Hasnain says:

This was a great read on various work styles.

“What happens when you put a trailblazer in a road builder role or vice versa? Disaster. Imagine a trailblazer trying to build roads. They’re likely to get impatient, cutting corners and rushing through the process. They might ignore critical planning phases, resulting in a road that’s prone to collapse. Their instinct to "figure it out as we go" doesn’t work in a world where safety and longevity matter.

Now flip it. A road builder, when tasked with blazing a new trail, often freezes. They get stuck in analysis paralysis, overthinking every decision. They’re so focused on finding the "optimal" path that they forget the point of trailblazing is to just start moving. Progress slows to a crawl, and what could’ve been an exciting adventure turns into a frustrating exercise in indecision.

The real magic happens when people are placed in roles that align with their strengths. A good leader can spot who thrives in the unknown and who excels at refinement. And no matter which role you’re in, the key is to keep moving forward. The last thing you want to be is the one standing around, complaining—you’re just wasting everyone’s time.”

Hasnain says:

Learnt a lot from this one.

“Looking back at these three mistakes - destroying our culture through rapid growth, fragmenting our architecture with microservices, and outsourcing our core support function - there's a common thread. Each represents choosing short-term scalability over long-term sustainability. We sacrificed what made Airbnb special - its culture, its technical simplicity, and its human touch - in pursuit of rapid growth and cost optimization.”

Hasnain says:

I remember visiting Lahore in 2018 (?) when there was a huge outbreak of smog the day after I arrived and ... it was not great. It took a while for my family that wasn't in Lahore to understand how bad it got (since it was the first in a while). This is 10x worse. It'll only get worse.

To contextualize the bad AQI for folks in the bay who may be familiar with AQI numbers -- it's currently >600, and has been recorded at over 1000 (some sources reported 1900). Those numbers are not typos.

Hasnain says:

Lots of useful advice here. Sure one takeaway definitely is “I wish it wasn’t this way” but it is what it is and if you’re operating in such an environment this advice is quite useful.

Beyond the pessimistic quote though - I really liked the author’s advice on knowing what to cut and prioritizing the most stressful/unknown parts first.

“Shipping is a social construct within a company. Concretely, that means that a project is shipped when the important people at your company believe it is shipped. If you deploy your system, but your manager or VP or CEO is very unhappy with it, you did not ship. (Maybe you shipped something, but you didn’t ship the actual project.) You only know you’ve shipped when your company’s leadership acknowledge you’ve shipped.”

Hasnain says:

Harrowing report. Worth a read for the dark times ahead.

“The cost to U.S.-born Americans, in tax dollars spent and in economic output lost, pales in comparison to the devastation that undocumented immigrants and their families would suffer. Uprooted from their homes and communities after decades in the country, they would face an uncertain future and the potential separation of their families, which include millions of U.S.-citizen children who have known only this country as home.

To speak of the enormity of the fiscal and economic costs of mass deportation is not to minimize the importance of this suffering. It is to reinforce just how radical a step a deportation campaign targeting millions of undocumented immigrants, who have been so integral to the U.S. economy and American communities, would be. There is no way to engage in mass deportation without fundamentally changing the federal government, the national economy, and, ultimately, America itself.”

Hasnain says:

Sage advice here - I found myself nodding along a lot. It aligned with some advice I received in the past around being more assertive - “find the edge of your comfort zone, exceed it a little bit - it’s still likely not enough, and you’ll see it’s not the end of the world.”. That helped me a lot in the past.

“Next time you’re feeling some discomfort in a situation, slow down and take a deep breath.

Check in with yourself. Where is your edge? What level of discomfort feels challenging but not overwhelming right now? Can you lean in and try something difficult? Or have you already leaned in too far and need to back off a little? Act accordingly. As the situation progresses, keep checking in with yourself.

Once it’s over, check in again – how did that go? Finally, give yourself some credit, and be aware of the potential for a vulnerability hangover.”

Hasnain says:

“So too with the engineering heuristics. Becoming a better engineer is becoming a better pathfinder in problem space.

There's probably a compelling general theory to be concocted in this space, but that's beyond the scope of this post. Spin up a background thread in your brain and think about it. Maybe you'll find a good path to an answer.”

Hasnain says:

“Listening to the developers’ commentary tracks in the remastered edition of Grim Fandango (who would have imagined in 1998 that games would someday come with commentary tracks?), I was shocked by how little talk there was about the gameplay. It was all lighting and dialog beats and soundtrack stabs and Z-buffers instead — all of which is really, really important in its place, but none of which can yield a great game on its own. Tellingly, when the subject of puzzle design did come up, it always seemed to be in an off-hand, borderline dismissive way. “I don’t know how players are supposed to figure out this puzzle,” says Tim Schafer outright at one point. Such a statement from your lead designer is never a good sign.

But I won’t belabor the issue any further. Suffice to say that Grim Fandango is doomed to remain a promising might-have-been rather than a classic in my book. As a story and a world, it’s kind of amazing. It’s just a shame that the gameplay part of this game isn’t equally inspired.”

Hasnain says:

Sometimes twitter leads me to the most fascinating things. I’ll link to the full paper in the comments. It’s just mind bending to see these case studies in how heart transplants changed people’s personalities to match the donor’s.

“Conclusion: The incidence of recipient awareness of personal changes in cardiac transplant patients is unknown. The effects of the immunosuppressant drugs, stress of the surgery, and statistical coincidence are likely insufficient to explain the findings. The plausibility of cellular memory, possibly systemic memory, is suggested.”

Hasnain says:

“In the meantime, Pak says, it’s clear that mathematicians need to engage in a more active discussion about the nature of mathematical proof. He and his colleagues ultimately didn’t have to rely on controversial computational methods; they were able to disprove the conjecture with total certainty. But as computer- and AI-based lines of attack become more common in mathematics research, some mathematicians are debating whether the field’s norms will eventually have to change. “It’s a philosophical question,” Alon said. “How do we view proofs that are only true with high probability?””