derision. “They are giving rights to Kabul women, and they are killing women here,” Pazaro said. “Is this justice?” Marzia, from Pan Killay, told me, “This is not ‘women’s rights’ when you are killing us, killing our brothers, killing our fathers.” Khalida, from a nearby village, said, “The Americans did not bring us any rights. They just came, fought, killed, and left.””

Hasnain says:

The data here is quite staggering. I do wonder what’s going on causation wise. It’s confusing to me because right after the below paragraph is a datapoint that white men (and men in general) of a certain income bracket tend to have less college attendance than women anyway.

“The college gender gap cuts across race, geography and economic background. For the most part, white men—once the predominant group on American campuses—no longer hold a statistical edge in enrollment rates, said Mr. Mortenson, of the Pell Institute. Enrollment rates for poor and working-class white men are lower than those of young Black, Latino and Asian men from the same economic backgrounds, according to an analysis of census data by the Pell Institute for the Journal.”

Hasnain says:

This was an interesting debugging story.

“Unbelievable! All the counters were zero! ZFS really wasn't in use, ever! But at the same time, it was eating over 30% of CPU capacity! Whaaat??

The customer had been right all along. ZFS was straight up eating CPU, and for no reason.

How can a file system that's not in use at all consume 38% CPU? I'd never seen this before. This was a mystery.”

Hasnain says:

Uh.. this sounds like a horrible abuse of privacy and also counter productive. If you don’t trust your employees, that’s a much bigger problem that won’t be solved by tools like this.

“Every minute or so, the program would capture a live photo of David and his workmates via their company laptop webcams. The ever-changing headshots were splayed across the wall of a digital conference waiting room that everyone on the team could see. Clicking on a colleague’s face would unilaterally pull them into a video call. If you were lucky enough to catch someone goofing off or picking their nose, you could forward the offending image to a team chat via Sneek’s integration with the messaging platform Slack.

According to the Sneek co-founder Del Currie, the software is meant to replicate the office. “We know lots of people will find it an invasion of privacy, we 100% get that, and it’s not the solution for those folks,” Currie says. “But there’s also lots of teams out there who are good friends and want to stay connected when they’re working together.””

Hasnain says:

This is an inspiring read. It combines a human interest story - going over the lives of some doctors and patients - with public policy, healthcare, and medial outcomes being contrasted across countries. I wish more countries followed this model.

“The results are enviable. Since the development of the ebais system, deaths from communicable diseases have fallen by ninety-four per cent, and decisive progress has been made against non-communicable diseases as well. It’s not just that Costa Rica has surpassed America’s life expectancy while spending less on health care as a percentage of income; it actually spends less than the world average. The biggest gain these days is in the middle years of life. For people between fifteen and sixty years of age, the mortality rate in Costa Rica is 8.7 per cent, versus 11.2 per cent in the U.S.—a thirty-per-cent difference. But older people do better, too: in Costa Rica, the average sixty-year-old survives another 24.2 years, compared with 23.6 years in the U.S.”

Hasnain says:

I need to revisit my priors and reconsider what I learnt from it. Sigh.

“And it doesn’t even always mean “easy read”: Readers should apply the same skepticism to the claims of Freakonomics as they would to the much-derided conventional wisdom. We encourage them to revisit these modern-day classics with a skeptical and inquiring mind. And we hope that future works in the pop-statistics genre will continue to impart a sense of the fun and importance of statistical reasoning, while more clearly recognizing the uncertainty and complexity inherent in scientific study of the world.”

Hasnain says:

Been learning a lot more about the chip shortage and supply chains in general lately. Lots of interesting stuff.

“Chips consist of as many as 100 layers of materials. These are deposited, then partially removed, to form complex three-dimensional structures that connect all the tiny transistors. Some of these layers are just one atom thin. Machines made by Applied Materials Inc., Lam Research Corp. and Tokyo Electron Ltd. juggle a host of variables, such as temperature, pressure, and electrical and magnetic fields, to make this happen.”

