Hasnain says:

“We've seen it all before. So familiar are we with the sight of Beirut exploding, what’s another dozen dead? Another thousand casualties crippling an already crippled healthcare system. Another mother screaming in Arabic as she carries her maimed daughter from a wreckage after a mobile phone blew up in her tiny hand.

What does it matter, so long as its Arabic she’s screaming, right? If you’re marveling at the “audacity” of a terror state’s ability to indiscriminately kill, you should not be surprised when that indiscriminate violence is reciprocated. You might feel differently when the bloodied children are not black, brown, or Muslim.”

Hasnain says:

“In short, four of Maga’s most influential voices are fiftysomething white men with formative experiences in apartheid South Africa. This probably isn’t a coincidence. I say that as a fiftysomething white man whose formative experiences include childhood visits to my extended family in apartheid South Africa. (My parents left Johannesburg before I was born.) We’d swim in my grandparents’ pool while the maid and her grandchildren lived in the garage. These experiences were so shocking, so different from anything I experienced growing up in Europe, that they are my sharpest childhood memories.”

Hasnain says:

This feels like one of those events that’ll change how people think of the world and warfare forever. Cue every security person changing their supply chain security threat model. unconfirmed reports indicate the devices were planted with explosives from the get go; and also seemingly confirmed reports say eg the American university in Beirut replaced all their pagers a couple of weeks ago for “regular maintenance”.

“Pagers used by hundreds of members of the militant group Hezbollah exploded near simultaneously in Lebanon and Syria on Tuesday, killing at least nine people — including an 8-year-old girl — and wounding several thousand, officials said. Hezbollah and the Lebanese government blamed Israel for what appeared to be a sophisticated, remote attack.”

Hasnain says:

The intro is somehow the least surprising and least scandalizing part of the article.

“Neom executives were summoned to the office to manage a crisis: Three workers had recently died toiling on the world’s biggest construction project.

Wayne Borg, a former Hollywood executive hired to run Neom’s media division, expressed frustration over the interruption to his evening.

“A whole bunch of people die so we’ve got to have a meeting on a Sunday night,” he said on a phone call, according to a recording heard by The Wall Street Journal. He said the project’s blue-collar workers from the Indian subcontinent had been “f—ing morons” and “that is why white people are at the top of the pecking order.” “

Hasnain says:

“Something has to change. It begins with fundamentally shifting how we value parenting, recognizing that the work of raising a child is crucial to the health and well-being of all society. This change must extend to policies, programs and individual actions designed to make this vital work easier.”

Hasnain says:

“Earlier this year, President Joe Biden said that “if you harm an American, we will respond.” Yet the Biden Administration has not even condemned my attack. The same was true when two weeks prior Americans were bludgeoned by Israeli settlers. And when a Palestinian American teen was shot and killed in the West Bank in January. And when a Palestinian American boy was shot and falsely imprisoned by Israeli forces last December.

A week ago, meters from where I was shot, Ayşenur Ezgi Eygi, a 26-year-old American activist, was killed at the same weekly protest in Beita. U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken called her killing “unprovoked and unjustified” after the Israeli military said she was “highly likely” hit by IDF stray fire. Biden and Harris both faced criticism in the days after her death for failing to call Eygi’s family, who say they are “deeply offended by the suggestion” that her killing was “unintentional.” They have called for an independent U.S. investigation. None have been announced.

Had the Biden Administration taken my shooting seriously, Ayşenur might still be with us today.”

Hasnain says:

““At least the Brits are willing to call it like it is, which leadership here appears unwilling to do despite being presented with all the same information about Israeli IHL violations,” said a third U.S. official familiar with the discussions. “Leadership misses the fact that if we showed the same moral and legal clarity as the U.K. … it would give us more leverage for a cease-fire deal, not less.””

