Hasnain says:

““You shouldn’t have to resort to a fast-food restaurant app to get information about power,” said Michelle Thibodeaux, who manages Airbnb properties on Galveston Island south of Houston. (A breakfast person, her usual order is the taquitos.)”

Hasnain says:

“Over the course of several months in 2024, TIME spoke to more than 40 people in the Granbury area who reported a medical ailment that they believe is connected to the arrival of the Bitcoin mine: hypertension, heart palpitations, chest pain, vertigo, tinnitus, migraines, panic attacks. At least 10 people went to urgent care or the emergency room with these symptoms. The development of large-scale Bitcoin mines and data centers is quite new, and most of them are housed in extremely remote places. There have been no major medical studies on the impacts of living near one. But there is an increasing body of scientific studies linking prolonged exposure to noise pollution with cardiovascular damage. And one local doctor—ears, nose, and throat specialist Salim Bhaloo—says he sees patients with symptoms potentially stemming from the Bitcoin mine’s noise on an almost weekly basis.

…

The number of commercial-scale Bitcoin mining operations in the U.S. has increased sharply over the last few years; there are now at least 137. Similar medical complaints have been registered near facilities in Arkansas and North Dakota. And the Bitcoin mining industry is urgently trying to push bills through state legislatures, including in Indiana and Missouri, which would exempt Bitcoin mines from local zoning or noise ordinances. In May, Oklahoma governor Kevin Stitt signed a “Bitcoin Rights” bill to protect miners and prevent any future attempts to ban the industry.”

Hasnain says:

Great read on graphics, simulation, and optimization. It took me a little while to find the live demo but it was pretty cool.

“What is the take away here?

CPUs and GPUs can crunch numbers fast. Like really really fast. Moving data around is slow and even slower when accessing data randomly. If you want to go fast, it is good to know how hardware works.

I enjoyed the hell out of this little journey into web workers and SharedArrayBuffers. SharedArrays are kinda like magic to me with their “eventual visibility”. Once webgpu is a little more well adopted I will take a stab into compute shaders.

Until next time, have a wonderful day.”

Hasnain says:

“Age discrimination is a fact of life. In California in 2010, for example, more people filed claims with the state Department of Fair Employment and Housing for age discrimination than for racial discrimination or sexual harassment. “Young people are just smarter,” Zuckerberg once said, in possibly the dumbest statement in American history. “There are no second acts in American lives,” F. Scott Fitzgerald once observed, in what might be the next dumbest.”

Hasnain says:

“When I was 11, former friends of Fremlin’s told my mother he’d exposed himself to their 14-year-old daughter. He denied it, and when my mother asked about me, he “reassured” her that I was not his type. In front of my mother, he told me that many cultures in the past weren’t as “prudish” as ours, and it used to be considered normal for children to learn about sex by engaging in sex with adults. My mother said nothing. I looked at the floor, afraid she might see my face turning red.

…

One day, during that period, while I was visiting my mother, she told me about a short story she had just read. In the piece, a girl dies by suicide after her stepfather sexually abuses her. “Why didn’t she tell her mother?” she asked me. A month later, inspired by her reaction to the story, I wrote her a letter finally telling her what had happened to me.

As it turned out, in spite of her sympathy for a fictional character, my mother had no similar feelings for me. She reacted exactly as I had feared she would, as if she had learned of an infidelity. “

Hasnain says:

I read this long and technically impressive post, learned a lot about physics (and ECS) and then let out a bunch of expletives when I got to this part:

“On a more personal note: I have officially graduated from high school, and will start university in late August. There’s still a decent amount of time until then, but once it does start, I will most likely have less time for development. I will try my best though, and I am very invested in trying to improve the state of physics and collision detection in the Bevy ecosystem.”

Hasnain says:

“In recent conflicts, such indirect deaths range from three to 15 times the number of direct deaths. Applying a conservative estimate of four indirect deaths per one direct death9 to the 37 396 deaths reported, it is not implausible to estimate that up to 186 000 or even more deaths could be attributable to the current conflict in Gaza. Using the 2022 Gaza Strip population estimate of 2 375 259, this would translate to 7·9% of the total population in the Gaza Strip. A report from Feb 7, 2024, at the time when the direct death toll was 28 000, estimated that without a ceasefire there would be between 58 260 deaths (without an epidemic or escalation) and 85 750 deaths (if both occurred) by Aug 6, 2024”

Hasnain says:

“The required quantities are unenviably vast. Each rider consumes close to 1.5kg of rice or pasta every day and in the region of 120g of carbohydrates per hour when on the bike - the equivalent carbohydrate content of five hourly bananas.

One EF rider once went through four tubs of maple syrup during the three-week race.”

Hasnain says:

“Moyer-Nocchi points out that coriander is not the only herb whose popularity has ebbed and flowed in Italy over the centuries. Marjoram was once widely used, but “no one necessarily associates that with Italy anymore,” she says. On the other hand, some of the flavors modern Italians use to express themselves have not actually been “Italian” for very long. Basil, which originated in Asia, has only been part of Italian cuisine for a few hundred years. “It’s very young, and yet seems so Italian,” Moyer-Nocchi says.

From Thailand with chilies to Belgium with chocolate, many modern nations have embraced once-foreign ingredients, folding them into their culinary identity until their absence becomes unthinkable. The curious history of cilantro in Italy shows that the reverse is also true. Sometimes, an ingredient becomes so unpopular that we forget it’s been there all along.”

Hasnain says:

“After learning Coq, mei began looking for an open problem to test it out. That’s when they found the Busy Beaver Challenge. A few weeks later, they’d translated several of the team’s proofs into Coq, including Ligocki and Kropitz’s proof that Skelet #1 never halts — Ligocki could finally be sure about it. Suddenly, an even higher standard of rigor than Stérin’s emphasis on reproducibility seemed possible. And it had all started with someone who had no formal training at all — an amateur mathematician.
“Let’s remember that means a lover of mathematics,” Moore said. “It is not a pejorative term.”

The Dam Breaks

Around the same time, a graduate student named Chris Xu made a breakthrough on the second monstrous machine — Skelet #17. It was usually easy to summarize the behavior of even the most fiendish five-rule Turing machines once you figured out how they worked. “Then you encounter some bullshit like Skelet 17, and you go, ‘Nah, the universe is trolling us,’” mei said. Understanding Skelet #17 by studying the patterns on its tape was like deciphering a secret message wrapped in four layers of encryption: Cracking one code just revealed another totally unrelated code, and two more below that. Xu had to decipher all of them before he could finally prove that the machine never halted.”