Hasnain says:

This was such a great read. I haven’t followed too much of his cooking, but I really appreciated the perspective on life and personal growth shown here. Lots of things to ponder.

“My kids’ book, “Every Night Is Pizza Night,” was actually about that—about the concept of “best,” and how the best has context, and people have different reasons for liking things, and those things can change. These are things which, when I was in my twenties and early thirties, I ignored. I think that, as you age and mature as a person, there are things that you come to internalize a lot better, and understand better. I was an asshole! I’m still one! But I’m less of an asshole now, and at least I recognize it. The kids’ book was, in many ways, a response to the way that some people take my work. Especially online, I’ll see somebody post a picture of a stew they made, and then they explain how they did it. And then someone else, in the comments, comes in and is, like, “No, that’s crap. Kenji said to do it this other way. Therefore, your stew is terrible.” That’s not at all how I want my work to be used.”

Hasnain says:

“Computer scientists still have much work to do before the protocol (or some variation on it) can be used in real-world applications. But that is par for the course, researchers said. “There’s a lot of notions in cryptography that, when they first came out, people were saying, ‘This is just pure theory, [it] has no relevance to practice,’” Pass said. “Then 10 or 20 years later, Google is implementing these things.”

The road from a theoretical breakthrough to a practical protocol can be a long one, Barak said. “But you could imagine,” he said, “that maybe 50 years from now the crypto textbooks will basically say, ‘OK, here is a very simple construction of iO, and from that we’ll now derive all of the rest of crypto.’””

Hasnain says:

Thinking about this today as I’ve been digesting and reading the news in Ukraine. There are a lot more examples of coverage I could share but frankly it’s gotten quite depressing (even the heart warming stories of Ukrainians bravely fighting back are tinged by the fact that they are forced to do it to survive), so I’ll stop and ponder here.

Solidarity with Ukraine - and down with all the warmongers across the world.

“Hence this is in solidarity with the people of Ukraine, they’re not somehow alone in being victims of war. War is the very act of dehumanization, and this is what we must resist, whether it happens in Ukraine or Yemen, crossing the Mediterranean or the river Dnieper, wherever the crushing of human life and very existence may be.

We have to realize, war isn’t something that just happens to white people. War happens to people. In solidarity with the people of Ukraine and the people in pain everywhere, we have got to recognize our shared humanity.”

Hasnain says:

“Long before we reach that point, the experiments will have already signified a substantial shift in the practicality of nonlocal games. These were invented to investigate the exotic phenomenon of nonlocality — the way objects can be instantaneously correlated across arbitrary distances. Now, nonlocal games provide the foundation for a much more practical process, the generation of a shared secret key.

“I sometimes say tongue-in-cheek even God couldn’t know it. The universe hadn’t decided what the value would be before it was measured,” said Colbeck. “That’s the origin of the security.””

Hasnain says:

Great technical read. And, as always, I wholeheartedly recommend {fmt}

“Would you have expected a “turn an integer into a string” routine to be loading resource file information blocks from some library, for each and every call? Yeah, me neither.

Technically, there are no bugs anywhere above - all the functions work correctly, as far as standard is concerned. But some of them have interesting (lack of) multi-core scaling behavior, some others have just regular performance overheads compared to others, etc.”

Hasnain says:

“Sure, employees like catered lunches, lounges filled with beanbag chairs and the masseuse who sets up in the conference room every other Friday. But they aren’t ready to recommit to a five-days-a-week relationship—or even a three-day one.

“You’re not going to get me on the train for two hours for free bagels,” says Jason Alvarez Schorr, a 36-year-old software engineer who quit his job in New York in January, when his former employer signaled an office return was imminent.”

Hasnain says:

I don’t know what I expected when reading this one, but it was definitely not what I expected. Surprisingly detailed and well researched. A lot of it isn’t easily quotable so I’ll leave the conclusion:

“A multivalent act, both flexible and formal, to kiss in the Middle Ages was to position oneself vis-à-vis another. By binding a legal or marital transaction with a kiss, one emphasized the mutual exchange of oaths and trust. By kissing a shoe or hem of a superior’s cloak, or by planting lips on a cross or Gospel book, one could display deference, respect, and veneration. By deigning to bestow a kiss on a lover, one could subvert mores or gender roles, all the while retaining the upper hand. And there are still manifold categories of kisses not discussed here: erotic same-sex kisses, kisses of homage between a celibate monk and a noblewoman, illicit kisses between those who professed to the religious life, parents’ kisses conferred on their children, &c. The closer we examine medieval references to kisses, the more the simple touching of lips unspools into layered, complicated, and ambiguous practice and meaning—each example more compelling to unpack than the last.”

Hasnain says:

More senseless war and death, millions of people will suffer as a result.

:(

“In a second round of comments, having effectively called for Russia’s expulsion from the UN, he concluded: “There’s no purgatory for war criminals, Mr Ambassador, they go to hell.””

Hasnain says:

“In the meantime, Frenk will keep using these simulations to explore challenges to the still-favored cold dark-matter model. “If it’s wrong,” he says, “I want to be the one who proves it wrong.””

