Hasnain says:

Interesting and endearing read on dwarf fortress and the challenges of maintaining a long running software project.

“Q: What are the challenges in developing a single project for so long? Do you think this is easier to do by yourself? That is, because you wrote every line, is it easier to maintain and change?

A: It’s easy to forget stuff! Searching for ‘;’, which is a loose method but close enough, we’re up to 711,000 lines, so it’s just not possible to keep it all in my head now. I try to name my variables and objects consistently and memorably, and I leave enough comments around to remind myself of what’s going on when I arrive at a spot of code. Sometimes it takes several searches to find the exact thread I’m trying to tug on when I go and revisit some piece of the game I haven’t touched for a decade, which happens quite a bit. I’d say most changes are focused only on certain parts of the game, so there is kind of an active molten core that I have a much better working knowledge of. There are a few really crusty bits that I haven’t looked at since before the first release in 2006.”

Hasnain says:

While a lot of the articles on this have been repeating the Bloomberg story (based on the lawsuit) - Kotaku went and did some more investigating and reading of the original material and… holy crap.

“Another image from the same Facebook album shows a screenshot of a 2013 group chat called the “BlizzCon Cosby Crew.” In it, former Blizzard designer David Kosak writes, “I am gathering the hot chixx for the Coz.”

“Bring em,” replies Afrasiabi. “You can’t marry ALL of them Alex,” Kosak writes. “I can, I’m middle eastern,” responds Afrasiabi. Jesse McCree, currently a lead game designer at Blizzard, then writes, “You misspelled fuck.””

Hasnain says:

Great read with an in depth analysis of RTS game design

“In my experience, weirdly, games with a lot of hard counters tend to (when the game is reasonably well balanced, anyway) average out into combat scenarios where the hard counter relationships smooth out the gameplay. If you have tanks, units that are good against tanks, air and units that are good against air, and infantry and units that are good against infantry, you don’t have a series of “Rock, Paper, Scissors” binary deletion interactions, but a dance of players trying to find good angles of attack and trying to preserve their units in order to deter or destroy or drive off pieces of the enemy army.”

Hasnain says:

This was an excellent 4 part read on the psychology of burnout, common stressors, and how to avoid it personally and organizationally.

““Why am I burned out? Because I’ve internalized the idea that I should be working all the time. Why have I internalized that idea? Because everything and everyone in my life has reinforced it—explicitly and implicitly—since I was young.””

Hasnain says:

Been a while since I've read a good technical article focused on math.

"Poisson's equation comes up in many domains. Once you know how to recognize it and solve it, you will be capable of simulating a very wide range of physical phenomena.

The knowledge from this post is a jumping off point into many, much deeper fields.

For applications we've already discussed steady-state temperature distributions, electrostatics and magnetostatics, and computational fluid dynamics. But these same tools are also used in geophysics, image processing, caustics engineering, stress and strain modeling, Markov decision processes, the list goes on!"

Hasnain says:

Relevant and timely read in the aftermath of the Pegasus story breaking. Very well written and a great analysis of technology, policy, and socio-economic incentives w.r.t the security and software industry.

"If you want to see change, you need to incentivize change. For example, if you want to see Microsoft have a heart attack, talk about the idea of defining legal liability for bad code in a commercial product. If you want to give Facebook nightmares, talk about the idea of making it legally liable for any and all leaks of our personal records that a jury can be persuaded were unnecessarily collected. Imagine how quickly Mark Zuckerberg would start smashing the delete key.

Where there is no liability, there is no accountability... and this brings us to the State. "

Hasnain says:

This was an interesting read on productivity and management. And it does align with some of my own prior personal experiences.

"Only when we are 0 percent busy can we step back and look at the bigger picture of what we’re doing. Slack allows us to think ahead. To consider whether we’re on the right trajectory. To contemplate unseen problems. To mull over information. To decide if we’re making the right trade-offs. To do things that aren’t scalable or that might not have a chance to prove profitable for a while. To walk away from bad deals."

Hasnain says:

I’ve read this twice today and it keeps getting worse as I process the implications. This is one reason we need more accountability in the systems we build and a higher standard for ethical considerations in the work being done in tech.

“Had the Cook County State’s Attorney’s office not withdrawn the evidence in the Williams case, it would likely have become the first time an Illinois court formally examined the science and source code behind ShotSpotter, Jonathan Manes, an attorney at the MacArthur Justice Center, told Motherboard.

“Rather than defend the evidence, [prosecutors] just ran away from it,” he said. “Right now, nobody outside of ShotSpotter has ever been able to look under the hood and audit this technology. We wouldn’t let forensic crime labs use a DNA test that hadn’t been vetted and audited.””

Hasnain says:

As with so many stories these days - this is worth reading, listening to, and reflecting upon to see how we must all do much better.

“Our company executives have claimed that actions will be taken to protect us, but in the face of legal action — and the troubling official responses that followed — we no longer trust that our leaders will place employee safety above their own interests. To claim this is a “truly meritless and irresponsible lawsuit,” while seeing so many current and former employees speak out about their own experiences regarding harassment and abuse, is simply unacceptable.”

Hasnain says:

The more that comes out about this story the more horrifying it is. Because it’s… just so normalized - how many stories do we just not hear about?

““Oh my God, these moments were horrible because Zahir was detaining Noor in the room and we all were standing outside his house and could not do anything for her. Zahir time and again came out of the room and chatted with us. He also asked us if we could lend him pliers,” said a common friend of Noor while talking to The Nation. He said it took 10 minutes to kill and behead Noor by Zahir Jaffar.”