Hasnain says:

The best defense is offense. This is amazing, from the discovery to the many clap backs here. Masterfully played too, with the bugs found, the exploits they’re going to “innocently” place, and also for highlighting violations of apple’s terms of service and putting the legality of evidence gathered this way into question.

“We are of course willing to responsibly disclose the specific vulnerabilities we know about to Cellebrite if they do the same for all the vulnerabilities they use in their physical extraction and other services to their respective vendors, now and in the future.”

Hasnain says:

Whew. The justice system did something right, for once. This is by no means anywhere close to justice for George Floyd and so many other victims of police brutality, but it's a good first start.

Next step: end qualified immunity?

(I doubt we will get abolishment anytime soon, even though that seems the most preferable outcome to me at this time, so settling for ending qualified immunity is a start)

"“However, we should not mistake a guilty verdict in this case as evidence that the persistent problem of police misconduct has been solved or that the divide between law enforcement and so many of the communities they serve has been bridged,” Schumer said. “We must remain diligent in our efforts to bring meaningful change to police departments across the country.”"

Hasnain says:

“What’s clear, though, is that both methods will blow past traditional solvers. And for phenomena where there are no established PDEs, learning neural operators may be the only way to model such systems. Consider the problem of traffic flow: Writing a PDE that accurately captures the dynamics of traffic is near impossible. But there’s plenty of data to learn from. “Instead of writing the PDEs, given data, you can use this neural operator to just learn the mapping,” said Azizzadenesheli.”

Hasnain says:

“Almost always, the conversation veered toward a universal theme: our relationship to work is broken. Generally speaking, our attitude toward our jobs is toxic, our demands on individuals are too great, and work’s rewards are not commensurate with the time spent. Most of us lack the support we need to balance our careers with any life outside the workplace. According to a 2019 Gallup Report on the State of the Global Workforce, 71 percent of adults say they’re not engaged at work, and 19 percent say they’re actively disengaged. Bleak.

Here, the pandemic has been clarifying. American work/office culture feels unsustainable. It’s not sustainable for the individuals who are burning out. As our pandemic workdays grow longer, it’s clear that this is not sustainable for our families. Profits might be steady, even soaring, but the workforce, like the communities and our lived environments, are collapsing. “

Hasnain says:

Eye opening take and some hard hitting journalism investigating failures in the media rooms at the Times and why it’s so hard to get quality journalism these days.

“Three Times journalists who cover the Middle East, who all asked to speak anonymously so as not to risk their jobs, told me that they and several of their colleagues had raised concerns with senior editors about Callimachi’s methods beginning with her first stories for the paper in 2014. They were ignored or intimidated into silence.

“Senior editors doubled down on the narratives that they wanted her to produce,” one correspondent told me, “and also doubled down on their own decision to make Rukmini a star. Anything that challenged that, they wanted to disregard or discredit.” In the aftermath of Caliphate’s disgrace, this reporter continued, some of them have “owned up to it privately, but not publicly. The Times has not been transparent.” From the start, according to the Times reporters I spoke to, Callimachi was encouraged to write blockbuster stories without any of the institutional checks that should have gone with the brief. (The New York Times did not respond to a request for comment.)”

Hasnain says:

I really really wish big tech employers would stop with the dual class employment system at some point in our lives.

“Then she got angry about the big things: All of her coworkers had back problems, Googlers were making double the salary for half the physical labor and she was warned that she might be fired for talking about COVID-related emergency hazard pay that Google had promised but not yet paid (the company eventually followed through with payment). She posted an angry discussion of working conditions and salary on her personal Facebook page.

That's when Modis took her badge and told her to go home. (Modis did not respond to multiple requests for comment.) "They said I was a security risk, that I might have violated the non-disclosure agreement that I signed by complaining about working conditions. “

Hasnain says:

“India is in now in the grips of a public health emergency. Social media feeds are full with videos of Covid funerals at crowded cemeteries, wailing relatives of the dead outside hospitals, long queues of ambulances carrying gasping patients, mortuaries overflowing with the dead, and patients, sometimes two to a bed, in corridors and lobbies of hospitals. There are frantic calls for help for beds, medicines, oxygen, essential drugs and tests. Drugs are being sold on the black market, and test results are taking days. "They didn't tell me for three hours that my child is dead," a dazed mother says in one video, sitting outside an ICU. Wails of another person outside the intensive care punctuate the silences.”

Hasnain says:

““What they try to do is spin it and say ‘Look at how unlawful protesters are as is evidenced by all of these arrests that we’ve made,’” he said. “Then they hope people have stopped paying attention after six, 10, 12 months when prosecutors say, ‘Hey, we’ve got to drop these charges because these people shouldn’t have been arrested.’””

Hasnain says:

This was a pretty great read on tech and incentive structures.

“Much has been written about that tragic fall (see link above), but that is not the cautionary tale I’m planning to tell here. This one is about what happens when money becomes your only motivator, and how the expectation of money can make you do irrational things.”

Hasnain says:

This is a generally decent article except for one really fatal flaw - could they have not asked anyone who’s ever taken an introductory stats course about Bayes’ theorem? I would hope they’d immediately learn it wasn’t that obscure.

“It’s not. And that’s because of a fascinating little mathematical anomaly known as Bayes’s theorem, named after the Rev Thomas Bayes, an 18th-century clergyman and maths nerd.

Bayes’s theorem is written, in mathematical notation, as P(A|B) = (P(B|A)P(A))/P(B). It looks complicated. But you don’t need to worry about what all those symbols mean: it’s fairly easy to understand when you think of an example.”