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François Chollet @fchollet
, 5 tweets, 1 min read Read on Twitter
Required reading if you are wondering what the "essence" of fascism is: Umberto Eco's description of the 14 defining features of fascism, from 1995.
nybooks.com/articles/1995/…
Too bad they didn't teach this in US journalism schools.
So, is Trump a fascist? For the most part, no, and the Trump administration is definitely not a fascist regime. However, Trumpism is fundamentally a fascist movement, and so are many of the growing ethno-nationalist, anti-globalization movements around the world.
Trumpism is not purely fascist -- it doesn't quite feature every single characteristic of fascism, & it has a number of original features of its own. But at its heart it is fascist; certainly enough to be wholeheartedly endorsed by a number of fascist true-believers like Spencer.
It would be more accurate to say that Trump is a vector of fascism, than to say that Trump is a fascist per se.
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I am very sad at how ineffective reCAPTCHA is at preventing spam bots. Either spammers have developed a well-oiled human-based pipeline for breaking captchas for <<$0.1 each, or they've made a DL-based captcha breaker. In any case, it's free-for-all these days.
For a long time my go-to spam prevention solution was invisible fields like "username", "password" in the registration form -- if you fill them in, you must be a bot. It used to be very effective, but increasingly less so recently, probably because bots are now browser-based.
Now I'm using ad-hoc questions visible to users. Trivial to break if a human were to write a script specific to my forms, but that's not part of my threat profile.
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It would be fascinating to instrument deep learning developer workflows, so as to run the numbers on the productivity increase that comes from using tools that reduce cognitive load vs. tools that lay traps for you to fall into
The first thing that users that recently switched to Keras mention to me is the productivity boost. In the time it would have taken them to debug their way through the implementation of one idea (`zero_grad()` anyone?), they can try out 2, 3 ideas.
It matters because trying more ideas (with fewer mistakes) means you will converge faster towards better ideas (thus winning competitions more often or increasing your paper acceptance rate).

I'm thinking Kaggle kernels or Colab would be a way to gather hard data on this...
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An empty field. The nearest house is 1km away. It’s freezing cold. What I am doing here?

Every place has a memory. Perhaps dreams. This one has nightmares.

Nearly a hundred people were massacred right on this spot. I am possibly the very last person to know that it happened.
This is a story that begins in 1859...

Wait, no. It begins during the fall of the Roman empire. But let's make a first stop in 1859.

In 1859, this field had a name. It translates to "Blacklands". This name is long forgotten, and you won't find it on any 20th century map.
Across the Blacklands was a rather extensive mound of earth and rocks. The owner of the Blacklands decided to get rid of the mound in order to improve the yield of his lands. He started digging.

Soon after, he began to uncover walls.
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"Distrust of the intellectual world has always been a symptom of Ur-Fascism, from Goering’s alleged statement ('When I hear talk of culture I reach for my gun') to the frequent use of such expressions as 'degenerate intellectuals.'”

-Umberto Eco, "Ur-Fascism"
"The official Fascist intellectuals were mainly engaged in attacking modern culture and the liberal intelligentsia for having betrayed traditional values."
One of my favorite essays: nybooks.com/articles/1995/…
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It is disquieting to watch the change in meaning and usage of the word "fake". If I view it simply as a matter of semantic drift, it's interesting. If I view it in terms of appropriation and colonization of the word, and the context in which that is happening, it's frightening.
I'm so old I remember when "fake" was a fairly neutral adjective, not a politically-charged pejorative divorced from all connection to reality.
What does "fake" mean today? It seems to encompass a range of meanings, including "I disagree," "I don't like this," "I don't want to be held accountable," "I'm shutting scrutiny or discourse down" & "I don't see you as fully human."
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Time to repost Umberto Eco’s immortal essay on 14 signs of Ur-Facism. The expression of fascism always varies by country. Nazis were a particular expression of fascism. There are many others. They all look like this: 1/16
1 The worship of traditionalism. “One has only to look at the syllabus of every fascist movement to find the major traditionalist thinkers. The Nazi gnosis was nourished by traditionalist, syncretistic, occult element 2/16
2 Irrationalism as virtue. “The Enlightenment, the Age of Reason, is seen as the beginning of modern depravity. In this sense Ur-Fascism can be defined as irrationalism.”3/16
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Maybe now's a good time to talk about “eternal fascism” or “ur-fascism,” a concept coined by Umberto Eco in a 1995 essay. Eco, who grew up in Italy under Mussolini, outlined 14 essential, characteristic traits of fascism. (Thread!) 1/ nybooks.com/articles/1995/…
Fascism trait #1:The cult of tradition. Eco is referring to a weird synthesis of different mystical and occult traditions which gives fascism a feeling of ancient “primeval truth,” revealed through often contradictory messages. 2/
We see hints of this cult of tradition in the alt-right's semi-satirical “meme magic” & “cult of kek." motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/…
And many politicians have dabbled in new age spirituality, resembling the “sycnretistic” belief system Eco described: salon.com/2017/04/23/ste… 3/
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I’m not saying Brexit is fascist. Umberto Eco is in this 1995 essay. Does this sound familiar to anyone?
Guys, Umberto Eco wrote this in 1995, which my sources tell me is definitely before this Brexit fiasco (though it’s beginning to feel like Brexit has been around for much, much longer).
Read these Eco quotes about how one defines fascism for yourselves and tell me that this doesn’t describe Brexit.
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A (loooong) thread abt Brexit populism and fascism.
Emphatically *not* a thread saying ppl who voted Brexit are fascists.
But one saying there’s some pretty fascist shit going on in the mainstream, pro-hard-Brexit, right. 1/20
2/ Back in '95 Umberto Eco wrote abt the common features of Euro fascism in a piece weirdly prescient of the discourse & ideology of the hard-Brexit supporting right… which, by his definition, is working to a fascist playbook (ta @peterjukes 4 the share) nybooks.com/articles/1995/…
3/ Fascism has *always* been a contradictory hodge-podge of disjointed approaches to bits and bobs of tradition, politics, culture, history, & spirituality; it’s *never* been singular & coherent, & is usually composed of numerous (contradictory) features. Features like these…
Read 20 tweets

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