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?"