Hasnain says:

Long read, I learnt a lot about history and the American courts from this one.

“If that grim diagnosis seems correct, the cure is more elusive. Some treatments, like court-packing, would be worse than the disease. Others, like imposing term limits, are harder to administer and wouldn’t be effective for years. Which means: The court is where it is. The Rule of Six is now in force. Conservatives have time to write their views into the law books, where they will remain for decades to come. The change they choose to enact will be swift or slow; it will be open or stealthy.
But make no mistake: It is coming. The court, and the nation, will be worse off for it.”

Hasnain says:

This was pretty well worded and worth a read. Harsh but fair in the picture they portray.

“Now obviously, your full-time job is simply to boost Airbnb’s stock price, so I don’t expect you’ll heed any of these suggestions; in which case, all that’s left to say is: Enjoy it while it lasts. Because they're coming for you, and when they do, there will be blood. You thought Occupy Wall Street had a big turnout? Wait until hundreds of millions of evicted renters smash your empire. Rule number one of business: Never back desperate people into a corner. Pretty soon, the listings on your website will just become a hit list.”

Hasnain says:

"By the late 1990s theorists had mastered predictions at the one-loop level, which might involve 100 Feynman integrals. At two loops, however — the level of precision of Gehrmann’s calculation — the number of possible sequences of events explodes. A quarter century ago, most two-loop calculations seemed unthinkably difficult, to say nothing of three or four. “The very advanced counting system used by elementary particle theorists for counting the loops is: ‘One, two, many,’” joked Ettore Remiddi, a physicist at the University of Bologna and Laporta’s sometime collaborator."

Hasnain says:

The chinese remainder theorem is one of those really cool mathematical tricks that I always forget about till I need it and end up having to google it.

"You probably won’t need the Chinese remainder theorem to plan your next picnic, but in case you need to distribute access to information among your friends or secretly share troop strength with your generals, make sure this extension of least common multiples is on your list."

Hasnain says:

Interesting analysis on the crypto craze.

“These days I read a lot of cross-disciplinary commentary on the crypto asset bubble, and what strikes me as particularly strange is the sheer level of disconnect between people’s lived experience of this mania. I’ve never seen anything else like this in technology and the topic will divide rooms. Between the software engineers, venture capitalists, economists, and the chattering class there is very little consensus at the base level of reality of what the heck is even going on. It draws parallels between the Indian proverb about the blind men and the elephant, or perhaps the idiom about the blind leading the blind.”

Hasnain says:

“Common sense dictates so much of what is done for infection control, since most funding bodies consistently prioritise the most immediate, urgent, or commercially beneficial societal problems. Furthermore, current guidelines tend to focus on solid bodies, such as people; surfaces, both hard and soft; equipment; and water. Air is literally nebulous. Just as cleaning was the Cinderella of infection control during the past decade or so (and methicillin resistant Staphylococcus aureus sorted that out), we must now confront the neglected, but substantive, role of air in transmitting infection.14 It is fair to say that air could be the final medium to define and standardise within the infection control itinerary.”

Hasnain says:

This was a great read that covered both the technical and social considerations and trade offs that go into language choice at both small and large companies. Worth a read.

“When one team has feature requests for another it's also very common just for them to jump in and make the change themselves. It's often far faster to coordinate changes via a simple code review rather than a series of Jira tasks, plus it's only fair that the team that wants the feature invests the time to make it happen. This is a major challenge when there's a (programming) language barrier between teams.”

Hasnain says:

“Practical and theoretical applications should soon follow. Different forms of locally testable codes are now being used in decentralized finance, and an optimal version will allow even better decentralized tools. Furthermore, there are totally different theoretical constructs in computer science, called probabilistically checkable proofs, which have certain similarities with locally testable codes. Now that we’ve found the optimal form of the latter, record-breaking versions of the former seem likely to appear.”

Hasnain says:

“P.S. A few random thoughts I didn’t know where to put above:

Travel bans are not evidence-based: It may seem like travel bans for individual countries are a necessary step, but I cannot stress enough that they do not work. For example, we had a travel ban with China in March 2020, only to be infiltrated with a European strain. Travel bans are a political move; a tool to show the public that the government is responding. Travel bans can do a lot of damage, though, like perpetuate disease related stigma. This variant has already spread. A travel ban is not an evidence-based solution unless you stop all travel from every country.”

Hasnain says:

“For many, this has provoked painful introspection. Some candidly confessed that they dismissed patients in the same way that they have since been treated. They’re ashamed about it. “What else was I wrong about?” one said.”