Hasnain says:

“This little trick shipped in Firefox 105 and had an enormous impact on Firefox stability on Windows. The chart below shows how many out-of-memory browser crashes were experienced by users per active usage hours

You’re looking at a >70% reduction in crashes, far more than our rosiest predictions.”

Hasnain says:

This was a great technical read that goes into a lot of distributed systems stuff.

“We mostly like Consul and would use it again in new designs. It’s easy to stand up. It’s incredibly useful to deploy infrastructure configurations. For example: we write blog posts like this and people invariably comment about how cool it is that we have a WireGuard mesh network between all of our machines. But, not to diminish Steve’s work on flywire, that system falls straight out of us using Consul. It’s great!

But we probably wouldn’t use Consul as the backing store for a global app platform again, in part because a global app platform might not even want a single globally consistent backing store. Our trajectory is away from it.”

Hasnain says:

SRO/SRE stories are always legendary

“Chasing down the Blips can teach you a lot about how a complex system functions. Sometimes it can help you find real problems before they happen. And a lot of the time, they'll teach you only one thing: That complex systems are chaotic, and sometimes things just harmlessly Blip and you'll never know why.

Our general policy was that if a Blip was big enough to set off an alert, we'd give it at least a cursory look.”

Hasnain says:

Sigh. Tucker Carlson, Fox News, Libs of TikTok and all the media commenters “just asking questions” have even more blood on their hands here. The quote below is a little misleading as the article and other reporting clarifies: the club was going to host a drag show and there has been a lot of nonsensical hatred against those recently.

“Although a motive in the shooting wasn’t yet clear, nor were the gender identities of the victims, the incident came as anti-gay rhetoric has intensified by extremists. In a statement, Club Q termed the shooting a hate attack.”

Hasnain says:

always learn something new with Amos’ posts.

“This is boring. Everything just works.

Right?? And yet I'm thrilled about it. I'm thrilled to know that, with Rust, I can do any of:

blocking I/O with threads
non-blocking I/O with tokio
io-uring with tokio-uring
eBPF with aya
just read procfs

And they all, boringly enough, work just fine. And I feel good about leaving them in production and never touching them again.

To me, that is the dream.”

Hasnain says:

Gotta love deep technical reads on fast data structures.

“Conclusions and next steps
boost::unordered_flat_map and boost::unordered_flat_set are the new open-addressing containers in Boost.Unordered providing top speed in exchange for some interface and behavioral deviations from the standards-compliant boost::unordered_map and boost::unordered_set. We have analyzed their internal data structure and provided some theoretical and practical evidence for their excellent performance. As of this writing, we claim boost::unordered_flat_map/boost::unordered_flat_set to rank among the fastest hash containers available to C++ programmers.”

Hasnain says:

Great read on how to profile, benchmark, and improve the performance of software.

“The test we used to measure performance, cating a big file, only measures performance in a very specific circumstance. There are other scenarios in which the performance of Zellij lacks or shines. It’s also important to note that because we are measuring the performance of full apps in a relatively complex and not 100% sterile environment, the measurements in this post should be regarded as loose signposts rather than exact measurements.

Zellij does not claim to be faster or more performant than any other software. Performance-wise, it only uses other software as an inspiration and something to aspire to.”

Hasnain says:

“And it wasn’t just the fault of Meta’s marketing team. Yann LeCun, a Turing Award winner and Meta’s chief scientist, defended Galactica to the end. On the day the model was released, LeCun tweeted: “Type a text and Galactica will generate a paper with relevant references, formulas, and everything.” Three days later, he tweeted: “Galactica demo is off line for now. It’s no longer possible to have some fun by casually misusing it. Happy?”

It's not quite Meta's Tay moment. Recall that in 2016, Microsoft launched a chatbot called Tay on Twitter—then shut it down 16 hours later when Twitter users turned it into a racist, homophobic sexbot. But Meta’s handling of Galactica smacks of the same naivete.

“Big tech companies keep doing this—and mark my words, they will not stop—because they can,” says Shah. “And they feel like they must—otherwise someone else might. They think that this is the future of information access, even if nobody asked for that future.””

Hasnain says:

So. Much. Corruption. Alito likes to complain when people call the court illegitimate, but he’s one of the main people that made it so!

“The ruling this year thrilled anti-abortion supporters, though it has proved deeply unpopular among the majority of Americans. After the draft was leaked, Mr. Schenck said, he felt compelled to come forward about his attempts to influence the court.

“You can position yourself in a special category with regard to the Justices,” he said. “You can gain access, have conversations, share prayer.”

Even when his group was most active at the court, he said, “I would look up at that phrase that’s chiseled into the building itself, ‘Equal Justice Under Law,’” he recalled. “I would think, ‘Not really.’””

Hasnain says:

lol.

“Multiple “critical” teams inside Twitter have now either completely or near-completely resigned, said other employees who requested anonymity to speak without Musk’s permission. That includes Twitter’s traffic and front end teams that route engineering requests to the correct backend services. The team that maintains Twitter’s core system libraries that every engineer at the company uses is also gone. “You cannot run Twitter without this team,” a departing employee said.

Several members of Twitter’s “Command Center” team, a group of engineers that is on call 24/7 and acts as the clearing house for problems internally, also tweeted about their departures. “If they go down, there is no one to call when shit breaks,” said a person familiar with how the team operates. The team that manages Twitter API for developers has also been severely gutted.

In a tweet Thursday evening, Musk said: “The best people are staying, so I’m not super worried.””