China And India

America’s Bad Bet on India New Delhi Won’t Side With Washington Against Beijing ......... India’s significant weaknesses compared with China, and its inescapable proximity to it, guarantee that New Delhi will never involve itself in any U.S. confrontation with Beijing that does not directly threaten its own security. ....... New Delhi sees things differently. It does not harbor any innate allegiance toward preserving the liberal international order and retains an enduring aversion toward participating in mutual defense. It seeks to acquire advanced technologies from the United States to bolster its own economic and military capabilities and thus facilitate its rise as a great power capable of balancing China independently, but it does not presume that American assistance imposes any further obligations on itself. ........ U.S.-Indian security cooperation today is breathtaking in its intensity and scope. The first and most visible aspect is defense consultations. The two countries’ civilian leaders, as well as their bureaucracies, maintain a regular dialogue on a variety of topics, including China policy, India’s procurement of advanced U.S. military technologies, maritime surveillance, and undersea warfare. These conversations vary in quality and depth but are critical for reviewing strategic assessments, defining the parameters of desired cooperation, and devising tools for policy implementation. As a result, the United States and India work together in ways that would have been unimaginable during the Cold War. ......... they cooperate to monitor China’s economic and military activities throughout the wider Indian Ocean region and have recently invested in mechanisms to share near-real-time information about shipping movements in the Indo-Pacific region with other littoral states. ......... A second area of success has been military-to-military collaboration, much of which takes place outside public view. The programs for senior officer visits, bilateral or multilateral military exercises, and reciprocal military training have all expanded dramatically during the past two decades. ........ the annual Malabar exercises, which bring together the U.S. and Indian navies, have now expanded to permanently include Japan and Australia; the Cope India exercises provide an opportunity for the U.S. and Indian air forces to practice advanced air operations; and the Yudh Abhyas series involves the land forces in both command post and field training activities. .......... India’s military has gone from having virtually no U.S. weapons in its inventory some two decades ago to now featuring American transport and maritime aircraft, utility and combat helicopters, and antiship missiles and artillery guns. U.S.-Indian defense trade, which was negligible around the turn of the century, reached over $20 billion in 2020. .......... U.S. companies remain contenders in several outstanding Indian procurement programs, but it seems unlikely that they will ever enjoy a dominant market share in India’s defense imports. The problems are entirely structural. For all of India’s intensifying security threats, its defense procurement budget is still modest in comparison with the overall Western market. ............ New Delhi’s demand that U.S. companies shift from selling equipment to producing it with local partners in India—requiring the transfer of intellectual property—often proves to be commercially unattractive, given the small Indian defense market. ......... The U.S. goal in military-to-military cooperation is interoperability: the Pentagon wants to be able to integrate a foreign military in combined operations as part of coalition warfare. India, however, rejects the idea that its armed forces will participate in any combined military operation outside of a UN umbrella. Consequently, it has resisted investing in meaningful operational integration, especially with the U.S. armed forces, because it fears jeopardizing its political autonomy or signaling a shift toward a tight political alignment with Washington. As a result, the bilateral military exercises may improve the tactical proficiency of the units involved but do not expand interoperability to the level that would be required in major combined operations against a capable adversary. ........... India treats military exercises more as political symbols than investments in increasing operational proficiency and, as a result, practices with numerous partners at varying levels of sophistication. On the other hand, the United States emphasizes relatively intense military exercises with a smaller set of counterparts. ......... bolstering India’s intelligence capabilities about Chinese military activities along the Himalayan border and in the Indian Ocean region .......... The existing arrangements for intelligence sharing are formally structured for reciprocity, and New Delhi does share whatever it believes to be useful. But because U.S. collection capabilities are so superior, the flow of usable information often ends up being one way. ........ Under Prime Minister Narendra Modi, India has increasingly focused on defense industrial cooperation as the key driver of its security partnership with the United States. Its underlying objective is to secure technological autonomy: ever since its founding as a modern state, India has sought to achieve mastery over all critical defense, dual-use, and civilian technologies and, toward that end, built up large public sector enterprises that were intended to become global leaders. Because this dream still remains unrealized, New Delhi has now prioritized Washington’s support for its defense industrial ambitions in tandem with similar partnerships forged with France, Israel, Russia, and other friendly states. ............ For over a decade, Washington has attempted to help India improve its defense technology base, but these efforts have often proved futile. ......... The Biden administration is now going to great lengths to reverse the failure of the Defense Trade and Technology Initiative. Last year, it announced the Initiative on Critical and Emerging Technology, which aims to fundamentally transform cooperation between the two countries’ governments, businesses, and research entities pertaining to technology development. This endeavor encompasses a wide variety of fields, including semiconductors, space, artificial intelligence, next-generation telecommunications, high-performance computing, and quantum technologies, all of which have defense applications but are not restricted to them. ........ Modi’s “Make in India, Make for World” drive, which aims to transform India into a major global manufacturing hub that could one day compete with, if not supplant, China as the workshop of the world. ........... During the Bush and Obama administrations, U.S. ambitions centered largely on helping build India’s power in order to prevent China from dominating Asia. As U.S.-China relations steadily deteriorated during the Trump administration—when Sino-Indian relations hit rock bottom as well—Washington began to entertain the more expansive notion that its support for New Delhi would gradually induce India to play a greater military role in containing China’s growing power. .......... Although China is clearly India’s most intimidating adversary, New Delhi still seeks to avoid doing anything that results in an irrevocable rupture with Beijing. ............. New Delhi’s relative weakness compels it to avoid provoking Beijing, as joining a U.S.-led military campaign against it certainly would. India also cannot escape its physical proximity to China. The two countries share a long border, so Beijing can threaten Indian security in significant ways—a capability that has only increased in recent years. ............ Should a major conflict between Washington and Beijing erupt in East Asia or the South China Sea, India would certainly want the United States to prevail. But it is unlikely to embroil itself in the fight. ........... Even as this partnership has grown by leaps and bounds, there remains an unbridgeable gap between the two countries, given India’s consistent desire to avoid becoming the junior partner—or even a confederate—of any great power. .

