Biden administration signals it will support push to sanction ICC
Move to censure International Criminal Court a sign of US anger over request for arrest warrants for Israeli ministers
Hasnain says:
Comes as Blinken admitted he would rather starve children across the globe (threatening to pull funding from UN programs that feed kids) than accept that the ICC has a valid warrant.
Dark day in history
Posted on 2024-05-21T22:04:23+0000
Google cuts mystery check to US in bid to sidestep jury trial
Alphabet's Google has preemptively paid damages to the U.S. government, an unusual move aimed at avoiding a jury trial in the Justice Department's antitrust lawsuit over its digital advertising business.
Hasnain says:
"Stanford Law School's Mark Lemley told Reuters he was skeptical Google’s gambit would prevail. He said a jury could ultimately decide higher damages than whatever Google put forward.
“Antitrust cases regularly go to juries. I think it is a sign that Google is worried about what a jury will do,” Lemley said.
Another legal scholar, Herbert Hovenkamp of the University of Pennsylvania’s law school, called Google's move "smart" in a post on X. “Juries are bad at deciding technical cases, and further they do not have the authority to order a breakup,” he wrote.
The U.S. Supreme Court ruled in a 2016 case that an offer for “complete relief” did not wipe out a class-action claim. But Google argued its payment is different, because it submitted an actual check and not merely an offer."
Posted on 2024-05-21T04:49:48+0000
Scarlett Johansson says she is 'shocked, angered' over new ChatGPT voice
Johansson says she was approached multiple times by OpenAI to be the voice of ChatGPT, and that she declined. Then the company released a voice assistant that sounded uncannily like her.
Hasnain says:
Of course.
“OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, who has said the 2013 Spike Jonze film is his favorite movie, invited comparisons by posting the word "Her" on X after the company announced the new ChatGPT version. But later, OpenAI executives denied any connection between Johansson and the new voice assistant.
The company said in a post on X just before midnight Pacific time Sunday that the voice would be paused as it addresses "questions about how we chose the voices in ChatGPT." A company spokeswoman would not provide further detail.”
Posted on 2024-05-20T23:30:02+0000
California university president put on leave for ‘insubordination’ after meeting Gaza protesters' demands
Mike Lee had agreed to move toward divesting from Israel and giving a pro-Palestinian group more sway over campus decisions.
Hasnain says:
As the president, who was he insubordinate to?!
“The punishment marks perhaps the harshest disciplinary action against a campus chancellor or president in California over the handling of protests of the war in Gaza. It also underscores an unwillingness to divest from Israeli weapons manufacturers — as pro-Palestinian protesters across the country have increasingly demanded the last few months — among leaders of the CSU system and its sister University of California system.”
Posted on 2024-05-16T19:33:03+0000
Jewish American Biden Appointee Is Latest To Resign In Protest Of Gaza Policy
"President Biden has the blood of innocent people on his hands," said Lily Greenberg Call in her resignation letter to the U.S. Department of the Interior.
Hasnain says:
From being part of the AIPAC lobby to the state department to this. Kudos.
Still hoping for more mass resignations at this point.
““The United States has long enabled Israeli war crimes and the status quo of apartheid and occupation. That status quo does not keep Israelis safe, nor Jews around the world. It certainly does not protect Palestinians, who have the right to freedom, safety, self-determination and dignity, just as much as Jewish people do, and every person does,” Call wrote. “Any system that requires the subjugation of one group over another is not only unjust, but unsafe.””
“"Nakba and Shoah, the Hebrew word for Holocaust, mean the same thing: catastrophe. I reject the premise that one people’s salvation must come at another’s destruction. I am committed to creating a world where this does not happen…this cannot be done from within the Biden Admin."”
Posted on 2024-05-16T05:16:11+0000
American Medical Missions Trapped in Gaza, Facing Death by Dehydration as Population Clings to Life
Upward of 20 American doctors are trapped in Gaza, some at the European Hospital, due to Israel’s post-invasion closure of the Rafah border crossing.
Hasnain says:
“Harm an American, and we will respond” - Joe Biden
*terms and conditions may apply. Valid exclusions include: you are brown or helping brown people
“UPWARD OF 20 American doctors are trapped in Gaza as a result of Israel’s post-invasion closure of the Rafah border crossing into Egypt, according to sources with knowledge of the plight of two ill-fated medical missions.
Israel has blocked fuel, food, and water from entering Rafah for over a week, leading to severe dehydration among the general population, as well as among the doctors on mission.”
Posted on 2024-05-13T19:15:55+0000
US students, once again, have led the way. Now we must all stand up for Palestine | Osita Nwanevu
Campus protests in solidarity with the people of Gaza have braved abuse and police raids but history will be kinder
Hasnain says:
“The student left is the most reliably correct constituency in America. Over the past 60 years, it has passed every great moral test American foreign policy has forced upon the public, including the Vietnam war, the question of relations with apartheid South Africa, and the Iraq war. Student activists were at the heart of the black civil rights movement from the very beginning. To much derision and abuse, they pushed for more rights, protections and respect for women and queer people on their campuses than the wider world was long willing to provide. And over the past 20 years in particular, policymakers have arrived belatedly to stances on economic inequality, climate change, drug policy and criminal justice that putative radicals on campus took up long before them.”
Posted on 2024-05-13T16:24:15+0000
It's always TCP_NODELAY. Every damn time. - Marc's Blog
The first thing I check when debugging latency issues in distributed systems is whether TCP_NODELAY is enabled. And it’s not just me. Every distributed system builder I know has lost hours to latency issues quickly fixed by enabling this simple socket option, suggesting that the default behavior i...
Hasnain says:
“Is Nagle needed?
First, the uncontroversial take: if you’re building a latency-sensitive distributed system running on modern datacenter-class hardware, enable TCP_NODELAY (disable Nagle’s algorithm) without worries. You don’t need to feel bad. It’s not a sin. It’s OK. Just go ahead.
More controversially, I suspect that Nagle’s algorithm just isn’t needed on modern systems, given the traffic and application mix, and the capabilities of the hardware we have today. In other words, TCP_NODELAY should be the default. That’s going to make some “write every byte” code slower than it would otherwise be, but those applications should be fixed anyway if we care about efficiency.”
Posted on 2024-05-13T00:53:18+0000
GPUs Go Brrr
how make gpu fast?
Hasnain says:
“From a philosophical point of view, we think a frame shift is in order. A “register” certainly shouldn’t be a 32-bit word like on the CPUs of old. And a 1024-bit wide vector register, as CUDA uses, is certainly a step in the right direction. But to us a “register” is a 16x16 tile of data. We think AI wants this -- after all this time, it’s still just matrix multiplies, reductions, and reshapes. And we think the hardware wants this, too -- small matrix multiplies are just begging for hardware support beyond just the systolic mma.
In fact, more broadly we believe we should really reorient our ideas of AI around what maps well onto the hardware. How big should a recurrent state be? As big can fit onto an SM. How dense should the compute be? No less so than what the hardware demands. An important future direction of this work for us is to use our learnings about the hardware to help us design the AI to match.”
Posted on 2024-05-13T00:52:26+0000
Biden Administration Probe Of Israeli Conduct In Gaza Says Military Aid Can Continue
The president's report "ignores the big question" of whether the U.S. government thinks Israel has violated international humanitarian law, a U.S. official told HuffPost.
Hasnain says:
“Senator Chris Van Hollen on the Blinken-Netanyahu report: ""If this conduct complies with international standards, God help us all".”
Posted on 2024-05-11T06:04:13+0000