Hasnain says:

“Also:

Don’t let people bully you into thinking that just because something is complicated, it’s impossible.
This is because almost every standard (except ISO8601, whatever) is just a file, and you can read it. You are smart. You can do it. Embrace the weirdness of Greenland’s daylight savings. Believe in yourself.
If I were UN secretary general, I would kick out any countries that I deem insufficiently considerate of Paul Eggert’s time”

Hasnain says:

This was inspiring.

“Despite these setbacks, I found other ways to make an impact. During Sudan’s revolution, I ran a social media campaign that raised $10,000 to send top AI students from Sudan to a major AI conference in Africa. Many are now making strides at companies like Google, Meta, and Silicon Valley startups. By my final semesters, though, the struggle caught up with me — I was barely getting through. I left academia with two workshop papers and two Ph.D. offers in hand.”

Hasnain says:

“"We are resigning due to information that has recently come to our attention which has led us to no longer be able to rely on management's and the Audit Committee's representations and to be unwilling to be associated with the financial statements prepared by management," Super Micro quoted EY as saying in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commision.”

Hasnain says:

Sigh.

(found this after I found the video clip circulating)

“Jennifer Guilbeault, 23, faces charges of second-degree assault as a hate crime, third-degree assault as a hate crime, and aggravated harassment for allegedly spraying the driver after he began praying in Arabic at an intersection. When the woman’s friend asked why she attacked the driver, she allegedly responded, “he’s brown.””

Hasnain says:

“Whether I'll be using Cursor in a few years or have moved on to another tool, I can't really tell. I am confident that at the time of writing this, Cursor is the best example of the potential of LLM coding assistants, and if you want to explore how this type of tool might be of value I suggest you give it a spin.”

Hasnain says:

“The rapid expansion of these shops underscores the demand for late-night social spots for not only young Muslims and Middle Easterners, but also younger people who are looking for a non-digital third space where they can hang out without alcohol or having to yell over loud music.”

Hasnain says:

“Based on data released in India, Bangladesh and Nepal, the film reports that 21,000 foreign workers from the three countries have died since Vision 2030 was launched eight years ago in 2016.”

Hasnain says:

I hate sharing twitter / media links but this one was something else and at least exposes some of the implicit media bias and bigotry

I applaud CNN for calling this out and condemning it. I wish they’d do the same when their own anchors and people on their side do similar levels of (admittedly less blatant) bigotry.

Hasnain says:

“Even before Hamas’s attack, soldiers in the West Bank frequently dealt violently with Palestinians. Givati says the army used patrols and checkpoints to make its presence felt. His most recent tour was in 2016: “The first thing . . . our commander told us is our mission is to make all of the Palestinians in our area feel like they cannot lift their heads up.””

Hasnain says:

I can’t quote most of the article because it’s so horrifying.

“Ahmad thinks back to the children he met in Darfur in 2005. “They were born in the camp and now they are back there. Is this the world that we all dream of,” he asks.

“There needs to be political intervention. There needs to be an end to the violence. People need to be held accountable for doing all this to innocent people,” Ahmad says.

“How can we let this happen? And for how long? The cost will be a lost generation. A generation that will want to take revenge.””

Hasnain says:

Oh come on..

“It’s impossible to compare Nabla’s AI-generated transcript to the original recording because Nabla’s tool erases the original audio for “data safety reasons,” Raison said.

Nabla said the tool has been used to transcribe an estimated 7 million medical visits.

Saunders, the former OpenAI engineer, said erasing the original audio could be worrisome if transcripts aren’t double checked or clinicians can’t access the recording to verify they are correct.”

Hasnain says:

When the financial times gets there before liberal institutions do, it’s a sad moment.

“Biden has the tools to rein in Netanyahu. He must halt the offensive arms sales to Israel that enable its relentless bombing of Gaza and Lebanon. He can do so without breaking Washington’s commitment to Israel’s defence, including providing air-defence systems. But Biden’s message should be clear: the bombing must stop and the day after must begin. If not, the devastation and suffering in the Middle East will come back to haunt the west.”

Hasnain says:

I need to read the full report, but the data in the summary video alone is frightening.

