Ruvan W (@ruvanw) header
Ruvan W (@ruvanw) profile picture

Academic who believes one of our responsibilities is to protect people from politicians. Views are personal, RTs & links are not always endorsements

Joined January 2009
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Do @dialoglk @doc_990 and @eChannelling know that their apps are not protecting genuine patients from booking doctors (e.g. Thashi Chang) via their web or mobile apps by allowing automated booking? This morning within 5 min, some interfaces show 35 appointments taken but your 1/2
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Appears to be not too dissimilar to the train ticket booking scam that has been dealt with by authorities and service providers. Since this is a fully private sector operation, @Nawalokahospitl would need to investigate and assist in getting the service providers to do better.
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Ruvan W retweeted
‼️URGENT ACTION REQUIRED! - SL MIGRANT WORKER'S LIFE AT RISK‼️ Worker: Pramadi Madhumali Nisansala Passport No: N8895047 SLBFE File: CD/334/2610 (CMS: 2026F034310) Sponsor: MESHARI FALEH MUTLAQ ALRASHDI Agency: Smart Travel Agency (Pvt) Ltd., Pramadi, a Sri Lankan migrant worker, currently in Saudi Arabia, has last contacted her family and friends in SL last evening around 6.27pm (SL time), and told them that she was facing numerous threats from her employer, and that she feared for her life and wanted to return home immediately. Thereafter, there has been no communication from her, except for a missed call from her number at 10.27pm (SL time). Her WhatsApp has since gone completely offline, and attempts to call her directly via her roaming number and even SMS messages have not been responded to. Given the hostility, and violent and explicit threats made by her employer, her family and friends fear that her phone has been forcibly taken from her, or worse, that she has been physically harmed, restrained, or kicked out. However, in response to desperate appeals by Pramadi to the Embassy of Sri Lanka in Saudi Arabia, the officer in charge of her case, had called her employer last morning (29), and instructed him to immediately hand Pramadi back to the agency that sent her, or to the SL Embassy, as the employer had not yet obtained an Iqama (official residence permit and smart-card ID) for her, as legally required. This is after she had worked there fore four months. Having also incurred a foot injury, Pramadi was not even able to be hospitalised, as she requires an Iqama to access any services in Saudi. The Embassy official was also going to instruct the Agency that sent her, to get Pramadi back immediately, threatening to ban their agency if they did not comply. Stories like Pramadi's one, are unfortunately very common, with SL migrant workers working in the middle east in particular, having NO safeguards or assurances in place whatsoever to ensure their safety or wellbeing! We call on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs - Sri Lanka Vijitha Herath and the Sri Lanka Bureau of Foreign Employment who are wholly responsible for the safety and security of migrant workers such as Pramadhi; - To ensure her safe return home. - To fast-track and intervene in all such urgent cases of migrant workers at risk, as they work under very unsafe circumstances, to send much needed foreign exchange to Sri Lanka. - To give the highest priority to negotiations with the Saudi and other relevant Governments, to put in place at least basic bilateral safeguards and commitments to ensure the safety and security of all SL migrant workers working in the region. (This is an urgent appeal on behalf of Pramadhi's anxious family, and all information via Chanu Nimesha who has been directly in touch with Pramadi, her family and officials from the SL Embassy in Riyadh and the SL Foreign Ministry.) - Post by @EmDeeS11 facebook.com/share/p/1K4pHLx…
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apps don't even show the date as being bookable! Update: at 7.10, through an older session, managed to get appointment #44 but all your interfaces are showing only 43 appointments taken even at 7.20! Someone is playing both your systems - collusion at insider levels 🤔 2/2
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Very excited to share Genie 4, our incredible interactive world model, bringing together real-time physics, reasoning, and audio! Simulations within simulations, makes you wonder just how deep the rabbit hole goes... I have a feeling we will be finding out soon enough...
