Hasnain says:

Insightful read on promo packets. Once you’re in the know this seems fairly obvious, but it’s not obvious at all from the outside. Focus on impact, folks!

“Regardless of the narrative structure you choose, before typing a single word into your promo packet draft, try to tell someone (yourself even), verbally, your bunny story. How bad was your Dark Lord’s reign? What were your weapons of battle? And just how happy were your bunnies in the last chapter of your hero’s journey?”

Hasnain says:

“I do not quite know what is worse. The prospect that billionaire Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos dictated this absurd Editorial Board article, similar to how he forbade the Washington Post from endorsing during the Presidential election? Or, the prospect that the Washington Post editorial board actually believes the bloviating fact-less propaganda they just published. Either way, it does not bode well for a healthy fourth estate committed to holding the powerful accountable.

The facts are clear. The ICC is perfectly within its jurisdiction, right, and obligation to hold Netanyahu, Gallant, and Hamas leaders accountable for war crimes. That the ICC has not yet reached the point of filing arrest warrants for each of the despots mentioned by The Post is nothing more than an argument for increased ICC funding so it can fulfill its mandate of prosecuting war crimes. Rather than excuse war crimes committed by people The Post likes, perhaps its editorial board can remember that their job as journalists is not to capitulate in the face of atrocity, but to hold fast the call for democracy. If this is a task too difficult for The Post’s board, then maybe it’s time to resign and let actual journalists take the lead.”

Hasnain says:

“However, it is now clear to me that there is ongoing work on structured editing which either doesn’t know about incremental parsing in general, or Tim’s algorithms specifically. I hope this post serves as a useful advert to such folk that incremental parsing exists, and Tim’s and Lukas’s theses specifically, are absolutely worth the investment of time in reading.
I would love to see more progress in this area, and the more that those working on it know the breadth of our existing knowledge, the more likely we are to make meaningful progress. I hope to see more such progress soon!”

Hasnain says:

“An event happens on a date, at a time. The precise details of that time are very important: if you tell people to show up to your event at 7pm and it turns out they should have arrived at 6pm they’ll miss an hour of the event!

Some of the worst bugs an events website can have are the ones that result in human beings traveling to a place at a time and finding that the event they came for is not happening at the time they expected.

So how do you store the time of an event?”

Hasnain says:

“Any system that disrupts internet services, hampers business operations or raises privacy concerns could pose a serious threat to both private individuals and the broader business community, digital rights activist Aziz said.

“Pakistani businesses rely on global platforms for services like web hosting, and many have contracts requiring confidentiality. If the new system inspects network traffic, blocks VPNs, or imposes a registration regime, it could create more obstacles,” she warned.”

Hasnain says:

“The ICC’s decision has far-reaching economic and diplomatic implications, particularly for Israel’s relationships with the EU. As Josep Borrell rightly stated, this is a legal decision with binding consequences for EU member states. Israel’s preferential trade agreements with the EU, which exempt 65 percent of its exports from customs duties, are now under serious scrutiny.

It is ethically and legally indefensible for the EU to maintain these privileges while the sitting prime minister of Israel face charges of genocide and war crimes. Similarly, Israel’s participation in European sports leagues, cultural exchanges, and academic programs like Erasmus must be reconsidered. These partnerships starkly contradict the legal and moral weight of the ICC’s findings.

Economic consequences could extend beyond the EU. Countries in the Global South, many of which have been vocal in supporting the ICC’s mandate, may impose their own restrictions on trade and collaboration with Israel. This would not only isolate Israel diplomatically but also pressure it to comply with international law.”

Hasnain says:

“But this great awakening has been slower to develop in business-school psychology, several academics told me. “No one wants to kill the golden goose,” one early-career researcher in business academia said. If management and marketing professors embraced all of psychology’s reforms, he said, then many of their most memorable, most TED Talk–able findings would go away. “To use marketing lingo, we’d lose our unique value proposition.””

