Hasnain says:

As always with one of Charity’s posts, I found myself nodding along. There’s so much gold in the founder mode discussions, but it was unfortunately buried under so much hubris. She does a great job extracting the useful information in this piece.

“There is actually no shame in this! He is right: being a CEO is fucking hard. It does not come naturally. Nobody is born good at it. It takes a lot of hard work and pain and suffering to become someone who is good at running a company. I was CEO of Honeycomb for 3.5 years, and it almost killed me. I never got good at it. I have immense respect for the people who do it well.

But this attitude he has, where the buck stops literally everywhere but him — is one I find so fucking repellent. Ethics aside, I also feel like it constitutes a material risk to any company when the CEO is so lacking in humility and self-awareness. (I can leave room for the possibility that he is actually humble as fuck and he just…chose not to share those reflections with us in this talk. 🤷)”

Hasnain says:

The words I have to say about Assad are extremely impolite and vulgar because what else can one say about a maniac who deserves only the worst fates imaginable?

“"One hundred thousand is the most conservative estimate" of the number of bodies buried at the site, said Moustafa, head of the Syrian Emergency Task Force. "It's a very, very extremely almost unfairly conservative estimate."
Moustafa said that he is sure there are more mass graves than the five sites, and that along with Syrians victims included U.S. and British citizens and other foreigners

Hasnain says:

“The survey from Emerson College Polling found 68 percent of all respondents found the actions of the person who shot and killed Thompson unacceptable.

But a startling 24 percent of those aged 18-29 found it “somewhat acceptable,” and 17 percent of that group found it completely acceptable.”

Hasnain says:

“Unlike in most of the developed world, the US healthcare system is provided entirely by private companies and there is no universal, single-payer system for non-seniors. Most Americans must either individually pay into an insurance plan or get insurance through their employer. Plans can cost hundreds and (often) thousands of dollars a month, depending on the extent of users’ needs and the plans being offered by insurers.

“Commentators and talking heads don’t seem to understand the reaction because they don’t see these industries as violent ones,” Ongweso continued. They clearly understand that someone was murdered, he said, “but struggle with the idea that the population views what these companies do is murder on an industrial scale”.”

Hasnain says:

This is horrifying and sobering. There’s data in here that is mind numbing. I’ll leave with just one quote because the rest is horrifying.

Note that the data implies a 99:1 ratio of civilian:military deaths in the incidents they studied, and that’s just Oct 2023.

“By almost every metric, the harm to civilians from the first month of the Israeli campaign in Gaza is incomparable with any 21st century air campaign. It is by far the most intense, destructive, and fatal conflict for civilians that Airwars has ever documented. Key findings include:

At least 5,139 civilians were killed in Gaza in 25 days in October 2023. This is nearly four times more civilians reported killed in a single month than in any conflict Airwars has documented since it was established in 2014.

In October 2023 alone, Airwars documented at least 65 incidents in which a minimum of 20 civilians were killed in a particular incident. This is nearly triple the number of such high-fatality incidents that Airwars has documented within any comparable timeframe.

Over the course of 25 days, Airwars recorded a minimum of 1,900 children killed by Israeli military action in Gaza. This is nearly seven times higher than even the most deadly month for children previously recorded by Airwars.”

Hasnain says:

"Though a lot of workers seemingly have little choice but to comply with RTO mandates, Kaplan predicts many will refuse anyway and foresees a “bloodbath” in 2025 with neither employers nor employees backing down. Some people are sitting on savings from the postpandemic boom and can afford to be jobless for a while; others are optimistic that the labor market will heat back up and re-empower them to negotiate flexible work arrangements. "

Hasnain says:

Chock full of great lessons about compilers and common misconceptions. I learnt a bunch of new things from this one and refreshed my memory about a number of others

“I hope that your answer is no. From a compiler developer's standpoint, this absolute garbage. Basically such a compiler is unusable. At best, it is some kind of research artifact that helps you explore an idea. But forget production. It's not even ok for debugging. To see why, consider a small project with say 5000 lines of code. With 99% correctness rate, this means that in every compilation, 50 lines of code are incorrect. Fifty! And the worst part is: you don't know which and they can be different with every code change. You probably have had the experience of tracking down a bug in a single line of code, which can be both frustrating and time-consuming. Image how it is debugging 50 changing lines of code! Now, imagine moving this to a large-scale project, with possibly millions of lines of code. No, thanks.”

Hasnain says:

Man I miss Scuba. iykyk

“For instance, I observed a spike in p95 build times for iOS CI jobs. Using correlation, I compared the p95 data to CI cluster usage graphs and noticed a simultaneous spike in job wait times. Honeycomb’s synchronized dotted line across graphs confirmed the alignment, leading to a strong hypothesis: long CI agent wait times were causing the build time spike.”

Hasnain says:

“Even more important, the work demonstrates that the Gowers norm can act as a powerful tool in a new domain. “Because it’s so new, at least in this part of number theory, there is potential to do a bunch of other things with it,” Friedlander said. Mathematicians now hope to broaden the scope of the Gowers norm even further — to try using it to solve other problems in number theory beyond counting primes.”

Hasnain says:

This was a really cool read. Had to leave the part before the tldr though because that response time puts us all to shame.

“Timeline and Conclusion

The bug was reported August 23, 2024, and it was acknowledged after only 21 minutes, asking to verify their proposed fix. After acknowledging, a new release↗ was pushed a few minutes later.

Long Story Short

These three issues were all caused by the same root cause; the usage of a non-cryptographically secure PRNG. All of the bugs were exacerbated by the unexpected low entropy in the Flutter PRNG, where the internal seeds are just 32 bits. We showed practical attacks that will recover secrets within a reasonable time and how they led to attacks on Flutter developers, users of the Proton Wallet mobile application, and users of SelfPrivacy.”