Hasnain says:

“Statements like these from the prime minister and senior ministers in his cabinet have to be considered together with the sheer scale of the human casualties and the indiscriminate physical destruction inflicted on their orders. The most plausible explanation of current Israeli policy is that its object is to induce Palestinians as an ethnic group to leave the Gaza Strip for other countries by bombing, shooting and starving them if they remain.

A court would be likely to regard that as genocide. “

Hasnain says:

I wonder at what point the editorial board will grapple with their own paper’s complicity here. But this is a start.

“Faced with the systematic destruction of Palestinian life in Gaza, other states must together produce a systematic, comprehensive and concrete response. If not now, when? What more would it take to convince them? This is first and foremost a catastrophe for Palestinians. But if states continue to allow international humanitarian law to be shredded, the repercussions will be felt by many more around the world in years to come. History will not ask whether these governments did anything to stop genocide by an ally, but whether they did all they could.”

Hasnain says:

“Some parents have faced the agony of having multiple children die from these diseases.
Mitochondria are passed down only from mother to child. So this pioneering fertility technique uses both parents and a woman who donates her healthy mitochondria.
The science was developed more than a decade ago at Newcastle University and the Newcastle upon Tyne Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust and a specialist service opened within the NHS in 2017.”

Hasnain says:

“When it comes to personnel (at least in eng), there's a very significant Meta → OpenAI pipeline. In many ways, OpenAI resembles early Meta: a blockbuster consumer app, nascent infra, and a desire to move really quickly. Most of the infra talent I've seen brought over from Meta + Instagram has been quite strong.

Put these things together, and you see a lot of core parts of infra that feel reminiscent of Meta. There was an in-house reimplementation of TAO. An effort to consolidate auth identity at the edge. And I'm sure a number of others I don't know about.”

Hasnain says:

“Japan, of course, was not alone in these views. But even in the 1980s the average man spent fewer than 40 minutes interacting with their children on the average workday – and that was often during a family meal. According to one observational study, some men could not even make tea or locate their own clothes without their wife’s assistance. When the father did interact with his children, he was often remote and commanded respect, even fear – a fact reflected in the common saying “jishin, kaminari, kaji, oyaji” – “earthquake, thunder, fire and father”.”

Hasnain says:

“In Singapore, Cecilia Tortajada and other experts are working on how to protect the city-state from rising waters in the years to come. The local Building and Construction Authority (BCA) recently commissioned a study to inform the national framework for coastal protection and new measures are introduced yearly.
But everyone is keeping an eye on Tokyo, trying to gauge how well it weathers the typhoons and summer downpours testing its shields.
“If a country as prepared as Japan is suffering, and a city like Tokyo suffers, we should all be paying attention,” sighs Tortajada.”

Hasnain says:

“Yogev agrees. “Once you’ve found a hole, then you know the boat is leaking and it’s going to sink soon,” he said. “I don’t think their attack was very limited — I believe it could be easily used to actually steal money.”
Even if that outcome doesn’t come to pass, the attack has shaken cryptographers’ confidence in the Fiat-Shamir protocol, and the random oracle model more generally. “Maybe it’s time to rethink and revise many other things we think we’ve proven,” Canetti said. When you take a leap of faith, you never know where you’re going to land.”

Hasnain says:

“Then we started negotiating. I opened my laptop; we started going slide by slide through my talk, removing bits every time. One of the main concerns for them was one of the slides I had indicated no AI for war crimes, and it had logos of Microsoft, Amazon, Google Cloud, Palantir, and Cisco; they wanted me to remove that. I had removed a lot of things already. I removed content that mentioned Gaza, Palestine, Israel. I edited “genocide” to “war crimes.” I had removed a slide that connected Meta with illegal data torrenting practices. For me, that was the limit. So, they went and discussed it and came back and said if I don’t remove that one image, or add hundreds of other logos on that slide so that it doesn’t incriminate those particular companies that were identified, I couldn’t give the talk. “

Hasnain says:

“Klartag had broken open a central problem in the world of lattices and sphere packing after just a few months of study and a few weeks of proof writing. “It feels almost unfair,” he said. But that’s often how mathematics works: Sometimes all a sticky problem needs is a few fresh ideas, and venturing outside one’s immediate field can be rewarding. Klartag’s familiarity with convex geometry, usually a separate area of study, turned out to be just what the problem required. “This idea was at the top of my mind because of my work,” he said. “It was obvious to me that this was something I could try.””

Hasnain says:

“If there’s a glimmer of hope in all this rage-inducing misery, it can be found in the growing number of people around the world who refuse to be intimidated into silence. We may have seen a small example of that courage in New York City recently, and I’m not talking only about Zohran Mamdani winning the Democratic party nomination for mayor. That same day, two of Brooklyn’s progressive politicians, Alexa Avilés and Shahana Hanif, were running for renomination. Both supported Palestine, both were relentlessly attacked for their positions on Gaza, and both refused to change their views. Pro-Israel donors poured money into their opponents’ campaigns. Yet both handily won their races.

Multiple factors go into winning any political campaign, but any expressed support for Palestine used to be a death knell. Could it be that we’re on the cusp of change? Maybe Palestinian freedom is no longer a liability but is now a real winning position in politics?

Palestine is perhaps the clearest expression today, as Haddad told me, of how “power feels threatened by the truth.” She continued: “If they are so afraid of a student with a sign or a chalked message or a demand for justice, then we are stronger than they want us to believe.” She better be right. For all our sakes.”