Hasnain says:

Great read on the value and benefit of (corporate) engineering blogs. Kind of ironic I share this one first as I got here from a link on another of his blogposts.

I also should finally dust off my old blog and start posting again perhaps…

“I've been comparing notes with people who run corporate engineering blogs and one thing that I think is curious is that it's pretty common for my personal blog to get more traffic than the entire corp eng blog for a company with a nine to ten figure valuation and it's not uncommon for my blog to get an order of magnitude more traffic.

I think this is odd because tech companies in that class often have hundreds to thousands of employees. They're overwhelmingly likely to be better equipped to write a compelling blog than I am and companies get a lot more value from having a compelling blog than I do.”

Hasnain says:

“But withholding paid leave from new parents can be lethal. The United States has one of the highest maternal death rates among developed countries. More than half of those maternal deaths occur after the birth. Only 17 percent occur on the day of delivery.

The death rates are higher for women living in poverty, and for Black women (who are three times as likely as white women to die from pregnancy-related complications). Adequate paid parental leave creates a life-or-death divide along racial and class lines. Survival after giving birth should not be a luxury afforded to wealthy white women.

A country with enough money to give a single billionaire a $2.9 billion lunar lander contract can afford to let women recover from the highly inconvenient task of perpetuating humanity. But we don’t. Because when it comes to an empathic or medically coherent understanding of childbirth, some of the people creating the budget proposal have the priorities of a Bond villain.”

Hasnain says:

Is it just me or this seems like a loan with a lot more strings attached and one that seems like it has a lot more downsides for the people being “invested” in?

“The decision to invest directly in humans brings about a host of legal, ethical, and moral questions that Lessin will surely need to confront head-on. The idea that someone might sign a 30-year employment contract and that society should explicitly value a human brings up questions of indentured servitude and worse—claims which Lessin sees as entirely ill-founded. (“it's def not indentured servitude,” he recently wrote in response to someone who said the legal issues seemed “daunting.”)”

Hasnain says:

Yikes. Great write up though, I learnt a bunch from this one.

“We managed to gain unauthorized access to customers’ Azure Cosmos DB instances by taking advantage of a chain of misconfigurations in the Jupyter Notebook Container feature of Cosmos DB. We were able to prove access to thousands of companies’ Cosmos DB Instances (database, notebook environment, notebook storage) with full admin control via multiple authentication tokens and API keys. Among the affected customers are many Fortune 500 companies. We also managed to gain access to the underlying infrastructure that runs Cosmos DB and we were able to prove that this access can be maintained outside of the vulnerable application—over the internet. Overall, we think that this is as close as it gets to a “Service Takeover”.”

Hasnain says:

Yikes. This seems unethical.

““Apple is trying maximize the money they’re making by driving in-app purchases that people buy through the Apple Store,” one source, who asked not to be named for fear of retaliation, told me.

“Apple has figured out that they can make more money off these developers if they push people to the App Store to purchase there versus a web flow.””

Hasnain says:

This was a great read worth internalizing.

[ disclaimer: it’s from someone I work with and highly respect ]

“A new era of automated code generation is beginning to take shape. This shift will create new opportunities to develop more secure code by scaling the techniques we already know to be effective. However, a number of technical challenges remain. It is imperative that we prepare for the changes this era will bring. “

Hasnain says:

This quote is... amazing. I knew people hated logarithms in math class but this is taking it to the next level.

"“iPads, which are made by Apple, have artificial intelligence in them that allow things to be viewed through three-dimensions and logarithms,” the defense insisted. “It uses artificial intelligence, or their logarithms, to create what they believe is happening. So this isn’t actually enhanced video, this is Apple’s iPad programming creating what it thinks is there, not what necessarily is there,” they added."

Hasnain says:

“Kiefer submitted a screenshot of Loder’s tweet as an exhibit, telling the court: “Loder states that he is not a journalist but an activist. There fore [sic] ‘slapp law’ doesn’t count.”

Unfortunately for Kiefer, that is not how the law works.”

Hasnain says:

Learnt a lot about programming language syntax and design trade offs from this one.

“I believe such a feature in Rust would be desirable. This might not give you the full flexibility of writing impl Iterator by hand, but I think it would cover the vast majority of cases people care about and are now stopped by the sudden complexity hurdle.”

Hasnain says:

“Not legal advice or anything, but if you wake up at night thinking about JAIL because of crimes you’re doing, don’t put that in email. Maybe also stop doing the crimes, but definitely don’t, like, manifest your jail dreams in email.”