BC MACHINE LEARNING
Saved by @SteveeRogerr

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/

 People who hold disfavored views struggle to find one another and mobilize. To find other people that feel the same way as you and make common cause with them to effect political change, you have to reveal your views and suffer social sanction.

2/
Search allows people who hold these views to find one another. If you have a deep feeling about your gender being nonbinary but don't know the words for it, you can search for communities of people who have those words, join them, and discover who you've been all along.

3/
This is why, in this moment, so many ideas are migrating from the fringe to the center: ideas about racial justice, gender identity, alternatives to market systems, etc. People have harbored these views all along, but have held back on expressing them.

4/
Being able to express yourself in private, among people who share your views, is a prelude to going public and putting your case to the wider world in hopes of effecting change.

5/
This goes for ALL disfavored views: not just ones we laud, but also the ones we deplore. Many Americans have nursed secret white supremacism but only whispered about it, because saying it aloud would attract social sanction, with real consequences.

6/
Search let these people find each other. Having formed groups, they were able to brave social consequences and begin to shout about it. When they did, they converted people who were sort-of racist all along to their cause. "Radicalization" is closely related to "convincing."

7/
But search isn't the only way that groups with hard-to-find traits can be discovered: there's also targeting. Ad-tech companies spy on us, ascribe traits to us, then sell the right to target those traits to advertisers.

8/
"Show my ad to midwestern high school cheerleaders"

"To people shopping for a new fridge"

"To the owners of senior dogs"

"To people with diabetes"

"To readers of cyberpunk science fiction novels"

"To people skeptical of Big Tech"

"To Bernie Sanders supporters"

9/
"To violent, Trump-addled conspiracists plotting insurrection"

https://t.co/Q8lsg2yCXg

10/
To be fair, the Facebook ads "for body armor, gun holsters, and other military equipment next to content promoting election misinformation and news about the attempted coup at the US Capitol" were probably not necessarily targeted at "coup plotting" per se.

11/

More from Cory Doctorow #BLM

Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
The Night of the Short Fingers saw many of the US's largest tech companies blocking Trump and trumpist platforms like Parler, provoking a storm of punditry about What It All Means for the tech companies to have taken this content moderation step.

1/


The best expert I know on the subject is @jilliancyork, my @eff colleague. She's published "an ongoing list" of "everything pundits are getting wrong about this current moment in content moderation."

You should read it.

Here's some highlights:

“Deplatforming Trump sets a precedent."

York: "The only 'precedent' set here is that this is indeed the first time a sitting US president has been deplatformed by a tech company."

3/

But political leaders around the world have already received this treatment: Lebanon, Burma, etc. Even the reach of the deplatforming is nothing new: last summer's US Iran ban saw blocks of everything, up to and including Etsy listings for "Persian dolls."

4/
HISTORY
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
One of the most Monkey's Paw things about my life is my relationship to books. When I was a teenager, I read all the way through the school and public libraries, spent everything I had on books, and still couldn't get enough and dreamt of more.

1/


Today, as a reviewer, I have more books than I can possibly read, huge, teetering mountains of books that I'm desperate to read, far beyond my ability to ever get through them. Periodically, I declare "book bankruptcy," sweep away the backlog and start over.

2/

Even then, my eyes are bigger than my stomach: I keep back a few books that I can't bear to part with and promise myself I'll read them someday. Usually I don't, but I just did, and boy did I ever make the right call with @TheUniverse's BROAD

I have read a LOT of histories of computing, and I had a front row seat for a lot of the events depicted in this book - people I worked with, people I worked against - and yet I was surprised over and over again with details and perspectives I'd never encountered.

4/

For example, for some reason, my ninth grade computer science course included lengthy readings on ENIAC, Univac, the Mark I and the Mark II, but none of those mentioned that they were all programmed exclusively or primarily by women.

