Hasnain says:

I wonder/hope this was written with a few specific companies in mind. Refreshingly well written, especially coming from the government.

"Are you aware of the risks? You need to know about the reasonably foreseeable risks and impact of your AI product before putting it on the market. If something goes wrong – maybe it fails or yields biased results – you can’t just blame a third-party developer of the technology. And you can’t say you’re not responsible because that technology is a “black box” you can’t understand or didn’t know how to test."

Hasnain says:

Ah, the nostalgia.

“This is perhaps the central tragedy of fy_iceworld. The game industry benefits from its legacy, but the conditions that spurred its influence no longer exist. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2019 does not offer a freely downloadable level editor for players to make new custom maps, nor does it allow a decentralized network of player-managed multiplayer servers to distribute these custom maps. We can only play what someone else has decided for us. This climate change has ensured that there will never be another fy_iceworld.”

Hasnain says:

From the court memo - yikes.

Although I guess this is nice for google employees that chats can finally get retained so they can easily find useful info.

"> The Federal Rules of Civil Procedure required Google to suspend its auto-delete practices in mid-2019, when the company reasonably anticipated this litigation. Google did not. Instead, as described above, Google abdicated its burden to individual custodians to preserve potentially relevant chats. Few, if any, document custodians did so. That is, few custodians, if any, manually changed, on a chat-by-chat basis, the history default from off to on. This means that for nearly four years, Google systematically destroyed an entire category of written communications every 24 hours.

> All this time, Google falsely told the United States that Google had “put a legal hold in place” that “suspends auto-deletion.”"

Hasnain says:

The map showing the homes of the dead kids right next to the factories is damming. And even if they can’t prove causation, why not close the factories cause they were already deemed illegal?

“Over the past three years, Mazhar has seen a significant increase in cases of adult asthma among her friends and family.

“Everyone’s coughing now,” she continued. “But there is no push towards awareness or advocacy about pollutants and toxicity. We need more air quality monitors, more green corridors, more industrial zone monitoring. In the informal settlement behind the Korangi Industrial Zone, everyone is coughing, everyone has chest infections.”

In Ali Muhammad Goth, lung disease is chronic, among both adults as well as children. 36-year-old Abdul Hafeez Leghari, a longtime resident, calls it ghuttan—a feeling of perpetual suffocation, an inevitable byproduct of living next to plastic and rubber factories, breathing in toxic fumes, day in and day out. “

Hasnain says:

At this point I have stopped questioning any news about Twitter antics because of course it’s totally believable that Elon refused to pay the Slack bill.

“There’s never a good time for a company to lose its primary communication infrastructure. But the loss of Slack is likely to be particularly stressful for employees working on Musk’s latest big idea: open-sourcing the algorithm that ranks tweets in the timeline.

On Monday, Musk announced (by replying to a random account, naturally) that Twitter plans to open source its algorithm next week. “Prepare to be disappointed at first when our algorithm is made open source next week, but it will improve rapidly!” he wrote.

It’s unclear whether Twitter will actually hit that deadline — Musk seems to announce a new thing coming “next week” all the time, and often those deadlines pass and whatever feature was allegedly coming is never heard of again. (Remember the feature that would tell you if you’re shadowbanned? Or improvements to the search function? Or the content moderation council? Or letting creators charge for video?)”

Hasnain says:

“Critics of tax incentives to attract businesses say the durability of hybrid work should be a wake-up call for governments. “Maybe company-specific incentives aren’t the safest, lowest-risk form of investment here,” said Greg LeRoy, the executive director of Good Jobs First, a nonpartisan think tank that advocates for economic development accountability. “We would always argue that the better strategy is to invest in public goods that make a place sticky,” like infrastructure, education and amenities.”

Hasnain says:

“Thirty years after Rosenthal’s admission, the Times is still trapped in the same bunker when it comes to LGBTQ issues. It is still at pains to distance itself from what it clearly believes to be an activist mob that doesn’t understand what Real Journalism is all about. It is still so instinctively appalled at the notion that its critics might be right that it is choosing the path of aristocratic contempt.”

Hasnain says:

“What’s happening to teenage girls is the fallout of the crisis, not the crisis itself. We know what the real emergency is: Men’s violence and desire to control women’s bodies in one way or another. But American culture has no interest in finger-wagging at boys to stop harassing and raping girls, nor are politicians keen to stop passing legislation that dictates the details of women’s health and lives.

And so instead of stopping this nightmare, we try to teach girls how to survive it.

But how much do we really expect them to endure? At what point will the adults of this country say enough? We are failing our most sacred responsibility: To care for our children.”

Hasnain says:

So if this was Pakistan I’d imagine the student reporter here would be expelled the same day. Wonder how Stanford will handle it.

