Hasnain says:

“There’s a very simple moral to this story, which Americans won’t want to hear. Capitalism destroyed their lives. It has destroyed their kids in so, so many ways. Making them suffer the trauma of “active shooter drills,” Making little seven year old girls set up lemonade stands to pay for brain cancer operations. Making little kids pay “lunch debt” — or go hungry. But perhaps the worst way of all that capitalism has hurt America’s kids is by making it impossible to have kids. Yesterday’s kids, who are today’s millennials, are on the cusp of an adulthood they can never reach. Their jobs don’t pay enough, they can’t afford homes of their own, where is there decent to work anyways — so who can have kids? Capitalism exploited yesterday’s kids so badly that today’s can’t have them, should they want them.”

Hasnain says:

Pretty good read on systems research and one person’s journey through their PhD.

“Although eRPC builds on top of many research results, I could have in theory built eRPC in my first year. For several years, I mistakenly—but for good reason—believed that RDMA and/or lossless networks were necessary for good performance. I and other researchers did not consider end-to-end designs that do not rely on in-network support because we believed that such designs would not perform well, in part because we had not found all the required optimizations. In the end, we re-discovered an essential lesson from the end-to-end arguments paper: “Using performance to justify placing functions in a low-level subsystem must be done carefully. Sometimes, by examining the problem thoroughly, the same or better performance can be achieved at the high level.” “

Hasnain says:

This is short and depressing - but worth reading; and please try to avoid going “WTF” at the end (you have been warned)

“The good news: after a year of planning and writing, I got the grant.

The bad news: both faculty co-chairs of the Climate Action Group are now among those losing their jobs as a consequence of Academic Program Prioritization, which, as far as I can see, is disaster capitalism for higher education.”

Hasnain says:

This attack is amazing - need to read the paper more in depth later. The tool recognizes an apple properly, but if you write “iPod” on it the model suddenly thinks it’s an iPod.

“We refer to these attacks as typographic attacks. We believe attacks such as those described above are far from simply an academic concern. By exploiting the model’s ability to read text robustly, we find that even photographs of hand-written text can often fool the model. Like the Adversarial Patch,22 this attack works in the wild; but unlike such attacks, it requires no more technology than pen and paper.”

Hasnain says:

This is horrible - I hope the fight for employees rights succeeds here.

“The success of the Model S project was the top priority at Tesla in April 2014, when Balan was walked into that security office. According to Balan’s recollection, the HR manager strongly suggested she drop her complaints about the supplier contracts. Balan said no. “OK, this is your exit interview,” Balan recalls being told. She was handed resignation papers and asked to sign them. When she protested, she said, a Tesla official threatened to have her led outside in handcuffs and told her, “This is what happens if you don’t know how to keep your mouth shut.””

Hasnain says:

This whole thing has been blowing up on Twitter, and I agree with this take here. This seems like a fairly straightforward way to provide evidence of an extraordinary claim.

“Show Me the Factors

According to the claims in Schnorr’s paper, it should be practical to set significant new factoring records. There is a convenient 862-bit RSA challenge that has not been factored yet. Posting its factors, as done for the CADO-NFS team’s records, would lend credence to Schnorr’s paper and encourage more review of the methodology.”

Hasnain says:

This was a pretty engaging read (/ podcast, but I read the transcript), from folks who are doing industry leading work in this space.

“You know, if you're not coming to a small team, working on a small project, most of the time you're looking at this huge code base with so many different components and you don't necessarily have a great big picture understanding of what actually it does, plus how it behaves.”

Hasnain says:

Very insightful, I learnt a bunch from this perspective.

“When someone is telling me they are or have been poor and I’m trying to determine how poor exactly they were, there’s one evergreen question I ask that has never failed to give me a good idea of what kind of situation I’m dealing with. That question is: “How many times have they turned off your water?”.”

Hasnain says:

This paper will be fun to read when it’s out...

“We follow a line of research that perform website fingerprinting attacks. We develop a sequence of attacks with progressively decreasing dependency on JavaScript features, culminating in the first browser-based side-channel attack which is constructed entirely from Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), and therefore works even when script execution is completely blocked.”

Hasnain says:

This is really cool! I also learnt something new today about why vaccinating against malaria has been so tough before.