Hasnain says:

"Guthrie, who is a hunter, says he wasn’t deterred by the thousands of years the bison had aged, nor the prospect of getting sick. “That would take a very special kind of microorganism [to make me sick],” he says. “And I eat frozen meat all the time, of animals that I kill or my neighbors kill. And they do get kind of old after three years in the freezer.”"

Hasnain says:

"I think this is a very interesting topic, that can serve as an introduction to understand other dynamic languages such as Javascript, where similar ideas are used for exploitation. For this reason, this is an in-depth explaination of the vulnerability, so that it can be used by others as a reference to understand how these attacks work."

Hasnain says:

"Shipping slowly should merit a post-mortem as much as breaking production does. Our industry doesn’t run like that, but that doesn’t mean you can’t personally follow the north star of Shipping Fast."

Hasnain says:

"Importantly, you could also describe XAES-256-GCM entirely in terms of a standard NIST SP 800-108r1 KDF and the standard NIST AES-256-GCM AEAD (NIST SP 800-38D, FIPS 197)."

Hasnain says:

“There was no vote Ruth Bader Ginsburg cast and no decision she authored that was as consequential as her decision not to retire. ♦”

Hasnain says:

I don’t get why he had to brag about it online. He had gotten away with it!

“The investigation into Anand started after a moderator on the social media site Reddit notified Lehigh University of a post that was titled, "I have built my life and career on lies," officials explained.”

Hasnain says:

““Dictatorship doesn’t happen suddenly. It’s chipped away piece by piece. That’s why we need to stop it at the beginning,” said Hamadmad, who remembers asking to be read her Miranda rights, to which the officer replied, “No, I don’t have to.” Unbeknownst to her at the time, the Supreme Court had silently rolled back many of the protections guaranteed by the famous 1966 Miranda v. Arizona case in 2022.

“You can sense dictatorship when you’ve been through it, and I could sense it in that moment.””

Hasnain says:

“ More than 60 artists and participants boycotted this year’s festival over SXSW’s ties to defense groups that supply Israeli weapons in the ongoing Israel-Hamas war. The U.S. Army was a “super-sponsor” of the 2024 festival, and Collins Aerospace, a company under defense conglomerate RTX Corporation (f.k.a. Raytheon), also participated. “A music festival should not include war profiteers,” said Squirrel Flower, one of the first artists to boycott. “I refuse to be complicit in this and withdraw my art and labor in protest.”

SXSW previously defended its military ties amid this year’s controversy. The festival called the defense industry “a proving ground” for new technology and said working with the Army “is part of our commitment to bring forward ideas that shape our world.” The Army said it was “proud” to sponsor SXSW, which it called “a unique opportunity.””

Hasnain says:

“Looking at the projected heat increases for St. Louis, Hoffman said it will take a lot more than just air conditioning to keep the city cool. St. Louis and other cities across the country will have to mitigate heat, through increasing shade, green spaces and water features, while also managing heat by preparing for increased emergency room visits and establishing plans for water distribution and heat education materials.”

Hasnain says:

Insert “aw shit, here we go again” meme.

“Microsoft now has a chance to respond to the accusations, formally known as a statement of objections, before the commission makes its final decision. The company could face a fine worth up to 10% of its annual global revenue, or be forced to carry out “remedies” to satisfy the competition concerns.”

Hasnain says:

I don’t quite like the word for this but I’ll take it. Sometimes it’s good to just peace out and not think about anything you know?

“Still, West says that a recent trip from London from Bali (20 hours) taught him that there are benefits to rawdogging beyond its meditative nature. His best ideas, he says, have come from the time spent locked into the flight map, just thinking. “I'm there like, Oh, we're flying over Afghanistan. Oh, we're going at 36,000 feet instead of 37,” he says. “Or like, Oh, I think that's a good idea as a new series on my TikTok.” The experience left him refreshed. “When I saw my mom [upon landing], she was like, ‘You have so much energy,’” he recalls. “And I'm like, I feel fine. I feel recharged. I feel like I've been able to have time to myself.””

