Hasnain says:

It’s been a while since I’ve shared something that I was involved in writing but now is as good a time as any to change that.

I’m glad I had the opportunity here to talk about how I learnt and used Rust and why it’s quickly becoming my go-to language for writing programs.

All aboard the Rust hype train!

Hasnain says:

The wording here is… not great at all.

“On October 8th, Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos responded to the questions in an internal email. “It never feels good when people are hurting, especially our colleagues,” he wrote. “You should also be aware that some talent may join third parties in asking us to remove the show in the coming days, which we are not going to do.”

Sarandos also said that Chappelle’s last special, Sticks & Stones, is Netflix’s “most watched, stickiest, and most award winning stand-up special to date.””

Hasnain says:

If you zoom out a little this was a great read on engineering trade offs and how to approach designing programs and systems.

“As Rich Hickey once said:

Programmers know the benefits of everything and the tradeoffs of nothing.

We see the amazing benchmarks that some NoSQL databases provide, and we say “wow, they are so much faster/better/scalable than relational databases.” But we don’t ask ourselves why.

Instead of asking “how are they so much better?” we should be asking “what are they giving up?””

Hasnain says:

Really great read on how the COVID pandemic affected various families and worsened pre-existing inequalities, causing harm.

“In the U.S., most of us aren’t taught to use our sociological imaginations. We’re not taught to think about social problems as structural problems. We’re not taught to see the forces that operate beyond our control – forces like capitalism, patriarchy, and white supremacy. And we’re not taught to see how those forces create many of the challenges we face in our lives and constrain our ability to make choices that could help us overcome those challenges.

Instead, we — especially women and people from other systematically marginalized groups — are taught to self-help-book our way out of structural problems. To believe that all our problems would go away if only we were to strictly follow some seventeen-step plan.

Another part of this I can’t stop thinking about is how our lack of a social safety net is putting women’s health and relationships at risk. So much of the public conversation has focused on the women who are dropping out of the workforce. Those stories are important, but to me they signal the centrality of capitalism in all of our public concerns.”

Hasnain says:

“TikTok is not the only platform that tries to avoid scrutiny by quietly backing into a hedge while Facebook takes the heat—YouTube is the undisputed master of this strategy. But TikTok has the dubious privilege of being one of the few platforms that, according to polls, people dislike and distrust even more than Facebook. Maybe reports of Facebook’s imminent death are greatly exaggerated, but reports of TikTok’s rise certainly aren’t. If lawmakers want to address the problems that social-media platforms cause for young people, they should care about the platforms young people care about.”

Hasnain says:

“Could managers be correct in their assessment that women at the company are excellent performers in their current roles but lack the skills to be successful at a higher level? To the contrary, the researchers found that managers consistently underestimate women’s ability to perform in the future. They identified women and men with similar performance and potential scores for a given evaluation period, then looked forward to the next period and found that women tended to have higher performance scores than men, whether or not they been promoted into a more senior role.”

Hasnain says:

“The eight-hour workday was among the first fights taken up by the American unionized labor movement. Today’s fight over hours may be the one on which workers rebuild the movement.

“As much as I love my job, I’m realizing that it’s not worth my life,” Mr. Palacios said. “It’s unhealthy when your whole life is tied to a waged job. You don’t realize how bad that is until it’s too late.””

Hasnain says:

“Workers gave clear reasons for leaving the industry. Well over half of workers, 62%, reported receiving emotional abuse and disrespect from customers, and 49% reported abuse from managers, according to the Black Box Intelligence survey. Of workers surveyed, 15% left the restaurant industry in the last year, and another 33% said that they hope to.”

Hasnain says:

Clearly need to move to Portland

“I work for a company that makes beer taste like pine needles that have been soaking in a vat of apple cider vinegar for thirty years. Our logo is a Sasquatch wearing a trucker hat. I make $40,000 per year, but fortunately, Portland is super affordable probably.”

Hasnain says:

“Cunningham also credited the huge support system of people ready to organize climate actions alongside her. When she sent an emotional plea to Amazon employees asking them to sign on a shareholder resolution to require Amazon to release a climate plan, 8,700 obliged. When Cunningham and Costa were threatened with termination for speaking publicly about Amazon, 400 other workers spoke publicly about the company’s role in the climate crisis in protest. When Cunningham and Costa were terminated, Tim Bray – a respected engineer and the former vice-president of Amazon’s cloud computing group – resigned in protest.”