Hasnain says:

A very well researched piece which goes into academic research on politics, sociology, history, and polarization. I learnt a lot from this one, both about the US and international politics.

Very depressing read though.

“Drutman told me that the most likely path forward involves a massive shock to break us from our dangerous patterns — “something that sets enough things in motion that it creates a possibility [for radical change].”

This brings us back to the specter of political violence that hangs over post-January 6 America.”

Hasnain says:

Great read.

“But none of these changes will happen unless we fight for them. Just as the feminist movement reclaimed women’s right to their own bodies (and still has to fight for it today), I believe we now need an attention movement to reclaim our minds. I believe we need to act urgently, because this may be like the climate crisis, or the obesity crisis – the longer we wait, the harder it will get. The more our attention degrades, the harder it will be to summon the personal and political energy to take on the forces stealing our focus. The first step it requires is a shift in our consciousness. We need to stop blaming ourselves, or making only demands for tiny tweaks from our employers and from tech companies. We own our own minds – and together, we can take them back from the forces that are stealing them.”

Hasnain says:

Felt myself nodding along as I read this one.

“What we are not talking enough about is that we as a culture no longer value taking time for ourselves or resting. I find it amusing when friends take “activity vacations” where they brag about endless days of things planned to do. Is that really a vacation? Because it looks… exhausting.
In closing… people are quitting their jobs. Yes, many jobs are bad. More importantly however, we are all really tired.”

Hasnain says:

“In a reversal of the prevailing liberal narrative since 2016 — which either casts all ordinary Trump voters as irredeemable, bigoted villains, to the point of fantasizing that they lose their health insurance, or dumps the blame on nonvoters for failing their politicians — it’s the country’s elites and institutions, including the media, that are the real problem in Don’t Look Up. All corrupted by money, they mislead, manipulate, and distract the rest of us from what really matters. Maybe this is why the film’s been met with surprising hostility from a lot of the mainstream press, which have complained chiefly about the film’s lack of subtlety.”

Hasnain says:

This was so fascinating. So much we don’t know about our own history.

“Why did it take centuries for scientists to reinvent anything as sophisticated as the Antikythera device, and why haven’t archaeologists uncovered more such mechanisms? We have strong reasons to believe this object can’t have been the only model of its kind—there must have been precursors to its development. But bronze was a very valuable metal, and when an object like this stopped working, it probably would have been melted down for its materials. Shipwrecks may be the best prospects for finding more of them. As for why the technology was seemingly lost for so long before being redeveloped, who knows? There are many gaps in the historical record, and future discoveries may well surprise us.”

Hasnain says:

Great debugging and investigation.

“I hope you had fun learning about all this, and that you can use it to make your builds faster. If you didn't before, you should now have a lot of places to look at when you want to make your builds faster.”

Hasnain says:

Great read on concurrency and atomics (in rust)

“However, not matter how innocent the code looks, I like to double check my assumptions. I ran that with different numbers of threads and, although it was now faster than before, it didn’t scale at all again – it hit a throughput ceiling of about 4 million calls per second!”

Hasnain says:

Just heard of this scandal via a video advertisement for the podcast and I’m quite surprised as to how this story has been under the radar for so long.

““He's got kidney cancer, and so one of the one of his reasons for talking, I believe, is that he's he's he's probably going to die, although he was he didn't tell me exactly,” Wright said. “As he discusses on the podcast about his cancer you'll see that that's definitely a factor in why he decided to talk.””

Hasnain says:

More reporting on AirTag privacy concerns. This one stood out to me because this anecdote is just tossed in without calling this out as - IMO - a privacy violation:

“Mary Ford, a 17-year-old high school student from Cary, N.C., received a notification in late October that she was being tracked by an unknown AirTag after driving to an appointment. She panicked as she searched her car.

Ms. Ford only realized it wasn’t a threat when her mother revealed she had put the tracker in the vehicle about two weeks earlier to follow her daughter’s whereabouts.”

Hasnain says:

Great read. The fact that this was an AV vendor is really scary. I also appreciated the bit about not making bad code easily accessible even as an example.

"This code is such a bad idea, I’ve intentionally introduced errors so it won’t even compile.

...

I pointed out to the customer liaison that what the customer is trying to do is very suspicious and looks like a virus. The customer liaison explained that it’s quite the opposite: The customer is a major anti-virus software vendor! The customer has important functionality in their product that that they have built based on this technique of remote code injection, and they cannot afford to give it up at this point.

Okay, now I’m scared."