Wake up to reality

Mon, 13 Jan 2025 00:00:00 +0000

Given the (debatable) fact that we come into this earth tabula rasa, or as a clean slate, its is very interesting to observe it being slowly written on, and erased, time and time again, becoming more of a used slate, with dust traces from the past settling as biases withhold (there is a word for exactly this, which my dumb self will later use google to figure out — EDIT — Palimpsest), and new spaces made for me to be sensitive about issues which I was till now unaware, or simply ignorant of.

Yours truly, has never been much of a politically inclined person, social issues were never a concern for an upbringing, which was middle class enough to allow glimpses into the fact that something was potentially wrong with the world around, but also privileged enough to allow the bliss that is ignorance.

Well, shit changes…..sometimes, when you least expect it.

While reading books is usually seen has a harmless hobby, a mere pastime of the intelligentsia, a thing people do on lazy Sundays, with a well brewed cup of coffee in hand and the sun shining through the window, (totally not describing my own Sundays.. ahem) sometimes, they are not so harmless, and might change the entirety of your being, in just a few pages. Afterall, most of society, is driven by a few religious books, and most political philosphies, were first written as a book or a manifesto or a treatise.

While I started my reading journey, with typical young adult, coming of age books ( the harry potters, Percy Jackson, Colleen Hoover? ) , over the last 1 year or so, there is a whole new genere which is starting to attract me. And with it, came a whole new phase of discovering a new sensitivity to the society around, which I inhabit.

This is not a political piece however, I still don’t have a political philosphy of my own, and as someone who hasn’t even voted yet, ever, I am the last person to say anything about any social issue, but I will do so anyway, cause…it’s my blog lol

When talking about social issues, does it make sense to only talk about the country you live in? or are you supposed to talk about the issues which are faced in the world in general. Should I talk about racism in the US, or castesim in India? Is a global problem like climate change one that demands attention, or the threats to democracy in the world’s most populous country the issue? With so many things wrong in a world, which pretends to be working absolutely fine like clockwork, what problems do you claim as your own, what problems you chose to ignore as somehow less worthy of care, how do people develop their own socio-political agenda? I have no clue.

Are you supposed to follow a bottom-up approach, trying to make small improvements in the world immediately around you, or do you take a top-down approach, and campaign the fix the largest problems we face as a society. I personally feel more attracted towards the top-down approach, since I feel powerless against the tyranny of the masses, and the pestilence like nature of the inertia to change, renders a bottom up approach inefficient and a Sisyphean attempt at best.

I have never felt much attached to the nation I was born in, I didn’t chose to be born in this weird as hell world, with more problems than solutions, I didn’t chose the religion my family adopts, nor the cultural surroundings which have tainted my view of the world, in their view. I believe that the first 22 years of my life, were a blip, with barely any identity being formed, or maybe I have just dissolved whatever identity I had created in the past.

For the future, I hope I find issues that I think are worth solving, people I want to support, movements which feel like my own, identities I adopt, and maybe again discard as the time goes by.

Whatever the case be, its finally time for me, to wake up to reality —

Originally published on Medium.

Being the human behind an AI

Sat, 23 Nov 2024 00:00:00 +0000

Over the last 8 months or so, in my new (now slightly oldish) job as an AI Engineer at a startup, I have been one of the humans behind some of the AI products we offer ( mostly text to speech, and other speech stuff ), and I have also spent a lot of time in the past 5 years trying to get something meaningful out of these models. And its, fun, mostly.

Andrej Karpathy, famously spent a lot of time manually labelling the Imagenet dataset, looking a just a shit ton of images, and trying to figure out what they represent, and that effort led to the recent AI boom almost as much as anything else. But, how did it feel for him, and other researchers at Stanford, and at other academic labs, to be the ones putting in the manual grind to painfully, and slowly label these datasets, and get these models to work, when they, just fucking wont. Probably fun, mostly.

I am in no way even remotely close to the level of work done my these now almost mythical forefathers of our fields, but, hell, I have spent a LOT of time manually labelling datasets, looking at way too many images of travel destinations I had no hope of actually travelling during my stint in the travel team at MSFT, and an inhuman amount of time listening to different pronunciations of names and different tonalities and accents of humans in my current job. And I think I have become a lot more sensitive to human voices and sounds due to it, mostly.

A few of my colleagues work in lip-sync, where you have to create accurate AI generated lip-motions for an accompanying AI generated audio for a human speaker, and I can safely say that I suck at identifying what makes a good lip-sync. My teammates attribute this to my habit of consuming a plethora of anime, that too in sub, so I am more used to looking down at the subtitles than at the face of the characters to the point where I didn’t even realise that most animes have minimal lip-motion and at one point I almost sweared to someone that animes have diverse lip movements only to be shown multiple videos characters having just simple vertical or horizontal movements lol. My teammates working on lip-sync are however a different case, and have almost a superhuman ability to detect even a minor offset between lip movements and audios, while I am just sitting there finding no difference at all, mostly.

I wrote about occupational hazards in a previous post, which was mostly a negative take on how the tech industry is affecting my personality, but there is also something really transforming about being the human behind an AI. It has really made me more sensitive to things which we often take for granted as humans, and has probably changed me fundamentally in how I reason about things. A simple example of this is, text to speech, after working on it for 8 months now, I mentally play out any text I see or any name I see and think about how easy or hard would it be for an AI to read it out, and what mistakes it might make. Also since I have seen how hard it is for an AI to speak properly, even when trained on hundreds of thousands of hours, it is hard not to appreciate the easy at which we are able to just speak, and communicate with each other so well, mostly.

Another interesting effect of becoming more cognisant of this effect is the important of choosing important problems to work on, which I am actually interested in ( and quite frankly, I wasn’t interested in text-to-speech at all previously, now I do find it quite interesting ), since those are the areas of the human experience I will become more knowledgeable about and probably develop and unfair advantage in, well…. mostly :P

Originally published on Medium.

Philosophy | Ayush Mangal

Wake up to reality

Being the human behind an AI