Shashank Srikant

running for office, machine learning, programming languages/software engg, neuroscience.

[Shashank Srikant @ShashankSrikant]

For a year now, I've been putting together resources for undergrads/recent ugrads who want to experience doing research.

Figuring these details out took me a VERY long time.
Will appreciate RTs, so that young researchers in your n/w can benefit🧵

Link - https://t.co/NfhgF7nRzj

[jack @jack]

the government of india does not like technologies like bitchat and wants it taken down

[Jarshad NK @jarshadnk]

Sachin Tendulkar has finally spoken on the student protests, and I had to read his note twice: once as a fan and once as an editor. The fan was disappointed, but the editor realised that this was a textbook specimen of the kind of writing that George Orwell warned about in his essay “Politics and the English Language”.

The essay was written in 1946, but it might well have been written yesterday about this very statement. Orwell’s point was that when people want to hide something, they stop using plain words and reach instead for the passive voice, for fog, for phrases that sound like they mean something while meaning nothing at all.

Consider the line, where students are disappointed that “their hard work hasn’t been rewarded”. Rewarded by whom, and denied by whom? There was a paper leak, which means somebody leaked it, some institution failed to prevent it, and an official presides over that institution. Yet none of them appears in the statement, and neither does the leak itself. A crime with identifiable custodians has been turned into something that simply happened to lakhs of children through nobody's fault.

Then comes the list of those who must set things right: parents, teachers, friends, relatives, schools and administrators. If you read that list again slowly, you will notice it covers everyone in India except the people the students are actually protesting against, which is to say the NTA, the education ministry and the government. When everyone is responsible, nobody is, and that is not an accident of drafting. It was engineered to deflect blame.

There is also a quiet sentence buried in the middle. “A society which prioritises outcomes over effort will seek shortcuts over meritocracy” is a line about those who take shortcuts, meaning the cheat. So a note on protests around paper leaks ends up gently lecturing the leaked-upon about honesty. His father’s lovely lesson—that failure is okay but cheating is not—is again aimed squarely at individuals, while the scandal and protests right now are about institutions that failed them.

The rest of the statement is what Orwell called ready-made strips of words, glued together. Full of dreams and energy, fuel to our success, safeguard their aspirations. Nobody can disagree with any of it, which is precisely the point, for this is prose engineered so that no one in power will find a single sentence to object to.

What an actual position would have looked like is a single sentence in the active voice: The government must find and punish those who leaked the paper, and fix the system that allowed it. He wrote 160+ words to avoid writing that one.

Here’s Orwell’s full essay for those interested:
https://t.co/VlPoJdOcDG

[Kartik Sunagar @venomdetective]

🦇🌙 It’s #ToxinTuesday. And what better time to post a story about vampires than… midnight?

Tonight’s blog explores one of the most misunderstood venomous animals on Earth.

Yes, vampire bats are venomous.

🧵👇

[KC Sivaramakrishnan @kc_srk]

80% done.

Started from the parallelism basics, built up to non-blocking data structures.

Then a detour to effect handlers, building a Go-like concurrency with user-level threads, channels, select nested parallelism and async IO.

All in OCaml.

https://t.co/CJ9D1vrX3v

[Aruna S @arunasank]

Interpretability methods usually study single-token behavior.

But real model behaviors, like sycophancy or writing style, are diffuse across many tokens.

Can these diffuse behaviors be localized and controlled from long-form responses? YES!

[Steven Strogatz @stevenstrogatz]

Great article about the National Museum of Mathematics @MoMath1, now on Sixth Avenue! The new exhibits sound wonderful – I can't wait to visit. Check it out next time you're in NYC – fantastic for kids and grown-ups too. https://t.co/SO1GRT3Xaz

[KC Sivaramakrishnan @kc_srk]

Applications are open for the FP Launchpad Post-Baccalaureate Fellowship at IIT Madras, a fully funded 2-year fellowship in systems and functional programming.

Build real systems, publish research, contribute to open source.

https://t.co/oZOknz3xQC

[Mehdi (e/λ) @BetterCallMedhi]

I spent time in Shenzhen last year and when I saw Merz come back from China saying Germans need to work more I immediately knew what broke his brain because I lived the exact same cognitive shock

my first week in Huaqiangbei I burned through 4 prototype iterations of a motor controller board for less than a thousand bucks total, back home a friend was working on something similar and spent over 12 thousand for a single revision that took almost two months to arrive

when you live that contrast in your own hands with your own project something permanently shifts in how you see the world and it goes way deeper than speed & cost

what Shenzhen actually built is a collective learning organism, imagine 20 PCB fabs 15 injection mold shops 30 component distributors and a hundred firmware freelancers all within a 2km radius, looks insanely redundant from the outside until you realize redundancy is actually information density in disguise

I watched this firsthand with an injection mold supplier I was working with, this guy had seen a hundred founders iterate similar thermal designs over 6 months so he proactively modified his tooling before I even opened my mouth, he knew what I needed before I knew what I needed, the intelligence lives in the relationships between the nodes and it compounds daily

the west thinks about manufacturing as a cost center you optimize by centralizing…

