Sunday, March 19, 2023

19: Russia

Is the United States Creating a ‘Legion of Doom’? The emerging China-Russia-Iran axis may force the United States to choose between some unappealing options.
Paul Krugman: Three and a half myths about bank bailouts The fallout from banking problems has made a murky economic situation even murkier.
SAY GOODBYE TO CODING: MICROSOFT LAUNCHES POWER PLATFORM COPILOT

The forgotten maths genius who laid the foundations for Isaac Newton A new play explores the short life of Jeremiah Horrocks, whose astonishing discoveries ‘changed the way we see the universe’

The Lessons of the Great Depression Are Being Ignored FDR would have hated the fix to today’s banking crisis.
Opinion: ICC arrest warrant for Putin is a stunning statement

How AI could upend the world even more than electricity or the internet AGI -- defined as artificial intelligence with human cognitive abilities, as opposed to more narrow artificial intelligence, such as the headline-grabbing ChatGPT -- could free people from menial tasks and usher in a new era of creativity....... OpenAI, the company behind the generative software that churns out essays, poems and computing code on command, this week released an even more powerful version of the tech that operates it -- GPT-4. ....... Already, AI-infused digital assistants from Microsoft and Google can summarize meetings, draft emails, create websites, craft ad campaigns and more -- giving us a glimpse of what AGI will be capable of in the future. ...... With artificial intelligence Spataro wants to "rediscover the soul of work" ..... he used GPT-4 for a coding project, which a "very good" developer had told him would cost 5,000 pounds ($6,000) and take two weeks. ..... "GPT-4 delivered the same in 3 hours, for $0.11"



Devs can talk to GPT and describe the app they want to create. Copilot can then build it in seconds and suggest tips to improve it. ...... With Power Platform Copilot, all devs need to do is describe the app using simple natural language. Once that is done, Power Apps will build the app. By this, we mean that it will not only write code for the UI but also create the data table and business logic. ........ For instance, if a user tells Power Apps to “create a worker onboarding app, get new worker data and share training content and learning modules,” Copilot can create the app in one breach. ........ With Power Automate Copilot, processes can be created using natural language no matter what complexity the requirements have. Also, Copilot can optimize and update the process in a dialogue-based manner. ........ users can also use the GPT model to generate text content on the Power Automate Desktop. The new Azure OpenAI service in AI Builder can now be used in Power Automate Desktop.

His work proved, for the first time, that Earth is not at the centre of the universe, but revolves around the sun, refuting contemporary religious beliefs and laying the foundations for Isaac Newton’s groundbreaking work on gravity. ....... “Nobody understood the significance of Horrocks’s work until Newton picked it up” ...... In 1687, Newton acknowledged the importance of Horrocks’s observations in his Principia: “Newton wouldn’t have been able to complete his work on gravity, if Horrocks hadn’t done these observations at the time he did,” said Sear. “Newton relied on this earlier work.” ......... “At the age of 14 or 15 – no one’s quite sure – he walked to Cambridge from Lancashire, to study the stars.” ....... The son of a watchmaker, who was largely self-taught, Horrocks worked as a sizar while studying at Cambridge, serving his fellow students and even emptying their bedpans to pay his way. “He begged and borrowed books from the various Cambridge colleges, and left without a degree, probably because he’d run out of things to read,” said Sear. “We would be looking at him as some kind of child phenomenon today. At his age, understanding the maths he did, making these amazing observations on rudimentary telescopes and then drawing conclusions that overturned established religious and scientific beliefs about the nature of the universe – he was a genius and 400 years ahead of his time.” ....... “he committed the sin of dying young”. ...... and so was not publicly lauded for his discoveries the way Kepler and Galileo were. .

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov called the ICC’s move “outrageous and unacceptable,” dismissing the warrants as “null and void” for Russia. ........ When the International Criminal Court (ICC) announced on Friday that it had issued arrest warrants for Russian President Vladimir Putin and another key Russian official for charges related to an alleged scheme to forcibly deport thousands of Ukrainian children to Russia, it also effectively placed Putin’s name on a short list alongside some of the most brutal leaders the world has seen since the end of World War II. With that, it branded him before the entire world — including the Russian people — as an international pariah, potentially guilty of historically egregious crimes......... Only three sitting heads of state have faced ICC charges while in office. The other two were the late Libyan leader Moammar Gadhafi and Sudan’s former President Omar al-Bashir, both accused of horrifying crimes against their own people. ....... Putin is now an accused — not convicted — war criminal. ....... By most accounts, he enjoys the support of most Russians. Perhaps this will give some of them reason to reconsider. But one day, the Russian people will look beyond the propaganda they’ve been fed, and they will understand the horror of what’s been perpetrated in their name. ........ There’s almost no chance that Putin will face an ICC tribunal in The Hague anytime soon. As Peskov reiterated in his statement, Russia does not recognize the ICC’s jurisdiction, and as long as Putin is president, he’s likely to remain free. But, unless he faces the court and then somehow manages to clear his name — an outcome that is doubly unlikely — he will forever bear the branding of an accused war criminal. ......... Putin, along with Maria Lvova-Belova, his “Commissioner for Children’s Rights,” are now formally accused of violating the laws of war by forcibly removing Ukrainian children and deporting them to Russia. In the ICC’s words, they are “allegedly responsible for the war crime of unlawful deportation of population (children) and that of unlawful transfer of population (children) from occupied areas of Ukraine.” The arrest warrant states that there are “reasonable grounds to believe Mr. Putin bears individual criminal responsibility for the aforementioned crimes.” ........ Russia has allegedly been removing children from Ukraine and placing them in relocation camps inside Russia and in Russian homes. Lvova-Belova has been instrumental in carrying out the policy, which is not being conducted in secret. In fact, she publicly thanked Putin for making it possible for her, personally, to adopt a child from Donbas, a Russian-occupied area of Ukraine. ........ The Russian government claims it’s all practically a humanitarian move, aimed at saving Ukrainian children in a war zone. The ICC says it’s a violation of the Geneva Conventions. ICC prosecutors, Ukrainian authorities and groups focusing on locating the children say it’s part of Putin’s concerted effort to erase Ukraine’s nationhood. US and European officials say the children spend time in a network of dozens of camps where they undergo political reeducation, an effort to turn them into Russian citizens. ...... Ukrainian parents are desperately trying to get their children back. ....... These are just the first two arrest warrants over only one aspect of Russia’s assault on Ukraine ....... Putin’s ability to travel is now severely restricted, as more than 120 signatory countries to the Rome Statute creating the ICC are now required to arrest him if he sets foot in their territory. ....... a small rogue’s gallery of 20th century war-mongers, monsters to many of their people and their neighbors, went from feeling perfectly secure in their palaces to facing a tribunal in The Hague after they lost power at home. .

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