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Hasnain says:

“How much further damage can it be allowed to do? Do nations that really care about one another enable their friends to undermine their own security with reckless policies, to compromise their values, to harm themselves and all those who support them, to commit crimes that violate the teachings and values they were once supposed to emulate and embody, to commit crimes against humanity?”

Posted on 2023-12-31T18:39:38+0000

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Tracking developer build times to decide if the M3 MacBook is worth upgrading | incident.io

When our CTO said "I'll upgrade your MacBook if you can prove it's worthwhile" we embarked on a journey including (re)building a Go hot-reloader, instrumenting developer builds, analysing compiler performance and feeding an AI model the data until we had an answer.

Click to view the original at incident.io

Hasnain says:

“In the face of irrefutable evidence that new Space Black M3 Pro laptops would dramatically improve not only how cool we look on our commute, but also how fast we can ship changes and delight customers, the decision was an easy one and the new laptops are now on their way!”

Posted on 2023-12-30T05:01:29+0000

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The Free-Speech Debate Is a Trap

Free speech is a public utility, not a guarantee of justice. It’s time for the left to stop expecting it to serve its values.

Click to view the original at nymag.com

Hasnain says:

“What everyone knows on some level, I think, is that speech has the power to incite action because speech itself is already a material act. Yes, anti-Zionism is an idea, not a rock; but if it were only an idea, without any practical potential, then there would be no point in throwing it. The difference right now is that, given the tremendous political and ideological instability introduced by the war, a number of powerful people in America currently believe that talking about freeing Palestine could actually end up freeing Palestine, and it is this cascade of actions that they are ultimately trying to suppress. This tells us something very important: They are afraid. The question is not whether intifada, which means “uprising” in Arabic and invokes both civil disobedience and violent resistance, is a threatening term; if it were not threatening, the House would never have convened an entire hearing about it. The only question is whether threatened parties — the Israeli apartheid regime, American foreign-policy hawks, all the board members and lobbyists and donors and hedge-fund managers — deserve to be threatened.”

Posted on 2023-12-23T15:33:05+0000

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Lapsus$: GTA 6 hacker handed indefinite hospital order

Judge says hacker remains a high risk through his skills and motivation to carry out cyber-crime.

Click to view the original at bbc.com

Hasnain says:

Later goes on to call these “well defended” targets but umm..

“The jury was told that while he was on bail for hacking Nvidia and BT/EE and in police protection at a Travelodge hotel, he continued hacking and carried out his most infamous hack.
Despite having his laptop confiscated, Kurtaj managed to breach Rockstar, the company behind GTA, using an Amazon Firestick, his hotel TV and a mobile phone.”

Posted on 2023-12-21T20:41:29+0000

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Amid U.N. Security Council Intrigue, U.S. Privately Moves To Block Another Option For International Accountability For Gaza

The Biden administration is finalizing plans to urge Switzerland to reject a request from Palestine and its supporters to hold a conference on violations of the Geneva Conventions.

Click to view the original at huffpost.com

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,””

Posted on 2023-12-21T03:39:11+0000

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Jepsen: MySQL 8.0.34

MySQL is a popular relational database. We revisit Kleppmann’s 2014 Hermitage and confirm that MySQL’s Repeatable Read still allows G2-item, G-single, and lost update. Using our transaction consistency checker Elle, we show that MySQL Repeatable Read also violates internal consistency. Furthermo...

Click to view the original at jepsen.io

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."

Posted on 2023-12-20T05:49:35+0000

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‘Our country has lost its moral compass’: Arundhati Roy

Honoring P. Govinda Pillai, a Kerala scholar of Marxist theory, this speech calls for an end to the Israeli occupation of Palestine & the US's complicity in it.

Click to view the original at frontline.thehindu.com

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.”

Posted on 2023-12-20T05:01:41+0000

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Hannah Arendt Prize: "Comparison is the way we know the world"

Read the talk that Masha Gessen gave at the ceremony of the Hannah Arendt Prize in Bremen.

Click to view the original at zeit.de

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.”

Posted on 2023-12-19T05:17:11+0000

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Clarence Thomas’ Private Complaints About Money Sparked Fears He Would Resign

Interviews and newly unearthed documents reveal that Thomas, facing financial strain, privately pushed for a higher salary and to allow Supreme Court justices to take speaking fees.

Click to view the original at propublica.org

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.””

Posted on 2023-12-18T15:32:40+0000

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I can't sleep

I can't sleep. I'm lying in bed every night, and images of Gaza are running through my head. Fathers holding their babies, dead, caked in dust. Bombs dropped on homes, on hospitals, on schools. Tens of thousands of dead in indiscriminate bombings.

Click to view the original at blog.paulbiggar.com

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.”

Posted on 2023-12-14T23:16:51+0000