Hasnain says:

“Ned found that his February Social Security check hadn’t been paid, and he’s yet to receive his March check, either. His Medicare insurance had been canceled. He also learned that when you die, your credit score gets marked as “deceased, do not issue credit,” which makes it tough to get a loan.

“The good news is I don’t think it can go any lower than that,” he said cheerfully.

He called the bank first, and they said an electronic notification had been triggered on Feb. 18 that he had died back in November. But I’m on the phone with you right now, he told them. Also, what did I die of? Take it up with Social Security, they said.”

Hasnain says:

I haven’t read the book yet but man the Streisand effect is in full swing here and I don’t understand the PR strategy by Meta here.

Looking at some of the claims (especially the one where Sheryl played with the assistant's hair and the one where she invited the author into her bed on a private jet) - they’re so outlandish that I feel either:

1. The author is out of touch with reality and needs mental help
2. They’re true

(It’s hard to imagine an in between here)

“Following the decision, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone said in a post on X: "This ruling affirms that Sarah Wynn-Williams' false and defamatory book should never have been published."”

Hasnain says:

“The conjecture’s resolution is a seismic shift for the field of harmonic analysis, which studies the details of the Fourier transform.
A tower of three monumental conjectures in harmonic analysis rests atop the Kakeya conjecture. Each story in the tower needs to be sturdy for the stories above it to stand a chance themselves. If the Kakeya conjecture had been proved false — if Wang and Zahl had found a counterexample — the entire tower would have come tumbling down.
But now that they’ve proved it, mathematicians might be able to work their way up the tower, using Kakeya to build up proofs of these successively more ambitious conjectures. “All these problems that [mathematicians] dreamed about someday solving, they all look approachable now,” Guth said.”

Hasnain says:

“I can’t give advice on what you should do, but if you’re finding this job market difficult, it’s certainly not personal. My sense is that’s basically the experience that everyone is having when searching for new roles right now. If you are in a role today that’s frustrating you, my advice is to try harder than usual to find a way to make it a rewarding experience, even if it’s not perfect. I also wouldn’t personally try to sit this cycle out unless you’re comfortable with a small risk that reentry is quite difficult: I think it’s more likely that the ecosystem is meaningfully different in five years than that it’s largely unchanged.”

Hasnain says:

“Adams’ takeaway? Use what you have. In their case, it was an existing job queue, Golang and Kubernetes. “You decrease the maintenance burden while getting huge-scale wins,” she said.

And even the lowly cron box held a lesson or two.

“Slack ran key functionality for 10 years on one node. That’s a long time to deal with this less-than-ideal system. But it was good enough. It got the job done. And I think that is really a key takeaway,” she said. “It’s okay to keep it really simple, even if it’s kind of janky, for a long time.””

Hasnain says:

These numbers are astonishing and mind blowing. But they don’t get talked about enough. 2-3 million people a year saved for literal pennies on the dollar.

“I recognize we cannot save every hungry child around the world. I agree that U.S.A.I.D. is imperfect and should be reformed. I appreciate that helping people is harder than it looks. I understand that there are difficult trade-offs in allocating tax dollars.

Yet I think most Americans would both welcome some reforms and also be proud to see how we save the lives of hungry children and sick orphans around the world by allocating just 24 cents of every $100 of national income to aid. And I find it odious when the world’s richest man cackles about America shoving programs for needy children “into the wood chipper.”

When you meet those dying children and look into their eyes and hold their hands and feel faint heartbeats flutter, you can’t bear the gleeful laughter. You see children just like your own and hang your head in shame.
“

Hasnain says:

“As schoolchildren, many of us read the German pastor Martin Niemoller’s poem “First They Came.” Written just after the Holocaust, Niemoller’s poem highlights the moral and practical cost of allowing fear (or indifference) to prevent us from speaking out when others are targeted.

We must learn from the past. We cannot remain silent in the face of authoritarian attacks on our peers, even if they have not yet come for us.”

Hasnain says:

Chilling day for free speech in the US. Already a lot of the “free speech warriors” have shown themselves out by applauding this rather than seeing this for what it is and what it portends.

Also, Columbia, why are you repeating your own shameful history?

“Greer said she spoke by phone with one of the ICE agents during the arrest, who said they were acting on State Department orders to revoke Khalil’s student visa. Informed by the attorney that Khalil was in the United States as a permanent resident with a green card, the agent said they were revoking that instead, according to the lawyer.”

Hasnain says:

Trying to read up more on AI and agentic systems, and this deep dive on how Claude Code was implemented was pretty helpful for me to learn.

If y’all have tips on what I should be reading to better get familiar with this space I’m all ears.

“After diving deep into Claude Code and similar architectures, I realized there's a gap in practical, engineering-focused documentation on how these systems actually work. Most resources either stay at a theoretical level or skip to implementation details without covering the critical architectural decisions. This is really a "how things work" book, and the software pieces themselves would be recognizable”

Hasnain says:

Finally got around to reading this as I’m trying out and learning more about memory corruption exploits.

Kinda bummed I hadn’t read it earlier!

“This short book is written for people who want to understand the internals of 'heap memory', particularly the implementation of glibc's 'malloc' and 'free' procedures, and also for security researchers who want to get started in the field of heap exploitation.

The first section of the book covers an in-depth, yet concise, description about heap internals. The second section covers some of the most famous attacks. It is assumed that the reader is unfamiliar with this topic. For experienced readers, this text might be good for a quick revision.”