Bang average!

All of LLM usage is regression to the mean. From everything I've read about how LLMs  work, the models have predictive text as their foundation - they're a higher end autocomplete to put down what would usually come next in a sequence. GPT means "Generative, Pretrained and Transformer". The first word, "Generative", means it's creating responses based on the data sets it's pretrained on, not on true real world knowledge. The friendly neighbourhood assistant that OpenAI et al are trying to sell everyone sounds human but "knows" nothing! It can mine its data sets for patterns that approximate sensible answers to the prompts we enter into the boxes, with a friendly personality layered on, depending on how its coded. (Which incidentally, is a reason that GPT-5 received some mixed reviews, some users thought it had become too terse or unfriendly!) And to return to the generative aspect, that's why an LLM tends to hallucinate, as well. Making up text is its raison d'etre, it can't stop doing what it's supposed to. It can't say "I don't know", like a human could, since it doesn't have any memory bank or real world training. If its training data doesn't have the requisite depth to build a coherent answer, it tends to make up something to compensate. 

My point is, making up text based on data averaging isn't innovative. It's creative plagiarism, not creation. Out-of-the-box or creative thinking is not the forte of an averager. If more and more creators stop writing their own text or keep using LLMs, won't everyone also start sounding exactly the same?

Can an LLM generate creative solutions to problems? Can it be an aid to critical thinking, an assistant that you can bounce ideas off to test whether they will work or not? Can a scientific researcher use it to generate the crucial ideas that can move the boundary of human knowledge? I believe the answers are a resounding "No".  What LLMs can do is help humans become better hacks!  LLMs can help organise, automate simple routine work and create templates for emails and reports. But crucially, only someone without conscientiousness or regard to their reputation would send out LLM-generated matter to clients or publish them without reviewing and cross-checking. And for all the hype over AI replacing humans, would a manager trust a non-human agent to take on the responsibility of a job? I doubt it. The reason? That text box at the bottom of every LLM message box today "AI -generated content may be incorrect"! 

Linking and learning

Hello again! This blog had nearly been consigned to the dustbin of my memory when I realised that all the reading I do is useless unless properly processed and stored for future analysis. For me, writing certainly helps me process and remember facts and ideas better. The vast deluge of information surrounding us tends to be overwhelming for me. Finding connections between theories and statements and ideas is key to understanding what's going on in the world, rather than just other people's opinions. How does one make connections in the face of so much junk though? Unless you remember facts, there's no way to make the connections while reading, and piecemeal facts, like a branch without a tree, are first to be junked. My brain is like a leaky sieve, and I think I need to form connections while reading itself, so I can save those poor lonely piecemeal facts. Cling on to my lifeboat! Let's take the brain on a learning game this year. :)

Today's article  - a Guardian long piece about whether scientific theories will disappear in the face of big data. This was based on a 2008 article. Chris Anderson, editor of the Wired hypothesised (an ironic choice of word if ever there was one) at that time that this would happen to science soon, in the face of new data and new computational capability. Has it though? My major question about having AI tools analysing relationships between data is - are AI tools actually tools? Are they given instructions by researchers or do they look at data afresh without the need for guidance? If they require guidance, the hand of the scientist cannot be removed from the analysis, and AI will just become another useful method to study data with the scientist making the inferences. If not, the scientist becomes merely a black box operator, positing answers to real world problems without understanding why. And isn't the basis of much of human endeavour a quest to answer the "why"? What's the point of us if we cannot understand. Am I, if I don't think?

bits and pieces from here and there

one step forward
two steps back
excuse me sir
can we get back on track

there's no need to call him
he's one of those no-shows
coming to turn this talk
into a case of blows

shall we park this?
let's rake this down offline
i'm gonna drop off now
don't cut and waste my time

yeah, you know I hear you
i'm trying, my brains to rack
but from any perspective
you're just an arrogant crack

