Hasnain says:

“It will be impossible to do anything about guns in this country, at least at a national level, as long as Democrats depend on the cooperation of a party that holds in reserve the possibility of insurrection. The slaughter of children in Texas has done little to alter this dynamic.
Republicans have no intention of letting Democrats pass even modest measures like strengthened background checks, and as long as the Democratic senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema refuse to amend the filibuster, Republicans retain a veto over national policy. Victims of our increasingly frequent mass shootings are collateral damage in a cold civil war, though some Democrats refuse to acknowledge it, let alone fight it.”

Hasnain says:

The more that comes out about the police response the more horrified I am. First the refusal to go in and now it’s appearing that the police were the ones that successfully barricaded the shooter into one classroom. With kids in it. All the kids that died were in one classroom.

And other reporting says they later only went in to save their own kids.

““Go in there! Go in there!” nearby women shouted at the officers soon after the attack began, said Juan Carranza, 24, who saw the scene from outside his house, across the street from Robb Elementary School in the close-knit town of Uvalde. Carranza said the officers did not go in.”

Hasnain says:

Very depressing, and beautifully written at the same time.

“Francisco de Goya is remembered more for his Black Paintings than he ever was for the lush light little scenes that leave no imprint on the memory, his luxuriant years in the Spanish court, before he began to fear madness above all things and exiled himself in the Quinta del Sordo, the House of the Deaf. Madness is interesting, particularly when paired with a febrile hand and a delicate brush, and the story of America’s collapse is being written by a thousand thousand minds sharper than mine and more comprehensive than mine and better equipped to tell you what to do and how to feel and what to think. Me, I think of the open mouth. I think about small limbs whorled out in their moment of death, which came too soon and did not need to come at all. I think about a country surprised by the carnage it creates but continuing to feast. I think of the great limbs of the beast kneeling as it feeds and know it will not rise again.”

Hasnain says:

“DPS Director Steve McGraw said twice that the cops were the ones who barricaded the shooter into a classroom.

That contradicts previous statements by other DPS spox, who said the gunman barricaded himself and immediately began shooting kids.”

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.”