Hasnain says:

“Different world views

For Alicia Jones, not having anyone else to financially depend on—or split rent with—is the worst part of being single. “Especially with the threat of layoffs, it’s much more stressful being a single person,” said Jones, who is 38 and works in communications for a real-estate company in Washington, D.C.

Her last long-term relationship ended two years ago over conflicting views of their shared future. “He wanted the white picket fence and me at home with the kids,” Jones said. This despite the fact that her salary was nearly 50% higher than his. “

Hasnain says:

Definitely need to upgrade so we’re safe the next time a pirate swings by with a 2x4 cannon

“The bad news is that Joe and Jane Consumer won’t be able to buy these kinds of windows at the local home-supply store—at least not yet. While the primary manufacturer of this type of window is offering its tech to other window makers, it’s only opened up U.S. production in the past few months, and it’s still scaling up manufacturing.”

Hasnain says:

AirBnB recently did a large scale migration of code using LLMs. I've been trying to find good datapoints for things like this, so personally reading this blogpost (link in comments) was quite exciting.

I have done a crapton of these migrations by hand (aided with static analysis/codemod scripts in the past) and I'm excited to see where LLMs can go in this space.

Some key takeaways from this post (which resonated well for me, similar to how I'd do it as a human funnily enough):

* Break the migration into manageable chunks:
* Migrate each file independently
* Within that too, have a logical set of sequential steps.
* Don't try to do the whole thing in one shot
* Choosing the exact specific context matters a lot for the LLM
* Retries help -- if it fails, just try again
* It's easy to get "good enough" to e.g get 75% of the way there
* From there to 97% took a lot more work
* ... and it doesn't make sense to go to 100% (in terms of ROI)

Money quote from the article below

"Airbnb recently completed our first large-scale, LLM-driven code migration, updating nearly 3.5K React component test files from Enzyme to use React Testing Library (RTL) instead. We’d originally estimated this would take 1.5 years of engineering time to do by hand, but — using a combination of frontier models and robust automation — we finished the entire migration in just 6 weeks."

Hasnain says:

“It is time to meet the moment; the only question is how you will decide to. If you stay this course, tightly gripping the reins of power while you sabotage the fight your party and your people are ready and desperate to enter, few will see you as any sort of hero. No message you could hope to deliver will ever be taken seriously if you persist in behaving in this obstructive way. Whatever you may have accomplished in your career will be lost to the sands of time and you will be written into history as a Vichy clown, plagued by obtuse cowardice, who used his own power to make sure the nation would suffer the consequences of his own personal failures.”

Hasnain says:

“But the readers who objected to our headline have a point. My gut gave me a good reality check about the world we live in, but it failed to write a good headline. Although these are unprecedented times, a news headline should not quietly aid the erosion of our social consensus about the law, even if we ourselves are struggling to do our jobs because of that erosion. And even if the Supreme Court holds itself to be the arbiter of what is law, there is only so far that we, as Americans, can sit back and accept it — at the very least, we must flatly reject the idea that it can make Trump a king.”

Hasnain says:

“I know that some folks in the comments will whine that this is “political” or that it’s an overreaction. And it is true that there have been times in the past when people have overreacted to things happening in DC.
This is not one of those times.

If you do not recognize that mass destruction of fundamental concepts of democracy and the US Constitution happening right now, you are either willfully ignorant or just plain stupid. I can’t put it any clearer than that.

This isn’t about politics — it’s about the systematic dismantling of the very infrastructure that made American innovation possible. For those in the tech industry who supported this administration thinking it would mean less regulation or more “business friendly” policies: you’ve catastrophically misread the situation (which many people tried to warn you about). While overregulation (which, let’s face it, we didn’t really have) can be bad, it’s nothing compared to the destruction of the stable institutional framework that allowed American innovation to thrive in the first place.”

Hasnain says:

“The problem right now isn’t that we’re in a moment of great tension for our constitutional system, with members of Congress poised to act if the presidential defiance of the courts continues. Nor have we stumbled into some strange ambiguity where we’re wrestling with the right path forward. The problem is that in effectively a single blink of the historical eye, we’ve seen our entire constitutional system simply … stop. We aren’t just outside the bounds of normal constitutional operations; we’re several standard deviations outside anything America has ever experienced before. We can clearly see what’s happening is wrong—illegal and unconstitutional—and the actors who can do something about that just … aren’t.”

Hasnain says:

His only crime seems to have been one we all do: walking while brown.

“The 22 cases include Chicago resident Julio Noriega, 54, a U.S. citizen who, according to court documents, was arrested, handcuffed and spent most of the night at an ICE processing center in suburban Broadview. He was never questioned about his citizenship and was only released after agents looked at his ID.

“I was born in Chicago, Illinois and am a United States citizen,” Noriega said in his statement, adding that on Jan. 31, after buying pizza in Berwyn he was surrounded by ICE agents and arrested. Officers took away his wallet, which had his ID and social security card. “They then handcuffed me and pushed me into a white van where other people were handcuffed as well.””

Hasnain says:

This is absolutely nuts. And I feel like this is a great example of honeypots to be taught later in classrooms.

“Rippling crafted a letter that referenced an empty Slack channel in Rippling’s corporate Slack instance called “d-defectors,” and implied the Slack channel contained messages that would be of interest to Deel.

The letter was sent to only three people – Phillipe Bouaziz, the chairman of Deel’s board, CFO, General Counsel, and the father of Deel CEO Alex Bouaziz; Spiros Komis, Deel’s Head of US Legal; and the company’s outside counsel at law firm.

Within hours of sending the letter, Deel’s spy inside of Rippling searched – for the first time – for this empty and never-before-used Slack channel, proving that Deel’s top executives or its legal representatives were running the covert espionage operation.”

Hasnain says:

I tend to agree with this take.

“The net result of all of this for the programming market is: more software, better software, more programmers, better programmers. But the adjustment won't be without pain: some shitty software will get shipped before we figure out how to put guardrails around AI-driven development. Some programmers who are currently shipping mediocre software will find themselves replaced by newer, faster, AI-assisted developers before they manage to learn AI tools themselves. Everyone will have a lot of learning to do. But what else is new? Software development has always evolved rapidly. Embrace change, and you'll be fine.”