Hasnain says:

This was a great read. I liked that it went into the science but made it accessible and provided tangible suggestions of what to do. Of course since it matched some of my priors I found myself nodding along a lot.

“Beyond hiring, employee happiness should also be a consideration when measuring organizational performance. Yes, objective performance still matters greatly. But, while a high-performing division within a company may bring short-term profit, if that performance was driven by toxic leadership and management practices, then those profits could evaporate quickly if employees were to leave in response. Unwarranted attrition is expensive. The U.S. military, for example, has caught on to this and has fired commanding officers who have fostered poor organizational climates, and at times it has done so preemptively, before a catastrophic event could occur. After all, it costs several hundred thousand dollars and years of effort to recruit and train a nuclear reactor engineer, and much more to do the same for an aviator. Losing even a few to unhappiness borne from toxic leadership is expensive and creates personnel shortages that increase the risk to those who remain. Attrition and talent shortages in a corporation have similar negative effects.”

Hasnain says:

This was an interesting and engrossing human interest story. This totally flipped the usual scenario of a fake scammer / contractor / employee on its head: what if the whole company was a sham?

“The pandemic changed the way many of us worked - communicating through a screen became the norm. Ali Ayad exploited that. It was as if he wanted to be the next Elon Musk - and, in Madbird, he thought he had found a shortcut. A universe where he would be judged solely by his online presence rather than the offline reality.

And the most shocking part of Ali Ayad's gamble?

The fact that we live in an age where it nearly worked.”

Hasnain says:

Great analysis that brings up a lot of points that have been concerning me about the economic and social situation in California and the US at large.

“What’s happening in California is a microcosm, and slightly extreme case, of what is happening throughout much of America. Local politics are centered around enforcing housing scarcity to the benefit of homeowners. Overregulation and excessive litigation burden economic output. America has systematically undershot long run GDP and employment growth. Public institutions are paralyzed by the myriad of interest groups pulling them different directions. And the results in California are representative of the results in much of America: an economy that sacrifices growth for exclusion, that draws battle lines in a fight over a pie that’s no longer growing. Driven by a scarcity mindset, well-to-do California residents have chosen to erect walls around some of the best places in the world just to ensure that their financial assets and quality of life not be squandered by the presence of outsiders. California’s population is shrinking not because of its economic failure, but because it chooses not to accommodate everyone in its economic successes.”

Hasnain says:

This article was fascinating; though I don’t know if I would be able to read the full book the author is trying to drum up excitement for.

“One could hardly imagine a more comprehensive or devastating attack, and yet it is hard not to be amused by ​­it—by its relentlessness, its obsessional intensity. It is difficult to see its scare ​­quotes—”his ‘certain’ history . . . his ‘undoubted’ history . . . his ‘facts’”—​without imagining Round speaking, delivering the index out loud, a livid sarcasm in his voice. This is the subject index in its most extreme form, as far from the concordance as it can get. Where Marbeck’s method was meticulously neutral, Round’s is the polar opposite, all personality, all interpretation. Where Marbeck’s concordance was thorough, Round’s index is partial. It would be fair to say that John Marbeck owed his life to the difference between a concordance and a subject index.”

Hasnain says:

I feel like I still haven’t done enough reading for Black History Month, but this was a start.

“The Nuremberg Laws, too, came up with a system of determining who belonged to what group, allowing the Nazis to criminalize marriage and sex between Jewish and Aryan people. Rather than adopting a “one-drop rule,” the Nazis decreed that a Jewish person was anyone who had three or more Jewish grandparents.

Which means, as Whitman notes, “that American racial classification law was much harsher than anything the Nazis themselves were willing to introduce in Germany.””

Hasnain says:

I find it really crazy that child poverty was cut in half - half! - last year and that wasn’t heralded as both a massive indictment of how things were done in the past and a great achievement by the public. And now it’s so infuriating to see that the public and lawmakers are okay with millions of children going hungry again.

“Shame on Pat Toomey! Shame on Joe Manchin! And shame on the broader system that sees 3.7 million kids slip sliding needlessly into poverty as business as usual, and not as the biggest scandal in America right now, which it is. Even Biden — whose administration deserves credit for devising the scheme and getting the temporary version passed last year — seems to have moved on. With lobbying for Build Back Better on life support, Team Biden is busy drafting the largest Pentagon budget in American history, expected to target $800 billion or more for new tanks and stealth fighter jets, the only “need” that both Democrats and Republicans support without question.”

Hasnain says:

UK focused but I think the points generalize.

“If the government is genuinely concerned about the birth rate there are things it could do: make renting more secure, or invest massively in childcare or, hell, even reform planning rules to build enough new family homes. But it has so far chosen not to do those things — chosen, indeed, to raise taxes on the young to protect the interests of the old. This is not an irrational way for a government elected by the grey vote to behave. By the same token, waiting much, much later to have kids is not an irrational way for the under-40s to behave either.

Why is Britain’s fertility rate declining? Gee, I dunno, why does it hurt if you punch yourself in the face?”