5/
CULTURE
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Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: ADT insider threat; Billionaires think VR stops guillotines; Privacy Without Monopoly; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/nu1HbReiEX

#Pluralistic

1/


This Wednesday, I'm giving a talk called "Technology, Self-Determination, and the Future of the Future" for the Purdue University CERIAS Program:

https://t.co/po5IivZyr4

2/


ADT insider threat: If you build it they will spy.

https://t.co/kJrmtu8L3S

3/


Billionaires think VR stops guillotines: TARP with tasps.

https://t.co/MIKwvsICkr

4/


Privacy Without Monopoly: Podcasting a reading of the latest EFF whitepaper.

https://t.co/R2sl75y4rb

5/
TWITTER
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
Today's Twitter threads (a Twitter thread).

Inside: Privacy Without Monopoly; Broad Band; $50T moved from America's 90% to the 1%; and more!

Archived at: https://t.co/QgK8ZMRKp7

#Pluralistic

1/


This weekend, I'm participating in Boskone 58, Boston's annual sf convention.

https://t.co/2LfFssVcZQ

Tonight, on a panel called "Tech Innovation? Does Silicon Valley Have A Mind-Control Ray, Or a Monopoly?" at 530PM Pacific.

2/


Privacy Without Monopoly: A new EFF white paper, co-authored with Bennett Cyphers.

https://t.co/TVzDXt6bz6

3/


Broad Band: Claire L Evans's magesterial history of women in computing.

https://t.co/Lwrej6zVYd

4/


$50T moved from America's 90% to the 1%: The hereditary meritocracy is in crisis.

https://t.co/TquaxOmPi8

5/
TWITTER
Cory Doctorow #BLM
Cory Doctorow #BLM
@doctorow
Accountancy is more likely to be mocked than celebrated (or condemned), but accountants, far more than poets, are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.

1/


Though "bean counters" are employed by firms, they are notionally bound by a professional code of ethics every bit as serious as the Hippocratic Oath: "count things honestly." Without an accurate accounting of quantities, you can't make good decisions on quality.

2/

Though accountancy concerns itself with counting things, it is inextricably bound up with the realm of ideas, and accounting conventions (how you account for things) are philosophical matters, not empirical ones.

3/

It's no coincidence that #ModernMonetaryTheory owes more to accountancy than it does to economics. Economic accounts of the economy have an unfortunate tendency to proceed from first principles, creating models based on pure reason, without checking in on the actual world.

4/

For example, neoclassical econ's "homo economicus," the rational value-maximizing actor who populated so many models; or economists' insistence on targeting inflation with interest rates; or treating national "debts" like they were household debts.

5/
HISTORY

More from Machine learning

Roger Grosse
Roger Grosse
@RogerGrosse
Important paper from Google on large batch optimization. They do impressively careful experiments measuring # iterations needed to achieve target validation error at various batch sizes. The main "surprise" is the lack of surprises. [thread]

https://t.co/7QIx5CFdfJ


The paper is a good example of lots of elements of good experimental design. They validate their metric by showing lots of variants give consistent results. They tune hyperparamters separately for each condition, check that optimum isn't at the endpoints, and measure sensitivity.

They have separate experiments where the hold fixed # iterations and # epochs, which (as they explain) measure very different things. They avoid confounds, such as batch norm's artificial dependence between batch size and regularization strength.

When the experiments are done carefully enough, the results are remarkably consistent between different datasets and architectures. Qualitatively, MNIST behaves just like ImageNet.

Importantly, they don't find any evidence for a "sharp/flat optima" effect whereby better optimization leads to worse final results. They have a good discussion of experimental artifacts/confounds in past papers where such effects were reported.
MACHINE LEARNING
Pratham Prasoon
Pratham Prasoon
@PrasoonPratham
Everything you need to know about the math for machine learning as a beginner.

🧵👇

Before diving into the math, I suggest first having solid programming skills.

For example👇

(2 / 17)

In Python, these are the concepts which you must know:

- Object oriented programming in Python : Classes, Objects, Methods
- List slicing
- String formatting
- Dictionaries & Tuples
- Basic terminal commands
- Exception handling

(3 / 17)

If you want to learn python, these courses are freecodecamp could be of help to you.