Three of the biggest bank failures in US history happened in the last 100 days, yet majority of Americans don't know a single thing happened.

Weird times.

— Pomp 🌪 (@APompliano) May 1, 2023

28: India

28: ChatGPT

Watch an A.I. Learn to Write by Reading Nothing but Shakespeare They are trained by going through mountains of internet text, repeatedly guessing the next few letters and then grading themselves against the real thing. ........ The largest language models are trained on over a terabyte of internet text, containing hundreds of billions of words. Their training costs millions of dollars and involves calculations that take weeks or even months on hundreds of specialized computers. ........ They learn statistical patterns that piece words together into sentences and paragraphs. ........ our model has learned which letters are most frequently used in the text. You’ll see a lot of the letter “e” because that is the most common letter in English. .......... It usually doesn’t copy and paste sentences verbatim; instead, BabyGPT stitches them together, letter by letter, based on statistical patterns that it has learned from the data. ......... They can learn the form of a sonnet or a limerick, or how to code in various programming languages.

Generative because it generates words.

Pre-trained because it’s trained on a bunch of text. This step is called pre-training because many language models (like the one behind ChatGPT) go through important additional stages of training known as fine-tuning to make them less toxic and easier to interact with.

Transformers are a relatively recent breakthrough in how neural networks are wired. They were introduced in a 2017 paper by Google researchers, and are used in many of the latest A.I. advancements, from text generation to image creation.

Transformers improved upon the previous generation of neural networks — known as recurrent neural networks — by including steps that process the words of a sentence in parallel, rather than one at a time. This made them much faster.

