Hasnain says:

Zoe’s recent reporting on Apple has been quite interesting. Here is a recap of all the stuff that has happened, primarily over the last month. While this is focused on Apple, I’ve been taking away a lot of lessons as they relate to other companies too.

“I think that this is a real thing. I think there’s this feeling internally now that the executives are a little out of touch. The executives are saying, “Oh, come back to the office,” and the lower-level employees are like, “Well yeah, because you live five minutes from the office in this absolute mansion, and you’ve had this commute for 20 years, and you love it. We’re not in the same boat. We live an hour and a half outside of Cupertino. We’re not trying to go back to that life.” They feel like executives want things to go back to the way things always were, but the world has changed, and Apple can’t get back.”

Hasnain says:

If you read one article this month, read this. It’s a heartbreaking story of the human cost of the Afghan war - as told by various locals in the rural areas, with life events and history spanning back 20+ years. People fight and debate over who’s right and wrong and discuss various complex issues while forgetting the real and actual human toll this takes on people. One of the best pieces I’ve read in a long time, and I have a lot to think about and ponder.

There were too many quotes to pick out, including some absolutely rage inducing mistakes made by various governments, but I’ll leave with this one near the end:

“The Taliban takeover has restored order to the conservative countryside while plunging the comparatively liberal streets of Kabul into fear and hopelessness. This reversal of fates brings to light the unspoken premise of the past two decades: if U.S. troops kept battling the Taliban in the countryside, then life in the cities could blossom. This may have been a sustainable project—the Taliban were unable to capture cities in the face of U.S. airpower. But was it just? Can the rights of one community depend, in perpetuity, on the deprivation of rights in another? In Sangin, whenever I brought up the question of gender, village women reacted with derision. “They are giving rights to Kabul women, and they are killing women here,” Pazaro said. “Is this justice?” Marzia, from Pan Killay, told me, “This is not ‘women’s rights’ when you are killing us, killing our brothers, killing our fathers.” Khalida, from a nearby village, said, “The Americans did not bring us any rights. They just came, fought, killed, and left.””

Hasnain says:

The data here is quite staggering. I do wonder what’s going on causation wise. It’s confusing to me because right after the below paragraph is a datapoint that white men (and men in general) of a certain income bracket tend to have less college attendance than women anyway.

“The college gender gap cuts across race, geography and economic background. For the most part, white men—once the predominant group on American campuses—no longer hold a statistical edge in enrollment rates, said Mr. Mortenson, of the Pell Institute. Enrollment rates for poor and working-class white men are lower than those of young Black, Latino and Asian men from the same economic backgrounds, according to an analysis of census data by the Pell Institute for the Journal.”

Hasnain says:

This was an interesting debugging story.

“Unbelievable! All the counters were zero! ZFS really wasn't in use, ever! But at the same time, it was eating over 30% of CPU capacity! Whaaat??

The customer had been right all along. ZFS was straight up eating CPU, and for no reason.

How can a file system that's not in use at all consume 38% CPU? I'd never seen this before. This was a mystery.”

Hasnain says:

Uh.. this sounds like a horrible abuse of privacy and also counter productive. If you don’t trust your employees, that’s a much bigger problem that won’t be solved by tools like this.

“Every minute or so, the program would capture a live photo of David and his workmates via their company laptop webcams. The ever-changing headshots were splayed across the wall of a digital conference waiting room that everyone on the team could see. Clicking on a colleague’s face would unilaterally pull them into a video call. If you were lucky enough to catch someone goofing off or picking their nose, you could forward the offending image to a team chat via Sneek’s integration with the messaging platform Slack.

According to the Sneek co-founder Del Currie, the software is meant to replicate the office. “We know lots of people will find it an invasion of privacy, we 100% get that, and it’s not the solution for those folks,” Currie says. “But there’s also lots of teams out there who are good friends and want to stay connected when they’re working together.””

Hasnain says:

This is an inspiring read. It combines a human interest story - going over the lives of some doctors and patients - with public policy, healthcare, and medial outcomes being contrasted across countries. I wish more countries followed this model.

“The results are enviable. Since the development of the ebais system, deaths from communicable diseases have fallen by ninety-four per cent, and decisive progress has been made against non-communicable diseases as well. It’s not just that Costa Rica has surpassed America’s life expectancy while spending less on health care as a percentage of income; it actually spends less than the world average. The biggest gain these days is in the middle years of life. For people between fifteen and sixty years of age, the mortality rate in Costa Rica is 8.7 per cent, versus 11.2 per cent in the U.S.—a thirty-per-cent difference. But older people do better, too: in Costa Rica, the average sixty-year-old survives another 24.2 years, compared with 23.6 years in the U.S.”

Hasnain says:

I need to revisit my priors and reconsider what I learnt from it. Sigh.

“And it doesn’t even always mean “easy read”: Readers should apply the same skepticism to the claims of Freakonomics as they would to the much-derided conventional wisdom. We encourage them to revisit these modern-day classics with a skeptical and inquiring mind. And we hope that future works in the pop-statistics genre will continue to impart a sense of the fun and importance of statistical reasoning, while more clearly recognizing the uncertainty and complexity inherent in scientific study of the world.”

Hasnain says:

Been learning a lot more about the chip shortage and supply chains in general lately. Lots of interesting stuff.

“Chips consist of as many as 100 layers of materials. These are deposited, then partially removed, to form complex three-dimensional structures that connect all the tiny transistors. Some of these layers are just one atom thin. Machines made by Applied Materials Inc., Lam Research Corp. and Tokyo Electron Ltd. juggle a host of variables, such as temperature, pressure, and electrical and magnetic fields, to make this happen.”

Hasnain says:

“Let’s entertain a third possibility. People’s valuation of their own time has changed: Americans are less eager to do low-paid, often dead-end service and hospitality work, deciding instead that more time on family, education and leisure makes for a higher standard of living, even if it means less consumption.

If the lack of enthusiasm for bad jobs lasts, does this bode ill for the U.S. economy? The answer is no — and here’s why: The U.S. doesn’t have a job quantity problem; instead, it has a job quality problem.”

Hasnain says:

So much preventable death :(

“Eight counties across the state are using refrigerated trucks to store the bodies of the dead. Bell County which includes Temple, Texas, has requested a second FEMA trailer with an extra storage capacity of 50 bodies. Several smaller trailers have been donated by the state funeral directors association.

As more schools see spikes in COVID transmissions, more teachers and students will become infected and could die.”