datamansf retweeted
the same thing could be said about umar, sharjeel and many other activists who are languishing in jail. this is why it's important to speak up when the state targets marginalized ppl because when you don't, the emboldened state comes after the privileged as well.
A few years ago, Ashu had a high-paying corporate job in London, earning millions. Saurav was writing about the country’s legal system and living a great life. Both had successful careers, financial security and every reason to continue living the lives they had built for themselves.
But they chose to give it all up in the hope of making this country a better place. They had absolutely no reason to leave behind their comfortable lives, take to the streets, face uncertainty and eventually end up in jail. Yet they did.
What I admire most about these two is that despite coming from privileged backgrounds, they chose to fight for those who aren’t as fortunate. They could have easily looked the other way, enjoyed their lives and never bothered about the struggles of people they had never even met. Nobody asked them to make these sacrifices. Nobody expected them to. But they did, because they genuinely care about people beyond themselves.
And to me, that is the greatest quality a human being can have. To stand up for people you don’t know, to fight battles that aren’t your own, and to risk everything you have so that someone else might have a better life.
That’s the kind of people Ashu and Saurav are.
datamansf retweeted
Living for 50 years at the same address. Voting in every election since the 1970s. Today, the Election Commission says he cannot be found.
His name is Faiyaz Ahmed. He is 74, a retired professor of mechanical engineering at Jamia Millia Islamia, and he has lived in the same home for more than five decades. Under SIR, he is untraceable. His wife Anjum Ara, 62, lives in the same house. Under SIR, she has permanently shifted.
They never moved. Election Commission moved them out of the voter list.
This is Okhla, Delhi -
Citizens groups went door to door in just two polling booths, covering 258 households over seven days. They found at least 100 voters wrongly marked absent, shifted, dead or duplicate.
That was two booths. Across Okhla, nearly 1.6 lakh names appeared on the Commission's list of absent, shifted, dead & duplicate voters & more than 67,000 voters were put on the notice list. Okhla has seen the second highest rate of deletions.
If two booths hide 100 wrongful cases, the question isn't whether there's a problem. It's how big the problem is.
Look at who the Commission erased.
🔹Faiyaz Ahmed's son says he handed in completed enumeration forms for both his parents to the BLO. His own name made it to the draft roll. His parents' names did not.
🔹Naeemuddin, a former government adviser, has lived at the same address for 30 years. He went to his BLO himself. BLO took his photograph and got his signature on a form. He was still marked permanently shifted. He stood in front of the Commission's own officer and was recorded as gone.
🔹Ravi, 37, is alive. Under the voter ID card he was issued in 2023, he is listed as dead. His record now sits under a different EPIC number that no one ever told him about.
🔹Md. Farid Anwar's family was told by the BLO that his name had been deleted before the revision began. Yet his name appears on the SIR deletion list, with his form marked uncollectable.
The two official explanations cannot both be true.
And what is the remedy for these citizens? Form 6, the form for new voters.
A man who has voted for half a century is told to apply as if he were voting for the first time. His record is wiped and his voting history is gone, and what was his right becomes an application. More than 110 people left that hearing holding Form 6. None of them should have needed it.
Commission says it is holding weekend camps so that no eligible voter is left out. Around 20 voters who spoke to The Hindu had never heard of these camps. Some didn't even know who their BLO was.
The clock is running. Form 6 applications close on October 30. The final roll will be published on December 4 Any voter who doesn't find out in time loses their vote without ever knowing it happened.
In Karnataka, voters are being declared dead on forms they never filed. In Delhi, voters who stood before officials are being marked absent. Different states, same pattern: the Commission makes the mistake, and the citizen pays the price.
Questions must be answered -
🔹Who verified Okhla's nearly 1.6 lakh deletion-list entries, and did anyone actually knock on those doors?
🔹How was a voter who personally appeared before the BLO, was photographed and signed a form, recorded as "permanently shifted"?
🔹Why are voters registered for decades being forced to re-enrol as new voters instead of having their original records restored?
🔹Why did not a single official attend a public hearing where more than 150 affected voters came forward?
🔹Will the October 30 deadline be extended, and will every person on the deletion list be personally informed?
In 7 days, citizens & volunteers did what the Election Commission failed to do in months. They found the voters it lost.
The vote belongs to the citizen, not the Commission. A name deleted wrongly is a citizen silenced.
thehindu.com/news/cities/De…
At least 100 voters from two polling booths in Delhi’s Okhla constituency were found to have been wrongly classified as absent, shifted, dead or duplicate (ASDD) during the special intensive revision (SIR) of electoral rolls, a public audit covering 258 households over seven days found.