GPT-3 was trained on up to a million times as many words as the models in this article. Scaling up to that size is a huge technical undertaking, but the underlying principles remain the same.......... As language models grow in size, they are known to develop surprising new abilities, such as the ability to answer questions, summarize text, explain jokes, continue a pattern and correct bugs in computer code. ........... Some researchers have termed these “emergent abilities” because they arise unexpectedly at a certain size and are not programmed in by hand. The A.I. researcher Sam Bowman has likened training a large language model to “buying a mystery box,” because it is difficult to predict what skills it will gain during its training, and when these skills will emerge. ............... They are also prone to inventing facts and reasoning incorrectly. Researchers do not yet understand how these models generate language, and they struggle to steer their behavior. .

Peering Into the Future of Novels, With Trained Machines Ready Who wrote it, the novelist or the technology? How about both? Stephen Marche experiments with teaching artificial intelligence to write with him, not for him. ........ The journalist and author Stephen Marche wrote “Death of an Author” using three artificial intelligence programs. Or three artificial intelligence programs wrote it with extensive plotting and prompting from Stephen Marche. It depends on how you look at it. .......... “I am the creator of this work, 100 percent,” Marche said, “but, on the other hand, I didn’t create the words.” .......... He asked if Marche was interested in using the technology to produce a murder mystery. The result of that collaboration is “Death of Author,” in which an author who uses A.I. extensively winds up dead. ......... To coax the story from his laptop, Marche used three programs, starting with ChatGPT. He ran an outline of the plot through the software, along with numerous prompts and notes. While A.I. was good at many things, especially dialogue, he said, its plots were terrible. .......... Next, he used Sudowrite, asking the program to make a sentence longer or shorter, to adopt a more conversational tone or to make the writing sound like Ernest Hemingway’s. Then he used Cohere to create what he called the best lines in the book. If he wanted to describe the smell of coffee, he trained the program with examples and then asked it to generate similes until he found one he liked. ......... “To me, the process was a bit akin to hip-hop,” he said. “If you’re making hip-hop, you don’t necessarily know how to drum, but you definitely need to know how beats work, how hooks work, and you need to be able to put them together in a meaningful way.” .

How big is your team? Do all team members use ChatGPT? Have they fully integrated it into all your operations? Are your goals now at least two times bigger? My course gets you an yes to each of those questions.

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) April 28, 2023

I can see your venture is data-heavy. With the correct integration of ChatGPT, your team would be crunching data like a reflex action.

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) April 28, 2023

(2) Even if most of them are using it, that is a good sign. Very good. (3) Can do it to all business processes (4) This tells me you are not doing it right. You are not taking a holistic approach. You have to now reimagine all of your processes and 2X ambition (5) Good idea.

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) April 28, 2023

You look like a future billionaire.

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) April 28, 2023

Africa needs hundreds of future billionaires. Africa is the next China.

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) April 28, 2023

Your landing page needs a chatbot quick.

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) April 28, 2023

Edmund, I just saw this: https://t.co/IDVQgAlchc We have a meeting of minds. :)

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) April 28, 2023

It just dawned on me that anyone observing us from beyond the Milky Way will be seeing Earth before the emergence of human beings.

— Haroon (@haroon) April 28, 2023

Heat Waves In India

Petteri Orpo defeats Sanna Marin in Finland election. Now what? Center-right leader faces tricky path to build governing coalition. ....... The National Coalition Party (NCP) secured 48 of 200 parliamentary seats versus 43 for the Social Democrats, with the anti-immigration Finns Party securing second place with 46 seats. ........ For the European left, waking up to the loss of Marin was a blow. As a high-profile Social Democrat, she earned widespread praise over the past four years for her handling of the pandemic and adept response to the Ukraine crisis, including Finland’s dramatic pivot toward NATO. .......... But her ultimate failure to sell left-leaning economic policies to the Finnish electorate — for example, seeking growth through investment rather than cuts — will be noted in Europe. Swedish Social Democrat Magdalena Andersson failed to secure a second term in elections last fall, while Denmark’s Mette Frederiksen only won reelection in November after a series of sharp-right policy turns. ........... Even before the election was settled, some colleagues in Finland were suggesting she could seek a new challenge at the European Commission, possibly even as the Left group’s candidate for president. ....... a Finnish convention that offers the winning party the first chance to form a coalition — even if that lead consists of only two seats. .