Hasnain says:

“The 30-day ultimatum illuminates a grotesque tension at play among White House leadership. The Biden administration believes that its Israel policy should not be constrained by human rights law, but still badly wants to be seen as committed to upholding human rights. The White House’s letter to Israeli officials gestured at a commitment to human rights by expressing concern over the rapidly deteriorating humanitarian conditions in Gaza and demanding of Israel improvements in humanitarian access purportedly to ameliorate those conditions.

But the ultimatum was all for show, a public relations maneuver to create the illusion of a commitment to human rights and distance itself from the mass starvation policy it is enabling. That the demands were not enforced, that they were written in a way that would still allow Israel to starve Gaza, and the context in which the ultimatum itself was issued all reveal how deeply unserious the Biden administration was about deviating from the genocidal status quo. In this way, the administration’s PR stunt backfired — it’s now clearer than ever that the Biden administration’s policy is enabling mass starvation in Gaza. The 30-day ultimatum for Israel may not have changed US policy, but it clarified what that policy is.”

Hasnain says:

“Those three factors "got me to my 5.6 million-and-change number for 2024 at my current spend, as of six months ago," said Nader. He added a few caveats, including that his estimate does not fully account for taxes, he's not factoring in Social Security or Medicare, and he's assuming no changes in expenses after his daughter graduates from college.”

Hasnain says:

“Loudon made $1.7 million in illegal profits from the purchase and sale of stock market shares.

Loudon’s wife was an associate manager in mergers and acquisitions at international oil and gas company. Loudon learned her company was planning to purchase a travel center operator business.

Unbeknownst to his spouse, Loudon used the non-public information about the expected acquisition to purchase 46,450 shares ahead of the public notice.”

Hasnain says:

“On October 17, Israeli tanks again encircled the Jabalia refugee camp’s Tal Al-Zaatar area, where Islam Fayyad, his wife, and their three children, aged six, four, and eight months, were living. As Israeli forces closed in, Islam’s wife raised a white flag and attempted to flee with the children. When they neared a checkpoint, Israeli soldiers ordered them via loudspeakers to discard their belongings into a pit and approach the tanks. Israeli forces then separated the men from the women and children, holding Islam’s wife and children in front of military vehicles for two hours while shells and bullets flew overhead. Fayyad’s six-year-old daughter, Marwa, pleaded with her mother, “We are going to die, Mom,” as soldiers continued firing, undeterred by the children’s visible terror.”

Hasnain says:

“Think about how peculiar this argument is. The editorial board members, while again (falsely) implying Israel is not committing violence with impunity and that Palestinians in Gaza have other recourse, are arguing that punishing Israel for committing war crimes gives Trump more ammunition to attack an important international court – that the authors themselves are attacking in this editorial.

The ICC, they suggest, must maintain the legitimacy necessary to punish Putin for his war crimes, but only by undermining that legitimacy in allowing Netanyahu to remain unaccountable for his.

Got it?”

Hasnain says:

I hope folks stay safe and that no one is shot.

“The Ministry of Interior has announced the deployment of the Pakistan Army in Islamabad under Article 245 of the Constitution due to increasing security concerns in the federal capital.

Authorities have issued strict directives to security forces to act decisively against agitators and miscreants while authorising them to take extreme measures such as shooting rioters on sight.”

Hasnain says:

“As the world’s most powerful country, America may feel that appealing to international law and institutions is something that only wimpy Europeans need to do. But even the mighty US needs allies and global rules.”

Hasnain says:

Quite a gaffe from someone who researches misinformation and gave a TED talk on lying.

““The citation bears the hallmarks of being an artificial intelligence (AI) ‘hallucination,’ suggesting that at least the citation was generated by a large language model like ChatGPT,” Bednarz wrote. “Plaintiffs do not know how this hallucination wound up in Hancock’s declaration, but it calls the entire document into question, especially when much of the commentary contains no methodology or analytic logic whatsoever.”
Hancock, who wrote in his expert declaration that he was paid $600 an hour for his expert testimony,”

Hasnain says:

“What can someone gain by improving their mathematical thinking?