Hasnain says:

“Resources that are external to Rust really work best if they are wrapped at the lowest level, so that destructors can run automatically. Instead of freeing things by hand when you think it's right, let the compiler do it automatically when it knows it's right. In this case, wrapping xmlEntityPtr with a newtype and adding an impl Drop is all that is needed for the rest of the code to look like it's handling a normal, automatically-managed Rust object.”

Hasnain says:

“I’ve noticed I’m often more willing to revisit long-standing design decisions than others I talk to. I think it comes from having been present when the decisions were made. I know most of them were close calls and often began with “let’s try this for a while and see how it feels…”. Well, I think it comes from that and a certain predilection for recklessness. “

Hasnain says:

“Sometimes people observe at this point that the performance of Node.js 18 was already fine: 1.3 GB/s is plenty fast. It might be fast enough, but you must take into account that we are measuring a single operation that is likely part of a string of operations. In practice, you do not just ingest base64 data. You do some work before and some work after. Maybe you decoded a JPEG image that was stored in base64, and next you might need to decode the JPEG and push it to the screen. And so forth. To have an overall fast system, every component should be fast.”

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking for the future.

“Tauri often feels like the training wheels on a bicycle. It gets you started, but after a while you can't go any further without replacing it.

The positives are:

It's Rust, so we get to keep all our code even if we completely ditch Tauri next year.
Those training wheels are very nice to have on a new cross-platform GUI project.
It's gratis and libre, so you can't beat it on price.
The final word is, Tauri is good, try it out.”

Hasnain says:

“Digging through CPython was a satisfying peek behind the curtain on a tool I’ve used for years. It reminds me how much is hidden in day-to-day Python programming, and gave me an excuse to learn a lot more about how the program actually runs at a lower level. It’s also great to get more familiar with powerful profiling tools like py-spy, speedscope, and Valgrind. I hope you enjoyed following the journey!”

Hasnain says:

Like I mean if you’re that rich you’re definitely not hurting for *this* amount of money. Sigh.

“Household staff were paid a salary of between 220 and 400 Swiss francs (£195-£350) a month, far below what they could otherwise expect to earn in Switzerland. “They’re profiting from the misery of the world,” Bertossa told the court.”

Hasnain says:

:(

“The bus that was arranged to take him to Arafat on Saturday filled up fast, so he paid $400 for another ride. But the police stopped that bus from transporting unpermitted pilgrims, forcing him to walk for miles.

Kamal last heard from his father eight hours later when he reached Namira Mosque in Arafat for midday prayers; after that, his phone was off. Relatives in Saudi Arabia checked area hospitals but it wasn’t until Tuesday that they learned Kamal’s father had died. His name appeared on an online list of the deceased without indicating a cause.”

Hasnain says:

“Alternatively, by classifying themselves as remote, workers agree they can no longer be promoted or hired into new roles within the company.

Business Insider claims it has seen internal Dell tracking data that reveals nearly 50 percent of the workforce opted to accept the consequences of staying remote, undermining Dell's plan to restore its in-office culture.”

Hasnain says:

[ insert phrasing that would probably get me banned from Facebook ]

“The mother reported jumping into the pool to save her children. According to the mother, her 6-year-old-son was able to escape, but her petite 3-year-old daughter was unable. The alleged attacker snatched off the mother’s head scarf and used it to beat the mother as well as kicking her to keep her away while forcing her daughter’s head underwater.

Mrs. H stated that an African American man helped rescue her daughter from the attacker and more people gathered and witnessed. Cuffed and taken away by the police officer, the attacker reportedly shouted to a bystander woman who was calming the mother down “Tell her I will kill her, and I will kill her whole family.””

Hasnain says:

“Since mid 2023 we've been working on a framework for LLM assisted vulnerability research embodying these principles, with a particular focus on automating variant analysis. This project has been called "Naptime" because of the potential for allowing us to take regular naps while it helps us out with our jobs. Please don't tell our manager.”

Hasnain says:

More Lina Khan Ws

“According to the complaint, when consumers purchase a subscription through the company’s website, Adobe pushes consumers to its “annual paid monthly” subscription plan, pre-selecting it as a default. Adobe prominently shows the plan’s “monthly” cost during enrollment, but it buries the early termination fee (ETF) and its amount, which is 50 percent of the remaining monthly payments when a consumer cancels in their first year. Adobe’s ETF disclosures are buried on the company’s website in small print or require consumers to hover over small icons to find the disclosures.”

