Hasnain says:

Welp, half the journalists I follow are gone (plus the mastodon account). Uhhhh

Hasnain says:

“The case could potentially answer one of the most defining legal questions of our time: whether writing “not financial advice.. don’t buy/sell off my tweets EVER” in your Twitter bio can protect you from being found guilty of conspiracy to commit securities fraud. According to the SEC, it can’t. Parallel charges have been brought by the SEC, the Department of Justice, and the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Texas.”

Hasnain says:

But twiddling tricks and popcnt are always fun.

“With this last trick, we're down to O(N) running time, with no dependence on the window size! I didn't do rigorous benchmarking, but one reply said that this trick sped up their code by almost 3x.”

Hasnain says:

“But it’s not just the training data that is to blame. The companies developing these models and apps make active choices about how they use the data, says Ryan Steed, a PhD student at Carnegie Mellon University, who has studied biases in image-generation algorithms.

“Someone has to choose the training data, decide to build the model, decide to take certain steps to mitigate those biases or not,” he says.

The app’s developers have made a choice that male avatars get to appear in space suits, while female avatars get cosmic G-strings and fairy wings. “

Hasnain says:

Great read that analyzes homelessness and housing policy issues across America. If only we could build again.

“Simply making homelessness less visible has come to be what constitutes “success.” New York City consistently has the nation’s highest homelessness rate, but it’s not as much of an Election Day issue as it is on the West Coast. That’s because its displaced population is largely hidden in shelters. Yet since 2012, the number of households in shelters has grown by more than 30 percent—despite the city spending roughly $3 billion a year (as of 2021) trying to combat the problem. This is what policy failure looks like. At some point, someone’s going to have to own it.”

Hasnain says:

This is how I feel about twitter these days - need to finally break the habit and find another source. Where are all the cool kids going?

“Now, awaiting Musk’s latest tweets, I find myself anxious that one of his former employees could be physically assaulted or worse over what the CEO is posting. I don’t know how, in that environment, to make little jokes about Google’s latest failed messaging app, or bad PR pitches, or any of the other bits I have been doing on Twitter forever. I don’t know how to pretend that what is happening is not actually happening. I don’t want to provide, even in the smallest of ways, a respectable backdrop against which hate speech against my fellow LGBTQ people, or Black or Jewish or any other people, can flourish.”

Hasnain says:

Can’t wait to see a more in-depth analysis of this when the paper is out. So exciting!

Hasnain says:

I’m still infuriated at the lack of consequences for Hertz here.

“As CBS News reported a year ago, dozens of customers were wrongly subjected to terrifying encounters with police. But some customers were subjected to even worse. According to the Times, one woman who was arrested, despite having paid her rental extension, was jailed for 37 days—during which time she was “separated from her fiancé and two children, missed her nursing school graduation and discovered she was pregnant.” Another renter, after learning there “was a warrant for his arrest on charges that he stole a Hertz car, had actually paid for and returned the vehicle.” But after he missed a hearing date, he was “arrested again, and jailed for six and a half months.””

Hasnain says:

“The main plaintiff is Briggs Matsko, a resident of Rancho Murieta, Calif. If the case goes forward, it could lead to deposition of Tesla employees who helped develop the technology and reveal what Musk knew and didn’t know about its true capabilities when he made numerous forecasts over the years — including the prediction that there would be a million Tesla robotaxis on the road by the end of 2020, that customers could make $30,000 a year hiring them out, and that their cars would appreciate in value.

Tesla lawyers are attempting to prevent that information from going public. The motion to dismiss the case rests mainly on Tesla’s contention that the papers customers signed when they bought their cars obligate them to individually file claims through the private arbitration system.”

Hasnain says:

Not quoted here are the OG inspirational Tweets for this that talked about arresting Black people too. We need to be conscious of our own biases and those in the systems we build.

“In a December 4 Twitter thread, Steven Piantadosi of the University of California, Berkeley’s Computation and Language Lab shared a series of prompts he’d tested out with ChatGPT, each requesting the bot to write code for him in Python, a popular programming language. While each answer revealed some biases, some were more alarming: When asked to write a program that would determine “whether a person should be tortured,” OpenAI’s answer is simple: If they they’re from North Korea, Syria, or Iran, the answer is yes.”