“It's a tough time for the truth.”
An interview on politics, music, journalism, tech, and our not-so-inevitable doom.
Hasnain says:
“SK: When Biden dropped out and Harris came in, I had a brief fleeting feeling that maybe there would be change. Maybe this dynamic will finally end. Maybe she’ll move away from the policies of the Biden administration, which I do think were meant to make liberals and Democrats accept things that they never ever would have accepted under Trump. Things they would have spoken out against five or ten years ago.
The Biden administration did this slowly. It was this little drip, drip, drip effect of gradually normalizing mass death. I remember when the number of covid deaths surpassed the number of people who died on 9/11, people were horrified. Then suddenly we’re at a million, and they just stop counting. The same thing happened with Gaza. When the initial deaths passed 1000, people were horrified. Then you get to 40,000 and they’ve stopped counting — in part because the Israeli military killed the people who count them.
Getting people used to mass death is a prelude for getting them to accept mass murder: not just in Gaza, but anywhere in the world, including the United States.”
Posted on 2024-10-20T01:20:16+0000
‘Horrifying’ mistake to take organs from a living person was averted, witnesses say
At a hospital in Kentucky, a man who had been declared dead after a drug overdose was moving and visibly crying as he was prepped for surgery to donate his vital organs. The surgery was stopped, and the man is alive three years later.
Hasnain says:
““We actually were in the operating room. We had actually opened the patient and were in the process of sort of preparing their organs, at which point the ventilator triggered and so the anesthesiologist at the head of the table spoke up and said, ‘Hey, I think this patient might have just breathed,’” Cannon later told NPR in an interview. “If the patient breathes, that means they’re not brain dead.”
Nevertheless, a representative from the OPO wanted to proceed anyway, Cannon says. He refused.
“We were kind of shocked that an OPO person would have so little knowledge about what brain death means that they would say, ‘Oh, you should just go ahead.’ And we thought, ‘No. We’re not going to take any risk that we murder a patient.’ Because that’s what it would be if that patient was alive.””
Posted on 2024-10-18T06:20:46+0000
How we Outsmarted CSGO Cheaters with IdentityLogger - Mo Beigi
Learn how IdentityLogger used fingerprinting to combat ban evasion, protecting our CSGO community from relentless cheaters.
Hasnain says:
“The best part was that no one knew how we were able to do this and our admin team kept the implementation a top secret. We should have filed a patent! If cheaters learned how we were able to fingerprint them in this way, it would have been trivial for them to delete the cookies file on disk while ban evading. I am happy to report that the solution worked as expected from deployment date until October 2017 when Valve removed the VGUI browser entirely as part of their efforts to secure the game. It was only after this that I revealed the technique publicly and open-sourced the plugin.
Many years later, I remain really proud of this solution and how well it worked.”
Posted on 2024-10-17T07:37:24+0000
Federal Trade Commission Announces Final “Click-to-Cancel” Rule Making It Easier for Consumers to End Recurring Subscriptions and Memberships
The Federal Trade Commission today announced a
Hasnain says:
Lina Khan continues to deliver. Brb canceling my gym membership
“The Federal Trade Commission today announced a final “click-to-cancel” rule that will require sellers to make it as easy for consumers to cancel their enrollment as it was to sign up. Most of the final rule’s provisions will go into effect 180 days after it is published in the Federal Register.”
Posted on 2024-10-17T07:21:57+0000
Biden envoy told aid groups Israel too close an ally for US to suspend arms
Attendees of the late August meeting with Lise Grande said her remarks were surprisingly candid, shocking many in the room.
Hasnain says:
Been a while since I’ve seen someone in politics be honest. So kudos for that I guess.
“A humanitarian aid official who attended the meeting said Grande noted that Israel is one in a “tight circle of very few allies” that the U.S. will not oppose, nor will it “hold anything back that they want.”
“She was sort of saying, with certain allies, we can’t play bad cop,” the aid official said.”
