The Meta AI App Lets You ‘Discover’ People’s Bizarrely Personal Chats
Launched in April, the Meta AI platform offers a “discover” feed that includes user queries containing medical, legal, and other seemingly sensitive information.
Hasnain says:
This reminds me of Venmo defaulting payment notes to be public. We had some “fun” moments.
“Calli Schroeder, senior counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said in an interview with WIRED that she has seen people “sharing medical information, mental health information, home addresses, even things directly related to pending court cases.””
Posted on 2025-06-12T23:14:35+0000
Biden Administration Liars Need to be Punished
Elite impunity shouldn’t protect those who covered up war crimes.
Hasnain says:
“The American political system has long operated under a mafia-like code of omertà and impunity. Consider all the political figures that suffered no real loss of social status for catastrophic lies about war and peace: Robert McNamara, Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz. Miller can get away with acknowledging that he wasn’t candid because he knows he’ll remain a member in good standing of the political elite.
But there is no reason this system of elite impunity, which has led to so much harm, should remain in place. Ideally, Miller should be tried before a war crimes tribunal. That is not likely to happen: International law is traditionally used only against weak nations, not the governing class of a superpower. But what if ordinary citizens stepped in to say that Miller, and those like him, deserve to be ostracized? What if a progressive running for president in 2028 said they would blacklist from their administration Miller and similar figures (such as former national security adviser Jake Sullivan and former secretary of state Anthony Blinken). Matt Duss of the Center of International Policy, commenting on Miller’s interview, noted, “They all knew. All of them. They misled the public, and the Congress, because Biden wanted to keep sending weapons.” If they all knew, they should all be ostracized.”
Posted on 2025-06-07T11:50:48+0000
Israel is destroying the foundations of a Palestinian state
The Netanyahu government must be held to account over Gaza and the West Bank
Hasnain says:
The FT editorial board is Hamas, clearly.
“It is time to back rhetoric with action. Hamas’s abhorrent behaviour and the threat of Palestinian militancy should not absolve Israel of its own conduct. With US President Donald Trump paying little heed to the humanitarian catastrophe, European states must show Israel that its actions bear consequences. They should ban trade with settlements and sanction extremist settler entities. They should halve offensive weapons sales to Israel and sanction ultranationalists in the government who are fuelling the Gaza and West Bank violence.
Finally, they should lead the way in formally recognising a Palestinian state, before there is nothing left to recognise.
“
University of Michigan using undercover investigators to surveil student Gaza protesters
Revealed: security trailing students on and off campus as video shows investigator faking disability when confronted
Hasnain says:
What a world we live in now.
“Nessel and the FBI raided several protesters’ homes in late April. Several students said they noticed an uptick in the number of people tailing them since raids. In some cases, they have cussed and threatened students who confront them, several organizers who have been followed said. In one instance, someone followed a small group from a student meeting to a bar, and sat down at an adjacent table and began to eavesdrop and record them.
“The way that the university is now responding to student activism with a massive expansion of surveillance, through plain clothes cops, and proliferation of security cameras, is very alarming,” MacKeen-Shapiro said.”
Posted on 2025-06-06T21:08:09+0000
Why DeepSeek is cheap at scale but expensive to run locally
Why is DeepSeek-V3 supposedly fast and cheap to serve at scale, but too slow and expensive to run locally? Why are some AI models slow to respond but fast once…
Hasnain says:
“I’ll confess I struggle to see why this shouldn’t be possible in theory. As far as I can tell the practical barrier is how the attention step is batched: if you want to batch up attention GEMMs, they need to all be the same shape (i.e. the same number of prior tokens in the sequence). So you have to run groups of the same shape at the same time, instead of being able to just maintain a single queue. There’s at least some public research on this front, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more clever tricks for doing this that I haven’t seen.”
Posted on 2025-06-01T20:05:08+0000
The Nobel Prize Winner Who Thinks We Have the Universe All Wrong
Cosmologists are fighting over everything.
Hasnain says:
“Whether the cracks—if they really are cracks—will widen remains to be seen. Many new observations will come, not just from DESI, but also from the new Vera Rubin Observatory in the Atacama Desert, and other new telescopes in space. On data-release days for years to come, the standard model’s champions and detractors will be feverishly refreshing their inboxes. For the moment, though, Riess believes that the theorists have become complacent. When he reaches out to them for help in making sense of his empirical results, their responses disappoint him. “They’re like, Yeah, that’s a really hard problem,” he said. “Sometimes, I feel like I am providing clues and killing time while we wait for the next Einstein to come along.”
When I talked to Riess for the last time, he was at a cosmology conference in Switzerland. He sounded something close to giddy. “When there’s no big problems and everything’s just kind of fitting, it’s boring,” he said. Now among his colleagues, he could feel a new buzz. The daggers are out. A fight is brewing. “The field is hot again,” he told me. A new universe suddenly seems possible.”