Hasnain says:

“In northern Gaza, cut off by Israeli troops from the rest of the territory, hundreds of thousands of people are reduced to waiting for hours for charity-kitchen food that runs out too soon and to digging boreholes for water to drink, unsanitary though it might be.

There is never enough.”

Hasnain says:

“Ms. Hui said that being separated from her family was the hardest part. Her 14-year-old son was upset that she missed his middle-school graduation. Her daughter told her that one of her school friends offered to adopt Ms. Hui, so she could stay in the country.

During one call, her children tried to cheer up Ms. Hui by telling her about “Carol Day.” She said she was stunned to learn about the outpouring of support.

“I didn’t know they loved me,” she said.”

Hasnain says:

Glad the more mainstream media is waking up here. But it is too little too late, and I half wonder if it’s not for reputation laundering so folks can say “we were always against this.”

Now if only world leaders would listen.

“Words matter because they determine action. When we avoid naming a genocide for what it is, we become complicit in allowing it to continue. Terms like “humanitarian crisis” or even “war crimes” can function as euphemisms that fall short of triggering the moral and legal imperatives that genocide demands. The power of naming isn’t some academic exercise; it’s practical. It determines whether the international community mobilizes to stop atrocities or simply manages their aftermath.
There was a time when I would have cautioned against using a word like “genocide” too freely, worried about diluting its meaning. But we are well past that now. Shielding people from uncomfortable truths is self-defeating. Words have meaning, and they should be used when they describe reality. Otherwise, we’re in denial, and atrocities at this scale shouldn’t be denied.
Israel’s brutalization of the Palestinian population in Gaza has gone on too long. These are unspeakable — and, more important, indefensible — crimes. We cannot be complicit in minimizing them or pretending that they are not happening. Because they are. Enough.”

Hasnain says:

“So much of life and work is drudgery such that when you see something positive, someone taking initiative, someone with talent or potential doing something with their skills, how can you not feel an overwhelming urge to cheer them on and hope to see more of it? Hope to see it develop?

What's more, I want to be around people who are trying new things and improving themselves. I want to be around people who celebrate. So I in turn try new things and work to improve myself and I celebrate the people around me.

This energy is infectious. And I genuinely think even a single person in a group celebrating publicly changes the group dynamic.”

Hasnain says:

“Harper Reed, another longtime programmer and blogger who was the chief technology officer of former President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, agreed that career advancement for engineers could be an issue in an A.I. world. But he cautioned against being overly precious about the value of deeply understanding one’s code, which is no longer necessary to ensure that it works.”

Hasnain says:

This resonated a lot with me and is also why I don’t use AI for writing. I think, therefore I am. Can’t give that up.

“Rule of thumb: use AI on repetitive tasks or where the answer is absolute. If you’re thinking hard in the realm of ambiguity and human behavior, that’s learning how to manage, and you can’t afford to offload it.”

Hasnain says:

“All a developer has to do is realize what made old games last forever; and maybe he’ll end up the next Notch. After all, Minecraft wasn’t an AAA game, it was literally the biggest indie success story of all time. If Minecraft didn’t have its extensive mod community or player-hosted servers, it probably would have never been successful.

The problem is; with few exceptions (Nintendo, Bethesda, etc.) the mainstream video game industry does not want to make games that last. They only want to make mere slop with an expiration date to sell as many copies as possible before it piles up at GameStop for $3 a copy. They don’t care, because they assume you’ll be plopping down an $80 preorder to get next year’s game.”

Hasnain says:

“But while we can't safely conclude that beautiful writing is true, it's usually safe to conclude the converse: something that seems clumsily written will usually have gotten the ideas wrong too.

Indeed, the two senses of good writing are more like two ends of the same thing. The connection between them is not a rigid one; the goodness of good writing is not a rod but a rope, with multiple overlapping connections running through it. But it's hard to move one end without moving the other. It's hard to be right without sounding right.”

Hasnain says:

Sage advice. It’s the best way to learn.

“I observed you can move very quickly by running little experiments. Especially in software engineering, building small prototypes is cheap and quick. Solve your own problem, start small, keep it simple, iterate.

So, with all of the above, here’s my advice:

Reinvent for insight. Reuse for impact.”

Hasnain says:

So many really good quotes in here. Picking 2:

"The first step is to realize that the subway stops here. Up to this point in life, most of you have been rolling on train tracks. Elementary school, middle school, high school, college—it was always clear what the next stop was. In the process you've been trained to believe something that’s not true: that all of life is train tracks. And there are some jobs where you can make it stay like train tracks if you want, but really today is the last stop.