Joy, clarity and self-confidence.
Children do this all the time. That’s why they learn so fast. They have to. Otherwise, I mean, nothing makes sense. I think this is also why babies are super happy — because they have epiphanies all day long. It’s wonderful.”

Hasnain says:

This is really cool work

“Improving automated triaging: to get to a point where we’re confident about not requiring human review. This will help automatically report new vulnerabilities to project maintainers. There are likely more than the 26 vulnerabilities we’ve already reported upstream hiding in our results.”

Hasnain says:

Why does this senseless violence continue? Why must Pakistanis / Muslims kill other Pakistanis / Muslims? When will this end?

“Ajmeer Hussain, 28, survived the attack.

“Gunfire suddenly erupted and I started reciting my prayers, thinking these were my final moments,” Hussain told the AFP news agency.”

Hasnain says:

TIL. But also not surprising given the related civil rights case against a US university (I forget which one, either Columbia or Cornell iirc) who has a shared program with Tel Aviv university and is being sued because they intentionally discriminated against Arab Israelis.

““These cases seem to reflect systematic discrimination against U.S. citizens of a certain ethnicity, religion or nationality, which is directly in violation of the program requirements,” it continued. “

Hasnain says:

“The survey by Israel's Ministry for Diaspora Affairs and Combating Antisemitism found that 36.7 percent of American-Jewish teens either "agreed" or "strongly agreed" to the statement, "I sympathise with Hamas", Israeli media reported on Thursday.

…

An even greater percentage of American-Jewish teens, 41.3 percent, agreed with the statement that Israel was "committing genocide" in Gaza.

Hasnain says:

This whole speech is so powerful and worth reading. I wish he’d continue in his role longer. Was so hard to find a single thing to quote as I kept reading and deciding I needed to quote the next thing. So here’s one at random.

“legitimate to us Europeans to a greater part of the international community to portray ourselves as the guardians of international law and human rights when we see this being blatantly disregarded on a daily basis.

We cannot pretend to be and portray ourselves as the guardians of international law if we look to the other side when international law is being violated. We cannot proclaim ourselves to be the guardians of the rule of law without acting on the basis of the judgement of the International Court of Justice, confirming the illegality of the occupation.

We cannot pretend to hold a rule based international order and not implement the decision of the International Criminal Court. We cannot pick and choose the decisions we like and those we do not like. And we must ensure that the ICC is able to function without the impediment of any third party and without threats and intimidation like the one I have mentioned at the beginning that certainly terrifies me, because it is not coming from an authoritarian state, it is not coming from a Third World dictatorship; it is coming from the US Senate. Accountability has to be comprehensive and impartial.”

Hasnain says:

Humblebrag detected.

“On average, around 15 million TLS connections are established with Cloudflare per second. Upgrading each to ML-DSA, would take 1.8Tbps, which is 0.6% of our current total network capacity. No problem so far.”

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking for future re-reading as this will take a few turns to internalize.

"Future language design should rethink concurrency once more: Instead of adopting async/await, new languages should model themselves more like Java's Project Loom but with more user friendly primitives. But like Scratch, it should give programmers really good APIs that make concurrency natural. I don't think actor frameworks are the right fit, but a combination of structured concurrency, channels, syntax support for spawning/joining/selecting will go a long way. Watch this space for a future blog post about some things I found to work better than others."

Hasnain says:

“May” doing some heavy lifting here because what. This is a clear violation no?

“Turkish air strikes in drought-struck north-east Syria have cut off access to electricity and water for more than a million people, in what experts say may be a violation of international law.

Turkey carried out more than 100 attacks between October 2019 and January 2024 on oil fields, gas facilities and power stations in the Kurdish-held Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria (AANES), according to data collated by the BBC World Service”

Hasnain says:

Powerful words.

“This is us. This is mainstream, ruling class Australia.
This has also been the bleakest 13 month period for humanity in my living memory. We have all seen so many things we cannot unsee. Any illusions of Western morality, or even the benevolence and effectiveness of our political systems, should be well and truly out the fucking window by now. Hold it all in contempt, you do not need to cheer for any of these people. Personally, I don’t think any of this deserves your “social cohesion”.
No matter how small it may prove to be in the end, these warrants are a win for justice and humanity. May they make it as awkward as possible for genocide deniers to carry out their horrendous work.”

