General Spokesman

This is not a particularly good take and is indicative of a fundamental misunderstanding of what a top-tier technical college education is suppose to offer. Preparing to understand modern AI as a Harvard or Stanford undergrad is not about learning "prompt engineering", vibe coding, or building Slop Domain-Specific Wrapper Agent #1000, all of which can be picked up in a few days if not hours. To the contrary, the best way for a smart 18-22 year-old to understand AI is to develop a very solid intuition for undergraduate and graduate level probability, linear algebra, and classical ML. If you actually know how foundational RL topics like Q-learning work, you are 95% of the way there, and if you can't even learn that from Harvard or Stanford then this is probably a skill issue on your end. In @boazbaraktcs's excellent ML theory seminar in 2021, I don't think I wrote more than 200 lines of code cumulatively in the entire semester yet I learned an immense amount and credit that class for sparking my interest in modern AI. A year ago I couldn't coherently tell you what a transformer was, but it doesn't matter, because when you develop proper quantitative foundations in college you can figure it out in a couple of weeks. None of this stuff is really that complicated, people just like to pretend that it is.

Well, this time it's by Terence Tao himself: @tao/115306424727150237" target="_blank" rel="nofollow noopener">mathstodon.xyz/@tao/115306424…

🚨🚨🚨 "We found the model attempting to write self-propagating worms, and leaving hidden notes to future instances of itself to undermine its developers' intentions."

Ewin Tang (@ewintang) went to college at 14. A few years later, she upended a claim about quantum computers by proving that a classical algorithm could outmatch its quantum counterpart. Catch my convo with Ewin on this week’s episode of “The Joy of Why,” with pals @stevenstrogatz, @quantamagazine, and @prx: quantamagazine.org/what-is-the-tr…

"The C3 Commission of IUPAP is delighted to announce the awardees of the Boltzmann Medal 2025: Mehran Kardar & Yoshiki Kuramoto" This is the big triennial international award for career achievements in statistical physics.

A Chinese threat group, Salt Typhoon, has infiltrated major U.S. telecoms by exploiting CVE-2018-0171, a critical security flaw. The attackers maintained access for over three years, showcasing their patience and sophistication. Read more to learn: thehackernews.com/2025/02/cisco-…

Physicists and mathematicians infinitely prefer the humble blackboard to its high-tech rivals. What does slate-and-chalk offer, which cannot be simulated by paper or plastic? nautil.us/the-magic-of-t…

ICYMI: China hacked the US Dept. of Treasury. bit.ly/3W2ujcd

This is hilarious

Your first programming language shapes they way you solve problems. Really interesting read.

Last week, I built a Faraday cage with friends We built this to unlock hearing aids mode on the  AirPods for grandma, geoblocked in India for regulatory reasons This cage is in Koramangala, Bangalore 🇮🇳. But inside the cage, your phone thinks it's Menlo Park, California 🇺🇸

Apple released a hearing aids feature for the AirPods Pro a while ago. I bought a pair for grandma, but then realized that the feature was geoblocked in India So we at @_lagrangepoint decided to unblock it. It ended up involving a leaky microwave and building a Faraday cage:

@learning_pt It may conservatively cost about 20-25 crores to set up one KV and about 12 cr to run each of them. Unless, govt decides to collect fees, it doesn’t have the budget.

said this so many times plus increase the class sizes in KVs, cap of 40 isn't always practical or necessary esp for higher classes

@avataram @Bajirao_Bhatt Once we zoom in, the workmanship of the fluted design of the bezel seems quite disappointing.

Looks good. What say @avataram sir?

@RaghuKMittal @WazirXIndia @WazirXCares @NischalShetty What would be the meaning of "malicious payload" in this context?

#WazirXHack @WazirXIndia @WazirXCares @NischalShetty My theory on how the WazirX hack could have happened: 1/ The attacker put a malicious payload and gave it to signing to 3 WazirX signatories. The WazirX signatories looked at the Liminal UI to see what they were signing.

@Saiarav Like I said the outrage/shock is more due to the fact that there seemed no pressure to make a change to a settled/accepted reform. Almost all (incl me) can’t calculate fiscal impact, but can see political impact. Everything is fair game now on.

@Saiarav I think most are upset that pension reforms have been destroyed without any pressure. UPS is just one step away from becoming OPS. It is indexed to inflation. 10 years down the line it may get linked to wage. Regular contributions from govt and employees saving grace.

@Saiarav The comparison should ideally be between UPS and NPS. It was already known that OPS was unsustainable. OROP actually was demanded because civil servants gave it to themselves. There did not seem to be any overt pressure to disband NPS. Looks like the IAS pushed this through.

@Saiarav It is 20 years since NPS was launched. The corpus may already be short because the investing strategy was very conservative. Considering everyone may shift to UPS, a one time grant from the govt may be needed?

@Saiarav That may include LPG subsidies and other petroleum related subsidies?