Hasnain says:

Interesting exploration on something I know is very useful and also really hard to do in a statically compiled language.

“Getting this working was… a journey. Beyond just stretching my comfort with Rust, it stretches my ability to communicate about Rust.

Our goal is simple enough: we want a way to generate code, at compile time, that can verify that a particular path exists, starting at a base type (the root) and ending up at some other type (the value). Importantly, we need to do this with only access to types; we can’t work with actual instances of those types. This sort of type-level programming is tricky in Rust.”

Hasnain says:

A great and sad look into the world of art and how much looting is behind so many museum collections out there. I’m glad some are being taken back now.

“Sometimes, instead of removing an object right away, Blue Tiger’s team would take a photograph, which was then passed up the chain of brokers and buyers connecting looters in the field to foreign markets. If word came back that someone wanted the piece, Blue Tiger would go back and dig it out. “I knew from my team that all the objects went to Thailand,” he said. “Sia Ford was the No. 1 buyer.” At the time, he never felt as though he was doing something wrong. “But now I feel so sorry. Now I know that these things belong to Cambodia. They were made by our ancestors.””

Hasnain says:

“Amid taxi strikes and riots in Paris, Kalanick ordered French executives to retaliate by encouraging Uber drivers to stage a counter-protest with mass civil disobedience.

Warned that doing so risked putting Uber drivers at risk of attacks from “extreme right thugs” who had infiltrated the taxi protests and were “spoiling for a fight”, Kalanick appeared to urge his team to press ahead regardless. “I think it’s worth it,” he said. “Violence guarantee[s] success. And these guys must be resisted, no? Agreed that right place and time must be thought out.”

The decision to send Uber drivers into potentially volatile protests, despite the risks, was consistent with what one senior former executive told the Guardian was a strategy of “weaponising” drivers, and exploiting violence against them to “keep the controversy burning”.”

Hasnain says:

“But it seems likely that, just as in the 2008 financial crash, the bad-faith actors who exacerbated this meltdown will walk away unscathed. What’s more, many of the investors who bought into the cryptocurrency boom did so to claw back security after a decade racked by recession and uncertainty. Koh was one of those. “I was lucky to keep my job, but I was really angry at the suits, at the bankers, at the high‑bonus people,” he says. “The whole space of crypto was about giving normal people the option to gain the upper edge in society financially. It was a beacon of hope. We could ride the next big thing. But that beacon of hope has been put out for now. The trust has been broken. Yet again, sitting here, in decade number two, the bankers have won again.”

Future generations may look back at this boom as a period of mania, when money multiplied like bacteria and a collective delusion gripped financial markets. It may seem unfathomable, but it shouldn’t. After all, who doesn’t want to be rich?”

Hasnain says:

“Public health in the United States generally is woefully underfunded and understaffed, said Janet Hamilton, executive director of the Council of State and Territorial Epidemiologists.

Although Covid brought more money into public health coffers, those funds cannot be used for anything else. “We cannot function at the level I think that the public needs and expects us to if we’re going to always be so categorically funded,” she said. “We’re not learning this lesson for the first time.””

Hasnain says:

This was a scary read from someone who studies civil wars across the globe. It’s from march and things have only gotten worse since.

“The analogy is smoking. If I started smoking today, my risk of dying of lung cancer or some smoking-related disease is very small. If I continue to smoke for the next 10, 20, 30, 40 years, my risk eventually of dying of something related to smoking is going to be very high if I don’t change my behavior. And so I think that’s one of the actually optimistic things: We know the warning signs. And we know that if we strengthen our democracy, and if the Republican Party decides it’s no longer going to be an ethnic faction that’s trying to exclude everybody else, then our risk of civil war will disappear. We know that. And we have time to do it. But you have to know those warning signs in order to feel an impetus to change them.”

Hasnain says:

This was interesting and worth reading. And a parallel that I’m sure a lot of tech employees across the industry will find themselves relating to. The later part on banning creatives from even getting input from ERGs was eyebrow raising.

“Some of Sarandos’ lieutenants were similarly resistant to feedback, particularly from Los Gatos staffers. What expertise did techies have in making movies? Over time, it started to feel as if Netflix were two separate companies: the feedback-friendly tech organization, where everyone had an opinion on everything, and the top-down Hollywood studio, where executives had the final word.

Cureton, the engineer who had been rewarded for sharing tough feedback early on in his tenure, moved from the product to the studio organization and immediately found it less open to criticism. When he tried to fix technical problems outside his scope of work, he was warned to mind his own business. Eventually, he was fired. “Too much feedback and being out of my lane too often were the reasons I was given,” he says.”

Hasnain says:

Been a while since I recall the EU (rightly!) condemning the US.

“The European Parliament voted 324-155, with 38 abstentions, to condemn the U.S. Supreme Court's overturning of Roe v. Wade and demand that abortion rights be enshrined in the EU’s fundamental rights charter.”

Hasnain says:

This is great.

“The DMA says that gatekeepers who ignore the rules will face fines of up to 10 percent of the company's total worldwide annual turnover, or 20 percent in the event of repeated infringements, as well as periodic penalties of up to 5 percent of the company's total worldwide annual turnover. Where gatekeepers perpetrate "systematic infringements," the European Commission will be able to impose additional sanctions, such as obliging a gatekeeper to sell a business or parts of it, including units, assets, intellectual property rights, or brands, or banning a gatekeeper from acquiring any company that provides services in the digital sector.

So far, Apple has heavily resisted attempts by governments to enforce changes to its operating systems and services. For example, Apple simply chose to pay a $5.5 million fine every week for months in the Netherlands instead of obey orders from the Authority for Consumers and Markets (ACM) to allow third-party payment systems in Dutch dating apps.”

Hasnain says:

Great read. Goes into tech as well as business best practices. A harkening back to the good old days where a small team could build and ship amazing products. Worth learning from for sure.

“That a 30 member tech team has built and scaled a complex financial + stock broking stack from the ground up, built a whole suite of financial software for end users that people actually appreciate in an extremely complex, constraining, and rapidly changing regulatory environment, with zero prior industry knowledge, is quite a feat. More of an anomaly than a feat. I, however, find it natural and poignant that a group of hackers in the right environment guided by the right philosophies can be incredibly creative and productive, even in a place as unfashionable and uncool as the Indian stock broking industry. What used to be the norm—small groups of hackers building good software—has now transmogrified into being the exception.”