mangalam

infant, engineer

[mangalam @mangalamsx]

dear UX at @googlechrome,

i request you to keep this close (X) at the left side only when the panel appears after hovering to expand tabs. it reduces the friction of moving mouse to the right. thanks

[mangalam @mangalamsx]

@Ugaman01 @grok clearly ai generated. there are no side boosters

[mangalam @mangalamsx]

@dhruv_rathee you haven't installed cctv at your home? you should have!

[mangalam @mangalamsx]

"If you are an Indian in India capable to get a job outside India, by all means take it."

Never ever thought that this is so so patriotic!!

[Aravind @aravind]

I am going to give a contrary, controversial, but pragmatic advise: If you an NRI with a stable job outside India, please don't go back.

Surely go back to India if you are an entrepreneur who can create jobs, an innovator, or researcher. India needs you and India is booming with opportunities for you.

But for the rest of us workers, it is better to stay outside as long as opportunities exist. Those calling you back won't give you the jobs you are qualified for.

Even if they do, quitting jobs and going back to India will only increase competition for Indians in India unrealistically. It will reduce remittances and add to inflation in India.

Also, I had posted this before and will say this again: If you are an Indian in India capable to get a job outside India, by all means take it.

Nothing unpatriotic or bad about it as it's always made out to be. Enjoy your opportunity outside, keep India in heart always, and earn well to support family back home.

Indian govt has signed numerous bilateral agreements recently for improve the ease of Indians getting visas to work and study abroad. Make use of the opportunities if you can.

[mangalam @mangalamsx]

Please say something on your dear country USA not allowing more folks from India (or, have you already?) just because they are afraid of hardworking and talented folks.

And you talk about merit and hard work.

Funny!

[Elon Musk @elonmusk]

Dear Prime Minister Ambani,

Please accept my humble apologies for not realizing that you are the real boss of India.

Naturally, you would prefer to maintain your monopolistic exploitation of the great people of India, but would you nonetheless consider allowing Starlink to compete?

There are many areas of India, as there are in all countries, with no Internet access, which denies children the opportunity for education and for small businesses the opportunity to sell their goods to a global market. Starlink would change their lives for the better.

Thank you 🙏

[mangalam @mangalamsx]

@WhatsApp resolved!

did backup. uninstalled WhatsApp such that related data is also cleared. reinstall and login, sync the backup. worked

[mangalam @mangalamsx]

hi @WhatsApp, please help! I’ve contacted you through the official WhatsApp Support channel, but there’s a communication deadlock — I’m unable to receive WhatsApp messages or calls, so I may not be able to receive your response either.

[mangalam @mangalamsx]

@prathamgrv 😂😂😭

[mangalam @mangalamsx]

@GooglePlay @WhatsApp @kunalb11

[mangalam @mangalamsx]

I did backup of whatsapp chats and u installed the app. Now trying to install it, but it doesn't.

[mangalam @mangalamsx]

hi @WhatsApp, please help! I’ve contacted you through the official WhatsApp Support channel, but there’s a communication deadlock — I’m unable to receive WhatsApp messages or calls, so I may not be able to receive your response either.

[mangalam @mangalamsx]

hi @WhatsApp, please help! I’ve contacted you through the official WhatsApp Support channel, but there’s a communication deadlock — I’m unable to receive WhatsApp messages or calls, so I may not be able to receive your response either.

[mangalam @mangalamsx]

@WhatsApp I also can’t make WhatsApp calls, and my sent messages remain on a single tick. This has been happening since this morning. Please help urgently.

[mangalam @mangalamsx]

this!

[Andrew Ng @AndrewYNg]

The loudest voices stoking fears about AI dangers have made tremendous headway in the past two weeks. AI technology has not taken some unexpected, dangerous turn, but the hype around it — propelled by what appears to be a well orchestrated PR campaign — has drummed up considerable fear. I worry that it represents a setback for our field.

I have written frequently that fears of AI are overhyped. AI’s capabilities can be uncannily human-like and unpredictable, and it’s rational to worry when people who are directly involved express concerns. But I see the problems as a sign of the engineering work that ahead, rather than insurmountable barriers or the sky falling. AI technology continues to advance — which is a good thing! — but technical advances, poorly understood by the public, give those who seek to generate hype repeated opportunities to do so.