“Our findings indicate that Israel’s military campaign in Gaza is organised, systematic, and intended to destroy conditions of life and life-sustaining infrastructure.”

Hasnain says:

This was fascinating and I found myself nodding along, finally learning the technical term for this. I have more reading to do now.

“As we are spending more of our time in our digital persona, we need to understand the sociology involved with social media. When context collapses, the platform controls the only gate for information. It is an important lesson learned, and one that allows us to be mindful of our presence online and work to be a more accurate representation of our authentic self.”

Hasnain says:

“"Delta’s claims are based on disproven misinformation, demonstrate a lack of understanding of how modern cybersecurity works, and reflect a desperate attempt to shift blame for its slow recovery away from its failure to modernize its antiquated IT infrastructure," CrowdStrike said late on Friday.”

Hasnain says:

Just quoting twitter here:

“A year ago, Vox asked five scholars if they considered Israel to be committing genocide in Gaza. One said yes, the others said no. Returning to the same scholars a year later, Vox found that three of those who said no have subsequently changed their mind.”

Hasnain says:

I’ve been reading more about historical and/or ongoing conflict recently to better learn about how human beings can commit evil acts. Someone (rightly!) called me out for not speaking up about Syria and Yemen (and others..) often enough. I don’t have a good answer that doesn’t turn into some form of an excuse at its core. So here I am doing my part to bear witness to war crimes and genocide wherever they happen in the hopes that they will stop.

“An estimated 16.7 million people need emergency aid. More than half of the population in Syria is displaced, with 6.5 million being recognized as refugees and asylum seekers. Humanitarian efforts are desperately needed. Fully 47% of Syrian refugees are children, and one-third of them lack access to education. The UN Refugee Agency estimates that 90% of the population lives below the poverty line. [23]

Northeastern Syria, dominated by the Kurds, remains under the control of Syrian Defense Forces (SDF). Arab tribes accuse the SDF of discrimination. [43] Turkey maintains control along the northern border and have increased their attacks on Kurdish forces. The Israel-Palestine conflict resulted in increased strikes in Syria. Israel now regularly strikes different military positions in Syria, including the Damascus and Aleppo airports.

International attention has begun to shift away from the region. President Assad holds 70% of Syria’s territory and has become reintegrated into Arab League, effectively ending his previous isolation. [43] Despite the waning media attention, the Syrian conflict remains one of the worst humanitarian crises of the 21st century. The international community must end impunity for the Assad regime’s human rights abuses and aid in the reconstruction and distribution of aid throughout the region.”

Hasnain says:

… everything else aside how the heck did this group find out before the guy himself did, I am legitimately curious. We will never know though

“Nasr said his firing was disclosed on social media by the watchdog group Stop Antisemitism more than an hour before he received the call from Microsoft. The group didn’t immediately respond Friday to a request for comment on how it learned about the firing.”

Hasnain says:

“As journalists, we take this last directive seriously, feeling the weight of the question Palestinian American writer Fargo Tbakhi posed in December: “What does Palestine require of us, as writers writing in English from within the imperial core, in this moment of genocide?” We believe that one of the most vital contributions we can make is to confront the media ecosystem that enables—and all too often promotes—the slaughter of Palestinians. Over the last year we’ve seen the spirit of McCarthyism overtake our industry, with journalists being fired or pushed out of newsrooms or barred from covering Palestine for speaking out. Many publications are punishing journalists who have the moral clarity to accurately describe the horrors of the genocide. As long as journalists on the ground in Gaza continue to risk their lives to tell the story of their own annihilation, then the least US outlets can do is follow their lead and not be afraid to show the truth.”

Hasnain says:

Why do people agree to be interviewed by this guy?

“My question started with Israel intentionally denying aid to civilians, which I think is pretty obviously going on. And you responded in part by saying that Israelis were offended that anyone could believe that they’re trying to target civilians. Without getting into a dispute about every bombing and whether it’s a war crime or not, the government was trying to keep civilians from getting humanitarian aid. How do you wrestle with that? And do you understand why that fact may make people skeptical of other things the Israeli government or military says?

