Hasnain says:

“The lawyers who made the Venmo transactions were: Patrick Strawbridge, a partner at Consovoy McCarthy who recently successfully argued that affirmative action violated the US constitution; Kate Todd, who served as White House deputy counsel under Donald Trump at the time of the payment and is now a managing party of Ellis George Cipollone’s law office; Elbert Lin, the former solicitor general of West Virginia who played a key role in a supreme court case that limited the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate greenhouse gas emissions; and Brian Schmalzbach, a partner at McGuire Woods who has argued multiple cases before the supreme court.”

Hasnain says:

“One scientist familiar with the situation expressed a sense of frustration, saying that there is no way to counter the conspiracy theory suggesting they were part of an effort to censor conservative voices. They point out that researchers ran their studies openly and in full view of the public, and question why the judiciary committee is conducting its investigation behind closed doors, instead of allowing scientists to testify publicly about their work and their findings.

“I don’t think they want public testimony, because they don’t want those optics,” says the scientist, who requested anonymity so they could speak freely. “It’s political retaliation,” they say, and there is little that the individual researchers who are being targeted can do to fight back.”

Hasnain says:

“He spent the next two years bouncing around — switching teams, watching project leaders get promoted despite, he said, producing nothing of substance, and generally spinning his wheels. Graham was paid more than $300,000 a year but had little work to show for it. Feeling adrift with nothing to do, he gradually disengaged from his job and was eventually put on Amazon's formal performance-management plan.

Facing the threat of firing, Graham was finally put on a project to use machine learning to improve Amazon's music recommendations, which he described as "the first really interesting thing I worked on." He was happy to feel like a valuable member of the team, but Graham's manager told him something stunning: The finished project, which Graham worked on for more than a month, wouldn't see the light of day. It was simply an exercise to satisfy the terms of his performance plan and string out his employment, he was told. Graham left Amazon soon after.”

Hasnain says:

“The California Supreme Court just ruled against Kuciemba on the basis that a victory, while, in the court's words, "morally" the right thing to do, would create "dire financial consequences for employers" and cause a "dramatic expansion of liability" to stop the spread of covid.

There’s a few stunning details to note in this case. First, the court agreed that there is no doubt the company had ignored the San Francisco health ordinance. In other words, they accepted the company had broken the law. And then concluded “yeah, but, capitalism.””

Hasnain says:

“But, since the first step to fixing any problem is being able to clearly identify it, I'm gratified to hear more people recognizing the social and cultural factors that are shaping the otherwise-inexplicable choices of some of the most powerful people in the business world. Now here's hoping that those outside the bubble can gather together and organize an effective counter-response to the increasing dangers and harms posed by the radicalization of the loudest voices in tech.”

Hasnain says:

"Very little research, by contrast, is currently being pursued on lossless strategies, where transmissions are made smaller, but no substance is sacrificed. The reason? Lossless approaches are already remarkably efficient. They power everything from the PNG image standard to the ubiquitous software utility PKZip. And it’s all because of a graduate student who was simply looking for a way out of a tough final exam.

Seventy years ago, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor named Robert Fano offered the students in his information theory class a choice: Take a traditional final exam, or improve a leading algorithm for data compression. Fano may or may not have informed his students that he was an author of that existing algorithm, or that he’d been hunting for an improvement for years"

Hasnain says:

Great reflections on a software project and its evolution. Interesting even if you're not into Rust.

"Maybe you've nodded your head about one or two of the things above and think they're good ideas -- "hey, maybe we should have had a BDFL!" -- though more likely you think they're terrible. But the point of this post isn't just to lob a bunch of suggestions about direction at the current project, or grind a bunch of long-dull axes, or even to make myself look bad in public.

The point is to indicate thematic divergence. The priorities I had while working on the language are broadly not the revealed priorities of the community that's developed around the language in the years since, or even that were being-revealed in the years during. I would have traded performance and expressivity away for simplicity -- both end-user cognitive load and implementation simplicity in the compiler -- and by doing so I would have taken the language in a direction broadly opposed to where a lot of people wanted it to go."

Hasnain says:

Reminds me of various corporate incentive structures.

"But! Grenada could also do the math. They quickly worked out that an own goal of their own would lose them the match (2-3) but let them go into the finals on goal difference. And, just as quickly, Barbados realised that they couldn’t let that happen – so they had to defend not only their own goal, but their opponents’ goal too!

For the final five minutes of regular time, fans were treated to a truly bizarre sight. Grenada was trying to score a goal in both directions: if they won or lost by one point, they would have the greater victory. And to stop them, Barbados was defending both goals at the same time – blocking both attempts at their goal, but also attempts by Grenada to score an own goal."

Hasnain says:

Need to try this place ASAP.

"The latest trendsetter? West Berkeley’s Afghan Burrito, whose namesake specialty comes generously stuffed with kebab-inspired chicken or steak, rice, beans and — crucially — a signature “Golden Sauce” so top-secret that co-owners Khalid Popal and Hani Kharufeh are reluctant to tell me any of its ingredients. (“There’s water,” Kharufeh conceded the third time I asked the question.)"

Hasnain says:

Finally made my way through this, and oof. One quick takeaway was definitely around how the memes poking fun at crypto bros who've now become AI bros means AI has hit it mainstream and uh...

"These aren’t the only misleading stories Mostaque, 40, has told to maneuver himself to the forefront of what some are calling the greatest technological sea change since the internet — despite having no formal experience in the field of artificial intelligence. Interviews with 13 current and former employees and more than two dozen investors, collaborators and former colleagues, as well as pitch decks and internal documents, suggest his recent success has been bolstered by exaggeration and dubious claims."

...

"Following a string of abandoned startups (including a crypto project centered on a digitized Quran), Mostaque founded Stability in 2019 as an AI-powered data hub that global agencies would use to make decisions about Covid-19. "