hashemian

Textbook definition of taking something out of context. The full sentence is:

‘If America attacks Iran,’ I said, ‘won’t people be killed?’

‘They don’t kill people. Our own government does. No enemy in our history has done to us what these clerics have done.’

I donno, I've come across or read about fair number of people who worked on a crazy idea for a very long time, as if they were planning to throw their life away chasing that idea. Some had a breakthrough and ended up being a huge win. But I'm sure there are many many more who just ended up nowhere. So, I guess it's a gamble.

There is no way to access the Internet from inside Iran, not for private citizens, nor for companies, or even many server hosts. Just very very few places, directly linked and controlled by the government, have limited Internet access.

There is not even the option to call phone lines inside Iran, or call abroad from Iran (not tried direct call, but no VoIP works).

You still can access any server inside Iran ("Internet-e-Melli" or National Internet, they call it), but none of these servers in turn have access to free Internet.

Would love to hear your thoughts if there is a technical way to bypass such restriction (me and my friends, fairly tech savvy, could not find a way).

To those argue that LLMs might cheat by using EXIF, I saw a post recently on twitter (https://x.com/tszzl/status/1915212958755676350) and out of curiosity, screen-captured the photo and passed it to O3. So no EXIF.

You can read the chat here: https://chatgpt.com/share/680a449f-d8dc-8001-88f4-60023323c7...

It took 4.5m to guess the location. The guess was accurate (checked using Google Street View).

What was amazing about it:

    1. The photo did not have ANY text

    2. It picked elements of the image and inferred based on those, like a fountain in a courtyard, or shape of the buildings.

The original comment says "their mentality about open-model is wrong, evident from their post". Does not say it's shady! Why to be cynical?

This is one: https://x.com/JohnDSailer/status/1883648993974169641

I have friends in faculty positions at well-known universities who were very unhappy about these practices, but could not publicly discuss it fearing repercussion, prior to these events.

TBC, I am not supporting any of the things happening. I do think the DEI thing went too far, but what the new admin. is doing can be much worse.

If you are interested in this topic, I suggest watching the conversation between Edward Gibson and Lex Fridman. In the middle of the conversation [1] Edward talks about how there is a "human language comprehension network" within human brain, which gets activated only when we read or speak in any human languages, but nothing else. For example for those speaking multiple languages, reading or writing in any of those languages activates the network. But reading gibberish or computer code, neither activate the network.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F3Jd9GI6XqE&t=4906s

Thanks for the links. I watched some of his videos where he explained how DataColada did their forensic investigation in data manipulation.

What amazes me is how simple was the fraud (or at least the ones reported by Pete!). They basically just opened an excel file, started from the top, changed some random numbers, until they reached the effect they aimed for!!! Really? What about those that can do more sophisticated data manipulation?

It seems the site is not accessible. Either it times out, or shows "An error occurred", or 404, for the past 15 minutes.

I did it on mac without any issues. Are you using Mac or Linux? what is the issue?

Amazing work. Thank you.

I have a set of PDF files, and this week was thinking how I can link them to an LLM and be able to ask questions about them. So this was very timely.

I did a quick side-by-side testing against Nougat, and it clearly works better. On a handful of PDFs I tested, Marker extracted considerably more text (the text did not have any math, just academic papers), finished the job faster, and did not crash on any pdf, while Nougat took a lot longer to finish, and sometimes crashed due to out-of-memory error (could not allocate more than 7GB RAM!)

I agree, but I think they are more outlier than normal tweeter users.

I've been also trying to find these people and follow them on tweeter, but it's hard to find. Mostly either don't tweet much, or tweet a lot of noise!

I don't think tweeting and blogging can be compared really. I would see tweeting as a form of "talking to a group of people". You often don't research, proofread, and rewrite yourself when talking. The UI to tweeting also boosts this (mostly mobile devices I assume, via a small text box).

While bloggin is for writing an essay. You may write the essay and just publish it, but in most cases you do some research and at least proofread it once. And again the blogging UI is optimized for this: you have an empty page, nothing other than your written content.