China accidentally built a distributed neural network of manufacturing intelligence where knowledge diffuses horizontally across thousands of agents faster than any single western company can process internally

so when Merz comes back and says we need to work a bit more I think he saw the problem but COMPLETELY misdiagnosed the solution, telling Germans to work harder is like telling a horse to gallop faster when the other side built a combustion engine

the gap is ARCHITECTURAL

it’s ecosystem density, you need a custom connector in Shenzhen you walk 200 meters, in Munich you send an email and wait 3 weeks

it’s iteration speed, parallel search vs sequential optimization at the system level, it’s risk tolerance, Chinese founders ship something broken on Monday fix it Tuesday ship again Wednesday while European companies are still in the approval phase for the pilot program of the feasibility study…

and Merz only saw the surface, what he missed is the tier 2 cities like Hefei Chengdu Wuhan replicating the Shenzhen model at scale right now

BYD going from irrelevant to outselling every european automaker combined in roughly 5 years, Huawei building its own 7nm chip under maximum sanctions when every analyst said it was physically impossible & behind all of that a government that treats advanced manufacturing as an existential national priority while europe debates whether AI needs another ethics committee

I think what we’re watching is the most asymmetric economic competition in modern history and most western leaders are still framing it as a productivity problem when it’s actually an ontological one

Europe & America are optimizing variables that China stopped tracking years ago meanwhile China is compounding on dimensions the west has no framework to even measure
Merz at least had the courage to name

it out loud and I respect that genuinely but working a bit more inside a broken architecture just means you arrive at the wrong destination slightly faster

[Shashank Srikant @ShashankSrikant]

What stupid policies are these where accounts are suspended without a single reason provided, no warning, and no clear resolution path. Beyond ridiculous. This experience leaves me little trust to continue with google's paid services going ahead.

[Shashank Srikant @ShashankSrikant]

@AskWorkspace my entire workspace account was just shut down last week without any notice or heads up. No reasons provided. This has disrupted my entire team's work. And apparently, it is going to take another week to find out the reason for my account's closure!

[Jimmy Koppel @jimmykoppel]

If AI can code 100x faster, why aren't you shipping 100x faster?

Because AI code is not production-ready code, and definitely not code where you understand and can vouch for every line

Introducing the Command Center alpha. Support our Product Hunt launch!

[Jeremiah Johnson 🌐 @JeremiahDJohns]

One of my all-time favorite type of videos is pre-fame bands playing their extremely famous songs to a tiny room of people, because they're not yet known.

A thread of some examples:

Bastille playing Pompeii in what looks like someone's living room:

[Vinay Kumar @bahudari]

Jayant Narlikar is no more. While his contribution to Astrophysics was extraordinary, his contribution to popularising science & improving scientific temper in our society was exemplary.

Indian science is poorer.

[Kollegala Sharma @kollegala]

How can AI help Indian language scicommers? Here is my try which was just an idea two years ago when I spoke at #SJAI meet. This brief podcast is fully AI. A news brief from the newsletter #,Science-Adviser of @aaas was translated machine language (Google Translate was best. 1/n

[Marcel Böhme👨‍🔬 @mboehme_]

If I was still a PhD, I would definitely take this opportunity. So much opportunity for real impact!

[abhishek @abhi1thakur]

🤣

[Younghyo Park @younghyo_park]

Collect robot demos from anywhere through AR!

Excited to introduce 🎯DART, Dexterous AR Teleoperation interface enabling anyone to teleoperate robots in cloud-hosted simulation.

With DART, anyone can collect robot demos anywhere, anytime, for multiple robots and tasks in one sitting. Every data is automatically logged on our open-sourced cloud database DexHub for public use. https://t.co/bJ8N2C3xfc 🧵[1/n]

[PrakashLab @PrakashLab]

(1/n) Are you ready to plunge into depths of our oceans with us! This is the story of “hidden comet tails” & our discovery of how a crucial biological process across our planet can put brakes on carbon capture in our oceans. Latest in @ScienceMagazine https://t.co/ch4f2g0MS4

[International Chess Federation @FIDE_chess]

🇮🇳 India wins the 45th FIDE #ChessOlympiad! 🏆 ♟️

Congratulations to Gukesh D, Praggnanandhaa R, Arjun Erigaisi, Vidit Gujrathi, Pentala Harikrishna and Srinath Narayanan (Captain)! 👏 👏

Gukesh D beats Vladimir Fedoseev, and Arjun Erigaisi prevails against Jan Subelj; India secures at least a tie in their match against Slovenia, and clinches the gold!

[International Chess Federation @FIDE_chess]

🇮🇳India wins the 45th FIDE Women's #ChessOlympiad! 🏆 ♟

Congratulations to Harika Dronavalli, Vaishali Rameshbabu, Divya Deshmukh, Vantika Agrawal, Tania Sachdev and Abhijit Kunte (Captain)! 👏 👏