Hasnain says:

“If you can justify an AI coding subscription, you can justify buying the best tool for the job.”

Hasnain says:

“The net result of leaning extremely heavily into type checkers and unit tests, is that the LLM can quickly loop on itself to fix these problem, resulting in eliminating a whole slew of issues with vibe coded output. “

Hasnain says:

The only thing that surprises me about this quote is that first word

"Surprisingly, I think that the fact that I need to plan my features carefully before rushing into implementation is making me a better developer overall. This happens simply because it forces me to document the implementation and think it through before jumping into code. I also find myself explaining my reasoning more clearly because I have to write it down for the AI, whereas with colleagues I would typically discuss things in person or via video call."

Hasnain says:

“Looking further ahead, our long-term solution involves building a new, enhanced traffic management system. This system will allot network resources on a per-customer basis, creating a budget that, once exceeded, will prevent a customer's traffic from degrading the service for anyone else on the platform. This system will also allow us to automate many of the manual actions that were taken to attempt to remediate the congestion seen during this incident.”

Hasnain says:

wut

“At the meeting, some people had reasonable explanations for not getting their AI assistant accounts set up during the week, like being on vacation, Armstrong said.
“I jumped on this call on Saturday and there were a couple people that had not done it. Some of them had a good reason, because they were just getting back from some trip or something, and some of them didn’t [have a good reason]. And they got fired.””

Hasnain says:

“In recap. What you just built was a coding agent.

Perhaps you don't want to create a coding agent. What if you're in the data engineering profession? What would that look like? Think about all of the activities that you do day-to-day, where having the capability to automate using these primitives could be handy or valuable to your employer.

Your current workers are going to take your job, not AI.

If you're concerned about AI, the answer is straightforward: just invest in yourself. It really is that simple. This year is a particularly challenging time to be asleep at the wheel when it comes to personal development.”

Hasnain says:

“The beautiful thing about getting comfortable with repair is that it actually makes you better as a manager. When you know you can fix things when they go wrong, you’re more willing to make decisions, have difficult conversations, and take reasonable risks. You stop being paralyzed by perfectionism because you know that most mistakes, while serious, create opportunities for growth and stronger relationships when handled well.”

Hasnain says:

“I don’t know yet if the implementations of this yet are good enough to use at scale. Maybe they’re slow or maybe the bugs aren’t ironed out yet. But obviously it’s possible to build a system that takes an arbitrary declarative, stateless query and does this sort of static analysis and incremental computation behind the scenes, and it should be possible to make it fast and reliable. And if you can make it good, it’s obviously extremely useful. You get to cut out all of that application code that’s dealing with keeping things in sync and make dealing with the stateful data updates someone else’s job. And ideally you can change the performance characteristics (eg: how much to store in memory, whether the result needs to be updated immediately or can be deferred, etc) without rewriting all your code that actually computes the answer.

It’s too good of an idea for it to not succeed. Certainly if I was in charge of databases at AWS, this would be a major tentpole for my roadmap! I figure that a decade from now, most database systems will have a version of this built in.

I can’t wait until they do.”

Hasnain says:

“This new result is still just a lower limit on BB(6) — the true value could be even higher. Busy beaver hunters don’t expect to have a definitive answer anytime soon. The first sign of trouble was a monstrous six-rule Turing machine that the team has named Antihydra (opens a new tab), discovered by mxdys last year.

Antihydra almost certainly never halts. But researchers haven’t been able to prove it. And there’s a good reason for that: A busy beaver hunter who goes by Racheline has shown that the question of whether Antihydra halts is closely related to a famous unsolved problem in mathematics called the Collatz conjecture. Since then, the team has discovered many other six-rule machines with similar characteristics. Slaying the Antihydra and its brethren will require conceptual breakthroughs in pure mathematics.”

Hasnain says:

Lots of fun internal insights in this one.

“The main takeaway, again, is to keep things simple. Extreme scaffolding frameworks will hurt more than help you. Claude Code really made me believe that an "agent" can be simple and yet extremely powerful. We've incorporated a bunch of these lessons into MinusX, and are continuing to incorporate more.”

Hasnain says:

This is basically a black mirror plot right?

“In live-streamed broadcasts, viewers would egg on the streamers as they conducted acts of violence and physical and moral humiliation on Mr. Graven, according to Le Parisien, a French newspaper. As many as 15,000 people would watch, the newspaper reported. Mr. Graven had more than 500,000 followers on Kick, an Australian streaming platform that launched in 2022.”

