And a better way to deal with it. — What about Whataboutism? The Cambridge Dictionary defines Whataboutism as the practice of answering a criticism or difficult question by making a similar criticism or asking a different but related question, typically starting with the words “What about?” For example, A: The British Colonialists stole a lot of resources from Sri Lanka B: But…

And how to fix the problem — Amali and Bimal [The people and the transactions in this scenario are imaginary. But the numbers are based on real data, but significantly simplified] In 2010, both Amali and Bimal have Rs. 20M in cash to invest. Amali puts her money in a fixed deposit which pays 10% annual interest, every year. Bimal…

And other Transformer Driven Coding Tools — For those who don’t know, GitHub Copilot is an AI powered code auto-completion tool developed by OpenAI in collaboration with GitHub and Microsoft. It is built on top of GPT and is a (sort of) cousin of ChatGPT. It supports a range of programming languages including Python and JavaScript. This…

A contrarian capitalist’s view. — The Party Programme published on the People’s Liberation Front (JVP)’s website states, 55. This is the era of proletarian socialist revolution where the means of production is converted to social property. The production of commodities is evicted by direct social production led by the mass of class-conscious proletariat voluntarily assembled…

What the “G” in ChatGPT Means — The “G”, “P” and “T” in ChatGPT stand for “Generative”, “Pre-Trained” and “Transformer” respectively. The real power comes from the “T” or “Transformer”. But, for me, the “G” or “Generative” is the more foundational idea. In this article, I try to explain what “Generative” means in the context of Artificial…

On measuring the influence of ethnicity on how Sri Lankans vote — We vote for different reasons. Ideally, we should vote based on issues and policies we care about, and a candidate’s ability to satisfy these. Sadly, in practice, we tend to vote for far more primitive reasons. For example, many of us vote on life-long party loyalties, which we discussed in…

A Voter’s Wishlist — Just an opinion poll There is a Local Authority Election in the offing. But sadly, for too many people, it is nothing but an opinion poll for the major political parties in parliament, and a precursor to a general or presidential election. How can we be better voters? On the many levels of votingmedium.com Know it or not, Local Authorities provide important services, and it is…

Strictly a Thought Experiment — This is not a proposal. It is a thought experiment. I have already warned you that the idea is crazy. But then again “crazy” is neither necessary nor sufficient for “bad”. You decide… Citizens are shareholders The country is a corporation. Each citizen owns exactly one share. A citizen gets the share at…

On the many levels of voting — For representative democracy to be effective, we need informed voters who can “vote well”. “Voting well” is not about “who” you vote for, it is “how”. So, how well do you vote? Read on, if you want to find out. Level 0 — “I don’t vote” We will start with the worst type of voter —…