Hasnain says:

Great read, and this definitely was not what I was expecting from the title.

"I was awake for an hour or two in the middle of the night, thoughts wandering, when it occurred to me that I didn’t fully understand why this fix had worked here. "

Hasnain says:

This was an emotional read. Heartbreaking when you think about what these kids and parents had to go through, and infuriating when you think about the system that keeps trying to push this onto more people.

“Her loss of faith in the biblical literalism and patriarchal values of her childhood was coming in the way the movement’s adherents had always warned it would: through exposure to people with different experiences and points of view.

Those people just happened to be her daughter and her husband.

“This is the guy I’ve been married to for eight years,” she recalls thinking. “I know him. I know his heart. I know what kind of parent he wants to be to our kids. These easy answers of ‘Oh, you’re just not a Christian anymore, you just want to sin’ … didn’t work anymore.””

Hasnain says:

Great read.

"The point of this blog post is that, although most of us don’t work on software that would directly be considered safety-critical, we live in a world that’s becoming increasingly automated and computerized, and sometimes, bugs in seemingly mundane pieces of code, even web apps, can cause real-world suffering and harm, particularly when they go unfixed for weeks, months or even years. Part of the problem may be that many industry players lack respect for software engineering as a craft. Programmers are seen as replaceable cogs and as “code monkeys”, and not always given enough time to do due diligence. Some industry players also love the idea that you can take a random person, put them through a 3-month bootcamp, and get a useful, replaceable code monkey at the other end of that process. I want to tell you that no matter how you got to where you are today, if you do your job seriously, and you care about user experience, you could be making a real difference in the quality of life of many people. Skilled software engineers don’t wear masks or capes, but they can still have cool aliases, and they truly have the power to make the world better or worse."

Hasnain says:

I read about this drama earlier on twitter and now that it’s published with a little more detail and easier to share, here it is in all its glory. It’s even worse than the quote: it made up citations, the court asked the lawyer to clarify - and instead of taking the L then, he decided to ask chatgpt for the transcripts, which it made up. The firm is now in hot water (for good reason)

“Lawyer asked Chat GPT to find cases he could cite in a brief. It invented six decisions, including quotes and internal citations from the imaginary opinions, and when asked if they were real, said yes.”

Hasnain says:

As much as I love various programming language designs and discussions, the community aspects are hard to ignore. And often turn terrible.

“Who ultimately is responsible for turning some team discomfort into disgracing a public expert? How are we going to hold them accountable?
How do we put safeguards in place so that this doesn't happen again?
How can Rust not only be held accountable now, but maintain long-term accountability into the future?”

Hasnain says:

“What do you think is special about New York City’s halal restaurants?

Sameen Choudhry: In New York, there’s so many different ethnicities and backgrounds. And because we all live in New York City, we’re friends with each other. All of these ethnicities and backgrounds interest us, and we want to try their things … Now that a lot of the first-generation are a little older and starting their own businesses, that’s in the back of their head.”

Hasnain says:

"The search for an aperiodic monotile appears to have come to an end. Or has it? When tiling the plane aperiodically with the hat, you also need its reflection (what you get if you flip the tile over). Maybe there’s a yet-undiscovered aperiodic monotile out there that doesn’t require its mirror image. Find it and you’ll be famous. The inspiration might be right under your feet."

Hasnain says:

I don't know why I spent a bunch of time over a lot of days reading this paper, but I did, and I'm sharing here. Learned a lot about history, economics, and biology and food science from this one.

"Use of spices takes advantage of plant defensive compounds. Not surprisingly, in view of their evolved functions, these phytochemicals have antioxidant, antimicrobial, and antiviral properties. The use of spices essentially borrows plants' recipes for survival and puts them to similar use in cooking. Over time, recipes should “evolve” as new bacteria and fungi appear or indigenous species develop resistance to phytochemicals, requiring the addition of more spices or new spices to combat them effectively. However, there is a limit to how much of any one spice can be added before beneficial phytochemicals become phytotoxins. Thus, cookbooks from different eras are more than just curiosities. Essentially, they represent written records of our coevolutionary races against foodborne diseases. By cleansing foods of pathogens before consumption, spice users contribute to the health, longevity, and fitness of themselves, their families, and their guests. A Darwinian view of gastronomy thus helps us understand why “some like it hot” (spicy, that is!)."

