Hasnain says:

So much for democracy. This is just further evidence of the erosion of democracy in the US.

“The erosion of direct democracy in South Dakota mirrors how the GOP is reacting to initiatives they dislike elsewhere. According to an analysis last year by the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, Republican lawmakers filed dozens of bills nationwide to make it harder for voter-initiated measures to make it onto the ballot, and many of them have become law.

In Utah, after voter-initiated statutes that legalized medical marijuana, expanded Medicaid, and created an independent redistricting commission all succeeded in 2018, the legislature repealed all of the statutes in its next session; they later added new restrictions on the process of gathering signatures, making it more burdensome for organizers. Mississippi’s supreme court shut down the state’s entire ballot initiative process last year while striking down a marijuana referendum. Similarly, after Idahoans approved Medicaid expansion in 2018, the legislature moved to thwart future efforts by greatly increasing the difficulty of qualifying an initiative for the ballot.”

Hasnain says:

A lot of great things in this moving piece. Two things really stood out:

1) guns kill more kids than active military or police each year in the US
2) we aren’t even allowed to research gun violence by law, thanks to the NRA

“We need to become the kind of country that looks at guns for what they are: weapons that kill. And treat them with the kind of respect that insists they be harder to get and safer to use.

And then we need to become the kind of country that says the lives of children are more valuable than the right to weapons that have killed them, time and again. Since Columbine. Since Sandy Hook. Since always.”

Hasnain says:

“Yet thinking about Watergate saddens me these days. The nation that came together to force a corrupt president from office and send many of his co-conspirator aides to prison is a nation that no longer exists.”

Hasnain says:

Great interview of one of the greats in computer science (Leslie Lamport). Goes into theoretical CS and foundational systems work; along with formal verification and education.

“Specification languages like TLA+ aren’t used very widely in industry, right? Why do you think that is?

Well, I’m doing what I can. But basically, programmers and many (if not most) computer scientists are terrified by math. So that’s a tough sell.
Secondly, every project has to be done in a rush. There’s an old saying, “There’s never time to do it right. There’s always time to do it over.” Because TLA+ involves upfront effort, you’re adding a new step in the development process, and that’s also a hard sell.”

Hasnain says:

“In modern times, health benefits are increasingly a reason why fruits are added to curries. Or they serve as an innovation or talking point: contemporary grape curries simmered in cashew nut paste being one such example. They’re also a way of showing off wealth and status. Combined with luxury ingredients such as cream, saffron, pistachio nuts, and gold or silver leaf, they can be a shorthand for conveying that a completely made-up party dish has desirable historic royal associations and is “Mughlai.””

Hasnain says:

“It will be impossible to do anything about guns in this country, at least at a national level, as long as Democrats depend on the cooperation of a party that holds in reserve the possibility of insurrection. The slaughter of children in Texas has done little to alter this dynamic.
Republicans have no intention of letting Democrats pass even modest measures like strengthened background checks, and as long as the Democratic senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema refuse to amend the filibuster, Republicans retain a veto over national policy. Victims of our increasingly frequent mass shootings are collateral damage in a cold civil war, though some Democrats refuse to acknowledge it, let alone fight it.”

Hasnain says:

The more that comes out about the police response the more horrified I am. First the refusal to go in and now it’s appearing that the police were the ones that successfully barricaded the shooter into one classroom. With kids in it. All the kids that died were in one classroom.

And other reporting says they later only went in to save their own kids.

““Go in there! Go in there!” nearby women shouted at the officers soon after the attack began, said Juan Carranza, 24, who saw the scene from outside his house, across the street from Robb Elementary School in the close-knit town of Uvalde. Carranza said the officers did not go in.”

Hasnain says:

Very depressing, and beautifully written at the same time.

“Francisco de Goya is remembered more for his Black Paintings than he ever was for the lush light little scenes that leave no imprint on the memory, his luxuriant years in the Spanish court, before he began to fear madness above all things and exiled himself in the Quinta del Sordo, the House of the Deaf. Madness is interesting, particularly when paired with a febrile hand and a delicate brush, and the story of America’s collapse is being written by a thousand thousand minds sharper than mine and more comprehensive than mine and better equipped to tell you what to do and how to feel and what to think. Me, I think of the open mouth. I think about small limbs whorled out in their moment of death, which came too soon and did not need to come at all. I think about a country surprised by the carnage it creates but continuing to feast. I think of the great limbs of the beast kneeling as it feeds and know it will not rise again.”

