Hasnain says:

“FC: On CNN recently, Hinton downplayed the concerns of Timnit Gebru—who Google fired in 2020 for refusing to withdraw a paper about AI’s harms on marginalized people—saying her ideas were not as “existentially serious” as his own. What do you make of that?

MW: I think it’s stunning that someone would say that the harms [from AI] that are happening now—which are felt most acutely by people who have been historically minoritized: Black people, women, disabled people, precarious workers, et cetera—that those harms aren’t existential.

What I hear in that is, “Those aren’t existential to me. I have millions of dollars, I am invested in many, many AI startups, and none of this affects my existence. But what could affect my existence is if a sci-fi fantasy came to life and AI were actually super intelligent, and suddenly men like me would not be the most powerful entities in the world, and that would affect my business.” “

Hasnain says:

Mojo has been pretty exciting to watch (and I need to say hi to my friends there). Need to try it soon!

“But I’d much prefer to use a language that’s as elegant as Python and as fast as expert-written C, allows me to use one language to write everything from the application server, to the model architecture and the installer too, and lets me debug and profile my code directly in the language in which I wrote it.

How would you like a language like that?”

Hasnain says:

Learnt a bunch of cool datastructure tricks from this one.

"The branchless Eytzinger layout is a great option if the data you are searching over is fixed and can be preprocessed to accommodate a faster memory access layout. Because it respects the characteristics of modern CPUs, it is basically one of the fastest ways to search in sorted data when implemented correctly.

Additionally, there are some further ideas like S-trees ([4]) or mixed layout ([2]) that you could try if you’re looking for the best binary search."

Hasnain says:

I keep thinking twitter (Elon) has made its dumbest decision yet and then…

“One former Twitter executive was taken aback by the remark, telling NPR that such a threat should be alarming to any business operating on the site, since it indicates that acquiescing to Musk's every whim may be necessary in order to avoid being impersonated.

For most of its 17-year history, Twitter has had rules that maintained a certain level of order and offered both individuals and organization some control over their presence on the platform.”

Hasnain says:

Great read. Brought back a bit of nostalgia but a lot of food for thought about internet culture and how social media is evolving.

“It is worth remembering that the internet wasn't supposed to be like this. It wasn't supposed to be six boring men with too much money creating spaces that no one likes but everyone is forced to use because those men have driven every other form of online existence into the ground. The internet was supposed to have pockets, to have enchanting forests you could stumble into and dark ravines you knew better than to enter. The internet was supposed to be a place of opportunity, not just for profit but for surprise and connection and delight. Instead, like most everything American enterprise has promised held some new dream, it has turned out to be the same old thing—a dream for a few, and something much more confining for everyone else.”

Hasnain says:

“Dr. Hinton said that when people used to ask him how he could work on technology that was potentially dangerous, he would paraphrase Robert Oppenheimer, who led the U.S. effort to build the atomic bomb: “When you see something that is technically sweet, you go ahead and do it.”

He does not say that anymore.”

Hasnain says:

The visuals here are horrifying, and somehow still not enough to convince the company to act.

““I feel awful about it,” said Scott E. Miller, the superintendent. His district has asked Norfolk Southern for its schedule so that the schools can plan for blockages and students can adjust their routines. The company has disregarded the requests, school officials said.

Mayor Thomas McDermott Jr. said that his experience with the rails has been similar, and that company officials have reminded him the rails “were here first,” running through Hammond before it was even a city. “To them, I am nobody,” he said. “They don’t pay attention to me. They don’t respect me. They don’t care about the city of Hammond. They just do what they want.””

Hasnain says:

Moving and enlightening piece. Gave me a lot to think about.

“ “Medically,” Dr. D said, “Lisa is much better. Her vital signs are strong, and she is not experiencing any nausea. This is the good news. The bad news,” he continued, “is that your wife called the nurses in the middle of the night to say that she saw her parents on a boat outside the window beckoning her to come. I know this may not make sense,” he went on, “but we see this repeatedly in our patients. When patients report a vision like this, they almost always die within a day or two. I’m so sorry.” My wife died a little more than twenty-four hours later.

I have spent a lot of time since my wife’s death trying to make sense of this paradox. In the high-tech, evidence-driven world of contemporary medicine, it was a dream that led a physician to conclude that my wife was dying. How was that possible?”

Hasnain says:

“Pakistan’s fast-food boom of the 1990s and 2000s overlapped with a rise in Pakistanis traveling to the U.S. for study, work, business and immigration. As a result, many of the food establishments launched in Pakistan at the turn of the millennium were brimming with ideas that those visiting the U.S. brought back with them. The cheesesteak was one of these.

All three of Lahore’s oldest continental cafes — Café Zouk, Freddy’s and CTC — have cheesesteaks on their menus. (And, just like in Philly, each claims to have been the driving force behind the growing popularity of the sandwich.) The cheesesteak at CTC, which opened as a bakery-deli in 2003, was especially popular in the 2000s. Freddy’s, opened two years earlier, in 2001, has featured its Philly steak sandwich from the onset. But Café Zouk, launched in 1995, says it introduced the cheesesteak to Lahore.”

Hasnain says:

“But turning back the clock and chaining the box shut is no longer an option. Whether America's chest-thumping CEOs like it or not, a new normal has been established. Women working from home are no longer the aberration — tradition-bound executives are. Steven Rattner, in his Times op-ed article, even went so far as to praise China — where many workers are expected to toil from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week — for its "extraordinary" work ethic. The old white men who lead corporate America may long for the good old days when every employee had to show up, in person, to toil in the mines for 72 hours a week. But the pandemic has disproved the myth that work and home function best as separate, gender-divided domains.

"The ideal worker in most industries has changed from 'full-time onsite plus overtime' to hybrid," Williams says. "That's a huge change. It's better for women. It's better for men who actually want to show up at home. It's better for people of color." It's better, in short, for everyone — even, ultimately, the corporate executives who are desperately trying to force their employees back to the office. Perhaps it would help if they knew that Pandora's box, in the earliest telling, was full not of evil plagues, but of gifts bestowed on her by the gods, at the order of Zeus himself. The more America's CEOs can unlock the gift of remote work, however "soft" or insufficiently "hardcore" it may feel to them, the stronger and more profitable their companies will be.”