Hasnain says:

“Zig applications should consider aborting on OOM. While the design goal of handling OOM errors correctly is laudable, and Zig makes it possible, I’ve seen only one application, xit which passes “matklad spends 30 minutes grepping for errdefer” test. For libraries, prefer leaving allocation to the caller, or use generative testing with an allocator that actually returns errors.

Alternatively, do as TigerBeetle. We take this pattern literally, reserve all resources in main, and never allocate memory afterwards:”

Hasnain says:

This is a marketing piece disguised as a technical blog (wish it had more detail) but it was useful nonetheless.

“The new algorithm issues an initial upquery to one side of the join, then combines the resulting join key with the original predicates on the other side. This composite condition is pushed down to RocksDB, allowing index-based retrieval of only the rows required to satisfy the join. This eliminates unnecessary data reads and avoids full-table scans.”

Hasnain says:

Whither code review?

“But the most damaging to Eaton Corp. was code that Lu named after himself, "IsDLEnabledinAD," which the DOJ translated as an abbreviation for "Is Davis Lu enabled in Active Directory."

That "kill switch" was designed to "lock out all users if his credentials in the company’s active directory were disabled," the DOJ said Thursday. And it worked flawlessly, "automatically activated" when Lu "was placed on leave and asked to surrender his laptop" in 2019. It locked out "thousands of company users globally," and no one had a clue what was going on.”

Hasnain says:

“Never ask the agent for its opinion on your design. True story- at the end of a long session, I asked Claude how my design was. It was effusive in its praise, pointed out all the things we had done for modularity, separation of concerns, etc. Then I exited Claude and restarted, and asked the exact same question, only this time it had no context. It told me that the design needed a lot of work, complained about the stuff it had just praised, etc.”

Hasnain says:

This was a really cool technical read.

“The protocol is evolving, the implementations are maturing, and the community is growing. Whether you're building the next generation of live streaming, exploring real-time collaboration, or pushing the boundaries of interactive media, consider whether MoQ may provide the foundation you need.”

Hasnain says:

“Conclusion
This setup has been working very well for my needs. There's a lot of potential for better tooling around offline-first applications and SQLite in the browser. I look forward to trying out those solutions!”

Hasnain says:

“Ms. Mishra, the Purdue graduate, did not get the burrito-making gig at Chipotle. But her side hustle as a beauty influencer on TikTok, she said, helped her realize that she was more enthusiastic about tech marketing and sales than software engineering.”

Hasnain says:

“But documents suggest that Microsoft engineers understood the data stored in Azure would include raw intelligence, including audio files, while some Israel-based Microsoft staff, including alumni of Unit 8200, appear to have known about what the unit hoped the joint project would achieve.

“You don’t have to be a genius to figure it out,” one source said. “You tell [Microsoft] we don’t have any more space on the servers, that it’s audio files. It’s pretty clear what it is.”

Microsoft’s spokesperson said: “We are not aware of Azure being used for the storage of such data.” They said Unit 8200 was simply a customer of its cloud services and Microsoft “did not build or consult with Unit 8200” on a cloud-based surveillance system.”

Hasnain says:

I got a 5/5 but one of these was a wild guess. I’m getting off my game here.

“5 out of 5

Congratulations, you have ascended to Artificial General Intelligence. Now carry on building that LLM, laying claim to Blackwells and have your A.I. agent get you a membership at Shack15. We know you know what we mean. (Just ask ChatGPT if you don’t.)”

Hasnain says:

This is super cool!

“By rethinking JSON.stringify from the ground up, from its high-level logic down to its core memory and character-handling operations, we've delivered a more than 2x performance improvement measured on the JetStream2 json-stringify-inspector benchmark. See the figure below for results on different platforms. These optimizations are available in V8 starting with version 13.8 (Chrome 138).”

Hasnain says:

“Jin-su is still working in IT now he's defected. He says the skills he honed working for the regime have helped him settle into his new life.
Because he isn't working multiple jobs with fake IDs, he earns less than when he worked for the North Korean regime. But because he can keep more of his earnings, overall, he has more money in his own pocket.
"I had got used to making money by doing illegal things. But now I work hard and earn the money I deserve."”

