Hasnain says:

“So too with the engineering heuristics. Becoming a better engineer is becoming a better pathfinder in problem space.

There's probably a compelling general theory to be concocted in this space, but that's beyond the scope of this post. Spin up a background thread in your brain and think about it. Maybe you'll find a good path to an answer.”

Hasnain says:

“Listening to the developers’ commentary tracks in the remastered edition of Grim Fandango (who would have imagined in 1998 that games would someday come with commentary tracks?), I was shocked by how little talk there was about the gameplay. It was all lighting and dialog beats and soundtrack stabs and Z-buffers instead — all of which is really, really important in its place, but none of which can yield a great game on its own. Tellingly, when the subject of puzzle design did come up, it always seemed to be in an off-hand, borderline dismissive way. “I don’t know how players are supposed to figure out this puzzle,” says Tim Schafer outright at one point. Such a statement from your lead designer is never a good sign.

But I won’t belabor the issue any further. Suffice to say that Grim Fandango is doomed to remain a promising might-have-been rather than a classic in my book. As a story and a world, it’s kind of amazing. It’s just a shame that the gameplay part of this game isn’t equally inspired.”

Hasnain says:

Sometimes twitter leads me to the most fascinating things. I’ll link to the full paper in the comments. It’s just mind bending to see these case studies in how heart transplants changed people’s personalities to match the donor’s.

“Conclusion: The incidence of recipient awareness of personal changes in cardiac transplant patients is unknown. The effects of the immunosuppressant drugs, stress of the surgery, and statistical coincidence are likely insufficient to explain the findings. The plausibility of cellular memory, possibly systemic memory, is suggested.”

Hasnain says:

“In the meantime, Pak says, it’s clear that mathematicians need to engage in a more active discussion about the nature of mathematical proof. He and his colleagues ultimately didn’t have to rely on controversial computational methods; they were able to disprove the conjecture with total certainty. But as computer- and AI-based lines of attack become more common in mathematics research, some mathematicians are debating whether the field’s norms will eventually have to change. “It’s a philosophical question,” Alon said. “How do we view proofs that are only true with high probability?””

Hasnain says:

“Maybe I’m bad at searching for these things, but these changes to C# seem to have gone completely under the radar in places where you read about memory safety and performance. Maybe it’s just because the language additions have happened super slowly, or maybe the C# and Rust communities have so little overlap that there aren’t enough people who program in both languages to notice the similarities. Maybe there’s something that makes C#’s ref subset so unusable that people just ignore it (I’ll admit to only having played around with it a bit, so far).

Here’s my theory: C# already had an equivalent to all of these things in its “unsafe” subset, so when introduced, ref-safety changes were typically framed as “bringing the performance of safe code closer to that of unsafe code,” which is arguably the opposite perspective of Rust’s “bringing the safety of high-performance code closer to that of high-level languages.” Perhaps that framing makes people miss that although the two languages are pushing in opposite directions, they might actually be getting closer together.”

Hasnain says:

“To physicists such as Carney, however, a mere strong suggestion that gravity is quantized isn’t all that informative. We already have an abundance of strong suggestions that all of reality is quantized, he says. What’s needed is proof — such as experiments that would close the remaining loopholes, no matter how bizarre they might seem.

“We’re so biased to think that everything is quantum that you should really be doing a lawyerly thing,” he said.”

Hasnain says:

It’s a sad day when the most honest “official” reporting I can find is from the daily mail, of all people. Will drop a link in the comments to the sky news report that they have since deleted which said similar things. A courageous 13 year old Dutch kid also did great reporting here.

To be clear - I abhor all violence. People should not be attacked for their religion. But it’s unclear to me if football hooligans going on a drunk rampage and picking a fight (and then the people they are hurting fighting back) is anti semitic, or just another Tuesday when it comes to, well, drunk football fans doing stupid things.

The quote below doesn’t even capture the worst of the videos/behavior seen.

“Videos show dozens of hooded figures dressed fully in black cheering and chanting 'f*** you Palestine' and 'ole' as one climbed halfway up the front of a building and removed a flag on the Rokin, a major street. “

Hasnain says:

“In dozens of emails, Théo said his wager was essentially a bet against the accuracy of polling data. Describing himself as a wealthy Frenchman who had previously worked as a trader for several banks, he told the Journal that he began applying his mathematical know-how to analyze U.S. polls over the summer.

He concluded the polls were overstating support for Vice President Kamala Harris. Unlike most armchair political commentators, he put his money where his mouth was, betting more than $30 million that Trump would win.”

Hasnain says:

This got buried in yesterday’s news. This is outright ethnic cleaning that they are admitting to.

“In a media briefing on Tuesday night, the IDF Brig Gen Itzik Cohen told Israeli reporters that since troops had been forced to enter some areas twice, such as Jabaliya camp, “there is no intention of allowing the residents of the northern Gaza Strip to return to their homes”.

He added that humanitarian aid would be allowed to “regularly” enter the south of the territory but not the north, since there are “no more civilians left”.

International humanitarian law experts have said that such actions would amount to the war crimes of forcible transfer and the use of food as a weapon.”

Hasnain says:

“Their nearly contemporaneous accounts are detailed, corroborated by other witnesses, and consistent with testimony by an Israeli soldier who fought in Gaza, and with interviews collected by Breaking the Silence, an organization that works with troops who have served in the occupied Palestinian territories. They described a practice in which Palestinians are detained, interrogated and ultimately released, indicating the Israeli army did not believe them to be militants. They described events that took place between January and August.

“This wasn’t something that happened just here and there but rather on a large scale throughout a number of different units, at different times, throughout the war and in different places,” said Joel Carmel, advocacy director of Breaking the Silence, an organization that collects and verifies testimonies from troops who have served in the occupied Palestinian territories.”