Hasnain says:

“Since the protests began on campuses throughout the United States, I have been struck by the verbal contortions many writers have gone through to avoid engaging with the gravity of Israel’s assault on Gaza—one of the most brutal, punitive military campaigns in modern history—and with the clarity of the students’ moral outrage. If you are in this country, and you have successfully ignored the images of children, dead and living, being pulled out from rubble in Gaza, of people being operated on without anaesthetic, of bodies torn limb from limb, of babies removed from incubators and left to die, of embryos destroyed in fertility clinics, of bodies hanging from buildings, of mothers and fathers carrying pieces of their children in plastic bags, of friends walking together struck and killed with precision missiles, you might get the impression from much of what you read that a woke mob has been flinging words like “colonialist” around indiscriminately, aggressing American Jewish students, and intimidating all those who oppose their views into silence.

It has been startling to me to read so many writers lamenting the speech of pro-Palestine protesters in the US compared with this actual violence—tantamount, according to numerous experts, to the crime of genocide. Such essays frequently describe speech as being either threatening (from the Palestinian side) or under threat (on the anti-Palestinian side).”

Hasnain says:

“Emily Bell says Lewis may be finding it hard to adapt to American values, despite his time at The Wall Street Journal — noting his patron there, Murdoch, was born in Australia and trained in Britain.

In the U.K., Bell says, newspapers are largely national in scope and engage in a ferocious battle for paying readers, advertisers and influence. Murdoch is among the most combative.

"In Britain, there are much more incestuous relationships, with much greater alignment of power rather than a genuine interest in actually holding power to account," Bell says. "And I think, if you bring that to The Washington Post, then I think you're going to see a lot of damage.”

Hasnain says:

“After rolling out this change, we saw a significant improvement in query runtimes for bigger, more complex environments, including ones with more than 2,000 services and on the order of 100,000 events per second flowing into our system. Median query duration in situations like these started at around 20s (a customer experience we were certainly not proud of!) and decreased to around 0.2 seconds. That’s two orders of magnitude and well within our internal query performance SLOs.

Additionally, this layer of abstraction affords us a lot more freedom to add more features to Honeycomb without worrying as much about the implications of our data model on query performance, since the two concepts are now (mostly) independent concerns. And finally, we’re brimming with ideas about how to leverage this new model to continue to improve query performance!”

Hasnain says:

sigh. First the Pakistani polio vaccine shenanigans, and now this. The pentagon does not shy away from opportunities to kill people.

““I’m sure that there are lots of people who died from COVID who did not need to die from COVID,” she said.

To implement the anti-vax campaign, the Defense Department overrode strong objections from top U.S. diplomats in Southeast Asia at the time, Reuters found. Sources involved in its planning and execution say the Pentagon, which ran the program through the military’s psychological operations center in Tampa, Florida, disregarded the collateral impact that such propaganda may have on innocent Filipinos.

“We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective,” said a senior military officer involved in the program. “We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.””

Hasnain says:

““I really do think it’s very likely that we will, at some time, it’s not a question of if, it’s more of a question of when we will have a bird flu pandemic,” Redfield said.
He also noted that bird flu has a “significant mortality” when it enters humans compared to COVID-19. Redfield predicts the mortality is “probably somewhere between 25 and 50 percent mortality.” NewsNation noted that the death rate for COVID was 0.6 percent.”

Hasnain says:

I feel seen.

“When I joined Graphite, there were almost no tests in the entire codebase. Out of the team of five engineers, three had previously worked at Meta — and had internalized the poor testing culture practiced there.”

Hasnain says:

“That Biden has elevated these claims speaks to either a corrupted game of outrage telephone, or intentionally disingenuous misframing to denigrate protests that rightfully criticize his policies on Gaza. Regardless, we will likely see people with an incentive to neutralize protests for Palestine leap on this opportunity, issuing a new round of policies to crack down on constitutionally protected First Amendment activity.”

Hasnain says:

Surprised immunity debt is still the leading theory when so many studies show COVID screws the immune system.

