Hasnain says:

This is cool.

"Every big-name real-time collaborative document editor works this way. But for many web developers, especially those building on serverless infrastructure, this kind of solution has long been out-of-reach. Standard serverless infrastructure -- and even cloud infrastructure more generally -- just does not make it easy to assign these coordination points and direct users to talk to the same instance of your server.

Durable Objects make this easy. Not only do they make it easy to assign a coordination point, but Cloudflare will automatically create the coordinator close to the users using it and migrate it as needed, minimizing latency. The availability of local, durable storage means that changes to the document can be saved reliably in an instant, even if the eventual long-term storage is slower. Or, you can even store the entire document on the edge and abandon your database altogether."

Hasnain says:

Pretty insightful read on transport systems, control theory, and on applying evidence based policies and failing to do so because of politics.

Oh and it discusses the lines between theory and practice; industry and academia.

"Once you build systems, it turns out that some holes in your concepts start to show up. You are faced with problems that you didn’t foresee. That forces you to refine your understanding, to revise your conceptual system. Answers always bring new challenges. But once you solve those challenges, then you can go back and make more soundly based conceptual contributions.

I have always gone from theory to practice and back."

Hasnain says:

I cannot tell if this is satire or not. This is a great piece of writing that is a view into corporate culture and quite horrifying at the same time. Kudos to the author for achieving their stated goals (they said this can equally be read as satire or not). I am praying this is satire, for what it’s worth.

“When you first encounter this mode of being, it may be so far outside of your normal range of experience you'll have trouble processing it. Marx thought that to be fulfilled, humans must feel a connection to the end result of their work. For example, a carpenter feels satisfaction when he finishes a chair or a table. But in an industrialized society people no longer feel this connection, which robs them of the fulfillment. He called this phenomenon "estranged labor". One way to think about people who are attracted purely to wealth and status is that under these same conditions they don't feel estranged. They've either eradicated this feeling in themselves long ago, or never felt it in the first place.

Can you build a successful organization that keeps the unprincipled out? No. As the company grows more successful, so does the allure. The organization starts getting constantly bombarded by world class actors who specialize in slipping past the founders's defenses. And since at higher rungs much of the job is recruiting, the new hire becomes a Trojan horse. As soon as they're in, they open the door to dozens of cronies who diffuse into the company. It's like putting a drop of ink in a glass of water-- there is no undo.”

Hasnain says:

Interesting article on modern data structures and systems protocols approaches. I need to go and watch the mentioned talk.

“Philosophically, if I modify a google doc my computer is asking Google for permission to edit the file. (You can tell because if google’s servers say no, I lose my changes.) In comparison, if I git push to github, I’m only notifying github about the change to my code. My repository is mine. I own all the bits, and all the hardware that houses them. This is how I want all my software to work. Thanks to people like Martin, we now know how to make good CRDTs. But there’s still a lot of code to write before local first software can become the default.”

Hasnain says:

Enter the world of ungodly, crazy hacks when live reloading code. I learnt a lot more than I think I’ll ever need to about process lifetimes and how the linker works on Linux. But this is really cool.

“With our workaround, or "breakaround", as I've recently taken to calling it, we've entered the land of super-duper-undefined behavior, aka SDUB.

Because events are happening in this order:

T1 (main thread) spawns a second thread, T2
In T2, libgreet.so is loaded
In T2, greet() from libgreet.so is called
In T2, greet() calls println!(), which accesses LOCAL_STDOUT, which is initialized, and for which a TLS destructor is registered (using the fallback, since we hid __cxa_thread_atexit_impl)
In T2, lib is dropped, so libgreet.so is unloaded
T2 finishes, so all pthreads TLS key destructors are called (this is how the fallback works)

...however, the destructors' code was in the DSO we just unloaded.”

Hasnain says:

This is really long, and I'm still digesting it, but some of these revelations are horrifying, totally expected, and depressing, all at the same time.

Hasnain says:

Noticed myself nodding along here - solid intro to type systems and why they are valuable.

"Types are not perfect. They still have tradeoffs. Some type systems aren’t worth it. But five years ago, I changed my mind about the value of type systems in general, because I learned about type systems that I hadn’t known about previously. And, critically, this taught me to be far less dogmatic about the value of ideas in programming languages and software development in general. If smart people see the value in something and I don’t, it’s quite likely that I have missed something, and there’s something to learn from them!"

Hasnain says:

Sigh.

“That capability still left Hron with only a small menu of commands, none of them especially harmful. So he then examined the mechanism the coffee maker used to receive firmware updates. It turned out they were received from the phone with—you guessed it—no encryption, no authentication, and no code signing.”

Hasnain says:

A worthwhile reminder at times.

“The next time someone asks you for something, assess your time and energy before taking on new responsibilities.

"People are missing out on things that we actually do want to do because we've been too busy turning around and saying yes to stuff that we shouldn't," says Lue.”

Hasnain says:

The fact that this can happen seemingly randomly is terrifying.

“When I speak to him, he has just relearnt – for the thousandth time – that his daughter and son are now 21 and 18, not the young children he remembers. He hopes the rest of their lives will not be lost to him. “I want to walk my daughter down the aisle and remember it. Should they become parents, I would like to remember that I have grandchildren, and who they are.””