This is Genie 4, our most realistic and interactive world model yet. 🌐 Explore dynamic environments in real time to see how the scene responds, sounds, and how the people in it move, react, and speak.
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Once again, for those who want to bet their country's critical comms on Starlink: From Ben Evans' awesome newsletter (see ben-evans.com/newsletter): "Starlink suddenly stopped working for anything moving at  over a certain speed in Ukraine ... and it turned out that (apparently) Elon Musk had made the decision by himself"
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So @officialunp a party once adored by large number of minorities in this country, wants Gnanasara; most racist monk of our lifetime to be pardoned. #lka #SriLanka #racism #Buddhism
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Deleting 15 years of climate change data WE paid for so big oil can keep raping us on high prices seems criminal.
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In order for any govt to have any real impact on cracking down on the drug menace, apprehending pedlars is not enough - what is done with the confiscated drugs is essential. Destroying would be to lose billions, so what can be done with them? @anuradisanayake @PresidentAKD
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Day 2 at RMV. In the rain, muddy, sweaty, waited in queues for hours since 5.30am. Finally when my token number was called they 'accepted' the documents. However the gasbags prior to approving it tell me that the signature and seal on the original book isn't too visible (it isn't - and I argued that an 'original' book in use since the mid 2000s will naturally be as such). However, if one looks carefully you can see the faded seal and full signature underneath the old lamination. I pointed out that everything else; the owner's letter of sale, his NIC copies, up-to-date revenue license, insurance, and all mandatory forms signed and attested were there. Also, all of this is what they previously perused and said was okay. I thought it ironic that there were people bringing in their books in bits and tatters managing to get them approved 😅. Clearly there were books in far worse conditions getting green lit. Having being told different things by different people working at the RMV (nothing helpful), at the end of my tether of patience I said 'fuck it', and walked out. Today's mission is a failure. My resolve does not accept failure. Live to fight another day then. I still refuse to offer 'special contributions'. හරි. තව කට්ටක් කමු 😠
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🇱🇰 Sri Lanka Document Datasets: A Large-Scale, Multilingual Resource for Law, News, and Policy 🆕 v2026-10-12-0839 is now live. - 299,131 documents (85.4 GB) - 26 distinct datasets - සිංහල, தமிழ் & English @GitHub: <github.com/nuuuwan/lk_datase…> @arXiv: <arxiv.org/abs/2510.04124> 🤖 @GitHub is updated automatically & near-instantly as new data becomes available. # SriLanka #OpenData #NLP #LKA
🇱🇰 Sri Lanka Document Datasets: A Large-Scale, Multilingual Resource for Law, News, and Policy 🆕 v2026-07-02-0940 is now live. - 278,621 documents (80.7 GB) - 26 distinct datasets - සිංහල, தமிழ் & English @GitHub: <github.com/nuuuwan/lk_datase…> @arXiv: <arxiv.org/abs/2510.04124> 🤖 @GitHub is updated automatically & near-instantly as new data becomes available. # SriLanka #OpenData #NLP #LKA
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While the Judiciary seems to have shaken off the fear caused by political terror posed by former politicians and their families being brought under the law, the medical profession appears to be still under the shackles of that fear and patronage. At least that's the perception.
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Anthropic is merging 30,000 PRs per day to their monorepo. In other words- agent write code, agents review code and no humans have any understanding what's going on. One has to wonder where the world is heading to in such a hurry.
New on our Engineering blog: Creating in-house source control. In May, we merged around 2,500 code changes per day. In September, we merged more than 30,000 per day. As a result, we became bottlenecked by developer infrastructure built for human (rather than agent) scale. Here, we share how we built a new version control system—and fully migrated our monorepo from git—in five months: anthropic.com/engineering/re…
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It's ok to have Starlink in SL, but nothing critical should depend on it. Historically we know that if a country's critical infrastructure (e.g. fuel supply, banking, internet) becomes too dependent on a US controlled entity, it can and will be used for political leverage.