Hasnain says:

“CRAIG CORRIE: Well, of course, we did call for a U.S. investigation into Rachel’s killing. Let me say that what we’re hearing today, it’s upsetting to our family to hear our State Department again, and I would expect them to say, that they are trying to find out the facts and looking to Israel for that. Israel does not do investigations; they do cover-ups. So, let’s face it, nothing’s going to come out of there that’s going to help these citizens or whoever may be killed in the future. That’s what we’re trying to stop. Our family worked for an investigation into Rachel’s killing, and we wanted some consequences out of that. And we hoped — even though we didn’t know the names of the people that would be killed in the future, we hoped that that would stop and it would not happen.

I think, at this point, yes, U.S. has to do an investigation, but there needs to be consequences. As Jonathan pointed out, these are American weapons that are being used. That’s against U.S. law, and it should be stopped. I know from working with members of Congress and their staff, working with the State Department, that under the Leahy Law, usually they’re asking for proof that it was a U.S. weapon. If I write a check, I don’t need proof about what’s going wrong. I need people to cooperate and determine that it’s not our money that’s being used that way. Israel does not do that, to my knowledge. So, we also need to look for international help here. I think that the U.N., the International Criminal Courts, they’re places that need to get involved. But we’re just sick and tired of hearing platitudes from the State Department. And these are people we’ve met. We have met with Antony Blinken before he became secretary of state. He’s a decent person. But there needs to be consequences, and there needs to be consequences that are enforced by the entire U.S. government and the international community.”

Hasnain says:

“Researchers on political extremism have highlighted a surge in violence targeting Palestinians since Oct. 7, including the murder of a 6-year-old boy near Chicago and a shooting that wounded three college students in Vermont, both of which were motivated by the victims’ heritage, authorities said. Advocacy groups have also documented waves of harassment and vandalism targeting Muslims and Jews at their homes, businesses and places of worship.”

Hasnain says:

“Coincidentally, there was an issue created just today on the Zig repository to add a select(2) wrapper to the standard library motivated by the /dev/tty limitation on macOS. It links to this wonderful blog post which I would have loved to find sooner.”

Hasnain says:

“When it comes to designing a system with GC, don’t count out conservative stack scanning; the tradeoffs don’t obviously go one way or the other, and conservative scanning might be the right engineering choice for your system.”

Hasnain says:

“These updates should be backwards compatible with any other version of Visual Studio 2022. It would be madness to make a change to Visual Studio 2022 that breaks compatibility with Visual Studio 2022's own runtime libraries. However, Microsoft did exactly that.

In Visual Studio 2022 v17.10.0, Microsoft made a non-backwards compatible change to std::mutex::lock. This was reported to Microsoft, however, the issue report was marked as "Closed - Not a Bug". Apparently this was intended!”

Hasnain says:

“It’s like walking into a movie halfway through—you can’t understand the plot because you missed the beginning.

The same goes for learning complex subjects like math, CS, whatever.”

Hasnain says:

Chock full of golden advice here. Bookmarking for the future

“You are lucky if 99.999% of the time network is not a problem.
ACID has many meanings.
Each database has different consistency and isolation capabilities.
Optimistic locking is an option when you can’t hold a lock.
There are anomalies other than dirty reads and data loss.
My database and I don’t always agree on ordering.
Application-level sharding can live outside the application.
AUTOINCREMENT’ing can be harmful.
Stale data can be useful and lock-free.
Clock skews happen between any clock sources.
Latency has many meanings.
Evaluate performance requirements per transaction.
Nested transactions can be harmful.
Transactions shouldn’t maintain application state.
Query planners can tell a lot about databases.
Online migrations are complex but possible.
Significant database growth introduces unpredictability.”

Hasnain says:

“Update, Sept. 5, 3:30pm: A reader has claimed that the default Starlink SSID is actually... "STINKY." This seemed almost impossible to believe, but Elon Musk in fact tweeted about it in 2022, Redditors have reported it in the wild, and back in 2022 (thanks, Wayback Machine), the official Starlink FAQ said that the device's "network name will appear as 'STARLINK' or 'STINKY' in device WiFi settings." (A check of the current Starlink FAQ, however, shows that the default network name now is merely "STARLINK.")

