Hasnain says:

“He and others in the harmonic analysis community will also have to reckon with a changed landscape. In harmonic analysis, there’s a constellation of questions about how the energy of a wave concentrates. If a conjecture known as Stein’s conjecture were true, it would cement connections between some of the most important questions in that broader constellation. But Cairo’s work shows that Stein’s conjecture is false. It eliminates one of the most promising links mathematicians had hoped to establish between different parts of harmonic analysis.
The math world is also adjusting to the fact of Cairo herself. After completing the proof, she decided to apply straight to graduate school, skipping college (and a high school diploma) altogether. As she saw it, she was already living the life of a graduate student. Cairo applied to 10 graduate programs. Six rejected her because she didn’t have a college degree. Two admitted her, but then higher-ups in those universities’ administrations overrode those decisions.
Only the University of Maryland and Johns Hopkins University were willing to welcome her straight into a doctoral program. She’ll start at Maryland in the fall. When she finishes, it will be her first degree.”

Hasnain says:

“A.I. companions should be available to those who need them most. Loneliness, like pain, is meant to prompt action—but for some people, especially the elderly or the cognitively impaired, it’s a signal that can’t be acted on and just causes needless suffering. For these people, offering comfort is simply humane.
As for the rest of us? I’m not a catastrophist. Nobody is going to be forced into an A.I. friendship or romance; plenty of people will abstain. Even in a world brimming with easy distractions—TikTok, Pornhub, Candy Crush, Sudoku—people still manage to meet for drinks, work out at the gym, go on dates, muddle through real life. And those who do turn to A.I. companions can tinker with the settings, asking for less flattery, more pushback, even the occasional note of tough love.
But I do worry that many will find the prospect of a world without loneliness irresistible—and that something essential could be lost, especially for the young. When we numb ourselves to loneliness, we give up the hard work of making ourselves understood, of striving for true connection, of forging relationships built on mutual effort. In muting the signal, we risk losing part of what makes us human”

Hasnain says:

As a parent to a 3.5yo (or just a human), there are things you read that sometimes just fuck you up. I had read the preview first and was dreading reading it. But we must bear witness.

“The first time my three-and-a-half-year-old son, Rafik, asked me “Are we going to die today?” was in December of 2023, roughly two months after the war began. We were lying in a recovery bed, still shaking from the blast that had buried us beneath the concrete roof of our house, in Gaza City. My entire family had passed out before we were found bleeding. Rafik was curled up on the ground, close enough that I could see him, but too far for me to reach out and hold him. After we were pulled from the rubble, I remember thinking, This is the moment that rewires a child forever. I’ve been watching that shift occur in front of me ever since.

Nour Jarada, a mental-health manager in Gaza, sees this rewiring on a daily basis. She works inside of medical tents that have no sound insulation, each one containing folding beds that separate trauma from trauma. The patients arrive on foot—some having walked for miles, many led in by family members who didn’t know what else to do. “Some don’t speak,” she told me. “They stare, sometimes scream. Most cry for hours, unblinkingly.” Children have asked Jarada if they could go back to school, as if normal were still hiding somewhere nearby.”

Hasnain says:

“To end starvation in Gaza, Israel must allow humanitarian-aid professionals to do their job. It must facilitate the movement of U.N. aid convoys without onerous checks and delays. It must help establish the necessary monitoring measures to ensure aid reaches those who need it most. It must assist Gaza’s hospitals in setting up intensive care units for the many malnourished children at death’s door.

Israel and the international community have a window of opportunity to deliver lifesaving aid to millions of people. We cannot wait until it’s time to count the graves of the children who have perished, declare it a famine — or indeed, a genocide — and say, simply, “Never again.””

Hasnain says:

Like.. no words at this point.

“These physicians were being fed a small amount of food once a day. Three weeks ago, that stopped. They are now completely on their own. There have been physicians and nurses who have simply passed out in the middle of the emergency department; there are people passing out during surgery. This is a completely new phenomenon in the last three weeks. When we were there, every person on our team lost between 12 and 15 pounds.
All of these physicians and nurses and environmental services people, they would work 16-18 hours, then they would walk home, sometimes an hour or an hour and a half, to get into their small tent with their family, then get up at 5 or 6 in the morning and come back and do it again. It’s just extraordinary.”

Hasnain says:

If only more of the US system focused on rehabilitation and not just punishment for the sake of - especially for non violent offense

“The United States criminal justice system is plagued by recidivism, or former prisoners’ return to custody after they have been released. Repeat offending creates a financial burden on the state and its taxpayers. But Commissioner Liberty has the data to show it’s well worth the effort and investment to expand access to education and addiction treatment.
“It’s very short-sighted, ridiculous to lock them up and release them more traumatized than when they arrived, right?” he said. “Many states have 60% return to custody rates. In Maine, we hover between 21% to 23% for males; women return at a rate of 9%. And if you attend college classes in Maine, you come back at a rate of 0.05% — you don’t come back at all.””

Hasnain says:

“Gee secured the team a room in the basement of the Hausdorff Research Institute, where they were unlikely to be disturbed by itinerant mathematicians. There, they spent an entire week working on Pan’s theorem, one 12-hour day after the next, only coming up to ground level occasionally for caffeine. “After a coffee, we would always joke that we had to go back to the mine,” Pilloni said.
The grind paid off. “There were many twists to come later,” Calegari said, “but at the end of that week I thought we more or less had it.”
It took another year and a half to turn Calegari’s conviction into a 230-page proof, which they posted online in February (opens a new tab). Putting all the pieces together, they’d proved that any ordinary abelian surface has an associated modular form.”

Hasnain says:

“With their new result, Khurana and Tomer have effectively reduced two open problems to one. If researchers complete the proof that quantum computers truly surpass classical ones at a specific task, that will automatically put quantum cryptography on much stronger theoretical footing than practically any kind of classical cryptography.
Alas, you won’t be able to use Khurana and Tomer’s new approach to send secret messages any time soon. Despite recent progress, quantum computing technology is not yet mature enough to put their ideas into practice. Meanwhile, other researchers have devised quantum cryptography methods that could be used sooner (opens a new tab), though more work will be needed to establish that they’re truly secure.”

Hasnain says:

“I don’t believe HUDs are universally better than copilots! But I do believe anyone serious about designing for AI should consider non-copilot form factors that more directly extend the human mind.

So when should we use one or the other? I think it’s quite tricky to answer that, but we can try to use the airplane analogy for some intuition:

When pilots just want the plane to fly straight and level, they fully delegate that task to an autopilot, which is close to a “virtual copilot”. But if the plane just hit a flock of birds and needs to land in the Hudson, the pilot is going to take manual control, and we better hope they have great instruments that help them understand the situation.

In other words: routine predictable work might make sense to delegate to a virtual copilot / assistant. But when you’re shooting for extraordinary outcomes, perhaps the best bet is to equip human experts with new superpowers.”

Hasnain says:

“I'm guessing that part of why AI coding tools are so popular is the slot machine effect. Intermittent rewards, lots of waiting that fractures your attention, and inherent laziness keeping you trying with yet another prompt in hopes that you don’t have to actually turn on your brain after so many hours of being told not to.

The exhilarating power of creation. Just insert a few more cents, and you’ll get another shot at making your dreams a reality.”