Opinion | I Cherish My Grief for the Mother I Never Expected to Have
There is grief that strangles you and grief that holds you.
Hasnain says:
Such a beautifully written essay. Who’s cutting onions in the house at this time of night?!
“That grief that strangles, versus the grief that holds — I know the difference now. I didn’t cry when my birth mother left, because my grief before was mostly made up of anger so ferocious that it just made me hate myself.
The grief I feel over the loss of Margaret levels me regularly; big floods of tears, suddenly, in the middle of the day. But at the same time, this grief is so much sweeter. Because I get to keep her. I get to miss her. The ways she took care of me, the things she taught me, the little ways that I wound up resembling her sometimes, even if she didn’t raise me.
Margaret used to tell me, “You’re so easy to love.” Somehow, now, I believe her. Her voice is in my head now, too. She gets to stay.”
Posted on 2022-05-08T11:07:05+0000
Xilem: an architecture for UI in Rust
Rust is an appealing language for building user interfaces for a variety of reasons, especially the promise of delivering both performance and safety. However, finding a good architecture is challenging. Architectures that work well in other languages generally don’t adapt well to Rust, mostly bec...
Hasnain says:
This was a really interesting exploration that goes into the complexities of building good UIs in general (state is hard!) and in particular how to do them in Rust which imposes additional constraints I’m on how you manage state. Looking forward to trying this at some point.
“The work presented in this blog post is conceptual, almost academic, though it is forged from attempts to build real-world UI in Rust. It comes to you at an early stage; we haven’t yet built up real UI around the new architecture. Part of the motivation for doing this writeup is so we can gather feedback on whether it will actually deliver on its promise.
One way to test that would be to try it in other domains. There are quite a few projects that implement reactive UI ideas over a TUI, and it would also be interesting to try the Xilem architecture on top of Web infrastructure, generating DOM nodes in place of the associated widget tree.”
Posted on 2022-05-08T10:51:56+0000
McConnell says national abortion ban ‘possible’
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) said in an interview with USA Today a national abortion ban is “possible” if Roe v. Wade gets overturned this summer. “If the leaked…
Hasnain says:
So much rage over the last few days on the abortion ban news. I don’t know where to begin.
““Mitch McConnell confirmed what voters have long known: Republicans will use every tool they can, from the courts to Congress, to make abortion illegal everywhere and strip away a woman’s right to make our own decisions. For voters, the stakes of protecting and expanding our Democratic Senate majority in 2022 have never been higher.””
Posted on 2022-05-08T01:18:34+0000
A faster lexer in Go - Eli Bendersky's website
A faster lexer in Go May 03, 2022 at 19:53 Tags Go , Programming , Compilation It's been a while since I've last rewritten my favorite lexical analyzer :-) That post is the last in a series implementing a lexer for the TableGen language in a variety of programming languages, using multiple technique...
Hasnain says:
Great read on profiling and improving Go programs.
“This post discussed some potential optimizations to a lexical scanner written in Go. It touched upon the relative efficiency of converting byte slices to strings vs. taking substrings, discussed some strategies w.r.t. API design in Go, and even got into optimizing GC behavior.”
Posted on 2022-05-07T11:21:38+0000
This Australian Bartender Found an ATM Glitch and Blew $1.6 Million
We asked Dan Saunders to describe the loophole and his five months of partying.
Hasnain says:
I wonder what would have happened had this guy not turned himself in. This is a pretty wild story.
Also, how do audits miss something like this?!
“So how did the police finally get involved?
I was seeing a psychiatrist as a result of the guilt and the anxiety. I felt like I needed to talk to someone about it. The first psychiatrist I saw said "I'm not qualified to do this" and I was like, “dude you're the shrink, surely you're qualified.” But then I found a guy who was a bit more sensible. He didn't tell me what to do or anything like that, but he said that turning myself in would be important and it’d clear my conscience and make sure I could move on.”
Posted on 2022-05-07T11:16:04+0000
How the Cinder JIT’s function inliner helps us optimize Instagram
This blog focuses on Cinder's JIT compiler and its new function inliner and how it helps us speed up our production application on Instagram.
Hasnain says:
Interesting read on JITs
“It’s time to collect data about the performance characteristics of our workload and figure out whether we can develop good heuristics about what functions to inline. There are papers to read and evaluate.
Take a look at our GitHub repo, and play around with Cinder. We have included a Dockerfile and prebuilt Docker image to make this easier.”
Posted on 2022-05-07T11:09:47+0000
Where Do Space, Time and Gravity Come From? | Quanta Magazine
Einstein’s description of curved space-time doesn’t easily mesh with a universe made up of quantum wavefunctions. Theoretical physicist Sean Carroll discusses the quest for quantum gravity with host Steven Strogatz.
Hasnain says:
Absolutely engrossing podcast transcript which discusses emergent theories on the origin of space time and some recent research in quantum gravity. Sean Carroll is great as always.
I loved the ending which touched a bit on the philosophy of science:
“Well, I do think that and, you know, I think that there’s a school of thought that says that scientists should not talk about their results until they’re completely established and refereed and everyone agrees they’re right. And not only do I think that that’s implausible, because even results that are refereed and published could be wrong, I think it’s very antithetical to the spirit of how science is, you know, and I want to emphasize that science is not just a set of results that are handed down from on high, it’s a process. We could be wrong. We’re making suppositions and hypotheses and guesses, and we’re going to figure out whether or not they work. And that’s not a bug, it’s a feature. That’s, that’s how science works. So I’m very willing to talk about tentative things as long as I try to emphasize that they are tentative things.”
Posted on 2022-05-07T11:02:17+0000
Starbucks Broke Law By Firing And Threatening Pro-Union Workers, Labor Board Alleges
An official with the National Labor Relations Board filed a wide-ranging complaint accusing the coffee chain of violating workers’ rights.
Hasnain says:
Starbucks’ union busting campaign has really been something else. I’m glad the labor board is finally doing it’s job.
“The complaint filed Friday was unusually wide-ranging, alleging a pattern of intimidation and retaliation at several stores in New York. It also implicated CEO Howard Schultz, alleging he violated the law last November by promising “an increase in benefits” if they didn’t unionize.”
Posted on 2022-05-07T04:16:41+0000
The Institutionalist's Dilemma
On trusting the process after it's openly failed
Hasnain says:
“The legitimacy crisis is that our institutions are illegitimate. For my entire adult life, beginning with Bush v. Gore, our governing institutions have been avowedly antidemocratic and the left-of-center party has had no answer for that plain fact; no strategy, no plan, except to beg the electorate to give them governing majorities, which they then fail to use to reform the antidemocratic governing institutions. They often have perfectly plausible excuses for why they couldn’t do better. But that commitment to our existing institutions means they can’t credibly claim to have an answer to this moment. “Give us (another) majority and hope Clarence Thomas dies” is a best-case scenario, but not exactly a sales pitch.”
Posted on 2022-05-06T07:52:40+0000
Abbott says Texas could 'resurrect' SCOTUS case requiring states to educate all kids
The comments came after a leaked draft opinion from the U.S. Supreme Court revealed that a majority of justices were considering overturning Roe v. Wade.
Hasnain says:
Harming everyone just because you feel one person doesn’t deserve it…
(Though education is a human right!)
“Abbott raised the possibility of challenging the ruling on education during a discussion about border security, after Pagliarulo asked whether the state could take steps to reduce the "burden" of educating the children of undocumented migrants living in Texas.”
Posted on 2022-05-05T04:15:41+0000