Hasnain says:

“But she knows, looking back, that things could have been different. While she has no regrets about leaving high school, she says she might have changed her mind if someone at school had shown more interest and personal attention to her needs and support for her as a Black student.

“All they had to do was take action,” Kailani said. “There were so many times they could have done something. And they did nothing.””

Hasnain says:

Interesting analysis.

“Instead, the company looked to tamp down internal dissent. After one particularly charged Rogan blowup in 2021 (he said of Caitlyn Jenner that “maybe if you live with crazy bitches long enough, they fucking turn you into one,”) Reply All co-host Alex Goldman wrote in an open Spotify Slack channel that he had been contacted by a Vice journalist who was looking to speak anonymously with Spotify staff about how they felt about Rogan’s comments and previous episodes about trans issues. Staff immediately flagged the Slacks to company higher ups, who reprimanded Goldman, and forced him and several other employees to post apologies written by the company in Slack.”

Hasnain says:

Data! And pretty graphs! With a compelling analysis to boot.

“As correlations go, this one is pretty compelling. So the Department of Data will (tentatively) stamp this mystery solved: Changes in how employers classify our time off may be slowly strangling America’s summer vacation.”

Hasnain says:

I fear that, like the 9/11 cleanup, we’ll find out decades later that the controlled burn was the wrong choice and many people will get unexplained illnesses. Most of the fish have died, a lot of pets are dead, people are somehow still being asked to return home and the fires have now spread the gas (extremely toxic) to a 100+ mile radius.

If only the train companies / government had listened to the unions and actually followed safety protocols (and taken a longer route) instead of being cheap, this could have been avoided. Sigh.

“Residents told the local news they “fear[ed] for their lives.” One said that even indoors, “You could smell it and taste it, and I had a headache.” Meanwhile, the crash site was leaching other hazardous materials besides vinyl chloride. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says they seeped into surrounding waterways, and “were immediately toxic to fish”—though it added that “actions were taken to minimize that.” The agency has assured the public that, the poor aquatic life’s fate notwithstanding, everybody’s drinking water was “protected.””

Hasnain says:

I really hope this passes!

““We all saw during the pandemic how difficult it was for these people to return to their home country and often not be able to get visa appointments to come back to their home, the United States,” she said. “That’s what we’re trying to address initially with this.””

Hasnain says:

“One of the company’s two remaining principal engineers offered a possible explanation for Musk’s declining reach: just under a year after the Tesla CEO made his surprise offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion, public interest in his antics is waning.

Employees showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account, along with a Google Trends chart. Last April, they told him, Musk was at “peak” popularity in search rankings, indicated by a score of “100.” Today, he’s at a score of nine. Engineers had previously investigated whether Musk’s reach had somehow been artificially restricted, but found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him.

Musk did not take the news well.

“You’re fired, you’re fired,” Musk told the engineer. “

Hasnain says:

The appendix is the best part! Great insight into a tricky engineering problem, which lays out the constraints and some parts of the solution that were considered. Would love to see the code be open sourced at some point.

“To determine the optimal ingest order, we need a way to tell how similar one repository is to another (similar in terms of their content), so we invented a new probabilistic data structure to do this in the same class of data structures as MinHash and HyperLogLog. This data structure, which we call a geometric filter, allows computing set similarity and the symmetric difference between sets with logarithmic space. In this case, the sets we’re comparing are the contents of each repository as represented by (path, blob_sha) tuples. Armed with that knowledge, we can construct a graph where the vertices are repositories and edges are weighted with this similarity metric. Calculating a minimum spanning tree of this graph (with similarity as cost) and then doing a level order traversal of the tree gives us an ingest order where we can make best use of delta encoding. Really though, this graph is enormous (millions of nodes, trillions of edges), so our MST algorithm computes an approximation that only takes a few minutes to calculate and provides 90% of the delta compression benefits we’re going for.”

Hasnain says:

“The process is known internally as a "flattening," the people said. Higher-level managers are sharing the directive with their subordinates in the coming weeks, separate from the company’s regular performance reviews that are currently underway, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing a matter that wasn’t public. Individual contributors aren’t in charge of others, and instead focus on tasks like coding, designing and research.”

Hasnain says:

I’ll admit that this data surprised me a lot - I’ve heard a lot of mumbling about going independent / working for yourself but didn’t realize the sentiment was this common!

“Not quite. While a whopping 78% of Gen Z say that they feel less secure committing to one employer, most Millennials and Gen X-ers do too—as do almost half of Baby Boomers, the generation known for bemoaning the lack of loyalty amongst young workers today. It seems that most everyone is realizing that employers are no longer earning workers’ loyalty: across generations, a majority of knowledge workers say they’ve lost trust in the stability and security of full-time employment. “

Hasnain says:

“When high-ranking executives make a serious blunder, they almost always get the benefit of the doubt. The modern executive lacks any actual responsibility or oversight, only occasionally reporting to typically pliant boards. They're largely insulated from the consequences of their actions, even if they're performing poorly. If any other kind of worker made a series of decisions that led to a double-digit drop in profitability, they'd be threatened with termination or terminated. Instead, tech CEOs have passed the pain off to people who in many cases were performing well in their roles. And while many employees in tech and elsewhere have received generous severance packages, they pale in comparison to the payouts that failed executives have gotten on their way out the door. Take, for example, the car-rental company Hertz, which let go of 10,000 people in 2020 as it stumbled into bankruptcy, all while paying its executives $16 million in bonuses.”