Hasnain says:

This is from 2014, but still worth reading.

“A blind cricket match cannot be described as anything else but a vision of incredible human triumph. Bowlers and batsmen have to feel the stumps to orient themselves towards which side to bat or bowl. Yet a batsman, crouched low to the ground to better hear the rattling sound of the ball, hits a ball he cannot see, basing his stroke completely on the noise the ball makes. Fielders dive full-length to stop balls, and then, instead of throwing the ball, run to the bowlers’ end to feel for the bowler’s hand to pass the ball to.”

Hasnain says:

This was a great read on transportation, systems thinking, politics, and policing.

“But the 85th percentile rule contains a fundamental truth: Drivers respond to the road they are given. Engineers use this rule to foster a cycle of wider, clearer roads and higher speeds. But the same logic could be employed in the opposite direction, too, in places where drivers and pedestrians interact.

There are three basic changes we could make to America’s roads, cars, and drivers to address speeding at its root. First, we could design roads to keep drivers at safe speeds. In rural areas, that means replacing intersections with roundabouts—a change associated with cutting crash rates by more than 50 percent. In cities, that means narrowing streets and intersections, building out curbs and speed bumps, and changing pavements to materials like paving stones that slow drivers down.”

Hasnain says:

This was a motivating read and human interest story.

“Now, I am not ashamed to say that a sticky Heineken can holds enormous value. It is what feeds me every day and pays for my clothes. It unites my family and helps me understand the value of hard work. It represents my family’s strong values and their dreams for me of getting the opportunity to go to college and lead a stable life.

Now, when people ask me what my parents do for a living, I tell them not with embarrassment or shame, but with pride. My parents are can collectors. Because my friend is right; my family is hustling to take care of their loved ones. That is something to be admired.”

Hasnain says:

“It’s easy to get attention for sensational claims, however, particularly when they come from official sources. Rachel Michelin, president of the California Retailers Assn., told the San Jose Mercury News that in San Francisco and Oakland alone, businesses lose $3.6 billion to organized retail crime each year.

That would mean retail gangs steal nearly 25% of total sales in San Francisco and Oakland combined, which amounted to around $15.5 billion in 2019, according to the state agency that tracks sales tax.

Can that be right? In a word: no.”

Hasnain says:

Someone at work recommended this article to me as I was thinking through a cross-functional problem and this is quite insightful. There’s a number of helpful case studies, and lots of experiences have been distilled down into useful takeaways.

“Many organizations have unwittingly designed innovation processes that produce inconsistent and disappointing outcomes. They spend time and money compiling data-rich models that make them masters of description but failures at prediction. But firms don’t have to continue down that path. Innovation can be far more predictable—and far more profitable—if you start by identifying jobs that customers are struggling to get done. Without that lens, you’re doomed to hit-or-miss innovation. With it, you can leave relying on luck to your competitors.”

Hasnain says:

This is horrifying and amazing at the same time. Honesty would be quite exciting to work on the quoted part for a coding challenge.

On a more serious note though - glad this was caught and patched before more human rights abuses could happen.

“JBIG2 doesn't have scripting capabilities, but when combined with a vulnerability, it does have the ability to emulate circuits of arbitrary logic gates operating on arbitrary memory. So why not just use that to build your own computer architecture and script that!? That's exactly what this exploit does. Using over 70,000 segment commands defining logical bit operations, they define a small computer architecture with features such as registers and a full 64-bit adder and comparator which they use to search memory and perform arithmetic operations. It's not as fast as Javascript, but it's fundamentally computationally equivalent.

The bootstrapping operations for the sandbox escape exploit are written to run on this logic circuit and the whole thing runs in this weird, emulated environment created out of a single decompression pass through a JBIG2 stream. It's pretty incredible, and at the same time, pretty terrifying.”

Hasnain says:

This is a felony, right?

“Supervisors and team leaders told employees that leaving would probably jeopardize their jobs, the employees said.

“If you leave, you’re more than likely to be fired,” Emery said she overheard managers tell four workers standing near her who wanted to leave. “I heard that with my own ears.””

Hasnain says:

From a few of the authors on the recent committee investigating the Supreme Court and providing recommendations to the president.

“Though fellow commissioners and others have voiced concern about the impact that a report implicitly criticizing the Supreme Court might have on judicial independence and thus judicial legitimacy, we do not share that concern. Far worse are the dangers that flow from ignoring the court’s real problems — of pretending conditions have not changed; of insisting improper efforts to manipulate the court’s membership have not taken place; of looking the other way when the court seeks to undo decades of precedent relied on by half the population to shape their lives just because, given the new majority, it has the votes.”

Hasnain says:

The story coming out over the weekend has been so heart breaking. And as more details come out, just infuriating.

““It could just as easily have been us. We would not have been ready,” an employee at the Indiana facility said of the tornado. “They put out an internal memo that says we’re rebuilding, but what are we doing to prevent this in the future? It’s always profit over employees.””

Hasnain says:

#hugops to all the oncalls responsible for patching things this weekend.

“Minecraft screenshots circulating on forums appear to show players exploiting the vulnerability from the Minecraft chat function. On Friday, some Twitter users began changing their display names to code strings that could trigger the exploit. Another user changed his iPhone name to do the same and submitted the finding to Apple. Researchers told WIRED that the approach could also potentially work using email.”