Hasnain says:

“The difficulty is that high-dimensional shapes often behave in ways that defy our human, low-dimensional intuition. For example, in dimensions 10 and up, it is possible to build a cube and a ball such that the cube has larger volume than the ball, but every slice through the center of the cube has smaller area than the corresponding slice through the center of the ball.

“The beauty of high-dimensional geometry is exactly that it doesn’t look anything like dimension two,” said Sébastien Bubeck of Microsoft Research in Redmond, Washington.”

Hasnain says:

Such a well written human interest story. Makes you think, and want to read more stories like this - and maybe even get the book (which covers even more examples of abandoned cities and islands)

“How would you live on your own private island? This is how the Rosies did it: They kept chickens, they kept cattle, they kept house. Their five children ran wild, scrambling in the rocky geos and paddling in the shallows (although they didn’t climb trees, because there are no trees). They weeded and darned and mended nets. They scavenged on the shoreline for items washed up – revelations from the outside world. They read everything they could get their hands on. They wrote letters, and received them too: handwritten notes addressed simply ‘Swona’, or sometimes to their house, which was named for them: Rose Cottage. They played instruments, and formed for a while an island orchestra with fiddle, pipes, squeezebox and a makeshift set of drums made of oil cans. Their father built boats, manned the tiny lighthouse, and in 1935, after a cargo ship ran aground off the western shore, salvaged enough from the wreckage to install electricity in their house – powered by windmill and a diesel generator. After that they listened to the radio: news, plays, tunes, the shipping forecast.”

Hasnain says:

““When the public saw you had U.S. government figures getting hacked, that quite clearly moved the needle,” Wyden told Reuters in an interview, referring to the targeting of U.S. officials in Uganda.

Lina al-Hathloul, Loujain’s sister, said the financial blows to NSO might be the only thing that can deter the spyware industry. “It hit them where it hurts,” she said.”

Hasnain says:

Just reading all the math involved here makes my brain hurt. Like… I’d heard how type 1 diabetes was hard but this make me appreciate it in a whole new way.

“”The worst part about it is that; If you are better at math you will live longer. Who makes a disease where the good math people live longer? — Scott Hanselman T1D”

I call the maths of T1D unreasonable because I am finding all this stuff difficult and stressful. Even though I know all the relevant numbers, even if I have all the information, even if I am comfortable with the calculations, even if all the factors are accounted for; when we give Sam food or insulin (and sometimes when we do nothing at all) his BGL changes in wildly unexpected ways.”

Hasnain says:

This is a great read - a mix of human interest story and science. This goes into nutrition, physiology, biology, and has a commentary on how a lot of the knowledge here is still evolving. I learnt a lot from this one.

“PONTZER GOT A LESSON in the value of food sharing in 2010, when he traveled to Tanzania to study the energy budgets of the Hadza hunter-gatherers. One of the first things he noticed was how often the Hadza used the word “za,” which means “to give.” It’s the magic word all Hadza learn as children to get someone to share berries, honey, or other foods with them. Such sharing helps all the Hadza be active: As they hunt and forage, Hadza women walk about 8 kilometers daily; men, 14 kilometers—more than a typical American walks in 1 week.

To learn about their energy expenditure, Pontzer asked the Hadza whether they’d drink his tasteless water cocktail and give urine samples. They agreed. He almost couldn’t get funding for the study, because other researchers assumed the answer was obvious. “Everyone knew the Hadza had exceptionally high energy expenditures because they were so physically active,” he recalls. “Except they didn’t.””

Hasnain says:

Interesting analysis.

“More prosaically, she thinks President Joe Biden could transcend the limitations of narrow congressional majorities by making bolder use of executive actions. She hedged a bit but left little doubt of her view that it’s a good thing that Speaker Nancy Pelosi and others in her party’s geriatric class of House leaders almost certainly will be moving on soon.”

Hasnain says:

This article speaks a lot of truth. I found myself nodding along a lot. Software engineers in general tend to overcomplicate things (lots of resume driven development) and I see more of it in the developer tools space as people want to make their tools stand out by appearing “cool”. But in the real world people just want to go on and solve their business problems, and they suffer in silence.

“If you watch enough conference talks or read enough blog posts, it would appear there are many software teams out there with pristine coding standards, non-flaky unit tests, staging environments that reflect production environments, and/or smooth people processes for responding to incidents. Getting to this point just requires a strong directive from above and discipline across engineering teams.”

Hasnain says:

I am a terribly inexperienced noob when it comes to biology so this took me a while to get through (lots of jargon I wasn’t familiar with) - but this was really interesting and educational!

“Another place to look is the enigmatic Asgard lineage of archaea, which were described only a few years ago and are thought to be the closest relatives of eukaryotes. They may be able to provide some resolution to the question of how cell fusion and other processes came together to create sex, ushering in the vibrant, bustling tangle of eukaryotic life.”

Hasnain says:

This almost seems like something out of a black mirror episode. I can see hardware devices going obsolete but .. wow.

