We hear a lot about Facebook as a platform for manipulation - using machine learning to bypass our critical faculties and trick us into believing things that are bad for us - but the real show is in Facebook's ability to target, not manipulate.

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If you think "It's not censorship unless the government does it," I want to change your mind.

It's absolutely true that the First Amendment only prohibits government action to suppress speech based on its content, but the First Amendment is not the last word on censorship.

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Here are some kinds of private speech-suppression that I think most of us can agree are censorship: when the John Birch Society burned mountains of rock records and novels - or when Tipper Gore's PMRC pressured record stores to drop punk, metal and rap albums.

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Or the Comics Code Authority, which signed up all comics publishers and retailers to block comics if they contained anything unfit for small children, which stunted American comics for generations while their European counterparts created entire sophisticated genres.

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Or MPAA ratings, in which a secret group of censors (falsely described as frequently rotated, randomly selected parents - really they're long-serving studio insiders) decides whether movies get NC-17 ratings and thus be blocked from nearly every screen in the country.

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(You can learn more about this from Kirby Dick's unmissable doc, "This Film Is Not Yet Rated," which documents both how the MPAA misleads the public about ratings, and uses them to block LGBTQ

Despite the massive triumphs of the world's largest corporations and most rapacious billionaires during the covid crisis, neoliberalism is in ideological retreat: more people are more critical of the idea that "free markets" can solve big problems than at any time in my life.

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The Democratic nomination race was a fight between the neoliberal wing of the party and the Democratic Socialists, with the candidates representing a spectrum between those two sides (and the odd outlier on either side).

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Supposedly, the party grandees brokered peace between the two main factions, but the left is rightfully suspicious about whether Biden - and Republicans-who-sit-as-Dems like Joe Manchin - will deliver anything beyond symbolic gestures.

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One bright spot: Bernie Sanders is finally chairing the Senate Budget Committee, giving him enormous power over muscular covid relief packages, Medicare expansion, and rolling back Trump and Bush tax-cuts on the

This is where Sanders' long experience in the Senate, and his virtuoso work using its procedures to advance his position, will serve him well. As we saw with McConnell, the ability to wield procedure is a powerful asset in getting stuff done.

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The Grand Duchy of Luxembourg is a founding member of the EU, but it's also a rogue state, enabling massive corruption throughout the trading bloc; while Cyprus and Malta will sell any corrupt robber-baron EU citizenship, it's Luxembourg that leads in laundering their money.

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As the @TaxJusticeNet's @nickshaxson memorably put it, Luxembourg is "a criminal enterprise with a country attached" - a country where corporations are guaranteed "an easy ride on taxes, disclosure, financial regulations, and criminal

2014's #Luxleaks exposed some of the worst corruption, whereby @PwC worked with Luxembourg officials to secure illegal tax benefits for major corporations and the world's richest

Luxleaks lead to a 2018 EU directive that required member states to publish registers of the true owners of the companies they registered.

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Luxembourg published theirs in 2019, and @lemondefr partnered with ten media orgs for a year-long analysis of the register, which was published this week: #Openlux. The findings reveal that Luxleaks was just the tip of the

1 There's a chasm between an NLP technology that works well in the research lab and something that works for applications that real people use. This was eye-opening when I started my career, and every time I talk to an NLP engineer at @textio, it continues to strike me even now.

2 Research conditions are theoretical and/or idealized. A huge problem for so-called NLP or AI startups with highly credentialed academic founders is that they bring limited knowledge of what it takes to build real products outside the lab.

3 A product is ultimately a thing that people pay for - not just cool technology or user experience. But I’m not even talking about knowledge gaps in go-to-market work. I'm talking purely technical gaps: how you go from science project to performant + delightful user experience.

4 Most commoditized NLP packages solve well-understood problems in standard ways that sacrifice either precision or performance. In a research lab, this is not usually a hard trade-off; in general, no one is using what you make, so performance is less important than precision.

5 In software, when you’re making something for real people to use, these tradeoffs are a big deal. Especially if you’re asking those people to pay for what you’ve made (can’t get away from that pesky GTM thinking). They expect quality, which includes precision AND performance.

Machine Learning for the Web developer in 2021.

The beginner's guide.​

🧵👇

I started machine learning as a web developer, if I can do it then anyone can.

This carefully curated thread will give you key insights into my journey and how you can make this transition, seamlessly.

(2 / 14)

"Machine learning is not what you think it is"

One of the main reasons why people find it difficult to get started with machine learning is because of the lack of information, and rightfully so.

(3 / 14)

Machine learning as a concept has existed since the 1950s, but has only become popular in recent years because of the exponential rise of advancements in computer hardware.

(4 / 14)

In short, it because of the sudden rise of this technology ,which was previously unknown to the general public, that there is a lot of misinformation around it.

(5 / 14)

In this thread, I will tell you how to learn python for data science in 1 hour 👇 1/N

It's not possible 2/N

It's not possible 3/N

It's not possible 4/N

It's not possible 5/N

Are you planning to learn Python for machine learning this year?

Here's everything you need to get started.
🧵👇

In this thread, we'll look at all the concepts in Python you need to know for machine learning along with free resources to help you out.

All of this is based on my experience of successfully teaching 300+ students how to code using Python.

(2 / 19

You can use many languages for machine learning, why Python?

Because of 2 reasons:
- Comparatively easier to learn than other languages
- Has the biggest and most mature community

This makes Python a no-brainer to learn for machine learning as a beginner.

(3 / 19)

These are the absolute basics which you must know about:

- Basic terminal commands
- Basic arithmetic (+,-,/,*)
- Accepting user input
- For & While loops
- Exception handling
- If-Else statements
- Functions, modules & Imports

(4 / 19)

Then comes the more tougher concepts which you must know about:

- Object oriented programming in Python:Classes, Objects, Methods
- PIP (Pypi)
- List slicing
- String formatting
- Dictionaries & Tuples
- Managing environments
- Dunder methods like __init__

(5 / 19)

🤔 Python generators

What are they? How to use them?

#Python

🧵Let's find out 👇

1️⃣ Python generators are lazy iterators delivering the next value when their .next() is called.

They are created by using the yield keyword

next() can be called explicitly or implicitly inside for loop

They can be finite or infinite

2️⃣ yield - where a value is sent back to the caller, but the function doesn’t exit afterward as with the return statement

The state of function is remembered.

For example, the number is incremented and sent back from yield at the consecutive call next()

3️⃣ Generator stores only the current state of the function - it generates next element on next() call and forgets the previous one -> it saves memory

For example, we don't need to store 1mio elements in memory to do something with each element

4️⃣ When you call a generator function generator object is returned - it's not executed yet

It executes only when next() is called

For example, that's why Exception is raised only on the next() call