Hasnain says:

“Several years later, the Scottish polemicist Thomas Carlyle jumped into the fray, in an article with the viciously racist title you might assume. With a few changes, the substance of its argument could appear in National Review today:

The West Indies, it appears, are short of labour. … Where a Black man, by working about half-an-hour a-day … can supply himself, aid of sun and soil, with as much pumpkin as will suffice, he is likely to be a little stiff to raise into hard work! … Sunk to the ears in pumpkin, imbibing saccharine juices, and much at ease in his creation, he can listen to the less fortunate white man’s “demand,” and take his own time in supplying it. Higher wages, massa; higher, for your cane crop cannot wait; — still higher, til no conceivable opulence of cane crop will cover such wages.”

Hasnain says:

Linking to Twitter threads sucks - but this was quite worth it. Really informative read on the history of infectious disease research and why the CDC and the WHO repeatedly got it wrong, dismissing airborne transmission as a theory and leading to so many deaths.

Hasnain says:

“As our time together is winding slowy to a close, I wish I'd taken better care of it. Better food, more exercise, more relaxation . . . but I also wonder if it would have made any difference. I tell myself it still has useful years ahead of it, even if it can't do some of the things it once accomplished with ease. I reflect, sheepishly, that it is the only animal I have ever treated this way. Would I have fed a beloved dog stimulants to keep it working when it needed sleep? Never. Would I have dosed a cat with a mild poisoning of alcohol to relax it among strangers? Of course not. “

Hasnain says:

Interesting technical debugging story.

“Memory reclamation is one of the most complicated parts of the Linux kernel. It is full of heuristic algorithms, complex corner cases, complicated data structures, and convoluted interaction with other subsystems. Memory reclamation is the core part of the Linux kernel and is relied upon by other subsystems. However, the bugs or suboptimal behaviors of memory reclamation may take a long time to get discovered. The fixes may be quite subtle and the validation may take substantial efforts to guarantee no regressions.”

Hasnain says:

“Society started to glorify the entrepreneurs who said they wanted to change the world, and told us how they structured their (very long) days for maximum greatness. Maitlis highlights a motivational shift between the Gordon Gekkos and the Mark Zuckerbergs of the world; the latter felt they were fueled by “passion for the product or service, or for a higher purpose". (The joke was on us, though, because much of that new technology ended up enabling the kind of overwork and burnout we're dealing with today.)”

Hasnain says:

“As the valley’s tech companies have driven the American economy since the Great Recession, the region has remained one of the most unequal in the United States.

During the depths of the pandemic, four in 10 families in the area with children could not be sure that they would have enough to eat on any given day, according to an analysis by the Silicon Valley Institute for Regional Studies. Just months later, Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla, who recently added “Technoking” to his title, briefly became the world’s richest man. The median home price in Santa Clara County — home to Apple and Alphabet — is now $1.4 million, according to the California Association of Realtors.”

Hasnain says:

This sounds like a coverup mixed with a case of dog ate the homework.

Hasnain says:

I had known about the Monty hall problem and the subsequent confusion as experts even doubted the analyses - but I had not known how vile and mean the comments had gotten - for no reason!

And this was back when sending comments actually required writing a letter and so I can only imagine how bad it would’ve been with the internet.

“Though her answer was correct, a vast swath of academics responded with outrage. In the proceeding months, vos Savant received more than 10,000 letters -- including a pair from the Deputy Director of the Center for Defense Information, and a Research Mathematical Statistician from the National Institutes of Health -- all of which contended that she was entirely incompetent:”

Hasnain says:

“The title can be read the other way. By emphasizing latency we get feedback sooner. Learning and adapting to external changes lead to less waste and therefore greater efficiency. Each piece is inefficient (compared to some theoretical maximum), but the whole is efficient.
In my world, latency dominates. Mostly. But it depends.”

Hasnain says:

So hard hitting and on point.

“Most of these complaints seem to be coming from franchised restaurants. Why? Well, it’s not complicated. Service workers didn’t decide one day to stop working — rather huge numbers of them cannot work anymore. Because they’ve died of coronavirus.”

...

“But rather than collectively grieve the deaths of tens of thousands of the people who serve us and keep us fed, and keep such tragedies in mind when considering the state of the food-service industry labor market today, business owners and their political lackeys call these workers “lazy.””