Hasnain says:

“On the matter of Israel’s man-made famine, Foer provides an interesting corroborating detail. In early April, national security adviser Jake Sullivan met with Israeli officials in the Situation Room and was prepared to tell them, “You’re about to be responsible for the third famine of the 21st century.” Sullivan never got to make his speech, because the Israelis sprang a new crisis on the White House by telling Sullivan they had just bombed an Iranian consulate in Syria, killing prominent Iranian military leaders.”

Hasnain says:

Climate change is here. This is 4 hours away from any coast, 2k meters above sea level, and it still got leveled.

Also took out the world’s only source for quartz that’s used to make the crucibles for making silicon chips as I understand it.

““We have complete neighborhoods that are no longer there,” he said. “We’re just trying now to go to where these neighborhoods were and just try to do some sort of search-and-rescue in some of the houses that are still there.”
�Days after the rain subsided in the Southern Appalachians, numerous flood alerts were still in effect because of continued runoff and swollen waterways. Multiple flash flood emergencies, the most dire flood alert, were in effect Sunday for numerous lakes along the Catawba River in western North Carolina because of both “catastrophic and historic inflows” and dam releases that could lead to “life threatening” flooding downstream.”

Hasnain says:

Appointing Khan has been the one unquestionably good thing Biden has done, I’d hate for that to be reversed later.

“Roughly 80 percent of Democrats feel that the government should be doing more to take on corporate monopolies, compared to only 3 percent who say it should be doing less, according to new polling. Nearly 90 percent of Democrats, meanwhile, feel that lobbyists and corporate executives hold too much power over the government.

The same poll, commissioned by the Tech Oversight Project, found that more than three-fourths of Democrats feel Big Tech wields monopoly power in ways that harm consumers and small businesses. Only 7 percent said the companies should face no repercussions, since they have continued to innovate.”

Hasnain says:

“historic new study out of Scotland shows the real-world impact of vaccines against the human papillomavirus: The country has detected no cases of cervical cancer in women born between 1988-1996 who were fully vaccinated against HPV between the ages of 12 and 13.

Many previous studies have shown that HPV vaccines are extremely effective in preventing cervical cancer. But the study, published on Monday in the Journal of the National Cancer Institute, is the first to monitor a national cohort of women over such a long time period and find no occurrence of cervical cancer.”

Hasnain says:

Always interesting watching something you worked on - very tangentially (I did only a smaaaaallll slice of work here) - hit the news later. I didn’t realize it spawned an investigation, but it makes sense.

“Officials in Ireland have fined Meta $101 million for storing hundreds of millions of user passwords in plaintext and making them broadly available to company employees.

Meta disclosed the lapse in early 2019. The company said that apps for connecting to various Meta-owned social networks had logged user passwords in plaintext and stored them in a database that had been searched by roughly 2,000 company engineers, who collectively queried the stash more than 9 million times.”

Hasnain says:

Can’t check the news without instantly getting depressed these days. At least I have the privilege to just ignore the news unlike those suffering. So many thoughts, so hard to put everything into words.

“Iran’s Foreign Minister Sayyed Abbas Araghchi told the UN Security Council the attack on southern Beirut by Israel involved 5,000-pound “bunker buster” bombs supplied by the United States.”

Hasnain says:

“More generally, when using SQLite as a library, you don't have to learn how to do fancy things in SQL syntax. Your logic can be in regular old application code in your programming language of choice, orchestrating the most basic SQL queries that are easy to learn. It's fine. The creators of SQLite have made this point themselves.”

Hasnain says:

“Increasing productivity: Safe Coding improves code correctness and developer productivity by shifting bug finding further left, before the code is even checked in. We see this shift showing up in important metrics such as rollback rates (emergency code revert due to an unanticipated bug). The Android team has observed that the rollback rate of Rust changes is less than half that of C++.”

Hasnain says:

“Previous advisories from U.S. law enforcement agencies have said some of the workers earn up to $300,000 annually, collectively generating hundreds of millions for the North Korean regime and its weapons programs. “

Hasnain says:

"“We allege that Visa has unlawfully amassed the power to extract fees that far exceed what it could charge in a competitive market,” Attorney General Merrick Garland said in a DOJ release.

“Merchants and banks pass along those costs to consumers, either by raising prices or reducing quality or service,” Garland said. “As a result, Visa’s unlawful conduct affects not just the price of one thing — but the price of nearly everything.”"