Hasnain says:

This (along with all the news coming out of Iran the last few months) is horrifying.

“In response to the parliament vote, activist and journalist Masih Alinejad tweeted: "227 members of the 290-seat Parliament in Iran have called on the Judiciary to issue death sentences for people arrested during the ongoing uprising. They want to execute innocent protesters who chanted Woman Life Freedom. The world must stop this act of terror."”

Hasnain says:

"As that allocation was happening for every single path that was being matched against, removing it made the whole program 1.7x faster in this instance. Not bad for a one character change."

Hasnain says:

“The fact there isn’t stems, for Paul, from a deeper problem. Despite underpinning the viability of life itself, nature’s contributions are absent from most economic modelling. And unlike corporations, nature has no legal standing: a river can neither sue its polluters, nor charge for the many services it provides. This has allowed it to become a “free” externality: something neither capitalism or the state has to account for, or take seriously.

“It’s effectively stealing from nature”, Paul says. “Thames Water don’t have to pay when they do an overspill into the river. The Highways authorities don’t have to pay when they discharge stormwater into the river. They don’t pay when they extract from the river.” If the full actual cost of what companies like Thames Water take from, and put back into, the Roding were actually accounted for, Paul believes “we could easily pay for dozens of people to look after the river.”

While the idea of a river being paid for its services might seem radical, it is gaining ground. Natural capital - the idea that nature provides intrinsic economic value, either through services it provides (e.g. the pollination of crops by bees) or the preservation of life (e.g. through the carbon dioxide it absorbs) is slowly becoming more normalised in policy circles.”

Hasnain says:

Great technical analysis and write up.

“Disabling writes to the secondary superclass cache worked well in our case, and even though this might not be a desirable solution in all cases, we wanted to share our methodology, toolset and the fix in the hope that it would help others encountering similar symptoms. While working through this problem, we came across JDK-8180450 — a bug that’s been dormant for more than five years that describes exactly the problem we were facing. It seems ironic that we could not find this bug until we actually figured out the answer. We believe our findings complement the great work that has been done in diagnosing and remediating it.”

Hasnain says:

The fact that a company lawyer is writing this is pretty huge.

“All of this is extremely dangerous for our users. Also, given that the FTC can (and will!) fine Twitter BILLIONS of dollars pursuant to the FTC Consent Order, extremely detrimental to Twitter’s longevity as a platform. Our users deserve so much better than this.

If you feel uncomfortable about anything you’re being asked to do, you can call Twitter’s Ethics Hotline at (800) 275-4843 or submit a report at ethicshelpline.twitter.com. Please also note the FTC’s number is: 1-877-FTC-HELP. You may also remember that Mudge reached out to httos://whistlebloweraid.org”

Hasnain says:

To all my friends and coworkers still at Meta: sorry you’re going through this. I’m here to talk or provide help/guidance for searching for your next job (based on my current experience).

“In the blog post announcing Meta’s cuts, Zuckeberg said laid off employees in the US would receive 16 weeks of base pay plus two additional weeks for each year of service, health insurance coverage for six months, and support for finding a new career and navigating immigration issues. Zuckerberg said the company would be instituting a hiring freeze through the first quarter of 2023 “with a small number of exceptions.””

Hasnain says:

“White America has always denigrated corpulence as a sign of immorality and sin. Historians, including Stearns, have long argued that modern Western dieting and beauty standards are direct descendants of puritanical Protestantism: fasting, self-discipline, and self-denial of earthly pleasures. More recently, sociologist Sabrina Strings, PhD, delved deeper into this connection, citing the confluence of Protestantism and the trans-Atlantic slave trade. In her 2019 book, Fearing the Black Body, Strings notes that the overtly racist concept of African gluttony, sloth, and ignorance, invented by European colonists and race scientists, met its perfect match in early American Protestantism. Thus, slimness was established as a mark of righteousness and superiority, while fatness symbolized unintelligence, immorality, and “blackness.””

Hasnain says:

“Twitter Inc., after laying off roughly half the company on Friday following Elon Musk’s $44 billion acquisition, is now reaching out to dozens of employees who lost their jobs and asking them to return.

Some of those who are being asked to return were laid off by mistake, according to two people familiar with the moves. Others were let go before management realized that their work and experience may be necessary to build the new features Musk envisions, the people said, asking not to be identified discussing private information.”

Hasnain says:

Time to upgrade!

“CPython 3.11 is 25% faster than CPython 3.10 on average according to benchmarks with pyperformance. The changes that are being done are part of something that Guido called: The "Shannon Plan". For the 3.11 release, the plan was about making a lot of optimizations in two main areas: startup and runtime. The release also includes additional optimizations that are not part of the faster CPython project.”

Hasnain says:

Will definitely need to try this in the future.

“One question that might arise is: is there any point in using fuzzing alongside Kani? In other words, if we can prove a harness for all inputs with Kani, would we still want to use fuzzing? The answer is yes, because fuzzing and Kani provide complementary benefits.

Kani verifies a Rust program by symbolically analyzing its code. This allows Kani to make mathematical statements about the expected semantics of the Rust code being verified. Kani allows you to prove that, for all possible inputs, the code under verification follows its specification, assuming everything else functions correctly (e.g. the underlying hardware, the OS, etc.).

Fuzzing concretely executes the program under test. This gives you end-to-end confidence that for the set of inputs generated by the fuzzer, the code under verification follows its specification, under real-world conditions. Fuzzing and Kani fit together to give more assurance than either provides on its own.”