So … What If Aliens’ Quantum Computers Explain Dark Energy?. “A wild thought experiment” concerning gravitons, quantum computing and aliens…

Recycling is a defeat. Great talk by Mark Adam, Managing Director of VITSOE. “Recycling is what you do when you fail to re-use.” “I am not rich enough to buy cheaply.” and more…

Securing Artificial Intelligence: Problem Statement and Securing Artificial Intelligence: Mitigation Strategy Report, two reports from ETSI provide another good introduction to the work on securing AI.

On the Internet, We’re Always Famous. Interesting analysis, even though it seems a bit scattered at the start.

Adversarial Machine Learning, PhD level course work. The introduction deck is very informative in itself and worth the read.

“Bad News” — what if disinformation was not really that? Good to pierce some bubbles once in a while but this article does struggle to provide substative counterpoints other than some arguably fundamental epistemological questions.

Stockholm Syndrome – Not What You’ve Been Told. “‘a myth invented to discredit women victims of violence’ by a psychiatrist with an obvious conflict of interest, whose first instinct was to silence the woman questioning his authority.”

Exam Week Puzzle Alice, Betty, and Carol took the same series of examinations. There was one grade of A, one grade of B, and one grade of C for each examination, where A, B, C are different positive integers. The final test scores were – Alice: 20, Betty: 10 and Carol: 9. If Betty was placed first in the arithmetic examination, who was placed second in the spelling examination?

On the 100th anniversary of publication of Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico Philosophicus: The World Is All That Is the Case – “Tractatus is less the greatest philosophical work of the 20th century than it is one of the most immaculate volumes of modernist poetry written in the past hundred years” and Ludwig Wittgenstein: a mind on fire – “My propositions serve as elucidations in the following way: anyone who understands me eventually recognises them as nonsensical, when he has used them – as steps – to climb up beyond them. (He must, so to speak, throw away the ladder after he has climbed up it.)”

Meet the Censored: Hitler, “censorship of education”.

Design for Safety, An Excerpt. Interesting framework and very relevant.

Thank You For Reading – “Your attentive kindness doesn’t get picked up by any analytical tool I’ve got other than my heart and my memory—however short lived.” Hear, hear! I can relate to this.

Facebook’s war on switching costs. “Network effects are how Facebook attracts users, but switching costs are how it holds them hostage. (…) Network effects inflate services, but low switching costs let the air out again. Interop is the escape valve that keeps big tech firms from sucking up all the oxygen and asphyxiating their rivals.” Well put!

“The Rare Earth Myth”. Interesting take on “China’s role as the bogeyman in the West’s rare earth debates”.

Intersectionality and AI, intersectional experience is greater than the sum of individual biases. “AI” holds up a mirror to our society and then amplifies (the good and) the bad. That we choose to ignore the bad is dangerous and makes us ostriches with head in the sand.

I’m a Luddite. You should be one too. “no technology is sacred in itself, but is only worthwhile insofar as it benefits society.”

The Wee Hours – For centuries, a night’s sleep was interrupted by a brief waking period.

The Peril of Politicizing Science. With a title like that, it is hard to disagree but it is not easy to agree with some of the specifics either.

Chaap Tilak by Abida Parveen & Rahat Fateh Ali Khan, pure qawwali bliss.

Obfuscated Apples, on defeating the obfuscation introduced by Apple in its CSAM scanning system. Interesting and important analysis. Some further clarifications and followup work here.

At best, we’re on Earth for around 4,000 weeks – so why do we lose so much time to online distraction?. Interesting take: “The solution to this mystery, dramatic though it might sound, is that whenever we succumb to distraction, we’re attempting to flee a painful encounter with our finitude – with the human predicament of having limited time and, more especially in the case of distraction, limited control over that time.”

A Leader’s Framework for Decision Making: HBR article from 2007 by David Snowden and Mary Boone where they introduce Cynefin Framework, a way to frame and work with complexity.

Aswath Damodaran – Laws of Valuation. Brilliant 30 minute lecture. Well articulated and very relevant.

Why Satan should chair your meetings, a literature lover’s guide to holding effective meetings. Interesting takes. Several nuggets of wisdom.

Hundreds of AI tools have been built to catch covid. None of them helped. AI reduced to what it probably is most of the time - statistical inference tool with codified biases.

Collatz conjecture – The Simple Math Problem We Still Can’t Solve Paul Erdős said about this “Mathematics may not be ready for such problems.” Start with any positive integer n. Then each term is obtained from the previous term as follows: if the previous term is even, the next term is one half of the previous term. If the previous term is odd, the next term is 3 times the previous term plus 1. The conjecture is that no matter what value of n, the sequence will always reach 1.

Drawings on the topic of Fake News, topcial and capturing the essence.

Github pledges legal aid for interoperators, “fantastic outcome”.

Disinformation for Hire, a Shadow Industry, Is Quietly Booming. Proxy based information warfare is here to stay. We need to think of counter measures and not act so surprised everytime.

Misinformation: A Pandemic Of The Unvaccinated?. Oh yes! Now that we know this, what can we do against this proxy-warfare technique?

The Russian perspective on information warfare, (2017). “Academics want to promote their ideas, politicians want to enforce their power, and the general public wants to regain a sense of national pride—rather than a result of a carefully planned and staged plot of Putin’s regime, as it is frequently presented in the West.”

Combating Foreign Disinformation on Social Media, US specific and “nascent”, “evolving”, “unclear”, “unsolved”.

When Is the Revolution in Architecture Coming? Intriguing and a call to action. “So, architects, be bold. Go crazy. Gothic futurism. Do it. They’ll call it pastiche. They’ll say it’s ignorantly recycling the past. Whatever. Screw ‘em. Let’s see what wonders can be created if the rules are broken and we start up again where Art Nouveau left off.”

Lessons learned from 15 years of SumatraPDF, an open source Windows app. Interesting read.

Why we’re blind to the color blue, never realised!

268435179 = -268 + 4^{(3×5 – 17)} – 9 via

Have we murdered the apostrophe? I have to admit, the wrong use of apostrophe’s irk me to no end.

Cores that don’t count, (pdf). Now, that is a new kind of ‘ghost in the machine.’ Sure to keep researchers and practitioners busy for a while.

The Shortcut and Blot, mesmerizing.

In Praise of the Gods - What the Rationalistic World Forgot. Burst some echo chambers. You are welcome.

Walkover, the story behind “the only time in Davis Cup history when a walkover decided the final.” Featuring the 1974 Indian tennis team and the stand against apartheid.