Hasnain says:

Like.. no words at this point.

“These physicians were being fed a small amount of food once a day. Three weeks ago, that stopped. They are now completely on their own. There have been physicians and nurses who have simply passed out in the middle of the emergency department; there are people passing out during surgery. This is a completely new phenomenon in the last three weeks. When we were there, every person on our team lost between 12 and 15 pounds.
All of these physicians and nurses and environmental services people, they would work 16-18 hours, then they would walk home, sometimes an hour or an hour and a half, to get into their small tent with their family, then get up at 5 or 6 in the morning and come back and do it again. It’s just extraordinary.”

Hasnain says:

If only more of the US system focused on rehabilitation and not just punishment for the sake of - especially for non violent offense

“The United States criminal justice system is plagued by recidivism, or former prisoners’ return to custody after they have been released. Repeat offending creates a financial burden on the state and its taxpayers. But Commissioner Liberty has the data to show it’s well worth the effort and investment to expand access to education and addiction treatment.
“It’s very short-sighted, ridiculous to lock them up and release them more traumatized than when they arrived, right?” he said. “Many states have 60% return to custody rates. In Maine, we hover between 21% to 23% for males; women return at a rate of 9%. And if you attend college classes in Maine, you come back at a rate of 0.05% — you don’t come back at all.””

Hasnain says:

“Gee secured the team a room in the basement of the Hausdorff Research Institute, where they were unlikely to be disturbed by itinerant mathematicians. There, they spent an entire week working on Pan’s theorem, one 12-hour day after the next, only coming up to ground level occasionally for caffeine. “After a coffee, we would always joke that we had to go back to the mine,” Pilloni said.
The grind paid off. “There were many twists to come later,” Calegari said, “but at the end of that week I thought we more or less had it.”
It took another year and a half to turn Calegari’s conviction into a 230-page proof, which they posted online in February (opens a new tab). Putting all the pieces together, they’d proved that any ordinary abelian surface has an associated modular form.”

Hasnain says:

“With their new result, Khurana and Tomer have effectively reduced two open problems to one. If researchers complete the proof that quantum computers truly surpass classical ones at a specific task, that will automatically put quantum cryptography on much stronger theoretical footing than practically any kind of classical cryptography.
Alas, you won’t be able to use Khurana and Tomer’s new approach to send secret messages any time soon. Despite recent progress, quantum computing technology is not yet mature enough to put their ideas into practice. Meanwhile, other researchers have devised quantum cryptography methods that could be used sooner (opens a new tab), though more work will be needed to establish that they’re truly secure.”

Hasnain says:

“I don’t believe HUDs are universally better than copilots! But I do believe anyone serious about designing for AI should consider non-copilot form factors that more directly extend the human mind.

So when should we use one or the other? I think it’s quite tricky to answer that, but we can try to use the airplane analogy for some intuition:

When pilots just want the plane to fly straight and level, they fully delegate that task to an autopilot, which is close to a “virtual copilot”. But if the plane just hit a flock of birds and needs to land in the Hudson, the pilot is going to take manual control, and we better hope they have great instruments that help them understand the situation.

In other words: routine predictable work might make sense to delegate to a virtual copilot / assistant. But when you’re shooting for extraordinary outcomes, perhaps the best bet is to equip human experts with new superpowers.”

Hasnain says:

“I'm guessing that part of why AI coding tools are so popular is the slot machine effect. Intermittent rewards, lots of waiting that fractures your attention, and inherent laziness keeping you trying with yet another prompt in hopes that you don’t have to actually turn on your brain after so many hours of being told not to.

The exhilarating power of creation. Just insert a few more cents, and you’ll get another shot at making your dreams a reality.”

Hasnain says:

This was an insightful-ish read on corporate culture and performance. Will have to ponder

“And for junior hires, how can they learn without knowing what good looks like? How can you learn what good looks like without ever having the ability to point to someone and talk about their performance?

Judge your coworkers, lest you not be judged, because to not be judged is to never learn.”

