Hasnain says:

This is going to give me nightmares as I sleep because what the heck, man

“So to put a bow on this:

The o3 model isn’t smoke and mirrors, tricking us by only using EXIF data. It’s at a comparable Geoguessr skill level to Master I or better players now (at least according to my own ~20 or so rounds of testing).

Humans still hold a big edge in decision time—most of my guesses were < 2 min, o3 often took > 4 min.”

Spoofing EXIF data doesn’t throw off the model.

Whether you view this as dystopian or as a technological marvel - or both - you can’t claim it’s a parlor trick.”

Hasnain says:

Great work by some great folks here, gonna bookmark this for late re-reading

“In some instances, the LLM resorted to “cheating” by producing patches that superficially resolved the issue without addressing the underlying problem. This can occur when the generator modifies or removes code in a way that prevents the crash from occurring, but does not actually fix the root cause of the issue. We observed that cheating happens more frequently when we request the LLM to retry within the same trajectory. A potential solution to this could be to empower the LLM to say “I cannot fix it,” which may come with a tradeoff with success rate. However, note that most of the cheating was caught in the verification step, highlighting the utility of differential testing.”

Hasnain says:

If I was still at Meta this would probably go in the clowntown group

"Personally, I use a solid color background. It was the default in Windows 95,¹ and I’ve stuck with that bluish-green background color ever since. It’s sort of like my comfort food.

Imagine my surprise when someone pointed me to a support article titled “The Welcome screen may be displayed for 30 seconds during the logon process after you set a solid color as the desktop background in Windows 7 or in Windows Server 2008 R2.” Why is logon slower with a solid background?"

Hasnain says:

We must bear witness. I did not think I’d be agreeing with “the American Conservative” but here I am.

“As the days roll on and the death toll piles up, how will future generations remember the role we played in this disaster? Will they view us, and Trump, as peacemakers and not the ones that looked away? It is not our responsibility or in our interest to save the world, true, but it’s also naive to believe that we do not play a sizable role in permitting Israel’s continued bombardment and starvation of the Palestinian people. Something must change and quickly or the blood of innocents will forever be stapled to the recorded rule of Trump and the MAGA right.”

Hasnain says:

““God did the State of Israel a favor that Biden was the president during this period, because it could have been much worse. We fought [in Gaza] for over a year and the administration never came to us and said, ‘ceasefire now.’ It never did. And that’s not to be taken for granted,” the former Israeli ambassador said.”

Hasnain says:

Gotta love fun bugs and UB

“This was the most interesting bug I’ve encountered for a while. I initially had a hard time believing that a bug like this would directly tie to a specific OS release, but I was proven completely wrong. At the end of the day, it was a simple bug in San Andreas and this function should have never worked right, and yet, at least on PC it hid itself for two decades.

This is an interesting lesson in compatibility: even changes to the stack layout of the internal implementations can have compatibility implications if an application is bugged and unintentionally relies on a specific behavior. This is also not the first time I encountered issues like this: regular visitors might remember Bully: Scholarship Edition which famously broke on Windows 10, for very similar reasons. Just like in this case, Bully should have never worked properly to begin with, but instead, it got away with making incorrect assumptions for years, before changes in Windows 10 finally made it run out of luck.

Yet again, we are reminded to:

Validate your input data – San Andreas was notoriously bad at this, and ultimately this was the main reason why an incomplete config line remained unnoticed.
Not ignore the compilation warnings – this code most likely threw a warning in the original code that was either ignored or disabled!
In the end, the GTA players are lucky: in many other games, issues like this would’ve remained unfixed and they’d become a folk legend. Thankfully, GTAs are moddable and well understood, so we can act upon problems like this and ensure the game stays functional for many more years to come.”

Hasnain says:

Ooooof. I have heard people talk about these group chats and elite cabals before, but oof. Especially that screenshot at the end.

