이모, baby PL thingy @fp_launchpad, sitar-strummer, 🇮🇳, inhabiting the settler-migrant continuum.

ಬೆಂಗಳೂರು/சென்னை/내 사랑이 사는 곳
Joined April 2019
Long-awaited update: I get to work with @kc_srk on the OCaml language. Elated and scared in equal measure.
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It's just as well that Lego shops didn't exist decades ago; I would have screamed the place down if my parents ever made the mistake of taking me there and not buying everything I wanted. (My parents did get me the choicest "building blocks" available ❤️)
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Alina Banerjee | ಅಲಿನಾ বৈনর্জি retweeted
If you’re taking my NPTEL course, Functional Programming with OCaml, I’d appreciate your feedback through a short survey. Let us know what worked well and what we can improve. The form link will be in the course announcements. Thank you!
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Alina Banerjee | ಅಲಿನಾ বৈনর্জি retweeted
Our classical music is the greatest achievement of Indian civilisation, and it would be tragic if its inherently pluralist and syncretic character falls prey to the polarising poison of Hindutva. My column in @ttindia : telegraphindia.com/opinion/n…
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I have been remiss and not realised that there is (more than one) KC Das in Chennai. I will have to get sweets for lab mates when I am back next week.
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Alina Banerjee | ಅಲಿನಾ বৈনর্জি retweeted
you’d never guess how Marx got to sound like Marx
lmao "I really don't want to sound like Marx. It's just, I'm looking at the data"
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Alina Banerjee | ಅಲಿನಾ বৈনর্জি retweeted
Most Indians don't know this, but the Dreze family are literally academic royalty in Belgium. Jean's brother the late Xavier Dreze was a highly regarded Marketing professor at UCLA's Anderson School of Management. He was one of the very very few who could do both modeling and consumer behavior research. He died very young at age 48. His obituary says he was a true polymath with multiple academic and sporting talents. Jean's father the late Jacques Dreze was an economist at the Université Catholique de Louvain. He was a highly regarded economist and the first president of the European Economic Association. He has collaborated with nobel laureates Robert Aumann and Franco Modigliani and his publication record is comparable with the best in the field. Jean Dreze could have had a very cushy life with his family legacy, white skin and European passport. Even in India, he could have been a social butterfly flitting in and out of five star hotels and running think tanks funded hy veated interests. Instead, he took Indian citizenship, learnt Hindi and roughs it out in rural Jharkhand. He designed many schemes and his footprint is all over Indian economic policy. You may like him or hate him. But Jean Dreze is more Indian than anyone who was born Indian, including you and me. He chose to be Indian. And he has dedicated his life to India. Think of this the next time some illiterate journalist asks "Who is Jean Dreze?"
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Alina Banerjee | ಅಲಿನಾ বৈনর্জি retweeted
Every young local reporter from Ranchi knows that since the past several years Jean Dreze is basically from Jharkhand.
Why should a young reporter know who Jean Dreze is? If he/she doesn’t know & asks him, it is what a reporter is supposed to do. Ask. Just coz he was in NAC during UPA (years ago) doesn’t make him a recognisable face to young reporters. The know it all ‘seniors’ need to chill
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Happily gave up his Belgian citizenship to permanently live here and work on actually trying to bring about better socio-economic policy. Not your usual White Guy in India in any way but how would people who don't read or understand anything know?
A reporter is asking Jean Drèze “Bhaisaab aap ho kaun?” A damning indictment of how low Indian media has fallen.
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A modern era Renaissance man
Ben Affleck reveals he writes Python, understands convolutional neural networks, worked extensively with GPUs, and used his celebrity status to get private looks at Google and OpenAI’s video models “I’ve always been kind of into computers since I was young. Then, when film started to move from analog film to digital, I became more interested in that aspect of it. The visual-effects workflow for many years has included machine learning, so I can write pretty shitty Python scripts and stuff like that. “With convolutional neural networks, which were the precursors to what the transformer can do, which is much more computation simultaneously, you would do things like look at what’s called a tensor. That’s the numerical translation of a visual image in numbers, like the batch number, the frame number and the red, green and blue values of each pixel in each frame. It’s just that simple. That numeric is called a tensor. “You’d use a convolutional neural network to identify patterns that reveal what’s called edge detection or feature extraction, which is identifying patterns well enough to know, this is where the window ledge is, so we can more easily take the green-screen image out and replace it with something. “That was familiar to me early on because, prior to Artists Equity, I had a small visual-effects company. I’ve worked with GPUs a lot too. The visual-effects guys said, ‘Hey, you should see. There are a couple: Google and this other company, OpenAI, are doing really interesting stuff with transformers in video.’ “I’ve learned that I can actually just call up and go, ‘Hey, it’s Ben Affleck. Can I come see what you’re doing?’ Sometimes people say yes, to my astonishment.”
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Alina Banerjee | ಅಲಿನಾ বৈনর্জি retweeted
Korea’s economic miracle convinced economist Ha-Joon Chang that developing nations need time and policy support to nurture new industries, he tells F&D magazine in an interview. imf.org/en/publications/fand…
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I have ideas where refinements eliminate the need for writing separate tests. The check is in the type itself i.e. when the function satisfies the lemma/property/refinement type.
Replying to @JulesJacobs5
And if your verification is type based (e.g., refinement types) then everything already works as it should. You don't need to add special features for having lemmas in interfaces; a lemma is just a value with a fancy type.
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Alina Banerjee | ಅಲಿನಾ বৈনর্জি retweeted
Proof Interfaces for Exploratory Mathematics Nishant Kheterpal, Matthew Keenan, Cyrus Omar, Jean-Baptiste Jeannin arxiv.org/abs/2610.02449 [𝚌𝚜.𝙿𝙻]
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Alina Banerjee | ಅಲಿನಾ বৈনর্জি retweeted
Who gets remembered when we tell the history of capitalism in India? Tata. Birla. Bajaj. Godrej; Parsis. Marwaris. Jains. Banias. What about the Bohras, Khojas & Memons? They were among Bombay's most important trading communities. Their story is the subject of my new book. 1/10
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Alina Banerjee | ಅಲಿನಾ বৈনর্জি retweeted
Goose: my latest programming language. Safer, faster and less memory than Rust/C++ for algorithms where tightly packed, flat data structures matter. It can represent more kinds of data structures as flat, pointer-free bytes than any language I know. github.com/aardappel/goose 1/
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Gently tussling over who gets to eat the tastier food (The black-and-white one is very sweet and let's the smaller, grey have it 😭).
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Alina Banerjee | ಅಲಿನಾ বৈনর্জি retweeted
Ten years of Sad Affleck memes and it turns out he'd just been trying to install CUDA drivers the whole time.
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