Voting season is coming around in #SriLanka , and I'm going to give you some recommendations. If you're Sri Lankan, please read.
Let me just say, I am not here to influence you who to vote for. All I ask is that you keep a few things in mind: 1) Every choice you have is flawed. Regardless of who you're voting for, you're voting to give power to parties composed of thieves, crooks, liars, frauds; in some cases war profiteers and criminals.

We @TeamWatchDog have been asked for our thoughts on the proposed Online Safety Bill. Here is our stance:
this bill is not only a tyrant's wet dream, but it is so absurd as to be completely impractical without enormous govt staff and compromising Sri Lankan sovereinty. Thread: First: finding truth is hard. Making up lies is easy. To disprove a lie takes way more effort than to tell it. Example: I can say that "31 ministers were in Parliament on 10/16/94". Easy to state, hard to disprove without recordskeeping, staff to go through records, etc.

Just catching up on the Sri Lankan outrage about ... a pride march?
Huh. Weird priorities. If I had kids I'd want to protect them from: terrorism, civil war, bombs, starvation, torture, police states, rape, racist mobs, domestic violence, economic meltdowns... And yet all these things have happened in Sri Lanka in living memory; are still happening; and I see more outrage, and more energy, directed at a bunch of people basically saying "who I bang is none of your business".

I know university cut-off marks arrived, and a lot of A/L students are in a cycle of grief and despair.
If you didn’t get into uni, chin up! As bad as it looks right now, your story doesn’t end here.
I don’t have formal tertiary education either. Here are some tips: Let’s start with a caveat: this is if your parents don’t have the money to put you through private university. I left school broke (depending on my mother’s salary in a garment factory), with no A/Ls, and what looked like no choices. Your mileage may vary. So:

On the AI image generation space: there seem to be bad faith arguments on both sides.
1) On the AI dev side, there’s a complete avoidance of ethics in data. Artists should be paid for their work. If you’re using copyrighted material, pay for the right to make a derivative work. Claiming fair use (you put it up on the web, it’s fair game!) is stretching the point a bit. Laws have not caught up, and few artists could have anticipated the nature of the use. It’s legal (Google scrapes data) but the ethics are shit.

Personal decision:
1. Sri Lanka is in multiple crises (economy, fuel, meds, industries of all sorts struggling). This is backed up by Watchdog data.
2. Those who can leave are leaving or have left already
3. Food is the next big crisis. It’s coming. Urban poor are hardest hit. One of the things I’ve been thinking hard since 2019 (when I started seeing the writing on the wall) is how to survive as a writer in systems collapse.
Solution is simple. Either I leave and write poverty porn from afar, or I stay and do something.

To Indian journalists being airdropped into Sri Lanka right now:
1. A lot of us have other things to do besides giving you exhausting interviews. Doubly so when electricity (and therefore ability to work) is in flux. You may not notice it in your hotels, but it’s real. 2. The story you’re trying to ‘cover’ may or may not exist. It doesn’t matter what you pitched to your editor to get a ticket to Sri Lanka. You likely pitched it based on half-assed information (this applies to 6 of the 9 journalists I have spoken to so far since April 1)

Friends, Sri Lankans, countrymen, lend me your time. We're hearing from multiple sources of a devastating shortage of medicines across the country #srilankacrisis
We're tracking this @TeamWatchDog. I need your help! Please read: Our intentions are simple.
1) We get data on this, by hospital
2) We turn that into a list of medicines and equipment needed, and how much, if possible
3) Then we get it into the hands of every organization that can help, local or international.

One of the most heartbreaking things about #SriLankaCrisis is the number of young people getting together and saying "why are our problems impossible? Here are ideas, let's fix them".
The problem is that some ideas are more misinformed that not. They're what we might call 'dad wisdom' - things repeated so often with such confidence that we take them for granted.
It's not the fault of people generating ideas. I blame Sri Lanka's education system. So here's a thing we're doing @TeamWatchDog

$1.94 billion: the current stock of foreign currency reserves at the Central Bank of Sri Lanka.
Here's an easy (if imperfect) way to think about this: if our country was a person, they'd be in the ~1660s on the @Forbes billionaire's list. And we have a tough call before us. @TeamWatchDog we keep banging the doomsday drum about debt. That's because we need to pay $1 billion soon, as well as smaller payments that still amount to the millions of $.

longform.watchdog.team/observations/t…

"We compete against problems, not against people."
- John Goodenough
Too much to expect the Parliament to know the words of Nobel laureates.
But until a majority of them understand this basic principle, all we’re going to get is PR, infighting, and a whole lot of pain. Like I don’t think people really understand the scope of how fucked we are.
1) Who signs on behalf of Sri Lanka with the IMF?
2) How much oil to we have now to run generators until then?
3) Who knows best how to impose austerity on an economy that needs it to survive?