The REAL Piano

You know what? I found another reason heaven will be awesome. I'm assuming irrational numbers won't need to exist in heaven because we'll stop being finite and limited. IF that is so and mathematics exists in a whole different dimension in heaven, there will be a perfect piano there! Apparently, a piano can never be perfectly tuned. Feynman wrote something about this too! Because of frequencies and irrational numbers (the twelfth root of 2 can creep quite surreptitiously into this discussion) it's impossible to ever have the same ratios between all the notes. (Which makes you wonder why the piano was invented that way in the first place and why it's so popular. Fodder for a different post though, I guess.) Anyway, the upshot is that since piano tuners use an irrational number to tune a piano, the octaves are kept perfectly tuned but this tuning method flattens or sharpens the other intervals. It's fascinating! And it reminds me of  the image of the real Narnia in "The Last Battle". :)

Time, time, time, what has become of me?

Life is supposed to become simpler as you get older, right? 

Why is it that the more you grow, the less you know? 

The more that you know, the less you know you know about what you know!

Is it better not to try to know anything?

What now?

It's happened. Counting Day has come and gone, leaving the saffron brigade jubilant. The TV showed scenes of dancing and cheering in constituencies all over the country while even in Times Square, Abki Baar revolutionaries gathered to celebrate the landslide, historic win that they largely funded, and were offered brotherly support, as well as, for some reason, samosas in celebration. The revelry in the Stock market and on trading floors was also clear, with the Sensex passing 25,000 points. The Congress was wiped the floor with. AAP fared no better. Regional parties did reasonably well in states like West Bengal and Tamil Nadu. But the big ones- the B and U of the BIAMRU States- were swept by the Hindu Right. It's tragic that every single time, these states have the most decisive impact on the electoral outcome. The most illiterate people who are the least likely to have the knowledge to be able to make informed decisions; why do these decide who our rulers are?

So, what now? Love it or hate it, what's next for India? That's the big question.

Will the BJP act tough on nations like Pakistan- will machismo and militarism define our foreign policy from now on? 

Will 'development' take place at all? Is it only the Adanis and Ambanis who will have any reason to cheer in the next few years? 

Will education and health show the much needed inmprovements in order to increase employment, employability of the population, consistent economic growth, reduction in poverty and societal stability?

Will minorities feel secure and not be targeted by a newly buoyant RSS, who will now be confident of minimal retribution for any actions from the overloads who have historically shown a tendency to instigate communal hatred by their speeches and actions and absolutely no inclination to seriously prosecute communal rioters?

I don't know any of the answers, nor am I overtly optimistic about any. 

All I can do is pray. 

God save India ...from her own destructive children.

Just Cuckoo

I just watched 'One flew over the cuckoo's nest' because it was one of the top movies on IMDB's list.

Straight out, I have absolutely no idea why it was rated so highly.

To me, the entire movie didn't just have anti-female undertones....it was as plain as the cap on Nurse Ratched's head that the writer was completely and utterly sexist. The book was apparently written in the 1960s, partly in reaction to the second wave of feminism.

There was, for instance, glorification of the McMurphy character. He was a fun-loving character who sometimes took an interest in other people: he tried to bring Chief out of his shell for one thing ( the extreme was forcing Billy to sleep with his girlfriend -or hooker friend, whatever she was- Candy as some sort of sick reward), but there was absolutely nothing to impress one about him. An ex-con who was sent to prison for assault('Rocky Marciano's got more fights and he's a millionaire') and statutory rape('she was 15 going on 35') and gives his reasons for being sent to prison as 'because i fight and fuck too much' does not possess characteristics that should impress any sensible man or woman today. How can a character who lied and pretended to be mad just to escape the work farms be seen as an honourable male, in any sense?

This whole movie just reeked of the 'men will/should be men' flavour. And how can they be(for the uninitiated)? Fighting, boozing, gambling and having sex indiscriminately apparently. Hear that, guys?

I'm not saying I liked the Nurse Ratched character either. She showed plenty of malice as well. It's just that her portrayal is obviously meant to show that women shouldn't be in charge. How dare they even attempt to be, right? She should have been trying to make herself look sexy, giggling and hanging on to men like the Candy character- and the other one, I forget her name.

