Hasnain says:

“Was there an earlier moment when you realized you wanted to be a scientist?

The honest truth is that I did not always want to be a scientist. At the point of entering college, I was like, maybe I will double major in biology and English. I loved biology in particular, and I’ve always loved writing, so I thought maybe I’d be a writer.

I have always been very interested in everything. It’s a common refrain for astronomers to say, “Oh, ever since I was a little kid, I absolutely loved space, and I knew that’s exactly what I wanted to do when I grew up.” And I definitely loved space as a little kid, but I also loved rocks, and dinosaurs, and lizards. Salamanders in particular. If anything, it all started with looking under rocks for salamanders with my sisters in the backyard in Virginia. It’s just a curiosity about nature and a love of learning, and that’s what you get to do as a scientist.”

Hasnain says:

“I spent a long time on this post. It was difficult to balance realism against ease of understanding, but I feel good about where I landed. I'm hopeful that being able to see how these complex systems behave in practice, in ideal and less-than-ideal scenarios, helps you grow an intuitive understanding of when they would best apply to your workloads.”

Hasnain says:

“And this is how you properly test concurrent data structures.

Postscript
Of course, this is just a toy. But you can see some ways to extend it. For example, right now our AtomicU32 just delegates to the real one. But what you could do instead is, for each atomic, to maintain a set of values written and, on read, return an arbitrary written value consistent with a weak memory model.

You could also be smarter with exploring interleavings. Instead of interleaving threads at random, like we do here, you can try to apply model checking approaches and prove that you have considered all meaningfully different interleavings.

Or you can apply the approach from Generate All The Things and exhaustively enumerate all interleavings for up to, say, five increments. In fact, why don’t we just do this?”

Hasnain says:

This approach is nuts. Learnt a lot about algorithm design and also about high performance micro-optimizations

"The program is over-fit to the input spec and the particular host it runs on (Intel Xeon E3-1271 v3 @ 3.60GHz, 512MB RAM, Ubuntu 20.04). Given the CPU, it only uses SIMD instructions up to AVX2, no AVX512. It assumes the input is exactly according to the spec and hence does zero error handling and even on such input will only produce correct results with probability < 1, though very close to 1, depending on the parameters you choose."

Hasnain says:

"17 TiB of tablebases are unwieldy, so to do this migration without hours of downtime, we set up a second server with the new approach. This also allowed us to run controlled benchmarks on the full set of tablebases, before finally doing the switch and retiring the old server."

Hasnain says:

“Aaaand the quick and easy solution is rarely quick or easy. This was never meant to be so arduous - this whole “let’s make a primitive function” idea was meant to take an hour tops to avoid spending a couple hours implementing it at the bytecode level, but it ended up taking much longer! I don’t think I could have easily predicted this seemingly easy change would be so hard: this requires a lot of knowledge about the system you’re working with and about interpreter design, yet I’m but a humble PhD student. We’re getting there though.”

Hasnain says:

“A thing that is happening is happening. And you don’t even need a majority of people to accept reality.

You just need the right people to do so.

Because the right people can do things like install air filters in schools and hospitals. They can encourage masks. They can call out less than ideal vaccines and push for better ones. They can generate the background noise that popularizes the idea that covid is not over.”

Hasnain says:

His writing is always pretty on point, and this is a well argued piece. This made me chuckle though:

“Apparently, the Kurzweilian ideas have mutated over time, and seem to have taken root in a group of folks associated with a forum called "LessWrong", a more high-brow version of 4chan where mostly young men try to impress each other by their command of mathematical vocabulary (not of actual math). One of the founders of this forum, Eliezer Yudkowsky, has become one of the most outspoken proponents of the hypothesis that "the end is nigh".”

Hasnain says:

“Current and former US officials also told CNN that the five Israeli units were not the only ones the State Department had been examining. The special State Department panel had reached unanimous consensus at a working level that three additional units had been guilty of abuses prior to October 7, the officials said. Only Blinken or the Deputy Secretary of State can make a final determination on whether units remain eligible to receive US military assistance and it is unclear if the matter has come before them. The findings by the expert panel would have been enough to disqualify a military unit from any other country, the officials said.”

Hasnain says:

“Zimmerman predicts that more nonprofits will be announcing closures in the months and years to come.

“It's like a structural problem in the nonprofit field where we're all trying to address the harms of capitalism with band-aids and funded by the people and companies that have helped create these conditions,” he said.

He added: “F–k capitalism is what I want to say.”@