Hasnain says:

“"Worden hired contractors at Navarro's direction to remodel a section of the station that had been previously used as office space to add, among other upgrades, a kitchen, shower, heating, plumbing and security cameras," the DA's office said in a statement.”

Hasnain says:

“For the past year, I worked for the office devoted to promoting human rights in the Middle East. I believe strongly in the mission and in the important work of that office. However, as a representative of a government that is directly enabling what the International Court of Justice has said could plausibly be a genocide in Gaza, such work has become almost impossible. Unable to serve an administration that enables such atrocities, I have decided to resign from my position at the Department of State.

Whatever credibility the United States had as an advocate for human rights has almost entirely vanished since the war began. “

Hasnain says:

Something I get to brag about while having contributed absolutely nothing to.

“ It is an especially capable code model, surpassing specialized models like CodeLLaMA-70B on programming, in addition to its strength as a general-purpose LLM.

This state-of-the-art quality comes with marked improvements in training and inference performance. DBRX advances the state-of-the-art in efficiency among open models thanks to its fine-grained mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture. Inference is up to 2x faster than LLaMA2-70B, and DBRX is about 40% of the size of Grok-1 in terms of both total and active parameter-counts. When hosted on Mosaic AI Model Serving, DBRX can generate text at up to 150 tok/s/user. Our customers will find that training MoEs is also about 2x more FLOP-efficient than training dense models for the same final model quality. End-to-end, our overall recipe for DBRX (including the pretraining data, model architecture, and optimization strategy) can match the quality of our previous-generation MPT models with nearly 4x less compute.”

Hasnain says:

“I HAVE ORGANIZED airlifts of women legislators, judges, and journalists out of Afghanistan as Kabul fell; delivered ongoing aid to Ukrainian front-line villages during Russia’s invasion; worked on efforts to build runways, roads, and highways to deliver aid to Rwandan refugees after the genocide; and delivered aid shipments to enclaves besieged and under attack by the Syrian army.

None of it prepared me for the challenges of trying to bring a few trucks of food and medicine per week into the Gaza Strip.

It’s easy to point the finger at Israel, the country that is implementing the blockade of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents, half of whom are children. Yet trying to work the issue from every angle on a daily basis to get urgent medical and food aid in, I’ve come to the conclusion that President Joe Biden, for whom I hosted fundraisers and worked to elect in 2020, has signed on to Israel’s end goal of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza.”

Hasnain says:

“I did this whole project on my phone #
Here’s the thing I enjoy most about using Code Interpreter for these kinds of prototypes: since the prompts are short, and there’s usually a delay of 30s+ between each prompt while it does its thing, I can do the whole thing on my phone while doing other things.

In this particular case I started out in bed, then got up, fed the dog, made coffee and pottered around the house for a bit—occasionally glancing back at my screen and poking it in a new direction with another prompt.

This almost doesn’t count as a project at all. It started out as mild curiosity, and I only started taking it seriously when it became apparent that it was likely to produce a working result.

I only switched to my laptop right at the end, to try out the macOS compilation steps.

Total time invested: around an hour, but that included various other morning activities (coffee, dog maintenance, letting out the chickens.)”

Hasnain says:

As someone who’s recently become a convert, I need to get around to blogging about my process here. (And maybe use AI for it)

“There are many legitimate criticisms of LLMs. The copyright issues involved in their training, their enormous power consumption and the risks of people trusting them when they shouldn’t (considering both accuracy and bias) are three that I think about a lot.

The one criticism I wont accept is that they aren’t useful.

One of the greatest misconceptions concerning LLMs is the idea that they are easy to use. They really aren’t: getting great results out of them requires a great deal of experience and hard-fought intuition, combined with deep domain knowledge of the problem you are applying them to.”

Hasnain says:

From one of the world’s foremost experts on famine.

“Israel has had ample warning of what will happen if it continues its campaign of destroying everything necessary to sustain life. The IPC’s Famine Review Committee report on 21 December authoritatively warned of starvation if Israel did not cease destruction and failed to allow humanitarian aid at scale. Israel’s own judge nominated to sit at the international court of justice, Aharon Barak, voted with the court’s majority in favour of “immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance”.

Israel has not changed course. The supplies entering Gaza are woefully short of the minimum calories Israel specified before the war. American airdrops of supplies and an emergency port are a pitiful pretence of a substitute.