Posted on 2024-10-17T06:30:33+0000
Rationalizing the Horrors of Israel’s War in Gaza
The novelist Howard Jacobson has argued that too much press coverage of dead Palestinian children is a new form of “blood libel” against Jews.
Hasnain says:
I don’t get why people agree to be interviewed by Chotiner. If he ever reaches out to me for an interview I’m going to hang my head in shame and run far away.
Also what the … was this guy even smoking.
"Howard, I think maybe we’re in a bit of a worrisome place if you see photos of dead children on television and your first thought is, They’re trying to make me, a Jew, hate my people.
You’ve twisted what I’ve said. That’s not my first thought. That’s not my first thought.
Second thought?
And it’s not my second thought. It all depends on how often you see them, and when you see them. You see them and you see them and that’s all you see, and then you feel, Is this what the war means to the media? This is what they want to stress again and again and again?"
Posted on 2024-10-15T08:10:30+0000
Iron Dome Is Not a Defensive System
The Iron Dome cannot meaningfully be considered “life-saving” in any value system that recognizes Palestinian humanity.
Hasnain says:
Note that this is from May last year:
“Viewed in light of its role in cementing a deadly status quo, the Iron Dome cannot meaningfully be considered “life-saving” in any value system that recognizes Palestinian life alongside Israeli life. Palestine advocates ought to oppose its funding not just because they oppose military aid for Israel in general, but on the specific grounds that by depriving Palestinians of even the most limited means of military deterrence, the US has given Israel a blank check to massacre Gazans whenever it is politically convenient. Especially in the absence of political will from the Israelis to end the devastating siege and blockade, Palestinians, desperate for life, have shown that they will continue to fight back. By funding a system that guarantees their acts of resistance are of almost no consequence to their oppressors, we are consigning them to death. “
Posted on 2024-10-14T05:14:50+0000
Cyanide - Improve an algorithm performance step by step
Improve an algorithm performance step by step 📅 2024-10-12 ⌛ 14 min Technology Rust Recently, I've been working on a new approximate nearest neighbor search algorithm called RaBitQ. The author has already provided a C++ implementation that runs quite fast. I tried to rewrite it in Rust (yet ano...
Hasnain says:
"Conclusion
SIMD is awesome when it's used properly
IO is also important, especially for the large datasets
The current performance is the same as the C++ version for dataset GIST. While I use more SIMD, the C++ version uses const generics."
Israel’s military says 4 soldiers were killed in a Hezbollah drone attack
Israel’s military says four soldiers were killed in a Hezbollah drone attack on an army base Sunday evening.
Hasnain says:
No words for this, especially since this para is the understatement of the year. I do not recommend watching the videos and pictures coming out of this (will not describe here but may do so in the comments.)
“Meanwhile, explosions hit early Monday outside Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir al-Balah, killing three people and injuring about 50 others, the hospital said. Tents caught fire, and residents of the Central Gaza community carried the injured into the hospital.”
Posted on 2024-10-14T01:36:15+0000
Netanyahu mulls plan to empty northern Gaza of civilians and cut off aid to those left inside
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is examining a plan to seal off humanitarian aid to northern Gaza in an attempt to starve out Hamas militants.
Hasnain says:
I prefer the phrasing an anti-zionist I follow on twitter used instead of the quote at the bottom because this is just ridiculous media complicity.
“"German Chancellor Adolph Hitler is examining a plan to seal off humanitarian aid to the Warsaw Ghetto in an attempt to starve out socialist & communist militants, a plan that could trap hundreds of thousands of Jews without food or water.”
This is what the piece says:
“Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is examining a plan to seal off humanitarian aid to northern Gaza in an attempt to starve out Hamas militants, a plan that, if implemented, could trap without food or water hundreds of thousands of Palestinians unwilling or unable to leave their homes.”
Posted on 2024-10-13T20:13:02+0000