Hasnain says:

Lots of deep thoughts in a tough and decisive topic, but this is required reading. Charity always threads the needle and makes great points.

“We’ve all watched companies become wildly successful under assholes, while waves of employees leave broken and burned out. I wish this wasn’t true, but it is. People’s lives and careers are just another externality as far as the corporate books are concerned.

Many live through this nightmare and emerge dead set on doing things differently. And so, when they become founders or leaders, they put culture ahead of the business. And then they lose.

Most companies fail, and if you aren’t hungry and zeroed in on the success of your business, your slim chances become even slimmer.

I don’t believe this has to be either/or, cultural success or business success. I think it’s a false dichotomy. I believe that healthy companies can be more successful than shitty ones, all else being equal. Which is why I believe that leaders who care about building a workplace culture rooted in dignity and respect have a responsibility to care even more about success in business. Let’s show these motherfuckers how it’s done. Nothing succeeds like success.”

Hasnain says:

“The solution for these irreducible representations came to Raskin at a moment when his personal life was filled with chaos. A few weeks after he and Færgeman posted their paper online, Raskin had to rush his pregnant wife to the hospital, then return home to take his son to his first day of kindergarten. Raskin’s wife remained in the hospital until the birth of their second child six weeks later, and during this time Raskin’s life revolved around keeping life normal for his son and driving in endless loops between home, his son’s school and the hospital. “My whole life was the car and taking care of people,” he said.

He took to calling Gaitsgory on his drives to talk math. By the end of the first of those weeks, Raskin had realized that he could reduce the problem of irreducible representations to proving three facts that were all within reach. “For me it was this amazing period,” he said. His personal life was “filled with anxiety and dread about the future. For me, math is always this very grounding and meditative thing that takes me out of that kind of anxiety.””

Hasnain says:

“Hopefully you have gained a little bit of an intuitive understanding of abstract interpretation. Last year, being able to write some code made me more comfortable with the math. Now being more comfortable with the math is helping me write the code. It’s nice upward spiral.”

Hasnain says:

“Hilbert was asked in 1934 by the minister of science under the Nazi regime whether mathematics in Göttingen had suffered from the departure of the Jews and friends of the Jews. He replied: “Suffered? It hasn’t suffered, Mr. Minister. It doesn’t exist anymore!” Hilbert was right. Only one of the pre-Nazi full professors stayed past 1934.

The center of mathematics shifted quickly during the Nazi era and in the wake of World War II. Courant, Weyl and others helped move it to the U.K. and the U.S., where most of the top-ranked mathematics programs are located today.

These countries’ mathematical heritage is in Göttingen. Its story is their story.”

Hasnain says:

“It is to be hoped that new archaeological discoveries will expand our picture of the Vikings in al-Andalus. Until they do, the main legacy of this period is the stories preserved by Arabic historians. The fear and fascination with the Vikings that continues to attract widespread popular and scholarly interest have exaggerated their destructive effects on medieval society. This same fear and fascination is palpable in medieval Muslim recollections of the Majūs.”

Hasnain says:

“The page-interleaved read pattern seems surprisingly under-discussed and I don’t remember ever seeing it used in code in the wild. Curious! If you’re aware of it being used anywhere, let me know, I’d love to see it! And if I’m missing any other memory-based optimization, let me know too. :)”

Hasnain says:

Don’t words have meaning?

“Michael Berkheimer was dining with his wife and friends at a wing joint in Hamilton, Ohio, and had ordered the usual — boneless wings with parmesan garlic sauce — when he felt a bite-size piece of meat go down the wrong way. Three days later, feverish and unable to keep food down, Berkeimer went to the emergency room, where a doctor discovered a long, thin bone that had torn his esophagus and caused an infection.

In a 4-3 ruling, the Supreme Court said Thursday that “boneless wings” refers to a cooking style, and that Berkheimer should’ve been on guard against bones since it’s common knowledge that chickens have bones.”

Hasnain says:

“So this VC cabal is trading against the basic principles of America — not merely against personal freedom, but democracy itself — in the hopes of profit. It’s not the first time tech has made the trade against freedom; IBM made it during the Holocaust.

In venture capital, you are what you fund. Andreessen and Horowitz understand this, even embody it. But they aren’t just funding the issues they discuss on their podcast; they are funding Trump and Vance. That means those donations are anti-abortion, anti-immigration, and possibly even anti-democracy because that is what the Trump / Vance ticket stands for. These are not subsidiary issues: these are now what two of Silicon Valley’s most prominent figures now stand for, too. Is that a good investment?”

Hasnain says:

Sorry we caused you to work over the weekend, here’s $10

“On Tuesday, a source told TechCrunch that they received an email from CrowdStrike offering them the gift card because the company recognizes “the additional work that the July 19 incident has caused.” “

Hasnain says:

First thought: “yikes”. Second thought: “this makes sense”.

“The next question is how the US and democratic nations should handle the threat of states with massive resources like China. The United States’ advantage is decentralized and open innovation. Some people argue that we must close our models to prevent China from gaining access to them, but my view is that this will not work and will only disadvantage the US and its allies. Our adversaries are great at espionage, stealing models that fit on a thumb drive is relatively easy, and most tech companies are far from operating in a way that would make this more difficult. It seems most likely that a world of only closed models results in a small number of big companies plus our geopolitical adversaries having access to leading models, while startups, universities, and small businesses miss out on opportunities. Plus, constraining American innovation to closed development increases the chance that we don’t lead at all. Instead, I think our best strategy is to build a robust open ecosystem and have our leading companies work closely with our government and allies to ensure they can best take advantage of the latest advances and achieve a sustainable first-mover advantage over the long term.”