Famine is unfolding in Gaza today. We should not have to wait until we count the graves of children to speak its name.”

Hasnain says:

“"Greed has been fucking this whole thing up for so long, since I started," Vincke said, while collecting the GDCA Best Narrative award for Baldur's Gate 3. "I've been fighting publishers my entire life and I keep on seeing the same, same, same mistakes over, and over.

"It's always the quarterly profits," he continued, "the only thing that matters are the numbers, and then you fire everybody and then next year you say 'shit I'm out of developers' and then you start hiring people again, and then you do acquisitions, and then you put them in the same loop again, and it's just broken...”

"You don't have to," Vincke went on. "You can make reserves. Just slow down a bit. Slow down on the greed. Be resilient, take care of the people, don't lose the institutional knowledge that's been built up in the people you lose every single time, so you have to go through the same cycle over and over and over. It really pisses me off."

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking so I can try this later.

"Do you know how to read @@ -5,6 +5,7 @@ syntax? Difftastic shows the actual line numbers from your files, both before and after."

Hasnain says:

“The lawsuit, filed to a federal court in New Jersey, alleges that Apple used "a series of shapeshifting rules" in a bid to "thwart innovation" and "throttle" competitors.

In a statement, Attorney General Merrick Garland said the company "undermines apps, products and services that would otherwise make users less reliant on the iPhone... and lower costs for consumers and developers".”

Hasnain says:

Late stage capitalism.

“But a customer service representative said that wouldn’t be possible because Shepherd’s subscription to the satellite service had expired, according to a new lawsuit. The employee said he couldn’t help until a $150 payment was made, the complaint said.”

Hasnain says:

“Castro quickly and successfully moved to repeal the ZEDEs law in the face of intense bipartisan U.S. pressure to maintain them. The American response has been to repudiate the very idea of Honduran democracy and sovereignty, with investors using the World Bank’s ICSID to force the new Honduran government to respect the policies carried out by the former president now sitting behind federal bars.”

Hasnain says:

Why are finances even a question here?

““Lately, Boeing appoints C.E.O.s that seem more focused on stock price and dividends than on flight safety and production quality,” said Dennis Tajer, a captain at American Airlines and a spokesman for the union that represents the airline’s pilots.
Boeing declined to comment.

How Boeing navigates its latest crisis in the coming weeks and months could have broad implications for its credibility with regulators, airlines and travelers, as well as its long-term financial performance.”

Hasnain says:

Amazing.

“Meta was apparently tipped off to this alleged betrayal when Khurana used his Meta email and network access to complete a writing assignment for Omniva as part of his hiring process. For this writing assignment, Khurana "disclosed non-public information about Meta’s relationship with certain suppliers that it uses for its data centers" when asked to "explain how he would help his potential new employer develop the supply chain for a company building data centers using specific technologies."

In a seeming attempt to cover up the alleged theft of Meta documents, Khurana apparently "attempted to scrub" one document "of its references to Meta," as well as removing a label marking it "CONFIDENTIAL—FOR INTERNAL USE ONLY.” But when replacing "Meta" with "X," Khurana allegedly missed the term "Meta" in "at least five locations."”

Hasnain says:

“In the end, product security is a red herring; it’s enterprise security that urgently needs a paradigm shift. I know that we’ll end up with more regulation for software development: the narratives of “market failures” are unfalsifiable and it’s the nature of all bureaucracies to amass influence and expand. But I think we’re barking up the wrong tree.”

Hasnain says:

From 2021 but still super relevant.

“But whether this or another approach is the best solution is not the key question. What matters is that housing shortages may be the biggest problem facing our era, and solving it needs to become everyone’s highest priority. And as important as it is, we should be wary of letting it become politically tribalised: the disastrous politicisation of Covid vaccines in the United States highlights the danger of that. Some kind of creative, below-the-radar solution that turns this zero-sum game into a positive-sum one is likely to have a better chance. In a tug of war, it’s often surprising how far you can go if you tug the rope sideways.

If we’re right about this, it means that fixing this one problem could make everyone’s lives much better than almost anyone realises – not just by making houses cheaper, but giving people better jobs, a better quality of life, more cohesive communities, bigger families and healthier lives. It could even give renewed reasons to be optimistic about the future of the West.”

