Hasnain says:

The kids are turning out alright. I also am quite peeved by the term “union avoidance” for some reason.

“But Jackson Lewis principal Pierson-Scheinberg, who presented on “The Evolving World of Labor Relations: An Organizing Re-Union,” may be learning some of her best lessons in union avoidance from her teenage son.

“Funny story,” she told the audience. Her son, a high school senior, was trying to get out of writing a paper, but the only way to get out of it was to bring an outside speaker to talk to his class.

“He goes, ‘Mom, I really think you would be cool, and I know you do this everywhere, it would be really cool if you come in. [But] you’re a union buster, so it can’t be you.’””

Hasnain says:

I am unreasonably excited by this.

“The first city to have the builder’s remedy thrust upon them was Santa Monica who failed to adopt a valid housing element. What happened next shocked California: the residential zoning for the city was eliminated by law.

The whole residential zoning.

A town which in the last eight years approved 1,600 new homes and within a week, saw a dozen development proposals filed that put 4,000 new homes in the pipeline with over 800 of them deed-restricted for low income households. They couldn’t reject a single home, either. It didn’t even go through a long city council process, the project approvals were merely administrative by the planning department. The city councils and zoning boards had zero authority to deny the projects. Zero.”

Hasnain says:

“Some police reform advocates are silent about the failure of these reforms and have pivoted loudly to blaming qualified immunity – a doctrine that prevents police from being sued for misconduct. Those who care about justice must absolutely challenge qualified immunity, as long as they understand that the protections that cops receive through the law is not the basis for their violence. Cops brutalized and killed people before they had immunity. The job necessitates it, which is why abolitionists have fought to reduce and eliminate police funding, encounters with cops, and the underlying reasons why cops have jobs in the first place.”

Hasnain says:

“In addition, she said, the agency “found merit to a charge alleging statements and conduct by Apple — including high-level executives — also violated the National Labor Relations Act.” Unless Apple settles, the board’s regional director will issue a complaint against the Cupertino, California-based company, Blado said in an email.

The agency’s investigations stemmed from cases brought in 2021 by former employees Ashley Gjovik and Cher Scarlett. Scarlett accused the company of maintaining work rules that “prohibit employees from discussing wages, hours, or other terms or conditions of employment.” Gjovik’s filings alleged that an email Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook sent pledging to punish leakers, as well as a set of policies in Apple’s employee handbook, violated federal law.”

Hasnain says:

I expect things will get really grim, really quickly today once the video is released. Cops almost never get even a slap on the wrist - and here they have been charged with murder; the union isn’t defending them and the police chief says she understands if there is outrage. Verbal accounts of the video are really horrifying. As someone on Twitter put it:

“The video is so bad they fired and charged the cops involved.

It’s so bad they’re preparing for rioting.

It’s so bad the police chief has a message out saying she understands the outrage.

Now imagine if there wasn’t a video.”

Hasnain says:

“Caltrans also weighed in after it was reached for comment by various media organizations. In a shocking moment of humility, they noted that, while they didn’t approve of Ankrom’s methods, they couldn’t deny the quality of his work. Not only would they not be pressing charges — they were going to leave his handiwork up. One Caltrans representative jokingly told ABC that they had a job application for Ankrom to fill out.”

Hasnain says:

This is scary. I hope the Streisand effect helps.

“When students at another college in the Indian capital — Jamia Millia Islamia University — announced their own plans on Wednesday to view the film, Delhi police swooped in to detain the organizers. Ranks of riot police armed with tear gas were also dispatched to the campus, according to witnesses and smartphone photos they shared.

All told, the remarkable steps taken by the government seemed to reinforce a central point of the BBC series: that the world’s largest democracy was sliding into authoritarianism under Modi, who rose to national power in 2014 and won reelection in 2019 on a Hindu nationalist platform.”

Hasnain says:

Drama aside, learning more about how the monarchy and press are intertwined in the UK has been eye opening.

“But how is it possible that Harry has managed to generate such interest, with the sales of his book smashing all previous records, while the British press relentlessly attack his character? And how has it made such a dent into the monarchy – an institution which millions support?

