Hasnain says:

“Why do textiles often get overlooked?

When I first started looking at textiles in this period, I thought, “why is it that textiles are not up there with metallurgy?” Well, one possibility is that we know that they’re produced by women. And so women’s labor may have been less important on an economic scale.

But if I hadn’t studied Ur’s ancient women, I would have thought that the entire country was ruled by men and that all of the things that occurred in civilization, the beginning of civilization, was about what men did. And now I know that’s just one part of how civilizations develop.”

Hasnain says:

This is just amazing.

“Every metric that matters to us has increased substantially from the rewrite, and we even identified some that were no longer relevant to us, such as number of bugs, user frustration, and maintenance cost. Today we are making some of the code that we can afford to open source available on our GitHub page. It is useless by itself and is heavily tied to our infrastructure, but you can star it to make us seem more relevant.”

Hasnain says:

“That number is difficult to compute, and it’s probably much larger than the actual number of coinciding points, but the authors proved that this hard ceiling does exist. They then translated the problem back into the language of number theory to determine a maximum number of shared torsion points on two elliptic curves — the key to their original question and a provocative demonstration of the power of arithmetic dynamics.

“They’re able to answer a specific question that already existed just within number theory and that nobody thought had anything to do with dynamical systems,” said Patrick Ingram of York University in Toronto. “That got a lot of attention.””

Hasnain says:

One of the best analyses I’ve seen on crypto/web3. So well sourced and thought out. And this was thrown together quickly! I wonder what the author would do with more time to prepare.

“I'm a big believer in Bill Joy's Law of Startups, "success is inversely proportional to the amount of money you have". For $2.5M we got Nvidia to working silicon that was revolutionary in two different respects. Right now, there is way too much money. If a system is to be decentralized, it has to have a low barrier to entry. If it has a low barrier to entry, competition will ensure it has low margins. Low margin businesses don't attract venture capital. VCs are pouring money into cryptocurrency and "web3" companies. This money is not going to build systems with low barriers to entry and thus low margins. Thus the systems that will result from this flood of money will not be decentralized, no matter what the sales pitch says.

Despite all the cleverness and hype, the technology just isn't that good. It is both extraordinarily inefficient, and extraordinarily insecure. Nicholas Weaver points out that the "Ethereum computer" is 1/5000 as powerful as a Raspbery Pi. and that for the cost of 1 second of its use you can buy nearly 60 Raspberry Pis. Moxie Marlinspike points out that an NFT is a link to a file of metadata that links to the image it purports to represent, so neither is guaranteed to exist or be valid. You have only to glance at Molly White's Web3 is going just great timeline wonder why anyone thinks this "wretched hive of scum and villainy" should be the future of the Web.”

Hasnain says:

“This is more than double what was achieved in similar tests back in 1997.

It's not a massive energy output - only enough to boil about 60 kettles' worth of water. But the significance is that it validates design choices that have been made for an even bigger fusion reactor now being constructed in France.”

Hasnain says:

“Bubeck and Sellke showed that smoothly fitting high-dimensional data points requires not just n parameters, but n × d parameters, where d is the dimension of the input (for example, 784 for a 784-pixel image). In other words, if you want a network to robustly memorize its training data, overparameterization is not just helpful — it’s mandatory. The proof relies on a curious fact about high-dimensional geometry, which is that randomly distributed points placed on the surface of a sphere are almost all a full diameter away from each other. The large separation between points means that fitting them all with a single smooth curve requires many extra parameters.”

Hasnain says:

“To collect data on the progress of treatment, Lyra periodically sends patients “outcomes surveys.” The questionnaires inquire, for example, about things like anxiety or irritability over the last two weeks, asking patients to rank their intensity from 0 to 3, according to surveys viewed by BuzzFeed News. The surveys, which use clinically accepted and standardized questions, are optional. But patients may feel compelled to complete them because the automated emails look like they are coming from their therapist.

Clinicians can use the data to help shape their treatment, but there’s another reason Lyra pushes the surveys: The company shares aggregated and anonymized data about patient outcomes with employers to illustrate the effectiveness of its services.”

Hasnain says:

“By the time the test wound down, numerous members of the “Shipbreaker” team concurred: The four-day workweek was more than just a success.
“Our team was under huge pressure and on the verge of burnout due to the nature of working from home during a critical period of production, with the added stress of covid on top of that,” said Klyne. “When the trial was over, it was obvious the four-day workweek saved us. I don’t think we could have got to where we are today without it.””

Hasnain says:

“Once the tea turns burgundy, the liquid is shocked with ice or cold water to preserve the color. BBC journalist and food blogger Aliya Nazki uses a Kashmiri colloquialism to describe the perfect hue. The concentrate, she writes, should look “just like pigeon-blood.” When milk is added, the tea turns pink. At this point the boiling liquid is repeatedly poured back into the pot with a ladle and vigorously aerated, a technique similar to frothing milk for coffee. “It is very laborious work,” says a London pink tea vendor featured on YouTube. It takes her four hours to produce a batch of hand-frothed Kashmiri chai.”

Hasnain says:

Great human interest story that covers a famous family of chefs in Kashmir and how the food culture has been passed down over generations. And how current economic realities are affecting things.

“Despite the astronomical cost, these catered meals are always the main event of any Kashmiri wedding. In many cases, the date of the ceremony is only set after consulting the wazas about their availability on that particular day. If the wazas are not available, the marriage is often postponed.”