That midnight scene was just astoundingly dumb. How can asking your girlfriend to sleep with another guy('you know he's cute'),  telling her 'I love you' and then slapping her butt go together in any sane guy's actions? Does she have no mind of her own or is she your property to be loaned out when required? Ohh that was enraging. I have a feeling McMurphy was actually mad. Why else did he go to sleep instead of calling Billy and Candy and scattering? Why did he have to stay in the ward at all? It didn't make sense how everyone just woke up the next day! I have a feeling that the writer just wanted a sad ending to show how terrible the ending for 'real men' is when there are women in power.

Those were two long hours of misogynism. There's a bitter aftertaste in my mouth, especially after I looked for reviews online and found this scum of a review. I couldn't believe such a site existed till I saw it.
Pshh.

Love that never fails

I was listening to the song 'Your love never fails' by Jesus Culture just now. And I was wondering about the lyrics. 'The sorrow lasts through the night but joy comes with the morning'. 'You make all things work together for my good'. And about 'You stay the same through the ages'. And I thought about how I've been struggling with the first two things: about how things of this world can make me forget God's love.

As a self-centred human, I often tend to define my 'good' as what I want from life. And I realise yet again what I so often forget, that anything I face doesn't mean that my eternal God's love has changed. Pain and sorrow have to be there so that life's joys can be realised and relished all the more. What's more, my life has been so sheltered that I don't realise what pain means. What I count as pain and what a tribal girl from a village in Bihar or Orissa counts as pain is definitely poles apart. Getting a good placement is nothing compared to starvation and the daily grind of earning enough in a day for food.
Perspective.That's all one needs from life, really.
And then the morning will come.

Lost

lost

all lost

a touch

one touch

a touch unthinking

uncaring for the moment

and it’s gone

all you dreamt would be yours

all you longed for

with your whole being

so much so that when it’s gone

you’re gone

your whole being filled with fire

now unquenchable

and unreachable

builds up inside

to the point where every single tiny little cell in your body resonates

with the need to let it out

to EXPLODE

into tiny little pieces

scattered all over your world

For my Appacha..

I've always thought my grandfather and I had a special relationship. I've been told I was with him in the car park at the hospital when Sana was born which is one of my earliest imagined vague memories. Vague, or imagined, as the case may be, it really doesn't matter. I loved him anyway. I‘m forgetting my own life at a really rapid rate, but I can remember many scenes from my childhood with him. I’ll never forget the ‘Silence Game’ that he played with us so seriously for so long which we never ever suspected wasn’t a bona fide game! He would sit on his chair in the verandah, the one on the left side and Sana and I would sit on the other two. I remember also (in the days before 2000) him riding the scooter out for errands and how we used to run to open the gate and come back on the scooter with him.  

I remember how wonderful he was after he lost his eyesight: how he never complained or whined about it, but took it with his trademark brand of humour and wit and had an unbroken and unshaken faith. I remember how he would sit and read the headlines as far as his limited eyesight would permit him, how he watched the news for hours together everyday and how both of them always consequently knew everything that was going on in the world. I remember him never failing to watch Munshi on Asianet at 6pm(or was it 7pm). I can remember watching parts of Malayalam movies with him where he still understood more of what was going on, without looking, than I did. I remember how he used to sit, with hands interlocked, head tilted down and eyes screwed up, concentrating on the dialogues and the way he used to laugh at a joke, the sudden bark of laughter. 

I remember how he used to put on the pump every day and listen for the water to fall from the overflow pipe and how he started delegating it to us: a special task. I remember how he used to tell us stories: about how he joined the army, how he bought the house, how he met Ammachi! His favourite saying was “Be content with what you have”. I remember how his dialogues could be really funny and surprising. I remember how he took stupid stands sometimes just to irritate Mama or Reji appa and went on arguing with them, sometimes with hilarious results, with everyone getting quite agitated! And then there was his ‘Tapatha thithips’ , samosas and buns...there's such a flood of memories!

Life won’t be quite the same without him in it.