I do. I do. In the immediate aftermath of October 7th, there were voices here, serious voices, that were calling for a total siege of Gaza. Those voices had quickly faded after a couple of days, and they realized that it was untenable. And here I’m very grateful, frankly, to the Biden Administration, which has behaved like a real friend to Israel, both in supporting us and also in setting limits, in setting red lines. I’m grateful for both expressions of support.

Why does Israel need to be told to allow food to starving people if this war is being fought on the up-and-up?

Because October 7th was—

Hasnain says:

Finished a non fiction audio book for a change - this one was definitely fun. Need to find a new one to keep me occupied during the commutes. Lots of eye opening insights into forensics and toxicology as well as US history. This bit from the review stood out:

“Please note: this book is not actually helpful if you were looking for tips on how to poison someone (unless you are the U.S. government, in which case there are notes scattered throughout on how to poison industrial alcohols).”

Hasnain says:

Powerful moral clarity. I can only hope to be as morally righteous as TNC.

“And to the extent that I’ve been bothered by this conversation, it’s because it has gone into a kind of meta-conversation about CBS News, ethics, who is woke and who is not, and tough interviews. And that’s bullshit.

The topic is apartheid. Apartheid is the topic. And people who don’t want to talk about apartheid, because it’s uncomfortable, much like they did with the protests last year at colleges, try to turn this into a conversation about manners.

It is amazing to me that the debate is not: “Ta-Nehisi said Israel is perpetrating apartheid, and that is not true and here’s why.” Or “Ta-Nehisi said Israel is not a democracy. It is a democracy and here’s why.” Or “Ta-Nehisi said half the population that Israel rules are second-class citizens or worse. That is not true. Here’s why.” I didn’t even get challenged in that interview. And the reason why I’m not challenged is that these are facts. There is a mountain of citations to back up those conclusions.

People don’t want to straightforwardly say: “I am defending apartheid because … ” Or “I think the apartheid is appropriate because … ” Or “I think a dictatorship over a group of people that began, conservatively, more than 50 years ago is appropriate because … ” Instead, you get this conversation about manners, man.”

Hasnain says:

I love the verge. Especially when they call out hypocritical behavior (CEO of intuit dodging the question on whether they lobby against free filing)

“We don’t do that here at The Verge. As many of our listeners and readers know, we have a very explicit and very strict ethics policy. The most important thing to note is that we never allow anyone to preview or approve interview questions, and we certainly do not allow anyone to review or alter the work that we publish. I told this to Rick, and he came back and asked that we “delete that which takes away from the conversation,” which he defined as “raised voices” or us “speaking over each other,” so that “listeners understand your question and the answer Sasan gave.”

I have to be honest with you — that’s one of the weirdest requests I’ve ever gotten. So here’s what we’re going to do: we’re going to run that whole part of the interview first, unedited, so you can tell me. It’s about five minutes long, and you can decide for yourself. Then we’ll come out of it, and we’ll run the rest of the interview, which, like I said, is an otherwise fascinating episode of Decoder. Okay, here’s that bit:”

Hasnain says:

A must read. It was hard, triggering, and rage inducing to read this. But that is not even an iota of the pain the people in Gaza are suffering. I’m sparing the genocidal quotes and I’ll just leave with the conclusion of the piece:

“The destruction inflicted by the Israeli military not only wipes out the current livelihood of the Palestinian people—it also erases their entire future. As soldiers have shared on social media, their goal is not just demolishing buildings; it is to crush the dreams, hopes, and symbols of those who live there.

While many speak of the “day after,” what we see from these soldiers forces us to ask: What will be left of Gaza when that day comes?”

Hasnain says:

“This change from sorted linked lists to optionally-sorted vectors made Ion compilation of this Wasm module about 20 times faster, down to 14 seconds.”

Hasnain says:

“It became apparent to Hardy and his colleagues that Ramanujan could sense mathematical truths — could access entire worlds — that others simply could not. (Hardy, a mathematical giant in his own right, is said to have quipped that his greatest contribution to mathematics was the discovery of Ramanujan.) Before Ramanujan died in 1920 at the age of 32, he came up with thousands of elegant and surprising results, often without proof. He was fond of saying that his equations had been bestowed on him by the gods.
More than 100 years later, mathematicians are still trying to catch up to Ramanujan’s divine genius, as his visions appear again and again in disparate corners of the world of mathematics.”