Global warming is killing Indians and Pakistanis Annual heatwaves on the poor and crowded Indo-Gangetic Plain are a horrific consequence of climate change ............ In the opening scenes of “The Ministry for the Future”, the novelist Kim Stanley Robinson imagines what happens to a small Indian town hit by a heatwave. Streets empty as normal activity becomes impossible. Air-conditioned rooms fill with silent fugitives from the heat. Rooftops are littered with the corpses of people sleeping outside in search of a non-existent breath of wind. The electricity grid, then law and order, break down. Like a medieval vision of hell, the local lake fills with half-poached bodies. Across north India, 20m die in a week............. The Indo-Gangetic Plain, which extends from the spine of Pakistan through northern India to the deltas of Bangladesh, is home to 700m people and exceptionally vulnerable to the heat pulses that climate change is making more frequent. It is one of the hottest, poorest and most populous places on earth .......... Between 2000 and 2019, South Asia saw over 110,000 excess deaths a year due to rising temperatures .......... Last year’s hot season, which runs from March until the arrival of the monsoon in late May or early June, was one of the most extreme and economically disruptive on record. This year’s could rival it. ......... above-average temperatures and heatwaves until the end of May. ......... Despite a relatively cool March, the coming weeks could be perilously hot. ........ Scientists record heat stress as a combination of temperature and humidity, known as a “wet-bulb” measurement. As this combined level approaches body temperature, 37°C, it becomes increasing hard for mammals to shed heat through perspiration. At a wet-bulb temperature of around 31°C, dangerously little sweat can evaporate into the soup-like air. Brain damage and heart and kidney failure become increasingly likely. Sustained exposure to a temperature of 35°C, the level Mr Robinson imagines in his book, is considered fatal. ........... India could become one of the first places where wet-bulb temperatures routinely exceed the 35°C survivability threshold. ......... The magnifying effect of the built urban environment, which can be 2°C hotter than nearby rural areas, is often especially pronounced in India’s concrete jungles. Those living in slum housing, which offer little air circulation and often use heat-sucking materials such as tin, suffer the worst of it. ........... “vast regions of South Asia are projected to experience [wet-bulb temperature] episodes exceeding 31°C, which is considered extremely dangerous for most humans” ........

India loses 101bn man hours per year to extreme heat, and Pakistan 13bn

......... In 2017, heat-exposed work accounted for 50% of India’s gdp and employed 75% of the labour force, or some 380m. ......... warn people of extreme temperatures, advise them to stay indoors and drink lots of water, and put emergency services on high alert. .

The Indian Premier League is taking over global cricket India’s lucrative domestic contest is strangling international contests .

We are living through a trillion-dollar rebalancing Beneath a veil of silence, a hugely dramatic and powerful episode of financial repression is ongoing ...... There is nothing more inevitable than death, taxes and bank failures. But what about the bailouts? ........ we have entered a new era, one in which thoroughgoing liquidation of financial bubbles is politically unthinkable and so moral hazard and zombie balance sheets pile up. ....... Put them together and you have a vision of ever larger balance sheets, inevitable crisis and no less inevitable bailout, opening the path to even greater leverage and risk. ......... mega-quantitative easing in response to the truly unprecedented shock of the Covid-19 lockdowns. ............ We would not be here but for the pandemic. ..........

the trillion-dollar balance sheet shift from bond investor to bond issuers triggered by the post-Covid pile-up of inflation and interest rate rises.

......... We need public investment so as to escape the reactive cycle we are locked in and to begin anticipating the challenges of the polycrisis, whether in public health, climate change or destabilising geopolitics......... Those in the bottom half of income and wealth distribution are bystanders in the great balance-sheet reshuffle. They hold few, if any, financial assets and pay relatively little tax. They have lived the drama of Covid and its aftermath as a shock to jobs and a cost of living crisis. Unlike bondholders or investors, their interests are not represented by lobbyists. Their households are not too big to fail. .

