I guess Orwell speak again and a case of weaponizing "leakages". NREGA is such an important program. It is modest, yet radical, and it works.

"I have always found it odd that when it comes to development people readily dismiss the realities of policymaking — such as the fact that in all jurisdictions policies only succeed because there are interested actors incentivized to make them stick."

Sober analysis on Indian elections by Devesh Kapur. "Nothing concentrates the mind like a fight for survival, and, while imperfect and incomplete, the opposition’s decision to join forces in the so-called INDIA coalition limited vote fragmentation." Competition is good, I say! :)

looking forward to reading all of this, congratulations to all the authors! :)

Learning from the last decade: commitment to truth, courage, kindness and perseverance matter. Everything else such as brilliance, articulation, wagairah wagairah are overrated.

It has been a tremendous honor and a privilege to serve as ACM SIGCHI President over the last three years. It took time, energy, commitment, a whole lot of love (and undoubtedly some tears), to pull us out of the pandemic to the point that we are at today. [1/6]

Wow! Looking forward to reading this!

We should call models like Llama 3, Mixtral, etc. “open-weight models”, not “open-source models”. For a model to be open-source, the code and training data need to be public (good examples: GPT-J, OLMo, RedPajama, StarCoder, K2, etc.). Weights are like an exe file, which would be

This is a fantastic and rich outline of how academic research can effect policy change. Bonus: a detailed convo with Christina Ciocca Eller and her tireless work on the information integrity report from White House Office of Science & Technology Policy

Here is the conversation between Dwarkesh Patel and François Chollet . youtube.com/watch?v=UakqL6… One could say a downstream consequence of that marketing decision to call it "intelligence" or is it rekindled ho(y)pe sponsored by OpenAI :)

I tell the story of my podcast, A SENSE OF REBELLION, in tomorrow's Boston Globe archive.is/uZoVY

This is wonderfully chaotic! :) Looking forward to listening to this podcast about the secret tech AI startups from Boston!

This is an awesome resource for tracking work ok NREGA.

If you are looking for level-headed opinion on thinking about AI and its consequences in the near and medium term, do watch this episode! You may not agree with all of the takes...but Arvind Narayanan makes his views clear! I really liked Harry Stebbings pointed questions as well

We must not forget Bhopal !

Very interesting study on xkcd. Participate.

What a sobering read on living (or surviving) without Aadhaar.