Hasnain says:

“Other teams are conducting the first JWST observations of TRAPPIST-1, a relatively nearby red dwarf star orbited by seven Earth-size rocky worlds. Several of these planets are in the star’s habitable zone, where conditions favoring liquid water and even life may be possible. While JWST cannot directly image the planets, spectroscopy will help identify the gases in their atmospheres — possibly even hints of gases that could signify biological activity. “What we really want is Earths,” said Macintosh.”

Hasnain says:

This was a really interesting read.

“DEB COHEN: Some of the studies we were actually having a bit of a laugh about, um. So what you would do is you would starve people overnight. Um, you'd fast them overnight and then you'd ask them to cycle to exhaustion. One group, you would give a sports drink containing sugar, and the other group you would give water. Well, guess what? The people that have had a bit of sugar are going to outperform the people that have been starved and had water, it's not rocket science.

So there are all sorts of these, all sorts of these kinds of studies that they do, and you look at it and go, that just does not happen.

JEN GUNTER: And it doesn't matter that it's not clinically relevant. Now you've got something that looks statistically different and you can peg a marketing campaign around that.

DEB COHEN: Exactly. And if you throw enough darts at a dartboard, if you've got your eyes blindfolded, then one of them is going to hit the dart board at some point.”

Hasnain says:

“These tradeoffs are often intensely difficult to pursue openly. Who wants to be known as the politician in favor of benefits fraud or the financial CEO who thinks they are not laundering enough money?

One of the interesting questions here is who gets to resolve tensions like this. Generally speaking, it will be private actors applying their own cost-benefits decisions. There is substantial space for regulations to help with cases, like identity theft, where actors can choose to spend other people’s risk budgets to maximize for their own interests.”

Hasnain says:

This was pretty interesting. I’ve seen huge page remapping be quite useful at $work so it’s cool to see it talked about more broadly.

“Hey, sorry for the long article, but there was a lot to cover. I hope that it sparked your interest in using Huge Pages for code especially if you’re maintaining a large codebase. For further reading, I would recommend the paper “Runtime Performance Optimization Blueprint: Intel® Architecture Optimization with Large Code Pages”, which was instrumental to me.”

Hasnain says:

“Under Brazil's constitution, indigenous people have a right to their traditional land, and access to the land he inhabited, known as the Tanaru Indigenous Territory, has been restricted since 1998.

The areas surrounding the 8,070-hectare territory are used for farming and landowners have in the past expressed their anger at being banned from entering the indigenous territory.

In 2009, a Funai post in the area was damaged and cartridge shells were left behind in what was considered a threat to the Man of the Hole and the Funai agents protecting him.”

Hasnain says:

TIL. I understand why they have to make it harder to bypass warnings, but this is so inscrutable and hard to find.

(this will make my life so much easier)

Hasnain says:

This is some really cool stuff.

“Now that we can clone running VMs quickly, we can enable new workflows where you don't have to wait for development servers to spin up. Together with the GitHub App, you will have a development environment for every PR so you can quickly review (or run end-to-end tests).”

Hasnain says:

Great read going into a bunch of engineering tradeoffs. The follow up post is also solid.

“Here’s one of the first passages to jump out to me, from Chapter 3: Embracing Risk:

The low-latency user wants Bigtable’s request queues to be (almost always) empty so that the system can process each outstanding request immediately upon arrival. (Indeed, inefficient queuing is often a cause of high tail latency.) The user concerned with offline analysis is more interested in system throughput, so that user wants request queues to never be empty. To optimize for throughput, the Bigtable system should never need to idle while waiting for its next request.

This is a profound and general insight. When I read this passage, my last decade of abject suffering suddenly came into focus for me.”

Hasnain says:

The story they highlight here is really interesting. One frustrating takeaway I had here was just how much folks in computer science tend to reinvent things from first principles and ignore valuable work and research done elsewhere. Especially with AI, the stakes are super high - let’s not skip the ethical decisions, please. Algorithms are never neutral. It’s never just math.

“Along with all its faults, I think the Seattle committee also gave us much to admire. It was profoundly, even uncomfortably, honest about the hard choices at the center of kidney medicine. It refused to pretend that such choices were—or ever could be—entirely technical. And it tried, albeit clumsily, to democratize the values inside a complex, high-tech system. The Seattle physicians and their lay colleagues were rationing a scarce supply of dialysis treatments. But even after Congress provided dialysis for everyone, the shortage of transplantable kidneys was destined to spark similar questions, ones we still face today. And Scrib’s experiment with sharing the moral microphone (along with other stories I tell in the book) helped spark the system we have today.”

Hasnain says:

“But the same system also helped you to become badminton and football stars. Can you see why I’m asking what makes you go against the system now?

“No, we can’t. We’d have done better under a civilised, democratic system. Even without the failed system. Our society would’ve been better off,” says the former footballer, Hao Haidong, and he raises his voice:

"If the system made us into the stars we became, why aren’t there 20 more like me or 10 more like Ye?””