Hasnain says:

I don't know why I spent a bunch of time over a lot of days reading this paper, but I did, and I'm sharing here. Learned a lot about history, economics, and biology and food science from this one.

"Use of spices takes advantage of plant defensive compounds. Not surprisingly, in view of their evolved functions, these phytochemicals have antioxidant, antimicrobial, and antiviral properties. The use of spices essentially borrows plants' recipes for survival and puts them to similar use in cooking. Over time, recipes should “evolve” as new bacteria and fungi appear or indigenous species develop resistance to phytochemicals, requiring the addition of more spices or new spices to combat them effectively. However, there is a limit to how much of any one spice can be added before beneficial phytochemicals become phytotoxins. Thus, cookbooks from different eras are more than just curiosities. Essentially, they represent written records of our coevolutionary races against foodborne diseases. By cleansing foods of pathogens before consumption, spice users contribute to the health, longevity, and fitness of themselves, their families, and their guests. A Darwinian view of gastronomy thus helps us understand why “some like it hot” (spicy, that is!)."

Hasnain says:

Micro-optimizations are always a fun beast.

"Loop fusion is a simple and powerful technique to decrease the total number of memory accesses in the program. Although we described here the simplest version, loop fusion is possible even if datasets overlap partially.

In general, any idea that would result in a decrease of memory accesses has the potential to speed up your code. If you have any ideas that are not mentioned in this post, feel free to leave a comment so we can update this post."

Hasnain says:

Great read. I was interviewed for this to provide background info (my quotes didn't make it in :( ) but this gave me a bunch of context I wasn't aware of around how Rust came to be where it is today - which surprised me.

"“It’s enjoyable to write Rust, which is maybe kind of weird to say, but it’s just the language is fantastic. It’s fun. You feel like a magician, and that never happens in other languages,” he says. “We definitely took a big bet—it’s a new technology.”"

Hasnain says:

New creator for me to follow, clearly.

"Cheung eventually enrolled in a post-bachelor program in 2017 for computer science but dropped out when Bay Area Foodies picked up momentum. He just couldn’t resist the pull of creating food videos before his hobby became a full-time gig. He launched his TikTok in 2019, and it has grown to nearly 400,000 followers."

Hasnain says:

I've always found a stark difference between how communities operate between Pakistan and the States - and while initially I appreciated the changes after moving - now, as I've grown a little, my feelings are much more mixed.

"Those omissions continue. Fueled in part by pandemic distrust, a latter-day strain of individual-over-community sentiment often paired with invocations of liberty and freedom occupies a significant chunk of the national conversation these days — to the point where advocacy about community thinking is sometimes met with accusations of socialism.

Let’s not consign Americans to be the heirs of a built-in loneliness gene, though. A new generation is insisting that mental health be part of the national conversation, and many voices — among them women and people of color — are increasingly offering new alternatives to the old myths.

What’s more, the very place where the discussion about loneliness is being held today — in the office of the surgeon general, a presidential appointee — suggests that other paths are possible."

Hasnain says:

I knew this work was hard and grueling from all I have read and heard but seeing this with the time pressure really demonstrates that. And… that’s even without being forced to see the horrifying material these poor moderators are forced to look at day in day out.

“So much of the discussion lately around content moderation and trust & safety doesn’t come from a place of any kind of actual experience with moderating content and understanding the competing pressures, both internal and external, towards allowing free speech, protecting user safety, and complying with various laws and other factors.
A friend of mine in the trust & safety world once suggested that these conversations would be a lot more useful if everyone had to spend a few days moderating an actual community, and could learn how content moderation is not about “suppressing viewpoints,” but almost always about understanding really complex scenarios in which you have to make decisions in a very limited period of time, with limited information, and where there may not be any “right” answer.
Enter: Moderator Mayhem.”

Hasnain says:

I am so glad I got the opportunity to take leave when I did (and then some). Really wishing that was normalized more in the states.

“Lacking those tight ties can be a real loss for fathers and their relatives. In the average month in 2015, 300,000 women took parental leave compared with 22,000 men—but when men do take paternity leave, the majority of them are glad they did. Research suggests that fathers who take leave are more engaged with their kids throughout the first years of their lives. Plenty of people have argued for equitable parental leave on the grounds that it could get fathers more involved from the start in child-rearing. But it wouldn’t just benefit dads and their kids; it could strengthen children’s bonds with their whole extended family.”

Hasnain says:

On one hand I understand not exposing too many software knobs to users. On the other hand, especially with complex systems like optimizers, sometimes you really want an override…

“One way to solve this problem is to add hints to the query to tell the optimizer the right way to join these two tables. But PostgreSQL famously does not support plan hints (at least not natively — you have to install pg_hint_plan). In our example, the customer did not have the necessary permissions to install this extension in RDS, and the person who could do it was on vacation.”

Hasnain says:

I definitely found myself nodding along here for obvious reasons. Picking a quote alone takes time, and whenever I try to write a more meaningful summary it takes a lot longer. Let alone doing this for a book…

“It’s surprising how even many of the most prolific readers I know are unaware of the value of inspectional reading. Most readers start on page one of a book and plow through until they’re done or decide to cut their losses — without ever reading the table of contents or the preface.

One great alternative to writing summaries is to talk about the books you’re reading. Explaining the ideas you’re reading about to someone else is one of the best ways to engage with the material, since (a) it forces you to formulate it in your own words, and (b) they might challenge the ideas and get you to examine them more critically.”

Hasnain says:

This whole thing was so horrifying to read. People getting rich off a grift while kids suffer.

“In a cloud storage account she'd once shared with Winenger, she said, she found thousands of his photos and videos, including explicit images of their three shared children. She loaded them onto a thumb drive for the San Diego County Sheriff's Department, whose investigation into Winenger had never closed.

Within days, Winenger was arrested. He was soon charged with 19 felonies, including possession of child pornography and 14 counts of committing forcible lewd acts against a child, Robert.

He pleaded not guilty and was released on bail, his access to the children suspended. Because of the no-contact order he'd previously obtained against Montes, the children landed in a county shelter. Winenger's defense attorney, Patrick Clancy, declined to comment on Winenger's behalf, saying he doesn't try his cases in the press.”