Hasnain says:

“Gee secured the team a room in the basement of the Hausdorff Research Institute, where they were unlikely to be disturbed by itinerant mathematicians. There, they spent an entire week working on Pan’s theorem, one 12-hour day after the next, only coming up to ground level occasionally for caffeine. “After a coffee, we would always joke that we had to go back to the mine,” Pilloni said.
The grind paid off. “There were many twists to come later,” Calegari said, “but at the end of that week I thought we more or less had it.”
It took another year and a half to turn Calegari’s conviction into a 230-page proof, which they posted online in February (opens a new tab). Putting all the pieces together, they’d proved that any ordinary abelian surface has an associated modular form.”

Hasnain says:

“With their new result, Khurana and Tomer have effectively reduced two open problems to one. If researchers complete the proof that quantum computers truly surpass classical ones at a specific task, that will automatically put quantum cryptography on much stronger theoretical footing than practically any kind of classical cryptography.
Alas, you won’t be able to use Khurana and Tomer’s new approach to send secret messages any time soon. Despite recent progress, quantum computing technology is not yet mature enough to put their ideas into practice. Meanwhile, other researchers have devised quantum cryptography methods that could be used sooner (opens a new tab), though more work will be needed to establish that they’re truly secure.”

Hasnain says:

“I don’t believe HUDs are universally better than copilots! But I do believe anyone serious about designing for AI should consider non-copilot form factors that more directly extend the human mind.

So when should we use one or the other? I think it’s quite tricky to answer that, but we can try to use the airplane analogy for some intuition:

When pilots just want the plane to fly straight and level, they fully delegate that task to an autopilot, which is close to a “virtual copilot”. But if the plane just hit a flock of birds and needs to land in the Hudson, the pilot is going to take manual control, and we better hope they have great instruments that help them understand the situation.

In other words: routine predictable work might make sense to delegate to a virtual copilot / assistant. But when you’re shooting for extraordinary outcomes, perhaps the best bet is to equip human experts with new superpowers.”

Hasnain says:

“I'm guessing that part of why AI coding tools are so popular is the slot machine effect. Intermittent rewards, lots of waiting that fractures your attention, and inherent laziness keeping you trying with yet another prompt in hopes that you don’t have to actually turn on your brain after so many hours of being told not to.

The exhilarating power of creation. Just insert a few more cents, and you’ll get another shot at making your dreams a reality.”

Hasnain says:

This was an insightful-ish read on corporate culture and performance. Will have to ponder

“And for junior hires, how can they learn without knowing what good looks like? How can you learn what good looks like without ever having the ability to point to someone and talk about their performance?

Judge your coworkers, lest you not be judged, because to not be judged is to never learn.”

Hasnain says:

Unfortunately the title was more promising than the actual content here

“The function universities have long played is less one of educating than of credentialing. Carter gives us good reason to think the credentialing function of universities is about to collapse, due to AI. But he finds new possibilities, or rather old possibilities, emerging from the wreckage: liberal education in the original sense, as a leisure activity (“scholar” is from schole, leisure) for its own sake; for the love of truth. Unburdened of its current gatekeeping role in the political economy of managerialism and bullshit jobs, and no longer serving as a legitimation operation for unpopular political projects (producing “the Science” that must be “followed”), the successor to the modern university will be something subterranean rather than publicity-seeking, disconnected from power and money, useless, a place where people with the most searching minds gather to pursue truth for the love of it, as literal amateurs.

“

Hasnain says:

““Surveillance evidence is frequently submitted in court,” they said. “Obviously, there are things like hacking which are just out-and-out illegal, but unfortunately they are just part of the landscape.”
Private intelligence firms claim that illegally obtained information is routinely submitted to courts in the U.K., with the third industry figure telling POLITICO there are “ludicrous cover stories put in front of judges” where people are trying to “launder stolen information into court proceedings.”
“I think judges could probably do a better job of being a bit more wide-eyed about what is going on,” they added, citing one case in which information from a stolen tablet was submitted to court — with the legal team doing so claiming it had simply been handed to them in the middle of the night by a whistleblower.
“Everyone knows which firms do it,” the same person said. “The most disturbing thing is it’s all signed off by law firms. There’s still some SRA [Solicitors Regulation Authority]-regulated lawyer somewhere who’s either proactively signed off that hacking or they have not asked the question when the materials come back in of: How the fuck did you get this?””

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.”