Hasnain says:

I don’t get why people agree to be interviewed by Chotiner. If he ever reaches out to me for an interview I’m going to hang my head in shame and run far away.

Also what the … was this guy even smoking.

"Howard, I think maybe we’re in a bit of a worrisome place if you see photos of dead children on television and your first thought is, They’re trying to make me, a Jew, hate my people.

You’ve twisted what I’ve said. That’s not my first thought. That’s not my first thought.

Second thought?

And it’s not my second thought. It all depends on how often you see them, and when you see them. You see them and you see them and that’s all you see, and then you feel, Is this what the war means to the media? This is what they want to stress again and again and again?"

Hasnain says:

Note that this is from May last year:

“Viewed in light of its role in cementing a deadly status quo, the Iron Dome cannot meaningfully be considered “life-saving” in any value system that recognizes Palestinian life alongside Israeli life. Palestine advocates ought to oppose its funding not just because they oppose military aid for Israel in general, but on the specific grounds that by depriving Palestinians of even the most limited means of military deterrence, the US has given Israel a blank check to massacre Gazans whenever it is politically convenient. Especially in the absence of political will from the Israelis to end the devastating siege and blockade, Palestinians, desperate for life, have shown that they will continue to fight back. By funding a system that guarantees their acts of resistance are of almost no consequence to their oppressors, we are consigning them to death. “

Hasnain says:

"Conclusion
SIMD is awesome when it's used properly
IO is also important, especially for the large datasets
The current performance is the same as the C++ version for dataset GIST. While I use more SIMD, the C++ version uses const generics."

Hasnain says:

No words for this, especially since this para is the understatement of the year. I do not recommend watching the videos and pictures coming out of this (will not describe here but may do so in the comments.)

“Meanwhile, explosions hit early Monday outside Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, killing three people and injuring about 50 others, the hospital said. Tents caught fire, and residents of the Central Gaza community carried the injured into the hospital.”

Hasnain says:

I prefer the phrasing an anti-zionist I follow on twitter used instead of the quote at the bottom because this is just ridiculous media complicity.

“"German Chancellor Adolph Hitler is examining a plan to seal off humanitarian aid to the Warsaw Ghetto in an attempt to starve out socialist & communist militants, a plan that could trap hundreds of thousands of Jews without food or water.”

This is what the piece says:

“Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is examining a plan to seal off humanitarian aid to northern Gaza in an attempt to starve out Hamas militants, a plan that, if implemented, could trap without food or water hundreds of thousands of Palestinians unwilling or unable to leave their homes.”

Hasnain says:

Always speaking truth to power. Her words are always so powerful. I do have to note that PEN refused to link to her speech when it announced the award on its social media.

So hard to pick one quote from here. Read the whole thing.

“Since October 7th 2023, apart from the tens of thousands of people it has killed, Israel has displaced the majority of Gaza’s population, many times over. It has bombed hospitals. It has deliberately targeted and killed doctors, aid workers and journalists. A whole population is being starved – their history is sought to be erased. All this is supported both morally and materially by the wealthiest, most powerful governments in the world. And their media. (Here I include my country, India, which supplies Israel with weapons, as well as thousands of workers.) There is no daylight between these countries and Israel. In the last year alone, the US has spent 17.9 billion dollars in military aid to Israel. So, let us once and for all dispense with the lie about the US being a mediator, a restraining influence, or as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (considered to be on the extreme Left of mainstream US politics) put it, ‘working tirelessly for a ceasefire’. A party to the genocide cannot be a mediator. Not all the power and money, not all the weapons and propaganda on earth can any longer hide the wound that is Palestine. The wound through which the whole world, including Israel, bleeds.”

Hasnain says:

Interesting stuff. This bit in particular was an idea I hadn’t heard of before.

“Even when running in a degraded mode, it is able to continuously and reliably ingest data. Because of this, our data ingestion layer (written in Rust) has been designed to have as few responsibilities as possible. Its sole job is to get data into some semi-persistent storage as quickly as possible, with several cascading storage options in the case of failures or outages.
Even in the event of an auth service outage, it will still record requests, but with a flag to authorize the request async in the processing layer.”

Hasnain says:

Great read as always

“While writing this piece, a friend told me a story about when he became an engineering manager a decade ago, and soon noticed that his two women engineers were the lowest paid and the lowest leveled people on the team, which didn’t seem to correlate with their actual skills or experience. He asked his own manager what was up with this, and the response he received was: “Well yeah, neither of them has ever been a flight risk.”

This kind of attitude is, to put it politely, a fucking cancer on our industry.”

Hasnain says:

Long and rambles at times but there’s useful advice here - and I certainly needed some on prioritization.

“Being purposeful is also the secret to agility. Purpose can help move faster and in times of crisis, rally the team together. It helps avoid analysis paralysis and avoid the delays inherent in waiting for numbers to emerge before taking a decision. When employees are in a quandary due to a fork in the road, purpose can guide them to choose which way to move without escalating up the hierarchy or awaiting further direction from their hierarchy. In situations where it really matters, we tend to become data driven when we should be doing the opposite, pause and then reflect on why the business or product exists.”

Hasnain says:

“Keep an eye on your dicts. Don’t let them take control of your application. As with every piece of technical debt, the further you postpone introducing proper data structures, the more complex the transition becomes.”