✍️@suruchiarchives
thehindu.com/news/cities/Del…
datamansf retweeted
Must read for those who are genuinely curious what's wrong with SIR.
Living for 50 years at the same address. Voting in every election since the 1970s. Today, the Election Commission says he cannot be found.
His name is Faiyaz Ahmed. He is 74, a retired professor of mechanical engineering at Jamia Millia Islamia, and he has lived in the same home for more than five decades. Under SIR, he is untraceable. His wife Anjum Ara, 62, lives in the same house. Under SIR, she has permanently shifted.
They never moved. Election Commission moved them out of the voter list.
This is Okhla, Delhi -
Citizens groups went door to door in just two polling booths, covering 258 households over seven days. They found at least 100 voters wrongly marked absent, shifted, dead or duplicate.
That was two booths. Across Okhla, nearly 1.6 lakh names appeared on the Commission's list of absent, shifted, dead & duplicate voters & more than 67,000 voters were put on the notice list. Okhla has seen the second highest rate of deletions.
If two booths hide 100 wrongful cases, the question isn't whether there's a problem. It's how big the problem is.
Look at who the Commission erased.
🔹Faiyaz Ahmed's son says he handed in completed enumeration forms for both his parents to the BLO. His own name made it to the draft roll. His parents' names did not.
🔹Naeemuddin, a former government adviser, has lived at the same address for 30 years. He went to his BLO himself. BLO took his photograph and got his signature on a form. He was still marked permanently shifted. He stood in front of the Commission's own officer and was recorded as gone.
🔹Ravi, 37, is alive. Under the voter ID card he was issued in 2023, he is listed as dead. His record now sits under a different EPIC number that no one ever told him about.
🔹Md. Farid Anwar's family was told by the BLO that his name had been deleted before the revision began. Yet his name appears on the SIR deletion list, with his form marked uncollectable.
The two official explanations cannot both be true.
And what is the remedy for these citizens? Form 6, the form for new voters.
A man who has voted for half a century is told to apply as if he were voting for the first time. His record is wiped and his voting history is gone, and what was his right becomes an application. More than 110 people left that hearing holding Form 6. None of them should have needed it.
Commission says it is holding weekend camps so that no eligible voter is left out. Around 20 voters who spoke to The Hindu had never heard of these camps. Some didn't even know who their BLO was.
The clock is running. Form 6 applications close on October 30. The final roll will be published on December 4 Any voter who doesn't find out in time loses their vote without ever knowing it happened.
In Karnataka, voters are being declared dead on forms they never filed. In Delhi, voters who stood before officials are being marked absent. Different states, same pattern: the Commission makes the mistake, and the citizen pays the price.
Questions must be answered -
🔹Who verified Okhla's nearly 1.6 lakh deletion-list entries, and did anyone actually knock on those doors?
🔹How was a voter who personally appeared before the BLO, was photographed and signed a form, recorded as "permanently shifted"?
🔹Why are voters registered for decades being forced to re-enrol as new voters instead of having their original records restored?
🔹Why did not a single official attend a public hearing where more than 150 affected voters came forward?
🔹Will the October 30 deadline be extended, and will every person on the deletion list be personally informed?
In 7 days, citizens & volunteers did what the Election Commission failed to do in months. They found the voters it lost.
The vote belongs to the citizen, not the Commission. A name deleted wrongly is a citizen silenced.
thehindu.com/news/cities/De…
datamansf retweeted
The state is deliberately prolonging Ashu and Saurav’s illegal arrest by using every dirty trick in the book to delay court proceedings and prevent their release.
They have no legal grounds to keep them behind bars, so they are resorting to delaying tactics to keep them there.
VIDEO | Delhi: Reacting to the judicial custody of CJP co-convenors Saurav Das and Ashutosh Ranka, CJP legal head Ratna Singh says, "We have been here since morning. We were told that the entire hearing would take place at 12.00 pm. Today, everything was complete, the verification was done, and all requirements were met. We have been waiting here since noon. The SEM (Special Executive Magistrate) was at the police station by 1:30 pm, but he did not enter the courtroom until 5.00 pm. When he finally arrived, he refused to hear our case on its merits regarding whether Saurav and Ashutosh should be released from judicial custody. Instead, he made arbitrary remarks. The public prosecutor, who had not appeared at the police station for the last four days, was present today. Within about five minutes of the proceedings, the SEM told the court that he had received a threatening message. From that point on, the entire discussion revolved solely around that message. It is clear that this entire episode was orchestrated. They had decided beforehand to come into the courtroom and focus exclusively on this alleged threatening message, completely bypassing whether the formalities required for Saurav and Ashutosh's release were fulfilled. Given how this process has been deliberately delayed and handled, I am utterly disappointed..."
