Hasnain says:

Climate change :( With the heat waves around the world and now this…

“Mexico City gets about a quarter of its water from the Cutzamala system, a series of reservoirs, water treatment plants and lengthy canals and tunnels, which is running dry. Some say the system could be unable to provide water by June 26, known as “Day Zero” in the metropolitan area of 22 million, although scientists say rainfall could avert that disaster. As of May 21, the Cutzamala system is at 28 percent of its capacity, according to the Basin Agency for the Valley of Mexico, a historic low.”

Hasnain says:

“The Israeli government evidently felt Bensouda was vulnerable because she came from a tiny African state, the Gambia. One source for the Guardian explained the Israeli government’s thinking: “With Bensouda, she’s black and African, so who cares?”

Israel misjudged Bensouda. She impressively resisted this intimidation effort. Once she received assurance from the court in February 2021 that Palestine had sufficient status as a state to join it and confer jurisdiction, she acted. Her term was about to end in June 2021, so she could have handed the problem to Khan, but instead, in March 2021, she opened the investigation that has now implicated Israeli officials.”

Hasnain says:

““I think these statements blow me away, the scale of these numbers with young voters,” Evan Roth Smith, Blueprint’s lead pollster, told Semafor. “Young voters do not look at our politics and see any good guys. They see a dying empire led by bad people.””

Hasnain says:

"The problem is that certain medicines necessarily given to these donors before death, but in expectation of death, may hasten their death. The medicines are given for the sole purpose of making their organs more viable for transplantation. Heparin, for example, prevents blood clotting, while phentolamine dilates blood vessels and improves blood flow to the organs. Yet heparin also increases the chances of bleeding into the brain, while phentolamine may lower blood pressure to the degree that a person goes into shock. Although these patients are near death for other reasons, the medicines may become their actual cause of death. This makes doctors uneasy; hence the rule not to give these medicines to donors prone to bleeding or with low blood pressure."

Hasnain says:

"So, the reasons we don’t have widespread graph support:

* There are many different kinds of graphs
* There are many different representations of each kind of graph
* There are many different graph algorithms
* Graph algorithm performance is very sensitive to graph representation and implementation details
* People run very expensive algorithms on very big graphs.

This explains why languages don’t support graphs in their standard libraries: too many design decisions, too many tradeoffs, and too much maintenance burden. It explains why programmers might avoid third party graph libraries, because they’re either too limited or too slow. And it explains why programmers might not want to think about things in terms of graphs except in extreme circumstances: it’s just too hard to work with them."

Hasnain says:

I did a double take when I first read that Atlantic piece because what depraved demon from the depths of hell do you have to be to go out and imply “yes it was legal to kill this child and it’s unfortunate to imply we were illegally killing this child (which would be bad)”

“Think about the kind of worldview which could publish something like that. This made it through the entire editing process in a mainstream liberal publication.

Anyone who’s been following the Gaza genocide on social media today will be seeing this phrase “legally killed child” alongside footage of children ripped apart by Israeli military explosives in a civilian displacement camp — a pairing which, if you have a beating heart in your chest and a functioning empathy center in your brain, will spark a very special kind of rage inside you.

The way these two points dance together just says so much about what we’re dealing with here, when you take a step back and really look at it. It says so much about Israel. It says so much about western civilization. It says so much about the western press in general and liberal war propaganda rags like The Atlantic in particular. It says so much about the kind of mainstream political worldview which could allow for such a thing to exist. And it says we live in a civilization that has gone completely, utterly insane.”

Hasnain says:

“Dr H.A. Hellyer, a scholar of security studies and the Middle East at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the Biden administration risks “a massive blow to American credibility, such as it is,” if it fails to support the court’s order.

“The ICJ ruling is not in the abstract, nor is it in need of detailed interpretation. It’s very clear,” he said. “This is the highest court in the world, and they’ve said any action in Rafah that could bring about the destruction of Palestinians needs to immediately stop. So you either support international law or you don’t.””

Hasnain says:

“In a message to employees that was leaked to Vox, OpenAI chief strategy officer Jason Kwon acknowledged that the provision had been in place since 2019 but that “The team did catch this ~month ago. The fact that it went this long before the catch is on me.”

