Hasnain says:

Been reading more history lately and that’s how I came across a reference to the Geechee language and had to look it up. I’m glad there are efforts to keep it alive. It’s sad how many languages are dying even in this day and age.

“M’Cheaux, who spoke Gullah exclusively until he learned English in middle school, said the notion of teaching Gullah to outsiders would have been laughable when he was younger. According to Page, some Gullah Geechee elders were physically beaten for speaking the language by educators who traveled south to teach them standard English, as recently as her grandparents’ generation.

Students were put into speech or remedial classes – contributing to a stigma that has lasted for decades. Growing up in Charleston, South Carolina, which has a high concentration of people of Gullah Geechee descent, Page said she remembers a time when saying someone “sounded Geechee” would be considered a provocation, or “fighting words”. As a result, some Gullah people only used the language privately, opting to code-switch in public, or stopped speaking it entirely, preventing their children from learning it as a means of protection.”

Hasnain says:

This won’t end well.

“Homeowners with mortgages are typically required to purchase home insurance, but some without mortgages are opting to go without, especially in places where costs have risen sharply. While that could save them money, it could also make it prohibitively expensive to rebuild if their homes are damaged by natural disasters.

About 6.8% of homeowners reported going without home insurance in 2023, down from 7.4% in 2021, according to an analysis of Census Bureau data by Sharon Cornelissen, director of housing at the Consumer Federation of America.

But the proportion of uninsured owners rose in some major metro areas, especially in Miami, where 21.2% of homeowners went without home insurance in 2023, up from 14.5% in 2021.”

Hasnain says:

As the genocide goes on, I console myself by believing people who support it are primarily just living on an alternative diet of facts and propaganda. I do not want to believe we’re in a world where people acknowledge the facts and are still okay with it. These are not isolated incidents. The Israeli government and military does not sufficiently investigate itself in a lot of cases (unclear about this one). Children are never okay to hurt - doubly so when there is no possibility at all of Hamas being in the vicinity (you’ll see my horrifying example in a sec). Note that this example predates 2023 (article is unclear but it’s either before 2012 or in the 4 years after).

Lastly, as someone pointed out - this is the stuff that gets past their military censor. If they are okay publishing this, what are the other horrors that are left unpublished.

Quote, with as many trigger warnings as I can put below:

"”A new commander came to us. We went out with him on the first patrol at six in the morning. He stops. There's not a soul in the streets, just a little 4-year-old boy playing in the sand in his yard. The commander suddenly starts running, grabs the boy, and breaks his arm at the elbow and his leg here. Stepped on his stomach three times and left. We all stood there with our mouths open. Looking at him in shock ... I asked the commander: "What's your story?" He told me: These kids need to be killed from the day they are born. When a commander does that, it becomes legit."”

Hasnain says:

That clincher at the end, unquoted, is also worth recapping: this hypocritical douche claims he wants to be at the forefront of helping women, while doing this behind the scenes.

“Ms. Abel relayed his frustration to Ms. Nathan: “I think you guys need to be tough and show the strength of what you guys can do in these scenarios. He wants to feel like she can be buried.”

“Of course- but you know when we send over documents we can’t send over the work we will or could do because that could get us in a lot of trouble,” Ms. Nathan responded, adding, “We can’t write we will destroy her.”
Moments later, she said, “Imagine if a document saying all the things that he wants ends up in the wrong hands.”

“You know we can bury anyone,” she wrote.”

Hasnain says:

Worth reading in full.

“I can offer no new insight about how shocking the response to Thompson’s murder has been, or how thin the threshold is between the politesse of acceptable average American decorum and an ecstatic celebration of violence. I, personally, wish every family be spared the fate of the Thompsons. I also wish every family be spared the fate to which the bone-grinding machine that Brian Thompson sat atop condemns millions of others. So long as we tolerate the existence of health insurance for profit, no one will be spared.”

Hasnain says:

“A RealClearInvestigations analysis found that Pelosi’s profits spiked from a variety of holdings that won significant government rescue funds – which amounted to $28 million, a total more than previously known. For their family’s stake in the Auberge du Soleil, the Pelosis received more income in 2021, when bailout funds channeled to the resort, than any other time over the last 10 years.”

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.”