“Failure is an inevitable part of innovation. The Argus II was an innovative technology, and progress made by Second Sight may pave the way for other companies that are developing bionic vision systems. But for people considering such an implant in the future, the cautionary tale of Argus patients left in the lurch may make a tough decision even tougher. Should they take a chance on a novel technology? If they do get an implant and find that it helps them navigate the world, should they allow themselves to depend upon it?

Abandoning the Argus II technology—and the people who use it—might have made short-term financial sense for Second Sight, but it’s a decision that could come back to bite the merged company if it does decide to commercialize a brain implant, believes Doerr.”

Hasnain says:

“The real losers of this year’s gerrymandering arms race might be the voters themselves. In their zeal to protect and expand their political turf, both parties have slashed the number of competitive districts across the country, meaning that millions fewer Americans will have a meaningful say in who represents them in Congress. Even Holder lamented the lack of competition in the map Democrats drew in New York. Yet for Democrats, the broader goal of their redistricting effort was not competitive maps but a fair fight for the House, and in the end, the key to achieving some level of parity with Republicans was not less gerrymandering, but more of it.”

Hasnain says:

This is great!

“"We have experienced two difficult years. With this agreement, we set a beacon for an economy that is more innovative, sustainable and digital. The aim is to be able to make people and businesses stronger," Belgian prime minister Alexander de Croo told a press conference announcing the reform package.”

Hasnain says:

“Hyodo hopes that comprehensive knowledge of which two- and three-quark particles stick together could explain another mystery — why groupings of four or five quarks are so rare. Physicists have cataloged hundreds of quark duos and trios, but just a handful of tetraquarks and pentaquarks.

To that end, ALICE has been sifting through a billion or so collisions that took place between 2016 and 2018. Starting this spring, however, an upgrade to the LHC will let them take data 100 times faster. Over the next decade, Fabbietti expects to measure the mingling of rarer hadrons containing even heavier quarks.”

Hasnain says:

Interesting collection of data points. My own biases and search history lead me to generally agree here.

“This isn’t true (yet), but it reflects some general sense that the authentic web is gone. The SEO marketers gaming their way to the top of every Google search result might as well be robots. Everything is commercialized. Someone’s always trying to sell you something. Whether they’re a bot or human, they are decidedly fake.

So how can we regain authenticity? What if you want to know what a genuine real life human being thinks about the latest Lenovo laptop?

You append “reddit" to your query (or hacker news, or stack overflow, or some other community you trust).”

Hasnain says:

The original story this is referencing is wild and absolutely worth a read. But I love this meta analysis because it calls a pattern I’ve seen people reference and it’s not great.

“If we start to imagine adding steps to the interview process to protect against an imposter job candidate, the “solutions” we come up with are quite aggressive. We could ask candidates on video (or in person) to see a photo ID and match the ID against the resume. But this would seem very weird. It starts an interview off in a hostile manner, and send the a strong message of distrust. Honest candidates – which are, remember, the vast majority – will wonder why the heck this company is acting so weird, and will rightly see this as a red flag about the company culture. There will be negative consequences for your hiring practices. For example, anyone who goes by a name that doesn’t match their government ID could be forced into an uncomfortable explanation. Congratulations: your attempt to identify fraudsters has accidentally created a transphobic hiring practice.”

Hasnain says:

This type of reasoning is downright infuriating.

““UC’s own data show that UC can easily accommodate the court-ordered enrollment cap without harming in-state student prospects by limiting offers to out-of-state, international, and certificate program students,” Save Berkeley’s Neighborhoods said in a press release.”

Hasnain says:

“That was fiction, but there were actual documented flatulists at work in Japan by the 1700s. During the Edo period, Tokyo streets were full of misemono, attractions that sometimes featured the kind of people who would later populate “freak shows”; one of the more popular misemono stars was a man called Kirifuri-hanasaki-otoko, meaning “the mist-descending flower-blossom man”, who, in 1774, demonstrated his ability to take in quantities of air and release it in “modulated flatulent arias”, according to the late professor Andrew Markus of the University of Washington. (Farts were a bit of a thing in the Edo period: A series of illustrated scrolls from the time, made by artists unknown, is titled “He-Gassen”, or “Fart Battle”, and is precisely, hilariously what is sounds like it is.)”

Hasnain says:

“Why do textiles often get overlooked?

When I first started looking at textiles in this period, I thought, “why is it that textiles are not up there with metallurgy?” Well, one possibility is that we know that they’re produced by women. And so women’s labor may have been less important on an economic scale.

But if I hadn’t studied Ur’s ancient women, I would have thought that the entire country was ruled by men and that all of the things that occurred in civilization, the beginning of civilization, was about what men did. And now I know that’s just one part of how civilizations develop.”

Hasnain says:

This is just amazing.

“Every metric that matters to us has increased substantially from the rewrite, and we even identified some that were no longer relevant to us, such as number of bugs, user frustration, and maintenance cost. Today we are making some of the code that we can afford to open source available on our GitHub page. It is useless by itself and is heavily tied to our infrastructure, but you can star it to make us seem more relevant.”

