Hasnain says:

Heartbreaking.

“When situations do escalate and people get hurt, the NYPD resists scrutiny. Citing its internal investigations, which often drag on, the department withholds crucial details. When the investigations are finally done, rarely are there consequences for officers, commanders or the department itself.

“It’s baked into the culture of the NYPD to make excuses before you make change,” said one NYPD commander who helped craft the training.”

Hasnain says:

“But ominous no longer fits what we’re observing in the data, because calamity is no longer imminent; it is here. The bulk of evidence now suggests that one of the worst fears of the pandemic—that hospitals would become overwhelmed, leading to needless deaths—is happening now. Americans are dying of COVID-19 who, had they gotten sick a month earlier, would have lived. This is such a searingly ugly idea that it is worth repeating: Americans are likely dying of COVID-19 now who would have survived had they gotten September’s level of medical care.”

Hasnain says:

Reverse engineering a binary to patch it so your computer can go to sleep properly. Hmm..

(Worth a read to understand all the tech behind it)

“But NVIDIA Share wasn't asking for raw input from the joystick.

Not directly, anyhow. NVIDIA Share is partially built upon CEF, Chromium Embedded Framework. Why be happy with only wrapping your head around esoteric desktop development when you can throw frustrating web development into the mix? The more the merrier, I say. We didn't need that RAM anyway.”

Hasnain says:

Well put and quite an interesting take. This makes a good point but is a bit depressing to read.

“Contrast that attitude with almost every Western country. America’s an egregious example, and Americans blame Trump for their Covid nightmare. The fault, though, isn’t just his. It’s a larger failure of American institutions, society, the American mind — to this day, you won’t read a single media column or see a single pundit saying that Covid should be eliminated. Joe Biden won’t say it. Nobody will. And so what do you expect? The average American acts like the world’s biggest idiot, precisely because nobody is educating him or her not to be. Teaching them that the way to deal with pandemics is to wipe them out.

If I wrote a column tonight entitled: “America’s goal should be zero Covid cases,” and sent it to the NYT — it’d get swiftly rejected. You see how deep the problem goes. Nobody much is willing to face reality in America to the point that basic ideas that make other societies successful aren’t even part of society’s and the individual persons’ thought process anymore.”

Hasnain says:

“In the award ceramony [sic], the Bell Labs researcher presenting the award explicitly said he doesn't understand how InstaHide is secure, but, and I quote, “it works nonetheless”. No! It does not.”

Sigh...

Hasnain says:

This is an interesting proposal.

“Does Colombia have the right to do what it wants with cocaine?

This is the thing. Anti-drug policy doesn’t have the same effect for a country like the United States or a European country as it does for Colombia. We’re the producers. That means this is destroying the lives of our youth, of our soldiers and police. The economy is totally disfigured because of this business. And look at the problems of corruption. It’s brutal. Our current anti-policy is destroying Colombia.”

Hasnain says:

A useful guide since I'm terrible at buying gifts.

"Unless you are absolutely convinced that you are god's gift to... well, gift-giving, then you're probably seeing the same loss of value with your own gifts. Or, to put it another way, a lot of your gifts probably suck whether you realise it or not."

Hasnain says:

“Heejung Chung, a labour sociologist at the University of Kent and an advocate for greater workplace flexibility, sees the practice of delaying sleep as the fault of employers. Tackling the problem would benefit workers but also help ensure a “healthy, efficient workplace”, she points out. “It’s actually a productivity measure,” she says. “You need that time to unwind. Workers need something to do other than work. It’s risky behaviour to do only one thing.””

Hasnain says:

Long, detailed and really interesting read of an end to end exploit.

“Of course, an iPhone isn't designed to allow people to build capabilities like this. So what went so wrong that it was possible? Unfortunately, it's the same old story. A fairly trivial buffer overflow programming error in C++ code in the kernel parsing untrusted data, exposed to remote attackers.

In fact, this entire exploit uses just a single memory corruption vulnerability to compromise the flagship iPhone 11 Pro device. With just this one issue I was able to defeat all the mitigations in order to remotely gain native code execution and kernel memory read and write.”

Hasnain says:

This is from the CASP-13 results from two years ago. I wonder what the author thinks of the latest results. The indictment of academic science is damning and even scarier is the indictment of big pharma below it.

“An indictment of academic science

I don’t think we would do ourselves a service by not recognizing that what just happened presents a serious indictment of academic science. There are dozens of academic groups, with researchers likely numbering in the (low) hundreds, working on protein structure prediction. We have been working on this problem for decades, with vast expertise built up on both sides of the Atlantic and Pacific, and not insignificant computational resources when measured collectively. For DeepMind’s group of ~10 researchers, with primarily (but certainly not exclusively) ML expertise, to so thoroughly route everyone surely demonstrates the structural inefficiency of academic science. This is not Go, which had a handful of researchers working on the problem, and which had no direct applications beyond the core problem itself. Protein folding is a central problem of biochemistry, with profound implications for the biological and chemical sciences. How can a problem of such vital importance be so badly neglected?”