Clash between Young Thug's attorney and the judge could upend Atlanta trial
Did the judge the presiding over Young Thug’s racketeering trial in Atlanta let his emotions get the better of him Monday when he held a defense lawyer in contempt and sentenced him to 10 weekends in jail?
Hasnain says:
The more I read about this case and what’s happened these last 2 days the more I keep losing my mind
“Georgia State University law professor Anthony Kreis said Glanville’s hostile reaction to Steel’s valid concerns about the meeting was shocking.
“Judges cannot respond by unduly taking their feelings out against an attorney like Judge Glanville did yesterday,” Kreis said. “Frankly, I was surprised that Judge Glanville didn’t take a step back all day to reconsider what he was doing or at least pump the brakes.””
Posted on 2024-06-12T03:22:17+0000
An Introduction to Low-Latency Scripting for Game Engines
The basics condensed into one very large document
Hasnain says:
"libriscv is a mature RISC-V emulator that is currently being used in game engines. As far as I know, it is the only emulator that focuses solely on latency, and provides specialized solutions and tools to accomplish fast in-and-out function calls wrapped around a safe sandbox. It has much lower latencies than gold standard emulators. It is also among the fastest interpreters right now."
Posted on 2024-06-09T05:35:47+0000
Adam Shatz · Israel’s Descent
Eight months after 7 October, Palestine remains in the grip, and at the mercy, of a furious, vengeful Jewish state, ever...
Hasnain says:
Worth reading in full - especially where the author calls out (rightly, IMO) that Israel has lost the moral war amongst people that have a conscience. More so in light of today’s events.
“The violence will not cease unless the US cuts off the delivery of arms and forces Israel’s hand. This isn’t likely to happen anytime soon: Netanyahu is due to address Congress on 24 July, after receiving an unctuous, bipartisan invitation to share his ‘vision for defending democracy, combating terror and establishing a just and lasting peace in the region’. Biden’s call for a ceasefire has been met with another humiliating rejection by Netanyahu, who knows that the administration isn’t about to suspend military aid or observe any of its own ‘red lines’. But the encampment movement, and the growing dissent among progressive Democratic leaders from Rashida Tlaib to Bernie Sanders, foreshadows a future in which Washington will no longer provide weapons and diplomatic cover for Israel’s crimes. Whether Palestinians will be able to hold onto their lands until that day, in the face of the settler zealots and ethnic cleansers who have captured the Israeli state, remains to be seen.”
Posted on 2024-06-08T18:51:05+0000
Israel says Hamas weaponised rape. Does the evidence add up?
The Israeli government insists that Hamas formally sanctioned sexual assault on October 7, 2023. But investigators say the evidence does not stand up to scrutiny. Catherine Philp and Gabrielle Weiniger report on eight months of claim and counter-claim
Hasnain says:
“Patten is less hopeful. “When I discussed it in Israel I did not get any positive feedback,” she explains. “The ball is in the court of the government of Israel.” Angered by its stance, the families of some of those killed and taken hostage on October 7 are taking their complaint to the International Criminal Court, despite Israel’s refusal to engage with that body on a state level. In the meantime, Patten has seen her findings instrumentalised by both sides: the denialists who focus on the evidentiary failings in Israel’s version of events, and those who have used the claims in support of the brutal campaign being visited on Gaza and its civilian population. “On one hand we have the fog of war, and that often silences crimes of sexual violence. But we have also seen in history instances where sexual violence can be weaponised,” she told reporters. “Truth is the only path to peace.””
Posted on 2024-06-07T20:13:47+0000
AI in software engineering at Google: Progress and the path ahead
We strive to create an environment conducive to many different types of research across many different time scales and levels of risk.
Hasnain says:
“To expand on the above successes toward these next generation capabilities, the community of practitioners and researchers working in this topic would benefit from common benchmarks to help move the field towards practical engineering tasks. So far, benchmarks have been focused mostly around code generation (e.g., HumanEval). In an enterprise setting, however, benchmarks for a wider range of tasks could be particularly valuable, e.g., code migrations and production debugging. Some benchmarks, such as one for bug resolution (e.g., SWEBench), and prototypes targeting those benchmarks (e.g., from Cognition AI) have been published. We encourage the community to come together to suggest more benchmarks to span a wider range of software engineering tasks.”