Hasnain says:

“That number is difficult to compute, and it’s probably much larger than the actual number of coinciding points, but the authors proved that this hard ceiling does exist. They then translated the problem back into the language of number theory to determine a maximum number of shared torsion points on two elliptic curves — the key to their original question and a provocative demonstration of the power of arithmetic dynamics.

“They’re able to answer a specific question that already existed just within number theory and that nobody thought had anything to do with dynamical systems,” said Patrick Ingram of York University in Toronto. “That got a lot of attention.””

Hasnain says:

One of the best analyses I’ve seen on crypto/web3. So well sourced and thought out. And this was thrown together quickly! I wonder what the author would do with more time to prepare.

“I'm a big believer in Bill Joy's Law of Startups, "success is inversely proportional to the amount of money you have". For $2.5M we got Nvidia to working silicon that was revolutionary in two different respects. Right now, there is way too much money. If a system is to be decentralized, it has to have a low barrier to entry. If it has a low barrier to entry, competition will ensure it has low margins. Low margin businesses don't attract venture capital. VCs are pouring money into cryptocurrency and "web3" companies. This money is not going to build systems with low barriers to entry and thus low margins. Thus the systems that will result from this flood of money will not be decentralized, no matter what the sales pitch says.

Despite all the cleverness and hype, the technology just isn't that good. It is both extraordinarily inefficient, and extraordinarily insecure. Nicholas Weaver points out that the "Ethereum computer" is 1/5000 as powerful as a Raspbery Pi. and that for the cost of 1 second of its use you can buy nearly 60 Raspberry Pis. Moxie Marlinspike points out that an NFT is a link to a file of metadata that links to the image it purports to represent, so neither is guaranteed to exist or be valid. You have only to glance at Molly White's Web3 is going just great timeline wonder why anyone thinks this "wretched hive of scum and villainy" should be the future of the Web.”

Hasnain says:

“This is more than double what was achieved in similar tests back in 1997.

It's not a massive energy output - only enough to boil about 60 kettles' worth of water. But the significance is that it validates design choices that have been made for an even bigger fusion reactor now being constructed in France.”

Hasnain says:

“Bubeck and Sellke showed that smoothly fitting high-dimensional data points requires not just n parameters, but n × d parameters, where d is the dimension of the input (for example, 784 for a 784-pixel image). In other words, if you want a network to robustly memorize its training data, overparameterization is not just helpful — it’s mandatory. The proof relies on a curious fact about high-dimensional geometry, which is that randomly distributed points placed on the surface of a sphere are almost all a full diameter away from each other. The large separation between points means that fitting them all with a single smooth curve requires many extra parameters.”

Hasnain says:

“To collect data on the progress of treatment, Lyra periodically sends patients “outcomes surveys.” The questionnaires inquire, for example, about things like anxiety or irritability over the last two weeks, asking patients to rank their intensity from 0 to 3, according to surveys viewed by BuzzFeed News. The surveys, which use clinically accepted and standardized questions, are optional. But patients may feel compelled to complete them because the automated emails look like they are coming from their therapist.

Clinicians can use the data to help shape their treatment, but there’s another reason Lyra pushes the surveys: The company shares aggregated and anonymized data about patient outcomes with employers to illustrate the effectiveness of its services.”

Hasnain says:

“By the time the test wound down, numerous members of the “Shipbreaker” team concurred: The four-day workweek was more than just a success.
“Our team was under huge pressure and on the verge of burnout due to the nature of working from home during a critical period of production, with the added stress of covid on top of that,” said Klyne. “When the trial was over, it was obvious the four-day workweek saved us. I don’t think we could have got to where we are today without it.””

Hasnain says:

“Once the tea turns burgundy, the liquid is shocked with ice or cold water to preserve the color. BBC journalist and food blogger Aliya Nazki uses a Kashmiri colloquialism to describe the perfect hue. The concentrate, she writes, should look “just like pigeon-blood.” When milk is added, the tea turns pink. At this point the boiling liquid is repeatedly poured back into the pot with a ladle and vigorously aerated, a technique similar to frothing milk for coffee. “It is very laborious work,” says a London pink tea vendor featured on YouTube. It takes her four hours to produce a batch of hand-frothed Kashmiri chai.”

Hasnain says:

Great human interest story that covers a famous family of chefs in Kashmir and how the food culture has been passed down over generations. And how current economic realities are affecting things.

“Despite the astronomical cost, these catered meals are always the main event of any Kashmiri wedding. In many cases, the date of the ceremony is only set after consulting the wazas about their availability on that particular day. If the wazas are not available, the marriage is often postponed.”

Hasnain says:

“As for Barclay's plan to listen to the soundscapes within Challenger Deep, he and his colleagues finally accomplished that goal. In 2021 they landed a device at our planet's deepest point, recording the tranquil rhythms of the ocean for four hours.”

Hasnain says:

Leaving the gory details out of the summary here because they are extremely triggering. But the case here is absolutely nuts. I don’t get how 38 professors were comfortable enough writing a letter of support for this person.

What’s much more damning is how Harvard ran the investigation here though. From the legal complaints it came out that they got confidential therapy notes from the victim’s therapist (!) and handed them over to the abuser (!!). This crosses so many lines I don’t even know where to begin.

