Hasnain says:

“But, as he prepares to publish further findings from his scrutiny of the VA database, Al-Aly is in no doubt that clinicians and society at large will be dealing with the after-effects of Covid in perpetuity. “This is not something that will go away in a week, in a year, or two, or three. This will reverberate with us for generations,” he says.”

Hasnain says:

Free speech debates often go far and wide but I will always draw a line at targeted violence (amongst other lines). Cloudflare has been getting a lot of (deserved, imo) flak for this and there are some instances of them losing business as well. I wish this would be resolved soon so more people don’t have to suffer.

“The official website of the DropKiwifarms campaign is now online. Our campaign has seen a surge of support, and outlets such as Business Insider, Time Magazine, Vice, Kotaku, and Daily Dot have begun to take notice and requests by media to organizers of the campaign keep pouring in. We are now entering into the second phase of this campaign where our organizational efforts intensify and we start to put more focused pressure on Cloudflare employees to get them to drop a website that the Anti-Defamation League has described as an “Extremist-friendly Forum”. Kiwifiarms is a transphobic hate forum that actively stalks people, publishes doxxing information, and is implicated in multiple suicides of transgender and neurodivergent people. Recently, users of the forum have also swatted a sitting congressperson, and Kiwifarms is hosted by a company formerly named after Adolf Hitler’s plan for Jewish genocide. Joshua Moon, the site’s owner, was permanently banned on Twitter for calling for genocide against Muslims and asking a Jewish journalist if he could have his fingers for a necklace.”

Hasnain says:

“Kaba: To me, the reason “defund the police” resonates with people is because we’re saying what we actually want to see happen. Some people on the left say: “‘Defund’ is totally ridiculous, it’s a budget gimmick.” Then some on the right say, “All hell is going to break loose, you all want the end of society.” For me, defund is such a clear, easy demand to understand. People understand it, they just don’t want to do it. People are like, “Oh, it’s so complicated!” No, it’s not. We’ve seen for years people defund public education and take that money and put it into more military, more policing, more prisons. The demand is to reverse that trend.

Ritchie: The common response is “that was the wrong slogan”, but it clearly had an impact because it generated the powerful backlash that we’ve seen, which is police doing exactly what Mariame was talking about – exercising their power politically and with ferocity over the last two years, precisely because their power was threatened by this idea, because they faced one of the greatest crises of legitimacy in at least a generation. Yes, we want to take money away from death and put it toward life, especially in a pandemic and climate catastrophe and economic crisis. People also say: “Defund movements have come and gone and are dead.” But people are still pushing defund demands on the ground across the US and are seeing now that mayors and city councils are having to justify and put a lot of energy into re-legitimizing police and refilling their budgets.”

Hasnain says:

This was a really detailed analysis and an interesting overview of how tv censorship is done in China. Cool application of software to a problem that wouldn’t have easily been solved without.

“Hong Kong-based journalist and author Nury Vittachi shared a similar experience in a New York Times opinion piece, describing that a crime story he co-wrote with a Chinese director had to be rejiggered multiple times, finally resulting in an “implausible tale” that involves noble detectives of Chinese origin in order to pass the authorities’ review.

“The rules kill creativity,” Vittachi added.”

Hasnain says:

This was a fun little read. And makes me wonder if I should blog at some point about my static site generator that I rewrote late last year to tinker around with some fun rust concepts.

“Why reinvent the wheel again?

I wanted to write my own static site generator as a fun and interesting project. It shouldn’t be that hard and it would give me complete control over the site, which should give me a bit more flexibility than if I used an existing site generator.”

Hasnain says:

This is from July but super relevant in light of all the debates around student loan forgiveness. It’s too easy to forget the all too real costs that these usurious loans have on people.

“The family made good on both: as ward chairwoman, Robert’s wife maintained the family home as a community backbone, and Betty Ann, who asked that she and her family members be identified by first name only, grew up with a steady stream of neighbors flowing through the house. Although her mother had no money, Betty Ann was a strong student and earned enough scholarships to receive a bachelor’s and master’s degree in education. In the next few decades, she worked as a public-school teacher in Pittsburgh and Harlem, in addition to raising two children as a single mother. But she grew increasingly frustrated by the marks of educational inequity—moldy lunches, low-grade reading materials—that plagued her classrooms. “I thought the only way that I could change things was to have a higher degree,” she told me.

In 1983, at the age of fifty-two, Betty Ann enrolled in New York University’s law school. As a middle-aged Black woman, she wasn’t exactly the typical N.Y.U. law student. Her white male classmates would slyly elbow her books off the long library tables, and once, while standing at her locker, a classmate waved a ten-thousand-dollar tuition check, signed by his father, in her face. Betty Ann had borrowed twenty-nine thousand dollars in federal loans. Today, she owes $329,309.69 in student debt. She is ninety-one years old.”

Hasnain says:

This was the precursor to the last post; this time focused on engineers. Great read and I felt myself nodding along.

“You should have a career path that challenges you and contributes to your personal life goals, with the coaching and support you need to get there.

You should substantially choose your own work, in consultation with your manager and based on our business goals. This is not a democracy, but you will have a voice in our planning process.”

Hasnain says:

This was a really good read - I liked the framing of how management responsibilities have changed a bit in the industry over the last few years, and Honeycomb’s approach was quite refreshing. And the quote really hit home for me:

“Why? Admittedly, partly for crass practical reasons: so many of the best and most promising managers I know have left management roles for senior IC roles since 2018, and as someone who has to hire managers, this creates a supply problem for me. Sincerely though, I also observe that a truly staggering number of Honeycomb’s most effective, most admired senior ICs are former managers, and while they seem quite happy and I wouldn’t wish them back to their old roles, the fact that all of these smart, thoughtful, driven, emotionally intelligent people all chose to leave the same high-paying, respectable role must mean something (yes, respectable—it is unfortunately a fact universally acknowledged that every in-law is more impressed by “Engineering Manager” or “Director of Engineering” than “Senior Software Engineer” or “Staff Engineer”).

Partly, this is just a sign that we’ve made senior IC roles more appealing—more lucrative, more autonomous, with clearer career progression—as we intended to do! This is good. But I think it is also a sign that the job of engineering manager has gotten harder, and in many organizations, it can now feel like an unwinnable game, caught between two distinct and sometimes conflicting generations of expectations. “

Hasnain says:

Climate change is real and is unfortunately going to lead to so many more deaths unless radical action is taken. My heart goes out for these folks - and if you can donate, please do.

““Pakistan is under an unprecedented monsoon spell and data suggests the possibility of re-emergence of another cycle in September,” she said.

Two of the worst-hit provinces – Balochistan and Sindh – have received 298mm and 689mm rains respectively this year, which is about 400 percent more than the 30-year average.”

Hasnain says:

I wonder if there has been follow up research here since this study was done since the results are quite staggering.

“The impact of the air filters is strikingly large given what a simple change we’re talking about. The school district didn’t reengineer the school buildings or make dramatic education reforms; they just installed $700 commercially available filters that you could plug into any room in the country. But it’s consistent with a growing literature on the cognitive impact of air pollution, which finds that everyone from chess players to baseball umpires to workers in a pear-packing factory suffer deteriorations in performance when the air is more polluted.

If Gilraine’s result holds up to further scrutiny, he will have identified what’s probably the single most cost-effective education policy intervention — one that should have particularly large benefits for low-income children.”