Hasnain says:

“DPS Director Steve McGraw said twice that the cops were the ones who barricaded the shooter into a classroom.

That contradicts previous statements by other DPS spox, who said the gunman barricaded himself and immediately began shooting kids.”

Hasnain says:

“Some children didn’t come home and our politicians and many of our citizens barely lifted their heads beyond quick, empty thoughts and prayers tweets they think exonerate them from culpability and exempt them from action.

This is because too much of America is losing something critical: we’re losing our outrage when children are murdered with guns.”

Hasnain says:

No words.

““We’re devastated by this horrific act of gun violence that will forever traumatize the Uvalde community,” said Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, a grassroots organization that is part of Everytown. “School shootings are not acts of nature, they’re man-made acts of inaction, of cowardice, of corruption by all lawmakers who refuse to pass laws proven by data to stop preventable, senseless shootings like in Uvalde. We cannot and will not accept a reality in which our children aren’t safe in schools or their communities.”

Such efforts are all but sure to fall short, however. There was a push to enact gun safety measures ten years ago after 20 young children and six adults were killed at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. But the efforts to pass legislation, which Joe Biden supported as vice-president, fell apart in the US Senate. The Uvalde massacre was the 27th school shooting this year in the US, according to Education Week.”

Hasnain says:

This is notable as I believe this is the first time in recent memory where a western news outlet has called out Israel for what they have done. No ifs or buts here, well sourced byline and article, and I imagine a bunch of legal cover prepared behind the scenes.

“But an investigation by CNN offers new evidence — including two videos of the scene of the shooting — that there was no active combat, nor any Palestinian militants, near Abu Akleh in the moments leading up to her death. Videos obtained by CNN, corroborated by testimony from eight eyewitnesses, an audio forensic analyst and an explosive weapons expert, suggest that Abu Akleh was shot dead in a targeted attack by Israeli forces.”

Hasnain says:

“The theorem gave a new understanding of NP and explained some of its intriguing properties. Computer scientists had found that for some NP problems, answers seemed not only hard to compute, but hard to approximate as well. The PCP theorem helped explain why. It said that if a solution to an NP problem was found, it could always be reformatted in a way where most checks from a verifier (say 90 percent) would pass (but not all of them, because the proof is still just probabilistic). From the vantage point of the verifier, it would therefore look like the problem was solved approximately, to 90 percent accuracy. But because NP problems are hard to solve, it is often difficult to find a PCP for them, and therefore it’s equally hard to find a solution that is approximately correct beyond a certain point (such as 90 percent).”

Hasnain says:

Great read that covers an investigation into a production issue and a fix; while going into some detail about async and observability in Rust

“A few weeks ago, as Journeys adoption started to increase and JourneyX started to process more events, we began to notice a disturbing pattern in its memory usage. The most active processes were consistently utilizing lots of memory, then getting killed by the kernel. The Linux kernel has a piece of functionality called the OOM (out-of-memory) killer, which will automatically kill processes when they consume too much of the system memory. This prevents the system from becoming unstable or locking up due to resource starvation. In our case, the JourneyX processes were constantly being killed, restarted, and killed again by the OOM killer. This showed up on a graph as a sawtooth pattern of rapid allocation and near-instant deallocation when the process was killed. Memory usage would spike up to 17 GiB in the busiest processes, but we expect one of these worker processes to need under 1 GiB.”

Hasnain says:

Universities keep getting more expensive and unaffordable; while teaching loads increasingly go to overworked and underpaid adjuncts. This situation needs to be remedied somehow.

This is a long and detailed account of one person’s experience here as an adjunct at Berkeley.

“Here are my reflections on the various aspects of being a Unit-18 lecturer. I am grateful for the experience, as I've learned a lot, but alas, there were more negatives than positives in the end. I will be going back to industry, but perhaps one day will return to academia when it's a better fit.”

Hasnain says:

Well sourced, engaging article on the absolute misery the world (especially, France) put Haiti through. I learnt a lot from this one.

Minor qualms aside (a few exaggerated claims of being the 'first' to report on this; concerns around local experts not being cited) this is well written and worth a read.

