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Jul 21, 2021

In today's Hindu, I argue that we need to professionalize intelligence gathering, bringing intelligence agencies under parliamentary oversight, making them non-partisan, and ensuring that civil liberties and rule of law are protected. #PegasusProject thehindu.com/opinion/lead/p

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Peter Suber (@petersuber@fediscience.org)

@petersuber

This is big. No #embargoes. No #APCs. "The #EU is ready to agree that immediate #OpenAccess to…publicly funded research should become the norm, w/o authors having to pay fees & that the bloc should support #nonprofit scholarly publishing models."

researchprofessionalnews.com

EU ready to back immediate open access without author fees - Research Professional News

Provisionally agreed position also expresses support for non-profit publishing models

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"A History of the Church of England in India: Since the Early Days of the East India Company", by Eyre Chatterton, Bishop of Nagpur (1924). anglicanhistory.org/india/chattert Interesting to read this the day King Charles III, the Supreme Governor of the Church of England, was anointed.

Generative AI Meets Copyright - Pamela Samuelson

Lecture by Prof. Samuelson on #AI & #copyright (looking at both output & input). This is in the US context, but is useful globally since it's not abt 'fair use'. She notes that © law could be an "existential threat" to generative AI. (via

@JoeBeOne

)

youtube.com

Talk Title: “Generative AI Meets Copyright”Speaker: Pamela Samuelson, Richard M. Sherman Distinguished Professor of Law, UC BerkeleyAbstract: The question th...

"Are these the last convulsions of an incoherent order which was hollowed out long ago by the decline of Christianity and the end of Britain as a world power?" Good article by @

@yuanyi_z

Screenshot from https://unherd.com/thepost/todays-coronation-is-a-wonderful-contradiction-in-terms/

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Yuan Yi Zhu

@yuanyi_z

12h

It's hard to describe how bizarre today's coronation will be, even by the standards of monarchies. But you will remember where you were when you saw it. Me for @unherd. unherd.com/thepost/todays

Exploring India’s megalithic culture, a riddle set in stone

Fascinating article on India's megalithic cultures. It reminds me there's so much I've yet to discover about India.

livemint.com

Massive stone structures dotted across the subcontinent provide a fascinating glimpse into India's prehistoric past

If *copying* copyrighted works for search engines isn't seen as copyright violation, then *training* on copyrighted works ought not be seen as a copyright violation either. It's clearly "transformative use"/fair use, and should be seen as a fair dealing. #copyright #AI

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Hey @MosaicML. If you fine-tune on books3 full of 197,000 Copyrighted works, are you sure you have legal rights to relicense the model as commercial? Meta has been unable to license LLaMa because they know © law, not because they want to keep it private... FYI @AuthorsGuild twitter.com/vitaliychiley/…

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Kristian Lum

@KLdivergence

The replies to this tweet are a perfect example of the type of behavior that people are afraid of if they say anything positive about LLMs.

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ruchowdh.bsky.social

@ruchowdh

May 3

The most shocking thing about this thread is how many people are saying they’ve been afraid to say this themselves. This is entirely true. twitter.com/KLdivergence/s…

Over-zealous privacy activism can harm people. Privacy shouldn't be seen as some abstract idea to be maximised. #mentalhealth #privacy #datap

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Crisis Text Line

@CrisisTextLine

Jan 29, 2022

A recent story cherry-picked and omitted information about our data privacy policies. We want to clarify and fill in facts that were missing so people understand why ethical data privacy is foundational to our work. A thread

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This interview, while purportedly about important issues around AI ethics and safety, seems to boil down to Google office politics and tech policy personality cults.

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Wilfred Chan

@wilfredchan

My full interview with @mer__edith, about what's missing from Geoffrey Hinton's media tour, how AI doomers put us into a "trance," and why labor organizing is still the most powerful check against Big Tech: fastcompany.com/90892235/resea

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elisa freschi (evidences & reasoning, not claims)

@elisa_freschi

21h

in our hands and in our feet. After all, these too depend on adjunct conditions. 3/3 (Thanks to

@winnie4prez

for prompting me to check this passage).

elisa freschi (evidences & reasoning, not claims)

@elisa_freschi

21h

The #AdvaitaVedānta opponent might say that this is due to adjunct conditions (upādhi) adding artificial distinctions. Veṅkaṭanātha retorts that if adjunct conditions were enough to pluralise our experiences, then we would not recognise as ours even the sensations of pain 2/

elisa freschi (evidences & reasoning, not claims)

@elisa_freschi

21h

#Veṅkaṭanātha on #OtherMinds: Why is the case that, although there is a single consciousness (brahman), we don’t share the experience of others (e.g., we don't see the waves a Portuguese surfer is seeing now, nor do we smell the cherry blossoms currently flowering in Japan)? 1/

#censorship #FoE #India #FOSS #e2ee #security #privacy

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Pratik Sinha

@free_thinker

15h

Alt News uses matrix+element as a communication backend because it is open source, decentralised and end-to-end encrypted. It is mind-boggling that the Indian Govt has banned an open-source app which is the easiest to audit for any backdoors. element.io/blog/india-ban

Mahesh Sathiamoorthy

@madiator

Cool paper that distills the rationales from larger LLMs into smaller ones for good model size reduction & get task-specific models. arxiv.org/abs/2305.02301 See this: ".. our 770M T5 model outperforms the 540B PaLM model using only 80% of available data on a benchmark task."

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May 28, 2014

What is the idea of false consciousness but soft paternalism?

May 28, 2014

"Smart-" = "Privacy-invasive". And that's not going to change. Problem isn't that "privacy is dead". It's that most of us want it to die.