And I'll try to continue to remember.

I love Economics classes! We've discussed Picasso's work, the Dark Knight, classical music concerts, conspiracies behind the depreciating rupee and  a hundred other things that seem very unrelated to our course on the face of it!

Anyway, so in one class, Sir made us do an exercise to see how many of us would donate to a common pool of money if we could use it anyway, whether we donated it or not. He was trying to demonstrate the need for paying taxes and the selfishness of free-riding individual consumers.

This throws up so many interesting questions! One such is whether, when a attendance is required for a particular function, an entire body of people can be trusted to attend or whether coercion and pressure to attend (if it leads to greater good) is justified. We have three hour sessions everyday! 

The right of it

I love this! It's exactly what I'd love to tell some people sometimes.
But then of course that would mean that they'd just quote it right back to me.
So does that mean no one should ever quote it to anyone else?
Confusing thing.
Maybe an outsider should quote it to everyone!
But then the outsider might be wrong in believing his statement is not wrong.
Grrr...Philosophy!

Anyway, I'll try to find a moral of the story: keep Snoopy's last statement in mind during arguments or discussions(especially theological ones!).

Unless you're right.
;)

White fluorescent strips shine down

Everywhere,one sees lines and light

And all the time, voices raised

Blending in the cacophony

Of a place which pays one to stay

And where one stays just to pay

One’s rent and food and bills.

I huddle in my green stole

All so cold..
Think I've caught the chills.

ToyLands

I think toy shops can be the most magical places ever. Call me a kid if you want to, but just looking at the racks and racks of toys does something to my brain! It's worse if there are samples left around.. Today, I even got a kid who was holding one half of a ball tossing game to show me how it was played. He looked rather nonplussed! While my friend was looking around for something for her brother,I began trying out the scooter and the Xbox too. If the manager would let me, I'm sure I'd spend hours in there! I think the whole fascination is just with the connection to the part of my own brain which has been shut down/overwritten by other parts: the 'play circuit', if you will! As a kid, playing was quite an end in itself: I didn't feel like I should be doing something else while I spent time in my backyard digging for hours. As adults, we have to think about work and manage time. Now all I can do is watch kids play, and play with them when I feel I can fit it into my schedule!

++i or i++?

The stereotype of computer programmers in media is often that of 'nerds' who can't see beyond their own noses. After a couple of weeks' exposure to their job, I think the stereotype falls, as a lot of stereotypes do tend to fall, beside the wayside.

One thing programmers always want their code to be is 'clean'. In other words, it should be efficient, short and uncomplicated, and should do the job you want it to do, and nothing else! High quality programming is as creative a job as art. Anyone can copy a painting or picture: it requires knowledge of technique. Technique is easy to master, procedures are easy to master, too; the harder part is in being the person who says:"Wait a minute, let's try that!" or"But can't we do it this way?". Copying code from a book is easy; thinking up new ways of writing it based on your knowledge(and not just technical knowledge, but knowledge of the world, such as it is!), requires a special kind of mind! I think the top quality computer programmers, artists, musicians, designers and engineers all do pretty much the same thing!

Also, just today, I was looking at a bit of code that left me completely mystified. The author of the book it was in seemed engagingly excited about it and it clearly was something special, but its meaning left me completely in the dark. Frankly, I felt a bit like a kid wanting to get into a cool club. I do hope the mysteries of code unravel themselves more and more over the next six months!

PS. I just feel so pleased with myself. My previous post had a white background for some reason and I went into the HTML part of the editor and removed the colour. Let the initiation begin!

Will you, won't you?

High on money
But low on care
High on profits
(Let's up the fare!)

