Hasnain says:

"Day-by-day, month-by-month, the App Store will get a little less rich and vibrant as apps start being designated as outdated and get removed. Another consequence of this hostile policy is that indie and hobbyist developers may stop building mobile apps. After all, the web is fundamentally a more stable place for experimental software and “finished artworks”, since backwards-compatibility is the gold standard and apps can run indefinitely.

After 4 hours of work to re-compile my app and 44 hours waiting in the review queue, WorldAnimals is now updated to a new version. I am safe for at least another three years before getting automatically flagged for removal. Unless, that is, Apple decides there is a new threshold for “outdated” and change their policy once again."

Hasnain says:

"I’ll end with some advice to remember next year as the downturn ends and the upswing begins. The personal freedom to ignore downturns comes from financial stability, and the best path to financial stability is taking money off the table whenever you can until you’ve reached financial independence. A lot of financial advice out there is written from the perspective of very wealthy folks. If you’re already wealthy, your goal is to maximize the risk-adjusted expected return of endeavors, often by taking meaningful risk. For example, if you’re wealthy, it’s almost always the right decision to early exercise your equity. If you have millions of dollars, then it’s reasonable to risk $100k now for the potential of millions in reduced tax in six years. That’s not necessarily true when you’re not already wealthy."

Hasnain says:

“In light of all this, it's only natural that Providence would turn to McKinsey when they needed help committing crimes and destroying thousands of people's lives. McKinsey helped Providence craft a program to coerce poor people into paying for care they were entitled to get for free. They called it "Rev-Up."

Writing in the New York Times, Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Katie Thomas reveal the full depravity of "Rev-Up." McKinsey advised Providence to train its staff to avoid truthfully answer poor patients' queries about whether they were eligible for free care.”

Hasnain says:

“It is so true. Organizations are so much better at adding things than they are at taking things away. We’re better at setting goals and talking about what we’re going to do than we are at talking about what we’re NOT going to do. It's easier to add process than it is to ask why we're still doing that thing that worked great two years ago but mostly isn't relevant anymore. We’re better at adding meetings than we are at removing them. “

Hasnain says:

This just seems straight up evil.

“Here's the idea behind why boosting the nation's unemployment could cool inflation. With an additional million or two people out of work, the newly unemployed and their families would sharply cut back on spending, while for most people who are still working, wage growth would flatline. When companies assume their labor costs are unlikely to rise, the theory goes, they will stop hiking prices. That, in turn, slows the growth in prices.

But some economists question whether crushing the job market is necessary to bring inflation to heel.

"The Fed clearly wants the labor market to weaken quite sharply. What's not clear to us is why," Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, said in a report. He predicted that inflation is set to "plunge" next year as supply chains normalize.”

Hasnain says:

Ah, UB, the bane of every C++ programmer’s existence.

“With that out of the way, the next step was multiplayer determinism. One big goal was that I didn't want to cut multiplayer from the game. Furthermore, I wanted players on PC to play with players on Nintendo Switch. This is the first time we had to make sure the game is deterministic between ARM and x86. We should be fine, C++ is portable, right? Just don't use undefined behaviour. Turns out we use quite a lot of undefined behaviour, both in our main code and in the libraries. For example, when casting a double to an integer, if the value does not fit in the integer, it is considered undefined behaviour and the resulted value is different on ARM and x86 CPUs.”

Hasnain says:

Great read as always on career paths.

“At some point you have to learn to tune in to your own inner compass. What draws you in to your work? What fuels your growth and success?

Being an adult means not measuring yourself entirely on other people’s definition of success. Personal growth might come in the guise of a big promotion, but it also might look like a new job, a different role, a swing to management or back, becoming well-known as a subject matter expert, mentoring others, running an affinity group, picking up new skill sets, starting a company, trying your hand at consulting, speaking at conferences, taking a sabbatical, having a family, working part time, etc. No one gets to define that but you.

You have a thirty- or forty-year adult life and career in front of you. What the hell are you going to do with all that time and space??”

Hasnain says:

“But, in context, it’s quite clear that this is a joke, a quote from a funny movie.

The issue is that so much of content moderation involves context. This is something that critics of content moderation (both those who want more and those who want less) never seem to fully grasp. How does a content moderator (whether AI or human) have enough context to handle all sorts of issues like this? Do you need to train your AI on classic movies? Do you need to make sure that everyone you hire has seen every popular movie and knows them by heart and can recognize when someone is quoting them?

