Hasnain says:

This is so exciting!

““The telescope’s performance so far is everything that we dared to hope,” says Jane Rigby, Webb operations project scientist at Goddard. “The engineering images that we saw today are as sharp and as crisp as the images that Hubble can take, but are at a wavelength of light that is totally invisible to Hubble. So this is making the invisible universe snapping into very, very sharp focus.””

Hasnain says:

“This became a real problem last year, as it failed to manage a volatile market. With fast-rising real estate prices early in the year, Zillow’s offers weren’t competitive enough. They changed the algorithm to bid more aggressively, and ended up with too many aggressive winning bids just as the market began to soften. Ironically, while Zillow's business model was premised on being patient, the company itself showed remarkable impatience.”

Hasnain says:

“To recap: These reports showed that the wife of a Supreme Court justice not only took undisclosed money from an activist who filed a brief in front of the court, but that she was also part of a campaign to try to overturn the 2020 election result and attended the rally that preceded the attack on the Capitol. And as Ginni Thomas herself helpfully explained in Monday’s interview: “Like so many married couples, we share many of the same ideals, principles, and aspirations for America.”

Ridiculously, Clarence Thomas wants us to believe he can carry on as an associate justice and remain above the fray. In September, speaking at the University of Notre Dame, he railed against growing criticisms of the court’s partisan behavior. If he really wanted to avoid looking like a politician, why allow his wife’s political activism and income streams to have even the appearance of an impact on his decisions instead of recusing himself?”

Hasnain says:

I am really happy to see more unionization efforts succeed, despite some horrible anti union efforts from companies that are household names. The fact that the quote mentions some of these tactics as “traditional” is eye opening:

““We’re in a moment when we are questioning how effective traditional union-busting tactics are,” said Rebecca Givan, a labor studies professor at Rutgers. “Traditional union-busting tactics like scaring immigrants and dividing workers by race – how effective they are has been brought into question.” Givan said workers at Starbucks stores that have unionized speak with workers at other Starbucks to inoculate them against anti-union efforts by telling them what anti-union message and tactics to expect.”

Hasnain says:

I really don’t know what to make of this now. Faith in the system: reduced. At least we’re all confused by this!

(For the record I support the change and am happy this is happening).

“This system raises the question: If any senator can pass a bill on any day, why aren’t people trying this all the time? Why doesn’t Sen. Bernie Sanders slip into the Senate when no Republicans are around and use unanimous consent to pass the Green New Deal? Why doesn’t Sen. Ted Cruz wait until Democrats are eating lunch and then single-handedly repeal Obamacare? Why doesn't Sen. Chuck Schumer make Tide pods look less delicious?”

Hasnain says:

From 2007, so it somehow reads like a piece from a much older and simpler time. Great read and human interest story about a person who accidentally discovers his wife could be a world record holder (for the highest Tetris score) and the ensuing trip to demonstrate this for the record books. It covers some video game history and is really well written.

“What does it mean to be the best in the world at something? This is what runs through my mind as we lay in bed Sunday morning. We are both struggling to understand what Lori's mastery of a game that Day calls "the embodiment of comprehensive thinking" means in our lives.

As I go to pack the car, I realize that Lori has bought some things on the trip, and fitting them into our Jeep Cherokee is getting tricky. Then I look over at Lori, and it all makes sense. "From now on," I tell the new master of fitting shapes into tight spaces, "you pack the car."”

Hasnain says:

Great read that goes into a lot of systems and optimization knowledge. And a worthwhile reminder of just how fast hardware is these days.

“For simple operators, it's feasible to reason about your memory bandwidth directly. For example, an A100 has 1.5 terabytes/second of global memory bandwidth, and can perform 19.5 teraflops/second of compute. So, if you're using 32 bit floats (i.e. 4 bytes), you can load in 400 billion numbers in the same time that the GPU can perform 20 trillion operations. Moreover, to perform a simple unary operator (like multiplying a tensor by 2), we actually need to write the tensor back to global memory.”

Hasnain says:

Really cool experiment!

“But the study is probably most notable for the surprising way that it collected measurements. A small research team managed to put an antiproton in orbit around the nucleus of a helium atom that was part of some liquid helium chilled down to where it acted as a superfluid. The researchers then measured the light emitted by the antiproton's orbital transitions.”

Hasnain says:

“It is hard to think of another historian who applies such a scientific approach to ancient history, except perhaps the Stanford professor Josiah Ober, who has applied political theory and modern economic modelling to information garnered from classical sources to equally eye-opening effect. The terminology is not off-putting because Stephenson proves able to weave it succinctly and fluidly into his account of how the Late Empire functioned.”

Hasnain says:

Great read on a business model justification and free tier pricing.

“All this is to say: our costs are carefully managed. Like other SaaS companies, we don’t build physical infrastructure. We avoid touching your packets - for privacy, but also to reduce our costs. We fix bugs and docs instead of answering the same questions over and over. Our control plane is lightweight, and our DERP network is cost-controlled. This allows us to maintain healthy operating margins, so that a free tier isn’t competing for resources with our paying customers.”