(Full video available on PTI Videos - ptivideos.com)
datamansf retweeted
If MGNREGA was the monumental failure that the BJP spent years portraying it as, why did its government retain the programme for over a decade and allocate unprecedented budgets to it?
The BJP government increased MGNREGA's annual budget allocation from ₹33,000 crore in 2013–14 to ₹86,000 crore in 2024–25, an increase of over 160%. During the COVID-19 crisis in 2020–21, the allocation reached an ₹1.11 lakh crore.
Why did the party that derided it constantly rely upon it to implement own flagship schemes, and repeatedly turn to it during national crises?
Why does even its replacement, VB–G RAM G, retain the fundamental architecture of a statutory rural employment guarantee?
The answers lie in MGNREGA's record, not the political rhetoric surrounding it.
1. Between 2014–15 and 2024–25, MGNREGA generated 3,029 crore person-days of employment. That is equivalent to over 12 crore full-time years of work, assuming 250 working days annually. For perspective, at Reliance Industries' 2024–25 workforce strength of 4.03 lakh, it would take approximately 300 years to generate an equivalent number of working days.
2. Those who refer to MGNREGA as a scheme that makes people dig up and fill up pits know nothing. The scheme has helped complete 8 crore works including water conservation, irrigation, watershed development, afforestation, rural connectivity and land improvement.
3. It is MGNREGA that helped carry out many of Modi government's repackaged flagship schemes including PMAY, Swachh Bharat Mission, POSHAN, Mission Amrit Sarovar, Jal Shakti Mission and PMKSY.
4. MGNREGA has been a lifeline during famine and droughts. In 2015–16, the NDA government extended the entitlement to 150 days in notified drought-affected areas.
5. When livelihoods collapsed and migrant workers returned to villages during COVID, MGNREGA was the crutch that generated a record 389 crore person-days in 2020–21, providing employment to approximately 7.6 crore households.
6. Women, Dalits and Adivasis continue to constitute a large portion of MGNREGA beneficiaries.
7. At its core, MGNREGA empowers because it transforms employment from an act of state benevolence into a legally enforceable entitlement. Its most radical premise is that livelihood security is a matter of dignity and citizenship, not charity or political patronage.
It is because of the above that so many of the world's most brilliant minds in policy and development refer to MGNREGA as a revolutionary anti-poverty mission. Nothing can erase its legacy.
datamansf retweeted
"The products we consider a luxury in India has become a commodity in China." - this is true for rest of the world as well.
Hence, China's 15K$ GDP per capita nominal goes very far. So when you evalutate China's standard of living PPP (32K$) is the right measure.
I had this experience. I typically stay in Marriot 4-5 stars due to years of loyalty to the brand, but one time I had to stay in a service apartment kind of property in Shanghai. It was a last min booking on a very popular day and everything was sold out. It was quite a nice area. I was bit annoyed still
But, when I stayed there, I absolutely loved it. What I loved was how high quality everything was: bed, other furniture, paitnings on the wall, linen, plates, cutlery and so on...they also had a great gym and good breakfast for a cheap price. It was not empty - it was full, if anyone doubts they were doing it due to low occupancy.
Most of the things are made locally and are procured at a fraction of price people pay outside China. Same applies to cars, electronics, apparel and so on...hence money goes very far in China.
That is why I say when you evalutate China's standard of living PPP (32K$) is the right measure.
My two cents after visiting the Canton Fair in Guangzhou, China:
The products we consider a luxury in India has become a commodity in China. There is intense domestic competition for some products — hundreds of manufacturers of two-wheelers, solar panels, solar inverters, home appliances.
The EV space is conquered here. You will find EVs in all shapes, forms, and sizes, many times over.
The battery + solar market is conquered too. Huge number of players making BESS + solar at competitive prices.
Learnings for India - the same market that is saturated here is opening up for domestic Indian players. Companies can get into BESS, two-wheeler EVs, and a big gap exists in local power electronics.
datamansf retweeted
Mountains make a sound right before they fall.
It's a crackle, kind of like ice cubes popping when you pour a drink over them. A tea farmer in Taiwan heard it, pulled out his phone, and filmed a huge chunk of cliff coming down.
One county over, there's a slope that's done the exact same thing five times since 1862. Every time it fell, it set up the next one.
