Hasnain says:

“The pair started collaborating when Erik was 6 years old. “We had a company called the Erik and Dad Puzzle Company, which made and sold puzzles to toy stores across Canada,” said Erik Demaine, now a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Erik Demaine learned basic math and the visual arts from his father, but eventually taught Martin advanced math and computer science. “Now we’re both artists and both mathematicians/computer scientists,” Erik Demaine said. “We collaborate on many projects, especially those that span all of these disciplines.””

Hasnain says:

“Such warnings were echoed by U.N. chief Guterres, citing scientists’ warnings that the planet is moving “perilously close to tipping points that could lead to cascading and irreversible climate impacts.”

“But high-emitting governments and corporations are not just turning a blind eye; they are adding fuel to the flames,” he said, calling for an end to further coal, oil and gas extraction. “Investing in new fossil fuels infrastructure is moral and economic madness.””

Hasnain says:

“We need a deeper theory of work and time. When we say “That meeting should have been an email,” we’re not just saying “My boss wouldn’t stop talking.” We’re also saying “I think the information from that synchronous event would have been more productively shared as an asynchronous communication, so that an hour of necessary work wasn’t shifted later into the workday.” Our late-night mini workdays are not just an expression of benign flexibility. They’re also the consequence of inflexible managers filling the day with so many meetings that we have to add a “worknight” to do our job.”

Hasnain says:

“This is the core of fluctuation relations: Properties of a system far from equilibrium participate in an equality with equilibrium properties. My colleague Chris Jarzynski at the University of Maryland discovered this in 1997. (He’s so modest, he calls the equality the nonequilibrium fluctuation relation, while the rest of us call it Jarzynski’s equality.) Although the DNA experiment provided one of the most famous tests of this principle, the equation governs loads of systems, including those involving electrons, beads the size of bacteria and brass oscillators that resemble centimeter-long tire swings.”

Hasnain says:

This is effectively state sanctioned murder right?

“The Public Health Agency labelled advice from national scientists and international authorities as extreme positions, resulting in media and political bodies to accept their own policy instead. The Swedish people were kept in ignorance of basic facts such as the airborne SARS-CoV-2 transmission, that asymptomatic individuals can be contagious and that face masks protect both the carrier and others. Mandatory legislation was seldom used; recommendations relying upon personal responsibility and without any sanctions were the norm. Many elderly people were administered morphine instead of oxygen despite available supplies, effectively ending their lives.”

Hasnain says:

“We demand a layered, collective, and equitable approach to the pandemic. We recognize that none are safe from contagious disease until we are all safe. It is with this understanding that we will continue to share the latest on the state of the pandemic, toolkits for action, and recommendations on what to do, developed for and together with community organizations. For it is only through collective power that we can create a new, more equitable world that can not only control outbreaks but also prevent them from emerging in the first place.”

Hasnain says:

This, and the broader story of how Amazon workers fought to unionize and won against all odds (and a ton of frankly repulsive actions taken by Amazon) has been inspiring. More power to the workers, and I hope more unions follow - across companies and industries.

“Those one-on-one conversations were so important because Amazon told a lot of people we were a third party. And in the end, that bit them. At first workers would come up to us and be like, “How are you guys able to be in the building? You guys don’t even work here.” Then we’d literally show them our work badge and say, “We do work here — everyone that’s in the union here right now works here.” So they’d be curious at that point. And by the end of our conversations, they often felt bamboozled by Amazon because they realized that they had been lied to.”

Hasnain says:

Great read combining a language comparison and a discussion of API design tradeoffs.

"Now that we understand why the Rust API is structured as it is, it’s worth asking – why is the C mutex API structured in a way that is hard to use and trivial to misuse, requiring elaborate comments or even static analysis to get right? This, despite the standard API being designed circa 2010, well into the era of commodity multicore processors.

The question is simultaneously fair and unfair. There are important language features missing from C (and C++) that make it impossible to implement a Rust-style mutex API with the same guarantees – lack of explicit lifetimes, absence of an equivalent to Sync, lack of well-defined “move semantics” for ensuring that values end their lives at controlled moments (like with MutexGuard). So, it’s unreasonable to expect the C standard to define a safe mutex API.

But it is not unreasonable to use better tools."

Hasnain says:

The exponential growth of anti trans activism on the far right (which is now becoming scarily normalized by certain parts of the US media and politics; and extremely common in say the UK) has been very worrying to watch and read about and fight against. This goes into some of the origins of the movement.

“I keep going back to my conversation with Lavin about the Hirschfeld archives. Burning them was one of the first things the Nazis did, but it certainly isn’t what we remember them for. The fact that trans people make an easy first target doesn’t mean we will be the last or even the most important ones. The longer I look at all this, the more information I assemble, the more my mind drifts back to that long-ago fire.

The thing is, fire always spreads. Look around you and see what’s already burning. “

Hasnain says:

This is just amazing, both the exploit itself and the analysis of how it works.

"The advent of Memory Tagging Extensions (MTE), likely shipping in multiple consumer devices across the ARM ecosystem this year, is a big step in the defense against memory corruption exploitation. But attackers innovate too, and are likely already two steps ahead with a renewed focus on logic bugs. This sandbox escape exploit is likely a sign of the shift we can expect to see over the next few years if the promises of MTE can be delivered. And this exploit was far more extensible, reliable and generic than almost any memory corruption exploit could ever hope to be."