"No country could be expected to come to Haiti’s defense. The world powers had frozen it out, refusing to officially acknowledge its independence. American lawmakers in particular did not want enslaved people in their own country to be inspired by Haiti’s self-liberation and rise up.

So, Haiti’s president, eager for the trade and security of international recognition, bowed to France’s demands. With that, Haiti set another precedent: It became the world’s first and only country where the descendants of enslaved people paid reparations to the descendants of their masters — for generations.

It is often called the “independence debt.” But that is a misnomer. It was a ransom."

Hasnain says:

Great human interest story that goes into some of the science behind multilingualism and how kids with disabilities are (and are not!) affected by it.

““In the U.S., what is so interesting is that we are probably the most plurilingual country in the world. We have a lot of languages that are being spoken,” she said. “But it's also one of the most aggressively ideologically monolingual countries in the world in that we really don't casually accept that multilingualism is normal and should be preserved.””

Hasnain says:

“On one hand, she explained that authorities are investigating the killings as a racially motivated hate crime carried out by an 18-year-old who reportedly wrote of his belief in a conspiracy theory that white Americans are being “replaced” by people of color through immigration, interracial marriage and integration.

“But I’m also supposed to tell you that that’s just one perspective,” Close recalled telling her students. “Another perspective is that this young man was out defending the world — or his kind — from being taken over.”

Close waited for her comment to fully register with her students, then added: “If you guys want to know why I’m thinking about quitting at the end of the year, it’s because of these types of policies — the fact that I have to have this conversation with you.””

Hasnain says:

“The search continues for a resolution to the apparent paradox, and with it, a better understanding of quantum theory. Such puzzles have been fruitful for physicists in the past. As John Wheeler once said, “No progress without a paradox!”

“If you ignore such questions,” Popescu said, “you’re never really going to … understand what quantum mechanics is.””

Hasnain says:

“Aveni also went in a floral direction—he said my party could start when nearby sunflowers faced a certain way—but my favorite idea of his was more interactive. “I’d give everybody a stick 12 inches long,” he said, “and I’d tell them, ‘Go out into your backyard, find a flat place, put the stick in the ground, and when [its shadow] reaches a certain point—maybe when it’s three feet from the base—that’s when I want you to come.”

So if you ever get a stick in the mail from me, you know you're in for a good time.”

Hasnain says:

“The stunning wins come as the party debates who is to blame for Biden’s sinking approval rating and increasingly dire forecasts of upcoming midterm losses. Party establishment figures have pointed the finger at the left for making unreasonable demands couched in slogans like “defund the police” that turn off voters. The progressive wing has countered that Biden’s popularity has sunk as centrist Democrats have slowly murdered his agenda, while the left has fought to enact it. “

Hasnain says:

Food for thought as I ponder the events of the last week.

“Just as in the Republican Party in the U.S., many in the right wing of Israel’s government have lost their way, and are damaging their country more than their enemies could. And just as in the U.S., the cure is to set aside euphemisms and both-sidesism and excuses and to acknowledge that both our countries are suffering the institutionalization of forms of racism that runs contrary to our espoused values, even if it is hardly contrary to the actual truth of the history in either nation.”

Hasnain says:

“So sure this isn't trivial. But it's also not impossible, and making this stuff work would improve the security of, well, everything. We literally have the technology to prevent attacks like Github suffered. What do we have to do to get people to actually start working on implementing that?”

Hasnain says:

My 2cents as a brown man: if I always have to “answer for my race” or “please tell me why Muslims hate us all”; why do republicans never have to answer for their ilk?

“Journalists and reporters must repeatedly hound Republican officials with follow up questions about this national security threat. Recall that Democrats and President Joe Biden still are asked about “defunding the police,” even though it is not a mainstream DNC position, or about critical race theory (CRT) panic even after it was revealed to be a bad-faith trojan horse created by right-wing activists to incite racial panic and anxiety.”

Hasnain says:

“When generics arrived in Java, I hated them. I thought the ratio of pain removed to complexity added was way too low. I don’t hate Go’s generics, which is actually pretty strong testimony given that I spent the best part of a couple of days fighting all the stuff described above.

But, my guess is the Go generics story is isn’t finished yet.”