“The resulting research, based on data collected from more than 60 organizations and public health agencies, shows that 44 countries and territories have reported at least one infectious disease resurgence that’s at least ten times worse than the pre-pandemic baseline.
The post-Covid global surge of illnesses — viral and bacterial, common and historically rare — is a mystery that researchers and scientists are still trying to definitively explain. The way Covid lockdowns shifted baseline immunities is a piece of the puzzle, as is the pandemic’s hit to overall vaccine administration and compliance. Climate change, rising social inequality and wrung-out health-care services are contributing in ways that are hard to measure.”

Hasnain says:

“You might wonder about the impact of these changes on Rust’s complexity. Certainly they grow the set of things the type system can express. But in my mind they, like NLL before them, fall into that category of changes that will actually make using Rust feel simpler overall.
To see why, put yourself in the shoes of a user today who has written any one of the “obviously correct” programs we’ve seen in this post”

Hasnain says:

“i considered you to be my friend, how could you do this to me?

Hi Lucas, I'm not judging you. We can still be friends. But we can be better friends if you stop using notebooks.”

Hasnain says:

Great read as always from Charity.

“The bottleneck we face is hiring, not training

The bottleneck we face now is not our ability to train up new junior engineers and give them skills. Nor is it about juniors learning to hustle harder; I see a lot of solid, well-meaning advice on this topic, but it’s not going to solve the problem. The bottleneck is giving them their first jobs. The bottleneck consists of companies who see them as a cost to externalize, not an investment in their—the company’s—future.

After their first job, an engineer can usually find work. But getting that first job, from what I can see, is murder. It is all but impossible—if you didn’t graduate from a top college, and you aren’t entering the feeder system of Big Tech, then it’s a roll of the dice, a question of luck or who has the best connections. It was rough before the chimera of “Generative AI can replace junior engineers” rose up from the swamp. And now…oof.

Where would you be, if you hadn’t gotten into tech when you did?

I know where I would be, and it is not here.

The internet loves to make fun of Boomers, the generation that famously coasted to college, home ownership, and retirement, then pulled the ladder up after them while mocking younger people as snowflakes. “Ok, Boomer” may be here to stay, but can we try to keep “Ok, Staff Engineer” from becoming a thing?”

Hasnain says:

“Unusual” relationships? They should just outright call this sexual harassment as I don’t see how it can be any different given the power differential here.

“Elon Musk had a sexual relationship with a former SpaceX intern, who he later hired onto his executive team, according to The Wall Street Journal. He also had a sexual relationship with a second employee. And a third woman alleged that Musk asked her several times to have his children; she refused. He then denied her a raise and complained about her performance.”

Hasnain says:

That diagram is something else.

“Days later, Rush received an even more pointed warning from Boeing’s Mark Negley, who had stayed in contact with the CEO after he helped with a preliminary design. Negley had recently carried out an analysis of Spencer Composites’ hull based on information Rush had shared. He did not mince words when sharing his findings, which WIRED is reporting for the first time. “We think you are at a high risk of a significant failure at or before you reach 4,000 meters. We do not think you have any safety margin,” he wrote in an email on March 30. “Be cautious and careful.”

Negley provided a graph charting the strain on the submersible against depth. It shows a skull and crossbones in the region below 4,000 meters.”

Hasnain says:

“Notably, our adoption rate, calculated as the number of files that our codemod ran on divided by the total number of files converted to RTL, reached approximately 64%. This adoption rate highlights the significant utilization of our codemod tool by the frontend developers who were the primary consumers, resulting in substantial time savings. “

Hasnain says:

The more I read about this case and what’s happened these last 2 days the more I keep losing my mind

“Georgia State University law professor Anthony Kreis said Glanville’s hostile reaction to Steel’s valid concerns about the meeting was shocking.

“Judges cannot respond by unduly taking their feelings out against an attorney like Judge Glanville did yesterday,” Kreis said. “Frankly, I was surprised that Judge Glanville didn’t take a step back all day to reconsider what he was doing or at least pump the brakes.””

Hasnain says:

"libriscv is a mature RISC-V emulator that is currently being used in game engines. As far as I know, it is the only emulator that focuses solely on latency, and provides specialized solutions and tools to accomplish fast in-and-out function calls wrapped around a safe sandbox. It has much lower latencies than gold standard emulators. It is also among the fastest interpreters right now."