Hasnain says:

Unfortunately the title was more promising than the actual content here

“The function universities have long played is less one of educating than of credentialing. Carter gives us good reason to think the credentialing function of universities is about to collapse, due to AI. But he finds new possibilities, or rather old possibilities, emerging from the wreckage: liberal education in the original sense, as a leisure activity (“scholar” is from schole, leisure) for its own sake; for the love of truth. Unburdened of its current gatekeeping role in the political economy of managerialism and bullshit jobs, and no longer serving as a legitimation operation for unpopular political projects (producing “the Science” that must be “followed”), the successor to the modern university will be something subterranean rather than publicity-seeking, disconnected from power and money, useless, a place where people with the most searching minds gather to pursue truth for the love of it, as literal amateurs.

“

Hasnain says:

““Surveillance evidence is frequently submitted in court,” they said. “Obviously, there are things like hacking which are just out-and-out illegal, but unfortunately they are just part of the landscape.”
Private intelligence firms claim that illegally obtained information is routinely submitted to courts in the U.K., with the third industry figure telling POLITICO there are “ludicrous cover stories put in front of judges” where people are trying to “launder stolen information into court proceedings.”
“I think judges could probably do a better job of being a bit more wide-eyed about what is going on,” they added, citing one case in which information from a stolen tablet was submitted to court — with the legal team doing so claiming it had simply been handed to them in the middle of the night by a whistleblower.
“Everyone knows which firms do it,” the same person said. “The most disturbing thing is it’s all signed off by law firms. There’s still some SRA [Solicitors Regulation Authority]-regulated lawyer somewhere who’s either proactively signed off that hacking or they have not asked the question when the materials come back in of: How the fuck did you get this?””

Hasnain says:

“Statements like these from the prime minister and senior ministers in his cabinet have to be considered together with the sheer scale of the human casualties and the indiscriminate physical destruction inflicted on their orders. The most plausible explanation of current Israeli policy is that its object is to induce Palestinians as an ethnic group to leave the Gaza Strip for other countries by bombing, shooting and starving them if they remain.

A court would be likely to regard that as genocide. “

Hasnain says:

I wonder at what point the editorial board will grapple with their own paper’s complicity here. But this is a start.

“Faced with the systematic destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza, other states must together produce a systematic, comprehensive and concrete response. If not now, when? What more would it take to convince them? This is first and foremost a catastrophe for Palestinians. But if states continue to allow international humanitarian law to be shredded, the repercussions will be felt by many more around the world in years to come. History will not ask whether these governments did anything to stop genocide by an ally, but whether they did all they could.”

Hasnain says:

“Some parents have faced the agony of having multiple children die from these diseases.
Mitochondria are passed down only from mother to child. So this pioneering fertility technique uses both parents and a woman who donates her healthy mitochondria.
The science was developed more than a decade ago at Newcastle University and the Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and a specialist service opened within the NHS in 2017.”

Hasnain says:

“When it comes to personnel (at least in eng), there's a very significant Meta → OpenAI pipeline. In many ways, OpenAI resembles early Meta: a blockbuster consumer app, nascent infra, and a desire to move really quickly. Most of the infra talent I've seen brought over from Meta + Instagram has been quite strong.

Put these things together, and you see a lot of core parts of infra that feel reminiscent of Meta. There was an in-house reimplementation of TAO. An effort to consolidate auth identity at the edge. And I'm sure a number of others I don't know about.”

Hasnain says:

“Japan, of course, was not alone in these views. But even in the 1980s the average man spent fewer than 40 minutes interacting with their children on the average workday – and that was often during a family meal. According to one observational study, some men could not even make tea or locate their own clothes without their wife’s assistance. When the father did interact with his children, he was often remote and commanded respect, even fear – a fact reflected in the common saying “jishin, kaminari, kaji, oyaji” – “earthquake, thunder, fire and father”.”