🔗Basics: youtube .com/watch?v=rfscVS0vtbw
🔗Intermediate :youtube .com/watch?v=HGOBQPFzWKo

(4 / 17)


You need to have really strong fundamentals in programming, because machine learning involves a lot of it.

It is 100% compulsory.

(5 / 17)
MACHINE LEARNING
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Abhishek Thakur
Abhishek Thakur
@abhi1thakur
In this thread, I will tell you how to learn python for data science in 1 hour 👇 1/N

It's not possible 2/N

It's not possible 3/N

It's not possible 4/N

It's not possible 5/N
MACHINE LEARNING
Anson Horton
Anson Horton
@AnsonHorton
1/ It's probably not the first thing you think of, but when we started .NET (COM+) in the late 90s, C# didn't exist yet. We were working on it at the same time as the CLR and the framework. So, you might wonder, what language was being used to generate IL and write the BCL?

2/ The answer is a language that we called SMC that Peter Kukol wrote the compiler for. Peter is a flat out amazing engineer and wrote the core parts of the compiler in just a few days. This unblocked the framework team, allowed vetting the runtime and interpreter, etc.

3/ SMC was a trimmed down C++ variant and the compiler was written in itself (i.e. SMC). It didn't support things like destructors, multiple inheritance, virtual base classes, etc. But, overall it enabled progress that would have otherwise been stalled.

4/ It did introduce a problem for the C# language and compiler team though. Every day more and more code was written in SMC, a language that we did not intend to ship externally. Designing a new language is hard (well, at least, a general purpose one that becomes popular).

5/ So there was a constant balancing act between laying enough of the foundation of the language and the C# compiler to replace SMC and making sure that the design lived up to the goals and ideals the team was striving for. If we waited too long to adopt C#,
MACHINE LEARNING
Kieran Snyder
Kieran Snyder
@KieranSnyder
1 There's a chasm between an NLP technology that works well in the research lab and something that works for applications that real people use. This was eye-opening when I started my career, and every time I talk to an NLP engineer at @textio, it continues to strike me even now.

2 Research conditions are theoretical and/or idealized. A huge problem for so-called NLP or AI startups with highly credentialed academic founders is that they bring limited knowledge of what it takes to build real products outside the lab.

3 A product is ultimately a thing that people pay for - not just cool technology or user experience. But I’m not even talking about knowledge gaps in go-to-market work. I'm talking purely technical gaps: how you go from science project to performant + delightful user experience.

4 Most commoditized NLP packages solve well-understood problems in standard ways that sacrifice either precision or performance. In a research lab, this is not usually a hard trade-off; in general, no one is using what you make, so performance is less important than precision.

5 In software, when you’re making something for real people to use, these tradeoffs are a big deal. Especially if you’re asking those people to pay for what you’ve made (can’t get away from that pesky GTM thinking). They expect quality, which includes precision AND performance.
MACHINE LEARNING

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Elizabeth May
Elizabeth May
@_ElizabethMay
This is NONSENSE. The people who take photos with their books on instagram are known to be voracious readers who graciously take time to review books and recommend them to their followers. Part of their medium is to take elaborate, beautiful photos of books. Die mad, Guardian.


THEY DO READ THEM, YOU JUDGY, RACOON-PICKED TRASH BIN


If you come for Bookstagram, i will fight you.

In appreciation, here are some of my favourite bookstagrams of my books: (photos by lit_nerd37, mybookacademy, bookswrotemystory, and scorpio_books)
FUN
Vibhu Vashisth
Vibhu Vashisth
@VIBHU_Tweet
Did you know?
Ahilyabai Holkar was one of India's
greatest women rulers of all time.

Ahilyabai was Born on May 31,1725 in the village of Chondi,Jamkhed distt,Maharashtra to a man named Mankoji Shinde,who was the Patil(Chief) of a village and a member of proud Dhangar Community.


Despite the fact that girls' education was a farther dream in those days, Ahilyabai was homeschooled by her father.
Ahilya didn't belong to any royal family but in a twist of fate she is still remembered as one of the most revered Queen in the history.


