Caleb Tutty

A photograph of four emaciated dead bodies, propped up and being dressed with colorful tunics and sarongs by a person with black mask. Another man is sitting next to them, watching the process.

A photograph of a man combing the hair of a male dead body dressed in brown suit and tie. A female dead body wearing white dress was placed next to the male body.

The dried bodies of a man and a woman, propped up. One wore brown suit, tie, and black cap, and the other wore white bridal dress and the hands were holding a yellow bouquet.

A close up of the face of a man's cadaver with mustache and short beard. He was wearing a black hat that says "Toraja". A pair of hands took care of his facial hair and slipped a cigarette between his lips.

Ma'nene is a ritual in North Toraja, South Sulawesi, where people exhume the bodies of their loved ones from burial chambers, clean them, change their clothes, even serve their favorite food. It roots in ancient belief Aluk Todolo, "the Way of the Ancestors". 1/4 🧵

#WyrdWednesday

NZ not yet recognising Palestinian state, Foreign Minister Winston Peters announces The government has decided against recognising Palestinian statehood at the United Nations General Assembly in New York.

Disappointing and embarrassing.

NZ not yet recognising Palestine: www.rnz.co.nz/news/politic...

Industry pushes swift action on radioactive shrimp scare - Economy - The Jakarta Post The government noted that only a few accredited laboratories are currently capable of advanced food testing.

Great. Now I have to worry about radioactive shrimp: www.thejakartapost.com/business/202...

Aaaand they’ve just covered it up.

Which is just another layer of irony…

…given that this is state action against protest about state action against protest.

Jakarta Post front page article with a timeline of Sri Mulyani’s history as a finance minister serving three Presidents

Flurry of news about the Indonesian cabinet reshuffle - Sri Mulyani’s departure the biggest scalp and front page of the Jakarta Post. Not sure how many finance ministers can cause the stock market to fall on their resignation.

Juga kosong di Pondok Indah. There was a rumour that Fatmawati might have some, but empty there also.

V-Power kosong at another Shell

Another one. VPower is the 95 octane petrol here.

Shell station with no price listed for VPower petrol, as they have run out

Today's task is to try and find a Shell petrol station which still has VPower fuel available. There is apparently a shortage which doesn't seem to affect the state owned Pertamina stations. Probably caused in part by the Pertamina watering down and reimport petrol scandal and import quotas.

Why are people angry? What are they protesting? What’s happening in Indonesia?

#IndonesiaGelap tracks unrest, controversies, and public discontent across the country.

And also the public holiday on Friday. Friends here have said that 98 had lulls and spikes of activity so not sure what to make of where things will go next. With Prabowo’s arrangements with Megawati there is effectively no opposition in the DPR, so it feels like political elites are very separate.

This week has felt calmer, with many corporates calling for work from home arrangements for their staff and a larger, more ready police mobilisation. There are signs of being less heavy handed (e.g. with minors arrested and released) but at the same time tear gassing university students on campus.

Top: “RESET SYSTEM” graffiti in green and pink and below: a much earlier image of an ibu in a pink hijab waving an Indonesian flag in front of police in riot gear, who has since become a symbol of the protest movement.

The Jakarta Post mentions some of the symbolism of pink and green in the Indonesian protests: www.thejakartapost.com/indonesia/20...

Pink for the hijab worn by a now iconic protester and green for the Gojek driver Affan Kurniawan’s jacket - colours cropping up as part of online activism.

Wikipedia article: The Piréz people are a fictional nation invented by a Hungarian polling company to measure attitudes regarding immigration. In a 2006 survey of Hungarians, two thirds opposed offering asylum to the Piréz.

What if polling about immigration wasn't actually helpful?

The official voice of the US government Is cruel, gross, and weird. What is that doing to us? Joking memes about imprisonment, deportation, and death by alligator are designed to radicalize and desensitize.

The White House's memes about imprisonment, deportation, and death by alligator are designed to radicalize and desensitize.

“What you have is this desire to get people to buy into the fun of sadism,” says Jason Stanley, an author who’s leaving the US because of “concerns over fascism.”

Screenshot of a Nextjs app and Python agent playing a 4X game

I'm one of the Builders in Residence for Hugo and Stefan's Building LLM Applications course. I've been hacking around with an idea of a 4X (Explore, Expand, Exploit, Exterminate) game played by agents. Fun weekend project.

But very clean, modern and efficient.

There might be a feeder train from the airport, but the MRT currently just runs from Central Jakarta to the financial district and some of the main arterial of South Jakarta. Ride sharing includes as part of their strategy of getting a motorbike to take you the last mile to or from the station.

Well, everything there has kind of stalled. Prabowo is focusing on things like free school meals and the sovereign wealth fund. Jakarta has a nice, modern MRT now but unfortunately it just doesn’t go very far. Alternate day license plates schemes just cause people to buy two cars.

Though in practice it has been tied up with presidential egos, which leads to this on-again off-again situation

Hah, I see the typo now. Although I think a part of it is also the coal power plants which also make the air pollution unbearable. Living here I have sympathy for relocating the capital. The day time population of greater Jakarta being around 32 million is because of poverty and where opportunity is

Front page of today’s Jakarta Post with a photo of East Jakarta resident being evacuated from flooded areas in a policy dinghy

Flooding again in Jakarta with the heavy rain last night

One unintentional life hack about living in Indonesia is many of my favourite podcasts are ad-free. This is probably because networks like Megaphone or Acast probably do IP address targeting, and I only remember ads exist when accidentally downloading these podcasts using my UK sim on roaming.

If we are going to cede authority to the answers that LLMs give us (like over time trusting ChatGPT as the “truth”) do we need more diversity in the available models, across training material in different languages in order to represent different contexts? 2/2

There has been a lot of discussion about AI safety, and even something of a backlash with models like Mistral removing moderation mechanisms. I wonder more about ontological bias, especially in the current political moment. 1/2

Duolingo Wildfire streak stuck at 360/365 days

This has tormented me for about a year after I foolishly lost my Duolingo streak at 360 days. Now back at 328 it feels a bit like a Rocky montage… *hums Eye of the Tiger*

Home - Tools Competition Multi-million dollar global prize challenge for ed tech solutions addressing pressing issues in education and the learning sciences. Submit a proposal.

I wonder if anyone entering the tools-competition.org looking at something similar? Is there a Learning Engineering community on BlueSky? #EduSky

getting kids to speak for long enough. Asking them to express ideas also gives a sense of vocab and general comfort. Reading on the other hand tests fluency, which may be more controlled but you need to look at prosodic features in the audio.

... and learnt a few things. It didn't work as I intended.

Measuring the English CEFR level in the subset of speaking proficiency is more complicated. Spontaneous speech and reading are very different, especially when working with kids. One challenge in making a viable diagnostic assessment is ...

Paper on Automatic Assessment of English CEFR level assessment using BERT Embeddings

Lately we've been looking at how to improve diagnostic assessment, and going down that rabbit hole I found this paper: ceur-ws.org/Vol-3033/pap... along with the CEFR-SP dataset: github.com/yukiar/CEFR-SP (from this paper: arxiv.org/abs/2210.11766)

I tried to fine tune a BERT model...

Mobile application with daily activities

Simulator showing login screen for the Edukita app

I've been thinking a lot lately about AI tools which help English as an Additional Language speakers learn English. Through my consulting work with an Indonesian ed-tech I built a cross platform React Native project and supporting infra for outside-of-the-classroom family activities app. #EduSky