How do you deal with a situation where someone tries to hide behind the quote — but is actually threatening someone? (Not what Kel did here, but just noting, you can’t just say “okay, leave this line if it’s quoting a movie”).

The point is that it’s ridiculously complicated.”

Hasnain says:

This was a great read - that matched many of my management experiences as well.

“In my experience, the TLM role is **challenging but extremely rewarding**. You can be an Engineering Manager while still keeping your feet on the ground and solving challenging technical problems together with your team.

I’ve found that **people trusted me more to make the right decisions**. I knew how the technology stack _actually worked_ because I built a large part of it. It’s frustrating and demoralizing to report to a pure people manager who is unable to understand what people are building, and which problems they are facing, regardless of how much time you spend explaining it to them. Stepping into the TLM role is a good way to counter that, and reporting to a TLM is often deeply rewarding because they tend to care about people and technology in the right way to get amazing things done.”

Hasnain says:

“In the past, the deaths of Moore and Mungin might have gone unnoticed by anyone other than their loved ones, but the popularity of social media and smartphones has given millions a peek at the medical mistreatment some Black women receive.

Cynthia Adinig, an equity policy advocate based in Northern Virginia, used her cell phone to document about 20 of the visits she made to the ER to get help with mysterious symptoms, including an anaphylaxis-like reaction to ingesting food, that arose after a mild bout of covid in 2020. During one recorded visit, Adinig showed that even though she’d reported cardiac symptoms, there was no heart monitor in her room. In another visit, she was escorted out of the ER by a security guard after she was discharged. Wanting to understand her experiences better, she requested her medical records. She discovered that she had been tested for street drugs, without her knowledge, during a couple of her ER visits.

These cases of misdiagnosis and mistreatment suggest that even the best studies may underestimate long covid’s impact because racism and sexism within the medical system have left some people undiagnosed. “

Hasnain says:

These are just extremely heartbreaking.

“Workers get the equivalent of $4 for every 1,000 bricks they make. One adult working alone can’t do that amount in a day, but if the children help, they can make 1,500 bricks a day, workers said.

According to surveys done by Save the Children, the percentage of families saying they had a child working outside the home grew from 18% to 22% from December to June. That would suggest more than 1 million children nationwide were working. The surveys covered more than 1,400 children and more than 1,400 caregivers in seven provinces. Another 22% of the children said they were asked to work on the family business or farm.

The survey also pointed to the collapse in livelihoods that Afghans have endured the past year. In June, 77% of the surveyed families reported they had lost half their income or more, compared to a year ago, up from 61% in December.”

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking for future reading.

“At Starter Story, we've conducted and cataloged case studies on 3,780 successful businesses.

As a premium member, you can sort, filter, and search through all of these case studies. You can filter by revenue, country, number of founders, growth methods, and tons more.

Here is the full database of case studies. Enjoy!”

Hasnain says:

“This example is important because it underscores a psychological reality of productivity that can be lost among all the posturing around systems and tools. It’s easy to feel like it’s impolite to prioritize work that’s important to you above other peoples’ demands. This is what led Elizabeth, at first, to limit her research to only the few scraps of time during her week that no one else had already claimed.

Sustainable production of valuable work, however, requires a dash of selfishness. Elizabeth’s revised schedule was exactly right. No reasonable person would find her investment in a once-a-week babysitter, or request for weekend dad time, to be excessive. These acts of self-prioritization were, objectively speaking, small. But they made a large difference in Elizabeth’s ability to produce the tenure-caliber work she knew she had in her. Your work matters. It’s okay to fight for it in your schedule.

“

Hasnain says:

Great technical analysis and insight here.

“So after all this work, what did we learn?

Turning on -Ofast will end up turning on -ffast-math, and that can cause all sorts of problems for any program unlucky enough to load them.

Even if you explicitly ask for no fast math, you will still get fast math as long as -Ofast is enabled.

It is surprisingly feasible (though perhaps not wise) for a single individual with a good internet connection to download 4 TB of Python packages and scan 11 TB of shared libraries in a single day.

It is definitely not wise to try to run pip download or pip install --dry-run on every package listed in PyPI, at least not without some good sandboxing, because it will execute tons of random code from setup.py files and leave you with a giant mess to clean up.