But there's a problem with those apologies from company leadership. Company documents obtained by Vox with signatures from Altman and Kwon complicate their claim that the clawback provisions were something they hadn’t known about. A separation letter on the termination documents, which you can read embedded below, says in plain language, “If you have any vested Units ... you are required to sign a release of claims agreement within 60 days in order to retain such Units.” It is signed by Kwon, along with OpenAI VP of people Diane Yoon (who departed OpenAI recently). The secret ultra-restrictive NDA, signed for only the “consideration” of already vested equity, is signed by COO Brad Lightcap.”

Hasnain says:

More relevant today especially given the equity drama

“Every single thing that Sam Altman and OpenAI does is suspicious, and it has been for months, ever since Altman was fired and then rehired as CEO with — to this day — little or no explanation. Sam Altman has repeatedly said things that, if any founder with less power, presence, access and funding had said, they'd be laughed at, ignored, and treated like fantasists. Altman is the P.T. Barnum of tech, with just enough knowledge to be dangerous but far too little to actually say anything of note. He is not the technical mind behind OpenAI, he did not write its models, and looking up to him as some sort of technolojesus is bad for the tech industry and worse for the world. This is not a person that should be making decisions about the future of the tech industry, nor should he be allowed to spout fan fiction and automatically have it covered as gospel.”

Hasnain says:

Comes as Blinken admitted he would rather starve children across the globe (threatening to pull funding from UN programs that feed kids) than accept that the ICC has a valid warrant.

Dark day in history

Hasnain says:

"Stanford Law School's Mark Lemley told Reuters he was skeptical Google’s gambit would prevail. He said a jury could ultimately decide higher damages than whatever Google put forward.

“Antitrust cases regularly go to juries. I think it is a sign that Google is worried about what a jury will do,” Lemley said.

Another legal scholar, Herbert Hovenkamp of the University of Pennsylvania’s law school, called Google's move "smart" in a post on X. “Juries are bad at deciding technical cases, and further they do not have the authority to order a breakup,” he wrote.

The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 2016 case that an offer for “complete relief” did not wipe out a class-action claim. But Google argued its payment is different, because it submitted an actual check and not merely an offer."

Hasnain says:

Of course.

“OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who has said the 2013 Spike Jonze film is his favorite movie, invited comparisons by posting the word "Her" on X after the company announced the new ChatGPT version. But later, OpenAI executives denied any connection between Johansson and the new voice assistant.

The company said in a post on X just before midnight Pacific time Sunday that the voice would be paused as it addresses "questions about how we chose the voices in ChatGPT." A company spokeswoman would not provide further detail.”

Hasnain says:

As the president, who was he insubordinate to?!

“The punishment marks perhaps the harshest disciplinary action against a campus chancellor or president in California over the handling of protests of the war in Gaza. It also underscores an unwillingness to divest from Israeli weapons manufacturers — as pro-Palestinian protesters across the country have increasingly demanded the last few months — among leaders of the CSU system and its sister University of California system.”

Hasnain says:

From being part of the AIPAC lobby to the state department to this. Kudos.

Still hoping for more mass resignations at this point.

““The United States has long enabled Israeli war crimes and the status quo of apartheid and occupation. That status quo does not keep Israelis safe, nor Jews around the world. It certainly does not protect Palestinians, who have the right to freedom, safety, self-determination and dignity, just as much as Jewish people do, and every person does,” Call wrote. “Any system that requires the subjugation of one group over another is not only unjust, but unsafe.””

“"Nakba and Shoah, the Hebrew word for Holocaust, mean the same thing: catastrophe. I reject the premise that one people’s salvation must come at another’s destruction. I am committed to creating a world where this does not happen…this cannot be done from within the Biden Admin."”

Hasnain says:

“Harm an American, and we will respond” - Joe Biden

*terms and conditions may apply. Valid exclusions include: you are brown or helping brown people

“UPWARD OF 20 American doctors are trapped in Gaza as a result of Israel’s post-invasion closure of the Rafah border crossing into Egypt, according to sources with knowledge of the plight of two ill-fated medical missions.

