Hasnain says:

Great little piece of technical advice I hadn’t heard about before.

“Once you lose the autoplaying videos, the popups, the cookies, the cookie consent banners, the social network buttons, the tracking scripts, javascript and css frameworks, and all the other junk nobody likes — you're probably there.

But, assuming you've tried your very best to fit everything into 14kB, and can't — the 14kB rule is still useful.

If you Make sure the first 14kB of data you send to your visitors can be used to render something useful — for instance some critical CSS, JS and the first few paragraphs of text explaining how to use your app.”

Hasnain says:

Come for the feature announcement, stay for the great Rust praise. This matched my experience too.

“So, what did we learn? We all expect performance and dev processes to improve. Those indeed happened. What we didn’t expect was the extent to which dev velocity increased and operational incidents decreased. Dev velocity, which was supposed to be the claim to fame of Python, improved dramatically with Rust. Built-in testing, CI/CD, benchmarking, and an overzealous compiler increased engineers’ confidence in pushing changes, and enabled them to work on the same code sections and contribute simultaneously without breaking the code base. Most impressively though, real time operational events dropped almost to zero overnight after the original release. Sure, there are still surprises here and there but, by and large, the core engine has been shockingly stable and predictable.”

Hasnain says:

I love these blogs as I keep learning more about SQLite. Looking forward to the next one!

“While there are always trade-offs between design choices, the vast majority of applications will benefit from WAL mode. The SQLite web site helpfully lists some edge cases where the rollback journal would be a better choice such as when using multi-database transactions. However, those situations are rare for most applications.

Now that you understand how data is stored and transactions are safely handled, we'll take a look at the query side of SQLite in our next post which will cover the SQLite Virtual Machine.”

Hasnain says:

I think what’s not appreciated as much in the reporting on this great move is the 5% income cap and 20 year limit on loans. I still wish education would be free but this is a great first step.

“Biden on Wednesday also announced a new income-driven repayment plan that would cap monthly payments for undergraduate loans at 5% of a borrower’s discretionary income, down from the rate of 10% under most existing plans.”

Hasnain says:

Cue stargate reveal in 3,2,1…

“"After all, why would Congress establish and task a powerful new office with investigating non-'man-made' UFOs if such objects did not exist?"

"Make no mistake: One branch of the American government implying that UFOs have non-human origins is an explosive development."”

Hasnain says:

Given that this is coming from Mudge, this is likely highly credible and quite worrying to read. There’s always two sides to the story though and I wonder what context we’re missing out on. Like for example none of the reporting I read on this mentioned that the CISO also left at the same time - I hope that was due to an oversight (she’s arguably not as famous as Mudge) and not due to sexism. But.. it still seems notable enough to warrant a mention at least?

“But, the disclosure says, Zatko soon learned “it was impossible to protect the production environment. All engineers had access. There was no logging of who went into the environment or what they did…. Nobody knew where data lived or whether it was critical, and all engineers had some form of critical access to the production environment.” Twitter also lacked the ability to hold workers accountable for information security lapses because it has little control or visibility into employees’ individual work computers, Zatko claims, citing internal cybersecurity reports estimating that 4 in 10 devices do not meet basic security standards.”

Hasnain says:

“Years have passed since the experiments that accidentally bore these results were conducted. A whole new suite of experiments now use Jefferson Lab's higher energy 12 GeV beam to explore nuclear physics.

"One thing I'm very happy about with all these older experiments is that we trained many young students and they have now become leaders of future experiments," Chen said.

Only time will tell which theories these new experiments support.”

Hasnain says:

This was a really insightful read and now I have a new site to follow. I also learnt that Redis supports hyperloglogs which is really cool - wish I’d known that before!

“Rather than iterating over, sorting, and ordering rows, what if the data was in data structures you wanted from the ground up? Early on, it was used much like Memcached, but as Redis improved, it became viable for many other use cases, including publish-subscribe mechanisms, streaming, and queues.”

Hasnain says:

This was a really interesting read that I’ll come back to in the future - and maybe get vetted by some of my marketing friends.

“What is next?

Just go run your ads already

If you need a quick framework based on what we talked about, here it is:

Figure out what you want to achieve (goal)
Choose a platform. Make sure your audience is there
Setup conservative targeting (filter out too much if you have to but make sure you are talking to the right audience)
Design a practical and relevant ad creative. Use Moat for inspiration
Connect to the right landing page (amplify paths people are already taking)
Run a minimal viable test first
If the test was successful, scale your ad spend”

Hasnain says:

From 2019, so a lot (and very little) has changed since then. This was an informational read.

“Ultimately, she would like our history books to pay greater attention to nonviolent campaigns rather than concentrating so heavily on warfare. “So many of the histories that we tell one another focus on violence – and even if it is a total disaster, we still find a way to find victories within it,” she says. Yet we tend to ignore the success of peaceful protest, she says.

“Ordinary people, all the time, are engaging in pretty heroic activities that are actually changing the way the world – and those deserve some notice and celebration as well.””