Soham Chakraborty

here for the rabbit holes

[David Perell Clips @PerellClips]

The danger of AI is not just the slop, but what we lose in the process. Michael Pollan explains:

"We're moving into this time where we're gonna sub out writing to AI. And AI can write our papers, and professors are dealing with this everywhere now.

But what is lost is a way of thinking.

Writing does something to your brain. It gives you access to things you can't know just walking around or thinking or planning or outlining.

If you were just transcribing what was in your head, it would be kind of onerous. But it really is what you learn in the course of a day spent writing, things you didn't know, ideas that you didn't expect. And that's the thrill of it."

[Aditi Agrawal @Aditi_muses]

Turns out that tweet about ProtonVPN registrations skyrocketing in India after the Telegram blocking order has been withheld in India. 🤦🏻‍♀️

GoI often hunts for an axe to step on it.

[D. Yanagizawa-Drott @YanagizawaD]

Cool stuff, building on ideas around “world models” by Econs and CS people @keyonV, @asheshrambachan and @m_sendhil.

Question: If you train on next turns for Manhattan taxi drivers, will the model learn a map of Manhattan?

They showed GPTs can be almost perfect at next-token (next turn) prediction… but paradoxically stupid regarding what the right map is.

New paper (NextLat) shows that predicting “next latent state” (jointly with next token) appears to much better at world modeling

It’d be great to see economists get into this game… help build architectures for world models of the global economy

[Don Palathara @DonPalathara]

In India, training is mistaken for education. If a society produces engineers, doctors and scientists who think unscientifically, cling to caste hierarchies and religious dogma, the education system has clearly failed. Skills are for jobs. Education should be about shaping minds.

[Owen Jones @owenjonesjourno]

Winston Churchill starved India.

We owe it to the victims not to rewrite history.

[Novara Media @novaramedia]

A secret society of the world’s elites co-founded by spyware billionaire Peter Thiel has been exposed by hacktivists.

Dialog is a private, invitation-only network, co-founded in 2006 by Palantir chairman Thiel and data entrepreneur Auren Hoffman.

The organisation holds off-the-record summits for powerful figures from the worlds of politics, finance, military, celebrity and tech.

Frequently compared to the Bilderberg Group and World Economic Forum, Dialog has spent two decades refusing to disclose the identity of its members and has a private website.

However, a directory in the website’s code was revealed by Swiss hacktivist maia arson crimew, who previously leaked the US government’s no-fly list and hacked surveillance-camera company Verkada, WIRED reported.

The directory included “participant profiles” for those planning to attend the group’s summits, featuring contact information, facts about themselves - and even if they were “looking for love” at Dialog events.

Profiles included Texas senator Ted Cruz, US treasury secretary Scott Bessent, chief economist at Israel’s finance ministry of Shmuel Abramzon, and a number of Google and Google DeepMind execs.

Other names from the world of entertainment include Hollywood actors Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Josh Brolin, podcast host and author Sam Harris, and tech entrepreneur and longevity obsessive Bryan Johnson, Straight Arrow News reported.

In many cases it isn’t known if those named are full members, conference participants or merely guests of the organisation.

WIRED reported that a separate source revealed details of an upcoming Dialog retreat at a venue outside Dublin, Ireland.

The retreat, due to be held 12-16 August this year, is set to host NATO’s top US commander Alexus Grynkewich, as well as multiple officials from the Trump administration, two US senators, a former Middle East chief of intelligence, and a sitting ambassador to the United States.

Also present will be six members of the so-called “Paypal Mafia”, and a number of those running the US’s most prominent surveillance and data firms.

The conference is set to feature sessions titled “Navigating WWIII”, “Battlefield Technologies”, “Money (Does?) Buy Happiness”, “Bring Back Nuclear” and “Build-a-Cult”, the latter of which will be moderated by the founder of the Christian networking site https://t.co/nbjzqZ95gS.

[Aunindyo Chakravarty @Aunindyo2023]

You could make a fortune by massaging the egos of India's half-literate parvenus.

All you need is a well-timed, performatively irate post attacking all rational and scientific thought as a Western conspiracy to subjugate the eternal 'Indic' civilisation.

[Anusha Ravi Sood @anusharavi10]

Nine people died the most horrific death in Vizag Steel Plant earlier this week. This isn’t the first incident. These are not the first workers to die a brutal death. Their lives should matter

Vizag Steel Plant tragedy: Workers list the lessons that were ignored
https://t.co/Avo9LMmo1U

[Mike Young @micyoung75]

Peter Thiel and Balaji Srinivasan have funded a platform called https://t.co/RpVwfEXBbO that allows anyone to file a complaint against a journalist's story for a starting price of $2,000. A team of human investigators examines the story, then submits findings to a "jury" of AI models - OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok, Google - which publish a "verdict" on the story's truthfulness and rank individual journalists on metrics including truth-telling and corrections.