Hasnain says:

“Accidentally”

I would honestly love to see the engineering post mortem here or given the stakes I am unfortunately biased towards assuming bad faith unless proven otherwise (sorry to my friends that work there)

“The plaintiffs’ counsel makes clear that they have no reason to believe the deletion was intentional. But they do say the incident underscores that OpenAI “is in the best position to search its own datasets” for potentially infringing content using its own tools.”

Hasnain says:

The reactions are all over the place:

"The EU's foreign policy chief, Josep Borrell, said the decision was not political but made by a court and thus should be respected and implemented.
"The tragedy in Gaza has to stop," he said.

Jordan's foreign minister Ayman Safadi also said the ICC's decision must be implemented, adding that Palestinians deserved justice after what he termed Israel's "war crimes" in Gaza.

The Netherlands' foreign minister Caspar Veldkamp said his country acts on arrest warrants for people on its territory and will not engage in "non-essential" contacts.

Republican Senator Lindsey Graham, a close ally of President-elect Donald Trump, said: "The court is a dangerous joke. It is now time for the U.S. Senate to act and sanction this irresponsible body."

The ICC has "lost all legitimacy" after issuing the arrest warrants for Netanyahu and Gallant, Israel's Foreign Minister Gideon Saar said."

Hasnain says:

Now I want khowsey again. Hopefully the event tomorrow at Zareens is still on.

“The enmeshed histories of Pakistan and China – with overlapping mountain ranges and confluence of rivers – gives credence to the interwoven narrative of the dish. In Myanmar, Ohn no Khauk Swe (coconut milk noodles) are iconic. Cookbook authors Amy and Emily Chung, aka the Rangoon Sisters, associate it with their Chinese-inspired Burmese tradition of having noodles on one's birthday for good luck. In Northern Thailand, khao soi is synonymous with soulful Chiang Mai train station food today.

One thing is for certain: when it comes to khowsey, there are as many variations as there are taste preferences. As such, serving guests individually is key, Fayyaz explained, and khowsey is not meant to be pre-assembled by the host.

"It's exciting," explained Shaikh, "The overall experience [of assembling it] is like a desi [characteristic of the subcontinent] version of [Chinese] hotpot".”

Hasnain says:

Yikes

“In northern California, flood and high wind watches were in effect, with up to 8 inches (20 centimeters) of rain predicted for parts of the San Francisco Bay Area, North Coast and Sacramento Valley.”

Hasnain says:

Where have I heard this phrasing before

“Google’s regulatory affairs VP, Lee-Anne Mulholland, said that the DOJ “continues to push a radical agenda that goes far beyond the legal issues in this case,” Bloomberg writes.”

Hasnain says:

This is just going to be “[insert terms here that would get me banned ]”

“The big picture: There are an estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the U.S. Trump's mass deportations are expected to impact roughly 20 million families across the country.

Immigration advocates and lawyers are preparing to counter the plan in court.
The president-elect's team is aiming to craft executive orders that can withstand legal challenges to avoid a similar defeat that befell Trump's Muslim ban in his first term, Politico reported.
Their plans also include ending the parole program for undocumented immigrants from Cuba, Haiti, Nicaragua and Venezuela, per Politico.”

Hasnain says:

As someone on twitter pointed out, this was written by James Bamford who’s one of the most well regarded journalists reporting on the NSA. Worth a serious read.

“Although neither the United States nor Israel recognize the jurisdiction of the ICC, most other countries of the world, including in Europe, do. So, should Biden join Netanyahu on the ICC’s wanted list, he would remain safe as long as he never leaves the country. But if he were to give a speech or attend a ceremony outside the country, an Interpol Red Notice would likely be waiting for him, followed by a quick trip to the ICC’s Court Tower in The Hague. According to The Architectural Review, those awaiting trial at the ICC are confined in a “dark gray holding cell complete with steel table and chair bolted to the floor, a slab for a bed, seatless stainless-steel prison toilet and sink.” And there is plenty of room for both Netanyahu and Biden.”