Hasnain says:

“In Singapore, Cecilia Tortajada and other experts are working on how to protect the city-state from rising waters in the years to come. The local Building and Construction Authority (BCA) recently commissioned a study to inform the national framework for coastal protection and new measures are introduced yearly.
But everyone is keeping an eye on Tokyo, trying to gauge how well it weathers the typhoons and summer downpours testing its shields.
“If a country as prepared as Japan is suffering, and a city like Tokyo suffers, we should all be paying attention,” sighs Tortajada.”

Hasnain says:

“Yogev agrees. “Once you’ve found a hole, then you know the boat is leaking and it’s going to sink soon,” he said. “I don’t think their attack was very limited — I believe it could be easily used to actually steal money.”
Even if that outcome doesn’t come to pass, the attack has shaken cryptographers’ confidence in the Fiat-Shamir protocol, and the random oracle model more generally. “Maybe it’s time to rethink and revise many other things we think we’ve proven,” Canetti said. When you take a leap of faith, you never know where you’re going to land.”

Hasnain says:

“Then we started negotiating. I opened my laptop; we started going slide by slide through my talk, removing bits every time. One of the main concerns for them was one of the slides I had indicated no AI for war crimes, and it had logos of Microsoft, Amazon, Google Cloud, Palantir, and Cisco; they wanted me to remove that. I had removed a lot of things already. I removed content that mentioned Gaza, Palestine, Israel. I edited “genocide” to “war crimes.” I had removed a slide that connected Meta with illegal data torrenting practices. For me, that was the limit. So, they went and discussed it and came back and said if I don’t remove that one image, or add hundreds of other logos on that slide so that it doesn’t incriminate those particular companies that were identified, I couldn’t give the talk. “

Hasnain says:

“Klartag had broken open a central problem in the world of lattices and sphere packing after just a few months of study and a few weeks of proof writing. “It feels almost unfair,” he said. But that’s often how mathematics works: Sometimes all a sticky problem needs is a few fresh ideas, and venturing outside one’s immediate field can be rewarding. Klartag’s familiarity with convex geometry, usually a separate area of study, turned out to be just what the problem required. “This idea was at the top of my mind because of my work,” he said. “It was obvious to me that this was something I could try.””

Hasnain says:

“If there’s a glimmer of hope in all this rage-inducing misery, it can be found in the growing number of people around the world who refuse to be intimidated into silence. We may have seen a small example of that courage in New York City recently, and I’m not talking only about Zohran Mamdani winning the Democratic party nomination for mayor. That same day, two of Brooklyn’s progressive politicians, Alexa Avilés and Shahana Hanif, were running for renomination. Both supported Palestine, both were relentlessly attacked for their positions on Gaza, and both refused to change their views. Pro-Israel donors poured money into their opponents’ campaigns. Yet both handily won their races.

Multiple factors go into winning any political campaign, but any expressed support for Palestine used to be a death knell. Could it be that we’re on the cusp of change? Maybe Palestinian freedom is no longer a liability but is now a real winning position in politics?

Palestine is perhaps the clearest expression today, as Haddad told me, of how “power feels threatened by the truth.” She continued: “If they are so afraid of a student with a sign or a chalked message or a demand for justice, then we are stronger than they want us to believe.” She better be right. For all our sakes.”

Hasnain says:

"What i have learnt is that you don’t need to work the room or become someone you’re not. Most of the time, it’s enough to show up with confidence, listen well, and leave one real moment behind. That’s the part people remember anyway."

Hasnain says:

And here we are, going out and about our day, while this is happening in our name

“This sentiment echoes what Pep Guardiola, manager of the Manchester City football club, said last month: that when he looks at the children of Gaza, he is afraid that his children will be next in line.
"Maybe we think that we see the boys and girls of 4 years old being killed [in Gaza] by the bomb or being killed at the hospital because it's not a hospital anymore. It's not our business," Guardiola said, upon receiving an honorary doctorate from the University of Manchester. "But be careful. The next one will be ours. The next 4- or 5-year-old kids will be ours. Sorry, but I see my kids when I wake up every morning since the nightmare started with the infants in Gaza. And I'm so scared."
For his part, Filiu says during our conversation, he saw in Gaza a place where "international law, basic human rights, the Geneva Convention, the attitude toward human rights – all are being tossed aside without hesitation and being supplanted by raw, random and very violent force."
The "Gazan monster," he warns, will not be contained within fences but will spill out across the globe. "It is threatening the whole world in a very basic and very immediate way."”

