Hasnain says:

“The USAID officials paint a bleak picture of the prospects for Palestinians trapped in Gaza amid a siege by Israel and fellow U.S. ally Egypt.

They cite outside analysts projecting that between mid-March and late May, dozens of children younger than 5 years old will die each day “due to starvation, malnutrition and disease,” and write in their concluding comment that “many of the coping strategies employed by people in Gaza will have long-term effects on the nutritional status and future livelihoods of those who survive the crisis.””

Hasnain says:

Today’s news started off depressing, got more frustrating, and then back to depressing. I don’t even know where to begin. Reading about the US government statements in response to the first incident (didn’t even have time for the other 2 big ones!) leaves me even more disillusioned. I wish this would all stop.

“Australian, Polish, UK and Palestinian aid workers were reportedly among the five killed in an Israeli attack following the delivery of food relief in central Gaza’s Deir el-Balah, the Gaza government media office reports. US-based aid group World Central Kitchen said “several” staff were killed in an Israeli air strike and called on Israel to stop “this indiscriminate killing” in Gaza.

Doctors Without Borders (also known by its initials, MSF) has said Gaza’s al-Shifa Hospital is “in ruins”, a day after Israeli troops withdrew from the complex following a two-week raid.”

Hasnain says:

Great read.

“Some of you might be surprised that I didn't write my kernels in assembly like BLIS does, especially given my history of projects like blink, SectorLISP and SectorLAMBDA. The truth is I've been coding in assembly this whole time. I configured Emacs so I can push a button, and the disassembly for the C++ code I'm working on will pop up on the screen in a few milliseconds. I know anyone whose codebase has slow build times doesn't possess this advantage, which has made me famous. Once I figure out how to do that for .cu files, I'll be unstoppable.”

Hasnain says:

“"Worden hired contractors at Navarro's direction to remodel a section of the station that had been previously used as office space to add, among other upgrades, a kitchen, shower, heating, plumbing and security cameras," the DA's office said in a statement.”

Hasnain says:

“For the past year, I worked for the office devoted to promoting human rights in the Middle East. I believe strongly in the mission and in the important work of that office. However, as a representative of a government that is directly enabling what the International Court of Justice has said could plausibly be a genocide in Gaza, such work has become almost impossible. Unable to serve an administration that enables such atrocities, I have decided to resign from my position at the Department of State.

Whatever credibility the United States had as an advocate for human rights has almost entirely vanished since the war began. “

Hasnain says:

Something I get to brag about while having contributed absolutely nothing to.

“ It is an especially capable code model, surpassing specialized models like CodeLLaMA-70B on programming, in addition to its strength as a general-purpose LLM.

This state-of-the-art quality comes with marked improvements in training and inference performance. DBRX advances the state-of-the-art in efficiency among open models thanks to its fine-grained mixture-of-experts (MoE) architecture. Inference is up to 2x faster than LLaMA2-70B, and DBRX is about 40% of the size of Grok-1 in terms of both total and active parameter-counts. When hosted on Mosaic AI Model Serving, DBRX can generate text at up to 150 tok/s/user. Our customers will find that training MoEs is also about 2x more FLOP-efficient than training dense models for the same final model quality. End-to-end, our overall recipe for DBRX (including the pretraining data, model architecture, and optimization strategy) can match the quality of our previous-generation MPT models with nearly 4x less compute.”

Hasnain says:

“I HAVE ORGANIZED airlifts of women legislators, judges, and journalists out of Afghanistan as Kabul fell; delivered ongoing aid to Ukrainian front-line villages during Russia’s invasion; worked on efforts to build runways, roads, and highways to deliver aid to Rwandan refugees after the genocide; and delivered aid shipments to enclaves besieged and under attack by the Syrian army.

None of it prepared me for the challenges of trying to bring a few trucks of food and medicine per week into the Gaza Strip.

It’s easy to point the finger at Israel, the country that is implementing the blockade of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents, half of whom are children. Yet trying to work the issue from every angle on a daily basis to get urgent medical and food aid in, I’ve come to the conclusion that President Joe Biden, for whom I hosted fundraisers and worked to elect in 2020, has signed on to Israel’s end goal of the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza.”

Hasnain says:

“I did this whole project on my phone #
Here’s the thing I enjoy most about using Code Interpreter for these kinds of prototypes: since the prompts are short, and there’s usually a delay of 30s+ between each prompt while it does its thing, I can do the whole thing on my phone while doing other things.

In this particular case I started out in bed, then got up, fed the dog, made coffee and pottered around the house for a bit—occasionally glancing back at my screen and poking it in a new direction with another prompt.

This almost doesn’t count as a project at all. It started out as mild curiosity, and I only started taking it seriously when it became apparent that it was likely to produce a working result.

I only switched to my laptop right at the end, to try out the macOS compilation steps.

Total time invested: around an hour, but that included various other morning activities (coffee, dog maintenance, letting out the chickens.)”

Hasnain says:

As someone who’s recently become a convert, I need to get around to blogging about my process here. (And maybe use AI for it)

“There are many legitimate criticisms of LLMs. The copyright issues involved in their training, their enormous power consumption and the risks of people trusting them when they shouldn’t (considering both accuracy and bias) are three that I think about a lot.

The one criticism I wont accept is that they aren’t useful.

One of the greatest misconceptions concerning LLMs is the idea that they are easy to use. They really aren’t: getting great results out of them requires a great deal of experience and hard-fought intuition, combined with deep domain knowledge of the problem you are applying them to.”

Hasnain says:

From one of the world’s foremost experts on famine.

“Israel has had ample warning of what will happen if it continues its campaign of destroying everything necessary to sustain life. The IPC’s Famine Review Committee report on 21 December authoritatively warned of starvation if Israel did not cease destruction and failed to allow humanitarian aid at scale. Israel’s own judge nominated to sit at the international court of justice, Aharon Barak, voted with the court’s majority in favour of “immediate and effective measures to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance”.

Israel has not changed course. The supplies entering Gaza are woefully short of the minimum calories Israel specified before the war. American airdrops of supplies and an emergency port are a pitiful pretence of a substitute.

Famine is unfolding in Gaza today. We should not have to wait until we count the graves of children to speak its name.”