The answer is simple – and for Britain’s media gatekeepers, deeply worrying. A shared language and increasingly global platforms for news and information means the UK is becoming, culturally speaking, an appendage of the United States. While English has proven an extraordinary tool of soft power, even after the collapse of the British empire, it increasingly feels like a site of cultural exposure. And although the Windsors have the BBC and Fleet Street, Harry has Netflix, Spotify, Penguin, and a smorgasbord of US chat show hosts. When it comes to winning the hearts of Britain’s under-50s, the country’s most powerful clan is holding a pea-shooter in a gunfight. And the momentum is only going in one direction”

Hasnain says:

“Musk framed his takeover of Twitter last year as being a win for free speech, and he pledged to only moderate speech on the platform if it went outside the bounds of the law. His actions since then have been a series of backslides. For example, he banned accounts using public information to track his and other powerful peoples' flights after saying he would never do so, in order to preserve freedom of speech.

Musk once called himself a "free speech absolutist" and said that "some governments" were demanding that satellite internet company Starlink block Russian news sources, but that it would not unless "at gunpoint."”

Hasnain says:

Disappointed in Harvard; but super proud of the way these students protested and raised awareness.

“Accusations against Comaroff, a professor in Harvard’s anthropology department, date back to University of Chicago tenure in the 1970s. According to reports, Harvard disregarded warnings about this record in 2012 and decided to hire him anyway. While at Harvard, an internal investigation determined that he continued to engage in “conduct that violated the FAS Sexual and Gender-Based Harassment Policy and the FAS Professional Conduct Policy.” A lawsuit filed by three graduate students alleged Comaroff committed unwanted kissing, groping, and sexual remarks. Nonetheless, Harvard permitted him to return to the classroom this academic year. “

Hasnain says:

US tipping culture is uniquely weird.

““If you work for a company, it’s that company’s job to pay you for doing work for them,” said Mike Janavey, a footwear and clothing designer who lives in New York City. “They’re not supposed to be juicing consumers that are already spending money there to pay their employees.””

Hasnain says:

Great investigation and write up of a tricky to find bug.

“This article ended up being longer than I anticipated but I believe the detail is important. I was using several debugging features for the first time, searching for how to do almost everything as I went, so I wanted to cover every step to make it easier for the next person. GDB's ability to arbitrarily search and reinterpret memory has broad utility but I hadn't seen these commands demonstrated before, either in tutorials or using it for more basic troubleshooting.”

Hasnain says:

“"This is such a beautiful place," I said to them. "I'm sure lots of people would love to live here. How would you feel if I brought my family to live here?"

The air in the room went still. The men looked at each other in silent embarrassment. Then one cleared his throat and spoke, with a worried look on his face: "Well, you would need to learn our way of life. It wouldn't be easy."

The village was on the path to extinction, yet the thought of it being invaded by "outsiders" was somehow worse.”

Hasnain says:

Lies, damned lies, and statistics. This was a great human interest story mixed with an analysis of some controversial murder cases - that weren't actually murders.

"The similarities go beyond statistics to the way Letby has been vilified. Social media commentary will “make your stomach turn,” Gill says. “People are saying we should bring back hanging, shoot the bitch.” The media have portrayed her as an “evil creature,” says Neil Mackenzie, a lawyer based in Edinburgh, Scotland, who specializes in medical negligence cases and co-authored the RSS report. “I think there’s possibly misogyny in there,” Mackenzie says. “The press loves bad women.”

The RSS report Gill and others published in September does not claim Letby is innocent, in part because public comment on the guilt or innocence of a person standing trial may be considered contempt of court in U.K. legal systems. “We’ve got to have no opinion on this case,” Green says, but “there’s potential here for miscarriage of justice.”

Gill says a deep cognitive bias works against defendants like Letby. People “don’t believe in chance, actually,” he says. “Quantum mechanics has been shouting at us for 100 years that the physical universe is built on randomness. … But we don’t understand this. It upsets us deeply. When a succession of bad things happens, we know there must have been an agent responsible. And so we naturally believe in devils and witches, gods and angels.”"

