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Former CDC director predicts bird flu pandemic

Former Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Director Robert Redfield said he predicts a bird flu pandemic will happen, it’s just a matter of when that will be. Redfield joined NewsNatio…

Click to view the original at thehill.com

Hasnain says:

““I really do think it’s very likely that we will, at some time, it’s not a question of if, it’s more of a question of when we will have a bird flu pandemic,” Redfield said.
He also noted that bird flu has a “significant mortality” when it enters humans compared to COVID-19. Redfield predicts the mortality is “probably somewhere between 25 and 50 percent mortality.” NewsNation noted that the death rate for COVID was 0.6 percent.”

Posted on 2024-06-16T02:33:11+0000

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Going from 0 to 1: How to write better unit tests when there are none

When I joined Graphite, there were almost no tests in the entire codebase. Out of the team of five engineers, three had previously worked at Meta — and had internalized the poor testing culture practiced there.

Click to view the original at graphite.dev

Hasnain says:

I feel seen.

“When I joined Graphite, there were almost no tests in the entire codebase. Out of the team of five engineers, three had previously worked at Meta — and had internalized the poor testing culture practiced there.”

Posted on 2024-06-15T21:22:33+0000

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Hasnain says:

“That Biden has elevated these claims speaks to either a corrupted game of outrage telephone, or intentionally disingenuous misframing to denigrate protests that rightfully criticize his policies on Gaza. Regardless, we will likely see people with an incentive to neutralize protests for Palestine leap on this opportunity, issuing a new round of policies to crack down on constitutionally protected First Amendment activity.”

Posted on 2024-06-15T13:27:54+0000

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Yes, Everyone Really Is Sick a Lot More Often After Covid

It's not your imagination: Around the world, people really are getting sick more often than before the pandemic

Click to view the original at bloomberg.com

Hasnain says:

Surprised immunity debt is still the leading theory when so many studies show COVID screws the immune system.

“The resulting research, based on data collected from more than 60 organizations and public health agencies, shows that 44 countries and territories have reported at least one infectious disease resurgence that’s at least ten times worse than the pre-pandemic baseline.
The post-Covid global surge of illnesses — viral and bacterial, common and historically rare — is a mystery that researchers and scientists are still trying to definitively explain. The way Covid lockdowns shifted baseline immunities is a piece of the puzzle, as is the pandemic’s hit to overall vaccine administration and compliance. Climate change, rising social inequality and wrung-out health-care services are contributing in ways that are hard to measure.”

Posted on 2024-06-15T03:33:20+0000

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The borrow checker within · baby steps

There is another place where the borrow checker’s rules fall short: phased initialization. Rust today follows the functional programming language style of requiring values for all the fields of a struct when it is created. Mostly this is fine, but sometimes you have structs where you want to initi...

Click to view the original at smallcultfollowing.com

Hasnain says:

“You might wonder about the impact of these changes on Rust’s complexity. Certainly they grow the set of things the type system can express. But in my mind they, like NLL before them, fall into that category of changes that will actually make using Rust feel simpler overall.
To see why, put yourself in the shoes of a user today who has written any one of the “obviously correct” programs we’ve seen in this post”

Posted on 2024-06-14T23:17:25+0000

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Welcome to yobihome

You can come to McDonalds and order a salad, but you won't. Same with notebooks, you can write NASA-production-grade software in a notebook, but most likely you won't. Notebooks make you lazy, and encourage bad practices.

Click to view the original at yobibyte.github.io

Hasnain says:

“i considered you to be my friend, how could you do this to me?

Hi Lucas, I'm not judging you. We can still be friends. But we can be better friends if you stop using notebooks.”

Posted on 2024-06-14T14:41:37+0000

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Generative AI Is Not Going To Build Your Engineering Team For You - Stack Overflow

June 10, 2024Generative AI Is Not Going To Build Your Engineering Team For YouIt’s easy to generate code, but not so easy to generate good code. Credit: Alexandra FrancisWhen I was 19 years old, I dropped out of college and moved to San Francisco. I had a job offer in hand to be a Unix sysadmin fo...

Click to view the original at stackoverflow.blog

Hasnain says:

Great read as always from Charity.

“The bottleneck we face is hiring, not training

The bottleneck we face now is not our ability to train up new junior engineers and give them skills. Nor is it about juniors learning to hustle harder; I see a lot of solid, well-meaning advice on this topic, but it’s not going to solve the problem. The bottleneck is giving them their first jobs. The bottleneck consists of companies who see them as a cost to externalize, not an investment in their—the company’s—future.

After their first job, an engineer can usually find work. But getting that first job, from what I can see, is murder. It is all but impossible—if you didn’t graduate from a top college, and you aren’t entering the feeder system of Big Tech, then it’s a roll of the dice, a question of luck or who has the best connections. It was rough before the chimera of “Generative AI can replace junior engineers” rose up from the swamp. And now…oof.

Where would you be, if you hadn’t gotten into tech when you did?

I know where I would be, and it is not here.

The internet loves to make fun of Boomers, the generation that famously coasted to college, home ownership, and retirement, then pulled the ladder up after them while mocking younger people as snowflakes. “Ok, Boomer” may be here to stay, but can we try to keep “Ok, Staff Engineer” from becoming a thing?”

Posted on 2024-06-14T04:38:02+0000

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Hasnain says:

“Unusual” relationships? They should just outright call this sexual harassment as I don’t see how it can be any different given the power differential here.

“Elon Musk had a sexual relationship with a former SpaceX intern, who he later hired onto his executive team, according to The Wall Street Journal. He also had a sexual relationship with a second employee. And a third woman alleged that Musk asked her several times to have his children; she refused. He then denied her a raise and complained about her performance.”

Posted on 2024-06-13T23:21:11+0000

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The Titan Submersible Disaster Shocked the World. The Inside Story Is More Disturbing Than Anyone Imagined

A year after OceanGate’s sub imploded, thousands of leaked documents and interviews with ex-employees reveal how the company’s CEO cut corners, ignored warnings, and lied in his fatal quest to reach the Titanic.

Click to view the original at wired.com

Hasnain says:

That diagram is something else.

“Days later, Rush received an even more pointed warning from Boeing’s Mark Negley, who had stayed in contact with the CEO after he helped with a preliminary design. Negley had recently carried out an analysis of Spencer Composites’ hull based on information Rush had shared. He did not mince words when sharing his findings, which WIRED is reporting for the first time. “We think you are at a high risk of a significant failure at or before you reach 4,000 meters. We do not think you have any safety margin,” he wrote in an email on March 30. “Be cautious and careful.”

Negley provided a graph charting the strain on the submersible against depth. It shows a skull and crossbones in the region below 4,000 meters.”

Posted on 2024-06-12T17:01:47+0000

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Balancing Old Tricks with New Feats: AI-Powered Conversion From Enzyme to React Testing Library at Slack - Slack Engineering

In the world of frontend development, one thing remains certain: change is the only constant. New frameworks emerge, and libraries can become obsolete without warning. Keeping up with the ever-changing ecosystem involves handling code conversions, both big and small. One significant shift for us was...

Click to view the original at slack.engineering

Hasnain says:

“Notably, our adoption rate, calculated as the number of files that our codemod ran on divided by the total number of files converted to RTL, reached approximately 64%. This adoption rate highlights the significant utilization of our codemod tool by the frontend developers who were the primary consumers, resulting in substantial time savings. “

Posted on 2024-06-12T14:01:09+0000