“On Monday night, as the lawsuit was about to be filed, another 50 or so Harvard scholars — most of them tenured, according to Walter Johnson, a history professor — replied in an open letter, criticizing Dr. Comaroff’s defenders for being too quick to accept the facts as presented by his lawyers.

“As evident from the letters written in his support, Professor Comaroff is a scholar with a powerful network of friends and colleagues,” who could discourage other students from coming forward, the latest letter said.”

Hasnain says:

I find it fascinating that the proven theoretical bound for squaring the circle requires something like 10^200 pieces while the experimental results are implying the bound might be … 22.

“That left some room for improvement, which is what Máthé, Noel and Pikhurko have delivered. Their pieces, again numbering about 10^200, are simpler in shape and much easier for mathematicians to visualize.
“The big leap here is that you couldn’t draw Spencer and my pieces in ways you can easily see, but with these pieces you can,” said Marks.

…

Already, Pikhurko has ideas to further simplify the pieces, reducing their total number and making them less uneven. And Marks has done computer experiments that suggest — but don’t prove — that the equidecomposition can be accomplished with 22 pieces. He believes the minimum number is likely even lower.”

Hasnain says:

From 2013, but still relevant to this day.

““For me, the real question is not about Fredrickson or Losada or Seligman,” Sokal says. “It’s about the whole community. Why is it that no one before Nick—and I mean Nick was a first semester part-time Master’s student, at, let’s be honest, a fairly obscure university in London who has no particular training in mathematics—why is it that no one realized this stuff was bullshit? Where were all the supposed experts?”

“Is it really true that no one saw through this,” he asks, “in an article that was cited 350 times, in a field which touts itself as being so scientific?””

Hasnain says:

Great read as always from Amos. I liked how this went into PL design and how sometimes a more restrictive language is better *because* of the things it makes explicit.

“If you check the comments section of whatever website you found this article on, you will surely notice comments from folks who haven't read all the way to the end (despite the title of the article being a giveaway).

We've seen many situations where Rust helps avoid common problems. We've also seen situations where Rust's design makes it somewhat harder to do something we want to do.

That's a natural consequence of the set of legal programs being smaller! A lot of useful programs are excluded! So sometimes, we need to find alternative formulations, for equivalent programs that are accepted by the Rust compiler.”

Hasnain says:

Important and insightful read on the growing teacher shortage in the US. Goes into the causes as well as some of the actions being taken to fix it.

“While some say it's too early to know the specific impacts of the pandemic, Lynn Gangone, president and CEO of the American Association of Colleges for Teacher Education (AACTE) told CNN the numbers already show Covid-19 further dissuaded Americans from going into teaching. In fall 2020 and 2021, about 20% of institutions surveyed by AACTE reported the pandemic resulted in a decline of new undergraduate enrollment of at least 11%. Roughly 13% of institutions reported "significant" declines in the number of new graduate students. Regional state colleges and smaller private institutions -- often found in rural communities -- have seen the steepest declines.

"I don't know how bad it's going to have to get before we realize as a country that if we don't invest in education ... we will not have anyone in the classrooms to teach our children," Gangone said.”

Hasnain says:

“"What is happening to Empyreal potently illustrates why we call civil forfeiture 'policing for profit,'" says Institute for Justice attorney Kirby Thomas West. "Law enforcement is trying to take more than a million dollars without charging anyone with a crime. That is absurd and deeply unconstitutional. It is yet another reason why lawmakers need to eliminate civil forfeiture altogether."”

Hasnain says:

Great read that comes with well sourced data and analysis - helps inform the recent reporting / discussions around crime waves in SF.

"Additionally, Mejia said that when the media covers crime, it tends to focus on individual incidents, particularly unusual-seeming ones. That’s why shootings in neighborhoods with traditionally high crime rates get relatively less coverage, or no coverage at all. But when a Louis Vuitton store gets broken into in a high-income part of town, that feels unusual and surprising, and is thus amplified.

Sensationalized media coverage of crime thus contributes to wide-scale misperceptions of crime trends. Meijia said it also engenders a feeling of hopelessness because it often does not cover solutions or efforts to change the problem, or look at underlying issues.

“It’s a hard thing to do, name responsibility and think of solutions,” Mejia said. “Traditionally coverage has not done that or doesn’t try to do that.”"

Hasnain says:

“The new paper begins with one of the most basic but provocative questions in mathematics: When do polynomial equations like x3 + y3 = z3 have integer solutions (solutions in the positive and negative counting numbers)? In 1994, Andrew Wiles solved a version of this question, known as Fermat’s Last Theorem, in one of the great mathematical triumphs of the 20th century.”

Hasnain says:

This is an amazingly well written piece of technical content. I now have another book and language to add to two extremely long lists. The author takes one key intuition all the way and gets some amazing results from it.