Hasnain says:

Even though this isn’t targeted at me, I found myself nodding along. Lots to ponder here.

“U.S. society is so in love with the idea of elections as self-empowerment that its elite has most people believing that justice is finite, a commodity limited to select groups who earn it through obedience. The elite want us to think that justice is finite because they have none to offer. The finitude of justice corresponds to a scarcity of resources for which we must struggle while those elites live in abundance.

The upshot, manifested through electoralism, is a set of impossible choices. Why should we have to choose between abortion access and imperialism? Why does inflation need to be mitigated through the blood of Arabs? Why must a decent judicial system be contingent on genocide? Anybody accepting this logic has been duped into fighting the wrong enemy. “

Hasnain says:

Damning report.

“Israel cannot rely on the security and safety of civilians as a justification for evacuating people if there are no safe areas to which civilians can move. Ultimately, as this report will show, even if Israel can demonstrate that its actions fall within the displacement exception, its lack of adherence to the strict protections required to make an evacuation lawful demonstrates that its orders for people to move were a pretext for forced displacement.”

Hasnain says:

… and yesterday they let in 2 aid trucks into northern Gaza - finally - after a month- to be delivered to a school/shelter. And then set it on fire.

“In the 30 days since the Biden administration’s warning, Israel bombed homes and camps sheltering Palestinians the Israeli military has displaced, targeted aid workers and medical staff, and admitted its goal to ethnically cleanse northern Gaza. And that’s not even the half of it”

Hasnain says:

These maps are so drastic.

“The number of infected people, measured over 70-some years and across all 50 states and the District of Columbia, generally declined after vaccines were introduced.

The heat maps below show number of cases per 100,000 people.”

Hasnain says:

“Naturally, one takeaway from this paper is, as University of Connecticut mycologist Mia Maltz summarizes, that “we cannot ignore the interdependence of all things in nature, especially the things we cannot see like microbes and fungi.”

But another takeaway is that, when in doubt, and the situation seems grim, just toss a couple of gophers at the problem and see if that does anything. It might just work!”

Hasnain says:

“The Committee called on all Member States to uphold their legal obligations to prevent and stop Israel’s violations of international law and hold it accountable.

“It is the collective responsibility of every State to stop supporting the assault on Gaza and the apartheid system in the occupied West Bank, including East Jerusalem,” the Committee said.

“Upholding international law and ensuring accountability for violations rests squarely on Member States. A failure to do so weakens the very core of the international legal system and sets a dangerous precedent, allowing atrocities to go unchecked.””

Hasnain says:

“The performance impact of these changes was surprisingly low, despite Google's modern C++ codebase making heavy use of libc++. Hardening libc++ resulted in an average 0.30% performance impact across our services (yes, only a third of a percent).”

Hasnain says:

After being gaslit by all the spokespeople day in day out - KJP, Patel, Kirby, and Miller - I’m happy to see them all leave. They have all been infuriating in their own way but I feel like Miller will be taught in “how to propaganda” for quite a while to come. This was just cathartic to read, including the part where he gets called a wet orc.

“Miller’s reactions belie a person who is so morally untethered from the reality around him that he genuinely seems confused/surprised when the journalists and diplomats he regularly interacts with are horrified by his words and behavior. He just cannot seem to calibrate his face to respond to the topics in question like a regular fucking person, and quickly tries to adjust when it becomes clear that he has just said or done something that has left his audience truly aghast (watch how quickly he goes from “just told a funny joke” face to “no no, this is a serious matter” face on the previously-linked clip). I would call it sociopathic, but sociopaths are generally better at approximating normal human emotions, so I don’t really know what to call Miller’s affliction. Satanic autism? Perhaps he’s a skinwalker from another planet, representing an alien race’s early attempts to colonize earth? The mind reels.”

