Hasnain says:

“This is the core of fluctuation relations: Properties of a system far from equilibrium participate in an equality with equilibrium properties. My colleague Chris Jarzynski at the University of Maryland discovered this in 1997. (He’s so modest, he calls the equality the nonequilibrium fluctuation relation, while the rest of us call it Jarzynski’s equality.) Although the DNA experiment provided one of the most famous tests of this principle, the equation governs loads of systems, including those involving electrons, beads the size of bacteria and brass oscillators that resemble centimeter-long tire swings.”

Hasnain says:

This is effectively state sanctioned murder right?

“The Public Health Agency labelled advice from national scientists and international authorities as extreme positions, resulting in media and political bodies to accept their own policy instead. The Swedish people were kept in ignorance of basic facts such as the airborne SARS-CoV-2 transmission, that asymptomatic individuals can be contagious and that face masks protect both the carrier and others. Mandatory legislation was seldom used; recommendations relying upon personal responsibility and without any sanctions were the norm. Many elderly people were administered morphine instead of oxygen despite available supplies, effectively ending their lives.”

Hasnain says:

“We demand a layered, collective, and equitable approach to the pandemic. We recognize that none are safe from contagious disease until we are all safe. It is with this understanding that we will continue to share the latest on the state of the pandemic, toolkits for action, and recommendations on what to do, developed for and together with community organizations. For it is only through collective power that we can create a new, more equitable world that can not only control outbreaks but also prevent them from emerging in the first place.”

Hasnain says:

This, and the broader story of how Amazon workers fought to unionize and won against all odds (and a ton of frankly repulsive actions taken by Amazon) has been inspiring. More power to the workers, and I hope more unions follow - across companies and industries.

“Those one-on-one conversations were so important because Amazon told a lot of people we were a third party. And in the end, that bit them. At first workers would come up to us and be like, “How are you guys able to be in the building? You guys don’t even work here.” Then we’d literally show them our work badge and say, “We do work here — everyone that’s in the union here right now works here.” So they’d be curious at that point. And by the end of our conversations, they often felt bamboozled by Amazon because they realized that they had been lied to.”

Hasnain says:

Great read combining a language comparison and a discussion of API design tradeoffs.

"Now that we understand why the Rust API is structured as it is, it’s worth asking – why is the C mutex API structured in a way that is hard to use and trivial to misuse, requiring elaborate comments or even static analysis to get right? This, despite the standard API being designed circa 2010, well into the era of commodity multicore processors.

The question is simultaneously fair and unfair. There are important language features missing from C (and C++) that make it impossible to implement a Rust-style mutex API with the same guarantees – lack of explicit lifetimes, absence of an equivalent to Sync, lack of well-defined “move semantics” for ensuring that values end their lives at controlled moments (like with MutexGuard). So, it’s unreasonable to expect the C standard to define a safe mutex API.

But it is not unreasonable to use better tools."

Hasnain says:

The exponential growth of anti trans activism on the far right (which is now becoming scarily normalized by certain parts of the US media and politics; and extremely common in say the UK) has been very worrying to watch and read about and fight against. This goes into some of the origins of the movement.

“I keep going back to my conversation with Lavin about the Hirschfeld archives. Burning them was one of the first things the Nazis did, but it certainly isn’t what we remember them for. The fact that trans people make an easy first target doesn’t mean we will be the last or even the most important ones. The longer I look at all this, the more information I assemble, the more my mind drifts back to that long-ago fire.

The thing is, fire always spreads. Look around you and see what’s already burning. “

Hasnain says:

This is just amazing, both the exploit itself and the analysis of how it works.

"The advent of Memory Tagging Extensions (MTE), likely shipping in multiple consumer devices across the ARM ecosystem this year, is a big step in the defense against memory corruption exploitation. But attackers innovate too, and are likely already two steps ahead with a renewed focus on logic bugs. This sandbox escape exploit is likely a sign of the shift we can expect to see over the next few years if the promises of MTE can be delivered. And this exploit was far more extensible, reliable and generic than almost any memory corruption exploit could ever hope to be."

Hasnain says:

“Let me take a guess: it would be difficult to promote a policy of “endemic infection that resembles a mild seasonal flu” while simultaneously warning the public that one in 10 infected will go on to develop a chronic illness, regardless of infection severity. In other words, it doesn’t fit nicely with a strategy of unmitigated spread where we are “living with Covid”.”

Hasnain says:

“Beyond gravitational waves, the general nature of the research suggests that the way the uncertainty principle organizes the quantum haystack could prove useful in other areas of quantum theory. The infinite array of relationships between amplitudes could enable independent cross-checks, for example, providing valuable guidance for calculations that can take months. And it may serve as a sharp test for distinguishing quantum theories that can describe our macro world from those that can’t.

“In the past it was intuition,” Roiban said. “Now it’s a clear-cut criterion. It’s a calculation, and it’s hard to argue with a calculation.””

Hasnain says:

“Under the fair-share proposal, it’s not enough for the United States just to stop adding emissions. This country needs to repay the climate debt it’s already incurred. USCAN calculates that to pay back its fair share the United States must cut its emissions by 70 percent by 2030, while contributing the cash equivalent of another 125 percent of its current emissions every year through technical and financial support to energy-poor nations.”