Asvatha

Hahahah. Thank you 😆

late response sorry, i'm just getting back on bluesky after a while. Have you found any? :D

Big BIG thanks to my advisors @aramsinn.bsky.social & @saifshahin.bsky.social. Thanks also to @paufder.bsky.social for being on my committee and @ubisurv.net for serving as the external examiner!

Screenshot of Title Slide of dissertation with a photo of the presenter.

Screenshot of the dissertation defense Zoom meeting room with icons of all attendees.

Happy to announce (belatedly) that I'm #PhDone! I defended my dissertation "Guilty Faces: Localizing Surveillance through the Cultural Construction of Facial Recognition" last month.

I would be so glad to never hear the term h1b again in my life

I assure you that you do not actually have to contribute to the great American Casteist NRI vs Racist White Person debates of 2024.. You don't have to speak up for your "Indian friends" and definitely don't have to learn and spout half-baked nonsense about the US immigration process.

My favorite part (and by that I mean the part i detest most) is when people say oomfie.. 🤢

Petition to ban the word oomf on bsky

If someone already has, please @ me with the link tia

Someone smarter than me needs to write a paper calculating the point at which the informational landscape becomes so polluted with garbage that the genAI hallucination problem becomes unsolvable by fact checking mechanisms.

A pinhole camera photo taken from Summer to Winter Solstice. It's a bit blurry as the aperture was made with a tiny needle and no focus mechanism. There are yellow to green lines across the photo, that's the Sun moving across the sky over the course of a day. The top line is from the Summer Solstice, the bottom line from the Winter Solstice. Cloudy days don't have any lines or broken lines as the Sun was obscured by clouds. There are some trees on the left, right and in the background.

A pinhole camera photo, a 6 month exposure from Summer to Winter solstice. There are trees on the right side and background. A house with two cars in the drive are visible almost in the center of the photo. The lines are made from the Sun moving across the sky with the bottom line being the Winter Solstice and the top line the Summer solstice. On cloudy days the lines are broken or not visible as the sun was obscured by clouds. The lines show some reflections from a tree trunk. The lines are mostly a white color with some hints of blue, green and yellow in places. Some of the colors could be from rain or snow staining the paper I was using.

Happy Winter Solstice!

These photos were taken with a pinhole camera I made from a beer can and left out from Summer to Winter Solstice - a 6 month exposure.

Bottom line = Winter Solstice. Top line = Summer Solstice.

The lines are the Sun moving across the sky w/some reflections. No line = clouds

Hard relate! This whole PhD has been a process of catching up with "basic" theory and foundational scholarship that everyone else already seems to know and is able to pull out (correctly) at whim.

we're always on the cusp of some revolution or other if marketing copies are to be believed

Randomly meeting one of my to-be mentors at a random event and getting a chance to speak with her for 10 mins (which was all the time she needed to convince me that I'm meant to do a PhD instead of job hunting in the DC think tank circuit)

I don't think it is! I'm just caught by surprise in most cases :)

We did that too (not to the US flag tho obviously) so I totally get it. It's just funny because their work is so critically oriented otherwise so you'd think there was some deprogramming at some point..

American hubris is really a difficult net to avoid huh? However thoughtful their work is & however they're placed in the socio-cultural hierarchy in the US, you eventually get hit with the casual "we're the best/greatest/insert other superlative in the world" when you least expect it

📌

Oh man not that guy.. I'm so sorry.. Given the discourse on here the last few days, I can't imagine the bsky team is even remotely ready to handle H trolls.

📌

ah ok then you know way more than I do :P

went down a reddit rabbithole for this (also for a friend obviously) and tl:dr adderall is not legally available here and everything else is heavily regulated and prescription only.. hope you have better luck than me.

Dropped by Twitter after a while to see what I missed and Xed outta there so fast. Indian men having a normal one over there to looks like..

I am not looking forward to the day the hordes get here.

This title if the comic is ‘Googling Stuff…’ The comic shows two columns: on the left is “Then” showing search results with one thing listed as “the thing you want” On the right column is ‘Now’ - also showing search results but in this case it’s a whole bunch of stuff you don’t need: AI TAKING A WILD STAB AT IT WITH SOME BLATANT MISINFORMATION SPONSORED RESULT SPONSORED RESULT SPONSORED RESULT SPONSORED RESULT PEOPLE ALSO ASK VIEW PRODUCTS And then right at the bottom just off screen is ‘the thing you want’

Googling Stuff: Then v Now.

Altman is the moment but Bezos is forever

Companies are so surveillance-pilled and data hungry that they are trying to get everyone to believe that one of the worst aspects of modern technology—that you are constantly surveilled—is now a thing you should wholeheartedly embrace and integrate into every aspect of your existence.

bsky.app/profile/abeb...

makes me shudder honestly

bsky.app/profile/hist...

*one of my biggest problems

My biggest problem with gen AI is that by the time the tech "gets better" (whatever that means), AI slop and hallucinations would have already permeated the information ecosystem, and the damage to the verifiability of facts will already be done.