Hasnain says:

““Because America is supporting the Israeli campaign, it will be affected by anything that charges Israel with crimes or demands that Israel adhere to something,” he said.

The U.S. has repeatedly said it is not assessing whether Israel is following international law in its campaign but expects Israelis to do so.

Other world governments say their sympathy for Israel amid its trauma does not excuse what they see as extremely alarming conduct in Gaza.

“While we strongly support Israel and are not ready to accept anything that would jeopardize its security… I don’t see any contradiction between the right to fight against terrorists, including Hamas, and the absolute necessity to stop attacks against civilians,””

Hasnain says:

"If you happen to sit on the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC 32 Data Management and Interchange committee, please imagine the soft chords of a heart-tugging piano lament have begun to play. A montage of transactional anomalies appears on your screen. Internal anomalies. Lost updates. Dirty writes. Jepsen is looking into the camera, holding a database."

Hasnain says:

She continues to be an inspiration as always.

“Twenty-one years ago, when I delivered “Come September” in New Mexico, there was a kind of omertà in the US around Palestine. Those who spoke about it paid a huge price for doing so. Today the young are on the streets, led from the front by Jews as well as Palestinians, raging about what their government, the US government, is doing. Universities, including the most elite campuses, are on the boil. Capitalism is moving fast to shut them down. Donors are threatening to withhold funds, thereby deciding what American students may or may not say, and how they may or may not think. A shot to the heart of the foundational principles of a so-called liberal education. Gone is any pretense of post-colonialism, multiculturalism, international law, the Geneva Conventions, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Gone is any pretence of Free Speech or public morality. A “war” that lawyers and scholars of international law say meets all the legal criterion of a genocide is taking place in which the perpetrators have cast themselves as victims, the colonisers who run an apartheid state have cast themselves as the oppressed. In the US, to question this is to be charged with anti-Semitism, even if those questioning it are Jewish themselves. It’s mind-bending. Even Israel—where dissident Israeli citizens like Gideon Levy are the most knowledgeable and incisive critics of Israeli actions—does not police speech in the way the US does (although that is rapidly changing, too). In the US, to speak of Intifada—uprising, resistance—in this case against genocide, against your own erasure—is considered to be a call for the genocide of Jews. The only moral thing Palestinian civilians can do apparently is to die. The only legal thing the rest of us can do is to watch them die. And be silent. If not, we risk our scholarships, grants, lecture fees and livelihoods.”

Hasnain says:

“We are not any smarter, kinder, wiser, or more moral than people who lived ninety years ago. We are just as likely to needlessly give up our political power and to remain willfully ignorant of darkness as it’s dawning. But we know something they didn’t know: we know that the Holocaust is possible.”

Hasnain says:

How is this not bribery? Sigh.

“On a commercial flight back from Awakening, Thomas brought up the prospect of justices resigning to Stearns, the Republican lawmaker. Worried, Stearns wrote a letter to Thomas after the flight promising “to look into a bill to raise the salaries of members of The Supreme Court.”

“As we agreed, it is worth a lot to Americans to have the constitution properly interpreted,” Stearns wrote. “We must have the proper incentives here, too.””

Hasnain says:

“I have spoken to many people in tech who are afraid that if they speak up, they’ll be unable to raise their next round, and lose 5-10 years of work on their venture, for their families and for their employees.

We must break the silence around the genocide in Gaza. I know this is a big ask. I know there are significant risks involved, and that's not your fault. But all the same, we cannot continue to be complicit in this genocide.”

Hasnain says:

“All of which is to say that something profound is happening in the world — a kind of metaphysical detachment of the west from the rest.

Where many people in the rest of the world once saw the west as the answer to their problems, they now realise that they will have to find their own way. But does this mean a total decoupling of the west and the rest is inevitable? Absolutely not. We still live in an interdependent world which faces many pressing common global challenges.

We have to talk to each other. But we must do so as equals. The condescension must end. The time has come for a dialogue based on mutual respect between the west and the rest.”

Hasnain says:

“Although Epic didn’t sue for damages, Epic Games CEO Tim Sweeney suggested Epic stood to make hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars if it doesn’t have to pay Google’s fee.”

Hasnain says:

“Update: In a social media post made after this article was published, Google DeepMind’s VP of Research Oriol Vinyals showed a bit more of how “Gemini was used to create” the video. “The video illustrates what the multimodal user experiences built with Gemini could look like. We made it to inspire developers.” (Emphasis mine.) Interestingly, it shows a pre-prompting sequence that lets Gemini answer the planets question without the sun hinting (though it does tell Gemini it’s an expert on planets and to consider the sequence of objects pictured).”

Hasnain says:

““Where are they supposed to go?” is indeed the question. The answer, clearly, is anywhere but Gaza. It would benefit the US media to start using this framework. Israel is forcibly transferring 2.2 million Gazans, in whole or in part, to either tiny tent cities, other countries, or both. There is little evidence of any campaign to go after those responsible for October 7 in any limited or targeted way. Indeed, Hamas, according to The Washington Post, remains “largely intact” after 15,000 Palestinians have been killed. We have mounds of evidence, increasing by the day, of a policy of collective punishment and collective guilt. Those calling the shots in US media should start updating their framing of this conflict accordingly. Israeli officials have hardly pretended otherwise.”