Hasnain says:

“Still, Ben-Zvi planned to use his 2018 sabbatical visit to the IAS for research squarely on the geometric side of the Langlands program. His plan was disrupted when he went to listen to a talk by Venkatesh.

“My son and Akshay’s daughter were playmates, and we were friends socially, and I thought I should go to some of the talks Akshay gave at the beginning of the semester,” Ben-Zvi said.”

Hasnain says:

Yay open source.

“Looking back at what got us to this point, it seems that almost every single thing we did in running this contest so far has been load-bearing. We’re not quite sure what to make of this! Perhaps that progress is more fragile and success is more contingent than it often seems in retrospect.”

Hasnain says:

I hate this hostile design. I hit this myself in a webapp the other day where I couldn’t scroll right on a wide table because chrome doesn’t show the scroll bar unless you’re already scrolling… until someone taught me shift + scroll wheel scrolls right on a Mac. Just give me a scroll bar!

““The simple fact that these skinny scroll bars exist are evidence that designers do not sit with non technical users to conduct usability testing. Because if they did that they would immediately discover the problem.

People with dexterity and hand control challenges have a difficult time with these skinny scroll bars.

People with eye sight challenges suffer with these skinny scroll bars.””

Hasnain says:

“But that reality of the job can also colour the way veterinarians view human lives – including their own – and for those already experiencing suicidal ideation, it can provide a simple justification: death is preferable to suffering. In a 2021 survey by pharmaceutical company Merck, 12.5% of the veterinarians surveyed said they were "suffering". And nearly half of the respondents were not receiving mental health care.

"There's an idea that veterinarians work on the belief that it's right to euthanise a hopeless case," says Volk, "and we are seeing ourselves, emotionally, as hopeless cases."

Death is a routine and repeated part of the job, and while it's never easy to end a life, Volk adds that it is easy to start seeing it as an option to alleviate their own distress.”

Hasnain says:

“The IRS says Microsoft owes an additional $28.9 billion in tax for 2004 to 2013, plus penalties and interest. “

Hasnain says:

“and eventually peaked just above 201 million requests per second. This was nearly 3x bigger than our previous biggest attack on record.

Concerning is the fact that the attacker was able to generate such an attack with a botnet of merely 20,000 machines. There are botnets today that are made up of hundreds of thousands or millions of machines. Given that the entire web typically sees only between 1–3 billion requests per second, it's not inconceivable that using this method could focus an entire web’s worth of requests on a small number of targets.”

Hasnain says:

I felt this in my bones (the whole piece, not just the quote - though the quote made me chuckle). Great piece as always from Julia on how to learn and share information and how we can make tech simpler.

“There's this "today I learned" person who's into sharing cool new tools they learned about, a bug that they ran into, or a great new-to-them library feature.

There's the person who has read the entire Internet and has 700 tabs open. If you want to know where to find something, there's a good chance they already have it open in their browser.”

Hasnain says:

Great post. Revised some virtual memory knowledge, learnt a lot more about kernel internals and performance optimizations.

“In our case, this concludes our optimization journey for our little synthetic benchmark, from 3.5GiB/s to 65GiB/s.”

Hasnain says:

Been following the news over the last day and it’s so depressing. Such a complex situation and so hard to put my feelings and opinions into just a few words. I hope there is an end to the senseless suffering and violence inflicted upon innocent civilians. Right now it doesn’t sound like that is going to happen anytime soon :(

“The United States will move an aircraft carrier strike group to the eastern Mediterranean Sea while providing munitions and other equipment to help Israel in its newly declared war against Hamas. U.S. officials expect the Israeli government to launch a ground incursion into the densely populated Gaza Strip in the next 24 to 48 hours. Israel has been pounding Gaza with strikes, promising retaliation for an unprecedented attack by the militant group that took Israeli security forces by surprise. The death toll has risen to 700 in Israel and thousands have been injured, according to local media, while Palestinian authorities said at least 413 were killed and about 2,300 injured in Gaza. At least 260 bodies were recovered at the site of a music festival near the Gaza border in southern Israel, which was attacked by Hamas on Saturday, Israeli media reported. Fears of a regional spillover grew after Lebanese militant group Hezbollah said it attacked Israeli targets near the border “in solidarity” with Hamas and Israel said it struck back.”

Hasnain says:

Found myself nodding and chuckling.

“From the Tao of Programming:

A novice asked the Master: "In the East, there is a great tree-structure that men call 'Corporate Headquarters'. It is bloated out of shape with vice presidents and accountants. It issues a multitude of memos, each saying 'Go Hence!' or 'Go Hither!' and nobody knows what is meant. Every year new names are put onto the branches, but all to no avail. How can such an unnatural entity exist?"

The Master replied: "You perceive this immense structure and are disturbed that it has no rational purpose. Can you not take amusement from its endless gyrations? Do you not enjoy the untroubled ease of programming beneath its sheltering branches? Why are you bothered by its uselessness?"”