Posted on 2024-06-07T03:22:19+0000
Starvation already causing many deaths and lasting harm in Gaza, agencies say
Extreme hunger taking huge toll, say food security reports, regardless of delays to possible declaration of famine
Hasnain says:
“The US-based famine early warning system network (Fews Net) said it was “possible, if not likely” that famine began in northern Gaza in April. Two UN organisations said more than 1 million people were “expected to face death and starvation” by mid-July.”
Posted on 2024-06-06T14:30:37+0000
You'll regret using natural keys
Beating another dead horse.
Hasnain says:
“After a few decades of programming, I've learned that sooner or later, there will be errors in your data. Either it's a clerical error, or the end-user mistyped, or there was a data conversion error when importing from an external system. Or even data conversion errors within the same system, as it goes through upgrades and migrations.
Your system should be designed to allow corrections to data. This includes corrections of external keys, such as chassis numbers, government IDs, etc. This means that you can't use such keys as database keys in your own system.”
Posted on 2024-06-06T06:21:14+0000
Not Just Scale - Marc's Blog
You don’t need distributed systems! Computers are so fast these days you can serve all your customers off a single machine!
Hasnain says:
“As a business owner, there’s nothing quite like the joy and misery of a full store. Joy, because its an indication of a successful business. Misery, because a larger store would have been able to serve more customers. The queue out the door is turning people away, and with those people go their business. Opening a second location could take months, as could adding space. The opportunity is slipping away.
A smart business needs to be correctly scaled. A hundred thousand square feet is too much for a taco truck. All that space is expensive, and distracting. Fifty square feet is too few for a supermarket. Folks can barely get into the door. A pedestrian bridge and a train bridge are built differently. Scale matters, both up and down.
This isn’t a hard idea. It’s right at the soul of what engineering aims to achieve as a field. The smartest thing that new engineers can do is focus on the needs of their businesses. Both now and in the future. Learn what drives the costs and scalability needs of your business. Know how it makes money. Understand the future projections, and the risks that come with them. Ignore the memes and strong opinions.”
Posted on 2024-06-06T06:18:03+0000
Windows Recall demands an extraordinary level of trust that Microsoft hasn’t earned
Op-ed: The risks to Recall are way too high for security to be secondary.
Hasnain says:
Wonder if Satya will cut his own pay now
“But given the sheer amount of data that Recall scrapes, the minimal safeguards Microsoft has put in place to protect that database once a malicious user has access to your PC, and the fact that many PC users never touch the default settings, the risks to user data seem far higher than the potential benefits of this feature.
Microsoft has struggled with security and privacy in its products. Not even a month ago, CEO Satya Nadella pledged to make security the most important thing at the company, following multiple high-profile data breaches and poorly handled information disclosures. Executive pay is being tied in part to security; rank and file employees are being told to “do security,” even when “faced with the tradeoff between security and another priority,” Nadella said. To launch Recall with such obviously exploitable security holes flies in the face of that directive.”
Posted on 2024-06-05T20:31:15+0000
Opinion: I've covered California's homeless since before the word was used. This is what I learned
In Sacramento, the problem has exploded from a few hundred "inebriates" in flophouses to thousands in tents and encampments. Democrats share the blame.
Hasnain says:
Worth a read.
“The blame, I eventually realized, also belongs to people we might call “good liberals.”
By 1980, baby boomers were in their first decade of homeownership in places such as Silicon Valley and the New York City suburbs of Westchester County. They rapidly became NIMBYs, vehemently opposing affordable housing in their neighborhoods. Many were Clinton Democrats. They went on to plant “Black Lives Matter” signs in their lawns. The message was hollow: We support you; just don’t live near us.
Boomers, especially if they were white, got to buy houses, and then they zoned everyone else out. They watched their lawns and home equity grow. I was one of them.”
Posted on 2024-06-05T01:57:32+0000