__rito__

In all honesty almost all exams are gamed by studying question patterns, studying previous years' papers, etc. There's nothing wrong in that whatsoever.

BUT it is such a toned down, dwarfed down version of what a holistic education should look like. It probably looks like that in undergrad CalTech Physics, maybe. Not much in most places.

People outside think it's so high and holy to be a PhD. It's not for most people.

Most people also go to academia because they can't find other jobs.

Things in Humanities are much worse than STEM, as there are much more subjectivity, favouritism, nepotism, groupism involved.

'Research' nowadays in most fields and institutions is nothing like whatever grand vision people tend to have: Faraday or Bell Labs, Maxwell or Bohr, Feynman or Bletchly Park.

An analyst is not just any literate person. S/he is already somewhere.

Not everybody will be willing to live the heavy trucker life. The choice (and sacrifice) itself is a component in the moat.

> On what basis are you telling this?

A career moat, probably. And I agree.

Every skill that any literate person can get in a few weeks is worthless. Always was the case.

Many of them were underage. AI workers aren't.

I appreciate what the project is trying to do, but why go on radical hyperbole such as "That, Ma says, is the essence of AI colonialism — the extraction of difficult, low-paid labor from the Global South for profit in the West."?

Also, do Chinese companies pay a higher rate? I have no idea. But Chinese data annotators also have to work with graphic content, I believe.

The workers are made to read bad things as part of AI training process, but they are adults agreeing to work in those things in exchange of pay, and they can always quit. The "workers" are computer literate English-speaking elites with stable internet connections even in poorer countries.

I have interacted with students from all over the world on different occasions. If I meet a student from India/US/China/Europe in a global research/academic/engineering forum, there is a non-trivial possibility that they are from a middle class or lower background, but when I meet, say, Africans, Bangladeshi people in the same places, they are almost always elites in their respective countries. It's not surprising, tbh.

My point it, when you are working for 4-5 USD per hour from Africa, you can communicate using good English, have a decent computer, have stable internet connection, a college degree, you are doing the AI work by choice.

Being paid by hours even in India is a great privilege where the culture is to make people work 10-12 hours shift for the pay of 8.

They say, "$2", I don't have any direct experience, but I saw ads for $4-$5 per hour, and that is for non-specialist work, and if you get steady work, you are paid more than "engineers" with 4 year degree at the end of the month.

In India, freshers Engineers in consultation shops get ₹30-40k per month, and have to be in office for 8-12 hours per day. Where 4$ per hour pay will get you 4$ * ₹95 * 8 hours per day * 5 days per week * 4 weeks per month = ₹60,800, which is enough for a comfortable middle class life (outside metros like Mumbai, Bangalore, etc.). There is also no money to be paid for rent, commute, etc.

People getting into these positions are getting in by choice, and remaining by choice.

If they wanted to shed light on real woes, they should have focused on the small terms the workers are hired for. And work not being regular, people laid off on short notice, short term contracts, etc.

Seeing salary as well as prices in US dollars eyes is a common folly. This is what I believe is called "geo arb".

I think, instead of 'Birdwatching', it could be any activity that required uninterrupted long time engagements, no immediate rewards, active involvement, slow progress, etc. Like cooking, painting, making films, writing, etc. You get the idea.

I have tinkered with Pharo before, but I have come across quite a few entries on HN front page where I encountered projects, releases and I had no idea what the thing was! It could be anything from a networking library to LLM wrapper, from a music band to an programming language.

Clicking on this page, one finds:

> What is Pharo? > > Pharo is a pure object-oriented programming language and a powerful environment focused on simplicity and immediate feedback.

I really appreciate these one liner introductions on any project.

It is a very rare event what is going on right now. The prices are mostly up due to memory shortage.

This is standard practice.

I developed many models from scratch deployed in various fields.

When you want to automatically detect a pathology from a give scan, you want it to be model that you own, train, use, and update, and not a generic vision capable LLM.

This is NOT what benchmaxxing is. You want the model to be accurate in terms of your cared metric- depending on the problem.

No, the anarchist cabal, the second opposition — the one with zero ground presence.

Reading a good newspaper shows the megaliked reels push a false narrative. Even the paper that the oppositions like.

Meta (Instagram) certainly pushes one side in India. I am sure of it.

I didn't quite believe its involvement with things in Myanmar where media, people vowed left and right of Meta's involvement.

But seeing it now firsthand, I certainly believe it.

- Accounts, posts from one cabal being pushed to your feed even if you don't follow any of them.