Hasnain says:

“My prediction is that we’re in the beginning of an era in which critical properties like security, compliance, availability, durability, and safety can be proved automatically for large-scale cloud architectures. From preventing potential issues with AI hallucinations to analyzing hypervisors, cryptography, and distributed systems, having sound mathematical reasoning at our foundations and continuously analyzing what we build sets Amazon apart.”

Hasnain says:

This was a fun little hack.

“So the trick here is that the Python dependency resolver (now lightning fast thanks to uv) reads those dependencies and rules out every package version that represents a number in an invalid position. The resulting version numbers represent the cell numbers for the solution.”

Hasnain says:

Clear incitement to ethnic cleansing

“"We will encourage voluntary transfer of all Gazan citizens. We will offer them the opportunity to move to other countries because that land belongs to us," Ben-Gvir added.

Sima Hasson, who represents the right wing group "The Mothers' Parade," addressed the crowd: "I'm going to say something that not everyone here is prepared to say, but I am, and I know a lot of you are: conquer, kick out, resettle."”

Hasnain says:

So many mixed feelings about this one. Mental health problems and PTSD are serious. It does take a toll on everyone including soldiers. But then you read more about this guy in the article and I think the quote speaks for itself. And I’ll leave an illuminating screenshot in the comments where he brags about destroying 5000 houses. Could CNN have picked a different example perhaps?

““He saw a lot of people die. Maybe he even killed someone. (But) we don’t teach our children to do things like this,” she said. “So, when he did this, something like this, maybe it was a shock for him.”

Guy Zaken, Mizrahi’s friend and co-driver of the bulldozer, provided further insight into their experience in Gaza. “We saw very, very, very difficult things,” Zaken told CNN. “Things that are difficult to accept.”

The former soldier has spoken publicly about the psychological trauma endured by Israeli troops in Gaza. In a testimony to the Knesset, Israel’s parliament, in June, Zaken said that on many occasions, soldiers had to “run over terrorists, dead and alive, in the hundreds.””

Hasnain says:

“SK: When Biden dropped out and Harris came in, I had a brief fleeting feeling that maybe there would be change. Maybe this dynamic will finally end. Maybe she’ll move away from the policies of the Biden administration, which I do think were meant to make liberals and Democrats accept things that they never ever would have accepted under Trump. Things they would have spoken out against five or ten years ago.

The Biden administration did this slowly. It was this little drip, drip, drip effect of gradually normalizing mass death. I remember when the number of covid deaths surpassed the number of people who died on 9/11, people were horrified. Then suddenly we’re at a million, and they just stop counting. The same thing happened with Gaza. When the initial deaths passed 1000, people were horrified. Then you get to 40,000 and they’ve stopped counting — in part because the Israeli military killed the people who count them.

Getting people used to mass death is a prelude for getting them to accept mass murder: not just in Gaza, but anywhere in the world, including the United States.”

Hasnain says:

““We actually were in the operating room. We had actually opened the patient and were in the process of sort of preparing their organs, at which point the ventilator triggered and so the anesthesiologist at the head of the table spoke up and said, ‘Hey, I think this patient might have just breathed,’” Cannon later told NPR in an interview. “If the patient breathes, that means they’re not brain dead.”

Nevertheless, a representative from the OPO wanted to proceed anyway, Cannon says. He refused.

“We were kind of shocked that an OPO person would have so little knowledge about what brain death means that they would say, ‘Oh, you should just go ahead.’ And we thought, ‘No. We’re not going to take any risk that we murder a patient.’ Because that’s what it would be if that patient was alive.””

Hasnain says:

“The best part was that no one knew how we were able to do this and our admin team kept the implementation a top secret. We should have filed a patent! If cheaters learned how we were able to fingerprint them in this way, it would have been trivial for them to delete the cookies file on disk while ban evading. I am happy to report that the solution worked as expected from deployment date until October 2017 when Valve removed the VGUI browser entirely as part of their efforts to secure the game. It was only after this that I revealed the technique publicly and open-sourced the plugin.

Many years later, I remain really proud of this solution and how well it worked.”