Hasnain says:

This was a great read

“I’ve always loved this incident for a few reasons:

This was a rare but brutal example of how writing non-thread-safe code can cripple your systems. There are a lot of problems you haven’t seen before because you’re not working on systems with sufficient volume to generate them.

The solution of automatically terminating random instances felt like a terrible engineering practice. But in the moment, it was the perfect solution to our problem.

Most importantly, we prioritized our own sanity”

Hasnain says:

This was a great read on various work styles.

“What happens when you put a trailblazer in a road builder role or vice versa? Disaster. Imagine a trailblazer trying to build roads. They’re likely to get impatient, cutting corners and rushing through the process. They might ignore critical planning phases, resulting in a road that’s prone to collapse. Their instinct to "figure it out as we go" doesn’t work in a world where safety and longevity matter.

Now flip it. A road builder, when tasked with blazing a new trail, often freezes. They get stuck in analysis paralysis, overthinking every decision. They’re so focused on finding the "optimal" path that they forget the point of trailblazing is to just start moving. Progress slows to a crawl, and what could’ve been an exciting adventure turns into a frustrating exercise in indecision.

The real magic happens when people are placed in roles that align with their strengths. A good leader can spot who thrives in the unknown and who excels at refinement. And no matter which role you’re in, the key is to keep moving forward. The last thing you want to be is the one standing around, complaining—you’re just wasting everyone’s time.”

Hasnain says:

Learnt a lot from this one.

“Looking back at these three mistakes - destroying our culture through rapid growth, fragmenting our architecture with microservices, and outsourcing our core support function - there's a common thread. Each represents choosing short-term scalability over long-term sustainability. We sacrificed what made Airbnb special - its culture, its technical simplicity, and its human touch - in pursuit of rapid growth and cost optimization.”

Hasnain says:

I remember visiting Lahore in 2018 (?) when there was a huge outbreak of smog the day after I arrived and ... it was not great. It took a while for my family that wasn't in Lahore to understand how bad it got (since it was the first in a while). This is 10x worse. It'll only get worse.

To contextualize the bad AQI for folks in the bay who may be familiar with AQI numbers -- it's currently >600, and has been recorded at over 1000 (some sources reported 1900). Those numbers are not typos.

Hasnain says:

Lots of useful advice here. Sure one takeaway definitely is “I wish it wasn’t this way” but it is what it is and if you’re operating in such an environment this advice is quite useful.

Beyond the pessimistic quote though - I really liked the author’s advice on knowing what to cut and prioritizing the most stressful/unknown parts first.

“Shipping is a social construct within a company. Concretely, that means that a project is shipped when the important people at your company believe it is shipped. If you deploy your system, but your manager or VP or CEO is very unhappy with it, you did not ship. (Maybe you shipped something, but you didn’t ship the actual project.) You only know you’ve shipped when your company’s leadership acknowledge you’ve shipped.”

Hasnain says:

Harrowing report. Worth a read for the dark times ahead.

“The cost to U.S.-born Americans, in tax dollars spent and in economic output lost, pales in comparison to the devastation that undocumented immigrants and their families would suffer. Uprooted from their homes and communities after decades in the country, they would face an uncertain future and the potential separation of their families, which include millions of U.S.-citizen children who have known only this country as home.

To speak of the enormity of the fiscal and economic costs of mass deportation is not to minimize the importance of this suffering. It is to reinforce just how radical a step a deportation campaign targeting millions of undocumented immigrants, who have been so integral to the U.S. economy and American communities, would be. There is no way to engage in mass deportation without fundamentally changing the federal government, the national economy, and, ultimately, America itself.”

Hasnain says:

Sage advice here - I found myself nodding along a lot. It aligned with some advice I received in the past around being more assertive - “find the edge of your comfort zone, exceed it a little bit - it’s still likely not enough, and you’ll see it’s not the end of the world.”. That helped me a lot in the past.

“Next time you’re feeling some discomfort in a situation, slow down and take a deep breath.