Hasnain says:

Micro-optimizations are always a fun beast.

"Loop fusion is a simple and powerful technique to decrease the total number of memory accesses in the program. Although we described here the simplest version, loop fusion is possible even if datasets overlap partially.

In general, any idea that would result in a decrease of memory accesses has the potential to speed up your code. If you have any ideas that are not mentioned in this post, feel free to leave a comment so we can update this post."

Hasnain says:

Great read. I was interviewed for this to provide background info (my quotes didn't make it in :( ) but this gave me a bunch of context I wasn't aware of around how Rust came to be where it is today - which surprised me.

"“It’s enjoyable to write Rust, which is maybe kind of weird to say, but it’s just the language is fantastic. It’s fun. You feel like a magician, and that never happens in other languages,” he says. “We definitely took a big bet—it’s a new technology.”"

Hasnain says:

New creator for me to follow, clearly.

"Cheung eventually enrolled in a post-bachelor program in 2017 for computer science but dropped out when Bay Area Foodies picked up momentum. He just couldn’t resist the pull of creating food videos before his hobby became a full-time gig. He launched his TikTok in 2019, and it has grown to nearly 400,000 followers."

Hasnain says:

I've always found a stark difference between how communities operate between Pakistan and the States - and while initially I appreciated the changes after moving - now, as I've grown a little, my feelings are much more mixed.

"Those omissions continue. Fueled in part by pandemic distrust, a latter-day strain of individual-over-community sentiment often paired with invocations of liberty and freedom occupies a significant chunk of the national conversation these days — to the point where advocacy about community thinking is sometimes met with accusations of socialism.

Let’s not consign Americans to be the heirs of a built-in loneliness gene, though. A new generation is insisting that mental health be part of the national conversation, and many voices — among them women and people of color — are increasingly offering new alternatives to the old myths.

What’s more, the very place where the discussion about loneliness is being held today — in the office of the surgeon general, a presidential appointee — suggests that other paths are possible."

Hasnain says:

I knew this work was hard and grueling from all I have read and heard but seeing this with the time pressure really demonstrates that. And… that’s even without being forced to see the horrifying material these poor moderators are forced to look at day in day out.

“So much of the discussion lately around content moderation and trust & safety doesn’t come from a place of any kind of actual experience with moderating content and understanding the competing pressures, both internal and external, towards allowing free speech, protecting user safety, and complying with various laws and other factors.
A friend of mine in the trust & safety world once suggested that these conversations would be a lot more useful if everyone had to spend a few days moderating an actual community, and could learn how content moderation is not about “suppressing viewpoints,” but almost always about understanding really complex scenarios in which you have to make decisions in a very limited period of time, with limited information, and where there may not be any “right” answer.
Enter: Moderator Mayhem.”

Hasnain says:

I am so glad I got the opportunity to take leave when I did (and then some). Really wishing that was normalized more in the states.

“Lacking those tight ties can be a real loss for fathers and their relatives. In the average month in 2015, 300,000 women took parental leave compared with 22,000 men—but when men do take paternity leave, the majority of them are glad they did. Research suggests that fathers who take leave are more engaged with their kids throughout the first years of their lives. Plenty of people have argued for equitable parental leave on the grounds that it could get fathers more involved from the start in child-rearing. But it wouldn’t just benefit dads and their kids; it could strengthen children’s bonds with their whole extended family.”

Hasnain says:

On one hand I understand not exposing too many software knobs to users. On the other hand, especially with complex systems like optimizers, sometimes you really want an override…

“One way to solve this problem is to add hints to the query to tell the optimizer the right way to join these two tables. But PostgreSQL famously does not support plan hints (at least not natively — you have to install pg_hint_plan). In our example, the customer did not have the necessary permissions to install this extension in RDS, and the person who could do it was on vacation.”

Hasnain says:

I definitely found myself nodding along here for obvious reasons. Picking a quote alone takes time, and whenever I try to write a more meaningful summary it takes a lot longer. Let alone doing this for a book…

“It’s surprising how even many of the most prolific readers I know are unaware of the value of inspectional reading. Most readers start on page one of a book and plow through until they’re done or decide to cut their losses — without ever reading the table of contents or the preface.

