Hasnain says:

“To expand on the above successes toward these next generation capabilities, the community of practitioners and researchers working in this topic would benefit from common benchmarks to help move the field towards practical engineering tasks. So far, benchmarks have been focused mostly around code generation (e.g., HumanEval). In an enterprise setting, however, benchmarks for a wider range of tasks could be particularly valuable, e.g., code migrations and production debugging. Some benchmarks, such as one for bug resolution (e.g., SWEBench), and prototypes targeting those benchmarks (e.g., from Cognition AI) have been published. We encourage the community to come together to suggest more benchmarks to span a wider range of software engineering tasks.”

Hasnain says:

“The US-based famine early warning system network (Fews Net) said it was “possible, if not likely” that famine began in northern Gaza in April. Two UN organisations said more than 1 million people were “expected to face death and starvation” by mid-July.”

Hasnain says:

“After a few decades of programming, I've learned that sooner or later, there will be errors in your data. Either it's a clerical error, or the end-user mistyped, or there was a data conversion error when importing from an external system. Or even data conversion errors within the same system, as it goes through upgrades and migrations.

Your system should be designed to allow corrections to data. This includes corrections of external keys, such as chassis numbers, government IDs, etc. This means that you can't use such keys as database keys in your own system.”

Hasnain says:

“As a business owner, there’s nothing quite like the joy and misery of a full store. Joy, because its an indication of a successful business. Misery, because a larger store would have been able to serve more customers. The queue out the door is turning people away, and with those people go their business. Opening a second location could take months, as could adding space. The opportunity is slipping away.

A smart business needs to be correctly scaled. A hundred thousand square feet is too much for a taco truck. All that space is expensive, and distracting. Fifty square feet is too few for a supermarket. Folks can barely get into the door. A pedestrian bridge and a train bridge are built differently. Scale matters, both up and down.

This isn’t a hard idea. It’s right at the soul of what engineering aims to achieve as a field. The smartest thing that new engineers can do is focus on the needs of their businesses. Both now and in the future. Learn what drives the costs and scalability needs of your business. Know how it makes money. Understand the future projections, and the risks that come with them. Ignore the memes and strong opinions.”

Hasnain says:

Wonder if Satya will cut his own pay now

“But given the sheer amount of data that Recall scrapes, the minimal safeguards Microsoft has put in place to protect that database once a malicious user has access to your PC, and the fact that many PC users never touch the default settings, the risks to user data seem far higher than the potential benefits of this feature.

Microsoft has struggled with security and privacy in its products. Not even a month ago, CEO Satya Nadella pledged to make security the most important thing at the company, following multiple high-profile data breaches and poorly handled information disclosures. Executive pay is being tied in part to security; rank and file employees are being told to “do security,” even when “faced with the tradeoff between security and another priority,” Nadella said. To launch Recall with such obviously exploitable security holes flies in the face of that directive.”

Hasnain says:

Worth a read.

“The blame, I eventually realized, also belongs to people we might call “good liberals.”

By 1980, baby boomers were in their first decade of homeownership in places such as Silicon Valley and the New York City suburbs of Westchester County. They rapidly became NIMBYs, vehemently opposing affordable housing in their neighborhoods. Many were Clinton Democrats. They went on to plant “Black Lives Matter” signs in their lawns. The message was hollow: We support you; just don’t live near us.

Boomers, especially if they were white, got to buy houses, and then they zoned everyone else out. They watched their lawns and home equity grow. I was one of them.”

Hasnain says:

"Muybridge’s accomplishment was reported widely throughout the world, and many began to hail Muybridge as a photographic wizard. When it began to appear that Muybridge was stealing all the limelight, Stanford tried to discredit him. In the book Horse in Motion: as Shown by Instantaneous Photography, written by Stanford’s friend and horseman J. D. B. Stillman, Muybridge was mentioned merely as a Stanford employee in a technical appendix. Subsequently, the Britain's Royal Society of Arts, which earlier had offered to finance further photographic studies by Muybridge of animal movement, withdrew the funding. Muybridge ended up suing Stanford, accusing him of wrecking his reputation. But the lawsuit was thrown out of court."

Hasnain says:

I think the author has drunk the AI kool-aid a bit too much, but there's some interesting insights in here.

"Text is becoming something new, that’s what I mean.

We’re inventing the camera and Photoshop simultaneously, and all their cultural repurcussions, and to begin with this means new apps with new user interfaces, and where it goes after that I have no idea."

Hasnain says:

Looks like NYU also took their site down. Sigh..

“In November, human rights lawyer Rabea Eghbariah was set to be the first Palestinian published in the Harvard Law Review. Then his essay was killed.
Today, he became the first in the Columbia Law Review.
Then the Board of Directors took the whole site down.”

Hasnain says:

“We cannot build movements for solidarity and abundance if we do not fight against the carceral state—it will always stand against us. In tandem with the Israel Defense Forces, police crush dissent and uphold the racial capitalist system. If we do not escalate against them, we will not survive. To flourish and to build a world beyond the nationalist death drive requires us to reject the illusion that cops and prisons provide safety or serve the public, to stop their ever-growing plunder of public resources—and to abolish the police entirely.”