Hasnain says:

“User stories are a great way of designing features, but when you are designing community features on the web it is also useful to have user stories that start “I am an absolute arsehole and I want to…”, which in this case would be “troll a particular user every single time they posted a comment”.”

Hasnain says:

The headline says it all, really.

So disappointed - and yet, not surprised, given they have a harassment problem and blocking functionality still does not exist.

Hasnain says:

“Over the last few decades, every improvement in matrix multiplication has come from improvements in the laser method, as researchers have found increasingly efficient ways to translate between the two problems. In their new proof, Alman and Vassilevska Williams reduce the friction between the two problems and show that it’s possible to “buy” more matrix multiplication than previously realized for solving a tensor problem of a given size.”

Hasnain says:

I am glad this has so many (and growing!) signatories.

There was a time when I used to respect RMS; but that went out the window a while back and I really really do not get why the foundation brought him back. The FSF has slowly been becoming more and more irrelevant, and this decision just shows how bad the board is.

“We are calling for the removal of the entire Board of the Free Software Foundation. These are people who have enabled and empowered RMS for years. They demonstrate this again by permitting him to rejoin the FSF Board. It is time for RMS to step back from the free software, tech ethics, digital rights, and tech communities, for he cannot provide the leadership we need. We are also calling for Richard M. Stallman to be removed from all leadership positions, including the GNU Project.

“

Hasnain says:

This was a really good read. I didn’t know that the origin for many of the DEI programs today lied in an act from Kennedy’s time.

“DEI efforts should answer not to those in glass-walled corner offices, but those most impacted by the policies it creates. Administrators, rank and file staff members, and service providers should dictate what it means to be represented, how it feels to belong, and what change means. Such a shift would radically alter who qualifies to work in DEI. Instead of people like scientists and business administrators, whose allegiances are to executives, the field would depend on union organizers, coalition builders, and activists. These are not easy—perhaps not even feasible tasks—but DEI is at a crossroads.”

Hasnain says:

This study had a really interesting methodology - they used police department data to first identify which officers are likely not biased and then used that baseline to look into indicators of bias. And the numbers are both higher and lower than I'd expect.

"A key strength of our setting is that the average officer writes hundreds of tickets over a several-year period. The high frequency of recorded activity allows us to adapt our empirical approach to estimate the degree of discrimination for each individual officer. Doing so, we find that 40 percent of officers practice discrimination. While this figure is not the majority of officers, it is hardly a few bad apples."

Hasnain says:

This goes far beyond COVID and is an indictment of the American healthcare system. Combine overworked doctors, a lack of trust in patients, and systemic biases against funding research into diseases that don’t commonly affect certain people and, well, this is the mess that you get.

“How could top scientists and medical professionals suffer collective amnesia about this crucial piece of information? Why weren’t we being warned about two types of potential COVID complications, acute and chronic?

The answer is simple: Our medical system is radically unequipped, practically and conceptually, to serve patients whose tests come back normal and whose chronic symptoms cannot be explained with a biological diagnosis or outsourced to a specialist.

Long COVID patients are far from the only ones in this situation. Millions of people suffer from similar chronic symptoms, many of them too debilitated to work a job or even leave their bed. They, too, have been told their symptoms are psychogenic. Those I spoke with recounted how they watched in horror as the first reports of post-COVID began to surface. They saw what was coming, even if the doctors and scientists didn’t.”

Hasnain says:

This is some pretty cool work.

“Honeybee takes only 3.5 seconds to do what Intel’s reference decoder does in two-and-a-half minutes, which is a 44x improvement! This is the difference between stepping away while the trace decodes and being able to take a sip of water while you wait.”

Hasnain says:

This whole piece is so heartbreaking and moving.

“Yesterday, after the prolonged delay, I finally did talk to my mother, and I asked her to please take extra care when leaving the house. I was trying not to cry, and of course I failed, and of course my mother immediately tried to reassure me. She listed all the reasons she felt okay going to the store—she had this list ready, she’d been thinking it through—and then she started trying to convince me, the one in less danger, not to leave my apartment. If I did leave, she proposed I talk more loudly than usual in English, the hope being that racist white people would know I belonged.”

Hasnain says:

Definitely worth reading in full, it goes into labor issues, tech, and gender discrimination.

I also don’t really understand Scalia’s statement on one case covered in the article - he tries to say that multiple individual instances of discrimination do not show bias in the aggregate, but... that does not make sense to me.

“But the Supreme Court ultimately found it didn’t matter if there was evidence that women were being paid less across the company. Writing the majority opinion, Justice Antonin Scalia denied that systematic sexism could be assumed to be the motive force behind a pay gap. “Left to their own devices most managers in any corporation,” Scalia wrote, “would select sex-neutral performance-based criteria for hiring and promotion that produce no actionable disparity at all. Others may choose to reward various attributes that produce disparate impact… still others may be guilty of intentional discrimination.” But crucially, “demonstrating the invalidity of one manager’s discretion will do nothing to demonstrate the invalidity of another’s.” As long as each manager was inflicting independent harms, there was no basis for class action status.”