Hasnain says:

This is amazing. I don’t even…

“Printer ink company Canon was forced by the silicon shortage to sell cartridges without the DRM chips used to dissuade customers from using third-party tanks. Accordingly, it is reportedly telling customers how to bypass its "genuine" ink bullshit.”

Hasnain says:

“The researchers found increases in diabetes in both data sets, though the relative rates were quite different: they found a 2.6-fold increase in new diabetes cases among children in one, and a smaller 30 percent increase in another.

“Even a 30 percent increase is a big increase in risk,” said Sharon Saydah, a researcher at the C.D.C. and lead author of the study. The differences likely result from different ways of classifying children as having Covid, she added.”

Hasnain says:

:(

“He said that most of the people who died in Murree did not die due to the cold, they died as they left their heaters on in the car and went to sleep.

“The fumes from the heater killed them.””

Hasnain says:

This was a great read on (middle) management and growing up the ladder. I obviously don’t have experience yet at the director level but I did find myself nodding along at the areas I’m familiar with.

“Your new job is to solve problems by removing roadblocks (including yourself), streamlining processes, and helping others be productive. You don't solve the problem yourself now; you create an environment where other people can solve the problem. This is how you add value.”

Hasnain says:

Great read from Moxie on web3. I continue to be a skeptic, but this was a well written analysis of the pros and cons of web3. I liked the analogies to past systems and how a lot of the stuff is still centralized under the hood.

“We should try to reduce the burden of building software. At this point, software projects require an enormous amount of human effort. Even relatively simple apps require a group of people to sit in front of a computer for eight hours a day, every day, forever. This wasn’t always the case, and there was a time when 50 people working on a software project wasn’t considered a “small team.” As long as software requires such concerted energy and so much highly specialized human focus, I think it will have the tendency to serve the interests of the people sitting in that room every day rather than what we may consider our broader goals. I think changing our relationship to technology will probably require making software easier to create, but in my lifetime I’ve seen the opposite come to pass. Unfortunately, I think distributed systems have a tendency to exacerbate this trend by making things more complicated and more difficult, not less complicated and less difficult.”

Hasnain says:

I just read this three part series from Lyft on how they ensure developers can stay productive developing in an environment containing 100s of microservices. Pretty interesting read, and I can't wait for the fourth (and supposedly final) part. Learnt a lot from this one.

"After beginning to migrate our development environments to Kubernetes about a year ago, a change in engineering resourcing was the catalyst for us to zoom out and re-examine our larger direction. Maintaining the infrastructure to support these on-demand environments had simply become too expensive and would only worsen with time. Solving for our situation would require a more fundamental change to the way we develop and test microservices. It was time to replace Devbox, Onebox, and integration tests on CI with alternatives that were sustainable for a system composed of hundreds of microservices."

Hasnain says:

I've been following Cindy's excellent takes on twitter for quite a while, and this long-form blogpost is equally great. Read it to understand more about how to be an effective engineer at the more senior levels (across lots of companies). So much good stuff it was hard to pick just one thing to quote.

"Managers need to deal with these skills as a part of their job description. So do ICs at the very senior levels, but it’s never too early to start cultivating this knowledge. In fact, a core part of mentoring engineers needs to be schooling them in how the organization works, which will then enable them to build a successful track record of getting things done.

Shielding non-senior engineers from organizational politics not just stymies their growth but also hinders their visibility into the skills they’d eventually need to learn the hard way, skills for which there exists no easy playbook, even if some managers and senior ICs might take a more short-sighted view and see this as a way to help other engineers “maintain focus”."

Hasnain says:

Really feeling for all the children, parents, teachers, and really everyone right now. This situation does not look like it will end well without much more drastic measures that the government seems to be unwilling to take right now. This guidance says it all:

“For teachers who test positive, symptoms that would allow them to return include a "minimal cough" — they can't be "coughing up phlegm" — and symptoms have to be mild or improving. Teachers will have to distance themselves if they take off their "well-fitting higher-level face covering" to eat or drink. They also must "must continue to stay at home outside of work" and "observe" other elements of isolation until 10 days pass.

They will not need a negative test to return to school. “

Hasnain says:

This is an amazing human interest story about a woman who persevered in the face of so much adversity. She was so accomplished as a surgeon and then as the first female department head, and then went on to be a lawyer who successfully fought the discrimination case against the department.

“In March of 2021, the tribunal found that Cybulsky’s rights were breached three times: when Flageole and McLean ignored her comments about gender, when the HR specialist did the same, and when Stacey opened her job up to new applicants.

“It is an act of discrimination to fail to take seriously the applicant’s allegations about the relationship between gender and perceptions about her leadership,” the adjudicator, Laurie Letheren, the vice-chair of the Human Rights Tribunal of Ontario, wrote. “Her dignity and self-worth were undermined, and those consequences are directly connected to the fact that the applicant is a woman.””

Hasnain says:

The examples in here are just sad. It clearly points to a lack of resourcing (lots of examples of the reviewers not having Arabic skills) but I wonder if there is a more fundamental incentive problem: are the reviewers incentivized to dismiss as many reports as possible so the pentagon doesn’t look bad? After all some of these look credible at first sight, e.g “the strike happened 17km away from where people claimed it was” (before someone points out the other location also had the same name).

“This investigation focuses on reviewers’ inability to establish details about the locations of strikes. In reviewing 80 assessments, including those with high numbers of reported civilian casualties, The Times repeatedly found what appeared to be simple mistakes. In a dozen instances, Pentagon assessors said that a location could not be identified, even though it was easily found on the internet, or they seemed to have just looked in the wrong place.”