We hear a lot about Facebook as a platform for manipulation - using machine learning to bypass our critical faculties and trick us into believing things that are bad for us - but the real show is in Facebook's ability to target, not manipulate.

1/

As the Qanon prophecies fail and the cult-members struggle to resolve their cognitive dissonance, it's a good time to revisit the history of paranoid, conspiratorial political movements in American history - the "paranoid style" that has dominated since the Revolution.

1/

After all, the very first skirmishes of the US war of independence were based on a conspiracy theory: that the levy on tea was a prelude to a sellout of the colonists to transnational mercantalist interests. US politics have always been conspiratorial.

2/

I found @zacharykarabell's @politico history of the Know Nothing party especially useful, as it tells the story of what happens when surging, paranoid, fractious political movements

The American Party was a secret 19th century organization founded on a conspiracy theory: that Irish immigrants were secretly planning a takeover of the US on behalf of the Pope.

4/

Surveillance companies assure us that they employ safeguards to ensure that their customers aren't abusing their products to engage in unlawful or unethical surveillance. And yet, inevitably, these companies abuse their tools THEMSELVES.

1/

It's almost as though being the kind of person who dreams of achieving incredible wealthy by spying on people makes you kind of an asshole.

2/

Like the people at @VerkadaHQ, "a fast-growing Silicon Valley surveillance startup" whose male employees used its own products to sexually harass their female colleagues and received the barest wrist-slaps for

Male Verkada employees maintained a private Slack channel where executives posted photos of female employees - captured with the company's own surveillance tools - and made sexually explicit remarks about them.

4/

When this came to light, the company's founder and CEO Filip Kaliszan called an all-hands meeting, expressed disappointment in the harassers, and told them that they could either quit...or lose some stock options. They chose the latter and remain employed there to this day.

5/

If you think "It's not censorship unless the government does it," I want to change your mind.

It's absolutely true that the First Amendment only prohibits government action to suppress speech based on its content, but the First Amendment is not the last word on censorship.

1/

Here are some kinds of private speech-suppression that I think most of us can agree are censorship: when the John Birch Society burned mountains of rock records and novels - or when Tipper Gore's PMRC pressured record stores to drop punk, metal and rap albums.

2/

Or the Comics Code Authority, which signed up all comics publishers and retailers to block comics if they contained anything unfit for small children, which stunted American comics for generations while their European counterparts created entire sophisticated genres.

3/

Or MPAA ratings, in which a secret group of censors (falsely described as frequently rotated, randomly selected parents - really they're long-serving studio insiders) decides whether movies get NC-17 ratings and thus be blocked from nearly every screen in the country.

4/

(You can learn more about this from Kirby Dick's unmissable doc, "This Film Is Not Yet Rated," which documents both how the MPAA misleads the public about ratings, and uses them to block LGBTQ

There is no shortage of takes about what's going on with Gamestop (and other surging stocks), Robinhood and Reddit's r/wallstreetbets, many of them contradictory - at least on the face of them. But I think it's possible for most of these takes to be right. Here's how.

1/

First you need to understand the underlying mechanics of the story. Stock markets are fundamentally a way of making bets, including bets on the outcome of other peoples' bets, and bets on the outcomes of THOSE bets.

2/

All this complexity creates lots of exploitable opportunities. Some of these opportunities are considered legitimate and are given respectable names like "arbitrage." Others are considered illegitimate, and are called disreputable things like "stock manipulation."

3/

A hypothetical Martian observing all this through a telescope could not tell you which kinds of bets were honest and which were dishonest, because the difference isn't about any objective standard, but rather, about power.

4/

The strategies of powerful people are legit, while the strategies of their would-be dethroners are not legit. Sometimes, even outright frauds are OK if they're done by people with enough power.

5/

🤔 Python decorators

What are they? How do you use them?

🧵 Let's find out 👇

1️⃣ Decorator is a function or a class that wraps another function or class modifying its behavior.

So how does that work?

The first thing to know is that everything in Python is an object - functions too

2️⃣ That means they can be passed to another function as an argument or returned from a function

Functions that take other functions as an argument are called higher-order functions

3️⃣ In Python, you can define a function inside other function - such functions are called inner functions

4️⃣ To create a decorator you just need to apply all of that together

log_enter_leave is a decorator.

my_function is the function.

To alter my_function's behavior we reassign it applying log_enter_leave decorator.

These are the tools you will need for machine learning in Python.

🧵👇

Anaconda

When you work in python, you'll be working with several frameworks and many of them work only on specific versions of python.

(2 / 13)

Now imagine downloading a new version of python and then installing it for every framework you want to work with 😬.

Meet Anaconda which allows you to run several versions of python. It comes pre-installed with several data science and machine learning frameworks.

(3 / 13)

Pip-env is also a way of maintaining several versions of Python and comes pre installed with Python.
You can use pip env or Anaconda, whichever works for you.

(4 / 13)

Jupyter Notebooks

Jupyter notebooks is an IDE just like VS code or Sublime. The special thing about jupyter is that you can parts of code in mini code editors called cells. This is great for prototyping and testing code.

(5 / 13)

🤔 Python generators

What are they? How to use them?

#Python

🧵Let's find out 👇

1️⃣ Python generators are lazy iterators delivering the next value when their .next() is called.

They are created by using the yield keyword

next() can be called explicitly or implicitly inside for loop

They can be finite or infinite

2️⃣ yield - where a value is sent back to the caller, but the function doesn’t exit afterward as with the return statement

The state of function is remembered.

For example, the number is incremented and sent back from yield at the consecutive call next()

3️⃣ Generator stores only the current state of the function - it generates next element on next() call and forgets the previous one -> it saves memory

For example, we don't need to store 1mio elements in memory to do something with each element

4️⃣ When you call a generator function generator object is returned - it's not executed yet

It executes only when next() is called

For example, that's why Exception is raised only on the next() call