So what's actually cracking? Look at the cliff before it goes. See the stripes? Those are layers of old seafloor, sand and mud that turned to stone and got shoved up into mountains. Every line between two layers is basically a crack that's already there. The only thing keeping a chunk attached is little stretches of solid rock reaching across those cracks. Geologists literally call them rock bridges, and a whole cliff can be hanging on a handful of them.
When one snaps, its weight gets dumped onto the ones still holding, so they snap faster. Every snap gives off a tiny pop. Once enough are going at once, it gets loud enough for a guy picking tea to hear it. Researchers in Italy and Austria have bolted sensors onto shaky slopes just to listen for those pops.
And Taiwan is about the worst place on Earth to have a cliff. The whole island sits where two tectonic plates are crashing into each other at more than 80 millimeters a year, about twice as fast as your fingernails grow. That pushes the mountains up so fast they're wearing away 3 to 6 millimeters a year, some of the fastest erosion measured anywhere on the planet. Then you pile typhoons and earthquakes on top.
The slope in the next county is called Tsaoling. Its rock layers tilt about 14 degrees downhill, like a stack of books sitting on a ramp. It came down in 1862, and then again in 1941, 1942, 1979 and 1999. In 1941 a house with four people living in it slid down the mountain and ended up on the other side of the river. The 1999 slide hit during the Chi-Chi earthquake and moved about 125 million cubic meters of rock. That's almost 50 Great Pyramids' worth, and it dammed the river.
Here's what got me. A 2003 study found every one of those slides broke loose a little higher up the mountain than the one before. Each collapse ripped off the top layers and left the rock underneath out in the rain for the first time. That rock weathered and got weaker until the next earthquake or typhoon finished the job. Before 1999, you could even see a small V-shaped crack at the top of the slope in old aerial photos, because the mountain had already started moving.
Which is why I keep thinking about that cliff in Chiayi. Whatever was sitting behind the rock that fell is out in the rain now too.
datamansf retweeted
Shameful! – at Noida, India
It’s been six days since this remarkable woman of Indian origin (see her story, attached) won the #NobelPeacePrize. And the Government of India, her ancestral homeland, hasn’t so much as congratulated her?! Shame on the petty men who have made such a deplorable decision.
datamansf retweeted
I only found out about the Paris massacre of 17 October 1961 on twitter about 7 yrs ago. It is one of post war Europe's dirty little secrets. The skeletons are still in the Seine.
Incredible. Don’t forget on 17th of October, 1961 France killed hundreds (exact number is unknown) of Algerians dressed in their best clothing protesting in the most ‘civilized’ way in Paris. Their bodies were thrown in the river. In addition, 12,000 Algerians were detained by police. This was during the Algerian war of independence.
datamansf retweeted
A fly that died years ago is flying around a harbor that doesn't exist.
Here's what's going on. Scientists took one female fruit fly and sliced its brain into about 7,000 pieces, each roughly 2,000 times thinner than a human hair. They photographed those slices 21 million times under an electron microscope. Then hundreds of people spent years tracing every connection by hand until they had the whole thing, all 139,255 neurons and 54.5 million synapses. That map is called FlyWire. Odyssey hasn't said exactly which map it used, but FlyWire is the one most of these projects build on.
Earlier this year a startup called Eon ran that map as a simulation with zero training and got a virtual fly that walks and grooms on its own.
Now Odyssey has put the brain somewhere new. The harbor in this clip isn't sitting on a server as a 3D model or a game level. Odyssey-3 is a 14-billion-parameter AI that learned how water and light behave by watching a ton of video, and it invents each frame as the fly steers through it.
This is kind of a big deal for a nerdy reason. For as long as people have tried to build a mind, there have been two camps. One says copy a real brain. The other says train a giant model on tons of data. Those camps have mostly fought each other, and in this clip one is living inside the other.
And here's a fun bit of math. The fly has 54.5 million synapses. The AI dreaming up its world has 14 billion parameters. Line those up and the world is about 250 times bigger than the brain living in it.
That's what happens when one approach rides on GPUs and the other rides on grad students with microscopes. The trained side ballooned in a couple of years. The copied side took the better part of a decade to get one fly.
What really got me is how little it takes to fool a fly. A fruit fly sees through about 800 tiny lenses per eye, so its whole view of the world is around 1,600 pixels. Each of your eyes sends about a million nerve fibers to your brain. Keeping a fly convinced means the AI only has to look right across 1,600 pixels, which is a pretty low bar, and it's clearing it.
The fake world will look good enough for human eyes long before anybody can slice up a human brain and rebuild all 86 billion neurons.
datamansf retweeted
Harper is brilliant and she is graciously breaking down AI systems for us to learn. Highly recommended follow.
