Hasnain says:

“Delving into specific papers, Bloom et al (2013) ran a randomized controlled trial (an RCT) on Indian textile firms, where some firms were randomly chosen to receive management training. The management advice was as simple as “record inventories”, yet this led to staggering increases in productivity – within the first year, treated firms saw a 17% increase in productivity, or a gain of $300,000 in productivity. This gap in productivity persisted, even nine years later on, in a follow-up study. “

Hasnain says:

No wonder the founder was asking for Lina Khan to be fired a few weeks ago. She continues to be my favorite government official

“The complaint cites one 2021 Care ad campaign on a third-party site saying “Childcare jobs from $18/hr,” while at the same time saying on its own website that, “On average, the national pay rate for babysitting jobs” and “The average rate for babysitters on Care.com” was between $13 and $14.25 per hour.”

Hasnain says:

I was somewhat in the general vicinity of this work so it’s really cool to see how it has evolved over time. The lessons in particular are cool

“Initially, we developed Policy Zones for batch-processing systems with some basic use cases. However, we realized that our designs for function-based systems were quite abstract and the adoption for a large-scale use case resulted in significant challenges, consequently, requiring considerable effort to map patterns to customer needs. Furthermore, refining the APIs and building missing operational support made it work effectively end-to-end across multiple systems. Only after addressing these challenges were we able to make it more generic and proceed with integrating Policy Zones across extensive platforms.”

Hasnain says:

“Although it took a while and a good bit of effort, I'm very glad I spent time time to get this bug fixed. It was very unique compared to the kind of development I've done in the past, and it was cool to experience how software gets built at Chromium's scale.

One of the main things motivating me to do this was the knowledge that if I succeeded, code I wrote would be part of an application that eventually makes its way onto millions (billions?) of devices.
Even though the change itself is niche and concerns developer tooling rather than the main browser, that kind of impact is very alluring to me.

Now that I've gained this experience contributing to Chromium, I'll certainly be on the lookout for more bugs that I might be able to fix in the future. I don't think I'll go out of my way to seek them out, though, due to the huge amount of time it takes to tackle the Chromium codebase from scratch.”

Hasnain says:

Another case where I read an article and think “there should be jail time involved here right?”

“Millions of surgeries were conducted across the US and Europe during the years from 2009 to 2013 when those misguided guidelines were in place. One provocative analysis from cardiologists Graham Cole and Darrel Francis estimated that there were 800,000 deaths compared to if the best practices had been established five years sooner. While that exact number is hotly contested, a 27 percent increase in mortality for a common procedure for years on end can add up to an extraordinary death toll.”

Hasnain says:

“Despite the legalization of street food vending at the state level, San Francisco continues to lag behind other California cities in creating a viable pathway for street food vendors to get inspected and go aboveboard. Entry into one of the night markets, a potential game-changer for street vendors, requires so much paperwork and upfront money that it limits access to the chosen few. I doubt folks like the Cambodian ladies at the Stockton market would bother, and San Francisco’s food scene is poorer for it. Notably, New York City’s equivalent to San Francisco’s annual event vendor fee is just $70”

Hasnain says:

“Centrism we are told, is being pro-Israel and pro-business, no matter what. This piece came out while Shapiro was facing criticism from the left for an old essay he wrote in which he called Palestinians too “battle-minded to be able to establish a peaceful homeland of their own”. He has never properly apologized for this, nor will he ever have to, because being racist against Palestinians is a centrist position.

As Orwell wrote, atrocities can be defended, “but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties”. If the Democratic party were to be honest about why it is doing very little to stop the carnage in Gaza and the settlements in the West Bank, the bluntest argument would be along the lines of: “Israel is an important tool in maintaining US imperialism and western interests. The ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is expedient to those interests. Human rights law doesn’t apply to atrocities enabled by the west.” Of course, being pro-ethnic cleansing doesn’t quite square with the do-gooding branding of the Democratic party. Instead, we are bombarded with the idea that massacring children is somehow a centrist and moderate position.”

Hasnain says:

“But what I saw was an ethnocracy, where half the people are first-class citizens, and the other half are something less. And this is a system sponsored and endorsed by the United States of America. The endorsement is not contradictory. For most of its history, America too was an ethnocracy in democratic clothing. The ostensible triumph over that old system, which we call Jim Crow, is one of the most uplifting stories America tells itself, one that has been repeatedly invoked at the DNC. How odd I find it that a people, presently brutalized by a similar system, whose relatives are being erased by that system’s wanton violence, are also being erased from the stage.”

