Abhisek

The Indian Synagogues Run By Muslims There has perhaps never been a more important moment to remember the sacred spaces shared peacefully by both Muslims and Jews and so, for this week's Substack, I want to talk about the synagogues of Calcutta.

Microsoft / GitHub injecting ads into CoPilot generated PRs: welcome to the future! notes.zachmanson.com/copilot-edited… (yes, this was a confirmed "feature" from someone on the CoPilot team; apparently they are disabling it after backlash)

Don't let AI service providers dilute the meaning of "local". If it can't run offline on compute and data you actually own, it's not a Personal Computer.

Excited to share “Poisoned Wells,” which presents the largest point-in-time study of website blocking in India to date. I tested the blocking of 294 million apex domains across six Indian ISPs, sending 1.76 billion DNS queries in total.

🚨 Google wants to force every Android developer to register with them, even if you never touch the Play Store. We signed the open letter opposing this alongside EFF, Proton, F-Droid, Tor Project, and 30+ others. Android's openness is non-negotiable. keepandroidopen.org/open-letter/

The United Kingdom is escalating its censorship and mass surveillance. When Mullvad tried to criticise this with the TV ad “And Then?”, it was banned on British television.

Encryption is kind of a lie. Data can be encrypted at rest, and even in transit…but not “in use”. Fundamentally, CPUs execute arithmetic instructions on decrypted plaintext; even with secure enclaves. But what if we got *really* clever:

True in general. Europe NRIs don't have the extra wealth chasing, net worth chasing, "top school district" chasing enthu/imperative that US NRIs do. Their schools, public transit, healthcare are taken care of. US NRI life is more materialistic. Often out of necessity. So stress.

Consistent with its historic commitment to a just and lasting peace in the Middle East, I have decided that France will recognize the State of Palestine. I will make this solemn announcement before the United Nations General Assembly this coming September. The urgent priority today is to end the war in Gaza and to bring relief to the civilian population. Peace is possible. We need an immediate ceasefire, the release of all hostages, and massive humanitarian aid for the people of Gaza. We must also ensure the demilitarization of Hamas, secure and rebuild Gaza. And finally, we must build the State of Palestine, guarantee its viability, and ensure that by accepting its demilitarization and fully recognizing Israel, it contributes to the security of all in the region. There is no alternative. The French people want peace in the Middle East. It is our responsibility — as French citizens, alongside Israelis, Palestinians, and our European and international partners — to prove that peace is possible. In light of the commitments made to me by the President of the Palestinian Authority, I have written to him to express my determination to move forward. Trust, clarity, and resolve. We will achieve peace.

You'll own NOTHING and be HAPPY! That's the message I've been hearing a lot these days... Sign the petition: stopkillinggames.com

Absolutely incredible footage from today, the biggest protest of the 21st century in The Netherlands. 150,000 people in The Hague to protest against the genocide in Palestine.

India's biggest AI startup, $1B Sarvam, just launched its flagship LLM. It's a 24B Mistral small post trained on Indic data with a mere 23 downloads 2 days after launch. In contrast, 2 Korean college trained an open-source model that did ~200k last month. Embarrassing.

How to kill an Artist “Democratically”

As a Software Engineer who deeply cares about my craft and the quality of code I produce, It’s incredibly hard to cope with the fact that shit software almost always wins.

I thought I am really bad in Database Design.

WTAF! @ECISVEEP openly admits that EPIC numbers are not unique. Incompetent bunch of jokers who cannot keep one column UNIQUE in a database expect the world to trust them and believe that they have programming genuises who built a 100% hackproof EVM. x.com/ECISVEEP/statu…

Ah, yes, encryption--the math that enables authentication, commerce, cybersecurity, the human right to privacy on which our networked world depends--is bad bc <spins wheel of bad guys> "pedophiles" <spins wheel of verbs> "love it most" Just profoundly unserious!

I had my first aha moment with OpenAI when it leaked that they had spent a year lying about that their API models being RLHF when they were really SFT. My second was when they sent anonymous legal threats to people in the OSS AI community who had GPT-4 details leaked to them.

@Bushra1Shaikh What is the definition of "Holy Book"? Only way any book burning activity can be viewed as crime is that it is polluting the environment.

Some of you may disagree but the public desecration of any holy book should be viewed as a hate crime and the offender should face consequences.

@kingslyj Informative and unfortunate. This is why I always use Scrambled Exif for sharing images⁽¹⁾. I wish there was something similar and convenient for videos as well. (1) f-droid.org/packages/com.j…

PSA: Android PNG screenshots contain metadata which includes (amongst other things)... - Your OS build number. - Time the screenshot was taken. (down to milli second???) - Your timezone. - Image specific UUID. #Privacy