Hasnain says:

“In photos of 2023’s World Economic Forum—or Davos as it is commonly called, after the Swiss resort town where it annually occurs—you might not notice the HEPA filters. They’re in the background, unobtrusive and unremarked upon, quietly cleansing the air of viruses and bacteria. You wouldn’t know—not unless you asked—that every attendee was PCR tested before entering the forum, or that in the case of a positive test, access was automatically, electronically, revoked. The folks on stage aren’t sporting masks (mostly), so unless you looked at the official Davos Health & Safety protocol, you wouldn’t be aware that their on-site drivers are required to wear them. You also might be surprised to learn that if, at any point, you start to feel ill at Davos, you can go collect a free rapid test, or even call their dedicated COVID hotline.”

Hasnain says:

Ah, fond memories of Karachi.

“DESPITE THEIR ENCUMBRANCE ON HUMAN life, the crows cawing away are the soundtrack to Karachi, and so to my childhood. The crazy cawing was the backdrop to when I first learned to ride a bike, when I sat for exams, when I played with my dolls. One crow visited my bedroom window every single afternoon; I once opened my window and tried to touch him, but he disappeared fast, fading into the crowd of other crows hanging out at the electric poles that lined the main road. I remember looking at that seemingly perpetual gathering when my grandfather died. I was sixteen and until then he had been a constant in my life. The crows were there as always, still meeting and parting, equally interested in the living and the dead.”

Hasnain says:

"According to the book——the eight marines parked the AI robot in the middle of a traffic circle and played a game: Whoever could reach the robot from a long distance away without being detected won. And all eight marines were able to do so. Some did cartwheels, throwing off the robot’s detection algorithm. Another pretended to be a tree, using branches and slowly moving toward the robot, smiling the whole time. But perhaps the best tactic used by the marines: hiding under a cardboard box.

Apparently, two different marines shared a single cardboard box and hid under it while moving toward the robot. “You could hear them giggling the whole time,” said a person in the book referred to as Phil.

As explained in the book, the AI system was trained to spot humans walking and running, not people doing somersaults or hiding in boxes. So these fairly simple and childish tactics worked and fooled the AI. Meanwhile, any average person would have easily spotted a moving box or a flipping soldier, showcasing a major issue with AI and its reliance on previous data and algorithms."

Hasnain says:

"According to archival nautical charts and aerial photographs, the Ashby Shoal first formed sometime around the middle of last century. One theory connects its appearance to the construction of Interstate 80, which runs along the nearby waterfront. “Mud was pumped from the highway site out into the bay and sand pumped from the bay back to the site, since fine bay mud is not ideal for building on,” according to a 1982 research paper authored by Allison Turner."

Hasnain says:

Am definitely curious to see if/when the no fly list gets published (even if it is from 2019).

“so what happens next with the nofly data

while the nature of this information is sensitive, i believe it is in the public interest for this list to be made available to journalists and human rights organizations. if you are a journalist, researcher, or other party with legitimate interest, please reach out at nofly@crimew.gay. i will only give this data to parties that i believe will do the right thing with it.

note: if you email me there and i do not reply within a regular timeframe it is very likely my reply ended up in your spam folder or got lost. using email not hosted by google or msft is hell. feel free to dm me on twitter in that case.”

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking this for the future - I wish I’d known about this earlier!

“In the past I’ve had to write queries to convert data in a table into user-friendly display text. One way to do this is with CASE expressions.”

Hasnain says:

Great read. The author asks a neural network to learn a common but complex function (binary addition) and then keeps making the model smaller until it’s explainable - and then discovers the solution is quite unexpected. Great visualizations and explanation.

“Even if this particular solution was just a fluke of my network architecture or the system being modeled, it made me even more impressed by the power and versatility of gradient descent and similar optimization algorithms. The fact that these very particular patterns can be brought into existence so consistently from pure randomness is really amazing to me.”

Hasnain says:

Great example for that “software bugs cost real money” post from a few weeks ago.

“The source said the NOTAM system is an example of aging infrastructure due for an overhaul.

"Because of budgetary concerns and flexibility of budget, this tech refresh has been pushed off," the source said. "I assume now they're going to actually find money to do it."

Hasnain says:

“Sarah, for her part, did recognise that her job had pushed her to the breaking point and left. But instead of moving within the industry, she took another path. She now works for a creative agency outside of fashion. She says she's much happier in her new role that offers clear progression, challenging work and varied daily tasks. “[Fashion] may have sounded like an impressive place to work,” she says, “but I realised it’s more important to have a fulfilling job than a cool name on a CV.””