Hasnain says:

“To sum up: the Biden administration’s attempt to stop this predatory industry from skimming money from Americans’ retirement savings is being blocked because the predatory industry itself has paid money to politicians in Congress to help it keep robbing the public. It is also being assisted by a Supreme Court that was purchased at great expense by business interests funding decades worth of right wing legal and lobbying groups. Because this issue touches on issues that can be made to seem esoteric and hard to understand—as soon as you say the word “fiduciary,” it sounds like you are talking about something that requires some serious financial expertise—it has flown under the radar of the general public. That could be remedied somewhat if we just spoke about this issue in plain and direct terms. Republicans who have been paid off are trying to ensure that an industry that exists to rob you can continue robbing you. That is what is happening here.”

Hasnain says:

Long, sobering account from an Israeli historian and world renowned expert on genocide. He goes into both history and the recent past.

“But another part of my apprehension had to do with the fact that my view of what was happening in Gaza had shifted. On 10 November 2023, I wrote in the New York Times: “As a historian of genocide, I believe that there is no proof that genocide is now taking place in Gaza, although it is very likely that war crimes, and even crimes against humanity, are happening. […] We know from history that it is crucial to warn of the potential for genocide before it occurs, rather than belatedly condemn it after it has taken place. I think we still have that time.”

I no longer believe that. By the time I travelled to Israel, I had become convinced that at least since the attack by the IDF on Rafah on 6 May 2024, it was no longer possible to deny that Israel was engaged in systematic war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocidal actions. It was not just that this attack against the last concentration of Gazans – most of them displaced already several times by the IDF, which now once again pushed them to a so-called safe zone – demonstrated a total disregard of any humanitarian standards. It also clearly indicated that the ultimate goal of this entire undertaking from the very beginning had been to make the entire Gaza Strip uninhabitable, and to debilitate its population to such a degree that it would either die out or seek all possible options to flee the territory. In other words, the rhetoric spouted by Israeli leaders since 7 October was now being translated into reality – namely, as the 1948 UN Genocide Convention puts it, that Israel was acting “with intent to destroy, in whole or in part”, the Palestinian population in Gaza, “as such, by killing, causing serious harm, or inflicting conditions of life meant to bring about the group’s destruction”.”

Hasnain says:

““Question everything,” Albert Einstein famously said. Personal creativity and organizational innovation rely on a willingness to seek out novel information. Questions and thoughtful answers foster smoother and more-effective interactions, they strengthen rapport and trust, and lead groups toward discovery. All this we have documented in our research. But we believe questions and answers have a power that goes far beyond matters of performance. The wellspring of all questions is wonder and curiosity and a capacity for delight. We pose and respond to queries in the belief that the magic of a conversation will produce a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Sustained personal engagement and motivation—in our lives as well as our work—require that we are always mindful of the transformative joy of asking and answering questions.”

Hasnain says:

"The pack was very popular and a financial savior for me, and I think these mockups helped a lot. They've been used in hundreds of indie games, even in big games like Nintendo's Cadence of Hyrule, created by local developer Brace Yourself Games."

Hasnain says:

“How well does this scale? We have a couple of big enterprise customers, but one especially well-known customer. Screenshotbot runs on their CI, so we get API requests 100s of times for every single commit and Pull Request. Despite this, we only need a 4-core 16GB machine to serve their requests. (And similar machines for the replicas, mostly running idle.) Even with this, the CPU usage maxes out at 20%, but even then most of that comes from image processing, so we have a lot of room to scale before we need to bump up the number of cores.”

Hasnain says:

Lots of valuable quotes here (especially around the judicious doubt and worry about LLM abuse). But the author’s perspectives seem to match mine. I’ll leave with the conclusion:

“One of the most common retorts I get after showing these examples is some form of the statement “but those tasks are easy! Any computer science undergrad could have learned to do that!” And you know what? That's right. An undergrad could, with a few hours of searching around, have told me how to properly diagnose that CUDA error and which packages I could reinstall. An undergrad could, with a few hours of work, have rewritten that program in C. An undergrad could, with a hours hours of work, have studied the relevant textbooks and taught me whatever I wanted to know about that subject. Unfortunately, I don't have that magical undergrad who will drop everything and answer any question I have. But I do have the language model. And so sure; language models are not yet good enough that they can solve the interesting parts of my job as a programmer. And current models can only solve the easy tasks.

