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."

Hasnain says:

This hit home a lot today. Oof.

“Watch a four-year-old finger-paint. They don't create for Instagram likes or gallery walls or market validation. They create for the pure joy of watching colors bleed into each other, for the satisfying squish of paint between fingers, for the magic of making something exist that didn't exist before. They possess the freedom to create without the burden of expectation.
Learning anything as an adult means reclaiming this beginner's privilege. It means giving yourself permission to be bad at something, to create things that serve no purpose other than your own discovery and delight. The beginner's mind understands that mastery emerges from play, that excellence grows from experimentation, that the path to creating something great runs directly through creating many things that aren't great at all.”

Hasnain says:

"At the turn of the 14th century, when Latin was already dead except as a language of scholars and priests, a Tuscan writer called Dante Alighieri observed that many words were almost identical across the Romance languages. He went on to make the frankly heretical suggestion that this was because the various flavours of Romance were all descended from Latin. At the time, in Europe, there was no concept of language evolution. The Bible held that linguistic diversity and its corollary, mutual bewilderment, was the punishment visited on humanity by God for the impertinent construction of the Tower of Babel—and medieval Europeans took the Bible literally."

Hasnain says:

“For more than a year now we’ve been aware that the BBC’s news output is out of step with reality. Audiences are being asked not to believe their own eyes and ears.

Anyone with a phone has seen the footage coming out of Gaza and the West Bank yet BBC News has tied itself in knots with notions of ‘complexity’.

Why have we taken a clear position on Ukraine and Russia when we fail to confidently assert facts when it comes to the Palestinian people? Robbie Gibb is at least part of the answer.

We raised these concerns so many times and we have not been listened to. We are speaking out because we must serve audiences better.”