One great alternative to writing summaries is to talk about the books you’re reading. Explaining the ideas you’re reading about to someone else is one of the best ways to engage with the material, since (a) it forces you to formulate it in your own words, and (b) they might challenge the ideas and get you to examine them more critically.”

Hasnain says:

This whole thing was so horrifying to read. People getting rich off a grift while kids suffer.

“In a cloud storage account she'd once shared with Winenger, she said, she found thousands of his photos and videos, including explicit images of their three shared children. She loaded them onto a thumb drive for the San Diego County Sheriff's Department, whose investigation into Winenger had never closed.

Within days, Winenger was arrested. He was soon charged with 19 felonies, including possession of child pornography and 14 counts of committing forcible lewd acts against a child, Robert.

He pleaded not guilty and was released on bail, his access to the children suspended. Because of the no-contact order he'd previously obtained against Montes, the children landed in a county shelter. Winenger's defense attorney, Patrick Clancy, declined to comment on Winenger's behalf, saying he doesn't try his cases in the press.”

Hasnain says:

Not sure what’s worse: this quote or the one about installing non compliant locks over explicit objections about them possibly killing people in the event of a fire.

“Indeed, Musk’s attorney, Alex Spiro, loudly opined that it was unreasonable for Twitter’s landlords to expect Twitter to pay rent, since San Francisco was a “shithole.”
So, Alex Spiro is a big time lawyer. One of the biggest. But, I’m pretty sure that not paying your contractually obligated rent because the city is a “shithole” is not how anything fucking works.”

Hasnain says:

Wonder how cities will adapt to the new normal. I for one would love more walkable areas and housing / transit downtown.

“Asking rents for office space will “end the year below pre-pandemic levels” and probably hit their lowest in a decade, according to the city’s latest forecasts. Asking rents in Manhattan offices averaged $75.13 per square foot in April 2023, down 50 cents from a year prior, according to Colliers.

It’s a worry for city officials, who for the last decade have relied on an ever-expanding commercial real estate sector for taxes to pay for schools, cops and trash collection. Commercial property taxes contribute about 20% of the city’s total tax revenues — with office buildings, specifically, contributing 10%. And as those revenues are flattening, the city’s expenses are forecast to keep growing, creating challenges for Mayor Eric Adams’s agenda.”

Hasnain says:

Interesting technical read about a massive recent outage. It was a bit of a bummer that they only went about publishing it when called out about their lack of transparency.

“Another common theme that all teams encountered during the service recovery was the fact that distributed, share-nothing data stores handle massive failures much better than most distributed data stores that require a quorum-based control plane. For example a fleet of independent data nodes with static shard assignment degrades roughly linearly as the number of nodes drops. The same fleet of data nodes, bound together by a quorum will operate without degradation so long as the quorum is met and refuse to operate once it’s not. Of course the quorum-based fleet is a lot easier to manage in the day-to-day, so going one way or another is not an obvious decision, but this outage highlights the need for us to re-examine past choices.”

Hasnain says:

I spent the last half hour (and change) reading this wondrous human interest story interwoven with a history of the war(s), food economics, supply chains, and more. So engrossing and so bizarre at the same time. Super well written. Gotta start with the prelude:

“This is a story about hippopotamuses, as advertised, but it’s also a story about two very complicated and exceptional men. These men were spies. They were also bitter enemies. Each wanted to kill the other and fully expected to feel really good about himself afterward. Eccentric circumstances—circumstances having to do with hippopotamuses—would join these men together as allies and even dear friends. But then, eventually, they’d be driven into opposition again.

Whatever strange bond these two men had, they were loyal to it. They were like repulsive magnets: Some fundamental property of each was perfectly opposed to the core of the other. And yet, somehow throughout their long lives—as several volatile phases of American history tumbled along in the background—they also had a way of continually snapping back together. One of these men was a humble patriot, known for his impeccable integrity. He tried to leave detailed, reliable accounts of what he did and thought and felt. The other, I discovered, was a megalomaniac and a pathological liar.

This is a true story, and a very serious one, even though it’s composed of many details that will seem ludicrous and impossible. Most of those details are irrefutable, though. And while I worked hard to verify the rest, doing so occasionally proved futile. I’d like to try and explain why.