Hasnain says:

"It begins to feel like a broad celebration of mediocrity. Finally, society says, with a huge sigh of relief. I don’t have to write a letter to my granddaughter. I don’t have to write a three-line fetch call. I don’t have to know anything, care about what I’m doing, or even have an opinion.

I can just substitute some Content™. I can just ask the computer for Whatever

But I like programming. I like writing. I like making things and then being able to sit back and look at them and think, holy fuck, I made that. There is no joy for me in typing a vague description into a computer and refreshing my way through a parade of Whatever until something is good enough.

The most obnoxious people like to talk about how Stable Diffusion is “democratizing art” and that is the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard. There is no fucking King of Art decreeing who is allowed to draw and who isn’t. You could do it. You could do it right now. But it’s hard, so you’d rather spend that time crying on Twitter about how unfair it is that learning a skill takes work and thank god the computer can give you all of the admiration with none of the effort now."

Hasnain says:

"This shouldn’t make us defensive or self-conscious, but it does. I, like many others, want to be great. I want to feel commitment and camaraderie and work hard and be my best and impact top and bottom lines. But I don’t want to also feel tormented or be tortured into greatness or look in the mirror and wonder why I suck. But what does that say about me?

I want more role models like Kevin Kelly. People that proudly whistle while they work. Who have boundless energy and healthy gums. Whose enthusiasm is contagious. Who are well-adjusted and emotionally regulated. Who have solid relationships and happy families. Who are hungry and impactful and care deeply, without being jerks. And I want more people to talk about these qualities with respect and reverence.

I have never been a billionaire or built a unicorn, so I can’t speak with any conviction about what it requires. I won’t be eulogized anywhere important and no one 300 years from now will talk about what great things I did. But I want to live in a world where you can have an impact and be happy. Maybe that’s naive, but I’m sticking to it."

Hasnain says:

This hit home a lot today. Oof.

“Watch a four-year-old finger-paint. They don't create for Instagram likes or gallery walls or market validation. They create for the pure joy of watching colors bleed into each other, for the satisfying squish of paint between fingers, for the magic of making something exist that didn't exist before. They possess the freedom to create without the burden of expectation.
Learning anything as an adult means reclaiming this beginner's privilege. It means giving yourself permission to be bad at something, to create things that serve no purpose other than your own discovery and delight. The beginner's mind understands that mastery emerges from play, that excellence grows from experimentation, that the path to creating something great runs directly through creating many things that aren't great at all.”

Hasnain says:

"At the turn of the 14th century, when Latin was already dead except as a language of scholars and priests, a Tuscan writer called Dante Alighieri observed that many words were almost identical across the Romance languages. He went on to make the frankly heretical suggestion that this was because the various flavours of Romance were all descended from Latin. At the time, in Europe, there was no concept of language evolution. The Bible held that linguistic diversity and its corollary, mutual bewilderment, was the punishment visited on humanity by God for the impertinent construction of the Tower of Babel—and medieval Europeans took the Bible literally."

Hasnain says:

“For more than a year now we’ve been aware that the BBC’s news output is out of step with reality. Audiences are being asked not to believe their own eyes and ears.

Anyone with a phone has seen the footage coming out of Gaza and the West Bank yet BBC News has tied itself in knots with notions of ‘complexity’.

Why have we taken a clear position on Ukraine and Russia when we fail to confidently assert facts when it comes to the Palestinian people? Robbie Gibb is at least part of the answer.

We raised these concerns so many times and we have not been listened to. We are speaking out because we must serve audiences better.”