Hasnain says:

This is gonna kill drop shippers right? And I’m assuming also hurt meta/google ads (temu spends $3b/yr on ads) and amazon in general.

“Known as de minimis, the rule waives import duties for small packages valued at less than $800 shipped into the US. Originally intended to exempt personal gifts and other items that Americans send home from trips abroad, it has since allowed foreign businesses to more easily sell goods to US consumers without needing to worry about paying import taxes. The number of de minimis packages has soared in recent years as the ecommerce market has become more global, making it difficult—if not impossible—for Customs and Border Protection to keep track of all the parcels flowing into the US.

According to the CBP, over 1.36 billion de minimis packages entered the US in fiscal year 2024, almost 10 times the number in 2015. That amounts to 3.7 million packages per day on average—many of which are now subject to scrutiny at the border for the first time.”

Hasnain says:

Welp. At a loss for words.

At least he has been honest about the destruction compared to Biden. That is the only silver lining in what is one of the most depressing moments of our generation.

““I mean they’re there because they have no alternative. What do they have? It is a big pile of rubble right now,” Trump said moments before hosting Netanyahu for Oval Office talks”

Hasnain says:

“It feels pathetic to even have to write this, but right now someone, somewhere needs to fight for something. To stand for something. To match the anger, fear, and sadness we all feel. Because this defeatism, nihilism, and just plain fecklessness from Democrats in the remaining time we have, if we even have it, to save everything we care about is utterly exhausting.

There are many reasons why I am launching an exploratory committee for a bid to the U.S. Senate, but something I’ve thought a lot about is that all these people being so thirsty for the title of “senator”—either in holding onto it for decades too long or striving to attain it—has, in practice, been disqualifying. Wanting to be a senator for the sake of being a senator has given us a collection of people who stand for little other than their own egos, who grow increasingly out of touch with any community but the cohort of 100 people who also share their title, and who cannot effectively serve as reflections of or advocates for the values we prize most.”

Hasnain says:

The style of writing echoes stuff that I’ve seen written about other countries a lot so this was … jarring.

“I’ve long believed that the American media would be more clear-eyed about the rise and return of Donald Trump if it was happening overseas in a foreign country, where we’re used to foreign correspondents writing with more incisive authority. Having watched with growing alarm the developments of the last 24 and 36 hours in Washington, I thought I’d take a stab at just such a dispatch. Here’s a story that should be written this weekend:

…

With rapidity that has stunned even longtime political observers, forces loyal to Musk’s junta have established him as the all-but undisputed unelected head of government in just a matter of days, unwinding the longtime democracy’s constitutional system and its proud nearly 250-year-old tradition of the rule of law. Having secured themselves in key ministries and in a building adjacent to the presidential office complex, Musk’s forces have begun issuing directives to civil service workers and forcing the resignation of officials deemed insufficiently loyal, like the head of the country’s aviation authority.”

Hasnain says:

““We have the power to turn the tide if we want to,” said Oona Hathaway, a professor of international law at Yale. “But at a certain point, the rules are going to become so eroded that it’s going to lose all legitimacy, and the United States is going to lose all legitimacy. We’re going to find that we’re going to be past the point of no return, and those rules are no longer going to be salvageable. And I think that would be a real tragedy.””

Hasnain says:

Todays fun fact of the day comes from this book I was listening to on my commute. TIL this fact (though it seems disputed)

“The Islam brought to America by enslaved Africans did not survive long, but it left traces that are still visible today. The practice of ring shout, a form of religious dance in which men and women rotate counterclockwise while singing, clapping their hands and shuffling their feet, was directly inherited from enslaved Muslims such as Bilali Mohammed and Salih Bilali in the Georgia Sea Islands. It originally mimicked the ritual circling (or shaw’t) of the Kaaba in Mecca by Muslim pilgrims.”

Hasnain says:

So many useful insights summarized concisely here. I’ll have to go over the papers again at some point to refresh my memory.

“Insight 9 : In a datacenter environment, we prefer centralized controllers over decentralized ones due to their simplicity and ability to make higher-quality decisions. In many cases, a hybrid approach—a centralized control plane combined with a decentralized data plane—provides the best of both worlds.”

Hasnain says:

Learned so much about so many things from this one. Gotta love when you see something like this a few thousand words into a post you already thought was quite interesting

“Now that the boring stuff is behind us, let’s start the fun part. Again, just as a reminder on how the intersection works: we do two phases of intersection, one for the conventional intersection and another for the bits that would cross the group boundary, and in the end, we merge these two.

In this section, we will take a look at assembly, some cool tools to analyze this assembly, AVX-512, differences in the microarchitecture of AMD and Intel chips, emulation of instructions, and a lot more. So again, sorry to bother you with all of the previous stuff, but it was important.”

Hasnain says:

“Moving data serialization format used by the Issue Service to Protobuf resulted in many improvements, including faster response time and reduced resource consumption (CPU, storage). Even though there were some challenges we had to solve during the migration, the final results were absolutely worth the effort. As we continue our work in the Issue Service and progress to handling more traffic and data, the impact of these relative improvements will continue to grow.”

Hasnain says:

“Inflation has lots of causes, it's true. But when an industry is consolidated enough to take advantage of a data brokerage or just engage in tacit collusion, any source of inflation – war, disease, weather – allows whole sectors to raise prices together, and keep them high, long after the shock has passed.”