Hasnain says:

Having verified this myself, uh, bro, what

“Microsoft is pulling yet another trick to get people to use its Bing search engine. If you use Bing right now without signing into a Microsoft account and search for Google, you’ll get a page that looks an awful lot like... Google.”

Hasnain says:

"While Yemeni coffee shops fill a need for the Muslim community, they attract a wide range of cultures, welcoming anyone looking for family-friendly outings or alcohol-free evenings.

“There’s been a huge transformation across the U.S. People are trying to transition from the nightlife bar environment,” Almatrahi says. “We provide not only the coffee experience but also the ambience.”

During the last lease negotiation for a new location, the landlord was “shocked” by Arwa’s proposed hours, according to Almatrahi. “We wanted to be open until one a.m. on the weekends. And they’re not used to that concept,” he says. “But that’s the power of cardamom.”"

Hasnain says:

This is a rough day. On one hand, I understand some of the criticisms. The fact checkers got things wrong. Facebook jail was real and appeals sucked.

But you don’t fix that by throwing the baby out with the bath water. Or making it acceptable to call women household objects. Or allowing transphobia. Or so many other things.

“The former employee I spoke with feared that whatever consequences Meta's surrender to the right on speech issues might have in the United States, its effect in the rest of the world could be even more dire.

"I really think this is a precursor for genocide," they said. "We've seen it happen. Real people's lives are actually going to be endangered. I'm just devastated”

Hasnain says:

Climate change is here. The videos I saw were scary, including the abandoned cars being bulldozed to let fire trucks through.

“A fire was burning out of control Tuesday in Pacific Palisades, destroying homes and forcing residents to abandon their vehicles and flee amid a potentially “life-threatening and destructive” windstorm.”

Hasnain says:

Lots to ponder from this piece about using LLMs for day to day productivity.

A few main takeaways for me:

* ensure you can easily verify the output
* getting over the starting hump is really valuable
* having more smaller specialized modules vs fewer larger reusable modules may be better
* use LLMs for tests!

“Let me try to motivate this for the skeptical. A lot of the value I personally get out of chat-driven programming is I reach a point in the day when I know what needs to be written, I can describe it, but I don’t have the energy to create a new file, start typing, then start looking up the libraries I need. (I’m an early-morning person, so this is usually any time after 11am for me, though it can also be any time I context-switch into a different language/framework/etc.) LLMs perform that service for me in programming. They give me a first draft, with some good ideas, with several of the dependencies I need, and often some mistakes. Often, I find fixing those mistakes is a lot easier than starting from scratch.”

Hasnain says:

Same day as unconfirmed rumors hit that 300 employees of another nationality did the same thing, I see a news story about some employees doing this. Like… why

“The former employees, over a three-year period, tricked the tech company into matching thousands of dollars in donations to children’s charities when they were not in fact donating a thing, the DA's Office said. The total take from the scheme was about $152,000”

Hasnain says:

“Mr Kingswood said he would be "surprised if the airfield hadn't met all the requirements in accordance with industry standards".
"I suspect if we went around the airfields at a lot of major international airports... we would find a lot of obstacles that could similarly be accused of presenting a hazard," he added.”

Hasnain says:

“Now one can try to reverse-engineer how the app decrypts the currency file, and developers have a wide suite of tools to practice security by obscurity. You can read the file backwards, shift everything left by 12 bits, then forward by 2, modulo every second byte with 3, subtract your birthday as a UNIX timestamp, blah blah blah.

While it certainly is fun to dig around and follow the trail to having a usable file, I enjoy actually finishing my projects much more.”

Hasnain says:

I’ve tried to do some of these on my own sites too. I miss the old web. And also working with / learning from Rachel.

“I've been thinking about things that annoy me about other web pages. Safari recently gained the ability to "hide distracting items" and I've been having great fun telling various idiot web "designers" to stuff it. Reclaiming a simple experience free of wibbly wobbly stuff has been great.

In doing this, I figured maybe I should tell people about the things I don't do here, so they realize how much they are "missing out" on.”

Hasnain says:

Great read which I’ll probably revisit over the years

“Engineering choices seem – dare I say? – more pragmatic. Alex Kotliarskyi from Secta Labs said he had to dial down his “tech purist views” from when he was at Facebook and Replit, and instead just choose “good enough” tools. At Fern Creek Software, Keith also said how he noticed how it’s VC-funded companies that aspire to technical elegance, and over engineering things.”