This fact is so terrifying that a lot of people try to remain in denial about it. (I certainly did.) But it's also exciting. You can go in any direction now."

"Now I have some good news: I'm almost done. I hate long speeches and I bet you do too. And frankly, if you can remember what I've told you so far, that will be enough. So let me remind you what I've told you: you've been able to go through life so far without steering much. If you want to, you can become more ambitious now, but to do that you have to start steering. You can't just drift. There’re a huge number of options, and you have to actively figure out which is the best for you. And the best way to do that is people. Find the interesting people. "

Hasnain says:

I wanted to quote the whole thing. Horrifying.

“It is too late for real justice in Gaza now. We can never bring back the dead children. We can’t erase what has happened. But it is not too late for accountability. The atrocities must be documented. The dead in Gaza must be properly counted so we know how many people have been murdered. The media must stop parroting the official death figure of more than 55,000 people being dead without putting this into context and noting that when you account for indirect deaths from starvation, disease, or cold, the real number of deaths is probably enormously higher.

If you have stayed quiet until now, telling yourself that all this is just far too complicated for you to speak up about, it is not too late to raise your voice. What is happening in Gaza is different from the horrors happening in Sudan and the Democratic Republic of Congo because, if you are in the west, it is happening in your name. It is happening with your tax money and with the help of your leaders. If you are in the US, your elected representatives have delivered a standing ovation for this genocide. We are all complicit. Although some of us are far more complicit than others.

So, again, think about what you want to say to future generations when they ask what you did at this very moment. Silence is not neutrality. And your silence will not be forgotten. As Martin Luther King Jr said: “In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.””

Hasnain says:

I’ve always seen eg those articles on Buzzfeed and elsewhere that are basically of the form “someone posted X on the internet, and others responded Y and Z”

Did not realize there was a tech equivalent and that I’d get quoted for a random LinkedIn comment posted at midnight

… I do wish they had posted the (imo) more interesting parts of my comment though.

“Databricks software engineer Hasnain Lakhani wondered what he’d do when people simply lied about whether they’d used AI. (“Seems like an arms race,” he suggested, with projects needing tools to screen for AI.)”

Hasnain says:

Just came across this and bookmarking for future re reading, for.. reasons

“I think there is a tremendous opportunity for the open source community to really push the state of the art in coding evaluations. There's only so many benchmarks that I, personally, can create, but if everyone is making benchmarks I could eventually imagine a universe of benchmarks where you could curate the problems that are relevant to your work and quickly and cheaply judge models in this way: a Wikipedia of Coding Benchmarks.”

Hasnain says:

“But he didn’t give up. He teamed up with his longtime collaborator Tuomo Kuusi (opens a new tab), a mathematician at the University of Helsinki — “I’m almost married to him. I mean, how do you describe your best friend?” Armstrong said — along with Ahmed Bou-Rabee (opens a new tab), his postdoctoral researcher at Courant. The three mathematicians set out to fortify homogenization so that it would act like a rigorous version of the original renormalization argument.”

Hasnain says:

Unicode strikes again.

"When I flagged about this rather big omission to GitHub people, I got barely no responses at all and I get the feeling the impact of this flaw is not understood and acknowledged. Or perhaps they are all just too busy implementing the next AI feature we don’t want."

Hasnain says:

“Who has time to read all that? Who has the time for any of this? Technology is making our lives harder, not easier.

So I guess the next question is, "How do I fix this?" Like most people, I've been pulling back. Less time relying on algorithms to predict what I like and more time just making notes and lists in Obsidian. Any time I stumble across something that looks interesting or something I don't want to forget, I make a note of it so I can retrieve it later.”

Hasnain says:

“The GOOD version is good, because it avoids repeatedly re-evaluating condition, removes a branch from the hot loop, and potentially unlocks vectorization. This pattern works on a micro level and on a macro level — the good version is the architecture of TigerBeetle, where in the data plane we operate on batches of objects at the same time, to amortize the cost of decision making in the control plane.”

Hasnain says:

“It’s true that a lot of open source projects really hate AI code. There’s several objections, but the biggest one is that users who don’t understand their own lack of competence spam the projects with time-wasting AI garbage. The Curl project banned AI-generated security reports because they were getting flooded with automated AI-generated “bug bounty” requests. [LinkedIn]

More broadly, the very hardest problem in open source is not code, it’s people — how to work with others. Some AI users just don’t understand the level they simply aren’t working at.