Because of highly connected nature of the modern software supply chain, even though a mere 49 packages were actually built with -ffast-math, thousands of other packages, with a total of at least 9.7 million downloads over the past 30 days, are affected.”

Hasnain says:

This is super exciting and makes me want to try fly.io even more.

"And we'll keep saying this: the reason we think LiteFS and full-stack SQLite is a good bet is that the design is simple. You can read a summary of the LiteFS design and understand what each of these components is doing. SQLite is one of of the most trusted libraries in the world; most of our job is just letting SQLite be SQLite. Your app doesn't even need to know LiteFS is there."

Hasnain says:

Great read on documentation and developer tooling.

“I hope I have both piqued your interest in API documentation browsers and demystified the creation of your own documentation sets. My goal is to turbocharge programmers who – like me – are overwhelmed by all the packages they have to keep in mind while getting stuff done.”

Hasnain says:

This whole story has been so bizarre, dehumanizing, and humiliating - I don’t even know where to begin.

“There seems to be a legitimate argument that what happened broke federal laws because the individuals were induced to get on a plane and travel across state lines based on false information. What should interest us more than the specific laws is that this clearly was not a state action. It looks much more like Project Veritas-type stunt. I’m not saying Veritas was behind it. I don’t think they are. But that kind of group: right-wing pranksters. In some way, DeSantis was either coordinating with them or funding them. It’s very much worth finding out which it is. You cannot look at any of this and think it was the work of government workers. Just not how those people operate. This is not to mention the fact that it still hasn’t been explained how or why the state of Florida had people prowling around a refugee center in Texas looking for people who could be coaxed to get on a plane which would fly surreptitiously to Martha’s Vineyard.”

Hasnain says:

“I just want to publish software that I think is neat so that other hobbyists can use and learn from it, and I otherwise want to be left the hell alone. I should be allowed to decide if something I wrote is “done”. The focus on securing the “software supply chain” has made it even more likely that releasing software for others to use will just mean more work for me that I don’t benefit from. I reject the idea that a concept so tenuous can be secured in the first place.”

Hasnain says:

“I graduated from San Leandro High School, a mere 30 miles away from the heart of Silicon Valley. In a school of 2500+ students, most of whom were Black and Latino, my high school only had 60 seats for AP computer science when I was in 11th grade. Because there were more interested students than there were seats, these seats were assigned by lottery. Students who did not get chosen would have to wait until the next academic year to sign up again. If you were in 11th grade like I was, this was your last chance to get a computer science class on your transcript before applying to college. I did not get a seat, and this affected my ability to be competitive for college admissions as a declared CS major.

I learned that schools a few miles away, where the majority of students were white, had entire CS departments. Cities like Palo Alto, Menlo Park, Berkeley, and Fremont offer their students a wide range of CS courses. I remember wondering how I could be competitive for college when I was up against kids who had been coding for years. This led me down a rabbit hole of findings where I learned of the severe lack of diversity in tech and the call for more women and people of color in the field. I knew I wanted to learn to code, but now also wanted to help more people who looked like me to have access to quality computer science education.”

Hasnain says:

With justice Roberts complaining about people thinking the court is now illegitimate, I wonder if he’ll take a look at this (I doubt he will).

““He was not terminated,” Bevers said. The head coach at the time had moved on, as did most of the coaching staff.

This did not stop Kennedy’s lawyers from telling the Supreme Court repeatedly that he was fired.

“The record is clear that Coach Kennedy was fired for that midfield prayer,” lawyer Paul Clement told the nine justices in the first 15 seconds of the oral arguments of the case in April. The words “fired,” “fire” or “firing” were used 16 times in the hour and a half session.

It wasn’t true though. The district’s lawyers tried to correct the record, to no avail.”

Hasnain says:

This was a great read on perseverance and on making games.

“The games industry is a very competitive space and there's a high likelihood you won't even make minimum wage for the time you put into it on your first game. I certainly haven't yet. Try to find what your passion is for making games and what you want to accomplish. If you're just in it for the money, there are easier ways to make money for your time. I'd advise seeing how far you can get doing game development as a side project to make sure you love doing it and can stick with it before pursuing it as a full time job. “

Hasnain says:

Loving the new FTC.

