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Opinion | Netanyahu Is Choosing to Starve Gaza

To end starvation — and stave off social collapse — in Gaza, Israel must allow humanitarian-aid professionals to do their jobs.

Click to view the original at nytimes.com

Hasnain says:

“To end starvation in Gaza, Israel must allow humanitarian-aid professionals to do their job. It must facilitate the movement of U.N. aid convoys without onerous checks and delays. It must help establish the necessary monitoring measures to ensure aid reaches those who need it most. It must assist Gaza’s hospitals in setting up intensive care units for the many malnourished children at death’s door.

Israel and the international community have a window of opportunity to deliver lifesaving aid to millions of people. We cannot wait until it’s time to count the graves of the children who have perished, declare it a famine — or indeed, a genocide — and say, simply, “Never again.””

Posted on 2025-08-02T22:59:32+0000

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Past ‘The Point Of No Return’: Doctor Describes How Starvation In Gaza Is Driving Mass Death

"In August and September, there are probably still going to be ... large numbers of deaths because children have already passed the tipping point," Mark Brauner, who volunteered in Gaza last month, told HuffPost.

Click to view the original at huffpost.com

Hasnain says:

Like.. no words at this point.

“These physicians were being fed a small amount of food once a day. Three weeks ago, that stopped. They are now completely on their own. There have been physicians and nurses who have simply passed out in the middle of the emergency department; there are people passing out during surgery. This is a completely new phenomenon in the last three weeks. When we were there, every person on our team lost between 12 and 15 pounds.
All of these physicians and nurses and environmental services people, they would work 16-18 hours, then they would walk home, sometimes an hour or an hour and a half, to get into their small tent with their family, then get up at 5 or 6 in the morning and come back and do it again. It’s just extraordinary.”

Posted on 2025-07-29T02:30:51+0000

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Preston Thorpe is a software engineer at a San Francisco startup — he’s also serving his 11th year in prison | TechCrunch

A senior software engineer for Turso, Thorpe is part of an experimental program in the Maine state prison system that allows incarcerated people to work remote jobs from custody.

Click to view the original at techcrunch.com

Hasnain says:

If only more of the US system focused on rehabilitation and not just punishment for the sake of - especially for non violent offense

“The United States criminal justice system is plagued by recidivism, or former prisoners’ return to custody after they have been released. Repeat offending creates a financial burden on the state and its taxpayers. But Commissioner Liberty has the data to show it’s well worth the effort and investment to expand access to education and addiction treatment.
“It’s very short-sighted, ridiculous to lock them up and release them more traumatized than when they arrived, right?” he said. “Many states have 60% return to custody rates. In Maine, we hover between 21% to 23% for males; women return at a rate of 9%. And if you attend college classes in Maine, you come back at a rate of 0.05% — you don’t come back at all.””

Posted on 2025-07-28T01:27:57+0000

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The Core of Fermat’s Last Theorem Just Got Superpowered | Quanta Magazine

By extending the scope of the key insight behind Fermat’s Last Theorem, four mathematicians have made great strides toward building a “grand unified theory” of math.

Click to view the original at quantamagazine.org

Hasnain says:

“Gee secured the team a room in the basement of the Hausdorff Research Institute, where they were unlikely to be disturbed by itinerant mathematicians. There, they spent an entire week working on Pan’s theorem, one 12-hour day after the next, only coming up to ground level occasionally for caffeine. “After a coffee, we would always joke that we had to go back to the mine,” Pilloni said.
The grind paid off. “There were many twists to come later,” Calegari said, “but at the end of that week I thought we more or less had it.”
It took another year and a half to turn Calegari’s conviction into a 230-page proof, which they posted online in February (opens a new tab). Putting all the pieces together, they’d proved that any ordinary abelian surface has an associated modular form.”

Posted on 2025-07-28T01:22:00+0000

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Quantum Scientists Have Built a New Math of Cryptography | Quanta Magazine

In theory, quantum physics can bypass the hard mathematical problems at the root of modern encryption. A new proof shows how.

Click to view the original at quantamagazine.org

Hasnain says:

“With their new result, Khurana and Tomer have effectively reduced two open problems to one. If researchers complete the proof that quantum computers truly surpass classical ones at a specific task, that will automatically put quantum cryptography on much stronger theoretical footing than practically any kind of classical cryptography.
Alas, you won’t be able to use Khurana and Tomer’s new approach to send secret messages any time soon. Despite recent progress, quantum computing technology is not yet mature enough to put their ideas into practice. Meanwhile, other researchers have devised quantum cryptography methods that could be used sooner (opens a new tab), though more work will be needed to establish that they’re truly secure.”

Posted on 2025-07-28T01:15:56+0000

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Enough AI copilots! We need AI HUDs

July 2025 Enough AI copilots! We need AI HUDs In my opinion, one of the best critiques of modern AI design comes from a 1992 talk by the researcher Mark Weiser where he ranted against “copilot” as a metaphor for AI. This was 33 years ago, but it’s still incredibly relevant for anyone designing...

Click to view the original at geoffreylitt.com

Hasnain says:

“I don’t believe HUDs are universally better than copilots! But I do believe anyone serious about designing for AI should consider non-copilot form factors that more directly extend the human mind.

So when should we use one or the other? I think it’s quite tricky to answer that, but we can try to use the airplane analogy for some intuition:

When pilots just want the plane to fly straight and level, they fully delegate that task to an autopilot, which is close to a “virtual copilot”. But if the plane just hit a flock of birds and needs to land in the Hudson, the pilot is going to take manual control, and we better hope they have great instruments that help them understand the situation.

In other words: routine predictable work might make sense to delegate to a virtual copilot / assistant. But when you’re shooting for extraordinary outcomes, perhaps the best bet is to equip human experts with new superpowers.”

Posted on 2025-07-28T00:59:05+0000

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Claude Code is a Slot Machine

Claude Code is a Slot Machine ...but the odds are better Claude Code keeps me waiting. Here I am pressing return like a crack-addicted rodent in a lab. “Yes, I want to make this edit.” I watch as it works, glassy-eyed and bored as the code scrolls by, and on the edge of my seat because my ideas ...

Click to view the original at rgoldfinger.com

Hasnain says:

“I'm guessing that part of why AI coding tools are so popular is the slot machine effect. Intermittent rewards, lots of waiting that fractures your attention, and inherent laziness keeping you trying with yet another prompt in hopes that you don’t have to actually turn on your brain after so many hours of being told not to.

The exhilarating power of creation. Just insert a few more cents, and you’ll get another shot at making your dreams a reality.”

Posted on 2025-07-28T00:26:21+0000

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Hasnain says:

This was an insightful-ish read on corporate culture and performance. Will have to ponder

“And for junior hires, how can they learn without knowing what good looks like? How can you learn what good looks like without ever having the ability to point to someone and talk about their performance?

Judge your coworkers, lest you not be judged, because to not be judged is to never learn.”

Posted on 2025-07-28T00:19:24+0000

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Math Is Erotic - First Things

The most shining moment of my education as a physics major at UC Santa Barbara came in the final lecture of an upper-division course on electricity and magnetism. We had learned...

Click to view the original at firstthings.com

Hasnain says:

Unfortunately the title was more promising than the actual content here

“The function universities have long played is less one of educating than of credentialing. Carter gives us good reason to think the credentialing function of universities is about to collapse, due to AI. But he finds new possibilities, or rather old possibilities, emerging from the wreckage: liberal education in the original sense, as a leisure activity (“scholar” is from schole, leisure) for its own sake; for the love of truth. Unburdened of its current gatekeeping role in the political economy of managerialism and bullshit jobs, and no longer serving as a legitimation operation for unpopular political projects (producing “the Science” that must be “followed”), the successor to the modern university will be something subterranean rather than publicity-seeking, disconnected from power and money, useless, a place where people with the most searching minds gather to pursue truth for the love of it, as literal amateurs.

Posted on 2025-07-28T00:14:01+0000

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Britain’s spies-for-hire are running wild

Lucrative, freewheeling — and largely unregulated — private intelligence and security firms are booming in the land of James Bond and John le Carré.

Click to view the original at politico.eu

Hasnain says:

““Surveillance evidence is frequently submitted in court,” they said. “Obviously, there are things like hacking which are just out-and-out illegal, but unfortunately they are just part of the landscape.”
Private intelligence firms claim that illegally obtained information is routinely submitted to courts in the U.K., with the third industry figure telling POLITICO there are “ludicrous cover stories put in front of judges” where people are trying to “launder stolen information into court proceedings.”
“I think judges could probably do a better job of being a bit more wide-eyed about what is going on,” they added, citing one case in which information from a stolen tablet was submitted to court — with the legal team doing so claiming it had simply been handed to them in the middle of the night by a whistleblower.
“Everyone knows which firms do it,” the same person said. “The most disturbing thing is it’s all signed off by law firms. There’s still some SRA [Solicitors Regulation Authority]-regulated lawyer somewhere who’s either proactively signed off that hacking or they have not asked the question when the materials come back in of: How the fuck did you get this?””

Posted on 2025-07-28T00:10:17+0000