Hasnain says:

I wonder if this is finally enough for the establishment to realize just how corrupt Thomas is and move to impeach. Like even I get trained on how accepting or giving a gift more than $25 is illegal (apparently $145 for judges) and this guy takes $500k vacations without disclosing them - all while saying he’s a man of the people and takes “vacations” to Walmart?

“For more than two decades, Thomas has accepted luxury trips virtually every year from the Dallas businessman without disclosing them, documents and interviews show. A public servant who has a salary of $285,000, he has vacationed on Crow’s superyacht around the globe. He flies on Crow’s Bombardier Global 5000 jet. He has gone with Crow to the Bohemian Grove, the exclusive California all-male retreat, and to Crow’s sprawling ranch in East Texas. And Thomas typically spends about a week every summer at Crow’s private resort in the Adirondacks.

The extent and frequency of Crow’s apparent gifts to Thomas have no known precedent in the modern history of the U.S. Supreme Court.”

Hasnain says:

“While the different standards of treatment have not created friction among Google employees spread around the world, “people have realized the way things happen in the US versus France and Germany” are different, says Parul Koul, executive chair of the Alphabet Workers Union and a software engineer at Google based in New York.

“It is inspiring for people in the US to see things are different in other places – it’s a blueprint for what people can fight for,” they added.”

Hasnain says:

Super long read where I learnt a lot more about capacity planning and cloud costs than I'll ever need to know (hopefully). But the fundamentals and little nuggets of generalizable information make this too good to not share (especially the bits around how this relates to security).

"Whatever detectors you end up writing, I hope you keep a human in the loop. Even if one hour a day of one valuable person's time is spent winnowing the crud, escalating the worthwhile alerts, and automating where it seems good, it will save the rest of your people a lot more. The goal is still to replace yourself with a small shell script. But first you have to get good enough at generating & judging alerts to be worth automating."

Hasnain says:

Gotta love C++! I'd always thought of this as a quirk to trip people up, but hey here's a semi legitimate use case!

"Therefore, if your evaluation of the index may have a side effect on the evaluation of the pointer, you can flip the order to force the index to be calculated first.

auto test()
{
return index()[p];
}
Astound your friends! Confuse your enemies!"

Hasnain says:

This whole story has been so messed up. I feel for the kid who had to suffer due to all the unreasonable adults here. The parents offered to reimburse everyone for the costs but the fair organizers were unreasonable. Also, I'm impressed the cops went 500 miles to retrieve a goat (likely out of their jurisdiction?) - don't they have anything better to do? Given the quote below, I do hope this does turn out to, uh, be a more negative experience for the fair than they hoped.

"“Making an exception for you will only teach [our] youth that they do not have to abide by the rules,” Silva wrote back to Long in an email reviewed by The Times dated June 28, 2022. “Also, in this era of social media this has been a negative experience for the fairgrounds as this has been all over Facebook and Instagram.”"

Hasnain says:

“The word chimera has two very different meanings. The first is a mythological creature composed of three different animals, and it is in that spirit that I’m predicting a future of human-machine co-productions. But a chimera is also an illusory dream—something profoundly hoped for that doesn’t come to pass.

The technologies that most empower humanity almost always produce a shadow ledger of pain. The steam engine unleashed the industrial revolution and brutally shortened life spans. Nuclear technology can power energy reactors or atomic bombs. The internet makes us productive and unproductive, delighted and miserable, informed and deluded. Like the future of everything else, the future of work will be, above all, messy.”

Hasnain says:

I’m actually surprised, but twitter did open source a bunch of “the algorithm”:
https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/open-source/2023/twitter-recommendation-algorithm

wondering what people will find as they go over the code.

(github: https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm and https://github.com/twitter/the-algorithm-ml )

Hasnain says:

Interesting read and I’d love to see any follow up studies here. I like how it presents the trade off between remote work and fertility rates. With how much some governments have been harping on about lower birth rates, you’d think they’d be open to more flexibility here, but they keep wanting to force people back into the office. Or not allowing immigrants. Sigh.

“Overall we see the impact of remote work on women’s intentions for family formation and the desire to have children. While remote work appears to have the biggest positive impact on older women who already have children, the clear positive impact on marriage rates suggests the potential for longer-run impacts—including changed fertility rates—on younger women. While the evidence is early and far from conclusive, we believe this research makes the case for the hypothesis that elevated levels of remote work during COVID made a positive contribution to the U.S. and potentially other developed countries’ fertility rates. Moreover, we believe this evidence is suggestive that the “return to the office” may contribute to falling birth rates, and that governments interested in supporting marriage and implementing pro-natal policies may be interested in considering how flexible work arrangements can be supported and encouraged.”

Hasnain says:

Simple rule with lots of ramifications. Worth thinking about as a design principle in general.

“Rust also has a rule. It’s kinda funny, because in some senses, this rule is almost the opposite of Magic’s, if you can even stretch the comparison this far. Here it is:

Whenever the body of a function contradicts the function’s signature, the signature takes precedence; the signature is right and the body is wrong.

This rule is also so pervasive in Rust that we take it for granted, but it is really, truly important. I think it is also important for Rust users to internalize the implications of this rule, so that they know why certain things work the way that they do.”

Hasnain says:

This is sad.

“"This is the first time in my career that I've ever seen [an increase in pediatric mortality] – it's always been declining in the United States for as long as I can remember," says the JAMA paper's lead author Steven Woolf, director emeritus of the Center on Society and Health at Virginia Commonwealth University. "Now, it's increasing at a magnitude that has not occurred at least for half a century."

Across the lifespan, and across every demographic group, Americans die at younger ages than their counterparts in other wealthy nations.”