““Technological advances and novel business models are no license to commit unfair, deceptive, or anticompetitive practices,” said Elizabeth Wilkins, Director of the FTC’s Office of Policy Planning. “We will use all our tools to protect gig workers and promote fair and competitive market practices in the gig economy.”

The statement highlights studies showing that gig work accounts for hundreds of billions of dollars in economic activity each year. According to a Federal Reserve report cited in the statement, 16 percent of Americans report earning money through a gig company, and another report shows that more than half of gig workers say the money they earn is essential or important for meeting their needs. Additionally, as noted in the Commission’s recent Serving Communities of Color report, many gig workers come from communities of color. The statement makes clear that, while gig companies may seem novel, traditional principles of consumer protection and competition still apply to them. “

Hasnain says:

“But redistributing the gains more evenly would have a far more transformative impact on quality of life for millions. The growth spurt boosted incomes of the bottom decile of US households by roughly an extra 10 per cent. But transpose Norway’s inequality gradient on to the US, and the poorest decile of Americans would be a further 40 per cent better off while the top decile would remain richer than the top of almost every other country on the planet.

Our leaders are of course right to target economic growth, but to wave away concerns about the distribution of a decent standard of living — which is what income inequality essentially measures — is to be disinterested in the lives of millions. Until those gradients are made less steep, the UK and US will remain poor societies with pockets of rich people.
“

Hasnain says:

“However, remember, back in May when Texas initially reinstated the law, it said it would come out with its full ruling later. Over the last few months I’ve occasionally pondered (sometimes on Twitter) whether the 5th Circuit would ever get around to actually releasing an opinion. And that’s what it just did. And, as 1st Amendment lawyer Ken White notes, it’s “the most angrily incoherent First Amendment decision I think I’ve ever read.”

It is difficult to state how completely disconnected from reality this ruling is, and how dangerously incoherent it is. It effectively says that companies no longer have a 1st Amendment right to their own editorial policies. Under this ruling, any state in the 5th Circuit could, in theory, mandate that news organizations must cover certain politicians or certain other content. It could, in theory, allow a state to mandate that any news organization must publish opinion pieces by politicians.

It completely flies in the face of the 1st Amendment’s association rights and the right to editorial discretion.
There’s going to be plenty to say about this ruling, which will go down in the annals of history as a complete embarrassment to the judiciary, but let’s hit the lowest points.”

Hasnain says:

Insurance companies: not the heroes we expected, but ones we will cheer on nonetheless in this case.

“John Chasnoff, a local activist who fought for years to get St. Ann to retool its chase policy, said he is dismayed that the catalyst for change was money — not the injuries to people including Cox.

“It’s an indictment on St. Ann police and their priorities that the voice of their insurers spoke louder than human lives,” Chasnoff said.”

Hasnain says:

“Sometimes it's a function of gentrification as capitalists drool over profits to be squeezed from tenants and businesses. Other times, it's a function of latent anxieties (e.g. racism) that views residents yet to be pushed out as dangerous mobs ruled by violence, drug use, and general chaos. But all of it ultimately traces back to the same thing: a housing crisis, a dearth of social programs supporting mental health and addiction, and a refusal to abandon carceral logic that says social problems should be hidden away in jail cells—not supported by systems funded with as much cash as our prisons and police departments.

In the meantime, we will have to suffer these outrage cycles as conservatives and liberals alike—frothing right-wing pundits, Silicon Valley tech executives, and Manhattan landlords—all try to convince us that they are trying to help, not sabotage, our society.”

Hasnain says:

This was a really interesting debugging story.

“This investigation reinforced the breadth of interestingly (for some values of “interesting”) configured clients that Tailscale (or any other service) has to deal with. While this was not the gnarliest bug ever, it was satisfying to keep accumulating breadcrumbs that explained more and more behaviors (e.g. the 5 minute timeout in the autocert library). And by closing it out, we were able to continue on our quest to make things just work.”

Hasnain says:

I’ve always admired how Patagonia has taken a stand on various issues - but this one is just next level. They have earned my business.

“Rather than selling the company or taking it public, Mr. Chouinard, his wife and two adult children have transferred their ownership of Patagonia, valued at about $3 billion, to a specially designed set of trusts and nonprofit organizations. They were created to preserve the company’s independence and ensure that all of its profits — some $100 million a year — are used to combat climate change and protect undeveloped land around the globe.

