Hasnain says:

More and more skills are being lost to the world as technology advances - not always for the better.

“These subtle signs in the desert contain volumes of information to the properly trained eye. By the depth of the tracks, a tracker can tell whether a camel was carrying anything on its back. They can also tell whether the camel was being led by person or roaming freely. If the camel’s droppings contain corn, rye, or any man-made food, then the camel was not grazing. Also, a camel being led would not graze nearby bushes, and if it did, it would only be along a set route. A roaming camel, on the other hand, skips around from bush to bush with no clear pattern.”

Hasnain says:

“But the pushback to quiet quitting reveals more about managers than workers — showing they have always expected overwork. Employees are no longer onboard with that, especially as prices rise, wages don't keep up, and going above and beyond just results in more work. That's where acting your wage comes in.

"If a company is paying you, let's say minimum wage, you're gonna put in minimum effort," Soto said. "If you're acting your wage, that means that the amount of labor that you're putting in reflects the amount that you're getting paid. So you're not going to go above and beyond and do the job of two to three people and do all this extra work if you're really not even making a livable wage."”

Hasnain says:

Sigh.

““I really don’t want to evoke the contract language, and bury this paper like, I feel like that would be fucked up and a disservice to the world,” said the UNI official. “But by the same token, there’s just, we cannot let you have our name in this document and jeopardize our relationship with CWA, CWA’s relationship with Microsoft, the Activision workers’ right to organize, my job, like, it’s just too much. It’s too much, it will never stand. I will be fired.”

“Our affiliates, they pay a portion of my salary,” the UNI official added. Asked why issues with CWA would undermine a report technically sponsored by UNI, the UNI official clarified that he was acting on behalf of CWA. “We have a financial relationship with CWA. They are one of our members.””

Hasnain says:

Sigh. Tech bros will be tech bros.

“On May 21, 2021, the team hosted their monthly “gala,” where Launch House members and friends gathered at the Beverly Hills mansion for a party. They loaded in a carful of booze, and though the founders had claimed they’d planned on only around 100 guests, hundreds more were added to the guest list. “Brett [Goldstein] told the girl at the door to let anyone in, regardless of Covid tests,” said one attendee. “If they weren’t on the guest list, as long as they were hot or had a lot of followers,” they could enter. “Even if Covid weren’t a thing, I’m sure it would have been a fire safety issue,” said another. “It wasn’t a networking event anymore; it felt like a club.” More concerning was the presence of seemingly underage girls, some of whom were seen falling over or passed out on the curb outside.”

Hasnain says:

Great read, and it reminds me that I need to go and blog about my own blog setup at some point.

“Normally this would be terrifying, especially with the amount of traffic my blog gets (as represented by this handy graph here). You'd think that something that does a lookup on every post in the worst case for the most common thing on the biggest dataset would make performance terrifyingly slow You'd also think that with the amount of traffic I get that it'd be an active detriment.

However, this is when I play my trap card! When you look at the analytics you can see that the most frequently read article is the most recently posted one! This means that it's not actually a big O of n lookup most of the time. It's constant time complexity. In theory this design is the terrifying type of thing that you normally find out about after you accepted a job offer, but in practice it's fine. It is a bit weird though, and I may need to rethink this in the future, but this has scaled to almost 300 posts as-is so I think it's okay for now.”

Hasnain says:

Sharing without comment.

“Facebook’s stonewalling has been revealing on its own, providing variations on the same theme: It has amassed so much data on so many billions of people and organized it so confusingly that full transparency is impossible on a technical level. In the March 2022 hearing, Zarashaw and Steven Elia, a software engineering manager, described Facebook as a data-processing apparatus so complex that it defies understanding from within. The hearing amounted to two high-ranking engineers at one of the most powerful and resource-flush engineering outfits in history describing their product as an unknowable machine.

The special master at times seemed in disbelief, as when he questioned the engineers over whether any documentation existed for a particular Facebook subsystem. “Someone must have a diagram that says this is where this data is stored,” he said, according to the transcript. Zarashaw responded: “We have a somewhat strange engineering culture compared to most where we don’t generate a lot of artifacts during the engineering process. Effectively the code is its own design document often.” He quickly added, “For what it’s worth, this is terrifying to me when I first joined as well.””

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking this for later re reading as I’ve run into this problem before.

“Where does this leave us? Unclear. If you go down the rabbit hole of reading about all the issues surrounding GATs and HKTBs you get a strong sense that it's better to avoid creating APIs that invole abstracting over ownership and borrowing when possible. You will run into walls and the workarounds might be ugly and hard to understand. So I guess a new thing I can recommend not to try to do: do not abstact over borrows and ownership if functions are involved (unless you really know what you are doing).”

Hasnain says:

This is nominally a post introducing a library, but it's so much more - I learnt a lot about good API design, string matching algorithms, and performance benchmarking. burntsushi's code and blogposts are always great, and this is no exception.

"In other words, if Rust’s primary string types work for your use case, then you should probably ignore bstr altogether and continue using them.

So why have a byte string library? The simplest way to explain it is to point at the std::io::Read trait. How does it work? Well, it says “anything implementing std::io::Read can take a writable slice of bytes, read from its underlying source and put the bytes from the source to the writable slice given.” Do you see anything missing? There’s no guarantee whatsoever about what those bytes are. They can be anything. They might be an image. They might be a video. Or a PDF. Or a plain text file.

In other words, the fundamental API we use to interact with data streams doesn’t make any guarantees about the nature of that stream. This is by design and it isn’t a Rust problem. On most mainstream operating systems, this is how files themselves are represented. They are just sequences of bytes. The format of those bytes usually exists at some other layer or is determined through some additional context."

Hasnain says:

This was a pretty good read on leadership.

"When you’re a senior leader you don’t get to throw your hands up and say that there was nothing you could do. Did your project rely on another team who screwed up? Sorry, you still need to figure out how to get it done. Are you an Engineering leader who hates their Product counterpart? Do they hate you? Too bad, you still need to get things done."

Hasnain says:

Yay!

““I think this becomes a tipping point, frankly,” said Christine Hendrickson, the vice president of strategic initiatives at Syndio, which provides software that helps employers identify pay disparities. “It’s at this point that employers are going to stop going jurisdiction by jurisdiction and start looking for a nationwide strategy.””