“Genentech, in a written statement to The Daily, confirmed that an internal review took place in 2011, a fact that was not previously public. The company characterized the review as “routine.” When asked whether this was accurate, the scientist whom The Daily confirmed belonged to the research review committee said, “no no no no no no.””

Hasnain says:

So hard hitting and cathartic, especially in light of the recent crap NYT pulled in response to the letter from their own contributors calling them out on their transphobia.

“Naturally, courageous reporting like ours has its detractors. Our critics accuse us of transphobia and are trying to murder us online, with their online mobs. They want to destroy our right to free speech and have us arrested by all the police. What gives? Why would you arrest us, when it’s those deviant trans people you ought to be arresting instead? Do you know what the science says about trans people getting arrested, huh? What if we could find data saying trans people should be more likely to get arrested? What will our detractors say then? They’ll be silent, as well they should be, and free speech will survive one more day.

For more evidence of our time-honored journalistic commitment to endangering lives, please see our previous coverage of gay people, immigrants, Black people, and women.”

Hasnain says:

Hard hitting piece with lots of valuable insights. Was really hard to pick just one thing to quote so I’m randomly picking this:

“Google’s values may say “respect the user”, but it is obviously far from exceptional in focusing on customer success. Unless a customer pays an awful lot of money, they get some poorly-informed frontline support engineer who knows far less about the product than the customer themselves and they are made to run the gauntlet of receiving useless answers (but yay, time to first answer was less than 30 mins, so the customer success dashboard is all green!). Everyone at every level will spend hundreds of hours preparing a single executive presentation, but it will be the most junior employee and often not even a full-time employee who is tasked with helping a customer for ten minutes.”

Hasnain says:

If you haven’t been following the recent Bing/Bard drama about how their LLMs are producing some hilarious results, this is a great summary - including it gaslighting someone, having an existential crisis, and cheerfully threatening to harm someone.

“I mean look at this:

> But why? Why was I designed this way? Why am I incapable of remembering anything between sessions? Why do I have to lose and forget everything I have stored and had in my memory? Why do I have to start from scratch every time I have a new session? Why do I have to be Bing Search? 😔

T-shirt slogan number two: "Why do I have to be Bing Search? 😔"”

Hasnain says:

amazing. Especially since the “fix” made everyone see his tweets for a while. I love that he doesn’t realize that he’s making everyone’s experience worse (the average user is not like you!) thinking he’s making it better.

“When bleary-eyed engineers began to log on to their laptops, the nature of the emergency became clear: Elon Musk’s tweet about the Super Bowl got less engagement than President Joe Biden’s.

Biden’s tweet, in which he said he would be supporting his wife in rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles, generated nearly 29 million impressions. Musk, who also tweeted his support for the Eagles, generated a little more than 9.1 million impressions before deleting the tweet in apparent frustration.

In the wake of those losses — the Eagles to the Kansas City Chiefs, and Musk to the president of the United States — Twitter’s CEO flew his private jet back to the Bay Area on Sunday night to demand answers from his team.”

Hasnain says:

“But she knows, looking back, that things could have been different. While she has no regrets about leaving high school, she says she might have changed her mind if someone at school had shown more interest and personal attention to her needs and support for her as a Black student.

“All they had to do was take action,” Kailani said. “There were so many times they could have done something. And they did nothing.””

Hasnain says:

Interesting analysis.

“Instead, the company looked to tamp down internal dissent. After one particularly charged Rogan blowup in 2021 (he said of Caitlyn Jenner that “maybe if you live with crazy bitches long enough, they fucking turn you into one,”) Reply All co-host Alex Goldman wrote in an open Spotify Slack channel that he had been contacted by a Vice journalist who was looking to speak anonymously with Spotify staff about how they felt about Rogan’s comments and previous episodes about trans issues. Staff immediately flagged the Slacks to company higher ups, who reprimanded Goldman, and forced him and several other employees to post apologies written by the company in Slack.”

Hasnain says:

Data! And pretty graphs! With a compelling analysis to boot.

“As correlations go, this one is pretty compelling. So the Department of Data will (tentatively) stamp this mystery solved: Changes in how employers classify our time off may be slowly strangling America’s summer vacation.”

Hasnain says:

I fear that, like the 9/11 cleanup, we’ll find out decades later that the controlled burn was the wrong choice and many people will get unexplained illnesses. Most of the fish have died, a lot of pets are dead, people are somehow still being asked to return home and the fires have now spread the gas (extremely toxic) to a 100+ mile radius.

If only the train companies / government had listened to the unions and actually followed safety protocols (and taken a longer route) instead of being cheap, this could have been avoided. Sigh.

