Hasnain says:

Learnt so much from this piece that I wasn’t aware of. From the free food program to a bit more about how the FBI sabotaged them to a lot more about the good work the Panthers did.

“The historian Françoise N Hamlin of Brown University has used the term ‘activist mothering’ to help understand both the work that the women Panthers were doing – and as a reason why their leadership and accomplishments have escaped due recognition. Hamlin explains that they would develop ‘strategies particular to their communities by continuing (or expanding) work … [such as] the nurturing of youth …. from which she could maximise the return on her gendered social position.’ Feminised work is often expected of women, and is among the limited acceptable roles they can inhabit. The Panther women took on leadership roles in realms where they exert authority and expertise, and continued to expand the scope and influence of their work and voice within their community and beyond. But women doing ‘women’s work’ was often taken for granted, and its legacies went uncelebrated.”

Hasnain says:

“If you read newspapers from 1918, when we had the last really big global pandemic, the arguments and the discussions could all be written today. The same types of complaints about face masks, the same types of arguments of, “Sure, it’s happening over there to that town, but it’s not coming here for us, we’re fine. And then, oops, actually, we’re in the middle of a surge.” And this same kind of almost national amnesia about the pandemic—a lack of memorializing, a lack of coming together and saying, “This happened to us, and we should be acknowledging that.” We did not learn the lessons from 1918; we repeated all of the same mistakes. Unless we have a better national conversation about it, to really make everyone aware of what just happened, what worked, what didn’t work, we’re just going to be in exactly the same place the next time a pandemic comes around.”

Hasnain says:

There have been a few thousand takes on this piece already - ranging from “micro services are dead” to “wait Amazon teams are allowed to crap on their serverless product?”. Hot takes aside I found this to be a decent exploration of “make it work” and then “make it efficient”.

“Moving our service to a monolith reduced our infrastructure cost by over 90%. It also increased our scaling capabilities. Today, we’re able to handle thousands of streams and we still have capacity to scale the service even further. Moving the solution to Amazon EC2 and Amazon ECS also allowed us to use the Amazon EC2 compute saving plans that will help drive costs down even further.

Some decisions we’ve taken are not obvious but they resulted in significant improvements. For example, we replicated a computationally expensive media conversion process and placed it closer to the detectors. Whereas running media conversion once and caching its outcome might be considered to be a cheaper option, we found this not be a cost-effective approach.”

Hasnain says:

“FC: On CNN recently, Hinton downplayed the concerns of Timnit Gebru—who Google fired in 2020 for refusing to withdraw a paper about AI’s harms on marginalized people—saying her ideas were not as “existentially serious” as his own. What do you make of that?

MW: I think it’s stunning that someone would say that the harms [from AI] that are happening now—which are felt most acutely by people who have been historically minoritized: Black people, women, disabled people, precarious workers, et cetera—that those harms aren’t existential.

What I hear in that is, “Those aren’t existential to me. I have millions of dollars, I am invested in many, many AI startups, and none of this affects my existence. But what could affect my existence is if a sci-fi fantasy came to life and AI were actually super intelligent, and suddenly men like me would not be the most powerful entities in the world, and that would affect my business.” “

Hasnain says:

Mojo has been pretty exciting to watch (and I need to say hi to my friends there). Need to try it soon!

“But I’d much prefer to use a language that’s as elegant as Python and as fast as expert-written C, allows me to use one language to write everything from the application server, to the model architecture and the installer too, and lets me debug and profile my code directly in the language in which I wrote it.

How would you like a language like that?”

Hasnain says:

Learnt a bunch of cool datastructure tricks from this one.

"The branchless Eytzinger layout is a great option if the data you are searching over is fixed and can be preprocessed to accommodate a faster memory access layout. Because it respects the characteristics of modern CPUs, it is basically one of the fastest ways to search in sorted data when implemented correctly.

Additionally, there are some further ideas like S-trees ([4]) or mixed layout ([2]) that you could try if you’re looking for the best binary search."

Hasnain says:

I keep thinking twitter (Elon) has made its dumbest decision yet and then…

“One former Twitter executive was taken aback by the remark, telling NPR that such a threat should be alarming to any business operating on the site, since it indicates that acquiescing to Musk's every whim may be necessary in order to avoid being impersonated.

For most of its 17-year history, Twitter has had rules that maintained a certain level of order and offered both individuals and organization some control over their presence on the platform.”

Hasnain says:

Great read. Brought back a bit of nostalgia but a lot of food for thought about internet culture and how social media is evolving.

“It is worth remembering that the internet wasn't supposed to be like this. It wasn't supposed to be six boring men with too much money creating spaces that no one likes but everyone is forced to use because those men have driven every other form of online existence into the ground. The internet was supposed to have pockets, to have enchanting forests you could stumble into and dark ravines you knew better than to enter. The internet was supposed to be a place of opportunity, not just for profit but for surprise and connection and delight. Instead, like most everything American enterprise has promised held some new dream, it has turned out to be the same old thing—a dream for a few, and something much more confining for everyone else.”

Hasnain says:

“Dr. Hinton said that when people used to ask him how he could work on technology that was potentially dangerous, he would paraphrase Robert Oppenheimer, who led the U.S. effort to build the atomic bomb: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.”

He does not say that anymore.”

Hasnain says:

The visuals here are horrifying, and somehow still not enough to convince the company to act.

““I feel awful about it,” said Scott E. Miller, the superintendent. His district has asked Norfolk Southern for its schedule so that the schools can plan for blockages and students can adjust their routines. The company has disregarded the requests, school officials said.

Mayor Thomas McDermott Jr. said that his experience with the rails has been similar, and that company officials have reminded him the rails “were here first,” running through Hammond before it was even a city. “To them, I am nobody,” he said. “They don’t pay attention to me. They don’t respect me. They don’t care about the city of Hammond. They just do what they want.””