“The tone was jesting, but “Marc radicalized over time,” Hanania recalled. Hanania said he found himself increasingly alienated from the group and the shift toward partisan pro-Trump politics, and he came to see the chat he’d established as a “vehicle for groupthink.” (A friend of Andreessen’s said it was Hanania, not Andreessen, who had shifted his politics.) The group continues without him.

Hanania argued with the other members “about whether it’s a good idea to buy into Trump’s election denial stuff. I’d say, ‘That’s not true and that actually matters.’ I got the sense these guys didn’t want to hear it,” he said. “There’s an idea that you don’t criticize, because what really matters is defeating the left.” He left the group in June of 2023.”

Hasnain says:

Ugh. That line about these being fringe test cases was a bit much though. Like has that PR person never talked to the average AI chatbot user?

[ insert joke about how the propaganda was better in my day ]

“It’s not an accident that Meta’s chatbots can speak this way. Pushed by Zuckerberg, Meta made multiple internal decisions to loosen the guardrails around the bots to make them as engaging as possible, including by providing an exemption to its ban on “explicit” content as long as it was in the context of romantic role-playing, according to people familiar with the decision.”.

Hasnain says:

Now I want to drive down to shawarmaji again

“For Abutaha, keeping his food “authentic” isn’t just about holding on to traditions, but also using them as a way to spark conversation about each dish’s Palestinian origins. On the surface, Shawarmaji has a typical shawarma spot menu: falafel, chicken and beef shawarma, and a range of Levantine salads. “My path is more about recreating the food I grew up eating, preserving the culture and the original food,” Abutaha explains. His food reclaims the flavors of Palestine and Jordan, even if it’s just by simply preserving the original spices and cooking methods, resisting the need for it to be “whitewashed” or “catered to a certain audience.”

However, this approach isn’t always met with positive reviews. He acknowledges, “You know, people aren’t gonna like the garlic sauce — ‘it’s too garlicky, blah, blah, blah,’ — but that’s something I didn’t wanna compromise on because that’s how I ate it.” By keeping the garlic sauce authentic to how it’s served in Jordan, Abutaha hopes to preserve all the hard work that went into creating shawarma — the years of his ancestors’ labor that ought to be remembered. “

Hasnain says:

“Gluing together their long-timescale breakthrough with previous work on deriving the Euler and Navier-Stokes equations from the Boltzmann equation unifies three theories of fluid dynamics. The finding justifies taking different perspectives on fluids based on what’s most useful in context because mathematically they converge on one ultimate theory describing one reality. Assuming that the proof is correct, it breaks new ground in Hilbert’s program. We can only hope that with just such fresh approaches, the dam will burst on Hilbert’s challenges and more physics will flow downstream.”

Hasnain says:

“Sometimes the volunteers hide their favourite plants under rock slates to conceal them from potential poachers. Since the cacti tend to have highly localised endemisms with small populations found only in specific sites, poachers can wipe out a whole species with a couple of flicks of a chisel, they say.
An increase in road construction and irregular housing has allowed more and more people to access the harsh and secluded desert habitat where Copiapoa live. "You open the window for poaching," says Pablo Guerrero, a cactus researcher at the Universidad de Concepción in Chile. Social media has also made it easier for collectors to find each other, while regulation and enforcement are much slower to catch up.
"Most countries in the world are very naive in the face of this kind of poaching," says Guerrero. "They say, 'They're plants, who cares, they're cacti, they all look the same'."”

Hasnain says:

“Most engineers can glue. Few can forge. But the ones who can — they create leverage that compounds.

If you’re lucky enough to find one: Don’t waste them on CRUD.

when you find one: Don’t give them your Jira board. Give them your hardest problem. Get out of their way. Let them build.”

Hasnain says:

Neat little tricks here. Secret management is hard

"Most of the leaked secrets were found in binary files that had been committed to the repository and later deleted. These files are typically generated by compilers or automated processes. A common example is .pyc files, which are Python byte-code files created when some Python interpreters compile source code. These often end up being committed unintentionally. Other examples include compiler-generated debug files, such as .pdb files, which are also occasionally committed by mistake."