But five years ago, the best an LLM could do was write a plausibly-English sounding paragraph. And we were amazed when they could form coherent ideas from one sentence to the next. Their practical utility was exactly zero. Today, though, they've improved my productivity at the programming aspects of my job by at least 50% on the average project, and have removed enough of the drudgery that I built several things I would never have attempted otherwise.”

Hasnain says:

Looking forward to reading the full detailed analysis of the 200+ page ruling when they come out, because this is one for the history books.

"One of the most significant revelations from the case was the size of Google’s payments to Apple to secure the default search engine spot on iPhone browsers. An expert witness for Google let slip that the company shares 36 percent of search ad revenue from Safari with Apple. In 2022, Google paid Apple $20 billion for the default position.

During closing arguments, Mehta homed in on those payments, wondering how other players in the market could possibly displace Google from that position. “If that’s what it takes for somebody to dislodge Google as the default search engine, wouldn’t the folks that wrote the Sherman Act be concerned about it?”"

Hasnain says:

“Tiny code contests have historically focused on the source code. What makes that problematic is how it incentivizes obfuscation. On the other hand, optimizing for binary size usually results in the source code becoming more elegant. In order to make program files tinier, one must choose data structures and design patterns that are harmonious with the way computers work. Doing that requires us to better understand the nature of the problem.”

Hasnain says:

Can confirm.

“"It is fascinating to see historical figures’ legacy records convey crucial scientific implications to modern scientists even centuries later," said co-author Sabrina Bechet of the Royal Observatory of Belgium. "I doubt if they could have imagined their records would benefit the scientific community much later, well after their deaths. We still have a lot to learn from these historical figures, apart from the history of science itself. In the case of Kepler, we are standing on the shoulders of a scientific giant."”

Hasnain says:

“"It is fascinating to see historical figures’ legacy records convey crucial scientific implications to modern scientists even centuries later," said co-author Sabrina Bechet of the Royal Observatory of Belgium. "I doubt if they could have imagined their records would benefit the scientific community much later, well after their deaths. We still have a lot to learn from these historical figures, apart from the history of science itself. In the case of Kepler, we are standing on the shoulders of a scientific giant."”

Hasnain says:

“Why was Justin able to do this? Because this codebase had no master plan. There was no overarching design the system had to fit into. No expected format for APIs. No documented design system. No architectural review board making sure things were coherent. The app was a complete and utter mess. No one could ever fix it, so no one tried to. What did we do instead? We carved out our own little world of sanity.

This monolithic app, due to sheer necessity, had grown to be a microcosm of nice, small apps around its edges. Each person, when tasked with improving some part of that app, would inevitably give up untangling that web, and find some nice little corner to build new things. And then slowly update links to point to their nice new stuff, orphaning the old.

This may sound like a mess to you. But it was remarkably enjoyable to work in. Gone were the concerns of code duplication. Gone were the concerns of consistency. Gone were the concerns of extensibility. Code was written to serve a use, to touch as little of the area around it as possible, and to be easily replaceable. Our code was decoupled, because coupling it was simply harder.”

Hasnain says:

Isn’t this voter fraud?

“If they agree to submit all that, the system still does not steer them to a voter registration page. Instead, it shows them a “thank you” page.

So that person who wanted help registering to vote? In the end, they got no help at all registering. But they did hand over priceless personal data to a political operation.”

Hasnain says:

“That process involved several surprising steps, including “what’s in my mind the most important idea, which still seems a bit magical to me,” Maynard said. At one point, there was a seemingly obvious step they should have taken to simplify their sum. Instead, they left it in its longer and more complicated form. “We do something that at first sight looks completely stupid. We just refuse to do the standard simplification,” Maynard said. “And this gives up a lot. It means that now we can’t get any easy bound for this sum.”

But in the long run, this turned out to be an advantageous move. “In chess you call it a gambit, where you sacrifice a piece to get a better position on the board,” Maynard said. Guth likened it to playing with a Rubik’s Cube; sometimes you have to undo previous moves and make everything look worse before finding a way to get more colors in the right place.”

Hasnain says:

“The Plague Tale games are a fun and fairly unique mix of survival horror, puzzle solving, and stealth gameplay that is all reliant on the core tech of the not-so-intelligent rats. The same system as described throughout this video was adopted in both A Plague Tale Innocence and Requiem, with the rats in the sequel being more deadly. The rats at better at reacting to light, more likely to attack on the fringes of light sources and can even climb up walls or operate on multiple floors. But as stated, the most impressive element is how they're optimised, now with 300,000 rats being able to pathfind at once. And it's through one simple yet effective piece of AI tech, that the game’s design goals are realised.”