All this Cabinet reshuffling is old men who still believe their cronyism will work out.
Nothing will change until we have:
1) Separation of temple and state - no more monks and astrologers running the show
2) An efficient civil service vetted for domain expertise 3) An independent judiciary and a police that actually has the ability to arrest the highest of the high (without it, the police are just tools)
4) Abolish the executive presidency. No more kings. No more tyrants

Notes from watching all this protest footage: actual people's protests / rallies in #SriLanka are usually far smaller than political party rallies.
Suggests multiple things:
1. Political parties have serious protest infrastructure (comms, money/incentives) 2. Very little of this protest infrastructure was actually used for the #gohomerajapakses protests. We have a few parties stepping in, such as SLMC in Addalaichenai, but none of the usual SJB/JVP shenanigans. Either these politicos, when push comes to shove, are afraid...

Looks like they blocked @twitter, @facebook and @whatsapp.
#GoHomeRajapaksas
Alright, let me drop some advice for people trying to get online
1) Don't download random VPN apps. Most of them steal data. If you want the good stuff, download TOR (torproject.org/download/). 2) TOR is free and some of the best VPN tech you can get for that price, but slow as hell. For something faster, download Opera. Got to settings (left hand, bottom, gear icon), type 'VPN' in the search and enable it.
opera.com/download

**NEW ANALYSIS DROP**
One of the things that we've been working @teamwatchdog is a complex series on how food is made and consumed in Sri Lanka, digging into fertilizer and the fallout of @GotabayaR's sudden organic farming push. But first, we had to dig into a persistent piece of myth that seems to underlie all these conversations, even at the the policymaker level: that Sri Lanka has been agriculturally self-sufficient.

Some stuff that we're working on @TeamWatchDog
1) A multi-part look at food production and policy, w/ critical look at the 'we were an agriculturally self-sufficient nation' narrative
2) Global perceptions on Sri Lankan corruption, married to govt dept raid data 3) the next in our economy series, starring the Special Goods and Services Tax as a filler before we move on to an explainer on the IMF

All told, 4 new analyses dropping this week + podcast + newsletter

IMO this is also one of the perils of ML. So much of academic CS glues models together and boasts performance on specific set of benchmarks without thinking about a) bias b) performance in the real world

https://twitter.com/AlexGDimakis/status/1506485470255280129

Don’t get more wrong. I’m glad that we can do this. I myself am more an engineer and data hound than a scientist. But this is how you also get legions of bullshit ‘AI’ companies that are either just a random forest or three GANs in a trenchcoat

Alright, folks. I promised a tweet-thread introduction to the open-source, alternate-economies world we've been building over at @SciFiEconomics.
So -rubs hands- shall we begin?
Welcome to Witness! Let's first talk about what it IS and why we're writing/designing it. [1] [2] Witness is a fictional, floating megacity set in a post-climate-change future.
Witness is made out of Distrikts: each Distrikt runs a radically different social contract and economic structure. There are solarpunks out to prevent waste; monastic orders aiming for the stars -

Few ideas:
1) Don't have cronies with fake PhDs openly consorting with your political apparatus
2) Actually fund public universities instead of buying more guns n' ammo. Pay lecturers well so you don't lose top-tier talent to private industry.

https://twitter.com/GotabayaR/status/1361725188161687556

3) Integrate aspects of the humanities and economics into STEM degrees instead of producing rote learners with no intellectual curiosity. Likewise, give the arts a dose of statistics, for the love of all that's good; we've got enough half-assed woo thinking as is.

Small observation: yesterday I 'attended' Boskone, an SFF convention I would normally not be able to attend without spending exorbitant fees flying out to the US, spending 30+ hours in airports and flights, finding hotels etc. COVID has shown us that many of the interactions we take for granted in SFF can be conducted digitally. Doing so unlocks a wealth of knowledge to people from across the world, as well as marginalized groups who would not be able to travel for various reasons.

To everyone on LK twitter trying to be extra and going 'why shouldn't we trust ayurveda western science has killed our indigenous arts':
Without repeated trials, anything is snake oil.
Without experimental evidence, it's charlatanry.
This is COVID. Shut up and sit down. Ever since this pandemic began, we've seen snake oil salespeople in full force - from Insta and FB influencers selling marked-up balms to rogue vedamahattayas drawing crowds in the thousands.
The impacts of health misinfo aren't going to be felt by edgelords in Colombo.