The unusual move comes at a moment of growing scrutiny for billionaires and corporations, whose rhetoric about making the world a better place is often overshadowed by their contributions to the very problems they claim to want to solve.

At the same time, Mr. Chouinard’s relinquishment of the family fortune is in keeping with his longstanding disregard for business norms, and his lifelong love for the environment.”

Hasnain says:

What I find infuriating is that most reporting is just talking about the supply chain disruption and not the core issue at hand: workers are looking to strike so they can get **unpaid** sick leave (not even paid!). America never fails to disappoint when it comes to cruel healthcare and employment situations.

““The average American would not know that we get fired for going to the doctor. This one thing has our members most enraged. We have guys who were punished for taking time off for a heart attack and covid. It’s inhumane.””

Hasnain says:

“The upshot: There may be no correlation between the severity of your COVID case and the lasting effect on your brain. You thought COVID felt like having a cold? Great, but you still may not know what the virus has done, or is doing, to your body. “Acute COVID-19 is a respiratory disease,” Koralnik says. “But long COVID is mostly about the brain.”

And plenty of people are developing it. Long COVID is now the country’s third leading neurological disorder, the American Academy of Neurology declared in July. As of the end of May, there were 82.5 million COVID survivors in the United States, and 30 percent of them — about 24.8 million — were considered “long-haulers.” A recent study of Northwestern’s Neuro COVID-19 Clinic patients showed that most neurological symptoms persist for an average of nearly 15 months after the disease’s onset.”

Hasnain says:

More and more skills are being lost to the world as technology advances - not always for the better.

“These subtle signs in the desert contain volumes of information to the properly trained eye. By the depth of the tracks, a tracker can tell whether a camel was carrying anything on its back. They can also tell whether the camel was being led by person or roaming freely. If the camel’s droppings contain corn, rye, or any man-made food, then the camel was not grazing. Also, a camel being led would not graze nearby bushes, and if it did, it would only be along a set route. A roaming camel, on the other hand, skips around from bush to bush with no clear pattern.”

Hasnain says:

“But the pushback to quiet quitting reveals more about managers than workers — showing they have always expected overwork. Employees are no longer onboard with that, especially as prices rise, wages don't keep up, and going above and beyond just results in more work. That's where acting your wage comes in.

"If a company is paying you, let's say minimum wage, you're gonna put in minimum effort," Soto said. "If you're acting your wage, that means that the amount of labor that you're putting in reflects the amount that you're getting paid. So you're not going to go above and beyond and do the job of two to three people and do all this extra work if you're really not even making a livable wage."”

Hasnain says:

Sigh.

““I really don’t want to evoke the contract language, and bury this paper like, I feel like that would be fucked up and a disservice to the world,” said the UNI official. “But by the same token, there’s just, we cannot let you have our name in this document and jeopardize our relationship with CWA, CWA’s relationship with Microsoft, the Activision workers’ right to organize, my job, like, it’s just too much. It’s too much, it will never stand. I will be fired.”

“Our affiliates, they pay a portion of my salary,” the UNI official added. Asked why issues with CWA would undermine a report technically sponsored by UNI, the UNI official clarified that he was acting on behalf of CWA. “We have a financial relationship with CWA. They are one of our members.””

Hasnain says:

Sigh. Tech bros will be tech bros.

“On May 21, 2021, the team hosted their monthly “gala,” where Launch House members and friends gathered at the Beverly Hills mansion for a party. They loaded in a carful of booze, and though the founders had claimed they’d planned on only around 100 guests, hundreds more were added to the guest list. “Brett [Goldstein] told the girl at the door to let anyone in, regardless of Covid tests,” said one attendee. “If they weren’t on the guest list, as long as they were hot or had a lot of followers,” they could enter. “Even if Covid weren’t a thing, I’m sure it would have been a fire safety issue,” said another. “It wasn’t a networking event anymore; it felt like a club.” More concerning was the presence of seemingly underage girls, some of whom were seen falling over or passed out on the curb outside.”

Hasnain says:

Great read, and it reminds me that I need to go and blog about my own blog setup at some point.

