Hasnain says:

“Since mid 2023 we've been working on a framework for LLM assisted vulnerability research embodying these principles, with a particular focus on automating variant analysis. This project has been called "Naptime" because of the potential for allowing us to take regular naps while it helps us out with our jobs. Please don't tell our manager.”

Hasnain says:

More Lina Khan Ws

“According to the complaint, when consumers purchase a subscription through the company’s website, Adobe pushes consumers to its “annual paid monthly” subscription plan, pre-selecting it as a default. Adobe prominently shows the plan’s “monthly” cost during enrollment, but it buries the early termination fee (ETF) and its amount, which is 50 percent of the remaining monthly payments when a consumer cancels in their first year. Adobe’s ETF disclosures are buried on the company’s website in small print or require consumers to hover over small icons to find the disclosures.”

Hasnain says:

“Since the protests began on campuses throughout the United States, I have been struck by the verbal contortions many writers have gone through to avoid engaging with the gravity of Israel’s assault on Gaza—one of the most brutal, punitive military campaigns in modern history—and with the clarity of the students’ moral outrage. If you are in this country, and you have successfully ignored the images of children, dead and living, being pulled out from rubble in Gaza, of people being operated on without anaesthetic, of bodies torn limb from limb, of babies removed from incubators and left to die, of embryos destroyed in fertility clinics, of bodies hanging from buildings, of mothers and fathers carrying pieces of their children in plastic bags, of friends walking together struck and killed with precision missiles, you might get the impression from much of what you read that a woke mob has been flinging words like “colonialist” around indiscriminately, aggressing American Jewish students, and intimidating all those who oppose their views into silence.

It has been startling to me to read so many writers lamenting the speech of pro-Palestine protesters in the US compared with this actual violence—tantamount, according to numerous experts, to the crime of genocide. Such essays frequently describe speech as being either threatening (from the Palestinian side) or under threat (on the anti-Palestinian side).”

Hasnain says:

“Emily Bell says Lewis may be finding it hard to adapt to American values, despite his time at The Wall Street Journal — noting his patron there, Murdoch, was born in Australia and trained in Britain.

In the U.K., Bell says, newspapers are largely national in scope and engage in a ferocious battle for paying readers, advertisers and influence. Murdoch is among the most combative.

"In Britain, there are much more incestuous relationships, with much greater alignment of power rather than a genuine interest in actually holding power to account," Bell says. "And I think, if you bring that to The Washington Post, then I think you're going to see a lot of damage.”

Hasnain says:

“After rolling out this change, we saw a significant improvement in query runtimes for bigger, more complex environments, including ones with more than 2,000 services and on the order of 100,000 events per second flowing into our system. Median query duration in situations like these started at around 20s (a customer experience we were certainly not proud of!) and decreased to around 0.2 seconds. That’s two orders of magnitude and well within our internal query performance SLOs.

Additionally, this layer of abstraction affords us a lot more freedom to add more features to Honeycomb without worrying as much about the implications of our data model on query performance, since the two concepts are now (mostly) independent concerns. And finally, we’re brimming with ideas about how to leverage this new model to continue to improve query performance!”

Hasnain says:

sigh. First the Pakistani polio vaccine shenanigans, and now this. The pentagon does not shy away from opportunities to kill people.

““I’m sure that there are lots of people who died from COVID who did not need to die from COVID,” she said.

To implement the anti-vax campaign, the Defense Department overrode strong objections from top U.S. diplomats in Southeast Asia at the time, Reuters found. Sources involved in its planning and execution say the Pentagon, which ran the program through the military’s psychological operations center in Tampa, Florida, disregarded the collateral impact that such propaganda may have on innocent Filipinos.

“We weren’t looking at this from a public health perspective,” said a senior military officer involved in the program. “We were looking at how we could drag China through the mud.””

Hasnain says:

““I really do think it’s very likely that we will, at some time, it’s not a question of if, it’s more of a question of when we will have a bird flu pandemic,” Redfield said.
He also noted that bird flu has a “significant mortality” when it enters humans compared to COVID-19. Redfield predicts the mortality is “probably somewhere between 25 and 50 percent mortality.” NewsNation noted that the death rate for COVID was 0.6 percent.”

Hasnain says:

I feel seen.

“When I joined Graphite, there were almost no tests in the entire codebase. Out of the team of five engineers, three had previously worked at Meta — and had internalized the poor testing culture practiced there.”

Hasnain says:

“That Biden has elevated these claims speaks to either a corrupted game of outrage telephone, or intentionally disingenuous misframing to denigrate protests that rightfully criticize his policies on Gaza. Regardless, we will likely see people with an incentive to neutralize protests for Palestine leap on this opportunity, issuing a new round of policies to crack down on constitutionally protected First Amendment activity.”

Hasnain says:

Surprised immunity debt is still the leading theory when so many studies show COVID screws the immune system.

“The resulting research, based on data collected from more than 60 organizations and public health agencies, shows that 44 countries and territories have reported at least one infectious disease resurgence that’s at least ten times worse than the pre-pandemic baseline.
The post-Covid global surge of illnesses — viral and bacterial, common and historically rare — is a mystery that researchers and scientists are still trying to definitively explain. The way Covid lockdowns shifted baseline immunities is a piece of the puzzle, as is the pandemic’s hit to overall vaccine administration and compliance. Climate change, rising social inequality and wrung-out health-care services are contributing in ways that are hard to measure.”