Hasnain says:

“It is so true. Organizations are so much better at adding things than they are at taking things away. We’re better at setting goals and talking about what we’re going to do than we are at talking about what we’re NOT going to do. It's easier to add process than it is to ask why we're still doing that thing that worked great two years ago but mostly isn't relevant anymore. We’re better at adding meetings than we are at removing them. “

Hasnain says:

This just seems straight up evil.

“Here's the idea behind why boosting the nation's unemployment could cool inflation. With an additional million or two people out of work, the newly unemployed and their families would sharply cut back on spending, while for most people who are still working, wage growth would flatline. When companies assume their labor costs are unlikely to rise, the theory goes, they will stop hiking prices. That, in turn, slows the growth in prices.

But some economists question whether crushing the job market is necessary to bring inflation to heel.

"The Fed clearly wants the labor market to weaken quite sharply. What's not clear to us is why," Ian Shepherdson, chief economist at Pantheon Macroeconomics, said in a report. He predicted that inflation is set to "plunge" next year as supply chains normalize.”

Hasnain says:

Ah, UB, the bane of every C++ programmer’s existence.

“With that out of the way, the next step was multiplayer determinism. One big goal was that I didn't want to cut multiplayer from the game. Furthermore, I wanted players on PC to play with players on Nintendo Switch. This is the first time we had to make sure the game is deterministic between ARM and x86. We should be fine, C++ is portable, right? Just don't use undefined behaviour. Turns out we use quite a lot of undefined behaviour, both in our main code and in the libraries. For example, when casting a double to an integer, if the value does not fit in the integer, it is considered undefined behaviour and the resulted value is different on ARM and x86 CPUs.”

Hasnain says:

Great read as always on career paths.

“At some point you have to learn to tune in to your own inner compass. What draws you in to your work? What fuels your growth and success?

Being an adult means not measuring yourself entirely on other people’s definition of success. Personal growth might come in the guise of a big promotion, but it also might look like a new job, a different role, a swing to management or back, becoming well-known as a subject matter expert, mentoring others, running an affinity group, picking up new skill sets, starting a company, trying your hand at consulting, speaking at conferences, taking a sabbatical, having a family, working part time, etc. No one gets to define that but you.

You have a thirty- or forty-year adult life and career in front of you. What the hell are you going to do with all that time and space??”

Hasnain says:

“But, in context, it’s quite clear that this is a joke, a quote from a funny movie.

The issue is that so much of content moderation involves context. This is something that critics of content moderation (both those who want more and those who want less) never seem to fully grasp. How does a content moderator (whether AI or human) have enough context to handle all sorts of issues like this? Do you need to train your AI on classic movies? Do you need to make sure that everyone you hire has seen every popular movie and knows them by heart and can recognize when someone is quoting them?

How do you deal with a situation where someone tries to hide behind the quote — but is actually threatening someone? (Not what Kel did here, but just noting, you can’t just say “okay, leave this line if it’s quoting a movie”).

The point is that it’s ridiculously complicated.”

Hasnain says:

This was a great read - that matched many of my management experiences as well.

“In my experience, the TLM role is **challenging but extremely rewarding**. You can be an Engineering Manager while still keeping your feet on the ground and solving challenging technical problems together with your team.

I’ve found that **people trusted me more to make the right decisions**. I knew how the technology stack _actually worked_ because I built a large part of it. It’s frustrating and demoralizing to report to a pure people manager who is unable to understand what people are building, and which problems they are facing, regardless of how much time you spend explaining it to them. Stepping into the TLM role is a good way to counter that, and reporting to a TLM is often deeply rewarding because they tend to care about people and technology in the right way to get amazing things done.”

Hasnain says:

“In the past, the deaths of Moore and Mungin might have gone unnoticed by anyone other than their loved ones, but the popularity of social media and smartphones has given millions a peek at the medical mistreatment some Black women receive.

Cynthia Adinig, an equity policy advocate based in Northern Virginia, used her cell phone to document about 20 of the visits she made to the ER to get help with mysterious symptoms, including an anaphylaxis-like reaction to ingesting food, that arose after a mild bout of covid in 2020. During one recorded visit, Adinig showed that even though she’d reported cardiac symptoms, there was no heart monitor in her room. In another visit, she was escorted out of the ER by a security guard after she was discharged. Wanting to understand her experiences better, she requested her medical records. She discovered that she had been tested for street drugs, without her knowledge, during a couple of her ER visits.

These cases of misdiagnosis and mistreatment suggest that even the best studies may underestimate long covid’s impact because racism and sexism within the medical system have left some people undiagnosed. “

Hasnain says:

These are just extremely heartbreaking.

“Workers get the equivalent of $4 for every 1,000 bricks they make. One adult working alone can’t do that amount in a day, but if the children help, they can make 1,500 bricks a day, workers said.

According to surveys done by Save the Children, the percentage of families saying they had a child working outside the home grew from 18% to 22% from December to June. That would suggest more than 1 million children nationwide were working. The surveys covered more than 1,400 children and more than 1,400 caregivers in seven provinces. Another 22% of the children said they were asked to work on the family business or farm.

The survey also pointed to the collapse in livelihoods that Afghans have endured the past year. In June, 77% of the surveyed families reported they had lost half their income or more, compared to a year ago, up from 61% in December.”

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking for future reading.

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Hasnain says:

“This example is important because it underscores a psychological reality of productivity that can be lost among all the posturing around systems and tools. It’s easy to feel like it’s impolite to prioritize work that’s important to you above other peoples’ demands. This is what led Elizabeth, at first, to limit her research to only the few scraps of time during her week that no one else had already claimed.

Sustainable production of valuable work, however, requires a dash of selfishness. Elizabeth’s revised schedule was exactly right. No reasonable person would find her investment in a once-a-week babysitter, or request for weekend dad time, to be excessive. These acts of self-prioritization were, objectively speaking, small. But they made a large difference in Elizabeth’s ability to produce the tenure-caliber work she knew she had in her. Your work matters. It’s okay to fight for it in your schedule.

“