Hasnain says:

“Unlike in most of the developed world, the US healthcare system is provided entirely by private companies and there is no universal, single-payer system for non-seniors. Most Americans must either individually pay into an insurance plan or get insurance through their employer. Plans can cost hundreds and (often) thousands of dollars a month, depending on the extent of users’ needs and the plans being offered by insurers.

“Commentators and talking heads don’t seem to understand the reaction because they don’t see these industries as violent ones,” Ongweso continued. They clearly understand that someone was murdered, he said, “but struggle with the idea that the population views what these companies do is murder on an industrial scale”.”

Hasnain says:

This is horrifying and sobering. There’s data in here that is mind numbing. I’ll leave with just one quote because the rest is horrifying.

Note that the data implies a 99:1 ratio of civilian:military deaths in the incidents they studied, and that’s just Oct 2023.

“By almost every metric, the harm to civilians from the first month of the Israeli campaign in Gaza is incomparable with any 21st century air campaign. It is by far the most intense, destructive, and fatal conflict for civilians that Airwars has ever documented. Key findings include:

At least 5,139 civilians were killed in Gaza in 25 days in October 2023. This is nearly four times more civilians reported killed in a single month than in any conflict Airwars has documented since it was established in 2014.

In October 2023 alone, Airwars documented at least 65 incidents in which a minimum of 20 civilians were killed in a particular incident. This is nearly triple the number of such high-fatality incidents that Airwars has documented within any comparable timeframe.

Over the course of 25 days, Airwars recorded a minimum of 1,900 children killed by Israeli military action in Gaza. This is nearly seven times higher than even the most deadly month for children previously recorded by Airwars.”

Hasnain says:

"Though a lot of workers seemingly have little choice but to comply with RTO mandates, Kaplan predicts many will refuse anyway and foresees a “bloodbath” in 2025 with neither employers nor employees backing down. Some people are sitting on savings from the postpandemic boom and can afford to be jobless for a while; others are optimistic that the labor market will heat back up and re-empower them to negotiate flexible work arrangements. "

Hasnain says:

Chock full of great lessons about compilers and common misconceptions. I learnt a bunch of new things from this one and refreshed my memory about a number of others

“I hope that your answer is no. From a compiler developer's standpoint, this absolute garbage. Basically such a compiler is unusable. At best, it is some kind of research artifact that helps you explore an idea. But forget production. It's not even ok for debugging. To see why, consider a small project with say 5000 lines of code. With 99% correctness rate, this means that in every compilation, 50 lines of code are incorrect. Fifty! And the worst part is: you don't know which and they can be different with every code change. You probably have had the experience of tracking down a bug in a single line of code, which can be both frustrating and time-consuming. Image how it is debugging 50 changing lines of code! Now, imagine moving this to a large-scale project, with possibly millions of lines of code. No, thanks.”

Hasnain says:

Man I miss Scuba. iykyk

“For instance, I observed a spike in p95 build times for iOS CI jobs. Using correlation, I compared the p95 data to CI cluster usage graphs and noticed a simultaneous spike in job wait times. Honeycomb’s synchronized dotted line across graphs confirmed the alignment, leading to a strong hypothesis: long CI agent wait times were causing the build time spike.”

Hasnain says:

“Even more important, the work demonstrates that the Gowers norm can act as a powerful tool in a new domain. “Because it’s so new, at least in this part of number theory, there is potential to do a bunch of other things with it,” Friedlander said. Mathematicians now hope to broaden the scope of the Gowers norm even further — to try using it to solve other problems in number theory beyond counting primes.”

Hasnain says:

This was a really cool read. Had to leave the part before the tldr though because that response time puts us all to shame.

“Timeline and Conclusion

The bug was reported August 23, 2024, and it was acknowledged after only 21 minutes, asking to verify their proposed fix. After acknowledging, a new release↗ was pushed a few minutes later.

Long Story Short

These three issues were all caused by the same root cause; the usage of a non-cryptographically secure PRNG. All of the bugs were exacerbated by the unexpected low entropy in the Flutter PRNG, where the internal seeds are just 32 bits. We showed practical attacks that will recover secrets within a reasonable time and how they led to attacks on Flutter developers, users of the Proton Wallet mobile application, and users of SelfPrivacy.”

Hasnain says:

What in the world is it with these names

“The field is already fairly crowded. Some of the better-known tools have on-the-nose names like FlirtFlow, ChatterCharms, and Botly. Another competitor, the relatively generically named Supercreator, has a suite of AI tools, from AI-generated scripts to an assistant called Inbox Copilot that algorithmically sorts simps, moving “spenders” to the top of the list and ignoring “freeloaders.””

Hasnain says:

“Cayley said the ICC faced “great difficulty assessing” the level of Hamas militant presence in hospitals “because clearly there are lies being spoken, but that is really something we do need to get to the bottom of as a prosecution office”.

He added: “I think that has been grossly exaggerated, but we need to be able to demonstrate very clearly what the level of military presence was, if at all, in these hospitals because I think we’ve been misled about that in the press.”

Cayley indicated that Israeli operations against Gaza’s healthcare facilities would be examined. “Looking at damage to health facilities, destruction of health facilities, we will be coming on to that probably later next year. We’re having to do this in stages simply because of the resources that we have,” he added.”

Hasnain says:

There is so much useful information here that I’ll find myself coming back to this a few times in the future. A lot of these are problems I’ve seen personally across multiple companies. Key takeaways for me

* fundamentals still matter. You can protect against the most advanced threats but if there’s something basic missing it’s still game over
* security, engineering, IT, etc being multiple orgs is valuable but also causes friction working across orgs. I wish there was something better, but everyone being in one org has its downsides too
* I wish there was one tool to rule them all
* there is a sore need for core fundamental improvements across the board

Picking one quote out of many that resonated with me:

“Tracking ownership of services, assets, and applications has become increasingly complex. “It’s quite social and messy… more gardening than construction,” as one participant described it. Missing service catalogs, incomplete asset inventories, and unclear SaaS application ownership create operational friction.”