Hasnain says:

I lost it when I saw the size of the table of contents - one line per failed messaging attempt - and realized it takes more than one full page on my phone.

“Because no single company has ever failed at something this badly, for this long, with this many different products (and because it has barely been a month since the rollout of Google Chat), the time has come to outline the history of Google messaging. Prepare yourselves, dear readers, for a non-stop rollercoaster of new product launches, neglected established products, unexpected shut-downs, and legions of confused, frustrated, and exiled users.”

Hasnain says:

Interesting read on how mortgage lending and the financial systems work, laws around fair housing, and how discrimination just persists throughout the system. The responses from the lenders were borderline gaslighting IMO.

“An investigation by The Markup has found that lenders in 2019 were more likely to deny home loans to people of color than to white people with similar financial characteristics — even when we controlled for newly available financial factors the mortgage industry for years has said would explain racial disparities in lending.”

Hasnain says:

“True, that 54 million Facebook users saw the story is only the latest proof of something we’ve known about the platform for a long time: If you drop poison into Facebook’s content well, it can be extraordinarily effective at spreading it out. That’s a terrible and important reality.

But it’s also true that it only matters if the poison gets dropped in the first place.

There’s no way for mainstream news organizations to keep all the poison out of social media, of course. But is it too much to ask for news outlets to refrain from dropping it in ourselves? Or at least to be a little reflective when it turns out we were the ones doing the poisoning?”

Hasnain says:

A really great read on authentication and API tokens. I learnt a bunch here.

“I continue to believe that boring, trustworthy random tokens are underrated, and that people burn a lot of complexity chasing statelessness they can't achieve and won’t need, because token databases for most systems outside of Facebook aren’t hard to scale.

A couple months ago, I’d have said that Macaroons are underrated in a different way, the way Big Star’s “#1 Record” is. Now I think there's merely underrated like the first Sex Pistols show; everyone who read about them created their own token format. We’re moving forward with Macaroons, and I’m psyched about that, but I’d hesitate to recommend them for a typical CRUD application.

But, don’t use JWT.”

Hasnain says:

Great read.

“At Reem’s, we’ve started to get rid of the notion that I’m the only creator. We are all creators and collaborators. I don’t have to have the vision every day — we can take turns being visionaries and executors. The pandemic has pushed us on a path to worker ownership and more democratic governance, which helps us all be accountable to the collective success of the business. I no longer feel lonely and isolated in this challenging era for restaurants because I struggle with my team rather than on behalf of my team.”

Hasnain says:

“I like to think of this as a puzzle, where we have all the edge pieces and we’re missing the center. We have many different insights about quantum gravity. There are many ways in which people are trying to understand it. Some by constraining it: What are things that it can’t do? Some by trying to construct aspects of it: things that it must do. My personal preferred approach is more to do with the information paradox, because it’s so pivotal; it’s such an acute problem. It’s clearly telling us: Here’s where you messed up. And to me that says, here’s a place where we can begin to fix our pillars, one of which must be wrong, of our understanding of quantum gravity.”

Hasnain says:

Relevant read on writing.

“Classic mistake: Writing about what you find interesting

You already know that QPU movement takes a lot of speed, and it’s incredible that there’s a slope that’s just right for Mario to walk up it for 12 hours building up speed.

But unless your audience is in exactly the right niche, they don’t know what the heck you’re talking about, so they just shrug and don’t read it.”

Hasnain says:

This was such a great read on burnout. I also have a lot of links to follow up on from here.

“I never thought I’d take five months off, without being able to explain to a future employer what I was doing. It felt like too much. But here we are. I hope they’ll be empathetic and understand - and honestly, it’ll be a red flag if they don’t. But I also think that this will become so common, that it’ll be normal. “Oh, you took a few months off in 2021? Me too.” (“Oh you gained 15lbs in 2020? Me too.”) If you have the financial ability to, don’t feel like you can’t quit your job. Your sanity is worth it.”

Hasnain says:

Hard hitting read.

“Through the selective lens of Brewster and others, these atrocities are no big deal. Too many Western journalists and analysts are contemptuous of and insensitive to the people of the country that the U.S. had invaded. Their eyes focus only on the violence of the “other”—the Taliban or ISIS or the broad catchall term “terrorists”— while simultaneously ignoring the bloodshed and violence wrought by a Western occupation. How can the U.S. claim to be morally superior to the terrorists it claims to fight, supposedly accountable to international laws regulating violence?”

Hasnain says:

This is a very well written and thought out piece. Lots of data, and the authors spend a lot of time contextualizing it. It certainly helped reveal some of my own blind spots on these topics.

“We surveyed more than 25,000 HBS graduates altogether; in this article we focus on MBAs, by far the largest proportion. Because we are primarily interested in the experiences of those who are still in the workplace, we report on Baby Boomers (ages 49–67), Generation X (ages 32–48), and Millennials (ages 26–31), also known as Generation Y. What our survey revealed suggests that the conventional wisdom about women’s careers doesn’t always square with reality.”