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."

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking for future re-reading

"This has an important implication for how we write our game: Everything needs to be perfectly deterministic. Fortunately, rust and wasm makes this easy for us, and the rewards for doing so are big:

No state synchronization aside from input ⇒ very low bandwidth
We can write the entire game in simple "forward" systems. No need to handle de-synced inputs. It's all done automatically for us by rolling back and re-simulating."

Hasnain says:

"The kicker is that across the industry, the perception of this Google-originating process isn’t necessarily any better than that of what it sought to replace. At a great cost, we merely traded the accusations of manager-level favoritism for grander conspiracy theories — sinister corporate agendas divined from the garbled words of secretive, shapeless committees.

The promise of a more egalitarian performance management process is a part of the mythos of Big Tech; but it’s also a fascinating study of painting oneself into a corner, unable to walk back."

Hasnain says:

I still need to try Fikscue!

"At their exceedingly popular restaurant Fikscue in Alameda, owners Fik and Reka Saleh offer a unique cuisine of their own making: Central Texas-style barbecue, like smoked beef back ribs and brisket, along with Indonesian curries, soups and fried rice. The Salehs didn’t initially offer halal meats during their early days as a pop-up, but said they made the change to be more inclusive. Their meat supplier Creekstone Farms is halal certified, and the restaurant doesn’t offer pork products. “So many people were very excited when we opened because there were no Texas-style barbecue restaurants they could try,” Reka said.

Seeing other nontraditional halal restaurants was also a factor: Reka noticed they did exist, but were fairly spread out. When she wanted to try something new with her whole family, which includes some members who observe Muslim dietary law, most online searches just brought them back to familiar Middle Eastern restaurants. “If we all wanted to have Chinese food or Thai we would have to drive really far,” she said. Reka is happy to see more options have become available, though Old Mandarin Islamic in the Sunset District of San Francisco is still a go-to."

Hasnain says:

“Conviction does not exist to the American. To be willing to die in a selfless act for what they believe in only exists for those outside America's sphere of influence. Many will recall reporting on those who self-immolated in protest in Iran and in Russia for instance where this sort of approach, unwilling to engage with the root of its cause, would not even be entertained, let alone written and published with sincerity. The Arab Spring began with a self-immolation. The self-immolation of Buddhist monks in protest of South Vietnam’s persecution became defining images of the war and its corruption. Within America’s walls however, there is a belief, unspoken and ingrained from birth, that democracy allows for everyone’s voices to be heard and that its representatives are inherently inclined to respond to the people and their widespread wishes.

Desperation at inaction or complicity in terror and atrocity need not apply. Everyone incensed by their government to such an extent must simply have something wrong with them. To be able to go about one’s day knowing that children are screaming from the hunger that is eating their insides and that pregnant women are eating bread made from animal feed, and that the United States is supporting Israel’s creation of this famine, is apparently the real sign of well-adjustment.”