Hasnain says:

I wonder what’s finally changing behind the scenes so that major publications are coming out and finally calling a spade a spade. Pleasantly surprised to see this as a full editorial from the guardian.

I hope it results in real change.

“The legal bar for proving genocide is exceptionally high. Washington has declared genocides four times in the last decade – in Iraq and Syria, Myanmar, Xinjiang in China and Sudan – without waiting for judges. International law moves slowly, and signatories to the convention, including the US and UK, are required not only to punish but to prevent genocide. The court of public opinion is reaching its own conclusion. Supporters of Israel often argue that it is held to an unfair standard. But Israel has international protection not only because of the history of the Holocaust, but also as a democracy and a western ally. Its actions are enabled by vast US military aid and political cover. Now it plans a Gaza without Palestinians. What is this, if not genocidal? When will the US and its allies act to stop the horror, if not now?”

Hasnain says:

This was great and now I’m looking forward to the next piece.

“This blog post described my journey into the world of MacOS vulnerability research and fuzzing. I hope I have shown how a knowledge-driven fuzzing approach can allow rapid prototyping and iteration, a deep understanding of the target, and high impact bugs.
In my next post, I will perform a detailed walkthrough of my experience attempting to exploit CVE-2024-54529.”

Hasnain says:

“A few pieces were critical of the film. The main charge was that I’d focused on a handful of crazies who weren’t representative of the wider community. “Weiss is a crackpot,” wrote a reviewer in the Daily Mail. On X, the Conservative environmentalist Ben Goldsmith claimed that the extremists in the film “represent a nutty fringe in Israeli society … about as … accurate a representation of the whole as Tommy Robinson is of UK society”.

But this comparison reveals what makes the situation in the West Bank so peculiar. In the UK, Robinson is widely seen as a fringe actor. He is excluded from politics and shunned by those close to government. And yet here was a situation where a similar figure enjoys enormous clout within the Israeli cabinet and who has the protection of the army in her project of settler expansionism. As the Haaretz journalist Etan Nechin said, responding to Goldsmith, “their representatives are literally sitting in the government and control everything from the police to treasury”.”

Hasnain says:

The madlads finally did it!

“Gold nuclei emerge from the collision with very high energy and hit the LHC beam pipe or collimators at various points downstream, where they immediately fragment into single protons, neutrons and other particles. The gold exists for just a tiny fraction of a second.

The ALICE analysis shows that, during Run 2 of the LHC (2015–2018), about 86 billion gold nuclei were created at the four major experiments. In terms of mass, this corresponds to just 29 picograms (2.9 ×10-11 g). “

Hasnain says:

So we have all out war. And innocents on both sides will suffer.

I hope this comes to an end soon. Why do leaders and people resort to violence. I wish the world was better. Sigh.

“Pakistan’s military said retaliatory strikes have been launched against India after three airbases were targeted by Indian forces, accusing India of using “air-to-surface missiles” from warplanes.
Pakistan Civil Aviation said it is closing its airspace from 03:15am local time (22:15 GMT) on Saturday until 12 noon (07:00 GMT) following the latest attacks.”

Hasnain says:

"Cursor has a fixed price. I suspect they are thinking about pricing the way gyms do: if everyone used Cursor as much as they allow you to, they’d go out of business. But in practice most people use a lot less tokens than they are paying for.

You can see this in practice when you use Claude Code, which is pay-per-token. Our heaviest users are using $50/month of tokens. That’s a lot of tokens.

I asked our CFO and he said he’d be happy to spend $100/dev/month on agents. To get 20% more productive that’s a bargain."

Hasnain says:

Senseless violence rising around the world :(

“A Pakistani military spokesperson has told the Reuters and AFP news agencies that the death toll from Indian strikes on Pakistan has risen to eight civilians.

Two further people have been reported missing with 35 injured in the strikes.

The spokesperson reported up to 24 strikes across six locations.”

Hasnain says:

I still need to get back to reading the postmortem on the recent sycophantic changes to ChatGPT. But damn..

“In that sense, Westgate explains, the bot dialogues are not unlike talk therapy, “which we know to be quite effective at helping people reframe their stories.” Critically, though, AI, “unlike a therapist, does not have the person’s best interests in mind, or a moral grounding or compass in what a ‘good story’ looks like,” she says. “A good therapist would not encourage a client to make sense of difficulties in their life by encouraging them to believe they have supernatural powers. Instead, they try to steer clients away from unhealthy narratives, and toward healthier ones. ChatGPT has no such constraints or concerns.”

Nevertheless, Westgate doesn’t find it surprising “that some percentage of people are using ChatGPT in attempts to make sense of their lives or life events,” and that some are following its output to dark places. “Explanations are powerful, even if they’re wrong,” she concludes. “

Hasnain says:

Looking forward to future posts in the series.

“For organizations dealing with similar challenges, FixrLeak offers key takeaways:

Prioritize structured code analysis: AST-based techniques help ensure fixes are safe and context-aware.

Automate targeted fixes: Focus on well-scoped, high-confidence fixes first to maximize success rates.

Integrate AI responsibly: Validate AI-generated code with rigorous testing and code review processes.

While FixrLeak is currently deployed at Uber, the principles behind it—combining static analysis with GenAI—can be adapted to other large-scale systems. Companies seeking to automate code quality improvements can explore similar techniques using AI-assisted code repair, AST analysis, and structured prompt engineering.

This blog kicks off a series from the Programming Systems group on leveraging GenAI for software engineering challenges. Stay tuned for the next post, where we explore how GenAI can automatically fix data races in Golang”

Hasnain says:

Bookmarking for later reading.

“This paper presents a tool called RustAssistant that leverages the emergent capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically suggest fixes for Rust compilation errors. RustAssistant uses a careful combination of prompting techniques as well as iteration between an LLM and the Rust compiler to deliver high accuracy of fixes. RustAssistant is able to achieve an impressive peak accuracy of roughly 74% on real-world compilation errors in popular open-source Rust repositories. We also contribute a dataset of Rust compilation errors to enable further research.”