1: India

18: India

13: India

This Changes Everything . “A.I. is probably the most important thing humanity has ever worked on. I think of it as something more profound than electricity or fire.” ....... What is hardest to appreciate in A.I. is the improvement curve. ....... I find myself thinking back to the early days of Covid. There were weeks when it was clear that lockdowns were coming, that the world was tilting into crisis, and yet normalcy reigned, and you sounded like a loon telling your family to stock up on toilet paper. ....... There is a natural pace to human deliberation. A lot breaks when we are denied the luxury of time. ......... the people working on A.I. ...... a community that is living with an altered sense of time and consequence. They are creating a power that they do not understand at a pace they often cannot believe. ......... Would you work on a technology you thought had a 10 percent chance of wiping out humanity? ...... They believe they might summon demons. They are calling anyway. ........ This was true among cryptocurrency enthusiasts in recent years. The claims they made about how blockchains would revolutionize everything from money to governance to trust to dating never made much sense. But they were believed most fervently by those closest to the code. ......... Crypto was always a story about an unlikely future searching for traction in the present. With A.I., to imagine the future you need only look closely at the present. ........ In 2021, a system built by DeepMind managed to predict the 3-D structure of tens of thousands of proteins, an advance so remarkable that the editors of the journal Science named it their breakthrough of the year. ....... “Within two months of downloading Replika, Denise Valenciano, a 30-year-old woman in San Diego, left her boyfriend and is now ‘happily retired from human relationships’” ........ Could it help terrorists or antagonistic states develop lethal weapons and crippling cyber attacks? ........ These systems will already offer guidance on building biological weapons if you ask them cleverly enough. ........ A.I. is already being used for predictive policing and judicial sentencing. ........ The “thinking,” for lack of a better word, is utterly inhuman, but we have trained it to present as deeply human. And the more inhuman the systems get — the more billions of connections they draw and layers and parameters and nodes and computing power they acquire — the more human they seem to us. .......... “as A.I. continues to blow past us in benchmark after benchmark of higher cognition, we quell our anxiety by insisting that what distinguishes true consciousness is emotions, perception, the ability to experience and feel: the qualities, in other words, that we share with animals.” ......... The major tech companies are in a race for A.I. dominance. The U.S. and China are in a race for A.I. dominance. Money is gushing toward companies with A.I. expertise. ....... Slowing down “would involve coordinating numerous people .

The Return of the Magicians people talk increasingly about the limits of the scientific endeavor — the increasing impediments to discovering new ideas, the absence of low-hanging scientific fruit, the near impossibility, given the laws of physics as we understand them, of ever spreading human civilization beyond our lonely planet or beyond our isolated solar system. ....... — namely, beings that can enlighten us, elevate us, serve us and usher in the Age of Aquarius, the Singularity or both. ........... a golem, more the embodied spirit of all the words on the internet than a coherent self with independent goals. .......... With the emergent forms of A.I., they argue, we have created an intelligence that can yield answers the way an oracle might or a Magic 8 Ball: through processes that are invisible to us, permanently beyond our understanding, so complex as to be indistinguishable from action in a supernatural mind. ...... the A.I. revolution represents a fundamental break with Enlightenment science, which “was trusted because each step of replicable experimental processes was also tested, hence trusted.” .......... the spirit might be disobedient, destructive, a rampaging Skynet bent on our extermination. ....... we would be wise to fear apparent obedience as well. .

