Hasnain says:

What a world we live in now.

“Nessel and the FBI raided several protesters’ homes in late April. Several students said they noticed an uptick in the number of people tailing them since raids. In some cases, they have cussed and threatened students who confront them, several organizers who have been followed said. In one instance, someone followed a small group from a student meeting to a bar, and sat down at an adjacent table and began to eavesdrop and record them.

“The way that the university is now responding to student activism with a massive expansion of surveillance, through plain clothes cops, and proliferation of security cameras, is very alarming,” MacKeen-Shapiro said.”

Hasnain says:

“I’ll confess I struggle to see why this shouldn’t be possible in theory. As far as I can tell the practical barrier is how the attention step is batched: if you want to batch up attention GEMMs, they need to all be the same shape (i.e. the same number of prior tokens in the sequence). So you have to run groups of the same shape at the same time, instead of being able to just maintain a single queue. There’s at least some public research on this front, but I wouldn’t be surprised if there were more clever tricks for doing this that I haven’t seen.”

Hasnain says:

“Whether the cracks—if they really are cracks—will widen remains to be seen. Many new observations will come, not just from DESI, but also from the new Vera Rubin Observatory in the Atacama Desert, and other new telescopes in space. On data-release days for years to come, the standard model’s champions and detractors will be feverishly refreshing their inboxes. For the moment, though, Riess believes that the theorists have become complacent. When he reaches out to them for help in making sense of his empirical results, their responses disappoint him. “They’re like, Yeah, that’s a really hard problem,” he said. “Sometimes, I feel like I am providing clues and killing time while we wait for the next Einstein to come along.”
When I talked to Riess for the last time, he was at a cosmology conference in Switzerland. He sounded something close to giddy. “When there’s no big problems and everything’s just kind of fitting, it’s boring,” he said. Now among his colleagues, he could feel a new buzz. The daggers are out. A fight is brewing. “The field is hot again,” he told me. A new universe suddenly seems possible.”

Hasnain says:

“In northern Gaza, cut off by Israeli troops from the rest of the territory, hundreds of thousands of people are reduced to waiting for hours for charity-kitchen food that runs out too soon and to digging boreholes for water to drink, unsanitary though it might be.

There is never enough.”

Hasnain says:

“Ms. Hui said that being separated from her family was the hardest part. Her 14-year-old son was upset that she missed his middle-school graduation. Her daughter told her that one of her school friends offered to adopt Ms. Hui, so she could stay in the country.

During one call, her children tried to cheer up Ms. Hui by telling her about “Carol Day.” She said she was stunned to learn about the outpouring of support.

“I didn’t know they loved me,” she said.”

Hasnain says:

Glad the more mainstream media is waking up here. But it is too little too late, and I half wonder if it’s not for reputation laundering so folks can say “we were always against this.”

Now if only world leaders would listen.

“Words matter because they determine action. When we avoid naming a genocide for what it is, we become complicit in allowing it to continue. Terms like “humanitarian crisis” or even “war crimes” can function as euphemisms that fall short of triggering the moral and legal imperatives that genocide demands. The power of naming isn’t some academic exercise; it’s practical. It determines whether the international community mobilizes to stop atrocities or simply manages their aftermath.
There was a time when I would have cautioned against using a word like “genocide” too freely, worried about diluting its meaning. But we are well past that now. Shielding people from uncomfortable truths is self-defeating. Words have meaning, and they should be used when they describe reality. Otherwise, we’re in denial, and atrocities at this scale shouldn’t be denied.
Israel’s brutalization of the Palestinian population in Gaza has gone on too long. These are unspeakable — and, more important, indefensible — crimes. We cannot be complicit in minimizing them or pretending that they are not happening. Because they are. Enough.”

Hasnain says:

“So much of life and work is drudgery such that when you see something positive, someone taking initiative, someone with talent or potential doing something with their skills, how can you not feel an overwhelming urge to cheer them on and hope to see more of it? Hope to see it develop?

What's more, I want to be around people who are trying new things and improving themselves. I want to be around people who celebrate. So I in turn try new things and work to improve myself and I celebrate the people around me.

This energy is infectious. And I genuinely think even a single person in a group celebrating publicly changes the group dynamic.”

Hasnain says:

“Harper Reed, another longtime programmer and blogger who was the chief technology officer of former President Barack Obama’s re-election campaign, agreed that career advancement for engineers could be an issue in an A.I. world. But he cautioned against being overly precious about the value of deeply understanding one’s code, which is no longer necessary to ensure that it works.”

Hasnain says:

This resonated a lot with me and is also why I don’t use AI for writing. I think, therefore I am. Can’t give that up.

“Rule of thumb: use AI on repetitive tasks or where the answer is absolute. If you’re thinking hard in the realm of ambiguity and human behavior, that’s learning how to manage, and you can’t afford to offload it.”

Hasnain says:

“All a developer has to do is realize what made old games last forever; and maybe he’ll end up the next Notch. After all, Minecraft wasn’t an AAA game, it was literally the biggest indie success story of all time. If Minecraft didn’t have its extensive mod community or player-hosted servers, it probably would have never been successful.

The problem is; with few exceptions (Nintendo, Bethesda, etc.) the mainstream video game industry does not want to make games that last. They only want to make mere slop with an expiration date to sell as many copies as possible before it piles up at GameStop for $3 a copy. They don’t care, because they assume you’ll be plopping down an $80 preorder to get next year’s game.”