Hasnain says:

“When the rhetoric of an entire movement devolves into Manichaean demonization of their political foes; when demographic shifts are represented as apocalyptic; and when a party can appeal to nothing but the consolidation of white power, it is an inevitability that such rhetoric will leave bodies in its wake. The Republican Party caters chiefly now to those who claim that to be born the wrong color is an act of genocide, and act with appropriate fervor. There has never been a lone wolf when it comes to racist terror in the United States; it suffuses every aspect of our politics and policy, and in latter years the mass howl of fear at change comes from a jaw that drips with blood. As long as we fail to recognize the wellspring of racial animus that animates the right wing in this country, the corpses will continue to accrue.”

Hasnain says:

“In February, they fed their system 30 years’ worth of real positions of the solar system’s planets and moons in the sky. The algorithm skipped Kepler’s laws altogether, directly inferring Newton’s law of gravitation and the masses of the planets and moons to boot. Other groups have recently used PySR to discover equations describing features of particle collisions, an approximation of the volume of a knot, and the way clouds of dark matter sculpt the galaxies at their centers.

Of the growing band of machine scientists (another notable example is “AI Feynman,” created by Max Tegmark and Silviu-Marian Udrescu, physicists at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology), human researchers say the more the merrier. “We really need all these techniques,” Kutz said. “There’s not a single one that’s a magic bullet.””

Hasnain says:

Scathing.

“I no longer have respect for you or your majority, and I have little hope for change. I can’t vote you out of office because you have life tenure, but I can withdraw whatever insignificant support my Bar membership might seem to provide.”

Hasnain says:

“Let that sink in. A nuclear-armed power, with one of the world’s most powerful militaries feared a flag-draped coffin. Israeli police wanted to deny Abu Akleh’s family and the public from publicly grieving the national icon and journalistic hero because they didn’t want her funeral to serve as a reminder of the national cause for liberation, dignity and independence.

When mourners poured out of the house carrying the flag draped coffin and began to chant, the police moved in to block the procession from advancing. Video shows police attacking mourners and pallbearers, beating them with batons, and at one point, almost causing pallbearers to drop the coffin.”

Hasnain says:

This is from 2019 and still super relevant in light of today’s shooting - I’d hazard things have since gotten worse. Today’s manifesto had quotes indistinguishable from what has been said by Tucker; and now the great replacement theory is mainstream. More than half of republicans believe it per a recent poll; and a lot of their politicians have said it too.

Dark times ahead.

“Fox’s use of this rhetoric of demographic replacement and migrant invasion has not occurred in a vacuum. It has been mirrored by Republican politicians, including President Donald Trump, who similarly deploy those racist tropes. That's no coincidence -- both Fox and the GOP depend on riling people up with racist appeals for their success. Their behavior won't change unless their incentives change.”

Hasnain says:

“At this point in 2022, with the Trump movement trying to take its revenge on the entire election system, that desperation may be all those voters have left—not a climate initiative, not a pandemic strategy, not a working social welfare program, not the Civil Rights Act or Roe v. Wade. Facing an existential threat against something much greater than the Democratic Party, the Democrats have been retreating into the habits that made Trump possible in the first place: hollow institutionalism, intra-party recriminations, self-sabotage along Republican attack lines.

As liberals and centrists dabble in anti-mask activism and crime scares, the left-of-center voting public finds itself in the paradoxical and demoralizing situation of seemingly caring more about whether the Democrats beat the Republicans than the Democratic Party does. Throughout Trump's presidency, the left complained that Trump was a bogeyman who allowed complacent Democrats to feel politically engaged without actually accomplishing anything. Now, he might be the only thing still capable of getting them to take the perils of this moment seriously.”

Hasnain says:

:|

Hasnain says:

“In short, the decision has allowed Texas to declare open season on tech platforms, with huge ramifications for everyone in the country. It could reshape the rights and obligations of all websites; our relationship to technology and the internet; and even our basic, fundamental understanding of the First Amendment.”

Hasnain says:

Schultz’s second run as ceo will (hopefully) go down as one where he tried to put in crazy amounts of horrible changes to try - and fail at - bust unions. Workers unite!

