Hasnain says:

This was chock full of great advice. I have seen this bias play out way too many times and try to counteract it when I can, but it sucks and is tough.

“If you could have seen me growing up, you would probably be shocked by just how shy I was. The thing is, most people are not born with the skill to discuss any topic intelligently and without preparation. But that's the beauty of learning to speak up: with enough practice, anyone can level up their skills and improve their career prospects, no matter how shy they think they are.

As leaders, we have the ability to help make the playing field more equal, and as colleagues, we can vouch for our fellow team members. And if you're a natural introvert, there are small steps you can start taking today to make your voice heard and your perspective known.”

Hasnain says:

This is amazing.

“Accenture’s developers also misrepresented the extent of their testing of the code by commenting out portions of the code, so the code appeared to be working.

On top of that, despite having specifically requested that the consultants provide a style guide in an interactive and updateable format — rather than a PDF — Accenture kept providing the guide in PDF format only, Hertz complained.

When Hertz confronted the consultants about the PDF problem, guess what the response was? Yep, it wanted "hundreds of thousands of dollars in additional fees" to cover the cost.”

Hasnain says:

“The memo therefore tells us what we suspected all along: The most powerful economic actors in the U.S. — entities like Bank of America and its clients — do not like working people to have power. But it’s nice to have it in their own words.”

Hasnain says:

This is a surprisingly hard problem that I’m always worried about introducing - I’ve seen this cause issues before too.

“Making these changes won’t be easy, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be done. Before Rust came along, achieving both memory safety and C++ levels of performance in a practical, easy-to-use language seemed impossible. And this change doesn’t even require a new language! It’s just a matter of redesigning a commonly used library to be less error-prone. Hopefully someday, deadlocks too will be an almost-unheard of class of bug. Even if this proposal isn’t suitable for implementation as is, I hope this starts a conversation so we can find better ways to address the problem.”

Hasnain says:

This was a great read on life in rural Alaska. It brought back a harkening for a simpler way of life - and it was an engrossing story told over food.

“Pagkalinawan reminded me, “People who come up to Bettles are amazed that we eat better than they do. I always tell them we can’t just go to a restaurant; we know what we want to eat and have to plan ahead for it.”

A friend from New York City, an amateur chef who studies food systems, came to visit and we hosted a potluck with the theme “eat local.” Adam went to the river and caught grayling, which was served over a bed of sauteed greens with a rhubarb sauce. Our neighbors brought moose burgers, locally grown potatoes cooked with our garden rosemary, and blueberry cobbler. We stayed up late, which can be hard to realize during the peak of the summer when the sun is still high in the sky, sharing food and drinking Bota Box wine. Although this was a gourmet meal, in many ways it was just as great as the store-bought hot dogs and macaroni salad we had eaten together hundreds of times before; the quality of a meal is really a reflection of the company you share it with as well as the long process and coordination it takes to get everything on the table. Then before bed, with the sun just starting to near the horizon, we all walked over to the small shop on the airstrip and finished the evening off with Mounds bars and Doritos.”

Hasnain says:

The science coming out of the JWST has been so incredibly exciting to see and learn about.

“JWST should be capable of finding far more distant supernovas too, which will give it another way to serve as a probe of the early universe. It may also find stars being torn apart by the supermassive black holes that reside at galaxies’ centers, something no previous telescope has seen. “For the first time we’re going to be able to peer into these very deep, dark regions,” said Ori Fox, an astronomer at the Space Telescope Science Institute who leads the team studying transients.

Transients, like other astronomical phenomena, are set to be redefined. After decades of planning and construction, JWST has hit the sky running. The issue now is keeping pace with the constant barrage of science coming down from a machine so complex yet faultless it almost defies belief that it was built by human brains. “It’s working, and it’s insane,” said Larson.”

Hasnain says:

Garbage collection is fascinating and definitely something I need to read up more on.

“The last remaining bit of the puzzle is still lacking: how is it guaranteed that the collection is completed before the FREE list is empty? If the mutator runs out of free objects before the collection cycle is completed, then the only option is to force the cycle to completion by calling advance() repeatedly until there are no more gray objects and then flip, but that's a stop-the-world situation. The solution is to call advance() from within alloc() guaranteeing scan progress. Baker proved that if advance() is called k times for each alloc() call, then the algorithm never runs out of free objects, provided that the total heap size is at least R*(1 + 1/k) objects, where R is the number of reachable objects.”

Hasnain says:

“Recent research has shown that a family has to earn at least $35.80/hour just to meet basic needs. The average two-kid family spends 25% of its income on child care alone — and these figures don’t even fully take into account runaway inflation, which recently topped 9%.

The reality is that today’s $40/hr median family income doesn’t leave as much wiggle room for American pastimes as it used to.

And as Steven Martinez, and many others, have learned, this is especially true of “the most magical place on Earth.””

Hasnain says:

How can these folks sleep at night? So much money wasted and much more importantly a misdirection of efforts away from things that could have saved so many lives.

“Over the last two decades, Alzheimer’s drugs have been notable mostly for having a 99% failure rate in human trials. It’s not unusual for drugs that are effective in vitro and in animal models to turn out to be less than successful when used in humans, but Alzheimer’s has a record that makes the batting average in other areas look like Hall of Fame material.

And now we have a good idea of why. Because it looks like the original paper that established the amyloid plaque model as the foundation of Alzheimer’s research over the last 16 years might not just be wrong, but a deliberate fraud.”

Hasnain says:

Lots of mixed feelings after reading this one. Like the author, I too yearn for the "good old days" when I would fully sink myself into my work and use that as a major fulfilment in life. There are definitely upsides to it.

I don't agree with taking it to the point where people feel like *they have no other choice* though - like the author points out they would cry at work, be forced to skip vacations, etc. Can't we have the best of both worlds - people motivated by their work that they want to do really well; but also not feeling so pressured they *have* to fire on all cylinders all the time?

I feel like the author has conflated the two things and while, sure, they are correlated, in a truly great work culture they shouldn't have to.

"A few months ago, someone complained to me that the new (very hot stuff) startup they were at had a “lgtm culture.” Upon inquiry, they explained that no matter what they do or how good it is, everyone just says “looks good to me.” “I know I should feel good about being a competent, trusted, contributing team member,” he continued, “and my new colleagues are so, so kind, but at the end of the day I just feel like no one has any standards.” He looked down at his coffee for a moment. “I’m afraid I’m never going to see my best work again.”

Yikes. Now multiply that same phenomenon across every other person working and every other company. What is that going to do for our collective impact? What will that do to progress? Mega yikes.

I’m not exactly sure how we balance the realities of the world today with a working life that asks so much of us. But I do know leaning all the way out isn’t the answer. I hope we find the right way through it, together. We certainly need the support of our leaders to get there, but I know from experience that anyone, in any corner of an organization, can play a meaningful role in building the organizations we want to be in.

And when we do, I think we’ve got a shot at transforming organizations into the incredible sources of community and self-actualization they should be.

Believe me, it’s possible. And believe me, it’s as good as you imagine it could be."