Hasnain says:

Worth reading in full - especially where the author calls out (rightly, IMO) that Israel has lost the moral war amongst people that have a conscience. More so in light of today’s events.

“The violence will not cease unless the US cuts off the delivery of arms and forces Israel’s hand. This isn’t likely to happen anytime soon: Netanyahu is due to address Congress on 24 July, after receiving an unctuous, bipartisan invitation to share his ‘vision for defending democracy, combating terror and establishing a just and lasting peace in the region’. Biden’s call for a ceasefire has been met with another humiliating rejection by Netanyahu, who knows that the administration isn’t about to suspend military aid or observe any of its own ‘red lines’. But the encampment movement, and the growing dissent among progressive Democratic leaders from Rashida Tlaib to Bernie Sanders, foreshadows a future in which Washington will no longer provide weapons and diplomatic cover for Israel’s crimes. Whether Palestinians will be able to hold onto their lands until that day, in the face of the settler zealots and ethnic cleansers who have captured the Israeli state, remains to be seen.”

Hasnain says:

“Patten is less hopeful. “When I discussed it in Israel I did not get any positive feedback,” she explains. “The ball is in the court of the government of Israel.” Angered by its stance, the families of some of those killed and taken hostage on October 7 are taking their complaint to the International Criminal Court, despite Israel’s refusal to engage with that body on a state level. In the meantime, Patten has seen her findings instrumentalised by both sides: the denialists who focus on the evidentiary failings in Israel’s version of events, and those who have used the claims in support of the brutal campaign being visited on Gaza and its civilian population. “On one hand we have the fog of war, and that often silences crimes of sexual violence. But we have also seen in history instances where sexual violence can be weaponised,” she told reporters. “Truth is the only path to peace.””

Hasnain says:

“To expand on the above successes toward these next generation capabilities, the community of practitioners and researchers working in this topic would benefit from common benchmarks to help move the field towards practical engineering tasks. So far, benchmarks have been focused mostly around code generation (e.g., HumanEval). In an enterprise setting, however, benchmarks for a wider range of tasks could be particularly valuable, e.g., code migrations and production debugging. Some benchmarks, such as one for bug resolution (e.g., SWEBench), and prototypes targeting those benchmarks (e.g., from Cognition AI) have been published. We encourage the community to come together to suggest more benchmarks to span a wider range of software engineering tasks.”

Hasnain says:

“The US-based famine early warning system network (Fews Net) said it was “possible, if not likely” that famine began in northern Gaza in April. Two UN organisations said more than 1 million people were “expected to face death and starvation” by mid-July.”

Hasnain says:

“After a few decades of programming, I've learned that sooner or later, there will be errors in your data. Either it's a clerical error, or the end-user mistyped, or there was a data conversion error when importing from an external system. Or even data conversion errors within the same system, as it goes through upgrades and migrations.

Your system should be designed to allow corrections to data. This includes corrections of external keys, such as chassis numbers, government IDs, etc. This means that you can't use such keys as database keys in your own system.”

Hasnain says:

“As a business owner, there’s nothing quite like the joy and misery of a full store. Joy, because its an indication of a successful business. Misery, because a larger store would have been able to serve more customers. The queue out the door is turning people away, and with those people go their business. Opening a second location could take months, as could adding space. The opportunity is slipping away.

A smart business needs to be correctly scaled. A hundred thousand square feet is too much for a taco truck. All that space is expensive, and distracting. Fifty square feet is too few for a supermarket. Folks can barely get into the door. A pedestrian bridge and a train bridge are built differently. Scale matters, both up and down.

This isn’t a hard idea. It’s right at the soul of what engineering aims to achieve as a field. The smartest thing that new engineers can do is focus on the needs of their businesses. Both now and in the future. Learn what drives the costs and scalability needs of your business. Know how it makes money. Understand the future projections, and the risks that come with them. Ignore the memes and strong opinions.”

Hasnain says:

Wonder if Satya will cut his own pay now

“But given the sheer amount of data that Recall scrapes, the minimal safeguards Microsoft has put in place to protect that database once a malicious user has access to your PC, and the fact that many PC users never touch the default settings, the risks to user data seem far higher than the potential benefits of this feature.

