Hasnain says:

“The Plague Tale games are a fun and fairly unique mix of survival horror, puzzle solving, and stealth gameplay that is all reliant on the core tech of the not-so-intelligent rats. The same system as described throughout this video was adopted in both A Plague Tale Innocence and Requiem, with the rats in the sequel being more deadly. The rats at better at reacting to light, more likely to attack on the fringes of light sources and can even climb up walls or operate on multiple floors. But as stated, the most impressive element is how they're optimised, now with 300,000 rats being able to pathfind at once. And it's through one simple yet effective piece of AI tech, that the game’s design goals are realised.”

Hasnain says:

I am glad he’s dead but also not looking forward to the regional war this might start by the time I wake up..

Hasnain says:

“I believe these proposals are a necessary part of our long journey toward court reform. The country, I think, needs to see the Democrats try this, pass something, and then watch in horror as the conservative extremists overturn these laws before the ink dries on the legislation.

Biden’s proposals are worthy ideas. When the Supreme Court rejects them, maybe people will be ready for the ideas that will actually bring the court to heel.”

Hasnain says:

Gotta love sci-fi shorts

“Officially, publicly, to anybody outside of the smallest inner circle, it was a quantum computing project. But to describe it as "quantum computing" was a mind-boggling understatement. There were already quantum computers. They were just computers. They were just faster.”

Hasnain says:

Gotta admire this guy's approach to business.

"Yes, Healthchecks.io is still a one-man business. Until 2022, I was part-time contracting. Since January 2022 Healthchecks.io has been my only source of income, but I work on it part-time.

At least for the time being I’m not looking to expand the team. A large part of why I’m a “solopreneur” is because I do not want to manage or be managed. A cofounder or employee would mean regular meetings to discuss what’s done, and what’s to be done. It would be awesome to find someone who just magically does great work without needing any attention. Just brief monthly summaries of high-quality contributions, better than I could have done. But I don’t think I can find someone like that, and I also don’t think I could afford them."

Hasnain says:

"This blog post shows a basic approach for programmatic packet capture and how it's then easy to plot the captured time series metrics in Python and Polars.

You also had a chance to see the techniques we use inside QuestDB itself to obtain great ingestion performance."

Hasnain says:

While all the media is still calling this abuse (it's rape - even the Likud member arguing it refers to actions which qualify as rape) - it's insane that *this* is what is causing riots -- soldiers got arrested for this and they are rebelling for the right to continue to rape prisoners.

What even...

"But the operation triggered an angry confrontation between the military police and IDF soldiers at Sde Teiman, captured on video by a reporter from Israel’s public broadcaster Kann News.

The detentions also prompted outcry from members of Israel’s far right, including a coalition of extreme-right members of parliament and their supporters who attempted to storm the military base in protest. Late on Monday, protesters also targeted a second base where the soldiers were being questioned, with violent confrontations continuing into the evening."

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking for later reading.

"The main idea here is that A* can be fast if you give it (a) a good graph, (b) a good heuristic. You might be used to using the grid as the input graph, and a distance function as the heuristic. Both of these are easy (and what I use in my tutorials) but not the fastest. The L1 library analyzes the grid map and constructs a smaller graph. It then analyzes the new graph and constructs a better heuristic. The combination of these two makes A* much faster than if you use a grid with a distance heuristic. Jump Point Search is well known for being faster than A* with a grid input and distance heuristic, but ordinary A* with an optimized input and optimized heuristic is even faster than Jump Point Search. See the comparison chart on the project page for numbers. Jump Point Search’s main advantage is that it works without preprocessing, which is useful for maps that change frequently."

Hasnain says:

Lots of useful insights here / this one really stood out though

“I read a post recently where someone bragged about using kubernetes to scale all the way up to 500,000 page views per month. But that’s 0.2 requests per second. I could serve that from my phone, on battery power, and it would spend most of its time asleep.”

Hasnain says:

“In the middle of Apple’s case against Microsoft, Xerox sued Apple, hoping to establish its rights as the inventor of the desktop interface. The court threw out this case, too, and questioned why Xerox took so long to raise the issue. Bill Gates later reflected on these cases: “we both had this rich neighbor named Xerox ... I broke into his house to steal the TV set and found out that [Jobs] had already stolen it.”

The rampant copying fueling the explosive growth of consumer computers meant that by 1990, the desktop user interface was ubiquitous; it was impossible to determine who originated any part of it, or who copied who. The quest to stake their claim nearly consumed Apple. But when they emerged, they had learned a thing or two. Today, Apple holds more than 2,300 design patents.

Apple's design patent for a device with rounded corners
Apple's design patent for a device with rounded corners
This story ends in 2011, with Apple suing Samsung for copying the design of its software and hardware products. One of the most remarkable claims: Samsung broke the law when it sold “a rectangular product with four evenly rounded corners.”“