Hopping to London
And Paris for chores
Not knowing who handles
Our own dirty clothes

Did you see her shoes
Now, darling, that's nice
Jimmy Choo does bring
That certain spice

Prada and Chanel
We rack up the bills
Not knowing who labour
At that moment kills

Or the servants who drive us
Who feed us our meals
Who deal with our children
Their tantrums, their squeals

It's in front of our eyes
But we heed it we don't
Misery is caused
By people who WON'T

Pieces of a Nation

I just watched the Satyamev Jayate episode on untouchability and i'm just angry! Bezwada Wilson got his wish with respect to one viewer at least! How?? How can things like this happen and people just push it under the doormat? How can people even think to themselves that they're better than someone else? How can they think that someone else will make them 'impure'? As if they're so pure anyway...It's just ridiculous that caste still exists and that nothing is being done to change it. It's at points like this that I think of how stupid democracy is. Politicians don't do anything because they don't want to anger the Hindu extremists and they just make caste into a big 'vote bank' and people don't matter. Classifications, labels, castes...the head/legs of Brahma, really? So what?

I really really want to do something! I don't want to be a person who just talks, but one who actually changes stuff. I'm going to study like crazy for IAS now.

Thing is, caste's never affected me at all. Though, actually, why are there no really poor people in our churches? Is it because of the English thing or is there a caste factor too? Am I playing even a small role in propagating casteism?

The small boy who didn't eat the midday lunch at school because he was made to sit apart from the others just made me cry. The way he innocently asked what 'untouchability' was was just heartbreaking.

And, somehow, when it comes to protesting against reservation on the basis of caste, there are a million voices. Everyone's against reservation. No one's for getting rid of the stupid castes!

A Clanging Cymbal

Love, love, love. Nothing compares to love! The beautifully written thirteenth chapter of 1 Corinthians  resounds with descriptions of that elusive emotion that everyone yearns to truly find.

If you had no idea what love was, though, nothing in that passage would make you think it was an emotion at all. Love, here, is all about action. 'Love is patient', 'Love is kind', 'Love does not boast' etc etc etc. Another interesting thing is that the absolute characteristics of love are defined here. There's no separate list for ways of loving your partner, family, friends or strangers. The degree of love doesn't depend on the other person at all! Here, love is active and it comes from within! It's God at work.

Is there any use my saying all this though, if I don't show love in my life either? Am I a clanging cymbal or maybe a guitar played with too much distortion?

Untitled

White light

Soft ties

Missed doors

Long sighs

Curtains of dust

Breathing air inside out

Twisting and writhing

Until the pain palls

Why do you stay here?
Eternity calls

Musicians and Tiger Mothers

I just finished reading 'Battle Hymn Of The Tiger Mother' by Amy Chua, a Chinese-American and professor of Law at Yale University. Her account of how she raised her kids is funny.... and makes one think. (It obviously got a HUGE negative reaction from the American audience, who anyway feel threatened by anything Chinese- yeah, even second generation Chinese!)


One huge theme from the book is about musical prodigies. I remember vividly how much my own piano teacher had to say on the subject. He used to tell us to look up YouTube videos to see under-tens playing pieces like ours! Check this out. Or this: (I played this piece when I was 16 or 17 and got nothing like the sounds she does!!!)

Having played piano myself for many years, I can see that it would be parents like Chua who produce musical prodigies. To excel at piano(I mean the concert pianist level of excellence), besides being musical, one needs to have technique drilled into you when you're small. It's nothing but practice, practice, practice! Even experienced concert pianists will need to break every single bar of a piece down and practise it for hours and hours together. Nothing happens by magic at all! Seeing a kid perform the way they do is lovely(notwithstanding the effect it tends to have on our self esteem) but our vantage point gives us no clue about the time that went into perfecting the particular piece.

Another question she constantly raises is about happiness. Her view, the view of the 'Chinese mother' as she calls it, is that kids will be happy once they start doing well at something, so a parent's job is to make sure they do whatever it takes in order to enable them to excel, even if it means destroying their present happiness-i.e. not letting them do whatever they want when they're younger. Mommy knows best! Haha! I certainly see her point, though, you know; for sure kids on their own will just gravitate towards appealing but mind numbing pursuits like TV or Facebook!


As she brings out, though-this method definitely won't work with all kids(it didn't even with her daughters); only those kids who(like her elder daughter)are mature enough to realise that maybe Mommy does know best!!