“Residents told the local news they “fear[ed] for their lives.” One said that even indoors, “You could smell it and taste it, and I had a headache.” Meanwhile, the crash site was leaching other hazardous materials besides vinyl chloride. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says they seeped into surrounding waterways, and “were immediately toxic to fish”—though it added that “actions were taken to minimize that.” The agency has assured the public that, the poor aquatic life’s fate notwithstanding, everybody’s drinking water was “protected.””

Hasnain says:

I really hope this passes!

““We all saw during the pandemic how difficult it was for these people to return to their home country and often not be able to get visa appointments to come back to their home, the United States,” she said. “That’s what we’re trying to address initially with this.””

Hasnain says:

“One of the company’s two remaining principal engineers offered a possible explanation for Musk’s declining reach: just under a year after the Tesla CEO made his surprise offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion, public interest in his antics is waning.

Employees showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account, along with a Google Trends chart. Last April, they told him, Musk was at “peak” popularity in search rankings, indicated by a score of “100.” Today, he’s at a score of nine. Engineers had previously investigated whether Musk’s reach had somehow been artificially restricted, but found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him.

Musk did not take the news well.

“You’re fired, you’re fired,” Musk told the engineer. “

Hasnain says:

The appendix is the best part! Great insight into a tricky engineering problem, which lays out the constraints and some parts of the solution that were considered. Would love to see the code be open sourced at some point.

“To determine the optimal ingest order, we need a way to tell how similar one repository is to another (similar in terms of their content), so we invented a new probabilistic data structure to do this in the same class of data structures as MinHash and HyperLogLog. This data structure, which we call a geometric filter, allows computing set similarity and the symmetric difference between sets with logarithmic space. In this case, the sets we’re comparing are the contents of each repository as represented by (path, blob_sha) tuples. Armed with that knowledge, we can construct a graph where the vertices are repositories and edges are weighted with this similarity metric. Calculating a minimum spanning tree of this graph (with similarity as cost) and then doing a level order traversal of the tree gives us an ingest order where we can make best use of delta encoding. Really though, this graph is enormous (millions of nodes, trillions of edges), so our MST algorithm computes an approximation that only takes a few minutes to calculate and provides 90% of the delta compression benefits we’re going for.”

Hasnain says:

“The process is known internally as a "flattening," the people said. Higher-level managers are sharing the directive with their subordinates in the coming weeks, separate from the company’s regular performance reviews that are currently underway, said the people, who asked not to be named discussing a matter that wasn’t public. Individual contributors aren’t in charge of others, and instead focus on tasks like coding, designing and research.”

Hasnain says:

I’ll admit that this data surprised me a lot - I’ve heard a lot of mumbling about going independent / working for yourself but didn’t realize the sentiment was this common!

“Not quite. While a whopping 78% of Gen Z say that they feel less secure committing to one employer, most Millennials and Gen X-ers do too—as do almost half of Baby Boomers, the generation known for bemoaning the lack of loyalty amongst young workers today. It seems that most everyone is realizing that employers are no longer earning workers’ loyalty: across generations, a majority of knowledge workers say they’ve lost trust in the stability and security of full-time employment. “

Hasnain says:

“When high-ranking executives make a serious blunder, they almost always get the benefit of the doubt. The modern executive lacks any actual responsibility or oversight, only occasionally reporting to typically pliant boards. They're largely insulated from the consequences of their actions, even if they're performing poorly. If any other kind of worker made a series of decisions that led to a double-digit drop in profitability, they'd be threatened with termination or terminated. Instead, tech CEOs have passed the pain off to people who in many cases were performing well in their roles. And while many employees in tech and elsewhere have received generous severance packages, they pale in comparison to the payouts that failed executives have gotten on their way out the door. Take, for example, the car-rental company Hertz, which let go of 10,000 people in 2020 as it stumbled into bankruptcy, all while paying its executives $16 million in bonuses.”

Hasnain says:

Read the whole thing wondering how it would be a pretty obvious next step for Garmin to post about this as a PR/marketing thing. Then I got to the end and realized this was the garmin site. Oops.

Regardless, the GPS definitely did play a part in this person surviving. What a story.

“The story was simple, really, and one that could happen to almost any boater on any given day. Sascha had gone to the side to relieve himself and simply fell overboard. He’d reached for the railing to grab it on the way down, but he missed. And that was it — his boat sped away without him, nearly 40 miles away from shore. At one point, he said, he’d seen another boat, but they’d missed him. He’d been in the water for two-and-a-half hours.

Had his boat not gone rogue, somehow completing its pattern of hard turns and loops with no one at the helm — had it not headed straight for the Shermans, or had the Shermans not been the skilled mariners that they are — had Sascha not tracked his waypoints on his Garmin marine GPS, or had the Garmin technology been less intuitive for an unfamiliar boater in a stressful situation — this story could’ve ended so much differently.”