- If you open a fresh account, the accounts from those cabal are recommended at top.

- Relentlessly showing posts from one side and promoting them like hell.

Suspected bot activities. There were posts that are sans merit clearly, but Insta pushed it and had the unvelievable amount of likes, like Messi would have, had he posted his wedding reels.

I don't have publishable evidence, but I ask you to trust me. Human to human.

I read newspapers, I don't trust megaliked reels. But most don't nowaday, and I saw real people fall to blatant lies and propaganda. It's real. You can say anything, but I am convinced fully.

Bond between father and son is special, but sweet between a father and daughter in a way that is unique to that particular set.

The bond between an older brother and younger sister is one of the most beautiful things on the planet. No need to see a natural thing like that.

I read Jurassic Park last month. Will recommend as well.

It is a deep and profound book. Proper SciFi.

Much emphasis on philosophy, ideas. It is so far from the public opinion about the movie: a monster attack and survival movie.

Really amazing book. So different from all other books, yet so great.

I also started Murakami with 1Q84.

Also make sure to read Sputnik Sweetheart and Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki.

Hard Boiled Wonderland is such an underrated Murakami novel. I recommend it to Murakami lovers.

Also, does that friend have a list of favourites?

f you just want correct future predictions at a past point, then you are reading Stephenson wrong.

What if it's dated? Anything wrong with that?

You don't like the mythology of a culture being blended into a great story with futuristic tech?

I just loved that.

I see Stephenson as an unapologetic celebration of nerdy, intelligent stuff. It it definitely not the only way.

I have read Quicksilver. The way the novel portrays that time, and my Science heroes, is just fantastic. I don't care at all that it's dated.

My first book from him was Cryptonomicon. I care about History, Math, Computers, and that book blended all that in a coherent setup with proper environmental creation.

I also like the writing style. It's so clean and friendly.

Will highly recommend.

Extremely fluid writing, and you encounter a whole new world.

It is definitely good. You see the world from a very young person's eyes, but the nuances, complexities, etc. of adult life and wider worls still touches you unaltered. That's rare.

I will check out the ones that you mention.

Pick up the Penguin paperback (mine is from the "Modern Classics" series). It's cheap and great to read.

I think I get accustomed to new authors after reading some tens of pages.

I give every author that much.

By the way, the paperbacks have way too small font size, and now I am reading on Kindle.

(I also notice there is a bad typo in GP, but can't edit that now.

'Ecori', is of course, 'Eco'.)

I read multiple books together.

- My Name is Asher Lev, by Chaim Potok

Upbringing of a painter and the beginning of his journey in 1950s New York in a Hasidic Jewish family. Existentialism, art, passion.

- The Art of Doing Science and Engineerig, by Hamming

Surprisingly fresh and piercing, even today.

- Miracle of Love, Ram Dass

Stories about Neeb Karori Baba, as mentioned in Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs.

- The Name of The Rose, Umberto Ecori

Murder mystery in a famous library-monastery in medieval Europe. Amazing portrayal of that time.

I have a books site: https://ritoghosh.com/books

It's a few months outdated.

Planned for the electric officials, unplanned for the consumers.

Nowadays, power cuts are announced via SMS in advanced. Before, this was not the case.

Mind sharing pointers to how to do DL things in AMD?

I don't know anything.

Things like training a Vision/RL/LM, downloading and running LMs, etc.

Neal is one of two living authors whose all books I buy. Happy to have found him during Covid, thanks to HN comments. I found Greg Egan during that time, and I am grateful to HN threads and comments on books.

That's an extremely weird thing to say?

Not everyone uses YT the same way?

I did most psets, assignments, etc.

And at your standard of "learning", 95% of students don't learn anything anywhere. I also align with what you must think of as "true learning", but at that standard, most people are "mostly not learning" at regular schools and unis.

What if it becomes irrelevant?

I have always been taught that greatness is in work (karma), and not in birth (janma), and honestly I have seen it practiced.

A "lower" caste High School teacher gets visibly much more respect in our society than a random priest from "higher" caste.

Why do you assume I am so called higher caste? My caste is under a bucket in India called "Other Backward Classes".

Honestly the caste never comes up. In almost any conversation. And I also grew up far away from megacities.

I only heard a couple of priests blabber about the glory of their caste, but they were piss poor and had nothing else to be proud of. And they were bad as priests as well. That is, you wouldn't call them if you care about pure Sanskrit pronunciation, carefulness and seriousness during rituals, etc.