Hasnain says:

“RTO is completely unnecessary. Americans have adapted and found we enjoy working from home. Its benefits are voluminous, especially when compared to being crammed into a tiny open office with dozens of other noisy workers.

Let’s be honest. This is about saving cities. Without commuting office workers, the office buildings go empty, they become worth a fraction of their cost, and retail cannot survive. This erodes the tax base of most cities so much as to create a more-than-serious problem.

That’s all this is about. Your local government officials are pressuring CEOs to get butts in seats and your bosses want to walk around the office feeling like a God again watching their peons slave away in terrible conditions.”

Hasnain says:

Great read, starts off with the Reddit story but goes into VC in general.

“Venture has been incentivized for years to create shambling “growth” companies that can be acquired by big firms that don’t think too much about what they’re buying, or dumped onto the public markets. The problem is that the markets themselves — as rotten as their incentives may be — have shown an intolerance for the lack of basic business acumen that most startups seem to have. An alarming amount of venture capital isn’t being invested to create good or sustainable or reliable or even public-ready companies, but obtuse stores of value that burn cash and lock up talented tech workers looking to vest their stocks.”

Hasnain says:

This graph is really scary.

“Climatologist Maximiliano Herrera, who closely tracks extreme temperatures around the globe, said he didn’t think the rapid warming would come so soon. “Even before El Niño was officially declared, the tropics and the oceans were already experiencing a very fast warming,” Herrera told CNN. “It was expected, yes,” he added. “But not as fast as it has been.””

Hasnain says:

“We are living through the end of the useful internet. The future is informed discussion behind locked doors, in Discords and private fora, with the public-facing web increasingly filled with detritus generated by LLMs, bearing only a stylistic resemblance to useful information. Finding unbiased and independent product reviews, expert tech support, and all manner of helpful advice will now resemble the process by which one now searches for illegal sports streams or pirated journal articles. The decades of real human conversation hosted at places like Reddit will prove useful training material for the mindless bots and deceptive marketers that replace it.”

Hasnain says:

Kept nodding along here. This has definitely been my experience.

“What this means is that if we are to get true mass adoption of tools that can significantly improve security, they will have to be tools that first and foremost solve a ‘gunshot to the chest’ problem for software developers, and then solve a ‘gunshot to the chest’ problem for security teams as a side effect as well. Just reducing friction is not enough.

…

I have had a personal revelation. If we want mass adoption of security technology and to have a truly meaningful impact on the state of software security, we have to stop building security tools and start building developer tools that have security features. “

Hasnain says:

Lots of great advice here.

“Trying to work out how much advice can be generalised is extremely hard. This is compounded by the fact that people who have experience in a lot of different projects often do not have in depth knowledge, or knowledge spanning a really long time period. I know from experience that conclusions I’ve come to after 2 or 3 years on a project are different to after 1 year, and they might change again after 5 or 10 years. So it may be that the most experienced people (judging by breadth) are actually the least qualified to advise others, due to lack of depth – but also the least aware of that!

And then you have the problem that many people with a lot of experience are pretty silent about it, and you have no idea how many they are (because they are not vocal about their existence either!) Further, the most vocal might not be the best qualified to help with your situation. For example, I know from at least 2 data points that it’s entirely possible to run a multi-million dollar business that has a main database containing much less than 100 Mb of data. But I don’t know how common that is, and I suspect you will probably hear a lot more from companies that have a massively different profit-to-data ratio.”

Hasnain says:

“In many cases, Instagram has permitted users to search for terms that its own algorithms know may be associated with illegal material. In such cases, a pop-up screen for users warned that “These results may contain images of child sexual abuse,” and noted that production and consumption of such material causes “extreme harm” to children. The screen offered two options for users: “Get resources” and “See results anyway.”

In response to questions from the Journal, Instagram removed the option for users to view search results for terms likely to produce illegal images. The company declined to say why it had offered the option.”

Hasnain says:

This seems to be peak capitalism / private equity brain gunning for infinite growth. Instant pot had a sustainable business and a great product and now.. this. Sigh

Hasnain says:

“In this war we’re in—the war that physics is fighting hard, and that we aren’t—winning slowly is the same as losing.”

Hasnain says:

“Police raided the Fremont home of then Gizmodo editor Chen, broke down his door when he didn’t answer and then seized external hard drives, four computers, two servers, phones and other items from his home — a raid that the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and other groups argued violated federal and state law.”