Hasnain says:

“We know that life under our faint young sun was possible, and now we might know why. What we are starting to see is just how lucky we may have been in avoiding becoming a permanent snowball Earth or even a steam Earth. Somehow, conditions were just right on our planet, keeping us in this narrow window between being frozen solid and evaporating to oblivion, and allowing us to survive — despite a few near misses. “There’s a huge discussion about the requirements for habitability,” said Feulner. “Even on Earth, things could have gone wrong easily.””

Hasnain says:

“The countries that have stopped the virus, that is, cannot keep stopping the virus, because the experts say there is already too much of the virus circulating. China is a pandemic waiting to happen because the United States is wholeheartedly committed to being a pandemic. The American program, they say, will be the program for the entire world. “

Hasnain says:

"As a result, when prices increased, some sellers experienced a marked decline in the sales and resulting profits from products enrolled in the program. Faced with price increases, online customers sometimes opted to buy Amazon’s own branded products — particularly its private label products. This resulted in Amazon maximizing its own profits regardless of whether consumers paid a higher price for sales of products enrolled in the “Sold by Amazon” program or settled for buying the same or similar product offered through Amazon."

Hasnain says:

Sigh. Algorithms are not neutral, example N+1:

“In a report issued days before Christmas in 2021, the department said its algorithmic tool for assessing the risk that a person in prison would return to crime produced uneven results. The algorithm, known as Pattern, overpredicted the risk that many Black, Hispanic and Asian people would commit new crimes or violate rules after leaving prison.”

Hasnain says:

“Now mathematicians will march their subconvex bound off to face other problems, maybe even including the Riemann hypothesis one day. That may seem far-fetched right now, but math thrives on hope, and at the very least, Nelson’s new proof has provided that.”

Hasnain says:

“But the Court’s five Republican justices ignored both the clear language and purpose of the law, erecting numerous extratextual bars that make it all but impossible to win a case like this without showing discriminatory intent. As Justice Elena Kagan wrote in an unanswerable dissent, Justice Samuel Alito’s opinion for the Court was a “law-free zone,” basing its holding on “on a list of mostly made-up factors.” (Among them: The majority invented a rule that restrictions on the vote that existed when the Voting Rights Act was enacted should be presumptively constitutional, which, if true, would sort of obviate the purpose of a Voting Rights Act in the first place.) “

Hasnain says:

This was an interesting economic perspective using an analog of systems thinking. I don’t fully agree with everything here (am not qualified to judge it all though) but the material resonated with me.

“Very few Americans have maids today because we don’t have a substantial labor force willing to work for a few thousand dollars a year. That in itself is a clear sign that living standards have risen substantially, even if reasonable people can disagree about exactly how large the improvement has been.”

Hasnain says:

“These roughly five or six seconds of dialogue had a profound effect on popular perceptions of Merlot and, in turn, on the entire California wine industry. According to a new study published in the Journal of Wine Economics (no, I did not make that up), in the years following Sideways’ release the price of Merlot fell and California wineries converted thousands of acres of Merlot grapes into the varietal preferred by Giamatti’s character in the film: Pinot Noir.”

Hasnain says:

I needed something to read for 10 minutes so I got curious and looked up some stuff on the filibuster and had to suffer through this article so I’m sharing it here in case anyone else wants to do similarly.

Jokes aside the content here is still somewhat relevant for the historical analysis even though we can now see which predictions worked out and which ones didn’t.

“Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson had staged the all-night session in a desperate attempt to break a Southern filibuster against a voting rights bill. His army of Northern Democrats and party-of-Lincoln Republicans were sleeping on Army cots nearby, ready to show up groggily for 3 a.m. quorum calls to prevent the Senate from adjourning. Meanwhile, 18 members of the segregationist Southern Caucus held the floor in four-hour shifts, which was about as long as their legs could take it. As North Carolina Senator Sam Ervin (later the hero of the Watergate hearings) said after ending his stint at the microphone, “My throat is fine, but I could feel it in my knees.””

Hasnain says:

Cloud costs are always scary. It's very easy to run up a huge bill without realizing what's going on.

"I have been, and still remain, a massive proponent of "the cloud". I built Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) as a cloud-first service that took advantage of modern cloud paradigms such as Azure Table Storage to massively drive down costs at crazy levels of performance I never could have achieved before. I wrote many blog posts about doing big things for small dollars and did talks all over the world about the great success I'd had with these approaches. One such talk was How I Pwned My Cloud Costs so it seems apt that today, I write about the exact opposite: how my cloud costs pwned me."