Hasnain says:

This is amazing.

“It alleges that Javice and Amar first asked a top engineer at Frank to create the fake customer list; when he refused, Javice approached “a data science professor at a New York City area college” to help. Using data from some individuals who’d already started using Frank, he created 4.265 million fake customer accounts—for which Javice paid him $18,000—and had it validated by a third-party vendor at her direction, JP Morgan alleges. The complaint includes screenshots of the professor’s invoices and claims that Javice went to notable lengths to ensure documentation of this work was either destroyed or altered to avoid raising eyebrows. Amar, meanwhile, spent $105,000 buying a separate data set of 4.5 million students from the firm ASL Marketing, per the complaint. Amar and ASL Marketing did not yet respond to a request for comment.”

Hasnain says:

This was pretty eye opening! Not something I’ll use soon; but worth thinking about the ideas expressed here.

“Unison is an amazing new programming language that I am sure will not only start being used, very soon, in the niches that can mostly benefit from its purely functional nature and distributed computing friendliness, but it is also set to fundamentally influence what is expected of software development UX in the years to come.

It solves problems that most of us didn’t even know were problems that could be solved. And it’s just a very nice language all around. I found it quite a lot easier to grasp than Haskell, for example, while still feeling that it gives me more than enough power to write clean, reliable code without subjecting me to some hassle that most other languages would (long, complex builds, unreliable tests, dependency version conflicts…).”

Hasnain says:

Still eagerly waiting for the day when this feature is banned and someone faces criminal penalties for this.

“The video and new photographs of the crash, which were obtained by The Intercept via a California Public Records Act request, provides the first direct look at what happened on November 24, confirming witness accounts at the time. The driver told police that he had been using Tesla’s new “Full Self-Driving” feature, the report notes, before the Tesla’s “left signal activated” and its “brakes activated,” and it moved into the left lane, “slowing to a stop directly in [the second vehicle’s] path of travel.””

Hasnain says:

Great analysis of bias in news media. I’ve often felt some of these biases at play and this does a good job of breaking them down, questioning the assumptions that lead to them, and then highlights the point with data.

“When doing systemic justice work, those of us to who talk to the media a lot know that the onus is always on us to come up with a new angle to make the story seem different. This is really a bad situation if the story you really need to tell in high volume is that our society continues to do a lot of the same things every day that are really really bad and that harm the world’s vulnerable people, animals, and ecosystems in basically the same ways every day.”

Hasnain says:

Isn’t this a place where people fly to Denmark just to eat at? This treatment is unacceptable - even for pay. The stories are horrifying. This also puts “The Menu” into a different light for me.

“Mr. Redzepi, who has long acknowledged that grueling hours are required to produce the restaurant’s cuisine, said that the math of compensating nearly 100 employees fairly, while maintaining high standards, at prices that the market will bear, is not workable.”

Hasnain says:

Great read on what software engineering careers are like.

“Although it may sound surprising, the primary focus of a software engineer's job is not writing code but rather creating value through the use of software that was written. Code is simply a tool to achieve this end goal. Code -> Software -> Value.”

Hasnain says:

The amount of racism still abound in the states is stunning and frankly depressing. This was a bittersweet but ultimately heartwarming read about how some of these injustices were righted (a little bit) and how one brave man stepped up - and brought others along to help.

“He didn’t seek the job. He had never paid much attention to Civil War history. City and state officials said they turned to Team Henry Enterprises after a long list of bigger contractors — all White-owned — said they wanted no part of taking down Confederate statues.
�For a Black man to step in carried enormous risk. Henry concealed the name of his company for a time and long shunned media interviews. He has endured death threats, seen employees walk away and been told by others in the industry that his future is ruined. He started wearing a bulletproof vest on job sites and got a permit to carry a concealed firearm for protection.”

Hasnain says:

Great exciting discovery. Also it seems the researchers are trying to patent it - isn’t the prior art 2000 years old though?