Israel has blocked fuel, food, and water from entering Rafah for over a week, leading to severe dehydration among the general population, as well as among the doctors on mission.”

Hasnain says:

“The student left is the most reliably correct constituency in America. Over the past 60 years, it has passed every great moral test American foreign policy has forced upon the public, including the Vietnam war, the question of relations with apartheid South Africa, and the Iraq war. Student activists were at the heart of the black civil rights movement from the very beginning. To much derision and abuse, they pushed for more rights, protections and respect for women and queer people on their campuses than the wider world was long willing to provide. And over the past 20 years in particular, policymakers have arrived belatedly to stances on economic inequality, climate change, drug policy and criminal justice that putative radicals on campus took up long before them.”

Hasnain says:

“Is Nagle needed?

First, the uncontroversial take: if you’re building a latency-sensitive distributed system running on modern datacenter-class hardware, enable TCP_NODELAY (disable Nagle’s algorithm) without worries. You don’t need to feel bad. It’s not a sin. It’s OK. Just go ahead.

More controversially, I suspect that Nagle’s algorithm just isn’t needed on modern systems, given the traffic and application mix, and the capabilities of the hardware we have today. In other words, TCP_NODELAY should be the default. That’s going to make some “write every byte” code slower than it would otherwise be, but those applications should be fixed anyway if we care about efficiency.”

Hasnain says:

“From a philosophical point of view, we think a frame shift is in order. A “register” certainly shouldn’t be a 32-bit word like on the CPUs of old. And a 1024-bit wide vector register, as CUDA uses, is certainly a step in the right direction. But to us a “register” is a 16x16 tile of data. We think AI wants this -- after all this time, it’s still just matrix multiplies, reductions, and reshapes. And we think the hardware wants this, too -- small matrix multiplies are just begging for hardware support beyond just the systolic mma.

In fact, more broadly we believe we should really reorient our ideas of AI around what maps well onto the hardware. How big should a recurrent state be? As big can fit onto an SM. How dense should the compute be? No less so than what the hardware demands. An important future direction of this work for us is to use our learnings about the hardware to help us design the AI to match.”

Hasnain says:

“Senator Chris Van Hollen on the Blinken-Netanyahu report: ""If this conduct complies with international standards, God help us all".”

Hasnain says:

Powerful words written by anti-Zionist Jews - all the way back in 1929. How prescient and relevant to the modern day, sadly.

“The Zionist devil, with its criminal, irresponsible demagogic agitation, has convinced the “helpless” Jews, the naïve masses, that it will return them to their national home under the protection of the expansive, powerful wings of that great biblical people, the English. The gullible, naïve masses took this at face value and set upon the conquest of Palestine’s land with cries of “Hurrah!” under the British flag and assisted by English battalions. This pitiful people, agitated by Zionist demagoguery, was not content with just conquering the land, with just becoming the owners of the land, but they also joyfully began a new campaign: the conquest of labor[5] with the slogan “Swój do swego,”[6] under which they themselves suffered in their land of Poland and condemned as an injustice.

It was not enough simply to steal the Arab’s land; we needed to then drive him from his land! Jews wanted to consolidate all rights for themselves. When it looked like a certain right would fall into the hands of the Arabs and do them good, the Zionists began an outcry: “The Philistines are upon you, Israel!” The goal is to turn the Arab into a disenfranchised, degraded creature which should never stop shaking in fear at the thought of the Jewish landowner.”

Hasnain says:

This is insane.

“They said the outage was caused by a misconfiguration that resulted in UniSuper’s cloud account being deleted, something that had never happened to Google Cloud before.

“Google Cloud CEO, Thomas Kurian has confirmed that the disruption arose from an unprecedented sequence of events whereby an inadvertent misconfiguration during provisioning of UniSuper’s Private Cloud services ultimately resulted in the deletion of UniSuper’s Private Cloud subscription,” the pair said.”

