Hasnain says:

Yay malicious compliance.

“Oxford City Council said the European Union flag required planning consent following post-Brexit legislation.
Ms Bearder said she has now told the authority she is flying the flag of the Council of Europe, which is identical and does not require consent.
She served as a Member of the European Parliament for South East England from 2009 until 2020 when the UK left the European Union (EU).”

Hasnain says:

“My favorite observation about this technique, due to a Reddit comment by Bob Nystrom, is that it essentially reinvents the idea of a bytecode interpreter. The Expr structs are bytecode instructions, and they contain variable references encoded as u32s. You could make this interpreter even better by swapping out our simple state table for some kind of stack, and then it would really be no different from a bytecode interpreter you might design from first principles. I just think it’s pretty nifty that “merely” changing our AST data structure led us directly from the land of tree walking to the land of bytecode.”

Hasnain says:

“We hear a lot of talk and speculation about why young people in America are so passionate on the topic of Palestine. From the students I was listening to today, the connection is clear. They see in Gaza the destruction of heritage, the obliteration of knowledge, the assault on institutions of learning. Far from seeming like a world away, it seems like the world in front of them. There’s been an assault upon the obligation of each generation to pass on to the next generation the intellectual legacy that was passed on to it, and whether the site of that assault is Gaza or the New York City school system, the problem is systemic. For people who are coming of age now, it’s also personal.”

Hasnain says:

Climate change :( With the heat waves around the world and now this…

“Mexico City gets about a quarter of its water from the Cutzamala system, a series of reservoirs, water treatment plants and lengthy canals and tunnels, which is running dry. Some say the system could be unable to provide water by June 26, known as “Day Zero” in the metropolitan area of 22 million, although scientists say rainfall could avert that disaster. As of May 21, the Cutzamala system is at 28 percent of its capacity, according to the Basin Agency for the Valley of Mexico, a historic low.”

Hasnain says:

“The Israeli government evidently felt Bensouda was vulnerable because she came from a tiny African state, the Gambia. One source for the Guardian explained the Israeli government’s thinking: “With Bensouda, she’s black and African, so who cares?”

Israel misjudged Bensouda. She impressively resisted this intimidation effort. Once she received assurance from the court in February 2021 that Palestine had sufficient status as a state to join it and confer jurisdiction, she acted. Her term was about to end in June 2021, so she could have handed the problem to Khan, but instead, in March 2021, she opened the investigation that has now implicated Israeli officials.”

Hasnain says:

““I think these statements blow me away, the scale of these numbers with young voters,” Evan Roth Smith, Blueprint’s lead pollster, told Semafor. “Young voters do not look at our politics and see any good guys. They see a dying empire led by bad people.””

Hasnain says:

"The problem is that certain medicines necessarily given to these donors before death, but in expectation of death, may hasten their death. The medicines are given for the sole purpose of making their organs more viable for transplantation. Heparin, for example, prevents blood clotting, while phentolamine dilates blood vessels and improves blood flow to the organs. Yet heparin also increases the chances of bleeding into the brain, while phentolamine may lower blood pressure to the degree that a person goes into shock. Although these patients are near death for other reasons, the medicines may become their actual cause of death. This makes doctors uneasy; hence the rule not to give these medicines to donors prone to bleeding or with low blood pressure."

Hasnain says:

"So, the reasons we don’t have widespread graph support:

* There are many different kinds of graphs
* There are many different representations of each kind of graph
* There are many different graph algorithms
* Graph algorithm performance is very sensitive to graph representation and implementation details
* People run very expensive algorithms on very big graphs.

This explains why languages don’t support graphs in their standard libraries: too many design decisions, too many tradeoffs, and too much maintenance burden. It explains why programmers might avoid third party graph libraries, because they’re either too limited or too slow. And it explains why programmers might not want to think about things in terms of graphs except in extreme circumstances: it’s just too hard to work with them."

Hasnain says:

I did a double take when I first read that Atlantic piece because what depraved demon from the depths of hell do you have to be to go out and imply “yes it was legal to kill this child and it’s unfortunate to imply we were illegally killing this child (which would be bad)”

“Think about the kind of worldview which could publish something like that. This made it through the entire editing process in a mainstream liberal publication.

Anyone who’s been following the Gaza genocide on social media today will be seeing this phrase “legally killed child” alongside footage of children ripped apart by Israeli military explosives in a civilian displacement camp — a pairing which, if you have a beating heart in your chest and a functioning empathy center in your brain, will spark a very special kind of rage inside you.

The way these two points dance together just says so much about what we’re dealing with here, when you take a step back and really look at it. It says so much about Israel. It says so much about western civilization. It says so much about the western press in general and liberal war propaganda rags like The Atlantic in particular. It says so much about the kind of mainstream political worldview which could allow for such a thing to exist. And it says we live in a civilization that has gone completely, utterly insane.”

Hasnain says:

“Dr H.A. Hellyer, a scholar of security studies and the Middle East at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, said the Biden administration risks “a massive blow to American credibility, such as it is,” if it fails to support the court’s order.

“The ICJ ruling is not in the abstract, nor is it in need of detailed interpretation. It’s very clear,” he said. “This is the highest court in the world, and they’ve said any action in Rafah that could bring about the destruction of Palestinians needs to immediately stop. So you either support international law or you don’t.””