One user of the LLVM compiler complained that his AI-generated pull requests were not being taken seriously — by a compiler project, where correct computer science and knowing precisely what the heck you’re doing is quite important.

The user considered it was the unpaid volunteer coders’ “job” to take his AI submissions seriously. He even filed a code of conduct complaint with the project against the developers. This was not upheld. So he proclaimed the project corrupt. [GitHub; Seylaw, archive]

“

Hasnain says:

This was a pretty motivating read! I’ve been doing this type of work recently for learning purposes and having an MCP for eg pwndbg would make this so much easier for a noob like me

(Now I must ensure I don’t get distracted by yet another rabbit hole on side projects…)

“What Does This Mean In Practice?

Let me walk you through what this enables:

Natural language crash analysis: "Why is this application crashing with an access violation at this address?" (Instead of: "What the $%#@ is this heap corruption!?")

Contextual debugging: "Show me the stack trace for thread 5 and explain what each function is doing based on the symbols." (Instead of staring at call stacks like they're ancient hieroglyphics)

Root cause identification: "What's causing this null pointer dereference and where should I look in the code to fix it?" (Instead of playing detective with memory addresses)

Instead of typing obscure commands like !analyze -v followed by a series of manual investigations, you simply ask questions in plain language, and the AI interprets the crash data for you. It's like having a WinDBG expert whispering in your ear, except it doesn't get annoyed when you ask the same question five times.

“

Hasnain says:

This was a great read - will probably come back to it periodically.

"Competitors don't really matter
You might have noticed I haven't mentioned anything about competitors here, despite operating in a highly competitive market.

The truth is I don't think they change much.

Sure, there are more "table-stakes" features that customers need before they'll even consider using you, but the real competitor is a lack of awareness of your product, more than anything."

Hasnain says:

"Obviously, we should have won on appeal to the Illinois Supremes. If you sit on that court, call me, we can straighten this out.

That said: today, Illinois public bodies can refuse to divulge database schemas.

This is problematic, because more and more data is finding its way out of file cabinets and shared drives and Word documents and into specialized applications, where the only way to get at the underlying data is to FOIA a database query.

Databases shouldn’t be a safe harbor for municipalities to conceal information from the public."

Hasnain says:

This is why we need more cross-pollination of ideas across disciplines and a willingness to learn.

"After implementing the learnings they had been given by Ferrari, the average number of technical errors per handover fell by 42 per cent and “information handover omissions” fell by 49 per cent. After initial resistance, these steps were rolled out at many hospitals across the country and remain to this day.

“It was very interesting talking to Ferrari in Zandvoort. They’ve been approached by lots of hospitals to say, oh, they don’t believe it, but when they’ve redone the work, the same thing happens,” Elliott adds.

Hasnain says:

I wonder what’s finally changing behind the scenes so that major publications are coming out and finally calling a spade a spade. Pleasantly surprised to see this as a full editorial from the guardian.

I hope it results in real change.

“The legal bar for proving genocide is exceptionally high. Washington has declared genocides four times in the last decade – in Iraq and Syria, Myanmar, Xinjiang in China and Sudan – without waiting for judges. International law moves slowly, and signatories to the convention, including the US and UK, are required not only to punish but to prevent genocide. The court of public opinion is reaching its own conclusion. Supporters of Israel often argue that it is held to an unfair standard. But Israel has international protection not only because of the history of the Holocaust, but also as a democracy and a western ally. Its actions are enabled by vast US military aid and political cover. Now it plans a Gaza without Palestinians. What is this, if not genocidal? When will the US and its allies act to stop the horror, if not now?”

Hasnain says:

This was great and now I’m looking forward to the next piece.

“This blog post described my journey into the world of MacOS vulnerability research and fuzzing. I hope I have shown how a knowledge-driven fuzzing approach can allow rapid prototyping and iteration, a deep understanding of the target, and high impact bugs.
In my next post, I will perform a detailed walkthrough of my experience attempting to exploit CVE-2024-54529.”

Hasnain says:

“A few pieces were critical of the film. The main charge was that I’d focused on a handful of crazies who weren’t representative of the wider community. “Weiss is a crackpot,” wrote a reviewer in the Daily Mail. On X, the Conservative environmentalist Ben Goldsmith claimed that the extremists in the film “represent a nutty fringe in Israeli society … about as … accurate a representation of the whole as Tommy Robinson is of UK society”.

