Hasnain says:

“Seriously, though, there’s one common theme to everything in this article: test your assumptions.

I assumed that exponential growth should apply to the witchcraft population in the Kat books. So I tested that assumption with models, and concluded that this applies… in certain conditions
Unckless’s formulas assumed that the Selection Coefficient is low. Because I violated the assumption, I made a simulation to find how the formula would fail.
I assumed that indexes in SQL databases magically speeds things up. I tested it out, and it slowed things down instead.
I assumed that a genealogy database is a good way to track a person’s descendants. After I analyzed the data, it became clear that it doesn’t. I came up with a new set of assumptions to explain why, but now I’m looking for ways to challenge those new assumptions.
I assume that people want to read about kids’ books, population genetics, and PostgreSQL in the same article. The jury’s still out on this one ;)”

Hasnain says:

“So far, we’ve learned that:

The initial app description is much more important than we thought
Coding is not a straight line, agents can review themselves
LLMs work best when they focus on one problem compared to multiple problems in a single prompt
Verbose logs do miracles
Splitting the codebase into smaller files helps a lot
For a human to be able to fix the code
They must be clearly shown what has been written and the idea behind it
Humans are lazy
It’s hard to get the LLM to think outside the box”

Hasnain says:

“These examples always flow in the same direction. Professor Alvaro Bedoya, the founding director of the Center on Privacy and Technology at the Georgetown University Law Center, wrote “It is a pattern throughout history that surveillance is used against those considered ‘less than’, against the poor man, the person of color, the immigrant, the heretic. It is used to try to stop marginalized people from achieving power.” The same pattern is found in the role of technology in decision systems.

The goal of many automated decision systems is to increase revenues for governments and private companies. When this is applied to health and medicine, the goal is often achieved by denying poor people food or medical care. People often trust computers to be more accurate than humans, in a bias known as automation bias.”

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking for later reference.

“Well, there you have it. A tangible, step-by-step plan to get out of the finicky situation that’s a complex legacy C++ codebase. I have just finished going through that at work on a project, and it’s become much more bearable to work on it now. I have seen coworkers, who previously would not have come within a 10 mile radius of the codebase, now make meaningful contributions. So it feels great.

There are important topics that I wanted to mention but in the end did not, such as the absolute necessity of being able to run the code in a debugger locally, fuzzing, dependency scanning for vulnerabilities, etc. Maybe for the next article!”

Hasnain says:

“The average visitor to Nome today would never guess that muskoxen were ever ghosts on the landscape. The animals adorn guidebooks and artwork at gift shops and draw wildlife viewers and photographers. With their bulky coats, sloping shoulders, short legs, and upturned horns, it’s not hard to picture them roaming alongside saber-toothed cats, wooly mammoths, and other big-bodied beasts of the Pleistocene. But all the muskoxen around Nome today have ancestors that saw the inside of a train station in New Jersey. Their reintroduction to Alaska was the result of a decades-long campaign by early 20th-century settlers and promoters, one that followed a template used many times over before and since: it was a plan for developing the Arctic, drawn up without the consent of Indigenous people.”

Hasnain says:

Lots to ponder here.

“More consequentially, the secular-political religion of the Shoah and the over-identification with Israel since the 1970s has fatally distorted the foreign policy of Israel’s main sponsor, the US. In 1982, shortly before Reagan bluntly ordered Begin to cease his ‘holocaust’ in Lebanon, a young US senator who revered Elie Wiesel as his great teacher met the Israeli prime minister. In Begin’s own stunned account of the meeting, the senator commended the Israeli war effort and boasted that he would have gone further, even if it meant killing women and children. Begin himself was taken aback by the words of the future US president, Joe Biden. ‘No, sir,’ he insisted. ‘According to our values, it is forbidden to hurt women and children, even in war ... This is a yardstick of human civilisation, not to hurt civilians.’”

Hasnain says:

I, uh, what…

“He also moved one girl’s arm and moved her body on the bed, the affidavit says. The girl “remained awake in fear that Mr. Meyden was going to do something” to her friend, according to the affidavit.

The affidavit says Meyden walked out of the room, prompting a girl to text her mother at 1:43 a.m. Sunday: “Mom please pick me up and say I had a family emergency. I don’t feel safe. I might not respond but please come get me (crying emoji), Please. Please pick up. Please. PLEASE!!””

Hasnain says:

“A couple of days before the interview, Benioff texted the same NPR colleague again, asking for intel on my story. Then he called me and demanded to know the title of this piece. During that call, he also mentioned he knew the exact area where I was staying. Unnerved, I asked how he knew, and he said, "It's my job. You have a job and I have a job." During the interview, he brings up more personal details about me and my family.

I leave the meeting disconcerted and still unclear about what exactly is happening with his land in Waimea.”

Hasnain says:

“It’s unlikely Michigan will be where this ends. Several other states yet to vote have an “uncommitted” option on their Democratic ballots, including states like Minnesota, which will vote in next week’s Super Tuesday primaries. You can bet the White House, despite all public pledges to the contrary, will be closely paying attention to them.”

Hasnain says:

"If I had a time machine to go back to 2012 and give myself a few pointers, what would I say?

Lots of little tips, and three big ones. Both boil down to spending a bit more money, to avoid a lot of headaches.

Use managed services for as long as possible. We did ourselves a big disservice by leaving Heroku after only a few months. We should have stayed on it for years - there was so much time wasted managing servers that could have been done for us during critical early days.

Set up a PIT sooner. I should have set up a team of professionals who wanted to work in this space much much earlier. Not in the Heroku days, but once it became untenable as we hit real scale.

Look after yourself just a bit more. For some reason I always found it really hard to prioritise projects that would decrease alerts, simplify oncall, or help me get more sleep. Until suddenly one day I snapped and reallocated a lot of budget to set up the PIT team. Getting decent sleep has many commercial benefits and it’s not selfish to prioritise that over other things the team could work on."