Tuesday, June 27, 2023

27: Russia



Opinion: Victory for Ukraine could be closer than we thought Both President Vladimir Putin, and Russia itself, have been shown to be far weaker than they would like to pretend to be. The sight of Wagner columns apparently being waved through on their way to Moscow, and calmly breezing in to occupy a key military headquarters while holding coffees, has exploded the idea that Putin has a firm and unchallenged grip on power throughout his own country........ the ability of a group of armed insurrectionists to roam southern Russia unchallenged has highlighted the Russian state’s lack of capacity to deal with challenges beyond the front line of its war on Ukraine. ........ The opportunity for Ukraine lies, instead, in the effect this should have on its coalition of Western backers. .

Wagner leader Prigozhin begins Belarus exile Prigozhin is a creation of the Kremlin. Since he formed the Wagner mercenary group in 2014, he has become a key tool of Putin's desire to reimpose Russian influence across the globe. ....... Shoigu has had a plan he hoped would reduce his adversary's influence for good, announcing that "volunteer formations" would be asked to sign contracts directly with the ministry of defence.

Tesla May Have Already Won the Charging Wars Deals with Ford and G.M. will make it easier to find a charger but could give Elon Musk control of critical infrastructure. ........... In addition to selling more electric cars in the United States than all other automakers put together, Tesla operates the country’s largest fast-charging network. ............ Tesla has 19,700 charging ports across the United States at about 1,800 stations



AI is killing the old web, and the new web struggles to be born ChatGPT is being used to generate whole spam sites. Etsy is flooded with “AI-generated junk.” Chatbots cite one another in a misinformation ouroboros. LinkedIn is using AI to stimulate tired users. Snapchat and Instagram hope bots will talk to you when your friends don’t. Redditors are staging blackouts. Stack Overflow mods are on strike. The Internet Archive is fighting off data scrapers, and “AI is tearing Wikipedia apart.” ............ Given money and compute, AI systems — particularly the generative models currently in vogue — scale effortlessly. They produce text and images in abundance, and soon, music and video, too............ Reddit’s moderators are staging blackouts after the company said it would steeply increase charges to access its API, with the company’s execs saying the changes are (in part) a response to AI firms scraping its data. “The Reddit corpus of data is really valuable,” Reddit founder and CEO Steve Huffman told The New York Times. “But we don’t need to give all of that value to some of the largest companies in the world for free.” .............. Wikipedia is familiar with being scraped in this way. The company’s information has long been repurposed by Google to furnish “knowledge panels,” and in recent years, the search giant has started paying for this information. But Wikipedia’s moderators are debating how to use newly capable AI language models to write articles for the site itself. ............ Google Search underwrites the economy of the modern web, distributing attention and revenue to much of the internet. Google has been spurred into action by the popularity of Bing AI and ChatGPT as alternative search engines, and it’s experimenting with replacing its traditional 10 blue links with AI-generated summaries. But if the company goes ahead with this plan, then the changes would be seismic. ........... Google’s new system is essentially a “plagiarism engine.” Its AI-generated summaries often copy text from websites word-for-word but place this content above source links, starving them of traffic. ............... Revenue-strapped sites would likely be pushed out of business and Google itself would run out of human-generated content to repackage. ............ for all AI’s vaunted ability to recombine text, it’s people who ultimately create the underlying data — whether that’s journalists picking up the phone and checking facts or Reddit users who have had exactly that battery issue with the new DeWalt cordless ratchet and are happy to tell you how they fixed it ............. It’s fluent but not grounded in real-world experience, and so it takes time and expertise to unpick. ............ There’s a famous essay in the field of machine learning known as “The Bitter Lesson,” which notes that decades of research prove that the best way to improve AI systems is not by trying to engineer intelligence but by simply throwing more computer power and data at the problem. The lesson is bitter because it shows that machine scale beats human curation. And the same might be true of the web. .............. the web itself killed what came before it, and often for the better. Printed encyclopedias are all but extinct, for example, but I prefer the breadth and accessibility of Wikipedia to the heft and reassurance of Encyclopedia Britannica.