“Normally this would be terrifying, especially with the amount of traffic my blog gets (as represented by this handy graph here). You'd think that something that does a lookup on every post in the worst case for the most common thing on the biggest dataset would make performance terrifyingly slow You'd also think that with the amount of traffic I get that it'd be an active detriment.

However, this is when I play my trap card! When you look at the analytics you can see that the most frequently read article is the most recently posted one! This means that it's not actually a big O of n lookup most of the time. It's constant time complexity. In theory this design is the terrifying type of thing that you normally find out about after you accepted a job offer, but in practice it's fine. It is a bit weird though, and I may need to rethink this in the future, but this has scaled to almost 300 posts as-is so I think it's okay for now.”

Hasnain says:

Sharing without comment.

“Facebook’s stonewalling has been revealing on its own, providing variations on the same theme: It has amassed so much data on so many billions of people and organized it so confusingly that full transparency is impossible on a technical level. In the March 2022 hearing, Zarashaw and Steven Elia, a software engineering manager, described Facebook as a data-processing apparatus so complex that it defies understanding from within. The hearing amounted to two high-ranking engineers at one of the most powerful and resource-flush engineering outfits in history describing their product as an unknowable machine.

The special master at times seemed in disbelief, as when he questioned the engineers over whether any documentation existed for a particular Facebook subsystem. “Someone must have a diagram that says this is where this data is stored,” he said, according to the transcript. Zarashaw responded: “We have a somewhat strange engineering culture compared to most where we don’t generate a lot of artifacts during the engineering process. Effectively the code is its own design document often.” He quickly added, “For what it’s worth, this is terrifying to me when I first joined as well.””

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking this for later re reading as I’ve run into this problem before.

“Where does this leave us? Unclear. If you go down the rabbit hole of reading about all the issues surrounding GATs and HKTBs you get a strong sense that it's better to avoid creating APIs that invole abstracting over ownership and borrowing when possible. You will run into walls and the workarounds might be ugly and hard to understand. So I guess a new thing I can recommend not to try to do: do not abstact over borrows and ownership if functions are involved (unless you really know what you are doing).”

Hasnain says:

This is nominally a post introducing a library, but it's so much more - I learnt a lot about good API design, string matching algorithms, and performance benchmarking. burntsushi's code and blogposts are always great, and this is no exception.

"In other words, if Rust’s primary string types work for your use case, then you should probably ignore bstr altogether and continue using them.

So why have a byte string library? The simplest way to explain it is to point at the std::io::Read trait. How does it work? Well, it says “anything implementing std::io::Read can take a writable slice of bytes, read from its underlying source and put the bytes from the source to the writable slice given.” Do you see anything missing? There’s no guarantee whatsoever about what those bytes are. They can be anything. They might be an image. They might be a video. Or a PDF. Or a plain text file.

In other words, the fundamental API we use to interact with data streams doesn’t make any guarantees about the nature of that stream. This is by design and it isn’t a Rust problem. On most mainstream operating systems, this is how files themselves are represented. They are just sequences of bytes. The format of those bytes usually exists at some other layer or is determined through some additional context."

Hasnain says:

This was a pretty good read on leadership.

"When you’re a senior leader you don’t get to throw your hands up and say that there was nothing you could do. Did your project rely on another team who screwed up? Sorry, you still need to figure out how to get it done. Are you an Engineering leader who hates their Product counterpart? Do they hate you? Too bad, you still need to get things done."

Hasnain says:

Yay!

““I think this becomes a tipping point, frankly,” said Christine Hendrickson, the vice president of strategic initiatives at Syndio, which provides software that helps employers identify pay disparities. “It’s at this point that employers are going to stop going jurisdiction by jurisdiction and start looking for a nationwide strategy.””

Hasnain says:

“Other teams are conducting the first JWST observations of TRAPPIST-1, a relatively nearby red dwarf star orbited by seven Earth-size rocky worlds. Several of these planets are in the star’s habitable zone, where conditions favoring liquid water and even life may be possible. While JWST cannot directly image the planets, spectroscopy will help identify the gases in their atmospheres — possibly even hints of gases that could signify biological activity. “What we really want is Earths,” said Macintosh.”

Hasnain says:

This was a really interesting read.

“DEB COHEN: Some of the studies we were actually having a bit of a laugh about, um. So what you would do is you would starve people overnight. Um, you'd fast them overnight and then you'd ask them to cycle to exhaustion. One group, you would give a sports drink containing sugar, and the other group you would give water. Well, guess what? The people that have had a bit of sugar are going to outperform the people that have been starved and had water, it's not rocket science.