Check in with yourself. Where is your edge? What level of discomfort feels challenging but not overwhelming right now? Can you lean in and try something difficult? Or have you already leaned in too far and need to back off a little? Act accordingly. As the situation progresses, keep checking in with yourself.

Once it’s over, check in again – how did that go? Finally, give yourself some credit, and be aware of the potential for a vulnerability hangover.”

Hasnain says:

“So too with the engineering heuristics. Becoming a better engineer is becoming a better pathfinder in problem space.

There's probably a compelling general theory to be concocted in this space, but that's beyond the scope of this post. Spin up a background thread in your brain and think about it. Maybe you'll find a good path to an answer.”

Hasnain says:

“Listening to the developers’ commentary tracks in the remastered edition of Grim Fandango (who would have imagined in 1998 that games would someday come with commentary tracks?), I was shocked by how little talk there was about the gameplay. It was all lighting and dialog beats and soundtrack stabs and Z-buffers instead — all of which is really, really important in its place, but none of which can yield a great game on its own. Tellingly, when the subject of puzzle design did come up, it always seemed to be in an off-hand, borderline dismissive way. “I don’t know how players are supposed to figure out this puzzle,” says Tim Schafer outright at one point. Such a statement from your lead designer is never a good sign.

But I won’t belabor the issue any further. Suffice to say that Grim Fandango is doomed to remain a promising might-have-been rather than a classic in my book. As a story and a world, it’s kind of amazing. It’s just a shame that the gameplay part of this game isn’t equally inspired.”

Hasnain says:

Sometimes twitter leads me to the most fascinating things. I’ll link to the full paper in the comments. It’s just mind bending to see these case studies in how heart transplants changed people’s personalities to match the donor’s.

“Conclusion: The incidence of recipient awareness of personal changes in cardiac transplant patients is unknown. The effects of the immunosuppressant drugs, stress of the surgery, and statistical coincidence are likely insufficient to explain the findings. The plausibility of cellular memory, possibly systemic memory, is suggested.”

Hasnain says:

“In the meantime, Pak says, it’s clear that mathematicians need to engage in a more active discussion about the nature of mathematical proof. He and his colleagues ultimately didn’t have to rely on controversial computational methods; they were able to disprove the conjecture with total certainty. But as computer- and AI-based lines of attack become more common in mathematics research, some mathematicians are debating whether the field’s norms will eventually have to change. “It’s a philosophical question,” Alon said. “How do we view proofs that are only true with high probability?””

Hasnain says:

“Maybe I’m bad at searching for these things, but these changes to C# seem to have gone completely under the radar in places where you read about memory safety and performance. Maybe it’s just because the language additions have happened super slowly, or maybe the C# and Rust communities have so little overlap that there aren’t enough people who program in both languages to notice the similarities. Maybe there’s something that makes C#’s ref subset so unusable that people just ignore it (I’ll admit to only having played around with it a bit, so far).

Here’s my theory: C# already had an equivalent to all of these things in its “unsafe” subset, so when introduced, ref-safety changes were typically framed as “bringing the performance of safe code closer to that of unsafe code,” which is arguably the opposite perspective of Rust’s “bringing the safety of high-performance code closer to that of high-level languages.” Perhaps that framing makes people miss that although the two languages are pushing in opposite directions, they might actually be getting closer together.”

Hasnain says:

“To physicists such as Carney, however, a mere strong suggestion that gravity is quantized isn’t all that informative. We already have an abundance of strong suggestions that all of reality is quantized, he says. What’s needed is proof — such as experiments that would close the remaining loopholes, no matter how bizarre they might seem.

“We’re so biased to think that everything is quantum that you should really be doing a lawyerly thing,” he said.”

Hasnain says:

It’s a sad day when the most honest “official” reporting I can find is from the daily mail, of all people. Will drop a link in the comments to the sky news report that they have since deleted which said similar things. A courageous 13 year old Dutch kid also did great reporting here.

To be clear - I abhor all violence. People should not be attacked for their religion. But it’s unclear to me if football hooligans going on a drunk rampage and picking a fight (and then the people they are hurting fighting back) is anti semitic, or just another Tuesday when it comes to, well, drunk football fans doing stupid things.

