Hasnain says:

Thinking about this today as I’ve been digesting and reading the news in Ukraine. There are a lot more examples of coverage I could share but frankly it’s gotten quite depressing (even the heart warming stories of Ukrainians bravely fighting back are tinged by the fact that they are forced to do it to survive), so I’ll stop and ponder here.

Solidarity with Ukraine - and down with all the warmongers across the world.

“Hence this is in solidarity with the people of Ukraine, they’re not somehow alone in being victims of war. War is the very act of dehumanization, and this is what we must resist, whether it happens in Ukraine or Yemen, crossing the Mediterranean or the river Dnieper, wherever the crushing of human life and very existence may be.

We have to realize, war isn’t something that just happens to white people. War happens to people. In solidarity with the people of Ukraine and the people in pain everywhere, we have got to recognize our shared humanity.”

Hasnain says:

“Long before we reach that point, the experiments will have already signified a substantial shift in the practicality of nonlocal games. These were invented to investigate the exotic phenomenon of nonlocality — the way objects can be instantaneously correlated across arbitrary distances. Now, nonlocal games provide the foundation for a much more practical process, the generation of a shared secret key.

“I sometimes say tongue-in-cheek even God couldn’t know it. The universe hadn’t decided what the value would be before it was measured,” said Colbeck. “That’s the origin of the security.””

Hasnain says:

Great technical read. And, as always, I wholeheartedly recommend {fmt}

“Would you have expected a “turn an integer into a string” routine to be loading resource file information blocks from some library, for each and every call? Yeah, me neither.

Technically, there are no bugs anywhere above - all the functions work correctly, as far as standard is concerned. But some of them have interesting (lack of) multi-core scaling behavior, some others have just regular performance overheads compared to others, etc.”

Hasnain says:

“Sure, employees like catered lunches, lounges filled with beanbag chairs and the masseuse who sets up in the conference room every other Friday. But they aren’t ready to recommit to a five-days-a-week relationship—or even a three-day one.

“You’re not going to get me on the train for two hours for free bagels,” says Jason Alvarez Schorr, a 36-year-old software engineer who quit his job in New York in January, when his former employer signaled an office return was imminent.”

Hasnain says:

I don’t know what I expected when reading this one, but it was definitely not what I expected. Surprisingly detailed and well researched. A lot of it isn’t easily quotable so I’ll leave the conclusion:

“A multivalent act, both flexible and formal, to kiss in the Middle Ages was to position oneself vis-à-vis another. By binding a legal or marital transaction with a kiss, one emphasized the mutual exchange of oaths and trust. By kissing a shoe or hem of a superior’s cloak, or by planting lips on a cross or Gospel book, one could display deference, respect, and veneration. By deigning to bestow a kiss on a lover, one could subvert mores or gender roles, all the while retaining the upper hand. And there are still manifold categories of kisses not discussed here: erotic same-sex kisses, kisses of homage between a celibate monk and a noblewoman, illicit kisses between those who professed to the religious life, parents’ kisses conferred on their children, &c. The closer we examine medieval references to kisses, the more the simple touching of lips unspools into layered, complicated, and ambiguous practice and meaning—each example more compelling to unpack than the last.”

Hasnain says:

More senseless war and death, millions of people will suffer as a result.

:(

“In a second round of comments, having effectively called for Russia’s expulsion from the UN, he concluded: “There’s no purgatory for war criminals, Mr Ambassador, they go to hell.””

Hasnain says:

“In the meantime, Frenk will keep using these simulations to explore challenges to the still-favored cold dark-matter model. “If it’s wrong,” he says, “I want to be the one who proves it wrong.””

Hasnain says:

This was a great read. I liked that it went into the science but made it accessible and provided tangible suggestions of what to do. Of course since it matched some of my priors I found myself nodding along a lot.

“Beyond hiring, employee happiness should also be a consideration when measuring organizational performance. Yes, objective performance still matters greatly. But, while a high-performing division within a company may bring short-term profit, if that performance was driven by toxic leadership and management practices, then those profits could evaporate quickly if employees were to leave in response. Unwarranted attrition is expensive. The U.S. military, for example, has caught on to this and has fired commanding officers who have fostered poor organizational climates, and at times it has done so preemptively, before a catastrophic event could occur. After all, it costs several hundred thousand dollars and years of effort to recruit and train a nuclear reactor engineer, and much more to do the same for an aviator. Losing even a few to unhappiness borne from toxic leadership is expensive and creates personnel shortages that increase the risk to those who remain. Attrition and talent shortages in a corporation have similar negative effects.”

Hasnain says:

This was an interesting and engrossing human interest story. This totally flipped the usual scenario of a fake scammer / contractor / employee on its head: what if the whole company was a sham?

“The pandemic changed the way many of us worked - communicating through a screen became the norm. Ali Ayad exploited that. It was as if he wanted to be the next Elon Musk - and, in Madbird, he thought he had found a shortcut. A universe where he would be judged solely by his online presence rather than the offline reality.

And the most shocking part of Ali Ayad's gamble?

The fact that we live in an age where it nearly worked.”

Hasnain says:

Great analysis that brings up a lot of points that have been concerning me about the economic and social situation in California and the US at large.

“What’s happening in California is a microcosm, and slightly extreme case, of what is happening throughout much of America. Local politics are centered around enforcing housing scarcity to the benefit of homeowners. Overregulation and excessive litigation burden economic output. America has systematically undershot long run GDP and employment growth. Public institutions are paralyzed by the myriad of interest groups pulling them different directions. And the results in California are representative of the results in much of America: an economy that sacrifices growth for exclusion, that draws battle lines in a fight over a pie that’s no longer growing. Driven by a scarcity mindset, well-to-do California residents have chosen to erect walls around some of the best places in the world just to ensure that their financial assets and quality of life not be squandered by the presence of outsiders. California’s population is shrinking not because of its economic failure, but because it chooses not to accommodate everyone in its economic successes.”