Hasnain says:

A different article confirms the city then went and shut this down. But the fact that this was happening in the first place in SF is nuts.

“Castro resident Chris Vasquez told me that he was walking by the Market Street Safeway in August and saw a tent with a “Free COVID Test” sign on it. He had recently returned from a wedding and decided a test was a good idea.

A technician swabbed his nose, then handed him a piece of paper to sign. It turned out to be a Boudin recall petition.”

Hasnain says:

This phrasing reads like straight up gaslighting.

“This group of employees felt a little betrayed because we’ve created such a great place to work that they forgot that sometimes these challenges will come up, and that’s what I mean about not recognizing that upfront, that folks would be hurt.”

Hasnain says:

I heard about this series - still need to watch it! But this article goes into a lot of detail into what happened from the other side and it’s… interesting. Hard to know fully what the truth is without more digging but the author here seems credible.

“ART+COM’s patent was invalidated in 2017 because another group, Sarnoff Research Center (SRI) in Palo Alto had shown a similar system in 1994, also called “TerraView”, which constituted prior art. In a supreme irony, the people asserting they “invented” Google Earth were bested by an earlier system with essentially the same name and function as theirs”

Hasnain says:

Can someone explain the math here? The way I see it, either the executive was lying about the daily cost, or there’s other long term payroll costs they’re hiding (so the cost of the proposal would be higher), or they’re grossly incompetent and want to harm workers.

My priors bias me towards some form of the latter but I am curious.

“Dan: They said they are prepared to move these production facilities down to Mexico. The main thing that would cost Kellogg’s money is equalization of wages within our ranks. Kellogg’s came out in the media and stated that our proposals would cost the company $60 million. In 2020, during the negotiations, before we started the extension, there was a Kellogg’s executive who stated in negotiations that he’s willing to spend $10 million a day to keep us out on the street. And to get rid of our union essentially. Well, if he’s willing to spend $10 million a day, I’m not a mathematician, but that’s six days out on the street.”

Hasnain says:

“Ultimately, the issue in dispute across these strikes is whether American workers can be muscled back into the punishing labor market conditions of the pandemic and the several decades that preceded Covid-19 that made the pandemic so brutal within the insecure and unequal American workplace. Will nonunion workers settle for low wages and dangerous conditions? Will union workers continue to ratify two-tier contracts with incremental givebacks to employers? When the U.S. worker “goes back” to work, what kind of economy will they be going back to?

This is precisely the same issue as the one roiling Capitol Hill right now: whether Congress’s role is to return us to a pre-pandemic status quo or to intervene on the side of a battered working class.”

Hasnain says:

Really solid set of technical post-mortems here. I find this interesting because it’s not a series of bugs or flaws - these are design decisions that now need to be revisited at scale.

“tl;dr: Our server outages have not been caused by a singular issue; we are solving each problem as they arise, with both mitigating solves and longer-term architectural changes. A small number of players have experienced character progression loss–moving forward, any loss due to a server crash should be limited to several minutes. This is not a complete solve to us, and we are continuing to work on this issue. Our team, with the help of others at Blizzard, are working to bring the game experience to a place that feels good for everyone.”

Hasnain says:

"This blood disorder is the result of a recessive gene, and so requires that both parents of a child have the recessive gene for the disorder to appear in their offspring. Without the Fugate’s intense isolation and inbreeding, this disorder would be incredibly rare in their bloodline."

Hasnain says:

This was some of the toughest stuff I did as a manager, and it was still something I wasn’t great at. I was (thankfully) recognized for it, but to see this play out differently for others is infuriating. What’s the point of doing anything else if the team isn’t healthy and well supported in tough times like this?

“The concepts of invisible labor and office housework put a spotlight on a societal reluctance to value work that is predominantly done by women. This happens because such work is often conflated with assumptions about what women are naturally good at or interested in. And women are not rewarded for capacities and concerns deemed to be intrinsic. Therefore, when a woman manager provides team members with emotional support during a time of societal crises, it can be overlooked as “caretaking” instead of being recognized as strong crisis management. When a Black woman manager hosts a panel on anti-racism in the wake of racial violence, she can be applauded for her “passion” but not rewarded for her time, leadership, or DEI acumen. Moreover, since recognition and reward are the markers of valuable work, that women leaders’ efforts are going unnoticed and unrewarded effectively renders it low status. Of course, women have always done this work. But in a time of intense social upheaval, amidst a global pandemic and a national reckoning on racism, there is much more of this work to be done. And getting it done matters even more to a company’s prospects.”

Hasnain says:

This is worth internalizing - I found myself nodding along. Working on pure execution speed doesn’t seem worth it, even though it has been one of the most important things I’ve done. The ability to avoid the “death by a thousand papercuts” problem by simply cutting down the time to address any individual one does wonders.

“More generally, Fabian Giesen has noted that this kind of non-linear impact of velocity is common:

There are "phase changes" as you cross certain thresholds (details depend on the problem to some extent) where your entire way of working changes. ... ​​There's a lot of things I could in theory do at any speed but in practice cannot, because as iteration time increases it first becomes so frustrating that I can't do it for long and eventually it takes so long that it literally drops out of my short-term memory, so I need to keep notes or otherwise organize it or I can't do it at all.

“

Hasnain says:

I still find it unconscionable and scary that a lot of the holdup on the bill is supposedly attributed to saving the jobs of some 30k coal workers (whose jobs are already dying a war of attrition) in one state - when so many others globally are suffering. One surprising statistic I learned today: there are more people employed in Broadway theater than all coal workers across the US. We don’t hear about protecting their interests though.

Also relevant: Manchin gets 500k/year from coal companies in WV, primarily from his son’s. But it’s infuriating how this doesn’t get called out more.

“But what have they concretely accomplished? For all its climate-destroying coal plants, China still installs more solar power than any other country, sells more electric vehicles than any other country, and operates a weak but expanding carbon market. Trans-Atlantic strategists worry that the European Union, which also maintains a carbon price, could eventually fuse its system to that of its largest trading partner, China. For the U.S. to fail to follow through after so much blabber would suggest, as China’s leaders reportedly believe, that our democracy is too sclerotic to meet the current crisis. That is a mortifying conclusion for the country, and a potentially dangerous one for the world order. If the U.S. cannot pass one of these policies, cannot bring itself to actually reduce carbon pollution, then it will strengthen the perception that American democracy is fundamentally sick, dying, unable to act on an issue on which its leaders’ credibility and its international stature rides. We will look like a decadent, soul-sick nation, too feeble to govern our basest instincts. And, well, aren’t we?”