But this comparison reveals what makes the situation in the West Bank so peculiar. In the UK, Robinson is widely seen as a fringe actor. He is excluded from politics and shunned by those close to government. And yet here was a situation where a similar figure enjoys enormous clout within the Israeli cabinet and who has the protection of the army in her project of settler expansionism. As the Haaretz journalist Etan Nechin said, responding to Goldsmith, “their representatives are literally sitting in the government and control everything from the police to treasury”.”

Hasnain says:

The madlads finally did it!

“Gold nuclei emerge from the collision with very high energy and hit the LHC beam pipe or collimators at various points downstream, where they immediately fragment into single protons, neutrons and other particles. The gold exists for just a tiny fraction of a second.

The ALICE analysis shows that, during Run 2 of the LHC (2015–2018), about 86 billion gold nuclei were created at the four major experiments. In terms of mass, this corresponds to just 29 picograms (2.9 ×10-11 g). “

Hasnain says:

So we have all out war. And innocents on both sides will suffer.

I hope this comes to an end soon. Why do leaders and people resort to violence. I wish the world was better. Sigh.

“Pakistan’s military said retaliatory strikes have been launched against India after three airbases were targeted by Indian forces, accusing India of using “air-to-surface missiles” from warplanes.
Pakistan Civil Aviation said it is closing its airspace from 03:15am local time (22:15 GMT) on Saturday until 12 noon (07:00 GMT) following the latest attacks.”

Hasnain says:

"Cursor has a fixed price. I suspect they are thinking about pricing the way gyms do: if everyone used Cursor as much as they allow you to, they’d go out of business. But in practice most people use a lot less tokens than they are paying for.

You can see this in practice when you use Claude Code, which is pay-per-token. Our heaviest users are using $50/month of tokens. That’s a lot of tokens.

I asked our CFO and he said he’d be happy to spend $100/dev/month on agents. To get 20% more productive that’s a bargain."

Hasnain says:

Senseless violence rising around the world :(

“A Pakistani military spokesperson has told the Reuters and AFP news agencies that the death toll from Indian strikes on Pakistan has risen to eight civilians.

Two further people have been reported missing with 35 injured in the strikes.

The spokesperson reported up to 24 strikes across six locations.”

Hasnain says:

I still need to get back to reading the postmortem on the recent sycophantic changes to ChatGPT. But damn..

“In that sense, Westgate explains, the bot dialogues are not unlike talk therapy, “which we know to be quite effective at helping people reframe their stories.” Critically, though, AI, “unlike a therapist, does not have the person’s best interests in mind, or a moral grounding or compass in what a ‘good story’ looks like,” she says. “A good therapist would not encourage a client to make sense of difficulties in their life by encouraging them to believe they have supernatural powers. Instead, they try to steer clients away from unhealthy narratives, and toward healthier ones. ChatGPT has no such constraints or concerns.”

Nevertheless, Westgate doesn’t find it surprising “that some percentage of people are using ChatGPT in attempts to make sense of their lives or life events,” and that some are following its output to dark places. “Explanations are powerful, even if they’re wrong,” she concludes. “

Hasnain says:

Looking forward to future posts in the series.

“For organizations dealing with similar challenges, FixrLeak offers key takeaways:

Prioritize structured code analysis: AST-based techniques help ensure fixes are safe and context-aware.

Automate targeted fixes: Focus on well-scoped, high-confidence fixes first to maximize success rates.

Integrate AI responsibly: Validate AI-generated code with rigorous testing and code review processes.

While FixrLeak is currently deployed at Uber, the principles behind it—combining static analysis with GenAI—can be adapted to other large-scale systems. Companies seeking to automate code quality improvements can explore similar techniques using AI-assisted code repair, AST analysis, and structured prompt engineering.

This blog kicks off a series from the Programming Systems group on leveraging GenAI for software engineering challenges. Stay tuned for the next post, where we explore how GenAI can automatically fix data races in Golang”

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking for later reading.

“This paper presents a tool called RustAssistant that leverages the emergent capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically suggest fixes for Rust compilation errors. RustAssistant uses a careful combination of prompting techniques as well as iteration between an LLM and the Rust compiler to deliver high accuracy of fixes. RustAssistant is able to achieve an impressive peak accuracy of roughly 74% on real-world compilation errors in popular open-source Rust repositories. We also contribute a dataset of Rust compilation errors to enable further research.”