BREAKING: Zelensky says he has been betrayed by Trump, that Elon Musk and Trump deliberately blocked Starlink in Ukraine overnight and that people have been killed as a result. "I am sure they knew what they did, absolutely. Because it was 1am at night, Starlink was blocked by SpaceX and the United States," he tells Piers Morgan. "This decision will bring a lot of human losses. Of course, people will die." He said interceptors that rely on Starlink did not work, and that "this is not the right side of history." Asked if he is angry with Musk, Zelensky said yes, calling it a big mistake. "Now Putin is laughing because, I mean this is for him, simple victory," he says on the Trump-Russia diesel deal.
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Minister Nalinda Jayatissa says Ven. Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara Thera is being treated in accordance with the law under the Prisons Ordinance, without any special treatment. He said the same law and procedures applied to 63 other Buddhist monks currently serving prison sentences are being applied to Gnanasara Thera.
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History will be unforgiving. There was never any Mecca "alliance" to defend Gaza from a Zionist genocide. But an "alliance" paid by petro-sheikh funds is now deployed against Yemen - a MUSLIM nation.
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Ruvan W retweeted
In case you forgot: Gnanasara was stripped of his saffron robes in 2018, too, when he was jailed for contempt of court. He has conveniently forgotten that he had worn jail jumpers before. Worse still, people are reporting his claims without fact-checking them. Sadhu, sadhu.
Bodu Bala Sena General Secretary Ven. Galagoda Aththe Gnanasara Thera blamed the government for “removing his robes” after he was produced before court in the attire of a convicted prisoner, claiming that no previous government had done so.
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How is it that the presidential pardons granted to Duminda Silva and Gnanasara Thero have been struck down as unlawful, yet the pardon granted to Sunil Ratnayake has not been similarly overturned? Ratnayake was convicted of murdering eight Tamil civilians in the Mirusuvil massacre—including three children aged just 5, 13 and 15. The Colombo High Court sentenced him to death in 2015, and a five-judge bench of the Supreme Court unanimously upheld his conviction on 24 April 2019. This was not an unproven allegation. It was a conviction affirmed by the country’s highest court. Yet, in March 2020, Gotabaya Rajapaksa used presidential power to pardon him and secure his release. With one executive decision, accountability painstakingly secured through years of legal proceedings was swept aside. Legal challenges were filed, and the Supreme Court imposed a travel ban on Ratnayake in March 2025 while considering those challenges. But where is the final accountability the victims’ families deserve? We believe justice will be done. If presidential power cannot lawfully shield Duminda Silva or Gnanasara Thero from punishment, the public deserves to know why Ratnayake’s pardon has not met the same scrutiny and consequence & the delay for it. Are the lives of eight Tamil civilians worth less? Is justice different when the convicted killer wears a military uniform? The demand is not for execution. It is for lawful punishment, equal justice and an end to impunity. A presidential pardon must not become a licence to erase responsibility for the murder of children. #lka @MASumanthiran @ShanakiyanR @anuradisanayake @Dr_HariniA #mirusuvilmassacre
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ON ACADEMIC PUBLISHING I was recently asked to judge a competition in which undergraduates would use AI to generate a journal paper in five minutes. I politely declined. But the invitation got me thinking about academic publishing, and the pressure to produce papers, and what some great scientists had to say about it. Albert Einstein warned that "...an academic career compels a young man to scientific production, and only strong characters can resist the temptation of superficial analysis..." Peter Higgs (of boson fame), put it bluntly: "Today I wouldn’t get an academic job. It’s as simple as that. I don’t think I would be regarded as productive enough." Higgs also questioned whether the prevailing academic climate would have given him the peace and quiet he needed for his 1964 breakthrough. Personally, I think we should reward academic work that reflects deep, sustained thought, and give researchers the time to do it, even when that takes years. I know 5 minutes is an extreme. But I worry that the incentives in academia push us closer to the spirit of 5-minute competitions than than to the spirit of great minds like Einstein or Higgs.
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