1/11
Sardar Patel's letter to Jawaharlal Nehru.
On #China & #Tibet.

Stark contrast to the far-sightedness of Sardar Patel.

Doesn't also reflect well on the BJP leadership either, that chose to get fooled by China, and ignore both history & realities.

Can we control the output of neural generation systems?
Can we build a better chatbot using this control?
And what makes a good conversation anyway?

Check out the blog post for our NAACL paper:

https://t.co/UAAUxSeA0L

#AI #NLProc #DeepLearning #ConversationalAI @facebookai

This post got a little delayed since the paper's publication, but the intervening time has given me an opportunity to reflect.

So this post has some extra thoughts regarding more recent NLG developments - e.g., pretrained models like GPT(2), and the suitability of beam search.

SRI BANKEY BIHARI JI, VRINDAVAN (UP)

Very famous Krishna Mandir where Bankey Bihari Ji is worshipped and looked after as a child.
Bankey means “Bent at three places”.
Thakur Ji was worshipped in Nidhivan till 1863. This mandir was constructed in 1864 by Goswamis.
@LostTemple7

Legend says that Swami Haridas used to worship Krishna in Nidhivan.
Once, his curious disciples entered the forest but they were almost blinded by bright, intense light. Upon knowing this, Swamiji himself went there and after his requests, Krishna appeared with his consort.

Krishna, then, left back this black charming murti,which we see now, before disappearing.
A curtain is drawn before the murti after every 15-30 second. It is said that if one stares long enough into the eyes of Shri Banke Bihari, the person would lose his self consciousness.

Bankey Bihari Ji sports a flute only once a year on the eve of Sharad Purnima.
Darshan of His lotus feet can be done only on Akshay Tritiya every year.
There are no loud bells here and
no early morning Darshan can be done so that child Krishna’s sleep is not disturbed.

SRI KANTESH HANUMANTHA, KADARAMANDALAGI (KAR)
#bharatmandir

KANTESHA means Prabhu full of brightness.
Here, Sri Hanuman appears with a front face and sparkling eyes. Earlier, the village was also called KANTESHPURI on the name of Kantesha Hanuman.

Several thousands of years ago, Hanuman lived in this village. He once saw the Sun and mistaking it to be a fruit, began flying towards it. Since then, this village came to be known as Kadara Man Dalagi. (Kadar means rays, mandala is cluster of rays).

It is believed that King Janmejaya had set up the shrine to get rid of his difficulties.
There is a small pond on the right side of the kshetram where Teppotsava (Float festival) is celebrated.

Kanaka Dasa has praised Sri Kantesha in his various poetic compositions.

Kanaka Dasa was the first devotee to popularize the power of Kantesha. It is said that once Kanaka Dasa was deeply wounded in a battle. To seek blessings, he visited Tirupati but Sri Venkatesha appeared in his dream and advised him to see Kantesha first before seeing him.

Ashta Siddhi

Ashta Siddhi is mentioned in Patanjali Yog sutra and can be obtained by very few through countless years of practice and devotion to all eight limbs of Ashtanga Yoga.

Siddhi can loosely be translated as accomplishment or a special power or unusual skill.

The eight Siddhis are:

1. Anima: Reducing one’s physical self to the size of an atom.

2. Mahima: Expanding one’s physical self to infinite level

3. Garima: Making one’s physical self so heavy as immovable by others

4. Laghima: Becoming almost weightless

5. Prapti: Being able travel anywhere in the Universe

6. Prakamya: Can know & understand what is going on in one’s mind. Can understand other person’s min.

7. Ishitva: Possessing title of Bhagwan

8. Vashitva: A seeker can subdue any person/thing

(Hanuman Jayanti is coming)

Hanumanji not only possessed all eight siddhis, but was also blessed by Sita mata as “Ashta Siddhi Nau Nidhi Ke Daata”.

When Hanumanji first reaches to Lanka on his mission to find Sita, he makes use of anima so as to be discrete in enemy territory.

He uses it again when he approaches Sita mata for the first time – reducing his size to that of a schoolboy, to avoid scaring her. He uses mahima to outwit & overpowers
the demons.

It’s underremarked upon that stablecoins accomplish basically all of the original design goals for Bitcoin qua a transactional mechanism (instant free value transfer anywhere), but that nobody cares about this because nobody ever cared about that part of the pitch.

“Why do people care about stablecoins then?”

A mix of “they encourage dollar-denominated liquidity in the cryptocurrency ecosystem and discourage withdrawal of the same” and “they’re good for money laundering.”

“But they make value transfer between exchanges much faster!”

This was a solved problem in traditional finance, too, mostly through the extension of credit. (It doesn’t matter how long settlement takes if there is sufficient trust to enable credit.)

The Bitcoin ecosystem is *positively allergic* to credit, so you have to call it a coin for them to accept it. And after you call it a coin they ignore everything the world has learned about credit, like risk management.

“Stablecoins aren’t credit!”

They’re pretty much exactly credit? A tether is a zero-coupon Bitfinex bond with a non-functioning call option. I