Hasnain says:

Not sure what’s worse: this quote or the one about installing non compliant locks over explicit objections about them possibly killing people in the event of a fire.

“Indeed, Musk’s attorney, Alex Spiro, loudly opined that it was unreasonable for Twitter’s landlords to expect Twitter to pay rent, since San Francisco was a “shithole.”
So, Alex Spiro is a big time lawyer. One of the biggest. But, I’m pretty sure that not paying your contractually obligated rent because the city is a “shithole” is not how anything fucking works.”

Hasnain says:

Wonder how cities will adapt to the new normal. I for one would love more walkable areas and housing / transit downtown.

“Asking rents for office space will “end the year below pre-pandemic levels” and probably hit their lowest in a decade, according to the city’s latest forecasts. Asking rents in Manhattan offices averaged $75.13 per square foot in April 2023, down 50 cents from a year prior, according to Colliers.

It’s a worry for city officials, who for the last decade have relied on an ever-expanding commercial real estate sector for taxes to pay for schools, cops and trash collection. Commercial property taxes contribute about 20% of the city’s total tax revenues — with office buildings, specifically, contributing 10%. And as those revenues are flattening, the city’s expenses are forecast to keep growing, creating challenges for Mayor Eric Adams’s agenda.”

Hasnain says:

Interesting technical read about a massive recent outage. It was a bit of a bummer that they only went about publishing it when called out about their lack of transparency.

“Another common theme that all teams encountered during the service recovery was the fact that distributed, share-nothing data stores handle massive failures much better than most distributed data stores that require a quorum-based control plane. For example a fleet of independent data nodes with static shard assignment degrades roughly linearly as the number of nodes drops. The same fleet of data nodes, bound together by a quorum will operate without degradation so long as the quorum is met and refuse to operate once it’s not. Of course the quorum-based fleet is a lot easier to manage in the day-to-day, so going one way or another is not an obvious decision, but this outage highlights the need for us to re-examine past choices.”

Hasnain says:

I spent the last half hour (and change) reading this wondrous human interest story interwoven with a history of the war(s), food economics, supply chains, and more. So engrossing and so bizarre at the same time. Super well written. Gotta start with the prelude:

“This is a story about hippopotamuses, as advertised, but it’s also a story about two very complicated and exceptional men. These men were spies. They were also bitter enemies. Each wanted to kill the other and fully expected to feel really good about himself afterward. Eccentric circumstances—circumstances having to do with hippopotamuses—would join these men together as allies and even dear friends. But then, eventually, they’d be driven into opposition again.

Whatever strange bond these two men had, they were loyal to it. They were like repulsive magnets: Some fundamental property of each was perfectly opposed to the core of the other. And yet, somehow throughout their long lives—as several volatile phases of American history tumbled along in the background—they also had a way of continually snapping back together. One of these men was a humble patriot, known for his impeccable integrity. He tried to leave detailed, reliable accounts of what he did and thought and felt. The other, I discovered, was a megalomaniac and a pathological liar.

This is a true story, and a very serious one, even though it’s composed of many details that will seem ludicrous and impossible. Most of those details are irrefutable, though. And while I worked hard to verify the rest, doing so occasionally proved futile. I’d like to try and explain why.

These two men will seem larger than life, but they lived at a time, a hundred years ago, when, I would argue, life in America seemed larger than life—when what was unimaginable still felt feasible and ideas that looked ridiculous could still come true.

That said, this is the story of one idea that looked ridiculous and didn’t come true. The idea was ridiculous. But it was completely reasonable, too.

All I can say is, try to keep that in mind.”

Hasnain says:

“There is a kind of public bloodthirst on the American right and thus among our right-leaning institutions at the moment. The simmering resentment atop which the scum of conservative politics has for so long floated is beginning to boil. I don’t know what this will ultimately mean and I’m leery of historical comparisons.

My unscientific sense, though, is that a worryingly large part of the general population—not even corrupt or prejudiced officials, but civilians who hold no office or public authority—feels emboldened by the way real, credentialed, powerful authority has begun to ostentatiously defer to murderers. Institutions, both the press and the government, are always more plastic than we think they are; they will bend so that they may countenance every kind of evil so long as they can do so in a way that reinforces their positions. Increasingly, these institutions, from the Times to the Journal to New York City’s elected officials, have become comfortable holding up callous, public murder—of leftist protesters, of homeless people, of prisoners of war—as excusable, not just on the basis of unfortunate extenuating circumstances, but in the name of a kind of hateful reverse morality.

Personally, I find myself too often tempted to meet this kind of crazed violence with equally passionate resistance; to go out looking for the fight that is constantly being threatened. But that’s not what I’ve been told to do by a figure no less central to my religious practice as a Christian than Christ. The job is not to administer the beatings, it’s to tend to the beaten.”

Hasnain says:

New anti remote work propaganda just dropped. I wonder if these folks have ever been to a big tech office. It was hard to *not* see any alcohol!

“Bloomberg spoke with a half dozen addiction specialists who treat mostly employed patients. All say that their treatment programs are over-enrolled in the wake of the pandemic, fueled by extended remote or hybrid arrangements that offer a dangerous triad: steady paychecks, proximity to drugs and alcohol out of view from co-workers, and incentive to maintain day-to-day functionality. As a result, undetected drug habits flourished and are only now coming to light as more companies require workers to return to the office.”

Hasnain says:

I had the honor of working with Yann very briefly on a couple of small bugfixes, and always was awed by his genius insights in creating lz4 and then ztsd. Didn’t know about the inspirational story behind it. (And can’t wait for the next gen successor to be fully released).

“Adam: This is the wildest story I’ve ever heard in terms of impact. A marketing professional, a project manager, a couple evenings a week after he bikes home from his job in Paris, starts tweaking a calculator game. And by the end of it, Yann has shifted a whole industry’s approach to data compression and saved billions and billions of dollars.

So the obvious question I have for Yann is how? How can you have that much impact in your career? In your hobby?

Yann: I would say the first advice here is don’t do that for the success. Success is too random and too far away. If someone targets success, it will lose stamina way before reaching that point. So do something because you like it. That’s the inner force that will drive you beyond I would say the normal investment that almost everybody can also do. And I think that’s very important one. So now if you are interested in a domain, keep going at it. And it’s really a small effort regularly in the same direction that brings you very far. I understood that from my mother”

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.”