Hasnain says:

I’ve only read the “before” article (this whole piece) so far and it’s a harrowing account of political, intelligence, and legal failures that culminated in the events of Jan 6. Worth reading.

“The memo — like the others before it — was jarringly prescient. But it also betrayed the FBI’s long-running institutional unease with investigating domestic extremism. The document cautioned that the people who had made the threatening posts “have been identified as participating in activities that are protected by the First Amendment. … Their inclusion here is not intended to associate the protected activity with criminality or a threat to national security.”

To some inside the FBI, that cautionary language was a telling example of how the bureau tempered its reaction to threats of violence from White, middle-aged and middle-class Americans.”

Hasnain says:

This (the first comment which has an answer) is a work of art and should be in some hall of fame. I learnt a lot reading through (half of, before I gave up) this

I loved the comment where someone says this should be a thesis and the author responds that this was harder than their MS thesis.

“This program aims for the maximum possible single-threaded performance. In terms of the FizzBuzz calculation itself, it is intended to sustain a performance of 64 bytes of FizzBuzz per 4 clock cycles (and is future-proofed where possible to be able to run faster if the relevant processor bottleneck – L2 cache write speed – is ever removed). This is faster than a number of standard functions. In particular, it's faster than memcpy, which presents interesting challenges when it comes to I/O (if you try to output using write then the copies in write will take up almost all the runtime – replacing the I/O routine here with write causes the performance on my CPU to drop by a factor of 5). As such, I needed to use much more obscure system calls to keep I/O-related copies to a minimum (in particular, the generated FizzBuzz text is only sent to main memory if absolutely necessary; most of the time it's stored in the processor's L2 cache and piped into the target program from there, which is why reading it from a sibling CPU can boost performance – the physical connection to the L2 cache is shorter and higher bandwidth than it would be to a more distant CPU).”

Hasnain says:

This was some really great advice that’s worth internalizing for folks working in infra and/or leading large projects.

“[32] Keep track of every other major project in your space within the company: you should be able to explain their technical design better than their own ICs. Grab any opportunities to debate scope with the leads of other similar projects: you should be able to articulate how your project fits into the larger ecosystem of options. Inter-team competition is healthy and necessary. Make friends with ICs in these projects: they understand your technical challenges better than anyone else in the company.”

Hasnain says:

I’m going to tell myself that one day I shall achieve such a productive workflow. Also goes to show how complex software development still is in this day and age.

“There's a lot more to say about all this, but I'm fairly happy with the workflow I've set up both for work, and for my personal projects. Now I can focus on the code I want to ship, and I can liberate some storage space in my brain, that was previously dedicated to all these manual procedures I had to follow all the time.”

Hasnain says:

This was a great read. Learnt a lot more about how other organizations and the industry at large is starting to think about privacy work.

“The privacy profession is dominated by lawyers—who certainly play a critical role—but privacy engineers are often the real superheros when things go wrong, and essential to preventing privacy disasters. Privacy engineering has emerged as a growing discipline focused on finding practical and often technical solutions to privacy protection. Organizations hire privacy engineers to develop privacy-protective products and services, build tools to promote and monitor privacy compliance throughout their organization, and to detect and remediate privacy problems. Privacy engineers may play a holistic role or focus on specific areas such as front-end, back-end, user experience, product management, or legal compliance.”

Hasnain says:

Chomsky’s interviews are always great. Learnt so much from this one.

“So, in the United States, if you’re a privileged person like Edward Said or me, punishments are not too bad. Maybe vilification, denunciation. Said had to have police protection. He had a buzzer in his apartment so he could call the police in case he was attacked. If you’re Fred Hampton, a Black Panther organizer, you can be assassinated by the national political police. It depends on who you are.”

Hasnain says:

Every single example here is horrifying, holy crap.

“The department does not note what prompted its audit. But in May 2019 — two months earlier — Davis School District drew national attention when the family of a biracial boy who went to school there filed a lawsuit, describing how the boy was purposefully shut in the doors of a school bus by the driver and left dangerously dangling outside as he drove forward.

The report specifically mentions that incident, saying that it was seriously mishandled by the district, which focused on protecting “certain employees from discipline” rather than worrying about the boy being endangered. The district later acknowledged it had received previous complaints about the bus driver’s discriminatory behavior that were brushed aside.”

Hasnain says:

This is a really interesting study. I’ll have to go through and read the paper to understand everything in detail.

“For far too long, U.S. policymakers have exhibited more interest in spending tax dollars on nationally self-destructive punishment systems than on supporting people living in vulnerable circumstances. As a result, the country has allowed unsafe spaces of neglect — from prisons and jails to nursing homes and decrepit schools in poor areas — to grow at the heart of our communities. Where we ought to have built spaces of care, we have instead built epidemic engines.”

Hasnain says:

How is this legal?! More importantly, why is this legal?

“"Johnson & Johnson doesn't have this liability anymore. They pushed all of it into the company they created just to file for bankruptcy," said Lindsey Simon, a bankruptcy expert at the University of Georgia School of Law.

As a result, Simon said, "consumers can't recover [damages] against a big solvent company. They have to recover against this smaller fictional company created [by J&J]."”

Hasnain says:

I wasn’t aware of the stuff going on with the .net community but this is pretty important to read. Not just for the technical content but for understanding open source business models and how they relate to corporate funding. And on keeping trust with developers.

“I am not sure. It takes years to build trust and only a few moments to lose it all. Microsoft is a huge organisation and we as outsiders often get to see only a handful of selected people being tasked to spread a certain message via their huge followings in order to create a public image in favour of Microsoft, but what if those people leave?

Do you trust Microsoft with Open Source or do you actually trust people like Jon Galloway, Scott Hanselman, Scott Hunter, Guido van Rossum, David Fowler, Damian Edwards, Miguel de Icaza and a handful of other OSS champions who have been pushing the OSS message internally from the bottom up? What if these people leave .NET? Will Microsoft continue to play nicely with the community?”