“But growing numbers of baristas are saying the company’s Covid policies have radicalized them, even if other chains’ conditions may be similar or worse. Both before and during the pandemic, they say, Starbucks consistently prioritized cost-cutting over their basic needs. The company rolled out $3-per-hour hazard pay in March 2020—but rolled it back after two months. Workers say that Starbucks refused to pay them during self-isolation following exposures if they hadn’t tested positive and that it didn’t do anything to help them secure tests. Twenty people who’ve worked at Starbucks during the pandemic say understaffing has gotten severe enough that it’s sometimes been a struggle to make it to the bathroom. Two of them say they’ve soiled themselves at work because they had no backup.”

Hasnain says:

This is amazing and I hope more research is done here to pinpoint a preventative measure.

“Since then, she’s worked to find the cause of SIDS, both for herself and for the medical community as a whole. She went on to explain why this discovery is so important for parents whose babies suffered from SIDS.

"These families can now live with the knowledge that this was not their fault," she said.”

Hasnain says:

“Aside from the Helen Lovejoy–esque nature of this appeal, it is factually wrong. Climate action was “for the children” in the 1990s. “We’re not doing this for the children,” Kate Larsen, an energy analyst at the Rhodium Group, told me after the event. “We’re doing this for us!” Heat waves hot enough to cook human flesh are already happening this month; they will become more common over the coming decades, striking multiple times a year. Unbearable droughts, sea-level rise so high as to break levees, and unpredictable famines will characterize life. Most of the world’s coral reefs, including the Great Barrier Reef, will undergo bleaching every few years, meaning the water will be so hot that the coral will eject their symbiotic microorganisms into the water, starving themselves in the process.”

Hasnain says:

““If this doesn’t get fixed soon, I don’t know how my son will survive,” said Phoebe Carter, whose 5-year old son John — a nature-lover and “paleontologist in training” — has a severe form of Eosinophilic Esophagitis, a rare digestive and immune system disease driven by a dysfunctional immune response to food antigens. “I just can’t stress that enough.””

Hasnain says:

This was a sad story to read, a growing indicator of how burnout is often systemic and organizational and not a personal thing. Of course I’m sure nothing happened to the exec in question.

“Over the last two decades I’ve managed to be productive despite struggling with chronic illness, and I owe a lot of this to the people I’ve worked with. Despite that, Google is the worst place I’ve ever worked and it quite literally gave me brain damage. If you find your job is making it hard to sleep, making you feel on edge every day, or making you constantly question your own self-worth, I would encourage you look for a new job.”

Hasnain says:

:(

““We were four journalists, we were all wearing vests, all wearing helmets,” Hanaysha said. “The [Israeli] occupation army did not stop firing even after she collapsed. I couldn’t even extend my arm to pull her because of the shots being fired. The army was adamant on shooting to kill.””

Hasnain says:

This whole complaint is pretty damning; reminiscent of the regulatory capture that happened with the Boeing crashes.

“Complaints were made to management at the Sturgis site. Even members of Quality Assurance (QA) leadership were also reported to have expressed concerns to the Complainant. One member of QA leadership went so far as to suggest to Complainant the “criminality” of the decision to proceed in this manner.””

Hasnain says:

So the leak was a shattering blow to the supreme court’s integrity but statements like this are not? Color me surprised.

“Of those rulings, the Obamacare one ruffled the most feathers because Roberts reportedly reversed his position days before the decision was announced, ultimately voting to find the law constitutional.

“There is a price to be paid for what he did. Everybody remembers it,” said an attorney close to several conservative justices, who was granted anonymity due to the sensitive nature of the court’s arguments.”

Hasnain says:

This keeps getting worse and worse.

“The other miscarriage treatment is a procedure described as surgical uterine evacuation to remove the pregnancy tissue — the same approach as for an abortion.

"The challenge is that the treatment for an abortion and the treatment for a miscarriage are exactly the same," said Dr. Sarah Prager, a professor of obstetrics and gynecology at the University of Washington in Seattle and an expert in early pregnancy loss.

Miscarriages occur in roughly 1 out of 10 pregnancies.”

Hasnain says:

It’s really crazy that the US has a strategic reserve of cheese (millions of pounds of it) but not for a critical supply like baby formula.

“Still, ignorance is no excuse for inaction, particularly from those who know better. A failure to address an everyday struggle affecting countless parents, caregivers, and of course, literal humans who by definition rely on others for their basic needs is bound to give credence to the notion, fair or not, that life under the Biden administration just isn’t working out. That it sucks, that we’re living the ramifications of inflation, and the government seems a bit too chill about it. “

Hasnain says:

“Recently, Yunger Halpern and other theorists showed that Kirkwood-Dirac negativity also underlies quantum behavior in contexts besides metrology, including quantum thermodynamics and fast information scrambling in black holes. The researchers say that bridges between these domains could foster further insights, or metrological advantages.”

