Hasnain says:

Interesting read on profiling, benchmarking, and Rust vs Go.

“I’m here today first to say what’s new, and then to think out loud about concurrent data processing, Go vs Rust, and Amdahl’s Law, of which I have a really nice graphical representation. Apologies because this is kind of long, but I suspect that most people who are interested in either are interested in both.”

Hasnain says:

Very interesting report and data; echoes some of my personal feelings and highlights some more that I hadn’t thought about.

Might need to go and read the whole additional full report and not just this post.

“2. Leaders are out of touch with employees and need a wake-up call

Many business leaders are faring better than their employees. Sixty-one percent of leaders say they are “thriving” right now — 23 percentage points higher than those without decision-making authority. They also report building stronger relationships with colleagues (+11 percentage points) and leadership (+19 percentage points), earning higher incomes (+17 percentage points), and taking all or more of their allotted vacation days (+12 percentage points).”

“3. High productivity is masking an exhausted workforce

Self-assessed productivity has remained the same or higher for many employees over the past year, but at a human cost. One in five global survey respondents say their employer doesn’t care about their work-life balance. Fifty-four percent feel overworked. Thirty-nine percent feel exhausted.”

Hasnain says:

This was eye opening.

“What makes this story worth telling is not the drama of an editorial shakeup at one of the world’s top medical journals. Rather, it’s the content of the podcast itself. Now, don’t get me wrong. If your goal is to understand what structural racism is and how it harms health, look elsewhere. The podcast’s errors are so naive or absurd—No physician is racist? No Black or Hispanic people experience discrimination because that would be illegal?—that it doesn’t merit a rebuttal. And if you know from experience the toll that racism takes, you may have decided early on not to listen. At best, it is a distraction, a theft of energy and time; at worst, a form of gaslighting.

Yet the podcast does serve a purpose—just not the one JAMA intended: it illustrates rather than illuminates the problem of structural racism in medicine. And not just in medicine: The conversation between Livingston and Katz succinctly presents some of the most common ways well-meaning white people (an oxymoron, if we understand whiteness properly) uphold white supremacy when talking about race. Moreover, because the podcast carried the imprimatur of the American Medical Association, it shows how white supremacy remains embedded in powerful institutions—even ones that profess liberal values of equal opportunity and health for all.”

Hasnain says:

This helps explain the ruckus this weekend.

“Recode has learned that Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos expressed dissatisfaction in recent weeks that company officials weren’t more aggressive in how they pushed back against criticisms of the company that he and other leaders deem inaccurate or misleading. What followed was a series of snarky and aggressive tweets that ended up fueling their own media cycles.”

Hasnain says:

Really well written and engaging story of an ongoing effort to reverse engineer and identify a pretty complex security breach.

“We found a bunch of malware sitting in the network collecting PII information from incoming HTTPS connection after they are decoded in a GOlang app. The data is exfiltrated through the malware network and eventually is sent to the bad guys. We have more info but I am still working on it, expect another blog post in the future with more details, samples, etc’.”

Hasnain says:

This is a pretty good - and scary! recap of this whole fiasco.

“Neither Netgate's responses, FreeBSD Core's, nor the off-record responses we heard from independent FreeBSD community members lead us to believe that there was in fact any process in place that could reasonably have been expected to catch this issue prior to it going out into the world in 13.0-RELEASE.

We take some heart in the fact that FreeBSD Core team's expressed a commitment to improving processes, refining tooling, and making code reviews more effective—but it's impossible to ignore the fact that this commitment comes as an afterthought to attacking "public discourse" that highlighted the need for those improved processes, refined tools, and more effective reviews in the first place.”

Hasnain says:

I don’t get why this is super controversial. Operations are operations, you want to stop them before they can get out of hand in case it’s a “bad” “person” doing it right? It’s not like these bugs can stay hidden forever.

“Security companies regularly shut down exploits that are being used by friendly governments, but such actions are rarely made public. In response to this incident, some Google employees have argued that counterterrorism missions ought to be out of bounds of public disclosure; others believe the company was entirely within its rights, and that the announcement serves to protect users and make the internet more secure.”

Hasnain says:

This does not sound like a good sign.

“When employees tagged the Phonetool problem as "SEV1" and logged it on an internal message board, a senior human resources manager responded by saying that employees could use workarounds other than Phonetool to do their work, and then marked the issue as resolved.”

Hasnain says:

But the memes coming out of this situation have been so glorious I don’t know where to begin.

“But Peter Berdowski, CEO of Dutch company Boskalis, which is trying to free the ship, compared it to "an enormous beached whale" and said "it might take weeks" to get the vessel off, possibly necessitating "a combination of reducing the weight by removing containers, oil and water from the ship, tugboats and dredging of sand."”

Hasnain says:

““The woman got the blame as usual,” says Ozoma. “They should all be held accountable. But you know what? They can never run away from this even when their kids look their names up online. This will always be tied to them. For that, I will forever be grateful to the Internet.””