Hasnain says:

This estimate is staggering.

““It’s a ridiculous decline,” Anderson said. “When I saw a 6.6 year decline over two years, my jaw dropped. … I made my staff re-run the numbers to make sure.”

Life expectancy isn’t really a prediction for a single individual. It’s more like a check engine light — an indicator for the health of society as a whole. When more people die than would be expected, or when they die at younger ages than expected, then life expectancy will decline.”

Hasnain says:

Need to resist the urge to just spend a few days playing with stable diffusion at this rate. I do have some old art projects I could dig up for this (need to find the images I liked, still have the code though).

“4.2 gigabytes.

That’s the size of the model that has made this recent explosion possible.

4.2 gigabytes of floating points that somehow encode so much of what we know.

Yes, I’m waxing poetic here. No, I am not heralding the arrival of AGI, or our AI overlords. I am simply admiring the beauty of it, while it is fresh and new.

Because it won’t be fresh and new for long. This thing I’m feeling is not much different from how I felt using email for the first time - “Grandma got my message already? In Florida? In seconds?” It was the nearest thing to magic my child-self had ever seen. Now email is the most boring and mundane part of my day.

…

I’m just thinking about those 4.2 gigabytes. How small it seems, in today’s terms. Such a little bundle that holds so much.

How many images, both real photos and fictional art, were crammed through the auto-encoder, that narrower and narrower funnel of information, until some sort of meaning was distilled from them? How many times must a model be taught to de-noise an image until it understands what makes a tiger different from a leopard? I guess now we know.

And now I suppose we ride the wave until this new magic is both as widely used, and boring, as email. So it goes.”

Hasnain says:

It’s been crazy watching the explosion in this technology since DALL-E was announced - openai must be a bit annoyed that free alternatives are now available. I’ve been playing around with stable diffusion and the results are really good with only a couple minutes of first attempts - can’t even imagine how they would be with more work.

“As such, each image in the training set contributes only a tiny amount of information—a few tweaks to some numeric weights spread across the entire network.

But... the people who created these images did not give their consent. And the model can be seen as a direct threat to their livelihoods. No-one expected creative AIs to come for the artist jobs first, but here we are!

I’m still thinking through this, and I’m eager to consume more commentary about it. But my current mental model is to think about this in terms of veganism, as an analogy for people making their own personal ethical decisions.

I know many vegans. They have access to the same information as I do about the treatment of animals, and they have made informed decisions about their lifestyle, which I fully respect.

I myself remain a meat-eater.”

Hasnain says:

“But, as he prepares to publish further findings from his scrutiny of the VA database, Al-Aly is in no doubt that clinicians and society at large will be dealing with the after-effects of Covid in perpetuity. “This is not something that will go away in a week, in a year, or two, or three. This will reverberate with us for generations,” he says.”

Hasnain says:

Free speech debates often go far and wide but I will always draw a line at targeted violence (amongst other lines). Cloudflare has been getting a lot of (deserved, imo) flak for this and there are some instances of them losing business as well. I wish this would be resolved soon so more people don’t have to suffer.

“The official website of the DropKiwifarms campaign is now online. Our campaign has seen a surge of support, and outlets such as Business Insider, Time Magazine, Vice, Kotaku, and Daily Dot have begun to take notice and requests by media to organizers of the campaign keep pouring in. We are now entering into the second phase of this campaign where our organizational efforts intensify and we start to put more focused pressure on Cloudflare employees to get them to drop a website that the Anti-Defamation League has described as an “Extremist-friendly Forum”. Kiwifiarms is a transphobic hate forum that actively stalks people, publishes doxxing information, and is implicated in multiple suicides of transgender and neurodivergent people. Recently, users of the forum have also swatted a sitting congressperson, and Kiwifarms is hosted by a company formerly named after Adolf Hitler’s plan for Jewish genocide. Joshua Moon, the site’s owner, was permanently banned on Twitter for calling for genocide against Muslims and asking a Jewish journalist if he could have his fingers for a necklace.”

Hasnain says:

“Kaba: To me, the reason “defund the police” resonates with people is because we’re saying what we actually want to see happen. Some people on the left say: “‘Defund’ is totally ridiculous, it’s a budget gimmick.” Then some on the right say, “All hell is going to break loose, you all want the end of society.” For me, defund is such a clear, easy demand to understand. People understand it, they just don’t want to do it. People are like, “Oh, it’s so complicated!” No, it’s not. We’ve seen for years people defund public education and take that money and put it into more military, more policing, more prisons. The demand is to reverse that trend.

Ritchie: The common response is “that was the wrong slogan”, but it clearly had an impact because it generated the powerful backlash that we’ve seen, which is police doing exactly what Mariame was talking about – exercising their power politically and with ferocity over the last two years, precisely because their power was threatened by this idea, because they faced one of the greatest crises of legitimacy in at least a generation. Yes, we want to take money away from death and put it toward life, especially in a pandemic and climate catastrophe and economic crisis. People also say: “Defund movements have come and gone and are dead.” But people are still pushing defund demands on the ground across the US and are seeing now that mayors and city councils are having to justify and put a lot of energy into re-legitimizing police and refilling their budgets.”

Hasnain says:

This was a really detailed analysis and an interesting overview of how tv censorship is done in China. Cool application of software to a problem that wouldn’t have easily been solved without.

“Hong Kong-based journalist and author Nury Vittachi shared a similar experience in a New York Times opinion piece, describing that a crime story he co-wrote with a Chinese director had to be rejiggered multiple times, finally resulting in an “implausible tale” that involves noble detectives of Chinese origin in order to pass the authorities’ review.

“The rules kill creativity,” Vittachi added.”

Hasnain says:

This was a fun little read. And makes me wonder if I should blog at some point about my static site generator that I rewrote late last year to tinker around with some fun rust concepts.

“Why reinvent the wheel again?

I wanted to write my own static site generator as a fun and interesting project. It shouldn’t be that hard and it would give me complete control over the site, which should give me a bit more flexibility than if I used an existing site generator.”

Hasnain says:

This is from July but super relevant in light of all the debates around student loan forgiveness. It’s too easy to forget the all too real costs that these usurious loans have on people.

“The family made good on both: as ward chairwoman, Robert’s wife maintained the family home as a community backbone, and Betty Ann, who asked that she and her family members be identified by first name only, grew up with a steady stream of neighbors flowing through the house. Although her mother had no money, Betty Ann was a strong student and earned enough scholarships to receive a bachelor’s and master’s degree in education. In the next few decades, she worked as a public-school teacher in Pittsburgh and Harlem, in addition to raising two children as a single mother. But she grew increasingly frustrated by the marks of educational inequity—moldy lunches, low-grade reading materials—that plagued her classrooms. “I thought the only way that I could change things was to have a higher degree,” she told me.

In 1983, at the age of fifty-two, Betty Ann enrolled in New York University’s law school. As a middle-aged Black woman, she wasn’t exactly the typical N.Y.U. law student. Her white male classmates would slyly elbow her books off the long library tables, and once, while standing at her locker, a classmate waved a ten-thousand-dollar tuition check, signed by his father, in her face. Betty Ann had borrowed twenty-nine thousand dollars in federal loans. Today, she owes $329,309.69 in student debt. She is ninety-one years old.”

Hasnain says:

This was the precursor to the last post; this time focused on engineers. Great read and I felt myself nodding along.

“You should have a career path that challenges you and contributes to your personal life goals, with the coaching and support you need to get there.

You should substantially choose your own work, in consultation with your manager and based on our business goals. This is not a democracy, but you will have a voice in our planning process.”