If the journalist doesn't respond to defend their reporting, the verdict is issued and published online anyway.

The platform is being sold as "letting anyone fight the press like a billionaire." The creator is Aron D'Souza, who led the Thiel-funded lawsuit that bankrupted Gawker in 2016.

The design choices tell you what this is. The system treats anonymous sources as less trustworthy and ranks anonymous whistleblower claims near the bottom. Anonymous sources are how most significant accountability journalism happens - they're how the Pentagon Papers got out, how the CIA's black site program got exposed, how the HHS stories we've covered this week were reported. The people who most need protection from powerful interests are specifically deprioritized by Objection's scoring system.

The creator calls it "the same as Community Notes." A civil rights and defamation attorney calls it "a high-tech protection racket for the rich and powerful."

One of those descriptions is accurate. The AI models being used as the "tribunal" were trained on journalists' work without consent or compensation. They hallucinate. They amplify bias. They are being deployed here specifically to issue verdicts on the work of the people whose labor built them.

Thiel killed Gawker with a lawsuit. This is faster and cheaper.

[Yanis Varoufakis @yanisvaroufakis]

There you have it. Anthropic's CEO said it: The murder of more than 100 schoolgirls in Minab targeted by Anthropic's CLAUDE "is a use case that doesn't even violate our red lines." Time to rise up against these technofeudal war criminals.

[Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur oPt @FranceskAlbs]

Israel’s genocide has been funded by many people who bought Israeli bonds underwritten by major global banks. Barclays and BNP have stopped that: good.

Now waiting for @GoldmanSachs, @BankofAmerica, @Citi, @DeutscheBank and @jpmorgan to do the same.

https://t.co/eaYK3udTbL

[Shashi Tharoor @ShashiTharoor]

Deeply shocking to read this official US statement, which contains absolutely no expression of regret or condolence for the loss of innocent Indian lives. How can a “friend” and strategic partner be so deeply insensitive?

Why couldn’t a non-compliant commercial vessel have been stopped using other, non-lethal means? Is it not possible to disable a ship's propulsion or steering without firing missiles targeted to kill civilian crew members?

Practically every merchant ship navigating these crucial waters has Indian crew on board. Are they all considered fair game for US missiles now?

This approach is unacceptable and I hope @DrSJaishankar had said so to @marcorubio.

[Aunindyo Chakravarty @Aunindyo2023]

@dtytrivedi As far as I know, EC is supposed to, by law, keep the voting data for 45 days after declaration of results. There was still a week to go for that when the EVMs got destroyed. This makes it impossible to legally challenge the result within the 45-day window.

[Valerio Capraro @ValerioCapraro]

LLMs can quietly shift our attitudes on important social issues.

In the experiments, participants wrote about issues such as the death penalty, voting rights for felons, fracking, and genetically modified organisms. As they wrote, the AI subtly nudged them toward one side of the debate.

The result? Their attitudes shifted in the direction favored by the AI.

They did so quietly. They did not argue, did not debate, did not try to persuade. They simply complete the sentences.

This is epistemia in action: the silent shaping of what becomes thinkable, sayable, and believable.

And it is LLMorphism at its most dangerous. We treat the model as a neutral linguistic prosthesis, while it is quietly reorganizing our cognition.
We risk becoming the LLM.

*
Paper in the first reply

[Guy Abel 鄭蓋堡 @guyabelguyabel]

🚨Out today in @Nature our new paper uses deep learning to map four decades of global human migration.

By building the first comprehensive dataset of global annual flows (1990-2023), we reveal that migration has nearly tripled since 2000.

🔗https://t.co/DuPQKF1asT

[Zack Polanski @ZackPolanski]

Elon Musk can say what he likes about me but I won't stay silent whilst foreign tech billionaires, money earned off the backs of real workers, try to interfere in our democracy, incite violence in our communities and tear apart our country.

Time for him to pipe down.

[Isabella M Weber @IsabellaMWeber]

France just voted to nationalize ArcerolMittal, once the world’s largest steel producer!

[The Wire @thewire_in]

#TheWireTalks | I think Penguin India Is Looking For Excuses To Drop My Book - Joe Sacco

@bombaywallah is joined by Joe Sacco to discuss why Penguin India backed away from distributing his book on the 2013 Muzaffarnagar riots and the changes it sought.

https://t.co/yV16419nCm

[Paul Novosad @paulnovosad]

You think politics is bad now, just wait until the median voter has never read a book