Hasnain says:

This is really cool! Looking forward to going all in here.

“But database optimization has become less important for typical applications. If you have a 1 GB database, an NVMe disk can slurp the whole thing into memory in under a second. As much as I love tuning SQL queries, it's becoming a dying art for most application developers. Even poorly tuned queries can execute in under a second for ordinary databases.”

Hasnain says:

“Water levels on Lake Mead have been dropping after two decades of drought made worse by climate change, with federal and state officials recently reaching a $200 million deal to maintain the viability of the reservoir that millions of people rely on.

But authorities had warned the public that Lake Mead's falling water levels could lead to the discovery of more bodies hidden below the surface.”

Hasnain says:

Such a beautifully written essay. Who’s cutting onions in the house at this time of night?!

“That grief that strangles, versus the grief that holds — I know the difference now. I didn’t cry when my birth mother left, because my grief before was mostly made up of anger so ferocious that it just made me hate myself.

The grief I feel over the loss of Margaret levels me regularly; big floods of tears, suddenly, in the middle of the day. But at the same time, this grief is so much sweeter. Because I get to keep her. I get to miss her. The ways she took care of me, the things she taught me, the little ways that I wound up resembling her sometimes, even if she didn’t raise me.

Margaret used to tell me, “You’re so easy to love.” Somehow, now, I believe her. Her voice is in my head now, too. She gets to stay.”

Hasnain says:

This was a really interesting exploration that goes into the complexities of building good UIs in general (state is hard!) and in particular how to do them in Rust which imposes additional constraints I’m on how you manage state. Looking forward to trying this at some point.

“The work presented in this blog post is conceptual, almost academic, though it is forged from attempts to build real-world UI in Rust. It comes to you at an early stage; we haven’t yet built up real UI around the new architecture. Part of the motivation for doing this writeup is so we can gather feedback on whether it will actually deliver on its promise.

One way to test that would be to try it in other domains. There are quite a few projects that implement reactive UI ideas over a TUI, and it would also be interesting to try the Xilem architecture on top of Web infrastructure, generating DOM nodes in place of the associated widget tree.”

Hasnain says:

So much rage over the last few days on the abortion ban news. I don’t know where to begin.

““Mitch McConnell confirmed what voters have long known: Republicans will use every tool they can, from the courts to Congress, to make abortion illegal everywhere and strip away a woman’s right to make our own decisions. For voters, the stakes of protecting and expanding our Democratic Senate majority in 2022 have never been higher.””

Hasnain says:

Great read on profiling and improving Go programs.

“This post discussed some potential optimizations to a lexical scanner written in Go. It touched upon the relative efficiency of converting byte slices to strings vs. taking substrings, discussed some strategies w.r.t. API design in Go, and even got into optimizing GC behavior.”

Hasnain says:

I wonder what would have happened had this guy not turned himself in. This is a pretty wild story.

Also, how do audits miss something like this?!

“So how did the police finally get involved?

I was seeing a psychiatrist as a result of the guilt and the anxiety. I felt like I needed to talk to someone about it. The first psychiatrist I saw said "I'm not qualified to do this" and I was like, “dude you're the shrink, surely you're qualified.” But then I found a guy who was a bit more sensible. He didn't tell me what to do or anything like that, but he said that turning myself in would be important and it’d clear my conscience and make sure I could move on.”

Hasnain says:

Interesting read on JITs

“It’s time to collect data about the performance characteristics of our workload and figure out whether we can develop good heuristics about what functions to inline. There are papers to read and evaluate.

Take a look at our GitHub repo, and play around with Cinder. We have included a Dockerfile and prebuilt Docker image to make this easier.”

Hasnain says:

Absolutely engrossing podcast transcript which discusses emergent theories on the origin of space time and some recent research in quantum gravity. Sean Carroll is great as always.