Hasnain says:

“The situation has sparked immense alarm and outrage among professional humanitarian groups, many of whom blasted Biden’s recent new proposals for Gaza.

“Oxfam does not support U.S. airdrops to Gaza, which would mostly serve to relieve the guilty consciences of senior U.S. officials,” Scott Paul of Oxfam America recently wrote on X.”

Hasnain says:

Did they just assassinate the whistleblower? (If this was a novel and a dystopia..)

“Boeing denied his assertions. However, a 2017 review by the US regulator, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), did uphold some of Mr Barnett's concerns.”

Hasnain says:

“A quick experiment with Claude suggests this approach could be promising (with some prompting, Claude was able to generate a program to generate an input to trigger the Heartbleed-style vulnerability mentioned above). But of course further work is needed to validate this approach and work out what challenges need to be overcome to make it practical (if indeed it can be made practical).

That’s certainly more work than can be squeezed into the odd free moment on a heatwave weekend.”

Hasnain says:

“In August of 2023, a month before Jager and Esch reached their plea agreements with prosecutors, this unidentified male co-conspirator escaped from prison. This triggered a nationwide manhunt and caused Esch and his family "to go into hiding," as stated in a court document. Two weeks after the escape, the co-conspirator was found dead.”

Hasnain says:

“Research Medical Center didn’t provide exact numbers but said in a statement that it treated dozens of people who had experienced frostbite during an 11-day cold snap in January. Twelve of those people — including some who were at the Jan. 13 game — had to undergo amputations involving mostly fingers and toes. And the hospital said more surgeries are expected over the next two to four weeks as “injuries evolve.””

Hasnain says:

“Currently, the hospital’s wards have 44 babies under 10 days old with weights as low as 2 kilograms (4 pounds), some on life support. Every incubator has at least three premature babies in it, raising the risk of infection. Al-Shair said he fears some will meet the same fate when returned home.

“We treat them now but God knows what the future will be,” he said.”

Hasnain says:

Excited to try this out. Some of the new fuzzing results people posted today are mind blowing.

“Claude 3 Opus, March 4th. This is just a few days old and wow: the vibes on this one are really strong. People I know who evaluate LLMs closely are rating it as the first clear GPT-4 beater. I’ve switched to it as my default model for a bunch of things, most conclusively for code—I’ve had several experiences recently where a complex GPT-4 prompt that produced broken JavaScript gave me a perfect working answer when run through Opus instead (recent example). I also enjoyed Anthropic research engineer Amanda Askell’s detailed breakdown of their system prompt”

Hasnain says:

“From accounts of people on the ground, videos and photographs of deadly episode after episode, plus the resultant mortalities from blocking or smashing the crucial necessities of life, a more likely estimate, in my appraisal, is that at least 200,000 Palestinians must have perished by now and the toll is accelerating by the hour.

Imagine Americans, if this powerful U.S.-made weaponry was fired on the besieged, homeless, trapped people of Philadelphia, do you think that only 30,000 of that city’s 1.5 million people would have been killed?”

Hasnain says:

“DeWitt, writing in his solo book Chile Peppers: A Global History, says TAM became widespread in Texas after its introduction. “It was much milder and larger than the traditional jalapeños, and genes of this mild pepper entered the general jalapeño pool. Cross-breeding caused the gene pool to become overall larger and milder.”

Since I know you’re wondering who the inventors are: the clue is in the name TAM II. The hot (but also not hot) new jalapeño is an invention of Texas A&M University. Yes, Aggies took the spice out of life.”

Hasnain says:

“EU regulators found that Apple’s actions had resulted in users paying “significantly higher prices” for music streaming services.

The iPhone maker charges a 30 per cent fee for all sales through the App Store, a cost the commission said had been passed on to consumers in the form of higher subscription charges.

As part of Monday’s ruling, the commission also banned Apple from blocking apps from offering their services outside the iPhone maker’s iOS software.”

Hasnain says:

“The graph confirms that mutex contention is highest (and therefore RWMutex is most useful!) when the arrival rate is high or the critical section has a long duration.

The graph shows something else interesting. The transition from “no contention” to “high contention” follows a straight line. If some values at the transition are taken and their product calculated, it’s clear that the product is always a constant.”

