Hasnain says:

“Japan, of course, was not alone in these views. But even in the 1980s the average man spent fewer than 40 minutes interacting with their children on the average workday – and that was often during a family meal. According to one observational study, some men could not even make tea or locate their own clothes without their wife’s assistance. When the father did interact with his children, he was often remote and commanded respect, even fear – a fact reflected in the common saying “jishin, kaminari, kaji, oyaji” – “earthquake, thunder, fire and father”.”

Hasnain says:

“In Singapore, Cecilia Tortajada and other experts are working on how to protect the city-state from rising waters in the years to come. The local Building and Construction Authority (BCA) recently commissioned a study to inform the national framework for coastal protection and new measures are introduced yearly.
But everyone is keeping an eye on Tokyo, trying to gauge how well it weathers the typhoons and summer downpours testing its shields.
“If a country as prepared as Japan is suffering, and a city like Tokyo suffers, we should all be paying attention,” sighs Tortajada.”

Hasnain says:

“Yogev agrees. “Once you’ve found a hole, then you know the boat is leaking and it’s going to sink soon,” he said. “I don’t think their attack was very limited — I believe it could be easily used to actually steal money.”
Even if that outcome doesn’t come to pass, the attack has shaken cryptographers’ confidence in the Fiat-Shamir protocol, and the random oracle model more generally. “Maybe it’s time to rethink and revise many other things we think we’ve proven,” Canetti said. When you take a leap of faith, you never know where you’re going to land.”

Hasnain says:

“Then we started negotiating. I opened my laptop; we started going slide by slide through my talk, removing bits every time. One of the main concerns for them was one of the slides I had indicated no AI for war crimes, and it had logos of Microsoft, Amazon, Google Cloud, Palantir, and Cisco; they wanted me to remove that. I had removed a lot of things already. I removed content that mentioned Gaza, Palestine, Israel. I edited “genocide” to “war crimes.” I had removed a slide that connected Meta with illegal data torrenting practices. For me, that was the limit. So, they went and discussed it and came back and said if I don’t remove that one image, or add hundreds of other logos on that slide so that it doesn’t incriminate those particular companies that were identified, I couldn’t give the talk. “

Hasnain says:

“Klartag had broken open a central problem in the world of lattices and sphere packing after just a few months of study and a few weeks of proof writing. “It feels almost unfair,” he said. But that’s often how mathematics works: Sometimes all a sticky problem needs is a few fresh ideas, and venturing outside one’s immediate field can be rewarding. Klartag’s familiarity with convex geometry, usually a separate area of study, turned out to be just what the problem required. “This idea was at the top of my mind because of my work,” he said. “It was obvious to me that this was something I could try.””

Hasnain says:

“If there’s a glimmer of hope in all this rage-inducing misery, it can be found in the growing number of people around the world who refuse to be intimidated into silence. We may have seen a small example of that courage in New York City recently, and I’m not talking only about Zohran Mamdani winning the Democratic party nomination for mayor. That same day, two of Brooklyn’s progressive politicians, Alexa Avilés and Shahana Hanif, were running for renomination. Both supported Palestine, both were relentlessly attacked for their positions on Gaza, and both refused to change their views. Pro-Israel donors poured money into their opponents’ campaigns. Yet both handily won their races.

Multiple factors go into winning any political campaign, but any expressed support for Palestine used to be a death knell. Could it be that we’re on the cusp of change? Maybe Palestinian freedom is no longer a liability but is now a real winning position in politics?

Palestine is perhaps the clearest expression today, as Haddad told me, of how “power feels threatened by the truth.” She continued: “If they are so afraid of a student with a sign or a chalked message or a demand for justice, then we are stronger than they want us to believe.” She better be right. For all our sakes.”

Hasnain says:

"What i have learnt is that you don’t need to work the room or become someone you’re not. Most of the time, it’s enough to show up with confidence, listen well, and leave one real moment behind. That’s the part people remember anyway."

Hasnain says:

And here we are, going out and about our day, while this is happening in our name

“This sentiment echoes what Pep Guardiola, manager of the Manchester City football club, said last month: that when he looks at the children of Gaza, he is afraid that his children will be next in line.
"Maybe we think that we see the boys and girls of 4 years old being killed [in Gaza] by the bomb or being killed at the hospital because it's not a hospital anymore. It's not our business," Guardiola said, upon receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Manchester. "But be careful. The next one will be ours. The next 4- or 5-year-old kids will be ours. Sorry, but I see my kids when I wake up every morning since the nightmare started with the infants in Gaza. And I'm so scared."
For his part, Filiu says during our conversation, he saw in Gaza a place where "international law, basic human rights, the Geneva Convention, the attitude toward human rights – all are being tossed aside without hesitation and being supplanted by raw, random and very violent force."
The "Gazan monster," he warns, will not be contained within fences but will spill out across the globe. "It is threatening the whole world in a very basic and very immediate way."”

Hasnain says:

"It begins to feel like a broad celebration of mediocrity. Finally, society says, with a huge sigh of relief. I don’t have to write a letter to my granddaughter. I don’t have to write a three-line fetch call. I don’t have to know anything, care about what I’m doing, or even have an opinion.

I can just substitute some Content™. I can just ask the computer for Whatever

But I like programming. I like writing. I like making things and then being able to sit back and look at them and think, holy fuck, I made that. There is no joy for me in typing a vague description into a computer and refreshing my way through a parade of Whatever until something is good enough.

The most obnoxious people like to talk about how Stable Diffusion is “democratizing art” and that is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. There is no fucking King of Art decreeing who is allowed to draw and who isn’t. You could do it. You could do it right now. But it’s hard, so you’d rather spend that time crying on Twitter about how unfair it is that learning a skill takes work and thank god the computer can give you all of the admiration with none of the effort now."

Hasnain says:

"This shouldn’t make us defensive or self-conscious, but it does. I, like many others, want to be great. I want to feel commitment and camaraderie and work hard and be my best and impact top and bottom lines. But I don’t want to also feel tormented or be tortured into greatness or look in the mirror and wonder why I suck. But what does that say about me?

I want more role models like Kevin Kelly. People that proudly whistle while they work. Who have boundless energy and healthy gums. Whose enthusiasm is contagious. Who are well-adjusted and emotionally regulated. Who have solid relationships and happy families. Who are hungry and impactful and care deeply, without being jerks. And I want more people to talk about these qualities with respect and reverence.

I have never been a billionaire or built a unicorn, so I can’t speak with any conviction about what it requires. I won’t be eulogized anywhere important and no one 300 years from now will talk about what great things I did. But I want to live in a world where you can have an impact and be happy. Maybe that’s naive, but I’m sticking to it."