If Biden Wanted to Ease U.S.-China Tensions, Would Americans Let Him? In polls, Americans’ views of China are starting to resemble their views of the Soviet Union decades ago. That could make it harder to mend ties. ........ Polls show striking similarities between the hostility, pessimism and militarism in Americans’ views of the Soviet Union during the late 1940s run-up to the Cold War, and how they view China today. While the parallels remain limited and the contexts different, this could complicate attempts to avert a Cold War-like clash. ........ By 1946, three-quarters of Americans disapproved of Soviet foreign policy. ......... In 1948, as the Soviets blockaded West Berlin, most Americans thought the U.S. should keep troops there even if it risked war. Today, most prioritize preventing an invasion of Taiwan over maintaining good relations with China, sending it weapons if China invades and using the U.S. Navy to thwart a blockade. By 1949, nearly half of Americans thought it was “just a matter of time” before the U.S. went to war with the Soviets. Today, two-thirds see Chinese military power as a “critical threat” to the U.S. over the next decade. ......... Chinese public opinion — which has become similarly negative and hawkish toward the U.S. under Mr. Xi — may also impede de-escalation. Academic research suggests that public opinion can drive leaders’ decision-making even in countries where politicians aren’t democratically elected. “There’s this public outcry for leaders to do something,” Mr. Kertzer said. “And then you end up in a situation where escalation on one side leads to escalation on the other.”......... “The conception at the macro level is that we are really in a serious competition,” Mr. Herrmann said. “Now the public has followed. And it’s not like you can turn this ship around overnight.”

Indian minister scoffs at Obama comment on protecting Muslims "He was commenting on Indian Muslims ... having bombed Muslim-majority countries from Syria to Yemen ... during his presidency," Sitharaman told a press conference on Sunday.

How To Write Effective Prompts For ChatGPT: 7 Essential Steps For Best Results . Without knowing how to prompt ChatGPT effectively it will remain a novelty tool with no real value. You’ll create generic mediocrity, not masterpieces worthy of sharing. You’ll waste more time than you save. The novelty factor will soon wear off and you’ll be back at the drawing board running your business the manual way. ......... “creating good prompts is easy when you follow the right framework and take out the guesswork” ........ “creating good prompts is easy when you follow the right framework and take out the guesswork” ........ Assign a role ....... Give a clear, descriptive, and accurate task ......... Provide context......... Large language models are capable of processing copious amounts of data. Unlike a human, who might make notes and forget about most of them, a model will process requests and handle every bit of information. Make the most of this power in your prompts. .......... Create rules ....... Garbage in, garbage out. Genius in, genius out. Learn how to prompt ChatGPT effectively to unlock a new level of output and stop wasting your time.

‘All bets are off’: An uncertain future after Wagner mutiny Speculation abounds on social media, but experts warn against drawing conclusions on the fate of the Wagner Group. ....... Prigozhin’s deal with Belarus does not necessarily guarantee his safety........ “It’s not possible for the Kremlin to marginalise Wagner,” he said. “Russia and Vladimir Putin depend on and, in fact, need the Wagner Group to carry out Russian foreign policy, not just in Ukraine, but around the world, in Libya, Syria, the Central African Republic, Mali and elsewhere.”



How Can ChatGPT Suggest Ways To Use Affiliate Marketing To Generate Leads And Sales?
How Can ChatGPT Provide Guidance On How To Use Customer Personas To Create Targeted Marketing Campaigns?
How Can ChatGPT Help Create And Manage A Customer Feedback Program?
How Can ChatGPT Provide Recommendations For Creating Effective Product Descriptions?
How Can ChatGPT Help Create And Implement A Social Media Content Calendar?

No comments: