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Federal Trade Commission Announces Final “Click-to-Cancel” Rule Making It Easier for Consumers to End Recurring Subscriptions and Memberships

The Federal Trade Commission today announced a

Click to view the original at ftc.gov

Hasnain says:

Lina Khan continues to deliver. Brb canceling my gym membership

“The Federal Trade Commission today announced a final “click-to-cancel” rule that will require sellers to make it as easy for consumers to cancel their enrollment as it was to sign up. Most of the final rule’s provisions will go into effect 180 days after it is published in the Federal Register.”

Posted on 2024-10-17T07:21:57+0000

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Biden envoy told aid groups Israel too close an ally for US to suspend arms

Attendees of the late August meeting with Lise Grande said her remarks were surprisingly candid, shocking many in the room.

Click to view the original at politico.com

Hasnain says:

Been a while since I’ve seen someone in politics be honest. So kudos for that I guess.

“A humanitarian aid official who attended the meeting said Grande noted that Israel is one in a “tight circle of very few allies” that the U.S. will not oppose, nor will it “hold anything back that they want.”

“She was sort of saying, with certain allies, we can’t play bad cop,” the aid official said.”

Posted on 2024-10-17T06:30:33+0000

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Rationalizing the Horrors of Israel’s War in Gaza

The novelist Howard Jacobson has argued that too much press coverage of dead Palestinian children is a new form of “blood libel” against Jews.

Click to view the original at newyorker.com

Hasnain says:

I don’t get why people agree to be interviewed by Chotiner. If he ever reaches out to me for an interview I’m going to hang my head in shame and run far away.

Also what the … was this guy even smoking.

"Howard, I think maybe we’re in a bit of a worrisome place if you see photos of dead children on television and your first thought is, They’re trying to make me, a Jew, hate my people.

You’ve twisted what I’ve said. That’s not my first thought. That’s not my first thought.

Second thought?

And it’s not my second thought. It all depends on how often you see them, and when you see them. You see them and you see them and that’s all you see, and then you feel, Is this what the war means to the media? This is what they want to stress again and again and again?"

Posted on 2024-10-15T08:10:30+0000

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Hasnain says:

Note that this is from May last year:

“Viewed in light of its role in cementing a deadly status quo, the Iron Dome cannot meaningfully be considered “life-saving” in any value system that recognizes Palestinian life alongside Israeli life. Palestine advocates ought to oppose its funding not just because they oppose military aid for Israel in general, but on the specific grounds that by depriving Palestinians of even the most limited means of military deterrence, the US has given Israel a blank check to massacre Gazans whenever it is politically convenient. Especially in the absence of political will from the Israelis to end the devastating siege and blockade, Palestinians, desperate for life, have shown that they will continue to fight back. By funding a system that guarantees their acts of resistance are of almost no consequence to their oppressors, we are consigning them to death. “

Posted on 2024-10-14T05:14:50+0000

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Cyanide - Improve an algorithm performance step by step

Improve an algorithm performance step by step 📅 2024-10-12 ⌛ 14 min Technology Rust Recently, I've been working on a new approximate nearest neighbor search algorithm called RaBitQ. The author has already provided a C++ implementation that runs quite fast. I tried to rewrite it in Rust (yet ano...

Click to view the original at blog.mapotofu.org

Hasnain says:

"Conclusion
SIMD is awesome when it's used properly
IO is also important, especially for the large datasets
The current performance is the same as the C++ version for dataset GIST. While I use more SIMD, the C++ version uses const generics."

Posted on 2024-10-14T05:06:42+0000

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Israel’s military says 4 soldiers were killed in a Hezbollah drone attack

Israel’s military says four soldiers were killed in a Hezbollah drone attack on an army base Sunday evening.

Click to view the original at apnews.com

Hasnain says:

No words for this, especially since this para is the understatement of the year. I do not recommend watching the videos and pictures coming out of this (will not describe here but may do so in the comments.)

“Meanwhile, explosions hit early Monday outside Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, killing three people and injuring about 50 others, the hospital said. Tents caught fire, and residents of the Central Gaza community carried the injured into the hospital.”