And they really complement each other: you talk to people to get ideas for your essays, and you write essays to share your ideas with people and use them as the base for your writing. I don't think you ever can replace tweeter (or similar services) with blogging.

I believe it comes from here:

https://blog.google/documents/72/Exposure_Notifications_Serv...

Section 3.c.i

Me and some of my colleagues are also Iranians living abroad, and this morning our account was deleted! We were already thinking to move to a self-hosted solution (rocket.chat likely), and this is a good reason to prioritize it.

Most of the human-subject research done in public health, sociology, and similar domains uses data collected in a similar way. They basically ask people to take notes on specific behaviour or fill short surveys multiple times a day (they call it ecological momentary assessment), then they analyze it in the context of their research.

So yes, a tool like this has value in helping with better understanding ourselves, but also can help population research as well.

Are you sure it wasn't a scam to rip you off? I'm born and raised in Tehran and numerous times I had gone out for dinner passed mid-night, and I simply walked into a restaurant, ordered the food, and ate (assuming the kitchen was still open).

Specially because people in Tehran prefer to have late supper compared to North Americans, it was a lot easier to find food options late at night than say in Toronto where past mid-night the only option is fast-foods.

There are a few other efforts towards this goal as well, and Apple ResearchKit is one of them, Funf is another one.

Two difference between Ethica and ResearchKit: 1. ResearchKit being from Apple, only works on iOS, while we are trying to have a tool for data collection from any platform, Android, iOS, smartwatch, etc. 2. ResearchKit is more of an API which can simplify coding of a research app, but still requires knowledge on iOS programming to get the app done, and then you need to deal with all other pieces you need to have an end-to-end product, the server, the back-end, data storage, etc. For many, this is way too much technical work to be able to use ResearchKit.

Overall, it's nice to see there are other groups working on this idea as well. It can attract more attention to this need.

I wish, we are very small, and very limited resource from few research projects we are contributing to, so we cant really afford. Sorry

All the figures in this book is missing (or at least up to the end of first chapter that I've read). Anyone knows where I can find the figures?

Hi Mehr

I'm sorry to hear about this, but glad to know you are determined to fight this back.

I'm also Iranian, right now living in Canada. I will register ASAP, hope it can help you or other similar patients.

My sister was diagnosed with Leukemia when she was 18 as well (she is living in Iran) around 7 years ago, but she was cured and she is been living a healthy life since then. Don't loose your hope, try to stay positive, you definitely know how important it is.

One more thing, I think it's amazing that you have started this thread to discuss this. You can start an effort to raise awareness on Leukemia and use your technology background to reach as many people as possible. Hopefully one day enough people will register in BMDW, so no one has to stay in waiting list any more.

" The narrative that America overthrew a democratically elected government in a coup is just false."

Glad to know that your knowledge is more than CIA even (sarcasm), as they already admitted that:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/aug/19/cia-admits-role...

Well, my experience with LinkedIn has been very different. To start, I don't have my mom in my LinkedIn! Not only I have found my current job from LinkedIn, I also regularly received interview invitation for positions from other companies (from large scale ones like Google, FB, Amazon, etc. to smaller companies).

But to me the best advantage of LinkedIn is it helps separate professional relationships/conversation separate from my personal life. My contact network at LinkedIn showing my professional connections is very different than my contact network in Facebook, and while I use both, I don't want them to be mixed.

Plus, it keeps my CV and I don't have to always look for my CV in bunch of doc files if I have to send it to someone.

Maybe you would have a different experience if you would spend more time on setting it up? (writing the CV, adding the right people. etc)

Nice piece, thank you.

I very much admire Obama administration to take a diplomatic approach on this issue, and I believe when hopefully these negotiations are succeeded, this can be an evidence that how a conflict can be resolved in peace without the need to start a new war.

I gave up long ago and started using insync. The only downside is that I don't feel comfortable a third-party company also have access to files, but besides this, the app is really nice, works just as expected.

well, they have one to use half a decade from now (2020), two more in reserve, and per your statement, they can make one per decade. Seems they are doing fine!