The quote below doesn’t even capture the worst of the videos/behavior seen.

“Videos show dozens of hooded figures dressed fully in black cheering and chanting 'f*** you Palestine' and 'ole' as one climbed halfway up the front of a building and removed a flag on the Rokin, a major street. “

Hasnain says:

“In dozens of emails, Théo said his wager was essentially a bet against the accuracy of polling data. Describing himself as a wealthy Frenchman who had previously worked as a trader for several banks, he told the Journal that he began applying his mathematical know-how to analyze U.S. polls over the summer.

He concluded the polls were overstating support for Vice President Kamala Harris. Unlike most armchair political commentators, he put his money where his mouth was, betting more than $30 million that Trump would win.”

Hasnain says:

This got buried in yesterday’s news. This is outright ethnic cleaning that they are admitting to.

“In a media briefing on Tuesday night, the IDF Brig Gen Itzik Cohen told Israeli reporters that since troops had been forced to enter some areas twice, such as Jabaliya camp, “there is no intention of allowing the residents of the northern Gaza Strip to return to their homes”.

He added that humanitarian aid would be allowed to “regularly” enter the south of the territory but not the north, since there are “no more civilians left”.

International humanitarian law experts have said that such actions would amount to the war crimes of forcible transfer and the use of food as a weapon.”

Hasnain says:

“Their nearly contemporaneous accounts are detailed, corroborated by other witnesses, and consistent with testimony by an Israeli soldier who fought in Gaza, and with interviews collected by Breaking the Silence, an organization that works with troops who have served in the occupied Palestinian territories. They described a practice in which Palestinians are detained, interrogated and ultimately released, indicating the Israeli army did not believe them to be militants. They described events that took place between January and August.

“This wasn’t something that happened just here and there but rather on a large scale throughout a number of different units, at different times, throughout the war and in different places,” said Joel Carmel, advocacy director of Breaking the Silence, an organization that collects and verifies testimonies from troops who have served in the occupied Palestinian territories.”

Hasnain says:

Not even keeping up the pretense anymore.

“The Israeli military has never made any claims of a Hamas presence at al-Awda. When asked what intelligence led troops to besiege and raid the hospital last year, the military spokesman’s office did not reply.”

Hasnain says:

“The development of new product lines for use in service of critical infrastructure or NCFs in a memory-unsafe language (e.g., C or C++) where there are readily available alternative memory-safe languages that could be used is dangerous and significantly elevates risk to national security, national economic security, and national public health and safety.”

Hasnain says:

Yikes

“A precondition for this vulnerability is that the username must be or exceed 52 characters any time a cache key is generated for the user.”

Hasnain says:

“For the team this is a moment of validation and success - finding a vulnerability in a widely-used and well fuzzed open source project is an exciting result! When provided with the right tools, current LLMs can perform vulnerability research.

However, we want to reiterate that these are highly experimental results. The position of the Big Sleep team is that at present, it's likely that a target-specific fuzzer would be at least as effective (at finding vulnerabilities).
We hope that in the future this effort will lead to a significant advantage to defenders - with the potential not only to find crashing testcases, but also to provide high-quality root-cause analysis, triaging and fixing issues could be much cheaper and more effective in the future. We aim to continue sharing our research in this space, keeping the gap between the public state-of-the-art and private state-of-the-art as small as possible.”

Hasnain says:

“The letter also calls on the broadcaster to implement a series of editorial commitments including “reiterating that Israel does not give external journalists access to Gaza; making it clear when there is insufficient evidence to back up Israeli claims; making clear where Israel is the perpetrator in article headlines; including regular historical context predating October 2023; and robustly challenging Israeli government and military representatives in all interviews”.”

Hasnain says:

This is going unquoted because I cannot find a single non horrifying thing to quote.

Hasnain says:

“The false citations do point to how AI misinformation can influence state policy, however — especially if high-level state officials use the technology as a drafting shorthand that causes mistakes that end up in public documents and official resolutions.”