Hasnain says:

The numbers here are astounding.

“We clearly have a ways to go, but you should be excited and expect the reality where we use these models extensively to be sooner than most people expect. Assuming progress is the safe bet with AI.”

Hasnain says:

Long but worth reading in full. It was hard to pick out one thing so I’ll just pick the most stark thing that isn’t covered by things I’ve shared before

“BBC journalists emphasize this context when they point to how Berg reshapes everything from headlines, to story text, to images, arguing he repeatedly seeks to foreground the Israeli military perspective while stripping away Palestinian humanity, with one journalist characterizing his approach as “death by a thousand cuts.”

In response to a request for comment from Berg, Drop Site News was informed that Berg had hired British-Israeli lawyer Mark Lewis, who is described as “the UK’s foremost media, libel and privacy lawyer.” The former director of UK Lawyers for Israel, Lewis attended the 2018 launch of Likud-Herut UK, a right-wing Zionist organisation, whose national director is his wife, Mandy Blumenthal. At the launch, Lewis emphasized the importance of “unapologetic Zionism.” Citing rising antisemitism, he announced that he and Blumenthal had immigrated to Israel in December 2018. “Europe in my view is finished,” he declared. His Twitter profile cites his current location as “Israel (legal work England).””

Hasnain says:

I got to integrate with and use glean for a number of use cases back at meta and it was pretty cool. Glad to see it being written about more.

“Furthermore, there are an ever-growing number of ad-hoc queries made by various people and systems to solve a variety of problems. Having a system like Glean means you can ask questions about your code: we don’t know all the questions we might want to ask, nor do we know all the data we might want to store, so Glean deliberately aims to be as general as possible on both of these fronts.”

Hasnain says:

Learnt a lot from this one - I expect myself coming back to it periodically as I get to explore more in AI. In particular it puts names to some techniques I had heard of but never tried out, especially around various workflows and orchestrations.

“One rule of thumb is to think about how much effort goes into human-computer interfaces (HCI), and plan to invest just as much effort in creating good agent-computer interfaces (ACI). Here are some thoughts on how to do so:

Put yourself in the model's shoes. Is it obvious how to use this tool, based on the description and parameters, or would you need to think carefully about it? If so, then it’s probably also true for the model. A good tool definition often includes example usage, edge cases, input format requirements, and clear boundaries from other tools.”

Hasnain says:

“For Üngör, a former student articulated the question at the heart of the debate in an email she sent him early in the war: “Do you only study genocide or do you also want to prevent it?”

It’s a dilemma many scholars of mass violence have been grappling with. Herf, the retired historian, said that for those studying the Holocaust there was a “moral impulse – and that was to see that it never happened again”. He cited fears of Iran and a second, nuclear Holocaust.

Hirsch, the scholar of memory, believes that naming genocide implicates a response.

“Genocide prevention is a responsibility,” she said, citing Philip Gourevitch’s well known book about the Rwandan genocide, We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed With Our Families. The book’s title implicitly calls out those watching as a genocide unfolds.

“Now, we’re watching on our iPhones, and still people are holding back.””

Hasnain says:

a few weeks ago Amnesty International became Hamas for truthfully reporting it’s a genocide. Then earlier this week, HRW. Now Doctors Without Borders.

The tide is turning. The hasbara defenses have gotten more desperate. I hope states listen.

“In January 2024, the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ordered Israel to implement provisional measures to prevent genocidal acts in Gaza. Despite this, no action has been taken to address these measures. MSF’s first-hand observations align with those of an increasing number of legal experts and organizations, concluding that ethnic cleansing and genocide are taking place in Gaza. MSF calls on States, particularly Israel’s closest allies, to end their unconditional support for Israel and fulfill their obligation to prevent genocide in Gaza. States must leverage their influence to alleviate the suffering of the population and enable a massive scale-up of humanitarian assistance in the Gaza Strip. “

Hasnain says:

“To work in DC now is to understand that the genocide in Palestine is not a mistake. The people actually in charge are doing this. Your job is a farce. Your work means nothing. The very top echelons are shredding everything you stood for. You will never afford a house in Washington. If you have a catastrophic health emergency, even you will need to turn to GoFundMe, and every day when you open your phone you see children mangled alive with weapons that you know legally should not be delivered.”

Hasnain says:

This one caught me off guard. I’ve been complaining about media bias for quite a while, including studies done by these folks. But even then I wouldn’t have imagined something this blatant because what. At least folks were slightly more subtle with their bias before.

“A survey of a year’s worth of Palestine-Israel coverage by four Sunday morning news shows—NBC’s Meet the Press, ABC’s This Week With George Stephanopoulos, CBS’s Face the Nation, and CNN’s State of the Union with Jake Tapper and Dana Bash—reveals a startling statistic: With the exception of one interview, the Sunday shows covered and debated the so-called “Israel-Hamas war” for 12 months without speaking to a single Palestinian or Palestinian American.”

Hasnain says:

What does one even say at this point, if soldiers and commanders from the “most moral army in the world” are admitting to this. This was the least horrifying example.

“While Palestinians are officially prohibited from entering, the reality is more severe than a simple exclusion zone. "It's military whitewashing," explains a senior officer in Division 252, who has served three reserve rotations in Gaza. "The division commander designated this area as a 'kill zone.' Anyone who enters is shot."

A recently discharged Division 252 officer describes the arbitrary nature of this boundary: "For the division, the kill zone extends as far as a sniper can see." But the issue goes beyond geography. "We're killing civilians there who are then counted as terrorists," he says. "The IDF spokesperson's announcements about casualty numbers have turned this into a competition between units. If Division 99 kills 150 [people], the next unit aims for 200."”

Hasnain says:

TIL the government only had 2(!) people assigned to Palestine, of which one resigned.

“Far from diplomacy, Casey now works at a local bank, where he watches from afar and his criticisms extend beyond a single administration. He sees a systemic failure in US policy towards Palestinians – a complete absence of a coherent strategy that in turn hurts Israelis too and remains viscerally personal.

“I remember two children killed in a ramming attack at a bus stop in Jerusalem who were the same age as my kids,” Casey said. “You see the effect the conflict has on people in Israel as well. Israelis deserve better, not just Palestinians.”

His ultimate assessment?

“We don’t have a policy on Palestine. We just do what the Israelis want us to do.”