Microsoft has struggled with security and privacy in its products. Not even a month ago, CEO Satya Nadella pledged to make security the most important thing at the company, following multiple high-profile data breaches and poorly handled information disclosures. Executive pay is being tied in part to security; rank and file employees are being told to “do security,” even when “faced with the tradeoff between security and another priority,” Nadella said. To launch Recall with such obviously exploitable security holes flies in the face of that directive.”

Hasnain says:

Worth a read.

“The blame, I eventually realized, also belongs to people we might call “good liberals.”

By 1980, baby boomers were in their first decade of homeownership in places such as Silicon Valley and the New York City suburbs of Westchester County. They rapidly became NIMBYs, vehemently opposing affordable housing in their neighborhoods. Many were Clinton Democrats. They went on to plant “Black Lives Matter” signs in their lawns. The message was hollow: We support you; just don’t live near us.

Boomers, especially if they were white, got to buy houses, and then they zoned everyone else out. They watched their lawns and home equity grow. I was one of them.”

Hasnain says:

"Muybridge’s accomplishment was reported widely throughout the world, and many began to hail Muybridge as a photographic wizard. When it began to appear that Muybridge was stealing all the limelight, Stanford tried to discredit him. In the book Horse in Motion: as Shown by Instantaneous Photography, written by Stanford’s friend and horseman J. D. B. Stillman, Muybridge was mentioned merely as a Stanford employee in a technical appendix. Subsequently, the Britain's Royal Society of Arts, which earlier had offered to finance further photographic studies by Muybridge of animal movement, withdrew the funding. Muybridge ended up suing Stanford, accusing him of wrecking his reputation. But the lawsuit was thrown out of court."

Hasnain says:

I think the author has drunk the AI kool-aid a bit too much, but there's some interesting insights in here.

"Text is becoming something new, that’s what I mean.

We’re inventing the camera and Photoshop simultaneously, and all their cultural repurcussions, and to begin with this means new apps with new user interfaces, and where it goes after that I have no idea."

Hasnain says:

Looks like NYU also took their site down. Sigh..

“In November, human rights lawyer Rabea Eghbariah was set to be the first Palestinian published in the Harvard Law Review. Then his essay was killed.
Today, he became the first in the Columbia Law Review.
Then the Board of Directors took the whole site down.”

Hasnain says:

“We cannot build movements for solidarity and abundance if we do not fight against the carceral state—it will always stand against us. In tandem with the Israel Defense Forces, police crush dissent and uphold the racial capitalist system. If we do not escalate against them, we will not survive. To flourish and to build a world beyond the nationalist death drive requires us to reject the illusion that cops and prisons provide safety or serve the public, to stop their ever-growing plunder of public resources—and to abolish the police entirely.”

Hasnain says:

Yay malicious compliance.

“Oxford City Council said the European Union flag required planning consent following post-Brexit legislation.
Ms Bearder said she has now told the authority she is flying the flag of the Council of Europe, which is identical and does not require consent.
She served as a Member of the European Parliament for South East England from 2009 until 2020 when the UK left the European Union (EU).”

Hasnain says:

“My favorite observation about this technique, due to a Reddit comment by Bob Nystrom, is that it essentially reinvents the idea of a bytecode interpreter. The Expr structs are bytecode instructions, and they contain variable references encoded as u32s. You could make this interpreter even better by swapping out our simple state table for some kind of stack, and then it would really be no different from a bytecode interpreter you might design from first principles. I just think it’s pretty nifty that “merely” changing our AST data structure led us directly from the land of tree walking to the land of bytecode.”

Hasnain says:

“We hear a lot of talk and speculation about why young people in America are so passionate on the topic of Palestine. From the students I was listening to today, the connection is clear. They see in Gaza the destruction of heritage, the obliteration of knowledge, the assault on institutions of learning. Far from seeming like a world away, it seems like the world in front of them. There’s been an assault upon the obligation of each generation to pass on to the next generation the intellectual legacy that was passed on to it, and whether the site of that assault is Gaza or the New York City school system, the problem is systemic. For people who are coming of age now, it’s also personal.”