Hasnain says:

Lina Khan continues to deliver. Brb canceling my gym membership

“The Federal Trade Commission today announced a final “click-to-cancel” rule that will require sellers to make it as easy for consumers to cancel their enrollment as it was to sign up. Most of the final rule’s provisions will go into effect 180 days after it is published in the Federal Register.”

Hasnain says:

Been a while since I’ve seen someone in politics be honest. So kudos for that I guess.

“A humanitarian aid official who attended the meeting said Grande noted that Israel is one in a “tight circle of very few allies” that the U.S. will not oppose, nor will it “hold anything back that they want.”

“She was sort of saying, with certain allies, we can’t play bad cop,” the aid official said.”

Hasnain says:

I don’t get why people agree to be interviewed by Chotiner. If he ever reaches out to me for an interview I’m going to hang my head in shame and run far away.

Also what the … was this guy even smoking.

"Howard, I think maybe we’re in a bit of a worrisome place if you see photos of dead children on television and your first thought is, They’re trying to make me, a Jew, hate my people.

You’ve twisted what I’ve said. That’s not my first thought. That’s not my first thought.

Second thought?

And it’s not my second thought. It all depends on how often you see them, and when you see them. You see them and you see them and that’s all you see, and then you feel, Is this what the war means to the media? This is what they want to stress again and again and again?"

Hasnain says:

Note that this is from May last year:

“Viewed in light of its role in cementing a deadly status quo, the Iron Dome cannot meaningfully be considered “life-saving” in any value system that recognizes Palestinian life alongside Israeli life. Palestine advocates ought to oppose its funding not just because they oppose military aid for Israel in general, but on the specific grounds that by depriving Palestinians of even the most limited means of military deterrence, the US has given Israel a blank check to massacre Gazans whenever it is politically convenient. Especially in the absence of political will from the Israelis to end the devastating siege and blockade, Palestinians, desperate for life, have shown that they will continue to fight back. By funding a system that guarantees their acts of resistance are of almost no consequence to their oppressors, we are consigning them to death. “

Hasnain says:

"Conclusion
SIMD is awesome when it's used properly
IO is also important, especially for the large datasets
The current performance is the same as the C++ version for dataset GIST. While I use more SIMD, the C++ version uses const generics."

Hasnain says:

No words for this, especially since this para is the understatement of the year. I do not recommend watching the videos and pictures coming out of this (will not describe here but may do so in the comments.)

“Meanwhile, explosions hit early Monday outside Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, killing three people and injuring about 50 others, the hospital said. Tents caught fire, and residents of the Central Gaza community carried the injured into the hospital.”

Hasnain says:

I prefer the phrasing an anti-zionist I follow on twitter used instead of the quote at the bottom because this is just ridiculous media complicity.

“"German Chancellor Adolph Hitler is examining a plan to seal off humanitarian aid to the Warsaw Ghetto in an attempt to starve out socialist & communist militants, a plan that could trap hundreds of thousands of Jews without food or water.”

This is what the piece says:

“Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is examining a plan to seal off humanitarian aid to northern Gaza in an attempt to starve out Hamas militants, a plan that, if implemented, could trap without food or water hundreds of thousands of Palestinians unwilling or unable to leave their homes.”

Hasnain says:

Always speaking truth to power. Her words are always so powerful. I do have to note that PEN refused to link to her speech when it announced the award on its social media.

So hard to pick one quote from here. Read the whole thing.

“Since October 7th 2023, apart from the tens of thousands of people it has killed, Israel has displaced the majority of Gaza’s population, many times over. It has bombed hospitals. It has deliberately targeted and killed doctors, aid workers and journalists. A whole population is being starved – their history is sought to be erased. All this is supported both morally and materially by the wealthiest, most powerful governments in the world. And their media. (Here I include my country, India, which supplies Israel with weapons, as well as thousands of workers.) There is no daylight between these countries and Israel. In the last year alone, the US has spent 17.9 billion dollars in military aid to Israel. So, let us once and for all dispense with the lie about the US being a mediator, a restraining influence, or as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (considered to be on the extreme Left of mainstream US politics) put it, ‘working tirelessly for a ceasefire’. A party to the genocide cannot be a mediator. Not all the power and money, not all the weapons and propaganda on earth can any longer hide the wound that is Palestine. The wound through which the whole world, including Israel, bleeds.”