These two men will seem larger than life, but they lived at a time, a hundred years ago, when, I would argue, life in America seemed larger than life—when what was unimaginable still felt feasible and ideas that looked ridiculous could still come true.

That said, this is the story of one idea that looked ridiculous and didn’t come true. The idea was ridiculous. But it was completely reasonable, too.

All I can say is, try to keep that in mind.”

Hasnain says:

“There is a kind of public bloodthirst on the American right and thus among our right-leaning institutions at the moment. The simmering resentment atop which the scum of conservative politics has for so long floated is beginning to boil. I don’t know what this will ultimately mean and I’m leery of historical comparisons.

My unscientific sense, though, is that a worryingly large part of the general population—not even corrupt or prejudiced officials, but civilians who hold no office or public authority—feels emboldened by the way real, credentialed, powerful authority has begun to ostentatiously defer to murderers. Institutions, both the press and the government, are always more plastic than we think they are; they will bend so that they may countenance every kind of evil so long as they can do so in a way that reinforces their positions. Increasingly, these institutions, from the Times to the Journal to New York City’s elected officials, have become comfortable holding up callous, public murder—of leftist protesters, of homeless people, of prisoners of war—as excusable, not just on the basis of unfortunate extenuating circumstances, but in the name of a kind of hateful reverse morality.

Personally, I find myself too often tempted to meet this kind of crazed violence with equally passionate resistance; to go out looking for the fight that is constantly being threatened. But that’s not what I’ve been told to do by a figure no less central to my religious practice as a Christian than Christ. The job is not to administer the beatings, it’s to tend to the beaten.”

Hasnain says:

New anti remote work propaganda just dropped. I wonder if these folks have ever been to a big tech office. It was hard to *not* see any alcohol!

“Bloomberg spoke with a half dozen addiction specialists who treat mostly employed patients. All say that their treatment programs are over-enrolled in the wake of the pandemic, fueled by extended remote or hybrid arrangements that offer a dangerous triad: steady paychecks, proximity to drugs and alcohol out of view from co-workers, and incentive to maintain day-to-day functionality. As a result, undetected drug habits flourished and are only now coming to light as more companies require workers to return to the office.”

Hasnain says:

I had the honor of working with Yann very briefly on a couple of small bugfixes, and always was awed by his genius insights in creating lz4 and then ztsd. Didn’t know about the inspirational story behind it. (And can’t wait for the next gen successor to be fully released).

“Adam: This is the wildest story I’ve ever heard in terms of impact. A marketing professional, a project manager, a couple evenings a week after he bikes home from his job in Paris, starts tweaking a calculator game. And by the end of it, Yann has shifted a whole industry’s approach to data compression and saved billions and billions of dollars.

So the obvious question I have for Yann is how? How can you have that much impact in your career? In your hobby?

Yann: I would say the first advice here is don’t do that for the success. Success is too random and too far away. If someone targets success, it will lose stamina way before reaching that point. So do something because you like it. That’s the inner force that will drive you beyond I would say the normal investment that almost everybody can also do. And I think that’s very important one. So now if you are interested in a domain, keep going at it. And it’s really a small effort regularly in the same direction that brings you very far. I understood that from my mother”

Hasnain says:

Learnt so much from this piece that I wasn’t aware of. From the free food program to a bit more about how the FBI sabotaged them to a lot more about the good work the Panthers did.

“The historian Françoise N Hamlin of Brown University has used the term ‘activist mothering’ to help understand both the work that the women Panthers were doing – and as a reason why their leadership and accomplishments have escaped due recognition. Hamlin explains that they would develop ‘strategies particular to their communities by continuing (or expanding) work … [such as] the nurturing of youth …. from which she could maximise the return on her gendered social position.’ Feminised work is often expected of women, and is among the limited acceptable roles they can inhabit. The Panther women took on leadership roles in realms where they exert authority and expertise, and continued to expand the scope and influence of their work and voice within their community and beyond. But women doing ‘women’s work’ was often taken for granted, and its legacies went uncelebrated.”

