Hasnain says:

““We have the power to turn the tide if we want to,” said Oona Hathaway, a professor of international law at Yale. “But at a certain point, the rules are going to become so eroded that it’s going to lose all legitimacy, and the United States is going to lose all legitimacy. We’re going to find that we’re going to be past the point of no return, and those rules are no longer going to be salvageable. And I think that would be a real tragedy.””

Hasnain says:

Todays fun fact of the day comes from this book I was listening to on my commute. TIL this fact (though it seems disputed)

“The Islam brought to America by enslaved Africans did not survive long, but it left traces that are still visible today. The practice of ring shout, a form of religious dance in which men and women rotate counterclockwise while singing, clapping their hands and shuffling their feet, was directly inherited from enslaved Muslims such as Bilali Mohammed and Salih Bilali in the Georgia Sea Islands. It originally mimicked the ritual circling (or shaw’t) of the Kaaba in Mecca by Muslim pilgrims.”

Hasnain says:

So many useful insights summarized concisely here. I’ll have to go over the papers again at some point to refresh my memory.

“Insight 9 : In a datacenter environment, we prefer centralized controllers over decentralized ones due to their simplicity and ability to make higher-quality decisions. In many cases, a hybrid approach—a centralized control plane combined with a decentralized data plane—provides the best of both worlds.”

Hasnain says:

Learned so much about so many things from this one. Gotta love when you see something like this a few thousand words into a post you already thought was quite interesting

“Now that the boring stuff is behind us, let’s start the fun part. Again, just as a reminder on how the intersection works: we do two phases of intersection, one for the conventional intersection and another for the bits that would cross the group boundary, and in the end, we merge these two.

In this section, we will take a look at assembly, some cool tools to analyze this assembly, AVX-512, differences in the microarchitecture of AMD and Intel chips, emulation of instructions, and a lot more. So again, sorry to bother you with all of the previous stuff, but it was important.”

Hasnain says:

“Moving data serialization format used by the Issue Service to Protobuf resulted in many improvements, including faster response time and reduced resource consumption (CPU, storage). Even though there were some challenges we had to solve during the migration, the final results were absolutely worth the effort. As we continue our work in the Issue Service and progress to handling more traffic and data, the impact of these relative improvements will continue to grow.”

Hasnain says:

“Inflation has lots of causes, it's true. But when an industry is consolidated enough to take advantage of a data brokerage or just engage in tacit collusion, any source of inflation – war, disease, weather – allows whole sectors to raise prices together, and keep them high, long after the shock has passed.”

Hasnain says:

“We need to build in the ability to reconfigure our systems in advance, without knowing exactly what sorts of changes we’ll need to make. The Canva engineers had some powerful operational knobs at their disposal through the Cloudflare firewall configuration. This allowed them to make changes. The more powerful and generic these sorts of dynamic configuration features are, the more room for maneuver we have. Of course, dynamic configuration is also dangerous, and is itself a contributor to incidents. Too often we focus solely on the dangers of such functionality in creating incidents, without seeing its ability to help us reconfigure the system to mitigate incidents.

Finally, these sorts of operator interfaces are of no use if the responders aren’t familiar with them. Ultimately, the more your responders know about the system, the better position they’ll be in to implement these adaptations. Changing an unhealthy system is dangerous: no matter how bad things are, you can always accidentally make things worse. The more knowledge about the system you can bring to bear during an incident, the better position you’ll be in to adaptive your system to extend that competence envelope.”

Hasnain says:

This was a fun read, reminding me I need to go back and keep up with the latest in succinct data structure research.

Also kinda timely quote given the recent hoopla around DeepSeek:

“Even though modern spell checkers use different techniques like edit distance and language models, the engineering insights from Unix spell remain valuable. It shows how deep understanding of theoretical concepts combined with practical constraints can lead to efficient and elegant solutions.

Most importantly, it demonstrates that some of the best innovations happen when we are resource constrained, forcing us to think deeper about our problems rather than throwing more hardware at them.”

Hasnain says:

“In 1872, Weierstrass published a function that threatened everything mathematicians thought they understood about calculus. He was met with indifference, anger and fear, particularly from the mathematical giants of the French school of thought. Henri Poincaré condemned Weierstrass’ function as “an outrage against common sense.” Charles Hermite called it a “deplorable evil.””

Hasnain says:

“The Real Culprit: setenv and getenv

setenv is not a safe function to call in a multithreaded environment. This is often a problem, and occasionally rediscovered as developers like us hit weird crashes in libc’s getenv [9], [10], [11], [12].”