“HVM doesn't need a global, stop-the-world garbage collector because every "object" only exists in one place, exactly like in Rust; i.e., HVM is linear. The catch is that, when an object needs to be referenced in multiple places, instead of a complex borrow system, HVM has an elegant, pervasive lazy clone primitive that works very similarly to Haskell's evaluation model. This makes cloning essentially free, because the copy of any object isn't made in a single, expensive pass, but in a layer-by-layer, on-demand fashion. And the nicest part is that this clone primitive works for not only data, but also for lambdas, which explains why HVM has better asymptotics than GHC: it is capable of sharing computations inside lambdas, which GHC can't. That was only possible due to a key insight that comes from Lamping's Abstract Algorithm for optimal evaluation of λ-calculus terms. Finally, the fact that objects only exist in one place greatly simplifies parallelism. Notice how there is only one use of atomics in the entire runtime.c.

This was all known and possible since years ago (see other implementations of optimal reduction), but all implementations of this algorithm, until now, represented terms as graphs. This demanded a lot of pointer indirection, making it slow in practice. A new memory format, based on SIC, takes advantage of the fact that inputs are known to be λ-terms, allowing for a 50% lower memory usage, and letting us avoid several impossible cases. This made the runtime 50x (!) faster, which finally allowed it to compete with GHC and similar. And this is just a prototype I wrote in about a month. I don't even consider myself proficient in C, so I have expectations for the long-term potential of HVM.

HVM's optimality and complexity reasoning comes from the vast literature on the optimal evaluation of functional programming languages. This book, by Andrea Asperti and Stefano Guerrini, has a great overview. HVM is merely a practical, efficient implementation of the bookkeeping-free reduction machine depicted on the book (pages 14-39). Its high-order machinery has a 1-to-1 relationship to the theoretical model, and the same complexity bounds, and respective proofs (chapter 10) apply. HVM has additional features (machine integers, datatypes) that do not affect complexity.”

Hasnain says:

This was a sobering read - not because of the content itself, but the implications that come from really thinking about what it's saying.

"Perfectionism endures because it has its merits, and we must see these clearly as well. It establishes a high standard and feeds on a source of intense energy, i.e. the fear of losing our identity and self-worth. So it is no surprise that some of the world's luminaries have made contracts with it.

But the cost of that contract is just as present. Carl Gauss, through whom it set mathematics back by decades:

> His own contemporaries begged him to relax his frigid perfection so that mathematics might advance more rapidly, but Gauss never relaxed. [...] Had he divulged what he knew it is quite possible that mathematics would now be half a century or more ahead of where it is.

— E.T. Bell, Men of Mathematics"

Hasnain says:

“But responsibility for North Korea's ongoing internet outages doesn't lie with US Cyber Command or any other state-sponsored hacking agency. In fact, it was the work of one American man in a T-shirt, pajama pants, and slippers, sitting in his living room night after night, watching Alien movies and eating spicy corn snacks—and periodically walking over to his home office to check on the progress of the programs he was running to disrupt the internet of an entire country.”

Hasnain says:

“When I was a boy, my dad told me that math is like a tower. One thing builds on the next. Addition builds on numbers. Subtraction builds on addition. And on it goes, ascending through algebra, geometry, trigonometry and calculus, all the way up to “higher math” — an appropriate name for a soaring edifice.

But once I learned about infinite series, I could no longer see math as a tower. Nor is it a tree, as another metaphor would have it. Its different parts are not branches that split off and go their separate ways. No — math is a web. All its parts connect to and support each other. No part of math is split off from the rest. It’s a network, a bit like a nervous system — or, better yet, a brain.”

Hasnain says:

ML can cause harm if left unchecked, case study #1000. Though humans are culpable here too - especially for the tone deaf responses and removals of negative reviews pointing out the harm.

“Since then, suicides linked to sales of the preservative through Amazon have continued. The New York Times identified 10 people who had killed themselves using the chemical compound after buying it through the site in the past two years, including a 16-year-old girl in Ohio, a pair of college freshmen in Pennsylvania and Missouri, and a 27-year-old in Texas whose mother has filed a wrongful-death suit against Amazon. Enough people purchased the preservative to attempt suicide that the company’s algorithm began suggesting other products that customers frequently bought along with it to aid in such efforts.”

Hasnain says:

Great read covering supply chains, economic factors, politics, and, as always - the importance of heeding warnings and putting in preventative work.

“As the country’s most cynical economists and credulous news anchors would tell it, the breaking of the ports was the natural result of lavishing stimulus checks upon lower-income Americans, who nearly ruined Christmas with their indomitable desire for foldable furniture and Tickle Me Elmo. In reality, it’s the combination of some of the worst sins in economic policy: privatization, deregulation, cartelization, with some parasitic private equity sprinkled in too, all of which sacrificed resiliency, long-term planning, and even the country’s aptitude for economic growth in favor of corporate profits.”

Hasnain says:

Headline really doesn’t seem to match the article contents but this is a good read.

“Four-day workweeks are having a moment, thanks to widely publicized trials launched in several countries in the past few months, alongside companies marking the switch with splashy announcements. WIRED spoke to 15 workers at six tech companies that have adopted a shortened week. Employees generally approved; some saw it as a mixed blessing, while others considered it “a godsend.” This is despite the fact that the precise interpretation of “four-day workweek” seems to vary; some companies stick to 40 hours; many use a 32-hour week, but all insist that the same amount of work—at a minimum—must get done.”