Hasnain says:

“If you read newspapers from 1918, when we had the last really big global pandemic, the arguments and the discussions could all be written today. The same types of complaints about face masks, the same types of arguments of, “Sure, it’s happening over there to that town, but it’s not coming here for us, we’re fine. And then, oops, actually, we’re in the middle of a surge.” And this same kind of almost national amnesia about the pandemic—a lack of memorializing, a lack of coming together and saying, “This happened to us, and we should be acknowledging that.” We did not learn the lessons from 1918; we repeated all of the same mistakes. Unless we have a better national conversation about it, to really make everyone aware of what just happened, what worked, what didn’t work, we’re just going to be in exactly the same place the next time a pandemic comes around.”

Hasnain says:

There have been a few thousand takes on this piece already - ranging from “micro services are dead” to “wait Amazon teams are allowed to crap on their serverless product?”. Hot takes aside I found this to be a decent exploration of “make it work” and then “make it efficient”.

“Moving our service to a monolith reduced our infrastructure cost by over 90%. It also increased our scaling capabilities. Today, we’re able to handle thousands of streams and we still have capacity to scale the service even further. Moving the solution to Amazon EC2 and Amazon ECS also allowed us to use the Amazon EC2 compute saving plans that will help drive costs down even further.

Some decisions we’ve taken are not obvious but they resulted in significant improvements. For example, we replicated a computationally expensive media conversion process and placed it closer to the detectors. Whereas running media conversion once and caching its outcome might be considered to be a cheaper option, we found this not be a cost-effective approach.”

Hasnain says:

“FC: On CNN recently, Hinton downplayed the concerns of Timnit Gebru—who Google fired in 2020 for refusing to withdraw a paper about AI’s harms on marginalized people—saying her ideas were not as “existentially serious” as his own. What do you make of that?

MW: I think it’s stunning that someone would say that the harms [from AI] that are happening now—which are felt most acutely by people who have been historically minoritized: Black people, women, disabled people, precarious workers, et cetera—that those harms aren’t existential.

What I hear in that is, “Those aren’t existential to me. I have millions of dollars, I am invested in many, many AI startups, and none of this affects my existence. But what could affect my existence is if a sci-fi fantasy came to life and AI were actually super intelligent, and suddenly men like me would not be the most powerful entities in the world, and that would affect my business.” “

Hasnain says:

Mojo has been pretty exciting to watch (and I need to say hi to my friends there). Need to try it soon!

“But I’d much prefer to use a language that’s as elegant as Python and as fast as expert-written C, allows me to use one language to write everything from the application server, to the model architecture and the installer too, and lets me debug and profile my code directly in the language in which I wrote it.

How would you like a language like that?”

Hasnain says:

Learnt a bunch of cool datastructure tricks from this one.

"The branchless Eytzinger layout is a great option if the data you are searching over is fixed and can be preprocessed to accommodate a faster memory access layout. Because it respects the characteristics of modern CPUs, it is basically one of the fastest ways to search in sorted data when implemented correctly.

Additionally, there are some further ideas like S-trees ([4]) or mixed layout ([2]) that you could try if you’re looking for the best binary search."

Hasnain says:

I keep thinking twitter (Elon) has made its dumbest decision yet and then…

“One former Twitter executive was taken aback by the remark, telling NPR that such a threat should be alarming to any business operating on the site, since it indicates that acquiescing to Musk's every whim may be necessary in order to avoid being impersonated.

For most of its 17-year history, Twitter has had rules that maintained a certain level of order and offered both individuals and organization some control over their presence on the platform.”

Hasnain says:

Great read. Brought back a bit of nostalgia but a lot of food for thought about internet culture and how social media is evolving.

“It is worth remembering that the internet wasn't supposed to be like this. It wasn't supposed to be six boring men with too much money creating spaces that no one likes but everyone is forced to use because those men have driven every other form of online existence into the ground. The internet was supposed to have pockets, to have enchanting forests you could stumble into and dark ravines you knew better than to enter. The internet was supposed to be a place of opportunity, not just for profit but for surprise and connection and delight. Instead, like most everything American enterprise has promised held some new dream, it has turned out to be the same old thing—a dream for a few, and something much more confining for everyone else.”

Hasnain says:

“Dr. Hinton said that when people used to ask him how he could work on technology that was potentially dangerous, he would paraphrase Robert Oppenheimer, who led the U.S. effort to build the atomic bomb: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.”

He does not say that anymore.”