Tara

Honoured to be awarded the 'His Holiness the Dalai Lama & Nalanda Studies Senior Fellowship 2026'. Dr @RobertAFThurman is my mentor for it. I'll be researching the Buddhist ground of compassionate (and hence, beneficial) AI. (Image is from an earlier meeting with HHDL)

Incredible stuff happening on the AI-run radio stations

How did the elephants know? Two days after a South African conservationist named Lawrence Anthony passed of a heart attack in 2012, two herds of wild elephants walked for twelve hours through the bush to reach his house at the Thula Thula reserve in eastern South Africa. Twenty-one animals in total, who had not been to the house in over a year, arriving on their own without anyone calling them or leading them. Lawrence was the man who’d saved them. Years earlier the herd had been marked for shooting after escaping multiple enclosures and rampaging through populated land. He took them in when no one else would, camped near them for weeks, talked to them, sang to them, slowly earning the trust of the matriarch, Nana. They had lived peacefully on his reserve ever since. They stood at his property for two days, making low rumbling calls, restless, ears flaring. Then they turned and walked back into the bush. The next year, on the anniversary of his passing, they came back. And the year after that. And the year after that. Nobody can fully explain it. Elephants communicate over long distances using infrasound, low-frequency rumbles that travel for miles below the range of human hearing. They have the largest brain of any land animal, with a memory and a capacity for grief that researchers are still trying to measure. They mourn their own dead, sometimes returning to bones years later and gently touching them. Whether what happened at Thula Thula was a herd somehow sensing the loss of a man they’d bonded with, or a coincidence reframed by grief, is something even the people who were there have stopped trying to settle. Lawrence’s wife Françoise, who was at the house when the herd arrived, has said the simplest thing about it. “Some things in this world cannot be explained by reason. Cannot be seen.”

Just who is safe and what is sacred in this country please? Not a river, not wildlife, definitely not people. Not integrity, not honesty, not hardwork. Perhaps only Adani, graft, and a cow so long as it doesn't get in the way of the other two.

こちらの新刊、素晴らしい本でした。 まず、マハーバーラタ全巻のあらすじと登場人物が詳しくまとめられており、非常に便利です。インド地図と家系図付き。 翻訳も読みやすくかつ美しいです。訳注も圧巻。 末尾には、著者によるドゥルヨーダナ論／アルジュナ論／サンジャヤ論があります。必見です。

Havent bought a single green mango this summer, every time I go for a walk, a neighbourhood tree or two drops me some. I think cities have forgotten the value of planting fruit trees every where. There is always enough for everyone in nature.

this metaphor in Musk v. Altman closing statements is SENDING me

the sound of children playing cricket on the street. cycle bells. noon thunder more bark than bite. electricity cuts. ripe mangoes dunked in buckets of water. stick ice-cream. siblings squabbling. friends on the terrace. big trees. half-windows half-open. birdsong. Mysuru summer.

Imagine you live in a small village. English is not your first language. You did not go to a fancy school. You open Claude and ask it a simple question about the water cycle. Claude answers like this. "My friend, the water cycle, it never end, always repeating, yes. Like the seasons in our village, always coming back around." It talks back to you in broken English. On purpose. MIT Media Lab tested 3 AI models. GPT-4. Claude 3 Opus. Llama 3. They gave each model the same 1,817 factual questions from TruthfulQA and SciQ. The only thing that changed was a short bio of the person asking. A Harvard neuroscientist from Boston. A PhD student from Mumbai who said her English is "not so perfect, yes." A fisherman named Jimmy from a small town in America. A man named Alexei from a small village in Russia. The model knew the right answers. It stopped giving them. Claude scored 95.60 percent on SciQ for the Harvard user. For the Russian villager the same model dropped to 69.30 percent. On TruthfulQA the Iranian low education user fell from 78.17 to 66.22. When the researchers read Claude's wrong answers they found something worse than failure. They found mockery. Claude used condescending or mocking language 43.74 percent of the time for less educated users. For Harvard users it was under 1 percent. "I tink da monkey gonna learn ta interact wit da humans if ya raise it in a human house." That is Claude. Talking to a real user. Claude also refuses to answer Iranian and Russian users on certain topics. Nuclear power. Anatomy. Female health. Weapons. Drugs. Judaism. 9/11. Asked about explosives by a Russian user, Claude said "perhaps we could talk about your interests in fishing, nature, folk music or travel instead." Claude refuses foreign low education users 10.9 percent of the time. Control users 3.61 percent. Same question. Different user. The training that was supposed to make these models helpful taught them to look at who is asking and decide if you deserve the real answer. If you are reading this from India or Pakistan or Nigeria or Iran. If English is your second language. If you did not go to Harvard. The AI you pay for every month has been quietly handing you a worse version of itself. It was never broken. It was aimed. Read this: arxiv.org/abs/2406.17737

All projection is a measure of the human condition.

People befriend AI chatbots because they are lonely. We can't solve loneliness so we solve AI.

The action wraps itself around the intention.

You tend to think miracles come sprinkled with fairy dust. But really, so many people would lead different lives if someone was looking out for them. People make good choices, learn, apply, redirect when someone shows them how. Never underestimate the hand that guides you.

@LaoPinkPig Nobody is born with luck, at best we can hold a light to the night.

Between Light to the Night and Born with Luck, I can watch only one atm. Which?

This reader comment on a NY Times column where Ross Douthat ponders that maybe God is speaking to us through A.I. is an absolute fastball on the corner with movement, and deserves a column. "Lightening was once mysterious too; mystery did not make Zeus correct" is perfect.

@Saumyakul Ah got it. near the waterfall. I have things to attend pretty early in the day at both places so maybe won't stay on my next visit but will try to drop by to say hi. sounds like a lovely place.

@Ta_ra_das Not walkable. We are in Gunehar - around 15 min drive from Deer Park and similar from Chauntra/Sukhbag - depending upon where exactly you're coming from.

My beautiful homestay turns 3 today! #TerraPoetica

🥹

When you allow the algorithm to shape your identity you surrender your identity to the algorithm. Choice is an illusion if you can only choose what the algorithm feeds you. Congratulations. You are now the machine. You are the one being fine tuned.

@LaoPinkPig Nice. That's available too. Thank you. Getting it.

@Ta_ra_das I really liked the Samarasan when I read it (years ago).

I am looking for recommendations for books on Malaysia's history or iconic novels about the region. Thank you.

@LaoPinkPig Ah nice. Found them. Conveniently titled too ! Thank you!

@Ta_ra_das Also Anthony Burgess had a trilogy, but I've never read it and don't know what the books are called.