Hasnain says:

Great read that mixes a human interest story (a conservative trump voting republican changing their views after taking this class) with educational material from a class. I definitely learnt stuff from this and now I have some readings to look up!

“The goal of the class is not to change minds, but to introduce students to critical race theory and how to apply it to the law, current events and issues in popular discourse, Murphree said. To that end, the class has talked about racism and how to define it, the idea of color-blindness, and the difference between equity and equality. They also learned about “interest convergence,” a core tenet of critical race theory that argues communities of color only achieve progress when white communities also benefit. Interest convergence, Jones said, helped her better understand why the Mississippi Legislature voted to change the state flag in 2020 — because “they were about to lose a lot of money with the NCAA.””

Hasnain says:

This is just brazen NIMBYism at this point. If it’s a mountain lion habitat then they shouldn’t have any schools or even other homes there.

““You can build a McMansion and that somehow won’t hurt the mountain lion,” said Foote. “But if you build two units the lions will somehow fall over and die.””

Hasnain says:

Great eye opening read from a member of the google AI ethics team.

“In a word, tech has a whiteness problem. Google is not just a tech organization. Google is a white tech organization. Meta is a white tech organization. So are Amazon, Apple, Microsoft, and others that are announced in the same breath when we discuss the “techlash”. But so are research centers like OpenAI who are backed by oodles of venture capital from Peter Thiel and Sam Altman, or the Allen Institute for AI, founded by Paul Allen from Microsoft. More specifically, tech organizations are committed to defending whiteness through the “interrelated practices, processes, actions and meanings”, the techniques of reproducing the organization. In this case, that means defending their policies of recruitment, hierarchization, and monetization. Sociologist Amber Hamilton discusses how corporate actors, tech organizations included, rarely named the symptoms of whiteness — that is, their own racist organizational practices — in their responses to the racial reckoning of 2020, one of the largest social movements of our lifetimes.”

Hasnain says:

Great analysis of both Rust and Zig from a Julia programmer. I’m still a rust fanboy but Zig has been on my radar quite a while and I’m looking forward to exploring it.

“So when should a person use rust and when should they use zig? After all, my conclusion here is certainly NOT "everyone should use zig instead of rust". The languages have similar goals, so this will usually come down to personal preference. Obviously, if, for whatever reason, you are ultra-paranoid about memory safety issues but cannot tolerate garbage collection, then it's almost as if you are obligated to use rust. That said, of course rust cannot magically guarantee that you will always write "correct" code. It's also not as if every piece of zig, C or C++ code you write is constantly at risk of segfaulting. In my C++ days, I can't say that the kinds of memory issues that rust was designed to solve were very often a serious concern for me (though, it's worth pointing out that I was doing scientific/numerical stuff that tended not to force me to do nearly as much allocating and deallocating as a more complicated run-time might).”

Hasnain says:

Great technical read and an example of how design docs should be written and trade offs should be considered.

“In experiments on hosts running major services at Twitter, this has the expected impact of eliminating issues related to throttling, giving a roughly 50% cost reduction for a typical service with untuned thread pool sizes”

Hasnain says:

“Think about it. After years of consumer lawsuits and investigations that showed the tobacco industry was doing all it could to get people hooked on a deadly product, the Food and Drug Administration severely limited cigarette advertising: The last Marlboro Man commercial aired in 1999. You cannot buy a pack of cigarettes without being confronted by a label warning that smoking can lead to cancer, lung disease, diabetes or other terrible diseases.

But if you tune in during Super Bowl week, be ready to ingest an unrelenting stream of carnival barker ads. They will gush over how you can wager during the game on everything from the coin toss to who will be the first receiver to catch a pass. They will hype the fun of parlay bets and so-called risk-free bets, which are not risk free at all.

There’s a cost. It can devastate.”

Hasnain says:

Great article on why *good* one-on-ones are so important. It’s sad that very few people put in the time and effort needed to do them well.

“One is that grad schools are really dysfunctional. If I, a person whose sole qualification is caring a lot, could help Eve speed up her dissertation by ~25%, then her philosophy department is leaving a lot of productivity on the table. But that was last week’s rant.

On the flip side, I also now think the “caring a lot” qualification is way more important than I used to.”

Hasnain says:

Generally agree with all the points here even though I think the tone is more positive and excited than I’d use myself. I’ve used wasm for some side projects now and it’s been great - and a lot of the listed benefits are super appealing. RLBox on its own is quite revolutionary.

“WebAssembly has been deployed in a fairly impressive list of places and serves an assortment of use cases, but these represent isolated pockets of activity within the broader tech world. Among my friends, the small fraction who have heard of WebAssembly think it’s really exciting in principle, but are not building with it because it isn’t quite mature yet. However, many of these issues are being actively worked on and will probably reach an acceptable state within the next year or two. As such, it seems we’re on the brink of an explosion in WebAssembly activity, ecosystem, and community.”