Hasnain says:

“Depending on the age of your APIs, you will have a diverging history of how they are represented to customers. That may be as simple as path parameters being inconsistent or perhaps something more complex like different HTTP methods for updates. While you can handle these individually at any sort of scale, that just isn’t feasible. As of this post, Cloudflare offers roughly 1,300 publicly documented endpoints, and we needed a more automatable solution. For us, that was codemods. Codemods are a way of applying transformations to perform large scale refactoring of your codebase. This allows you to programmatically rewrite expressions, syntax or other parts of your code without having to manually go through every file. Think of it like find and replace, but on steroids and with more context of the underlying language constructs.”

Hasnain says:

““Israel must cease all hostilities and States must end the export of all weapons immediately. These States can no longer ignore the fact that the weapons are being used to kill and maim innocent women and children. There can be no more excuses,” the experts said. “Women and children are entitled to special protection under international humanitarian law and human rights law”.”

Hasnain says:

This is mob like behavior.

““Target Israel and we will target you,” the senators tell Khan, adding that they will “sanction your employees and associates, and bar you and your families from the United States.”

Rather ominously, the letter concludes: “You have been warned.””

Hasnain says:

“Acute malnutrition rates there among children under 5 have surged from 1% before the war to 30% five months later, the USAID official said. The official called it the fastest such climb in hunger in recent history, more than in grave conflicts and food shortages in Somalia or South Sudan.

One of the few medical facilities still operating in northern Gaza, Kamal Adwan hospital, is besieged by parents bringing in thousands of children with malnutrition for treatment, the official said. Aid officials believe many more starving children remain unseen and in need, with families unable to bring them through fighting and checkpoints for care.”

Hasnain says:

Google argues this was a standard policy and wasn’t malicious, which is kinda hilarious given the below HN comment (and the fact that they were ordered to change this default by the court and just… didn’t).

“We have evidence that Google execs instructed their relations to turn off chat specifically to avoid future discovery [1]. Excerpt from this document :

> In one Chat, Mr. Pichai began discussing a substantive topic, and then immediately wrote: “also can we change the setting of this group to history off.”1 Then, nine seconds later, Mr. Pichai apparently attempted (unsuccessfully) to delete this incriminating message.”

“>All this time, Google falsely told the United States that Google had "put a legal hold in place" that "suspends auto-deletion." Indeed, during the United States' investigation and the discovery phase of this litigation, Google repeatedly misrepresented its document preservation policies, which conveyed the false impression that the company was preserving all custodial chats. Not only did Google unequivocally assert during the investigation that its legal hold suspended auto-deletion, but Google continually failed to disclose—both to the United States and to the Court—its 24-hour auto-deletion policy. Instead, at every turn, Google reaffirmed that it was preserving and searching all potentially relevant written communications.”

Hasnain says:

“Perhaps the most important thing about this segment, though, is that it exists at all—that it was deemed acceptable for Bash to air something so clearly biased and incendiary about such a sensitive topic. CNN executives would have lost their minds if Bash compared pro-Israel protesters to Nazi sympathizers, or even if she used disputed terms like “apartheid” or “genocide” to describe Israel’s behavior. But this kind of unhinged screed against the pro-Palestinian movement is apparently just fine. People supporting Palestine get to be written off as violent, Nazi-like extremists without a second thought, and CNN viewers tuning in for a supposedly fact-based look at the world get told that this is objective reality.

It’s just shameful. It’s so, so, so shameful. Bash and CNN disgraced themselves with this segment. The one good thing to come from this is that we know exactly who they are now.”

Hasnain says:

“Some on campus said they were stunned it took so long before officials stepped in to stop the clashes.

Ananya Roy, a professor of urban planning, social welfare and geography, condemned UCLA’s lack of response to the counterprotesters.

“It gives people impunity to come to our campus as a rampaging mob,” she said early Wednesday. “The word is out they can do this repeatedly and get away with it. I am ashamed of my university.””

Hasnain says:

And this was written yesterday - before today’s madness.

“I need not say much else. You’ve been condemned by your faculty, by the majority of students, and by scholars and human rights activists around the world. You are keeping no one safe, except for your donors, trustees, and Columbia’s endowment. Among these same trustees and donors are persons who have vowed to punish these students by blocking them from future employment.”