In other words, not only was this asinine conspiracy a terrible OPSEC idea, but the ringleaders didn't even change the default Wi-Fi name until they started getting questions about it. Yikes.”

Hasnain says:

One can hope

““One goal of this research, and vaccinology in general, is to work toward a universal vaccine that can generate antibodies and create an immune response with broad protection to a rapidly mutating virus,” said Will Voss, a recent Ph.D. graduate in cell and molecular biology in UT’s College of Natural Sciences, who co-led the study.”

Hasnain says:

Can confirm greppability is underrated, in logs too.

“When I’m working on maintaining an unfamiliar codebase, I will spend a lot of time grepping the code base for strings. Even in projects exclusively written by myself, I have to search a lot: function names, error messages, class names, that kind of thing. If I can’t find what I’m looking for, it’ll be frustrating in the best case, or in the worst case lead to dangerous situations where I’ll assume a thing is not needed anymore, since I can’t find any references to it in the code base. From these situations, I’ve derived some rules you can apply to keep your code base greppable”

Hasnain says:

“This notion lies at the heart of what the late British physicist Peter Higgs, namesake of the Higgs field, and his competitors pointed out in the 1960s: that one field can stiffen other fields, thereby permitting their ripples to vibrate in place with a resonant frequency, and thus giving their particles mass.”

Hasnain says:

“I think a lot of the patterns in MiniJinja are useful for projects outside of MiniJinja. Quite is quite a bit more hidden in it that I have talked about before such as how MiniJinja is abusing serde. If you have a need for a Jinja2 compatible template engine I would love if you get some use out of it. If you're curious about how to build a runtime and object system in Rust, you might also find some utility in the codebase.

I myself learned quite a bit about what creative API design can look like in Rust by building it. At this point I am incredibly happy with how the public API of the engine shaped out to be. The engine is extensively documented both internally and publicly and you can read all about it in the API docs.”

Hasnain says:

Decade old but still super relevant and the first time I’m reading it

“I’ve often regretted that I hadn’t kept fighting with the lawyers, working harder to balance all the legal requirements (many of them well-intentioned but designed for a top-down command and control culture) with my vision of how a company really ought to work. I focused my energy on product, marketing, finance, and strategy, and didn’t put enough time in to make sure I was building the organization I wanted.

Reading recently about the HR practices at Valve and Github, so reminiscent of early O’Reilly, I’m struck by the need to redefine how organizations work in the 21st century. I’m not saying that Valve or GitHub’s approach is for everyone, but they indicate a deep engagement with the problem space, and fresh approaches to the questions of how to manage an organization. Google’s People Analytics may be a more scalable application of new HR thinking to a company of serious size.”

Hasnain says:

“The only solution to this is to think early and often about the systems of accountability you have to set up. This is much, much harder than micromanaging details, because every system of accountability you set up will eventually be gamed. So in addition to accountability, you need to foster a strong, ethical company culture that encourages transparency while allowing for some mistakes.”

Hasnain says:

“Founders seeking to internalize Graham’s advice should recast it by asking themselves how they can foster mutual trust – and how they can build the systems that allow trust to be strengthened even as the team expands. For us at Oxide, writing is the foundation upon which we build that trust. Others may land on different mechanisms, but the goal of founders should be the same: build the trust that allows a team to kick a Jobsian dent in the universe!”

Hasnain says:

Great technical read as always. But I couldn’t help but chuckle at this bit

“Now, let’s explore potential optimizations. One of the first adjustments you might consider is disabling locale support. All the formatting in {fmt} is locale-independent by default (which breaks with the C++’s tradition of having wrong defaults)”

Hasnain says:

“The way managers are taught to run companies seems to be like modular design in the sense that you treat subtrees of the org chart as black boxes. You tell your direct reports what to do, and it's up to them to figure out how. But you don't get involved in the details of what they do. That would be micromanaging them, which is bad.”

Hasnain says:

“What might it mean for knowledge workers to fanatically pursue virtuosity in these fundamental skills, in the way that athletes seek in their fundamental skills?”