Hasnain says:

Interesting stuff. This bit in particular was an idea I hadn’t heard of before.

“Even when running in a degraded mode, it is able to continuously and reliably ingest data. Because of this, our data ingestion layer (written in Rust) has been designed to have as few responsibilities as possible. Its sole job is to get data into some semi-persistent storage as quickly as possible, with several cascading storage options in the case of failures or outages.
Even in the event of an auth service outage, it will still record requests, but with a flag to authorize the request async in the processing layer.”

Hasnain says:

Great read as always

“While writing this piece, a friend told me a story about when he became an engineering manager a decade ago, and soon noticed that his two women engineers were the lowest paid and the lowest leveled people on the team, which didn’t seem to correlate with their actual skills or experience. He asked his own manager what was up with this, and the response he received was: “Well yeah, neither of them has ever been a flight risk.”

This kind of attitude is, to put it politely, a fucking cancer on our industry.”

Hasnain says:

Long and rambles at times but there’s useful advice here - and I certainly needed some on prioritization.

“Being purposeful is also the secret to agility. Purpose can help move faster and in times of crisis, rally the team together. It helps avoid analysis paralysis and avoid the delays inherent in waiting for numbers to emerge before taking a decision. When employees are in a quandary due to a fork in the road, purpose can guide them to choose which way to move without escalating up the hierarchy or awaiting further direction from their hierarchy. In situations where it really matters, we tend to become data driven when we should be doing the opposite, pause and then reflect on why the business or product exists.”

Hasnain says:

“Keep an eye on your dicts. Don’t let them take control of your application. As with every piece of technical debt, the further you postpone introducing proper data structures, the more complex the transition becomes.”

Hasnain says:

“A year after October 7, no one seriously believes there will be peace between Israel and the Palestinians in our lifetime. The bombed and starved children of Gaza will never forget what they’ve been subjected to, nor the world’s general indifference; while it’s not on the same scale, their counterparts in Israel will never forget the national trauma of the attacks. The “two-state solution” that liberal Zionists have verbally supported for years as the only possible just outcome is an obvious fantasy. Other, far more disturbing outcomes seem likelier; at present, it is hard to see what consequences Israel will face from continuing to kill and displace Palestinians on all fronts while seizing and occupying more and more of their land. If there is one lesson to be taken from the past dismal year, it’s this: the liberal Zionist interpretation of the conflict has no predictive value, no analytical weight, and no moral rigor. It is a failed dream of the previous century, and it is unlikely to survive this one.”

Hasnain says:

“The Costs of War Project researchers estimate the cost to US taxpayers at over $17.9 billion, and the likely number of people killed at well over 100,000—which, even then, is a “very conservative, minimum amount of death.” As researchers begin to calculate the costs, the human and monetary toll is starting to become clearer.”

Hasnain says:

Long, detailed read on distributed systems and retries. Worth reading and internalizing.

“A couple of months after the incident review was completed, the platform team adopted the retry budget technique with a threshold of 10%. Over the following year, there were other incidents, but no amplification from retries was observed.
Thanks to the incident review, Ben learned that “when encountering transient errors, add retries” is a risky approach. He gained an in-depth understanding of the risks involved, even with exponential backoff. He learned about exponential backoff and jitter techniques, Little’s Law and closed-loop systems, the concept of metastable failure state, the problem of retry amplification and techniques like retry circuit breaker and retry budget, as well as circuit breaker and deadline propagation mechanisms.
Ben now has an even more exciting journey ahead of him, delving deeper into retries. But that’s the subject of another post.”

Hasnain says:

“As the project progressed, they got "a bigger and bigger pile of proof that Rust does actually work well".

There were regular cross-team meetings where team leads could discuss their problems. As time went on it became more and more noticeable that Julius didn't bring up many issues at all and when he showed his results, his colleagues were often left impressed.”

Hasnain says:

A different tweet I read said this is so far close to the mathematical limits for how big a hurricane can get in this area. Holy crap.

““This is the real deal here with Milton,” Tampa Mayor Jane Castor told a news conference. “If you want to take on Mother Nature, she wins 100% of the time.”

