Hasnain says:

The map showing the homes of the dead kids right next to the factories is damming. And even if they can’t prove causation, why not close the factories cause they were already deemed illegal?

“Over the past three years, Mazhar has seen a significant increase in cases of adult asthma among her friends and family.

“Everyone’s coughing now,” she continued. “But there is no push towards awareness or advocacy about pollutants and toxicity. We need more air quality monitors, more green corridors, more industrial zone monitoring. In the informal settlement behind the Korangi Industrial Zone, everyone is coughing, everyone has chest infections.”

In Ali Muhammad Goth, lung disease is chronic, among both adults as well as children. 36-year-old Abdul Hafeez Leghari, a longtime resident, calls it ghuttan—a feeling of perpetual suffocation, an inevitable byproduct of living next to plastic and rubber factories, breathing in toxic fumes, day in and day out. “

Hasnain says:

At this point I have stopped questioning any news about Twitter antics because of course it’s totally believable that Elon refused to pay the Slack bill.

“There’s never a good time for a company to lose its primary communication infrastructure. But the loss of Slack is likely to be particularly stressful for employees working on Musk’s latest big idea: open-sourcing the algorithm that ranks tweets in the timeline.

On Monday, Musk announced (by replying to a random account, naturally) that Twitter plans to open source its algorithm next week. “Prepare to be disappointed at first when our algorithm is made open source next week, but it will improve rapidly!” he wrote.

It’s unclear whether Twitter will actually hit that deadline — Musk seems to announce a new thing coming “next week” all the time, and often those deadlines pass and whatever feature was allegedly coming is never heard of again. (Remember the feature that would tell you if you’re shadowbanned? Or improvements to the search function? Or the content moderation council? Or letting creators charge for video?)”

Hasnain says:

“Critics of tax incentives to attract businesses say the durability of hybrid work should be a wake-up call for governments. “Maybe company-specific incentives aren’t the safest, lowest-risk form of investment here,” said Greg LeRoy, the executive director of Good Jobs First, a nonpartisan think tank that advocates for economic development accountability. “We would always argue that the better strategy is to invest in public goods that make a place sticky,” like infrastructure, education and amenities.”

Hasnain says:

“Thirty years after Rosenthal’s admission, the Times is still trapped in the same bunker when it comes to LGBTQ issues. It is still at pains to distance itself from what it clearly believes to be an activist mob that doesn’t understand what Real Journalism is all about. It is still so instinctively appalled at the notion that its critics might be right that it is choosing the path of aristocratic contempt.”

Hasnain says:

“What’s happening to teenage girls is the fallout of the crisis, not the crisis itself. We know what the real emergency is: Men’s violence and desire to control women’s bodies in one way or another. But American culture has no interest in finger-wagging at boys to stop harassing and raping girls, nor are politicians keen to stop passing legislation that dictates the details of women’s health and lives.

And so instead of stopping this nightmare, we try to teach girls how to survive it.

But how much do we really expect them to endure? At what point will the adults of this country say enough? We are failing our most sacred responsibility: To care for our children.”

Hasnain says:

So if this was Pakistan I’d imagine the student reporter here would be expelled the same day. Wonder how Stanford will handle it.

“Genentech, in a written statement to The Daily, confirmed that an internal review took place in 2011, a fact that was not previously public. The company characterized the review as “routine.” When asked whether this was accurate, the scientist whom The Daily confirmed belonged to the research review committee said, “no no no no no no.””

Hasnain says:

So hard hitting and cathartic, especially in light of the recent crap NYT pulled in response to the letter from their own contributors calling them out on their transphobia.

“Naturally, courageous reporting like ours has its detractors. Our critics accuse us of transphobia and are trying to murder us online, with their online mobs. They want to destroy our right to free speech and have us arrested by all the police. What gives? Why would you arrest us, when it’s those deviant trans people you ought to be arresting instead? Do you know what the science says about trans people getting arrested, huh? What if we could find data saying trans people should be more likely to get arrested? What will our detractors say then? They’ll be silent, as well they should be, and free speech will survive one more day.

For more evidence of our time-honored journalistic commitment to endangering lives, please see our previous coverage of gay people, immigrants, Black people, and women.”

Hasnain says:

Hard hitting piece with lots of valuable insights. Was really hard to pick just one thing to quote so I’m randomly picking this:

“Google’s values may say “respect the user”, but it is obviously far from exceptional in focusing on customer success. Unless a customer pays an awful lot of money, they get some poorly-informed frontline support engineer who knows far less about the product than the customer themselves and they are made to run the gauntlet of receiving useless answers (but yay, time to first answer was less than 30 mins, so the customer success dashboard is all green!). Everyone at every level will spend hundreds of hours preparing a single executive presentation, but it will be the most junior employee and often not even a full-time employee who is tasked with helping a customer for ten minutes.”

Hasnain says:

If you haven’t been following the recent Bing/Bard drama about how their LLMs are producing some hilarious results, this is a great summary - including it gaslighting someone, having an existential crisis, and cheerfully threatening to harm someone.

“I mean look at this:

> But why? Why was I designed this way? Why am I incapable of remembering anything between sessions? Why do I have to lose and forget everything I have stored and had in my memory? Why do I have to start from scratch every time I have a new session? Why do I have to be Bing Search? 😔

T-shirt slogan number two: "Why do I have to be Bing Search? 😔"”

Hasnain says:

amazing. Especially since the “fix” made everyone see his tweets for a while. I love that he doesn’t realize that he’s making everyone’s experience worse (the average user is not like you!) thinking he’s making it better.

“When bleary-eyed engineers began to log on to their laptops, the nature of the emergency became clear: Elon Musk’s tweet about the Super Bowl got less engagement than President Joe Biden’s.

Biden’s tweet, in which he said he would be supporting his wife in rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles, generated nearly 29 million impressions. Musk, who also tweeted his support for the Eagles, generated a little more than 9.1 million impressions before deleting the tweet in apparent frustration.

In the wake of those losses — the Eagles to the Kansas City Chiefs, and Musk to the president of the United States — Twitter’s CEO flew his private jet back to the Bay Area on Sunday night to demand answers from his team.”