Hasnain says:

Reading about this situation is so infuriating, especially when you read into what exactly this commander has done to put people at risk. The whole situation is so absurd that if someone wrote it in a book they’d be laughed at for being too unrealistic. And yet here we are, fated to laugh at this absurdity as a coping mechanism.

“The Navy and the federal judiciary are therefore in a standoff. The Navy will not deploy Doe’s warship until he is stripped of command. Merryday will not allow it to do so. As a result, Merryday has effectively taken a 10,000 ton, $1.8 billion guided-missile destroyer out of commission. As the Navy builds up its naval presence in Europe to guard against further Russian aggression, it is down a ship—solely because an unelected judge in Tampa has inserted himself into the chain of command.”

Hasnain says:

Great read on management and incentives at various companies. The quote I’ve picked is kind of cheeky, the real article has much more depth and nuance.

“JOHNSON: Oh, so many meetings. Like, compared to being a data scientist — I’d maybe have a half-hour meeting in the morning, and then I’d just be free to do coding and thinking and making stuff. But I was in meetings — I think Tuesdays, I used to be in meetings for like seven hours.

DUBNER: No offense, but did you not see that coming?

JOHNSON: No, I really didn’t. I thought it would just be like my normal data-scientist job with a few one-to-ones on the side. That was okay because it’s quite interesting; you’re talking about the work, you get into quite depth from problems with my team. It’s more the meetings, like an hour’s coffee with someone to try and set up a better working relationship with their team. Times that by like five or 10 other teams — it’s just draining. “

Hasnain says:

“The SARAS team took a different approach to antenna design in pursuit of more uniform sensitivity across all wavelengths. “The entire design philosophy is to preserve that spectral smoothness,” said Saurabh Singh, the lead author on the SARAS paper. The antenna — an aluminum cone propped on a Styrofoam raft — was floated in the middle of a placid lake to ensure there would be no reflections for more than 100 meters in any horizontal direction, which Parsons called “a really cool and innovative approach.” Moreover, the slow speed of light in water reduced the effect of reflections from the lake bottom, and the uniform density of the water made the environment much easier to model.”

Hasnain says:

This was a really interesting read on web/app development and how to make developing user interfaces more natural (especially for a backend developer like me who's scared of UI).

This goes into a lot of approaches I've thought/wondered about over the years, and matches some of the stuff I've seen described at a very high level in some of FB's code (w/o knowing the details). Good to see some of this in action elsewhere!

"We started this project wondering how the local-first availability of an app’s data could change and simplify app development. At this point, we’re left with more questions than answers. However, we see the outline of an approach where user interfaces are expressed as queries, those queries are executed by a fast, performant incremental maintenance system, and that incremental maintenance gives us detailed data provenance throughout the system. Together, those ideas seem like they could make app development radically simpler and more accessible, possibly so simple that it could be done “at the speed of thought” by users who aren’t skilled in app development.

We find a lot of inspiration from tools like spreadsheets, arguably the origin of the reactive programming model, and Airtable, which draws inspiration from the relational model. These tools are highly productive in their domains; in our experience, they are more productive than traditional developer tools even for skilled software engineers. Nonetheless, they have significant technical and conceptual limitations; you can’t use Airtable to write iTunes. We hope that by taking a step back and developing some key abstractions, we can achieve the full expressive power of “general purpose” programming tools and simplify them dramatically, for experts and novices alike."

Hasnain says:

“While some mathematicians bristled at the hype — dynamical systems was nothing new, after all — the impact of chaotic systems on mathematics and science was profound. The existence of chaos showed that even in a deterministic system, we may be unable to accurately predict the future because of its sensitive dependence on initial conditions. But because of tools like Smale’s horseshoe, we can still extract useful information from these systems.”

Hasnain says:

“Taken together, the new UV-IR mixing models illustrate the myopia of the old paradigm — one based solely on reductionism and effective field theory — and that may be a start.

“Just the fact that you lose reductionism when you go to the Planck scale, so that gravity is anti-reductionist,” Dubovsky said, “I think it would be, in some sense, unfortunate if this fact doesn’t have deep implications for things which we observe.””

Hasnain says:

Long but very worth a read. It’s a human interest story that goes into one man’s experience with casteism throughout his life; and through this covers a lot of history of discrimination in India and the fight to overcome it. And then talks about how the same thing is happening in the US and in Silicon Valley.

“In April 2021, the debate over caste cropped up even closer to home. Siddhant listened in on a video call organized by the Santa Clara County Human Rights Commission, which was debating whether to add caste to its antidiscrimination policy. Over seven hours, 269 people queued up to deliver 30-second speeches. Anonymous, self-identified Dalit tech workers kept their videos off as they described how they had lost jobs and faced casteist slurs. Residents from dominant-caste backgrounds spoke of witnessing bias in their communities and in the region’s tech companies. A representative from the Alphabet Workers Union spoke of how difficult it is for victims, many of whom are in the US on visas, to come forward. Numerous allies topped off their statements with “Jai Bhim”—a tribute to Bhimrao Ambedkar—but others, including a few who self-identified as members of oppressed castes, worried that adding caste as a protected category would perpetuate negative stereotypes about Indians, and especially Hindus, as bigots.”

Hasnain says:

Fine dining is always an experience - though I don’t think I have had quite a similar experience yet myself.

Also, fair warning: site is full of ads and you may want to ensure your Adblock is working to make things readable. I read it with the ads and it was a pain.

“While I'd got a few photos of my dishes, and one of me enjoying one, I was aware that nothing could possibly capture that experience. The way that all of my senses had been aroused, it just felt like alchemy.

How many flowers had the chef tasted to know that the little pink one goes best on asparagus? How many tried and failed attempts had gone into deciding just how much reindeer moss goes well with artichoke? What countries had he visited to learn what goes best with the finger lime? Or, in forests filled with mushrooms of every conceivable type, how had the chef decided to choose hen of the woods for me to enjoy today, right here in Birmingham?”

Hasnain says:

This was such a great read. I haven’t followed too much of his cooking, but I really appreciated the perspective on life and personal growth shown here. Lots of things to ponder.

“My kids’ book, “Every Night Is Pizza Night,” was actually about that—about the concept of “best,” and how the best has context, and people have different reasons for liking things, and those things can change. These are things which, when I was in my twenties and early thirties, I ignored. I think that, as you age and mature as a person, there are things that you come to internalize a lot better, and understand better. I was an asshole! I’m still one! But I’m less of an asshole now, and at least I recognize it. The kids’ book was, in many ways, a response to the way that some people take my work. Especially online, I’ll see somebody post a picture of a stew they made, and then they explain how they did it. And then someone else, in the comments, comes in and is, like, “No, that’s crap. Kenji said to do it this other way. Therefore, your stew is terrible.” That’s not at all how I want my work to be used.”

Hasnain says:

“Computer scientists still have much work to do before the protocol (or some variation on it) can be used in real-world applications. But that is par for the course, researchers said. “There’s a lot of notions in cryptography that, when they first came out, people were saying, ‘This is just pure theory, [it] has no relevance to practice,’” Pass said. “Then 10 or 20 years later, Google is implementing these things.”

The road from a theoretical breakthrough to a practical protocol can be a long one, Barak said. “But you could imagine,” he said, “that maybe 50 years from now the crypto textbooks will basically say, ‘OK, here is a very simple construction of iO, and from that we’ll now derive all of the rest of crypto.’””