Did you know the most sophisticated AI systems were actually so chaotic? Yep - this AI meme is actually pretty accurate.
“Deep learning” (as mentioned in the X post) refers to neural networks, which are the models that underlie the “generative” AI systems you know about: the text-, image-, video-, and song-generation models.
Are you surprised to learn that these systems aren’t straightforward? Does this usage of math make sense to you?
Hi, I’m Harper, AI educator, engineer and advisor.
••• My goal is to democratize AI, so everyone can understand it, use it, and make informed decisions about it. Happy you’re here. •••
I have two degrees in Computer Science specializing in Artificial Intelligence from @Stanford, experience teaching PhD-level AI courses there, and 4+ years building AI at @Facebook / @Meta.
Follow @harpercarrollai if you want to learn about AI, and let me know in the comments if there’s anything specific you want to learn about.
datamansf retweeted
This is a classic instance of governance by anarchy ! First commit illegality on a massive scale and then struggle to undo the illegality.
As the Election Commission launches a special drive in 20 states to bring back voters “left out” in the SIR, its officers are staring at a unique problem: persuading lakhs, possibly crores, of people to fill Form 6, the “Application Form for New Voters,” which asks them to declare they are applying “for the first time.”
Form 6 is the right route back, and officials say signing it invites no legal action. But people who’ve voted for decades balk at calling themselves new, and many believe the declaration is false.
Against that backdrop, Maharashtra’s CEO has proposed a fix: drop “New Voters” from the title, and let the deleted say they were enrolled before and cite their old EPIC number.
Break by @vallabhozarkarr
indianexpress.com/article/in… via @IndianExpress
datamansf retweeted
Jared Kushner - the son-in-law of US President saw Albania’s pristine Adriatic coastline as a lucrative luxury-tourism opportunity, supported by new airport infra and government incentives. Albanian citizens resisted, due to environmental risks and huge corruption. The government tried to suppress. Protests surged. And now 👇
datamansf retweeted
Now to host a study circle on Palestine in a private home, people need state permission?
“Give us a written notice first”
At 2:45 pm on 18 Oct, 20+ police officers, in uniform & plainclothes, arrived at a home in #Vakola, #Mumbai, where 10 students had gathered for a study circle organised by @ipsp_official. Police remained at the house at 7 pm
On 18 Sept, police searched books & other material at the same home after a #Palestine solidarity kite-flying event
datamansf retweeted
Imagine what theee columnists would be doing if Congress led UPA were presiding over illegal mass voter deletions/additions and systematic capture of Election Commission!
It's quite funny come to think of it. Every single time the govt is caught with its pants down, a whole gaggle of columnists get to work, advising the Leader of the Opposition on what he shouldn't, or should, do! They have not a word of caution or criticism for the government, but are full of wisdom for the Opposition! And they have been doing it for a dozen years. 🧐
Give it a break!
datamansf retweeted
Violent crackdown on Ambedkarite & anticaste activists today at IIT Bombay is shocking.
50+ students have died on IIT campuses. A student's parents are on a hunger strike for justice against a prof who didnt follow establish protocol. Instead of working transparently & introspecting its casteist culture-- IIT Bombay & Police detained activists & protestors violently & hassled the parents.
When institutions become more important than students. When people dont ask what is structurally wrong & instead caste-shame a dead student & his grieving parents-- you know you are in a morally dead society. No high-fancy rhetoric can rebrand or rescue it.
Jai Bhim.
datamansf retweeted
Everything is so exhaustingly brazen. Give EC immunity. Delete CCTV footage. Make voters run around. Stack the courts & newsrooms with yes men. Beat everyone up for Q the process.
And act innocent.
datamansf retweeted
Crucially important video: the legal proof that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza from this year's Nobel Peace Prize Winner
Navi Pillay on the legal proof for genocide in Gaza | Israel - Palestine... youtu.be/XYpDoWW-nZs?si=MyZg… via @YouTube
Please watch this short video. It is essential viewing
datamansf retweeted
When the CM is just an incompetent bully and
his police are only a political instrument to harass the opposition
— the tragic death of 18 persons at north Kolkata's puja pandal today evening (17th Oct 7.30 pm) was bound to happen.
@thewire_in @svaradarajan @mkvenu1 @seemay
datamansf retweeted
Speaking against @BJP4India is NOT antinational
Bjp isn't india. India isn't Bjp.
India existed before BJP. India will exist After BJP
You have to decide whether you are willing to STAND UP & SPEAK UP to protect our democracy!
Your Silence is why tyranny continues
@Cockroachisback