23h

"Assigned male/female at birth" (in any context other than DSDs) is among the dumbest reality-distorting phrases that I've ever seen. Journalists and academics using such verbiage reveal themselves to be thoroughly unserious and disconnected from reality.

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Apr 9, 2022

Replying to @JamesSurowiecki @wesyang and @SwipeWright

"It's a girl, since it has a vagina," is no more an assignment than, "it's a zebra, since it looks like a donkey with stripes." Both are inferences abt the whole based on parts. Neither, contra Butler & Fausto-Sterling, is a normative act (an "assignment"), neither is illocution.

Adam Thierer

@AdamThierer

The combo of AI-related concerns about disinformation + online safety + copyright all converge on common set of regulations: Identity mandates / watermarking / expanded platform liability / banning most kids online. It’ll be a remarkably sweeping govt information control regime.

Alice is risking her life!

@AliceFromQueens

Not aware of another major social media platform where users can contradict advertiser claims *in the advertiser's post* "Musk commits financial suicide" may apply here but "Musk ruined Twitter" doesn't.

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@PearlteaRizzy

I love that they're even doing community notes on promoted ad tweets now

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Should scholars who write about Indian traditions, religions, and history be required/encouraged to state their jāti/caste/lineage/tribe after their names? doi.org/10.1177/263498

Screenshot of https://doi.org/10.1177/26349825231164617

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Shannon Hardwick

@ShannonEliza

Girl with Pearl Earring, at the museum - Johannes Vermeer

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Replying to

You might find this of use.

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Feb 17

Evidence from Bihar suggests there's a correlation between alcohol prohibition and a reduction in violence against women. svri.org/blog/has-alcoh #vaw #alcohol

Feb 17

Evidence from Bihar suggests there's a correlation between alcohol prohibition and a reduction in violence against women. svri.org/blog/has-alcoh #vaw #alcohol

Dulwich Quantum Computing

Michio Kaku has been going batty for a while now. This thread is both fascinating and sad.

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@DulwichQuantum

@MichioKaku: "Quantum computers can act as a fact checker on ChatGPT." @JoeRogan: "It's going to be able to discern what's real and what's not real?" @MichioKaku: "Yes, and even gradations of what's true. It can give you detailed understanding of what is partially correct."

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144.9K views

In Request To Recall All Bank Notes Except Rs 100, High Court Seeks Centre's Reply

Oct 7, 2021

In 2017, the Madras High Court banned a game that didn't exist: indiankanoon.org/doc/98293123/ #misinformation #fakenews #bluewhalechallenge #PIL

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Then why did the Supreme Court admit PIL seeking a proactive blocking of porn? What right was being violated? #FoE twitter.com/nesshreeja/sta

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Why on earth should the Bombay High Court hear a case on renaming of a city? How is that a matter of fundamental rights? #PIL #India twitter.com/LiveLawIndia/s…

No fundamental right is violated by notes of denomination ₹100 being available. But the #DelhiHC doesn't dismiss this ridiculous #PIL with costs.

ndtv.com

Delhi High Court asked the Centre and Delhi government to present their stand on a plea seeking recall of all currency notes above Rs 100, restricting cash transactions above Rs 10,000, among other...

'The literature of left-wing political science is a literature of conflict, in which the main variables are those identified by Lenin: “Kto? Kogo?”—“Who? Whom?”'

newcriterion.com

Why I became a conservative by Roger Scruton

Roger Scruton on his student days in Paris.

Shar A

@Shar_A_

May 3

Mad that he did all that but the media just chooses to focus on his age

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A Deep Dive into the Harris-Klein Controversy

Here's John Nerst's original piece on decoupling:

everythingstudies.com

A long postmortem of the conflict between Sam Harris and Ezra Klein over Harris’s podcast with political scientist Charles Murray. I explain their disagreement as stemming from differences in…

Interesting summary by

@TomChivers

about John Nerst's concept of high-decoupling (which I am) vs. low-decoupling, and why discussions about *is* and *what ifs* are often are seen as arguments about *oughts*:

unherd.com

'Eugenics is possible' is not the same as 'eugenics is good'

Rows over eugenics reveal how difficult it is to 'decouple' controversial concepts in our heads

"the message that people are “born this way” has been enormously effective at changing hearts and minds" … "It turned a debate about whether certain behaviours were moral into a debate about civil rights for a marginalised group." –

@pastasnack_e

unherd.com

The mystery of gay animals

Biologists are deterred by politically inconvenient results

"If we stigmatise whole realms of research, well-meaning scientists will avoid showing an interest in sensitive topics, and only those with an axe to grind remain." Important article by

@pastasnack_e

. unherd.com/2023/05/the-my #AcademicTwitter #academia #science

unherd.com

The mystery of gay animals

Biologists are deterred by politically inconvenient results

I offer a brief comment as a "cyber expert" (??) on the current rhetoric on AI risks and US White House's actions to promote responsible AI innovation. whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/

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Mirror Now

@MirrorNow

WHITE HOUSE SUMMONS BIG TECH BOSSES Alarm Bells Over Artificial Intelligence "People are over estimating the #ArtificialIntelligence risk and under estimating the benefit:" @pranesh, Cyber Expert to @radhika1705

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The soft bigotry of low expectations: "underrepresented minority students" are "systematically shortchange[d]" by teaching through lectures; "multiple-choice test[s]" "fail to promote social justice principles". This is harmful for the very people it is meant to aid.

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Free Black Thought

@FreeBlckThought

Black students don't learn from lectures. So says UNC's Dept. of Allied Health Sciences (@UNC_HealthSci). UNC's new DEI plan will require faculty to "integrate social justice content into their teaching," apparently without lecturing. @JohnDSailer: nas.org/blogs/article/