Hasnain says:

This reminds me of Venmo defaulting payment notes to be public. We had some “fun” moments.

“Calli Schroeder, senior counsel for the Electronic Privacy Information Center, said in an interview with WIRED that she has seen people “sharing medical information, mental health information, home addresses, even things directly related to pending court cases.””

Hasnain says:

“The American political system has long operated under a mafia-like code of omertà and impunity. Consider all the political figures that suffered no real loss of social status for catastrophic lies about war and peace: Robert McNamara, Henry Kissinger, Dick Cheney, Paul Wolfowitz. Miller can get away with acknowledging that he wasn’t candid because he knows he’ll remain a member in good standing of the political elite.

But there is no reason this system of elite impunity, which has led to so much harm, should remain in place. Ideally, Miller should be tried before a war crimes tribunal. That is not likely to happen: International law is traditionally used only against weak nations, not the governing class of a superpower. But what if ordinary citizens stepped in to say that Miller, and those like him, deserve to be ostracized? What if a progressive running for president in 2028 said they would blacklist from their administration Miller and similar figures (such as former national security adviser Jake Sullivan and former secretary of state Anthony Blinken). Matt Duss of the Center of International Policy, commenting on Miller’s interview, noted, “They all knew. All of them. They misled the public, and the Congress, because Biden wanted to keep sending weapons.” If they all knew, they should all be ostracized.”

Hasnain says:

The FT editorial board is Hamas, clearly.

“It is time to back rhetoric with action. Hamas’s abhorrent behaviour and the threat of Palestinian militancy should not absolve Israel of its own conduct. With US President Donald Trump paying little heed to the humanitarian catastrophe, European states must show Israel that its actions bear consequences. They should ban trade with settlements and sanction extremist settler entities. They should halve offensive weapons sales to Israel and sanction ultranationalists in the government who are fuelling the Gaza and West Bank violence.

Finally, they should lead the way in formally recognising a Palestinian state, before there is nothing left to recognise.
“

Hasnain says:

What a world we live in now.

“Nessel and the FBI raided several protesters’ homes in late April. Several students said they noticed an uptick in the number of people tailing them since raids. In some cases, they have cussed and threatened students who confront them, several organizers who have been followed said. In one instance, someone followed a small group from a student meeting to a bar, and sat down at an adjacent table and began to eavesdrop and record them.

“The way that the university is now responding to student activism with a massive expansion of surveillance, through plain clothes cops, and proliferation of security cameras, is very alarming,” MacKeen-Shapiro said.”

Hasnain says:

“I’ll confess I struggle to see why this shouldn’t be possible in theory. As far as I can tell the practical barrier is how the attention step is batched: if you want to batch up attention GEMMs, they need to all be the same shape (i.e. the same number of prior tokens in the sequence). So you have to run groups of the same shape at the same time, instead of being able to just maintain a single queue. There’s at least some public research on this front, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more clever tricks for doing this that I haven’t seen.”

Hasnain says:

“Whether the cracks—if they really are cracks—will widen remains to be seen. Many new observations will come, not just from DESI, but also from the new Vera Rubin Observatory in the Atacama Desert, and other new telescopes in space. On data-release days for years to come, the standard model’s champions and detractors will be feverishly refreshing their inboxes. For the moment, though, Riess believes that the theorists have become complacent. When he reaches out to them for help in making sense of his empirical results, their responses disappoint him. “They’re like, Yeah, that’s a really hard problem,” he said. “Sometimes, I feel like I am providing clues and killing time while we wait for the next Einstein to come along.”
When I talked to Riess for the last time, he was at a cosmology conference in Switzerland. He sounded something close to giddy. “When there’s no big problems and everything’s just kind of fitting, it’s boring,” he said. Now among his colleagues, he could feel a new buzz. The daggers are out. A fight is brewing. “The field is hot again,” he told me. A new universe suddenly seems possible.”

Hasnain says:

“In northern Gaza, cut off by Israeli troops from the rest of the territory, hundreds of thousands of people are reduced to waiting for hours for charity-kitchen food that runs out too soon and to digging boreholes for water to drink, unsanitary though it might be.

There is never enough.”

Hasnain says:

“Ms. Hui said that being separated from her family was the hardest part. Her 14-year-old son was upset that she missed his middle-school graduation. Her daughter told her that one of her school friends offered to adopt Ms. Hui, so she could stay in the country.

During one call, her children tried to cheer up Ms. Hui by telling her about “Carol Day.” She said she was stunned to learn about the outpouring of support.

“I didn’t know they loved me,” she said.”

Hasnain says:

Glad the more mainstream media is waking up here. But it is too little too late, and I half wonder if it’s not for reputation laundering so folks can say “we were always against this.”

Now if only world leaders would listen.

“Words matter because they determine action. When we avoid naming a genocide for what it is, we become complicit in allowing it to continue. Terms like “humanitarian crisis” or even “war crimes” can function as euphemisms that fall short of triggering the moral and legal imperatives that genocide demands. The power of naming isn’t some academic exercise; it’s practical. It determines whether the international community mobilizes to stop atrocities or simply manages their aftermath.
There was a time when I would have cautioned against using a word like “genocide” too freely, worried about diluting its meaning. But we are well past that now. Shielding people from uncomfortable truths is self-defeating. Words have meaning, and they should be used when they describe reality. Otherwise, we’re in denial, and atrocities at this scale shouldn’t be denied.
Israel’s brutalization of the Palestinian population in Gaza has gone on too long. These are unspeakable — and, more important, indefensible — crimes. We cannot be complicit in minimizing them or pretending that they are not happening. Because they are. Enough.”

Hasnain says:

“So much of life and work is drudgery such that when you see something positive, someone taking initiative, someone with talent or potential doing something with their skills, how can you not feel an overwhelming urge to cheer them on and hope to see more of it? Hope to see it develop?

What's more, I want to be around people who are trying new things and improving themselves. I want to be around people who celebrate. So I in turn try new things and work to improve myself and I celebrate the people around me.

This energy is infectious. And I genuinely think even a single person in a group celebrating publicly changes the group dynamic.”