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis said Monday that it was imperative for debris from Helene to be cleared ahead of Milton’s arrival so the pieces cannot become projectiles. More than 300 vehicles gathered debris Sunday.

As evacuation orders were issued, forecasters warned of a possible 8- to 12-foot (2.4- to 3.6-meter) storm surge in Tampa Bay. That’s the highest ever predicted for the region and nearly double the levels reached two weeks ago during Helene, said National Hurricane Center spokesperson Maria Torres.”

Hasnain says:

“It’s a useful reminder that over the years, the traditional relational database has proved remarkably capable of absorbing innovation, from clustering to cloud to vector search. Trends in database architecture come and go, but somehow, when the dust settles, SQL always seems to be left standing.”

Hasnain says:

In a just world everyone involved would be in jail already (though that might still be too kind)

“The following day, after an additional round of Cabinet meetings, this time helmed by both Blinken and Biden, an outline of the decision was publicly announced by Prime Minster’s Netanyahu’s office: “We will not allow humanitarian assistance in the form of food and medicines from our territory to the Gaza Strip” and, in a separate Hebrew version, “In light of President Biden's demand, Israel will not thwart humanitarian supplies from Egypt as long as it is only food, water and medicine for the civilian population located in the southern Gaza Strip or moving there, and as long as these supplies do not reach Hamas. Any supplies that reach Hamas will be thwarted.” The Hebrew word לסכל, “to thwart,” is frequently used by Israel to describe targeted killings and assassinations. The previous policy of "thwarting" all humanitarian supplies from entering Gaza was conveyed to Egypt as an explicit threat to "bomb" aid trucks.

The substance of the Blinken-approved policy was starkly conveyed by Security Cabinet member Bezalel Smotrich, who later told the Israeli media: “We in the cabinet were promised at the outset that there would be monitoring, and that aid trucks hijacked by Hamas and its organizations [sic] would be bombed from the air, and the aid would be halted.””

Hasnain says:

This is why I always feel like everything should be e2e encrypted and that backdoors (err, law enforcement portals “for the good guys”) shouldn’t be allowed. There’s no way to do them securely.

“The surveillance systems believed to be at issue are used to cooperate with requests for domestic information related to criminal and national security investigations. Under federal law, telecommunications and broadband companies must allow authorities to intercept electronic information pursuant to a court order. It couldn’t be determined if systems that support foreign intelligence surveillance were also vulnerable in the breach.”

Hasnain says:

“You might expect lots of separate clusters to emerge as distinct academic families. But it turns out that almost all Nobel laureates share some connection, however distant, as represented by this sprawling network.

An incredible 702 out of 736 researchers who have won science and economics prizes up to 2023 are part of the same academic family — connected by an academic link in common somewhere in their history.”

Hasnain says:

“Adam recalled the broadcast as “an embarrassing moment” for CNN.

“It wasn’t a Hamas roster at all,” he said. “It was a calendar, and written in Arabic were the days of the week. But the report that came out from Nic Robertson just swallowed up Israel’s claim.”

To make matters worse, the Israeli claim had already been debunked by Arabic speakers on social media before the CNN footage aired, and, according to multiple CNN journalists and an internal WhatsApp chat seen by Al Jazeera, a Palestinian producer alerted her colleagues, including Robertson, but was ignored. After the report aired on television, they said, another producer tried to get it corrected before it was posted online.

“One colleague saw the report and flagged to Nic, [saying,] ‘Hold on, people are saying that this is not accurate,'” Adam said. “And apparently, Nic said, ‘Are you meaning to say that Hagari is lying to us?’

“There was a chance for this to get stopped. But Nic was adamant, and it went out. He’s a very experienced correspondent. If you are trusting the Israeli government over your own colleagues, then you need to have your wrist slapped at the very least because your reporting has given cover to the Israeli operation.””

Hasnain says:

The drama here has been nuts

“Mullenweg and Automattic have been in a skirmish with WP Engine for almost two weeks now, in which the CEO has called WP Engine a “cancer to WordPress,” accusing it of wrongfully using the WordPress and WooCommerce trademarks, and banning the company from accessing the open-source WordPress.org resources.

