Hasnain says:

“But for now, there appears to be scant political will to continue the waivers on Capitol Hill. The Biden administration didn’t include the extensions in its latest $1.5tn spending bill, reportedly at the insistence of the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell. McConnell has not commented publicly on the issue, and his office did not respond to a request for comment. But a GOP aide told Politico in March that it was no longer necessary to expand school nutrition programs more than two years into the pandemic.”

Hasnain says:

This is amazing.

“The year was 1986, and the American Physical Society’s annual April meeting was slated to be held in San Diego. But when scheduling conflicts caused the hotel arrangements to fall through just a few months before, the conference's organizers were left scrambling to find an alternative destination that could accommodate the crowd—and ended up settling on Las Vegas's MGM grand.

It was an unmitigated disaster for the Grand. Financially, it was the worst week they’d ever had. After the conference was over, APS was politely asked never to return—not just by the MGM Grand, but by the entire city of Las Vegas.”

Hasnain says:

“Maybe, though, the real value of re-deriving the second law lies not in satisfying Hilbert’s ghost but just in deepening our understanding of the law itself. As Einstein said, “A theory is the more impressive the greater the simplicity of its premises.” Yunger Halpern compares the motivation for working on the law to the reason literary scholars still reanalyze the plays and poems of Shakespeare: not because such new analysis is “more correct,” but because works this profound are an endless source of inspiration and insight.”

Hasnain says:

I don’t understand the US Supreme Court anymore.

“In the 1993 case Herrera v. Collins, Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia made a staggering claim. The Constitution, Scalia wrote, does not prevent the government from executing a person who new evidence indicates might be “actually innocent” — that is, someone with the potential to legally demonstrate they did not commit the crime for which they were convicted. Scalia didn’t just make his point casually. It was the reason he wrote a concurring opinion.

Scalia’s claim was so outlandish that Justice Sandra Day O’Connor felt obliged to specifically rebut him, even though they agreed on the ultimate outcome in the case. Only one other justice joined Scalia’s opinion: Clarence Thomas.

Last week, Scalia’s once-fringe position became law.”

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.””