Hasnain says:

“Some children didn’t come home and our politicians and many of our citizens barely lifted their heads beyond quick, empty thoughts and prayers tweets they think exonerate them from culpability and exempt them from action.

This is because too much of America is losing something critical: we’re losing our outrage when children are murdered with guns.”

Hasnain says:

No words.

““We’re devastated by this horrific act of gun violence that will forever traumatize the Uvalde community,” said Shannon Watts, founder of Moms Demand Action, a grassroots organization that is part of Everytown. “School shootings are not acts of nature, they’re man-made acts of inaction, of cowardice, of corruption by all lawmakers who refuse to pass laws proven by data to stop preventable, senseless shootings like in Uvalde. We cannot and will not accept a reality in which our children aren’t safe in schools or their communities.”

Such efforts are all but sure to fall short, however. There was a push to enact gun safety measures ten years ago after 20 young children and six adults were killed at Sandy Hook elementary school in Newtown, Connecticut. But the efforts to pass legislation, which Joe Biden supported as vice-president, fell apart in the US Senate. The Uvalde massacre was the 27th school shooting this year in the US, according to Education Week.”

Hasnain says:

This is notable as I believe this is the first time in recent memory where a western news outlet has called out Israel for what they have done. No ifs or buts here, well sourced byline and article, and I imagine a bunch of legal cover prepared behind the scenes.

“But an investigation by CNN offers new evidence — including two videos of the scene of the shooting — that there was no active combat, nor any Palestinian militants, near Abu Akleh in the moments leading up to her death. Videos obtained by CNN, corroborated by testimony from eight eyewitnesses, an audio forensic analyst and an explosive weapons expert, suggest that Abu Akleh was shot dead in a targeted attack by Israeli forces.”

Hasnain says:

“The theorem gave a new understanding of NP and explained some of its intriguing properties. Computer scientists had found that for some NP problems, answers seemed not only hard to compute, but hard to approximate as well. The PCP theorem helped explain why. It said that if a solution to an NP problem was found, it could always be reformatted in a way where most checks from a verifier (say 90 percent) would pass (but not all of them, because the proof is still just probabilistic). From the vantage point of the verifier, it would therefore look like the problem was solved approximately, to 90 percent accuracy. But because NP problems are hard to solve, it is often difficult to find a PCP for them, and therefore it’s equally hard to find a solution that is approximately correct beyond a certain point (such as 90 percent).”

Hasnain says:

Great read that covers an investigation into a production issue and a fix; while going into some detail about async and observability in Rust

“A few weeks ago, as Journeys adoption started to increase and JourneyX started to process more events, we began to notice a disturbing pattern in its memory usage. The most active processes were consistently utilizing lots of memory, then getting killed by the kernel. The Linux kernel has a piece of functionality called the OOM (out-of-memory) killer, which will automatically kill processes when they consume too much of the system memory. This prevents the system from becoming unstable or locking up due to resource starvation. In our case, the JourneyX processes were constantly being killed, restarted, and killed again by the OOM killer. This showed up on a graph as a sawtooth pattern of rapid allocation and near-instant deallocation when the process was killed. Memory usage would spike up to 17 GiB in the busiest processes, but we expect one of these worker processes to need under 1 GiB.”

Hasnain says:

Universities keep getting more expensive and unaffordable; while teaching loads increasingly go to overworked and underpaid adjuncts. This situation needs to be remedied somehow.

This is a long and detailed account of one person’s experience here as an adjunct at Berkeley.

“Here are my reflections on the various aspects of being a Unit-18 lecturer. I am grateful for the experience, as I've learned a lot, but alas, there were more negatives than positives in the end. I will be going back to industry, but perhaps one day will return to academia when it's a better fit.”

Hasnain says:

Well sourced, engaging article on the absolute misery the world (especially, France) put Haiti through. I learnt a lot from this one.

Minor qualms aside (a few exaggerated claims of being the 'first' to report on this; concerns around local experts not being cited) this is well written and worth a read.

"No country could be expected to come to Haiti’s defense. The world powers had frozen it out, refusing to officially acknowledge its independence. American lawmakers in particular did not want enslaved people in their own country to be inspired by Haiti’s self-liberation and rise up.

So, Haiti’s president, eager for the trade and security of international recognition, bowed to France’s demands. With that, Haiti set another precedent: It became the world’s first and only country where the descendants of enslaved people paid reparations to the descendants of their masters — for generations.

It is often called the “independence debt.” But that is a misnomer. It was a ransom."

Hasnain says:

Great human interest story that goes into some of the science behind multilingualism and how kids with disabilities are (and are not!) affected by it.

““In the U.S., what is so interesting is that we are probably the most plurilingual country in the world. We have a lot of languages that are being spoken,” she said. “But it's also one of the most aggressively ideologically monolingual countries in the world in that we really don't casually accept that multilingualism is normal and should be preserved.””

Hasnain says:

“On one hand, she explained that authorities are investigating the killings as a racially motivated hate crime carried out by an 18-year-old who reportedly wrote of his belief in a conspiracy theory that white Americans are being “replaced” by people of color through immigration, interracial marriage and integration.

“But I’m also supposed to tell you that that’s just one perspective,” Close recalled telling her students. “Another perspective is that this young man was out defending the world — or his kind — from being taken over.”

Close waited for her comment to fully register with her students, then added: “If you guys want to know why I’m thinking about quitting at the end of the year, it’s because of these types of policies — the fact that I have to have this conversation with you.””

Hasnain says:

“The search continues for a resolution to the apparent paradox, and with it, a better understanding of quantum theory. Such puzzles have been fruitful for physicists in the past. As John Wheeler once said, “No progress without a paradox!”

“If you ignore such questions,” Popescu said, “you’re never really going to … understand what quantum mechanics is.””