Hasnain says:

“I was reminded of all this as I watched an advance screener of Impeachment with my 17-year-old son. During a particularly galling scene, which incorporated footage of Jay Leno making sexual jokes, my son turned to me and asked: “So people in the 1990s were just dicks?”

“Well…” I thought about it for a minute. “They kind of were, but there was more to it.””

Hasnain says:

This was a very engaging read; now I feel like I need to get the book.

“You might just take this as a sign that the computers don’t exist, but let’s keep working with the idea that they do. If you want to reduce the heat a computer generates and you have a huge amount of memory, you have an amazing design option, which is called a reversible computer. That means that you change each bit in the whole computer only once, and then move on to another bit. That results in a total record of all computation—and that’s why it’s possible to run the computer in reverse: Nothing has been lost. If you move each bead in an extremely capacious abacus only once, you don’t generate the heat you would by moving each bead repeatedly. You can think of it as saving all the information in a tidy way instead of dispersing it. This is also a nice example of Claude Shannon’s famous principle that information and entropy are related.”

Hasnain says:

Well worth the read.

“So really, you had a one-sided war in those years, between 2001 and 2004, where the U.S. was fighting an enemy that didn't exist, and innocent people were the ones who were suffering. That really is what created the Taliban's resurgence. The Taliban wasn't a popular force in 2001, but in these communities, people saw the Taliban as a lesser of two evils to the violence perpetuated by the U.S. and by the U.S. proxies.”

Hasnain says:

“The risk is that long COVID becomes yet another neglected disease whereby some uncounted number of people become debilitatingly sick every year and fruitlessly bang for help on the door of an unconcerned medical establishment. But a better future is also possible, in which long-haulers—vocal, united, and numerous—finally galvanize research into the long-term consequences of viral infections; in which such research proceeds quickly as patient experts become partners; in which the world gets ways of preventing and treating long COVID, ME/CFS, and other marginalized conditions; and in which the ents’ interminable meeting ends in action and victory.”

Hasnain says:

No words.

“It was predictable that the Supreme Court would abandon Roe after Barrett replaced Ginsburg. But it is still “stunning,” as Sotomayor put it, that it would do so at midnight on a Wednesday in a shadow docket order with a few slapdash sentences of opaque reasoning. It is stunning, too, that the court would issue this order nearly a full day after it silently allowed Texas’ law to take effect. The majority’s decision reflects flagrant contempt for the right to abortion and a cynical tolerance for Republican politicians’ endless schemes to abolish it. The majority did not have the patience to wait until its coming term, when it will have the opportunity to overturn Roe the normal way, with full briefing, oral arguments, and a signed opinion. Nor did it have the courage to cop to its real view—that there is no constitutional right to abortion. Instead, the ultra-conservative majority upended Roe under the cover of a procedural punt.

The Constitution deserved better. Abortion patients in Texas deserved better. The country deserved better. Instead, five Republican-appointed justices have stripped women in the nation’s second-largest state of their reproductive autonomy. And they did so in the most cowardly, dishonest, and shameful manner imaginable.”

Hasnain says:

Does this mean Roe v Wade has now been gutted and will be overturned?

“The Supreme Court's failure to respond prompted a furious backlash from supporters of abortion rights just after the law went into effect.

"Access to almost all abortion has just been cut off for millions of people, the impact will be immediate and devastating," the ACLU said in a tweet.”

Hasnain says:

“But in the long term, remote work’s promise is more ambivalent. It offers more flexibility, accommodating people who would otherwise give up office work altogether. For many, it offers access to better economic opportunities, regardless of location. But for some it will also introduce more competition. Ultimately, remote work ushers some freelancers and employees into a global arena that seems to promise a higher ceiling, but a lower floor as well.”

Hasnain says:

It’s interesting to see Apple HR supposedly shoot itself in the foot here. Beyond this immediate article though, it seems quite a massive change for Apple employees to be talking about so much stuff more publicly - I wonder if this is a culture shift that will stick.

“The company’s rules for the in-office chat app say that “Slack channels for activities and hobbies not recognized as Apple Employee clubs or Diversity Network Associations (DNAs) aren’t permitted and shouldn’t be created.”

But that rule has not been evenly enforced. Currently, Apple employees have popular Slack channels to discuss fun-dogs (more than 5,000 members), gaming (more than 3,000 members), and dad-jokes (more than 2,000 members). On August 18th, the company approved a channel called community-foosball. The cat and dog channels are not part of official clubs, and all of these channels were specifically created to talk about non-work activities.”

Hasnain says:

It does need to be noted that this is not just 3 hours a week, it’s 3 very specific hours each week (8-9pm on weekends). I was a little happier when I read it was only for online games, but… wow.

“"Teenagers are the future of our motherland," Xinhua quoted an unnamed NPPA spokesperson as saying. "Protecting the physical and mental health of minors is related to the people's vital interests, and relates to the cultivation of the younger generation in the era of national rejuvenation."

Gaming companies will be barred from providing services to minors in any form outside the stipulated hours and must ensure they have put real-name verification systems in place, said the regulator, which oversees the country's video games market.”

Hasnain says:

Really great read on software, productivity, human psychology and work ethics. Also brought back some memories for me as I used to use the app it talks about at the start daily through my college years.

“No matter whose fault it is, we take this stuff personally. American to-do behavior has a deeply puritan streak. Benjamin Franklin was among the first to pioneer to-do lists, creating a checklist of “virtues”—temperance! frugality! moderation!—that he intended to practice every day. That’s what the information scientist Gilly Leshed and computer scientist and cultural theorist Phoebe Sengers, both at Cornell University, found when they talked to people about their to-do lists. “They abide by the norm of ‘We need to be productive citizens of this world,’” Leshed tells me. Doing more is doing good.

To-do lists are, in the American imagination, a curiously moral type of software. Nobody opens Google Docs or PowerPoint thinking “This will make me a better person.” But with to-do apps, that ambition is front and center. “Everyone thinks that, with this system, I’m going to be like the best parent, the best child, the best worker, the most organized, punctual friend,” says Monique Mongeon, a product manager at the book-sales-tracking firm BookNet and a self-admitted serial organizational-app devotee. “When you start using something to organize your life, it’s because you’re hoping to improve it in some way. You’re trying to solve something.””