Hasnain says:

"Another low point arrived more than 5,000 miles later when Kato experienced the racism other Africans have faced in Europe.

“The other time I felt like packing it in was in Croatia because I genuinely felt treated as an illegal immigrant. I didn’t feel welcomed or that I belonged in their society.

“The police stopped me at least four times a day. Sometimes, I caught locals taking photos of me and reporting me to the police,” he said.

“This experience, coupled with everything I was processing from my journey in Africa and other personal challenges, made it intensely difficult to keep moving forward.”

Kato wanted his journey to draw attention to the earliest migration of humans from Africa and challenge the racist notion that people should “go back to where they come from”. Viewed as a whole, he said the run had underlined the positive aspects of migration and its potential to “create a more culturally connected and enriched global society”."

Hasnain says:

I liked this migration story a lot (in addition to it just being a Rewrite-it-in-Rust thing). Lots of good tradeoff discussions in addition to gory technical and non-technical details. A few key takeaways for me:

* Motivation really does matter! Even if rust is chosen just because "it's more fun", if that gets you more contributors that's a good thing
* the last 10% is always the last 90%
* incremental migrations are necessary, big-bang rewrites don't work

"The port wasn’t without challenges, and it did not all go entirely as planned. But overall, it went pretty dang well. We’re now left with a codebase that we like a lot more, that has already gained some features that would have been much more annoying to add with C++, with more on the way, and we did it while creating a separate 3.7 release that also included some cool stuff."

Hasnain says:

Thought a lot before sharing this one. On one hand NYT I am glad the NYT is finally reporting truths others have reported and so many know to be evident.

On the other hand they still try to claim it's original reporting, and that this is previously unknown, even though... +972 reported on it months ago (April, IIRC). They can't even claim ignorance - they link to the same piece later on in this one!

a 20:1 ratio of civilian:military deaths being acceptable even for killing a lowly fighter is insane and not what I've seen any respectable modern military do. And there weren't penalties for going over.

On the balance though, given that at least a few more poeple will read this and understand what's going on, I figured I'd share and applaud the NYT reporting this.

"On a few occasions, senior commanders approved strikes on Hamas leaders that they knew would each endanger more than 100 noncombatants — crossing an extraordinary threshold for a contemporary Western military."

Hasnain says:

From the person that brought us Maus. I genuinely do not see how one can hold the horrific facts of the Holocaust in their head, internalize them, say “never again”, and then be okay when they learn what’s going on in Gaza. Disagree on scale however you want, but I’d want to be in opposition even if it gets anywhere near “1% holocaust” and I feel like this is far past that. I take solace and learn from scholars of genocide and the holocaust when they share some of the parallels they’ve seen. I wish the rest of the world will listen (and in particular leadership)

“After the documentary’s premiere, Spiegelman told the sold-out audience in a Q&A session that his next comic will be about Gaza, in collaboration with Joe Sacco. He was wary of providing any details on a project that he thinks will struggle to find a publisher in the United States.

“I’ll finish this thing or die trying. I’ve never had a bigger wrestling match inside my head,” he said. “My superego says, ‘You must do this if you’re going to live with yourself’,” and my id says, ‘Who wants the grief [of] being canceled by everyone on the planet?’””

Hasnain says:

Great read on mental models and thoughts around software engineering

“Do you feel it? Not only do you have to jump all over the article to get the meaning (shallow modules!), but the paragraph in general is difficult to understand. We have just created an unnecessary cognitive load in your head. Do not do this to your colleagues.

We should reduce any cognitive load above and beyond what is intrinsic to the work we do.”

Hasnain says:

178GB -> 5GB is insane

“If you work in a large-ish scale monorepo, and you have CHANGELOG.md or really any file that has a relatively long-ish name (>16 characters) which repeatedly gets updated, you may want to keep your eyes on this path walk stuff.”

Hasnain says:

“
It took less than 3 months of research to discover 6 separate bugs in the adsprpc driver, two of which (CVE-2024-49848 and CVE-2024-21455) were not fixed by Qualcomm under the industry standard 90-day deadline. Furthermore, at the time of writing, CVE-2024-49848 remains unfixed 145 days after it was reported. Past research has shown that chipset drivers for Android are a promising target for attackers, and this ITW exploit represents a meaningful real-world example of the negative ramifications that the current third-party vendor driver security posture poses to end-users. A system’s cybersecurity is only as strong as its weakest link, and chipset/GPU drivers represent one of the weakest links for privilege separation on Android in 2024. Improving both the consistency and quality of code and the efficiency of the third-party vendor driver patch dissemination process are crucial next steps in order to increase the difficulty of privilege escalation on Android devices.”

Hasnain says:

“AI isn't making our software dramatically better because software quality was (perhaps) never primarily limited by coding speed. The hard parts of software development – understanding requirements, designing maintainable systems, handling edge cases, ensuring security and performance – still require human judgment.

What AI does do is let us iterate and experiment faster, potentially leading to better solutions through more rapid exploration. But only if we maintain our engineering discipline and use AI as a tool, not a replacement for good software practices. Remember: The goal isn't to write more code faster. It's to build better software. Used wisely, AI can help us do that. But it's still up to us to know what "better" means and how to achieve it.”

Hasnain says:

Came across this great post on how AI will impact the industry and how people should react - and went down the rabbit hole. Great insights from the author as always.

“The key is to remain pragmatic and focused on delivering value. Learn to use AI tools where they make sense, but don't rely on them as a crutch. Continue developing your fundamental skills and domain expertise. And most importantly, remember that our field has always been about continuous learning and adaptation – this is just the latest chapter in that ongoing story.

The future belongs not to those who can generate the most code, but to those who can best understand and solve real-world problems while leveraging all available tools – including AI – appropriately.”

Hasnain says:

I don’t get this article. I’ve seen a lot of bad takes on what happened but this seems extra weird for some reason, and I’m hoping someone can explain. Author rightly identifies the source of frustration but then side steps what should be done to address the root cause and just talks about private security.

And I just don’t get the Israel link. Like, sure, I “get” it but there’s like so many interpretations. Is he saying CEOs are bad like Israel is? Or that both are “unfairly” maligned?

“While much remains to be learned about the alleged killer Mangione, his written manifesto suggests that he has a strong anti-corporate bias. This view is consistent with the framing of society by many in Gen Z, of which Mangione is a part, that life is a battle between oppressors and the oppressed. We saw that emerge after the Oct. 7 attacks on Israel by Hamas, with many Gen Zers framing Israel as the oppressor and the Palestinians as the oppressed. For them, giant corporations are the enemy that is harming them by only looking out for their profits, not their customers.”