Hasnain says:

Not great to lead with this example first. Like I get the money laundering or fraud ones but...

"The following new classifiers will soon be available in public preview for use with your Communication Compliance policies.

Leavers: The leavers classifier detects messages that explicitly express intent to leave the organization, which is an early signal that may put the organization at risk of malicious or inadvertent data exfiltration upon departure."

Hasnain says:

So much for democracy. This is just further evidence of the erosion of democracy in the US.

“The erosion of direct democracy in South Dakota mirrors how the GOP is reacting to initiatives they dislike elsewhere. According to an analysis last year by the Ballot Initiative Strategy Center, Republican lawmakers filed dozens of bills nationwide to make it harder for voter-initiated measures to make it onto the ballot, and many of them have become law.

In Utah, after voter-initiated statutes that legalized medical marijuana, expanded Medicaid, and created an independent redistricting commission all succeeded in 2018, the legislature repealed all of the statutes in its next session; they later added new restrictions on the process of gathering signatures, making it more burdensome for organizers. Mississippi’s supreme court shut down the state’s entire ballot initiative process last year while striking down a marijuana referendum. Similarly, after Idahoans approved Medicaid expansion in 2018, the legislature moved to thwart future efforts by greatly increasing the difficulty of qualifying an initiative for the ballot.”

Hasnain says:

A lot of great things in this moving piece. Two things really stood out:

1) guns kill more kids than active military or police each year in the US
2) we aren’t even allowed to research gun violence by law, thanks to the NRA

“We need to become the kind of country that looks at guns for what they are: weapons that kill. And treat them with the kind of respect that insists they be harder to get and safer to use.

And then we need to become the kind of country that says the lives of children are more valuable than the right to weapons that have killed them, time and again. Since Columbine. Since Sandy Hook. Since always.”

Hasnain says:

“Yet thinking about Watergate saddens me these days. The nation that came together to force a corrupt president from office and send many of his co-conspirator aides to prison is a nation that no longer exists.”

Hasnain says:

Great interview of one of the greats in computer science (Leslie Lamport). Goes into theoretical CS and foundational systems work; along with formal verification and education.

“Specification languages like TLA+ aren’t used very widely in industry, right? Why do you think that is?

Well, I’m doing what I can. But basically, programmers and many (if not most) computer scientists are terrified by math. So that’s a tough sell.
Secondly, every project has to be done in a rush. There’s an old saying, “There’s never time to do it right. There’s always time to do it over.” Because TLA+ involves upfront effort, you’re adding a new step in the development process, and that’s also a hard sell.”

Hasnain says:

“In modern times, health benefits are increasingly a reason why fruits are added to curries. Or they serve as an innovation or talking point: contemporary grape curries simmered in cashew nut paste being one such example. They’re also a way of showing off wealth and status. Combined with luxury ingredients such as cream, saffron, pistachio nuts, and gold or silver leaf, they can be a shorthand for conveying that a completely made-up party dish has desirable historic royal associations and is “Mughlai.””

Hasnain says:

“It will be impossible to do anything about guns in this country, at least at a national level, as long as Democrats depend on the cooperation of a party that holds in reserve the possibility of insurrection. The slaughter of children in Texas has done little to alter this dynamic.
Republicans have no intention of letting Democrats pass even modest measures like strengthened background checks, and as long as the Democratic senators Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema refuse to amend the filibuster, Republicans retain a veto over national policy. Victims of our increasingly frequent mass shootings are collateral damage in a cold civil war, though some Democrats refuse to acknowledge it, let alone fight it.”

Hasnain says:

The more that comes out about the police response the more horrified I am. First the refusal to go in and now it’s appearing that the police were the ones that successfully barricaded the shooter into one classroom. With kids in it. All the kids that died were in one classroom.

And other reporting says they later only went in to save their own kids.

““Go in there! Go in there!” nearby women shouted at the officers soon after the attack began, said Juan Carranza, 24, who saw the scene from outside his house, across the street from Robb Elementary School in the close-knit town of Uvalde. Carranza said the officers did not go in.”

Hasnain says:

Very depressing, and beautifully written at the same time.

“Francisco de Goya is remembered more for his Black Paintings than he ever was for the lush light little scenes that leave no imprint on the memory, his luxuriant years in the Spanish court, before he began to fear madness above all things and exiled himself in the Quinta del Sordo, the House of the Deaf. Madness is interesting, particularly when paired with a febrile hand and a delicate brush, and the story of America’s collapse is being written by a thousand thousand minds sharper than mine and more comprehensive than mine and better equipped to tell you what to do and how to feel and what to think. Me, I think of the open mouth. I think about small limbs whorled out in their moment of death, which came too soon and did not need to come at all. I think about a country surprised by the carnage it creates but continuing to feast. I think of the great limbs of the beast kneeling as it feeds and know it will not rise again.”

Hasnain says:

“DPS Director Steve McGraw said twice that the cops were the ones who barricaded the shooter into a classroom.

That contradicts previous statements by other DPS spox, who said the gunman barricaded himself and immediately began shooting kids.”