So there are all sorts of these, all sorts of these kinds of studies that they do, and you look at it and go, that just does not happen.

JEN GUNTER: And it doesn't matter that it's not clinically relevant. Now you've got something that looks statistically different and you can peg a marketing campaign around that.

DEB COHEN: Exactly. And if you throw enough darts at a dartboard, if you've got your eyes blindfolded, then one of them is going to hit the dart board at some point.”

Hasnain says:

“These tradeoffs are often intensely difficult to pursue openly. Who wants to be known as the politician in favor of benefits fraud or the financial CEO who thinks they are not laundering enough money?

One of the interesting questions here is who gets to resolve tensions like this. Generally speaking, it will be private actors applying their own cost-benefits decisions. There is substantial space for regulations to help with cases, like identity theft, where actors can choose to spend other people’s risk budgets to maximize for their own interests.”

Hasnain says:

This was pretty interesting. I’ve seen huge page remapping be quite useful at $work so it’s cool to see it talked about more broadly.

“Hey, sorry for the long article, but there was a lot to cover. I hope that it sparked your interest in using Huge Pages for code especially if you’re maintaining a large codebase. For further reading, I would recommend the paper “Runtime Performance Optimization Blueprint: Intel® Architecture Optimization with Large Code Pages”, which was instrumental to me.”

Hasnain says:

“Under Brazil's constitution, indigenous people have a right to their traditional land, and access to the land he inhabited, known as the Tanaru Indigenous Territory, has been restricted since 1998.

The areas surrounding the 8,070-hectare territory are used for farming and landowners have in the past expressed their anger at being banned from entering the indigenous territory.

In 2009, a Funai post in the area was damaged and cartridge shells were left behind in what was considered a threat to the Man of the Hole and the Funai agents protecting him.”

Hasnain says:

TIL. I understand why they have to make it harder to bypass warnings, but this is so inscrutable and hard to find.

(this will make my life so much easier)

Hasnain says:

This is some really cool stuff.

“Now that we can clone running VMs quickly, we can enable new workflows where you don't have to wait for development servers to spin up. Together with the GitHub App, you will have a development environment for every PR so you can quickly review (or run end-to-end tests).”

Hasnain says:

Great read going into a bunch of engineering tradeoffs. The follow up post is also solid.

“Here’s one of the first passages to jump out to me, from Chapter 3: Embracing Risk:

The low-latency user wants Bigtable’s request queues to be (almost always) empty so that the system can process each outstanding request immediately upon arrival. (Indeed, inefficient queuing is often a cause of high tail latency.) The user concerned with offline analysis is more interested in system throughput, so that user wants request queues to never be empty. To optimize for throughput, the Bigtable system should never need to idle while waiting for its next request.

This is a profound and general insight. When I read this passage, my last decade of abject suffering suddenly came into focus for me.”

Hasnain says:

The story they highlight here is really interesting. One frustrating takeaway I had here was just how much folks in computer science tend to reinvent things from first principles and ignore valuable work and research done elsewhere. Especially with AI, the stakes are super high - let’s not skip the ethical decisions, please. Algorithms are never neutral. It’s never just math.

“Along with all its faults, I think the Seattle committee also gave us much to admire. It was profoundly, even uncomfortably, honest about the hard choices at the center of kidney medicine. It refused to pretend that such choices were—or ever could be—entirely technical. And it tried, albeit clumsily, to democratize the values inside a complex, high-tech system. The Seattle physicians and their lay colleagues were rationing a scarce supply of dialysis treatments. But even after Congress provided dialysis for everyone, the shortage of transplantable kidneys was destined to spark similar questions, ones we still face today. And Scrib’s experiment with sharing the moral microphone (along with other stories I tell in the book) helped spark the system we have today.”

Hasnain says:

“But the same system also helped you to become badminton and football stars. Can you see why I’m asking what makes you go against the system now?

“No, we can’t. We’d have done better under a civilised, democratic system. Even without the failed system. Our society would’ve been better off,” says the former footballer, Hao Haidong, and he raises his voice:

"If the system made us into the stars we became, why aren’t there 20 more like me or 10 more like Ye?””