Hasnain says:

“Let’s entertain a third possibility. People’s valuation of their own time has changed: Americans are less eager to do low-paid, often dead-end service and hospitality work, deciding instead that more time on family, education and leisure makes for a higher standard of living, even if it means less consumption.

If the lack of enthusiasm for bad jobs lasts, does this bode ill for the U.S. economy? The answer is no — and here’s why: The U.S. doesn’t have a job quantity problem; instead, it has a job quality problem.”

Hasnain says:

So much preventable death :(

“Eight counties across the state are using refrigerated trucks to store the bodies of the dead. Bell County which includes Temple, Texas, has requested a second FEMA trailer with an extra storage capacity of 50 bodies. Several smaller trailers have been donated by the state funeral directors association.

As more schools see spikes in COVID transmissions, more teachers and students will become infected and could die.”

Hasnain says:

“I was reminded of all this as I watched an advance screener of Impeachment with my 17-year-old son. During a particularly galling scene, which incorporated footage of Jay Leno making sexual jokes, my son turned to me and asked: “So people in the 1990s were just dicks?”

“Well…” I thought about it for a minute. “They kind of were, but there was more to it.””

Hasnain says:

This was a very engaging read; now I feel like I need to get the book.

“You might just take this as a sign that the computers don’t exist, but let’s keep working with the idea that they do. If you want to reduce the heat a computer generates and you have a huge amount of memory, you have an amazing design option, which is called a reversible computer. That means that you change each bit in the whole computer only once, and then move on to another bit. That results in a total record of all computation—and that’s why it’s possible to run the computer in reverse: Nothing has been lost. If you move each bead in an extremely capacious abacus only once, you don’t generate the heat you would by moving each bead repeatedly. You can think of it as saving all the information in a tidy way instead of dispersing it. This is also a nice example of Claude Shannon’s famous principle that information and entropy are related.”

Hasnain says:

Well worth the read.

“So really, you had a one-sided war in those years, between 2001 and 2004, where the U.S. was fighting an enemy that didn't exist, and innocent people were the ones who were suffering. That really is what created the Taliban's resurgence. The Taliban wasn't a popular force in 2001, but in these communities, people saw the Taliban as a lesser of two evils to the violence perpetuated by the U.S. and by the U.S. proxies.”

Hasnain says:

“The risk is that long COVID becomes yet another neglected disease whereby some uncounted number of people become debilitatingly sick every year and fruitlessly bang for help on the door of an unconcerned medical establishment. But a better future is also possible, in which long-haulers—vocal, united, and numerous—finally galvanize research into the long-term consequences of viral infections; in which such research proceeds quickly as patient experts become partners; in which the world gets ways of preventing and treating long COVID, ME/CFS, and other marginalized conditions; and in which the ents’ interminable meeting ends in action and victory.”

Hasnain says:

No words.

“It was predictable that the Supreme Court would abandon Roe after Barrett replaced Ginsburg. But it is still “stunning,” as Sotomayor put it, that it would do so at midnight on a Wednesday in a shadow docket order with a few slapdash sentences of opaque reasoning. It is stunning, too, that the court would issue this order nearly a full day after it silently allowed Texas’ law to take effect. The majority’s decision reflects flagrant contempt for the right to abortion and a cynical tolerance for Republican politicians’ endless schemes to abolish it. The majority did not have the patience to wait until its coming term, when it will have the opportunity to overturn Roe the normal way, with full briefing, oral arguments, and a signed opinion. Nor did it have the courage to cop to its real view—that there is no constitutional right to abortion. Instead, the ultra-conservative majority upended Roe under the cover of a procedural punt.

The Constitution deserved better. Abortion patients in Texas deserved better. The country deserved better. Instead, five Republican-appointed justices have stripped women in the nation’s second-largest state of their reproductive autonomy. And they did so in the most cowardly, dishonest, and shameful manner imaginable.”

Hasnain says:

Does this mean Roe v Wade has now been gutted and will be overturned?

“The Supreme Court's failure to respond prompted a furious backlash from supporters of abortion rights just after the law went into effect.

"Access to almost all abortion has just been cut off for millions of people, the impact will be immediate and devastating," the ACLU said in a tweet.”