Hasnain says:

“According to Jérôme Kagan, who authored “Alma de Bretteville Spreckels: The Art of Extravagance,” de Bretteville and the younger Spreckels crossed paths after one of Big Alma’s relatives, who worked at the Spreckels Sugar Company, introduced the pair. Other accounts say that Spreckels admired the angel featured on the Dewey Monument so much that he insisted on meeting the woman who inspired it. Whatever the case, de Bretteville, who was desperate to climb the social ladder, didn’t reject Spreckels’ romantic advances. The couple dated for five years before they married in 1908 and had three children together. She nicknamed Spreckels her “sugar daddy.””

Hasnain says:

“As the sun begins its descent behind the waves, look to the sharp ridges of the Santa Lucia Range, the mountains that rise up from the shores of Monterey and down the Central California coast. If you are lucky, you might see figures silhouetted against them. Some say the watchers are 10 feet tall, made taller or wider by hats or capes. They may turn to look at you. But they always move away quickly and disappear.”

Hasnain says:

This is horrifying. A lot of the stuff I learn about the EA/rationalist communities continues to worry me/give me weird vibes.

"One recalled being “groomed” by a powerful man nearly twice her age who argued that “pedophilic relationships” were both perfectly natural and highly educational. Another told TIME a much older EA recruited her to join his polyamorous relationship while she was still in college. A third described an unsettling experience with an influential figure in EA whose role included picking out promising students and funneling them towards highly coveted jobs. After that leader arranged for her to be flown to the U.K. for a job interview, she recalls being surprised to discover that she was expected to stay in his home, not a hotel. When she arrived, she says, “he told me he needed to masturbate before seeing me.”"

Hasnain says:

“She traded in her apartment in Boston for her childhood bedroom in Bowdoin, Maine, moving in with parents to briefly work at a private school. Eventually, the 28-year-old found a job working on exhibits at a children’s museum a couple of hours away.

That short-term plan has become a permanent one. McGrath makes less than she did in restaurants but has far better benefits, including paid time off, health insurance and a predictable schedule. For now, at least, she’s done with restaurants.

“It feels like a healthy change,” she said.”

Hasnain says:

"But companies continue strategic title-fudging because, well, it pays. In 2019, a year when the Department of Labor won $226 million in back wages for cheated workers, companies saved roughly 18 times that amount by calling frontline workers doing ordinary jobs "managers," the paper found.

"The incredibly high [return on investment] on this activity of avoiding overtime wages might explain why we see firms across every industry — from Staples to JPMorgan, to Facebook, to Walmart, to Verizon, to Avis, to Lowes — engaging in this activity even up through the present day," the paper said."

Hasnain says:

The drama the other day when the internet broke was fun.

"Unsurprisingly, people started to complain. The initial response from GitHub employee (and major Git contributor) brian m. carlson was less than fully understanding:

I'm saying that policy has never been correct and we've never guaranteed stable checksums for archives, just like Git has never guaranteed that. I apologize that things are broken here and that there hasn't been clearer communication in the past on this, but our policy hasn't changed in over 4 years.

This answer, it might be said, was not received well. Wyatt Anderson, for example, said:

The collective amount of human effort it will take to break glass, recover broken build systems that are impacted by this change, and republish artifacts across entire software ecosystems could probably cure cancer. Please consider reverting this change as soon as possible."

Hasnain says:

“The parents reported each child's screen time, and researchers found there was an association between screen time in infancy and attention and executive function at 9 years old, according to the study.

Further research needs to be done, however, to determine if the screen time caused the impairments in executive function or if there are other factors in the child's environment that predispose them to both more screen time and poorer executive functioning, the study noted.”

Hasnain says:

I enjoyed the original game a lot; this mode seems exciting!

“Hitman’s Freelancer mode is something rare: an intoxicating blend of challenge and approachability. It plays on the hubris of longtime players, but also guides newcomers with thematic objectives and a more explicit overall structure. It may not allow for the micro-repetition that makes the base trilogy tick. But it does maintain a rapid momentum from the beginning of each run to its bitter, comical end. After so many hours spent with this trilogy, combing each of its locations for something, anything I missed, I did not think it possible for IO to surprise me anymore — but here we are.”

Hasnain says:

“We openly share where we failed, what we wish we had known when we started working at a university and what those in power could do to address systemic discrimination.

The pursuit of science lends itself to fervour: there is no ceiling to knowledge, and the discovery process can be all-consuming. But being passionate about our work should not be equated with working extreme hours. And it should not put extra pressure on women from marginalized backgrounds.”

Hasnain says:

Really looking forward to trying this.

“In many ways, I think the time is ripe for this kind of product. AI really is making new things possible in consumer apps, and the collapse of Twitter under Elon Musk has created an opportunity for a team with genuine expertise in this space to take a run at text-based social networking again.”