Hasnain says:

Really good read on roguelikes, a software bug, systems thinking, and human psychology and biases.

“And more than anything, we need more humility from the cognitive decoupling elite. We’re hard at work turning the world into metrics and dashboards and systems, and obviously those of us who are good at systems are happy to have things be more personally legible. But before we get too excited about turning the world into a video game, let’s remember how stupid we all looked when we tried treating a video game like a video game.”

Hasnain says:

Author makes a lot of solid points here, not as enlightening as their recent threads on Twitter however.

“But before we move on, before we head back to the mall, before we resume posting memes, and before we return to bickering with each other about whether we should have to mask up at Starbucks, let us remember that this day came about for one reason, and one reason only.

Because it is what we wanted.”

Hasnain says:

Really great read on burnout and working sustainably. The content was quite relatable, and it's very well written.

"I struggled to see the impact of burnout on my life until my coach held up a mirror and asked me to think honestly about how it was affecting me. There was a level of desperation and frustration in my voice that she had never heard before in the decade we had worked together. Having her reflect the acuteness of my feelings back to me clarified just how much burnout had skewed my thinking.

The burnout thief steals your peace of mind, but it often doesn’t leave obvious tracks. Here is a quick checklist for assessing whether you are experiencing burnout. These were the things I struggled with when I felt burnt out, even though I could hide it from others most days. If you answer “true” to more than half of these, consider finding a path out of where you are. "

Hasnain says:

Just a few days ago the news headlines were saying Afghanistan “could” fall in 90 days. This was… incredibly fast. And the response here also seems out of touch with reality:

“Secretary of State Antony Blinken rejected parallels being made with the rushed U.S. exit from the U.S. embassy in Vietnam in 1975, when staff was evacuated by helicopter from the building’s roof. He said the aim in Afghanistan was to target al Qaeda, which had been achieved.

“This is not Saigon,” said Mr. Blinken, speaking to CNN on Sunday. “We went to Afghanistan 20 years ago with one mission, and that mission was to deal with the folks who attacked us on 9/11. And we succeeded in that mission.””

Hasnain says:

““Renormalization helps us simplify the problem,” said Nathan Seiberg, a theoretical physicist at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. But “it also hides what happens at short distances. You can’t have it both ways.””

Hasnain says:

Solid read on observability and database design.

“Putting those capabilities together is what lets you dig through billions of rows of data, searching for that hidden needle in your haystack, getting answers to questions you could have never predicted asking in advance. That’s the experience that sets observability apart. “

Hasnain says:

This is written by an American war veteran.

“But if Cowboy is dead then he died a long time ago, and if Cowboy is dead it’s our fault for going there in the first place, giving his family the option of trusting us when we are the least trustworthy people on the planet.

We use people up and throw them away like it’s nothing.”

Hasnain says:

“The pandemic has given us all a taste of what large changes for which we were unprepared can feel like, but the planetary crisis is about to deliver a feast of them to our doorsteps.

Sooner, rather than later—and far sooner than most of us are used to imagining—we’re going to live through a set of apparently sudden tectonic lurches in how our nations, institutions and communities work, in their fundamental material structures. That upheaval may take a year to arrive, it may take two decades—but it’s coming. And while it’s true that the longer it takes, the worse the prospects for billions of people become, it’s also true that the longer it takes, the more powerfully it will shake the systems around us. When that tension slips its restraints, empires will fall.”

Hasnain says:

This was such a good read, mixing human interest stories with context on supply chain logistics, economics, and import regulations.

“This year, the Chaunsas in particular were sugary bombs of caramel, citrus, and grassy flavors, with a hint of rose that lingered on the tongue. My father, honestly not a big food lover, was praising God upon eating them. If the Mexican mangoes were a night out at a dinky jazz club, the Pakistani ones were a full-on Beyoncé concert, capable of changing your whole life.”

Hasnain says:

“It is especially unusual for the head of a site like Snopes to write stories using both his own byline and a pseudonym, potentially implicating Mikkelson in the same kind of deceptive behavior that the site has spent more than 25 years interrogating. The situation has left Snopes’ current staffers mortified.”