“Previously disregarded as merely evidence of sloppy mixing practices, or poor-quality raw materials, the new study suggests that these tiny lime clasts gave the concrete a previously unrecognized self-healing capability. "The idea that the presence of these lime clasts was simply attributed to low quality control always bothered me," says Masic. "If the Romans put so much effort into making an outstanding construction material, following all of the detailed recipes that had been optimized over the course of many centuries, why would they put so little effort into ensuring the production of a well-mixed final product? There has to be more to this story."”

Hasnain says:

Great technical read on SQLite and using it in a distributed manner.

“Only time will tell whether this was a good idea or not. I'm pretty confident that it will be. Just moving from three services to one is quite nice. Local development is simpler thanks to just using SQLite as well.”

Hasnain says:

Big fan of the moves the FTC has been making with Khan at the head

“The agency estimated that the rule could increase wages by nearly $300 billion a year across the economy. Evan Starr, an economist at the University of Maryland who has studied noncompetes, said that was a plausible wage increase following their elimination.”

Hasnain says:

Follow up from the post the other day, more nerding out on language design.

“Here are my two high-level reflections from the experience:

Good design in the first part of each puzzle – especially more functional techniques and abstractions – tended to make the second part easier. So, in general, functional languages seemed to have the advantage in the puzzles.

Using better algorithms and data structures was far more important than having a “faster” programming language. There was never a time where rewriting in another language felt like the right way to get better performance.

Read on for more specific reflections on language design.”

Hasnain says:

Felt myself nodding along quite a bit here in this fresh take on an eternal debate.

“Do you need to decompose the problem into independent entities? You can do that by embracing standalone processes hosted in Docker containers, or you can do that by embracing standalone modules in an application server that obey a standardized API convention, or a variety of other options. This isn't a technical problem that requires abandoning anything that's already been built--it can be done using technologies from anywhere in the last twenty years, including servlets, ASP.NET, Ruby, Python, C++, maybe even shudder Perl. The key is to establish that common architectural backplane with well-understood integration and communication conventions, whatever you want or need it to be.”

Hasnain says:

This was a really interesting and cool hack.

""There are many millions of people who have listened to the song Better Days, but that wasn't our goal," says Mr Ortíz. "Success for us was to be found in small, specific numbers. It was in the chosen few hearing it and understanding it."

Gen Mendieta, who had been rescued in the same year, helped the mission by appearing on live TV and asking the rebels to give the hostages access to the radio for company.

"Someone once said, 'Whoever has a book is not alone," he says, "and in our case, it was, 'Whoever has a radio is not alone.'""

Hasnain says:

This is some incredibly valuable data.

“I started Brick Experiment Channel in December 2017 and got accepted to YouTube Partner Program in June 2018. Now, October 2022, the total earnings are 664 thousand USD. That is 12500 USD per month. This is the money Google sends to my bank account, from which I pay taxes.”

Hasnain says:

“Even by the low standards for truth-telling in politics, the scope of Santos’s falsehoods has been breathtaking. It has surprised Democrats who researched him and missed so many details, as well as Republicans who vouched for him.”

Hasnain says:

Framing aside (this frames it as too big a problem and something that needs to be fixed; rather than a realization that the old ways are unsustainable and exploitative), this was a good read on business practices and how things are changing.

“At law firm Nixon Peabody LLP, associates have started saying no to working weekends, prompting partners to ask more people to help complete time-sensitive work. TGS Insurance in Texas has struggled to fill promotions, and bosses often have to coax staffers to apply. And Maine-based marketing company Pulp+Wire plans to shut down for two weeks next year now that staffers are taking more vacation than they used to.

“The passion that we used to see in work is lower now, and you find it in fewer people—at least in the last two years,” says Sumithra Jagannath, president of ZED Digital, which makes digital ticket scanners. The company, based in Columbus, Ohio, recently moved about 20 remote engineering and marketing roles to Canada and India, where she said it’s easier to find talent who will go above and beyond.

Since the onset of the pandemic, several employees have asked for more pay when managers asked that they do more work, she says. “It was not like that before Covid at all,” she adds.”

Hasnain says:

Hoping everyone stays safe out there.

“Widespread flooding, mudslides and road closures have already occurred all around region, including water so deep in the Bayshore area south of San Francisco that Highway 101 shut indefinitely in both directions. Snow continues to blanket the Sierra Nevada mountains, according to the National Weather Service.”