While they were living their humdrum lives, one day Malhar Rao Holkar, commander of the Peshwa Bajirao & Lord of the Malwa stopped in Chondi on his way to Pune, where he couldn't help but notice a young 8yrs old Ahilyabai in the temple service feeding the poor & hungry.

He was so impressed by the sheer innocence&beauty with simplicity character of Ahilyabai dat he asked her hand in marriage for his son Khanderao Holkar.Just like that she got married to Khanderao in 1733 at a tender age of 8&became a bride of esteemed Maratha community of Holkars

But destiny had something else in store for her as her husband died in the Battle of Kumbher in 1754 leaving her widow at 29.Distressed Ahilyabai was to commit Sati when her father-in-law Malhar Rao refused to let it happen.
ALL , AHILYABAIITIHAS
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KrishnaLeela
KrishnaLeela
@Talesofkrishna
🌿𝑻𝒉𝒆 𝒔𝒕𝒐𝒓𝒚 𝒐𝒇 𝒂 𝑺𝒕𝒂𝒓 : 𝑫𝒉𝒓𝒖𝒗𝒂 & 𝑽𝒊𝒔𝒉𝒏𝒖

Once upon a time there was a Raja named Uttānapāda born of Svayambhuva Manu,1st man on earth.He had 2 beautiful wives - Suniti & Suruchi & two sons were born of them Dhruva & Uttama respectively.
#talesofkrishna https://t.co/E85MTPkF9W


Now Suniti was the daughter of a tribal chief while Suruchi was the daughter of a rich king. Hence Suruchi was always favored the most by Raja while Suniti was ignored. But while Suniti was gentle & kind hearted by nature Suruchi was venomous inside.
#KrishnaLeela


The story is of a time when ideally the eldest son of the king becomes the heir to the throne. Hence the sinhasan of the Raja belonged to Dhruva.This is why Suruchi who was the 2nd wife nourished poison in her heart for Dhruva as she knew her son will never get the throne.


One day when Dhruva was just 5 years old he went on to sit on his father's lap. Suruchi, the jealous queen, got enraged and shoved him away from Raja as she never wanted Raja to shower Dhruva with his fatherly affection.


Dhruva protested questioning his step mother "why can't i sit on my own father's lap?" A furious Suruchi berated him saying "only God can allow him that privilege. Go ask him"
RELIGION
Nikita Poojary
Nikita Poojary
@niki_poojary
One of the most successful stock trader with special focus on cash stocks and who has a very creative mind to look out for opportunities in dark times

Covering one of the most unique set ups: Extended moves & Reversal plays

Time for a 🧵 to learn the above from @iManasArora

What qualifies for an extended move?

30-40% move in just 5-6 days is one example of extended move

How Manas used this info to book


Post that the plight of the


Example 2: Booking profits when the stock is extended from 10WMA

10WMA =


Another hack to identify extended move in a stock:

Too many green days!

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Julien \U0001f332
Julien 🌲
@julien
1/ there is this sense when you are young that your accomplishments need to be a list of things that seem impressive to others. A list of several items you did.

This isn't actually right, so here is another suggestion.

2/ I remember being 26 and writing about reading 52 books a year. I wrote blog posts about it. They got copied. It became "a thing." Now it's in Twitter bios. It looks impressive but it's insanely useless and I shouldn't have done it.

3/ what I should have known at that time is that only young idiots like myself, with no accomplishments, find list of tiny achievements impressive. Anyone who has actually done anything of substance doesn't gaf

4/ what is actually difficult, and worthwhile, instead is to do ONE single thing for a very, very long time. It's much harder and much rarer and results in outlier outcomes much more often.

Of course you can find this out too late if you are chasing the dragon of Ted talks etc

5/ if I had only worked on a startup for a year, I would've gotten nowhere, the same way that if you lift for 3 months, it achieves nothing. Everything good in life comes from perseverance, but at the beginning, you're just like "I need to be somebody!!!"
LIFE