Hasnain says:

“The FTC said Avast collected customers’ online browsing habits for years, including their web searches and which websites they visited, using Avast’s own browser extensions, which the antivirus giant claimed would “shield your privacy” by blocking online tracking cookies.

But the FTC alleged that Avast sold consumers’ browsing data through its now-shuttered subsidiary, Jumpshot, to more than a hundred other companies, making Avast tens of millions of dollars in revenue.”

Hasnain says:

Kinda crazy to own so much to be called out here alongside big company investors

“Reddit has raised about $1.3 billion in funding and has a post valuation of $10 billion, according to deal-tracking service PitchBook. Publishing giant Condé Nast bought Reddit in 2006. Reddit spun out of Conde Nast’s parent company, Advance Magazine Publishers, in 2011.

Advance now owns 34% of voting power. Other notable shareholders include Tencent and Sam Altman, CEO of startup OpenAI.”

Hasnain says:

“These questions and issues don’t just matter in the current moment (though this is when they matter the most), but also for the legacy of Canadian journalism — for how the public here and abroad, scholars, legal figures, government officials, and future journalists look back at what the Canadian media did during what there is a chance may be ruled a genocide.

History is not going to look fondly on Canadian media. The mass slaughter should have prompted change far before it was ruled that it may plausibly be genocide. But with the ruling, there’s even less of an excuse. Unfortunately, it seems too many journalists are content to wait around for what may be a years-long ICJ trial to conclude. And when that happens, and Israel is perhaps found guilty of genocide, they will have acted like they were always against it and did what they could. “

Hasnain says:

“The president’s admirers like to refer to him as the “comforter-in-chief”. His aides call him a “devout Catholic”. He himself has talked, movingly and at length, about grief, loss and pain. So how does that same Biden sleep at night, as US-made bombs continue to fall on innocents in Gaza? How does he justify his inaction and complicity? Here is a man who has experienced devastating personal tragedies, losing his 29-year-old wife and one-year-old daughter in a car crash and then, decades later, losing a son to brain cancer. Yet he now possesses the power, unique among the 8 billion people who live on this planet, to pick up the phone, dial a number beginning +972, and halt the daily killing of hundreds of wives and children.

It really is that simple.

So Mr President, there’s no point “venting” your frustration in private and telling only your aides that the war “has to stop”.

Tell that to Netanyahu. Make the call. End this genocide.”

Hasnain says:

I feel like this would have been called super unrealistic if someone wrote this as fiction.

“Johnson, husband No. 4, says anyone who gets involved with his ex-wife is in for an emotional roller coaster ride.

"One day she hates you and one day she loves you and the next day she hates you," Johnson told the AP. "I guess I am lucky to be alive."

After 13 borrowed years, it appears Graham no longer felt that way.”

Hasnain says:

What are we even doing at this point?

“The Environmental Protection Agency recently reapproved paraquat, a toxic herbicide, even though a group of environmental and public health groups have been suing the agency for ignoring multiple studies showing paraquat exposure increases a person’s odds of developing Parkinson’s disease. That’s in addition to paraquat’s short-term effects, which can include heart failure, kidney failure, liver failure, and lung scarring if even a small amount of it is ingested, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. In fact, the CDC fact sheet on paraquat includes the striking recommendation that if you get any on your clothes you should cut the affected garment off your body—because it is too dangerous to pull it over your head and risk ingesting paraquat—and see a doctor immediately. The company that sells paraquat, according to documents leaked to The Guardian in 2022, has known about possible long-term neurological effects since 1975 and deliberately downplayed them.”

Hasnain says:

“In the next few years, stories about children being mailed through rural routes would crop up from time to time as people pushed the limits of what could be sent through Parcel Post. In one famous case, on February 19, 1914, a four-year-old girl named Charlotte May Pierstorff was “mailed” via train from her home in Grangeville, Idaho to her grandparents’ house about 73 miles away, Nancy Pope writes for the National Postal Museum. Her story has become so legendary that it was even made into a children’s book, Mailing May.

“Postage was cheaper than a train ticket,” Lynch says.”

Hasnain says:

“Some experts, including Stephen Meier, chair of the management division at Columbia Business School in New York, remain genuinely baffled why companies like UPS are putting up a fight over return-to-office. But he believes there's a common thread among many of these firms: hard-line management tactics.

"You can't continue that leadership style that you had before [the pandemic]," he says. "You need to actually empower [employees] … And, I think, some leaders are just used to a certain command-and-control model."

This is true of many outspoken critics of remote work, such as Tesla CEO Elon Musk”

Hasnain says:

"Forty years into investigations of salt taste, researchers are still left with questions about how people’s tongues perceive salt and how the brain sorts those sensations into “just right” versus “too much” amounts. At stake is more than just satisfying a scientific curiosity: Given the cardiovascular risks that a high-salt diet poses to some of us, it’s important to understand the process.

Researchers even dream of developing better salt alternatives or enhancers that would create the “yum” without the health risks. But it’s clear they have more work to do before they invent something we can sprinkle on our dinner plates with abandon, free of health worries. "

Hasnain says:

Super long, super worth reading though.

"But unfortunately for Zuckerberg's argument, there are at least three major issues in play here where diseconomies of scale dominate. One is that, given material that nearly everyone can agree is bad (such as bitcoin scams, spam for fake pharmaceutical products, fake weather forecasts, adults sending photos of their genitals to children), etc., large platforms do worse than small ones. The second is that, for the user, errors are much more costly and less fixable as companies get bigger because support generally becomes worse. The third is that, as platforms scale up, a larger fraction of users will strongly disagree about what should be allowed on the platform."