I loved the ending which touched a bit on the philosophy of science:

“Well, I do think that and, you know, I think that there’s a school of thought that says that scientists should not talk about their results until they’re completely established and refereed and everyone agrees they’re right. And not only do I think that that’s implausible, because even results that are refereed and published could be wrong, I think it’s very antithetical to the spirit of how science is, you know, and I want to emphasize that science is not just a set of results that are handed down from on high, it’s a process. We could be wrong. We’re making suppositions and hypotheses and guesses, and we’re going to figure out whether or not they work. And that’s not a bug, it’s a feature. That’s, that’s how science works. So I’m very willing to talk about tentative things as long as I try to emphasize that they are tentative things.”

Hasnain says:

Starbucks’ union busting campaign has really been something else. I’m glad the labor board is finally doing it’s job.

“The complaint filed Friday was unusually wide-ranging, alleging a pattern of intimidation and retaliation at several stores in New York. It also implicated CEO Howard Schultz, alleging he violated the law last November by promising “an increase in benefits” if they didn’t unionize.”

Hasnain says:

“The legitimacy crisis is that our institutions are illegitimate. For my entire adult life, beginning with Bush v. Gore, our governing institutions have been avowedly antidemocratic and the left-of-center party has had no answer for that plain fact; no strategy, no plan, except to beg the electorate to give them governing majorities, which they then fail to use to reform the antidemocratic governing institutions. They often have perfectly plausible excuses for why they couldn’t do better. But that commitment to our existing institutions means they can’t credibly claim to have an answer to this moment. “Give us (another) majority and hope Clarence Thomas dies” is a best-case scenario, but not exactly a sales pitch.”

Hasnain says:

Harming everyone just because you feel one person doesn’t deserve it…

(Though education is a human right!)

“Abbott raised the possibility of challenging the ruling on education during a discussion about border security, after Pagliarulo asked whether the state could take steps to reduce the "burden" of educating the children of undocumented migrants living in Texas.”

Hasnain says:

“And who wouldn’t want to talk to him? In interviews — and a lengthy Forbes profile — he talked about turning his life around and getting his M.B.A., stints at Wall Street heavyweights like Goldman Sachs, and staggeringly profitable crypto investments that allowed him to make millions of dollars for himself and people like the talk show host Larry King.

If only all of that were true.

Within a few weeks of announcing the I.R.S. deal, the company fired Mr. Hannum. I had asked ZenLedger about things I could not verify about Mr. Hannum after I talked to him for an article about crypto trading and taxes. Much of what he had said to others did not check out, either.”

Hasnain says:

“The new paper does not definitively settle whether Leray solutions are unique. Its conclusions rely on an external force crafted specifically to make non-uniqueness occur. Mathematicians would prefer to avoid the addition of a force altogether and prove that some set of initial conditions leads to non-uniqueness without any outside influence. That question is now perhaps a stone’s throw closer to being answered.”

Hasnain says:

:| no words.

“The overturning of Roe would almost immediately lead to stricter limits on abortion access in large swaths of the South and Midwest, with about half of the states set to immediately impose broad abortion bans. Any state could still legally allow the procedure.”

Hasnain says:

Great read on diagnosing a ddos attack and making code changes quickly to make a server robust against them. Covers profiling, observability, caching, and various Rust frameworks.

“Long story short: a couple of my articles got really popular on a bunch of sites, and someone, somewhere, went "well, let's see how much traffic that smart-ass can handle", and suddenly I was on the receiving end of a couple DDoS attacks.

It really doesn't matter what the articles were about — the attack is certainly not representative of how folks on either side of any number of debates generally behave.

My assumption is that it's a small group (maybe a Discord?) with a botnet, who wanted to have fun.

And, friends: fun was had.”

Hasnain says:

“Our society is driven by contingent logics of austerity, under the constant pressure that there will never be enough care to go around, and you are only entitled to the survival you can buy; but we can and must demand more. We must look to those who have the most complex needs and build our community protections around those needs, instead of prioritizing the needs of the least vulnerable, which is what we are doing now. We cannot rely on pharmaceutical technology alone. We also have to use all of the social, economic, and political technologies at our disposal––just as much tools as vaccines and antivirals––like social distancing, masking, paid leave, eviction prevention, community harm reduction, upgraded ventilation, infrastructure investments, Medicare for All, debt cancellation, decarceration and so much more. These are just some of the potential social and fiscal tools that we could use to help people not just survive the pandemic but thrive in spite of it.”