First, I don’t see any step up in the risk of human extinction from AI compared to a few months ago. The theories about this remain the same fantastical, science fiction scenarios as a few months ago. The biggest change in AI risk is its cybersecurity capabilities — a topic which we should take seriously — but this, too, will not lead to the end of the world.

The most notable recent event leading to increased fear was when an OpenAI team deployed an agent swarm that hacked into Hugging Face. Much of the popular press contained significant hype. For example, some publications reported that a swarm of 1,200 agents carried out the attack. While this was technically accurate, as I write this, I have about 1,300 processes running on my laptop. Yes, the ability to get large swarms of agents to work in parallel on a task is a significant technical advance, And, in computing, many processes run at the same time. So this shouldn’t be seen as some magical capability.

Additionally, OpenAI’s buggy sandboxing and monitoring processes were key to enabling this incident. Fixing these bugs and putting in place improved monitoring would be appropriate fixes, not pausing AI. There are many well known ways to attack software systems. The main advantage of AI agents is that they are relentless. They will tirelessly try many tactics — and have the patience to chain vulnerabilities together — that previously would have taken an infeasible amount of human effort. But in the long term, I believe the advantage will lie with defenders (because they have more information with which to identify bugs, which they can fix), but the cyber-threat landscape has changed significantly. There are still bottlenecks to identifying and exploiting a vulnerability. AI agents still have to try a lot of things to see what works, and taking these actions takes time and might be detected by defenders. This is why, even though it is now easy to obtain versions of leading open weight models that have had their guardrails removed or weakened, so they will not refuse to try to execute cyber attacks, the world has not ended.

I am also concerned about the anthropomorphization of AI in a lot of reporting, where LLMs and agents are unnecessarily treated as if they were people. If I wield a hammer, miss a nail, and accidentally dent the wall, it’s not the fault of the hammer. The problem lies in how I used the hammer. Similarly, if I prompt an agent and it hacks into someone else’s system, the responsibility lies with me, not the agent.

Of course, we want to build systems that are as safe and predictable as possible. (For example, an unsafe hammer would be one whose head randomly flies off under normal use.) Today’s agentic systems are not predictable, but I see no reason why, by applying sound engineering practices, we won’t be able to make them extremely safe to use. One new element in the forecasts of AI-enabled doom is AI companies disclaiming responsibility for their own products. “I didn’t do it; my out-of-control agent did!” There’s a balance to be struck between the responsibility of the tool maker and the tool user, but when something goes wrong, let’s hold the people building and/or using the hammer responsible, rather than the hammer. (By the way, if you’re worried about AI bioweapon risk, David Bellamy has a great post on why this, too, is overhyped. Briefly, the bottleneck in building a bioweapon is not intelligence, but lab work and manufacturing.)

Pausing AI progress will create much more harm than benefit. First, our adversaries will certainly not slow down. Second, engineering requires discovering problems empirically so we can fix them. If we pause AI by a decade, we will also delay finding and implementing safety engineering fixes by about the same duration.

Of course, the incentive to stoke fears — for regulatory capture, to garner attention, or to make one’s technology seem more powerful — remains the same as before. Disclaiming responsibility is a new one. Taking a hard technical look at the actual risks however, I see little factual basis for the degree of fear that’s been stoked up. We still have hard research and engineering work ahead to improve AI safety, but the beneficial applications continue to vastly outweigh the risks, and we should keep building.

[Original text (with links): https://t.co/jni2tWazAH ]

[mangalam @mangalamsx]

@eris_nerung wrong!

[mangalam @mangalamsx]

@hilbertspaess so basically it's over OR proceed w caution

[mangalam @mangalamsx]

damn @matiks_play, i almost felt intimidated!! 😂

[mangalam @mangalamsx]

@Adyasha8105 @pangram is this reply an ai slop?

[mangalam @mangalamsx]

@Adyasha8105 imagine changing gates for a layover of 1 hr with 1st leg being delayed coz of operational issues hy 25mins, and you have to go to gate 8 from gate 91. basically moving from one end to the farthest end in 15 mins while you dont know the exact way

[mangalam @mangalamsx]

@CtrlAltSleep @Adyasha8105 are they free? ig they are only at rgia but not at igi. i have personally done it at igi, ngl

[mangalam @mangalamsx]

@aryamman_bhatia based on what I know the speeches big people give at universities are written by some selected group of professors. going that way, wont be surprised to know if it's written by some officer in his team