Hasnain says:

This was some pretty interesting algorithmic stuff.

“Seriously, I'm dumbfounded. BMP and TIFF have run-length-encoding and then GIF comes around with LZW. But there's nothing in between. Why? I found the space between RLE and LZW to be large enough to spend many days on. And there's a lot more to explore.”

Hasnain says:

“I wonder what was it about a T-shirt that said “Abolish ICE” that almost everyone in the newsroom other than me knew would not be tolerated. Of course, when I talk about this incident with my journalist friends, the topic of objectivity comes up, including the idea that publicly proclaiming “Abolish ICE” makes you unfit for journalism. I think that’s bullshit. American journalism has a long tradition of upholding the status quo, whether that’s supporting slavery or the so-called war on terror or the police—which is not objectivity, but simply a different subjectivity.”

Hasnain says:

This was a depressing and well written read covering some of the major trials going on in the US right now and their implications. Also I learnt I should prefer this version of CNN as it’s so much nicer.

“This angry White man has been a major character throughout US history. He gave the country slavery, the slaughter of Native Americans, and Jim Crow laws. His anger also helped fuel the January 6 insurrection at the Capitol.

It's this angry White man -- not the Black or brown man you see approaching on the street at night -- who poses the most dangerous threat to democracy in America.

That's a sweeping claim. But these trials represent something bigger than questions of individual guilt or innocence. They offer a disturbing vision of the future, and a choice about what kind of country we want to live in.”

Hasnain says:

This was really interesting, and doubly impressive that this got built in a weekend!

“Overall this exceeded my expectations for this weekend. It demonstrated that, at a minimum the fuzzer can find glitches not in the original input, and can generate a new set of inputs that can be given to an external emulator to replicate the glitch!

As such the main challenge facing this fuzzer going forward are around optimizing mutation and selection to pick interesting runs.”

Hasnain says:

“Americans don’t even have a sense of shared history. Is America’s story one of a moral crusade dedicated to defending the inalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness of which we should be proud? Or is it a story of territorial expansion, slaughter, slavery and imperialism of which we should be ashamed?”

Hasnain says:

Honestly not surprised at this one.

“Coupled with the recent release of federal demographic data, this poll points to a long-term evolution in parenthood trends in the United States. The spiraling costs of child care, health care and education — along with global instability, including the coronavirus pandemic and climate change — could all be contributing to a broader change in attitudes to marriage and priorities in life.”

Hasnain says:

I just spent half an hour reading a Twitter thread about a really weird legal case. I’d prefer sharing an article instead of tweets with screenshots but here you go. This one was both hilarious and enlightening at the same time.

“An Alabama steel mill and its Littler Mendelson PC defense team committed "calculated sabotage" on a wage-and-hour suit with repeated lies and an attempt to push blame for their own discovery stonewalling onto a third party, a federal judge has ruled.”

Hasnain says:

This is certainly changing my perspective on the recent inflation news.

“And what that means is pretty simple: Corporate America has seized on the fears of inflation to jack up prices on you and make a ton more money. According to The Wall Street Journal, nearly two out of three of the biggest U.S. publicly traded companies had larger profit margins this year than they did in 2019, prior to the pandemic. Not just profits. Larger profits. Nearly 100 of these massive corporations report profits in 2021 that are 50 percent above profit margins from 2019.

CEOs are quick to suggest to media that they have been forced to raise prices because of one difficulty or another. However, my organization More Perfect Union reviewed recent corporate earnings calls featuring CEOs of some of the largest companies in the world, like Tyson Foods, Kellogg’s, Pepsi, Mondelez (a huge snack food and beverage company that used to be known as Kraft), and others. And we found jubilant executives revealing that price hikes are great for business.”

Hasnain says:

I learnt a lot about language semantics from this one.

“In closing, I would like to propose that "Undefined Behavior" might need a rebranding. The term focuses on the negative case, when really all we ever care about as programmers or compiler authors is that programs do not have Undefined Behavior. Can we get rid of this double negation? Maybe we should talk about "ensuring Well-Defined Behavior" instead of "avoiding Undefined Behavior".

To sum up: most of the time, ensuring Well-Defined Behavior is the responsibility of the type system, but as language designers we should not rule out the idea of sharing that responsibility with the programmer.”

Hasnain says:

I know this is the reality at a lot of places but it’s sad that this is the case.

“We asked early career workers what resources they wished they could have had during those early pandemic months, and the responses were full of helpful ideas for any company. Most important, they wanted a clearly delineated mentor who — crucially — was not also their supervisor or in charge of evaluating their performance. One person suggested a dual mentor program that paired new employees with a co-worker in a similar position in the company who could offer advice on more quotidian concerns, as well as a more senior employee who could provide longer-term career advice.”