Hasnain says:

… yeah not sure how I feel about this one

“Cluely has published a manifesto comparing itself to inventions like the calculator and spellcheck, which were originally derided as “cheating.””

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking for future re-reading.

Hasnain says:

This was pretty motivational.

“These models are incredibly powerful now. 300 lines of code and three tools and now you’re to be able to talk to an alien intelligence that edits your code. If you think “well, but we didn’t really…” — go and try it! Go and see how far you can get with this. I bet it’s a lot farther than you think.

That’s why we think everything’s changing.”

Hasnain says:

I felt this in my bones.

"Even if you don’t personally hold these values, the vast majority of us are members of societies that do. But resistance is very possible. If everyone’s good at their job, shop there. If you need help with something, find a local company or self-employed person to pay directly — and tip them. If something feels like a massive deal, someone or some part of the earth is paying steeply for it, and chances are high you will pay more for it (in replacement costs, in labor, in time) later. And if you’re forced to use a company with bad services and bad products, the fault is very rarely the worker themselves, but the organization that makes it so difficult for them to be good at their job.

I’m not saying we should all spend more money on everything. Or that we should collectively lower our standards and accept shoddy work. I keenly understand that part of the reason we rely on these exploitative services is because we, ourselves, are subject to the demands of the same economy: one that tells us our time is always better spent working or recovering from work, instead of helping others with their bedframe assembly or, say, shopping in person.

But I do think it’s worth wondering: what would happen, how might the paradigm shift, if we continue normalizing paying far more for far less?"

Hasnain says:

"The reason why I think this is true is because we did a lot of work in developer experience with those macros that maybe look a bit shocking if you don't know UI programming, but actually they felt very familiar to UI engineers. They could work with it right off the bat, they don't have to deal with much complexity in the borrow checker. Usually, in the UI code, you can clone things if necessary, or even use a Rc and things like that. You all know, this is not super optimal. Yes, we came from JavaScript, so this is fine, I promise. The gnarly bits are down in the engine, and there we take a lot of care about data management and memory and so on. In the UI code, we can afford it easy. Even on the lowest level hardware, I have some slides that you'll see the impact of this."

Hasnain says:

“If paraparticles exist, they’ll most likely be emergent particles, called quasiparticles, that show up as energetic vibrations in certain quantum materials.

“We might get new models of exotic phases, which were difficult to understand before, that you can now solve easily using paraparticles,” said Meng Cheng (opens a new tab), a physicist at Yale University who was not involved in the research.”

Hasnain says:

“But the American higher-education sector is much more than a supplicant kneeling at the foot of the federal government. For better or for worse, it is absolutely central to the nation’s economy and society. And a big part of that centrality—one that some of us in academia try hard to ignore—is the spectacle of college sports. College and university sports teams are proudly represented on bumper stickers, billboards, hoodies, and barroom TVs in every city and every state.

All that a small group of university presidents has to do is hit pause on that spectacle for one season. In doing so, they’ll save millions of dollars and also broadcast to the nation that a cherished and essential American institution is under attack from its own government.”

Hasnain says:

“This was just one protest in one place—albeit one very large protest in one very big place. Perhaps the vibes were different in Marshfield, Mass. or Salt Lake City or Bolivia, N.C. (Hopefully the weather was.) Ultimately the big story is not what the signs said, but the deep groundswell of anger and unrest that brought so many people in so many places out into the streets and other public spaces of their communities. The message is: crowd large. A lot of politicians and administrators and business leaders, in bowing to Trump, have drawn confidence and comfort from the perceived vibe shift. Events like this puncture that delusion. They are an unavoidable illustration of outrage. Trump may have gotten a lot undone in the last three months, but the opposition never went away, and it may finally be emboldened.

On Saturday, it showed that it is everywhere.”