Posted on 2024-10-14T01:36:15+0000

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Netanyahu mulls plan to empty northern Gaza of civilians and cut off aid to those left inside

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is examining a plan to seal off humanitarian aid to northern Gaza in an attempt to starve out Hamas militants.

Click to view the original at apnews.com

Hasnain says:

I prefer the phrasing an anti-zionist I follow on twitter used instead of the quote at the bottom because this is just ridiculous media complicity.

“"German Chancellor Adolph Hitler is examining a plan to seal off humanitarian aid to the Warsaw Ghetto in an attempt to starve out socialist & communist militants, a plan that could trap hundreds of thousands of Jews without food or water.”

This is what the piece says:

“Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is examining a plan to seal off humanitarian aid to northern Gaza in an attempt to starve out Hamas militants, a plan that, if implemented, could trap without food or water hundreds of thousands of Palestinians unwilling or unable to leave their homes.”

Posted on 2024-10-13T20:13:02+0000

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'No Propaganda on Earth Can Hide the Wound That Is Palestine: Arundhati Roy's PEN Pinter Prize Acceptance Speech

'I refuse to play the condemnation game. Let me make myself clear. I do not tell oppressed people how to resist their oppression or who their allies should be.'

Click to view the original at thewire.in

Hasnain says:

Always speaking truth to power. Her words are always so powerful. I do have to note that PEN refused to link to her speech when it announced the award on its social media.

So hard to pick one quote from here. Read the whole thing.

“Since October 7th 2023, apart from the tens of thousands of people it has killed, Israel has displaced the majority of Gaza’s population, many times over. It has bombed hospitals. It has deliberately targeted and killed doctors, aid workers and journalists. A whole population is being starved – their history is sought to be erased. All this is supported both morally and materially by the wealthiest, most powerful governments in the world. And their media. (Here I include my country, India, which supplies Israel with weapons, as well as thousands of workers.) There is no daylight between these countries and Israel. In the last year alone, the US has spent 17.9 billion dollars in military aid to Israel. So, let us once and for all dispense with the lie about the US being a mediator, a restraining influence, or as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (considered to be on the extreme Left of mainstream US politics) put it, ‘working tirelessly for a ceasefire’. A party to the genocide cannot be a mediator. Not all the power and money, not all the weapons and propaganda on earth can any longer hide the wound that is Palestine. The wound through which the whole world, including Israel, bleeds.”

Posted on 2024-10-13T03:38:45+0000

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How Statsig streams 1 trillion events a day

A behind-the-scenes look at all the operations in place to ensure that Statsig can safely and seamlessly process 1 trillion events every day.

Click to view the original at statsig.com

Hasnain says:

Interesting stuff. This bit in particular was an idea I hadn’t heard of before.

“Even when running in a degraded mode, it is able to continuously and reliably ingest data. Because of this, our data ingestion layer (written in Rust) has been designed to have as few responsibilities as possible. Its sole job is to get data into some semi-persistent storage as quickly as possible, with several cascading storage options in the case of failures or outages.
Even in the event of an auth service outage, it will still record requests, but with a flag to authorize the request async in the processing layer.”

Posted on 2024-10-12T05:40:55+0000

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How Hard Should Your Employer Work To Retain You?

Recently we learned that Google spent $2.7 billion to re-hire a single AI researcher who had left to start his own company. As Charlie Brown would say: “Good grief.” 🙄 This is an (incredibly!) extr…

Click to view the original at charity.wtf

Hasnain says:

Great read as always

“While writing this piece, a friend told me a story about when he became an engineering manager a decade ago, and soon noticed that his two women engineers were the lowest paid and the lowest leveled people on the team, which didn’t seem to correlate with their actual skills or experience. He asked his own manager what was up with this, and the response he received was: “Well yeah, neither of them has ever been a flight risk.”

This kind of attitude is, to put it politely, a fucking cancer on our industry.”

Posted on 2024-10-12T03:35:30+0000