Hasnain says:

“Seriously, though, there’s one common theme to everything in this article: test your assumptions.

I assumed that exponential growth should apply to the witchcraft population in the Kat books. So I tested that assumption with models, and concluded that this applies… in certain conditions
Unckless’s formulas assumed that the Selection Coefficient is low. Because I violated the assumption, I made a simulation to find how the formula would fail.
I assumed that indexes in SQL databases magically speeds things up. I tested it out, and it slowed things down instead.
I assumed that a genealogy database is a good way to track a person’s descendants. After I analyzed the data, it became clear that it doesn’t. I came up with a new set of assumptions to explain why, but now I’m looking for ways to challenge those new assumptions.
I assume that people want to read about kids’ books, population genetics, and PostgreSQL in the same article. The jury’s still out on this one ;)”

Hasnain says:

“So far, we’ve learned that:

The initial app description is much more important than we thought
Coding is not a straight line, agents can review themselves
LLMs work best when they focus on one problem compared to multiple problems in a single prompt
Verbose logs do miracles
Splitting the codebase into smaller files helps a lot
For a human to be able to fix the code
They must be clearly shown what has been written and the idea behind it
Humans are lazy
It’s hard to get the LLM to think outside the box”

Hasnain says:

“These examples always flow in the same direction. Professor Alvaro Bedoya, the founding director of the Center on Privacy and Technology at the Georgetown University Law Center, wrote “It is a pattern throughout history that surveillance is used against those considered ‘less than’, against the poor man, the person of color, the immigrant, the heretic. It is used to try to stop marginalized people from achieving power.” The same pattern is found in the role of technology in decision systems.

The goal of many automated decision systems is to increase revenues for governments and private companies. When this is applied to health and medicine, the goal is often achieved by denying poor people food or medical care. People often trust computers to be more accurate than humans, in a bias known as automation bias.”

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking for later reference.

“Well, there you have it. A tangible, step-by-step plan to get out of the finicky situation that’s a complex legacy C++ codebase. I have just finished going through that at work on a project, and it’s become much more bearable to work on it now. I have seen coworkers, who previously would not have come within a 10 mile radius of the codebase, now make meaningful contributions. So it feels great.

There are important topics that I wanted to mention but in the end did not, such as the absolute necessity of being able to run the code in a debugger locally, fuzzing, dependency scanning for vulnerabilities, etc. Maybe for the next article!”

Hasnain says:

“The average visitor to Nome today would never guess that muskoxen were ever ghosts on the landscape. The animals adorn guidebooks and artwork at gift shops and draw wildlife viewers and photographers. With their bulky coats, sloping shoulders, short legs, and upturned horns, it’s not hard to picture them roaming alongside saber-toothed cats, wooly mammoths, and other big-bodied beasts of the Pleistocene. But all the muskoxen around Nome today have ancestors that saw the inside of a train station in New Jersey. Their reintroduction to Alaska was the result of a decades-long campaign by early 20th-century settlers and promoters, one that followed a template used many times over before and since: it was a plan for developing the Arctic, drawn up without the consent of Indigenous people.”

Hasnain says:

Lots to ponder here.

“More consequentially, the secular-political religion of the Shoah and the over-identification with Israel since the 1970s has fatally distorted the foreign policy of Israel’s main sponsor, the US. In 1982, shortly before Reagan bluntly ordered Begin to cease his ‘holocaust’ in Lebanon, a young US senator who revered Elie Wiesel as his great teacher met the Israeli prime minister. In Begin’s own stunned account of the meeting, the senator commended the Israeli war effort and boasted that he would have gone further, even if it meant killing women and children. Begin himself was taken aback by the words of the future US president, Joe Biden. ‘No, sir,’ he insisted. ‘According to our values, it is forbidden to hurt women and children, even in war ... This is a yardstick of human civilisation, not to hurt civilians.’”

Hasnain says:

I, uh, what…

“He also moved one girl’s arm and moved her body on the bed, the affidavit says. The girl “remained awake in fear that Mr. Meyden was going to do something” to her friend, according to the affidavit.

The affidavit says Meyden walked out of the room, prompting a girl to text her mother at 1:43 a.m. Sunday: “Mom please pick me up and say I had a family emergency. I don’t feel safe. I might not respond but please come get me (crying emoji), Please. Please pick up. Please. PLEASE!!””