Both WP Engine and Automattic have sent each other cease-and-desist letters. And WP Engine earlier on Thursday filed a lawsuit against Automattic and Mullenweg, accusing the company and its CEO of “abuse of power,” extortion, and saying the WordPress co-creator has conflicts of interest in handling WordPress as an open-source project.”

Hasnain says:

“Shifting gears to the thread that went viral this week. What was your initial reaction to realizing that Princeton had chosen not to include your responses in their announcement of your MacArthur award?

The Office of Communications reached out to me saying they had received the news from MacArthur and asked if they could interview me. So they sent me those three questions that I put online, and I wrote out my answers. And in writing the answers, I prefaced it by saying I know my answer to one puts you in a tricky position. But I would ask that if you can’t include the full context of that response, please don’t use any quotes from me in writing.

By then, I was 99 percent sure that they weren’t going to publish any of them. So I was not surprised at all that they didn’t. They were generous enough and wrote back after a few days to let me know that they had opted for option two, which is no quotes. And again, I know this wasn’t journalism. This is PR for the homepage of the university, and the point of that is to make the university look good. So I was under no sort of illusion that they were going to want to put anything in there that would cast doubt on the goodness of the university. There was no surprise.”

Hasnain says:

This is just.. I don’t have words left tonight. Will just go and hug my kid.

“Gaza was the first time I held a baby’s brains in my hand. The first of many.
- Dr. Mark Perlmutter, orthopedic and hand surgeon

Children are universally considered innocents in armed conflict. However, every single signatory to this letter saw children in Gaza who suffered violence that must have been deliberately directed at them. Specifically, every one of us who worked in an emergency, intensive care, or surgical setting treated pre-teen children who were shot in the head or chest on a regular or even a daily basis. It is impossible that such widespread shooting of young children throughout Gaza, sustained over the course of an entire year is accidental or unknown to the highest Israeli civilian and military authorities.”

Hasnain says:

“I am not afraid of Ta-Nahisi Coates chronicling Palestinian life. I am not afraid of Rashida Tlaib asserting that the state should not be prosecuting protesters. I am not afraid of the discomfort that will inevitably come when we allow Palestinians to be seen and grapple with our complicity in dehumanizing them. Instead, I am afraid that those who have championed Israel at all costs will soon get to live at home in the kind of theocracy they covet abroad.

For the high holidays this year, I am choosing the radical good deed of saying so out loud, despite how much more isolated that might make me within my own faith community. One should not have to be Jewish to call out wrongs in plain sight, whether they happen on the relatively comfortable couches of morning television or in the streets of Gaza, without fear of widespread retribution. But in this media and political landscape, it is incumbent on Jewish Americans who see these wrongs to use their voices and create the permission structure for legitimate criticism and debate.”

Hasnain says:

I am hoping this does not turn into WW3. As others put it more eloquently on twitter, this was the most preventable war of all time.

Hasnain says:

This is one of the most disgraceful interviews I’ve seen recently, and I’ve seen a lot of them. I am still incredulous at the display of racism here. I know people harp on and on about media being biased (from both sides!) but it’s been interesting seeing how media is portrayed in the states. Growing up, we treated media as biased always, and we tried to correct for it. But in the US people tend to ignore that for some reason. It’s often hidden (or agrees with our biases so we ignore it). But.. it’s there. And we should call it out for what it is.

TNC has the patience of a saint.

Quoting someone on Twitter:

“Among the many reasons that this segment will likely live in infamy as a clear example of open Islamophobic racism and journalistic malpractice from @CBSNews:

The producers flanked two Black journalists to provide a cover to a white journalist who is making an open, racist case for apartheid, and who suggests that human rights do not exist for Palestinians. A combination of racism and ignorance that suggests a deeply failed moral center for that show and that news operation.”

Hasnain says:

“Thomas Wolf suggested “paste the url of your website/linkedin/bio in Google’s NotebookLM to get 8 min of realistically sounding deep congratulations for your life and achievements from a duo of podcast experts”. I couldn’t resist giving that a go, so I gave it the URLs to my about page and my Twenty years of my blog post and got back this 10m45s episode (transcript), which was so complimentary it made my British toes curl with embarrassment”