Hasnain says:

“Through the Fulbright Program, we all got to meet someone we would not have met otherwise. Through the Fulbright Program, we created connections that would not have happened otherwise. Through the Fulbright Program, we have all been intellectually enriched. I hope that the politicians responsible for these programs see them for what they are, i.e., a unique opportunity to foster change, innovation, and mutual understanding across cultural barriers. I, for one, would love to support such a program. Let us not sell tomorrow in a feeble attempt to save money today.”

Hasnain says:

I ramble a lot so I support this message

(Shoutout to all the folks in hashtag yelling at work)

“We started experimenting with ramblings at Obsidian two years ago, and they’ve been surprisingly sticky. We have no scheduled meetings, so ramblings are our equivalent of water cooler talk. We want as much deep focus time as possible, so ramblings help us stay connected while minimizing interruptions.

Because they are so free and loose, some of our best ideas emerge from ramblings. They’re often the source of feature ideas, small prototypes, and creative solutions to long-standing problems.”

Hasnain says:

“He and others in the harmonic analysis community will also have to reckon with a changed landscape. In harmonic analysis, there’s a constellation of questions about how the energy of a wave concentrates. If a conjecture known as Stein’s conjecture were true, it would cement connections between some of the most important questions in that broader constellation. But Cairo’s work shows that Stein’s conjecture is false. It eliminates one of the most promising links mathematicians had hoped to establish between different parts of harmonic analysis.
The math world is also adjusting to the fact of Cairo herself. After completing the proof, she decided to apply straight to graduate school, skipping college (and a high school diploma) altogether. As she saw it, she was already living the life of a graduate student. Cairo applied to 10 graduate programs. Six rejected her because she didn’t have a college degree. Two admitted her, but then higher-ups in those universities’ administrations overrode those decisions.
Only the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University were willing to welcome her straight into a doctoral program. She’ll start at Maryland in the fall. When she finishes, it will be her first degree.”

Hasnain says:

“A.I. companions should be available to those who need them most. Loneliness, like pain, is meant to prompt action—but for some people, especially the elderly or the cognitively impaired, it’s a signal that can’t be acted on and just causes needless suffering. For these people, offering comfort is simply humane.
As for the rest of us? I’m not a catastrophist. Nobody is going to be forced into an A.I. friendship or romance; plenty of people will abstain. Even in a world brimming with easy distractions—TikTok, Pornhub, Candy Crush, Sudoku—people still manage to meet for drinks, work out at the gym, go on dates, muddle through real life. And those who do turn to A.I. companions can tinker with the settings, asking for less flattery, more pushback, even the occasional note of tough love.
But I do worry that many will find the prospect of a world without loneliness irresistible—and that something essential could be lost, especially for the young. When we numb ourselves to loneliness, we give up the hard work of making ourselves understood, of striving for true connection, of forging relationships built on mutual effort. In muting the signal, we risk losing part of what makes us human”

Hasnain says:

As a parent to a 3.5yo (or just a human), there are things you read that sometimes just fuck you up. I had read the preview first and was dreading reading it. But we must bear witness.

“The first time my three-and-a-half-year-old son, Rafik, asked me “Are we going to die today?” was in December of 2023, roughly two months after the war began. We were lying in a recovery bed, still shaking from the blast that had buried us beneath the concrete roof of our house, in Gaza City. My entire family had passed out before we were found bleeding. Rafik was curled up on the ground, close enough that I could see him, but too far for me to reach out and hold him. After we were pulled from the rubble, I remember thinking, This is the moment that rewires a child forever. I’ve been watching that shift occur in front of me ever since.

Nour Jarada, a mental-health manager in Gaza, sees this rewiring on a daily basis. She works inside of medical tents that have no sound insulation, each one containing folding beds that separate trauma from trauma. The patients arrive on foot—some having walked for miles, many led in by family members who didn’t know what else to do. “Some don’t speak,” she told me. “They stare, sometimes scream. Most cry for hours, unblinkingly.” Children have asked Jarada if they could go back to school, as if normal were still hiding somewhere nearby.”

Hasnain says:

“To end starvation in Gaza, Israel must allow humanitarian-aid professionals to do their job. It must facilitate the movement of U.N. aid convoys without onerous checks and delays. It must help establish the necessary monitoring measures to ensure aid reaches those who need it most. It must assist Gaza’s hospitals in setting up intensive care units for the many malnourished children at death’s door.

Israel and the international community have a window of opportunity to deliver lifesaving aid to millions of people. We cannot wait until it’s time to count the graves of the children who have perished, declare it a famine — or indeed, a genocide — and say, simply, “Never again.””