Balaji

I set up a bot to tweet editorials from newspapers and magazines. @editorial_agg Editorials help provide a big picture of the goings on which can sometimes get lost in the recommendation feeds, opinionated columns and hot-takes on Twitter.

Though lies conceal everything, though lies embrace everything, we will be obstinate in this smallest of matters:  Let them embrace everything, but not with any help from me. 4/4

It demands from us only obedience to lies and daily participation in lies—all loyalty lies in that. And the simplest and most accessible key to our self-neglected liberation lies right here:  Personal non-participation in lies. [!] 3/

since violence can conceal itself with nothing except lies, and the lies can be maintained only by violence.  And violence lays its ponderous paw not every day and not on every shoulder.  2/

Solzhenitsyn's "Live not by Lies!" (1974) When violence intrudes into peaceful life, its face glows with self-confidence ... But violence quickly grows old.  And it has lost confidence in itself, and in order to maintain a respectable face it summons falsehood as its ally 1/

@moxie In @JadAbumrad's Dolly Parton series, there is an analysis of the emotional trajectory over a 50-yr period which makes a similar argument about the status of women. subdued woman's servility & sorrow to questioning men to being angry and finally indifference and self-improvement

I didn’t go to college, but I did once unexpectedly end up at Princeton University’s “reunions weekend.” The way they do it, every 5th year class has their reunion on campus at the same time. So every year, on one weekend, the Princeton campus will be filled with people celebrating their 5th, 10th, 15th, and so on class reunions— all the way up until there’s nobody alive anymore. The beginning of reunions weekend kicks off with a parade! It is a parade of the Princeton graduates: featuring themselves, in honor of themselves, for… themselves. It works like this: all the graduates pack the sidewalks of the parade route, but ordered by graduation year. The recent graduates are standing at the end of the route, and the oldest graduates are at the beginning. Then, the parade begins. The oldest living graduate steps off the sidewalk and leads the parade. When everyone older than you has gone by, you step into the street and become the parade. Until you become part of the parade, you’re cheering the parade. You cheer and witness everyone before you, and then you are cheered and witnessed by everyone after you. It is a bizarre ritual. To see it, though, is like seeing the entire fossil record of Princeton graduates. The person leading the parade — the oldest living graduate in that cohort — is a white guy. And then, for a reallllly lonnnnnng time, it’s just white guys! After 30 minutes… a woman! A white woman. With people in the parade maybe holding signs like “first coed graduating class!” And then another 30 minutes of slowly, incrementally, more white women in the parade. And then… the first black man! Another 30 minutes of slowly, incrementally, more black men. And so on. By the end — the most recent class — is the exact opposite of the beginning. A mix of everyone you can think of. For some reason that parade really stuck with me. It’s simultaneously a representation of how much the world has changed, but also a representation of how many “minutes of parade” are still walking around having lived and ended up where they are under very different circumstances.

Los Gatos Gopher checks out its shadow on the first day of spring.

A spider had its dinner with us in our dining room.

Late-night visitor lounging on my desk lamp.

@RGVzoomin @grok en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berkeley_…

Hey @grok is this true ?

A contemporary western academic who thought seriously about the Gita was André Weil. He was born in a Jewish family, taught at Aligarh Muslim University, an agnostic and checked all the religious boxes.

@AlexKontorovich @QuantaMagazine @7homaslin @wtgowers 's Oxford "Very Short Intro to Mathematics" is excellent. I remember the book for a philosophical discussion and an exposition of what a proof is. It is great because it treats the reader as an inquisitive person and does not dumb down to make it accessible.

This is really fantastic news, the new @QuantaMagazine Books will publish a popular book by Tao, great job @7homaslin at making this happen! simonsfoundation.org/2025/12/08/qua… I've long been jealous of physicists: so many Nobel-laureate physicists have published books for popular readers; math is *way* behind in this respect, with very few top mathematicians willing to communicate with general audiences (you hear things like “eh, they’ll never understand anything anyway, why should I waste my time; let second-rate researchers do this work”). Hopefully Terry’s book will be a harbinger of more things to come!

Gemini cannot believe the news!

Power creates a black hole for the truth, and our all-too-human impulse to erase and ignore makes it all too easy for evil to keep happening, again and again. 2/2 From: nybooks.com/articles/2026/…

Why is it so difficult to see things plainly? Why do we, individually, and collectively as cultures and societies, repress the horrors we witness? 1/

"Without knots, there’s one wind circling the earth, together with our breathing." Vinod Kumar Shukla, one of our truest writers, is gone at 89. In 2024, Arvind Krishna Mehrotra wrote this memorable tribute: literaryactivism.com/grass-lives-ne…

@bijurao This played on shuffle today. So beautiful. (Found your tweet when searching for the song. )

Raga Shivmat Bhairav - “Pratham Allah” sung by the deeply religious nada yogi Pandit Mallikarjun Mansur. #myindia youtu.be/SgqF7BfN1JE

@davidword thanks for the translation and the performance. Both are very good!

@ijalabv Thanks for posting!

Kazi Nazrul Islam's "Bidrohi" - translated and performed by @davidword youtu.be/JmS94J4rZAU

Today was bookended by songs of protest/rebellion. Bob Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-gonna Fall" in the morning on shuffle and "Bidrohi" recommended at night.

“I need a photo-opportunity, I want a shot at redemption” is just verbose LLM output for “Attention is all you need.” "I can be your long lost pal ... You can call me AL" Who’ll be my role “model”? Now that my _model_ is gone, GONE!

If LLMs could sing their theme song would be Simon and Garfunkel's “You can call me Al” In a sans serif font AL and AI would even be the same! The existential questions, the need for attention, mistaken identity, hallucinations all fit an AI. youtube.com/watch?v=uq-gYO…