Should GPT exist? Gary Marcus asks about Microsoft, “what did they know, and when did they know it?”—a question I tend to associate more with deadly chemical spills or high-level political corruption than with a cheeky, back-talking chatbot. ........ in reality it’s merely a “stochastic parrot,” a glorified autocomplete that still makes laughable commonsense errors and that lacks any model of reality outside streams of text. ....... If you need months to think things over, generative AI probably isn’t for you right now. I’ll be relieved to get back to the slow-paced, humdrum world of quantum computing. ....... if OpenAI couldn’t even prevent ChatGPT from entering an “evil mode” when asked, despite all its efforts at Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback, then what hope do we have for GPT-6 or GPT-7? ....... Even if they don’t destroy the world on their own initiative, won’t they cheerfully help some awful person build a biological warfare agent or start a nuclear war? ......... a classic example being nuclear weapons. But, like, nuclear weapons kill millions of people. They could’ve had many civilian applications—powering turbines and spacecraft, deflecting asteroids, redirecting the flow of rivers—but they’ve never been used for any of that, mostly because our civilization made an explicit decision in the 1960s, for example via the test ban treaty, not to normalize their use. ........

GPT is not exactly a nuclear weapon. A hundred million people have signed up to use ChatGPT, in the fastest product launch in the history of the Internet. ... the ChatGPT death toll stands at zero

....... The science that we could learn from a GPT-7 or GPT-8, if it continued along the capability curve we’ve come to expect from GPT-1, -2, and -3. Holy mackerel. ....... I was a pessimist about climate change, ocean acidification, deforestation, drought, war, and the survival of liberal democracy. The central event in my mental life is and always will be the Holocaust. I see encroaching darkness everywhere. .......... it’s amazing at poetry, better than most of us. .

The False Promise of Chomskyism . .
Why am I not terrified of AI? “I’m scared about AI destroying the world”—an idea now so firmly within the Overton Window that Henry Kissinger gravely ponders it in the Wall Street Journal? ....... I think it’s entirely plausible that, even as AI transforms civilization, it will do so in the form of tools and services that can no more plot to annihilate us than can Windows 11 or the Google search bar......... the young field of AI safety will still be extremely important, but it will be broadly continuous with aviation safety and nuclear safety and cybersecurity and so on, rather than being a desperate losing war against an incipient godlike alien. ........ In the Orthodox AI-doomers’ own account, the paperclip-maximizing AI would’ve mastered the nuances of human moral philosophy far more completely than any human—the better to deceive the humans, en route to extracting the iron from their bodies to make more paperclips. And yet the AI would never once use all that learning to question its paperclip directive. ........ from this decade onward, I expect AI to be woven into everything that happens in human civilization ........ Trump might never have been elected in 2016 if not for the Facebook recommendation algorithm, and after Trump’s conspiracy-fueled insurrection and the continuing strength of its unrepentant backers, many would classify the United States as at best a failing or teetering democracy, no longer a robust one like Finland or Denmark ....... I come down in favor right now of proceeding with AI research … with extreme caution, but proceeding.

The Chomsky et al. opinion piece in the @nytimes about ChatGPT is making the rounds. Rather than trying to deconstruct their argument, I asked @bing what it thinks of it.

Now you can judge for yourself who has the moral high ground 😂. pic.twitter.com/itdh1VOatl

— Sebastien Bubeck (@SebastienBubeck) March 10, 2023

Planning for AGI and beyond Our mission is to ensure that artificial general intelligence—AI systems that are generally smarter than humans—benefits all of humanity.

Rahul Gandhi

I just did. On yours.

— Paramendra Kumar Bhagat (@paramendra) March 9, 2023

5 profiles for the Just Go Grind newsletter so far:

- Sam Altman of OpenAI
- Melanie Perkins of Canva
- Tope Awotona of Calendly
- Ooshma Garg of Gobble
- Ryan Petersen of Flexport

And I'm featuring an amazing woman Sunday who founded a $1B+ startup

Guess who?

— Justin Gordon (@justingordon212) March 9, 2023

In a startup, raw output matters way more than optics, but strong optics unlocks the cultural capital to achieve more output.

— Kyle Tibbitts (@KyleTibbitts) March 9, 2023

Happy International Women’s Day to everyone across the world! Here’s to a world that values women's work, health, and equality. Where women earn equal pay and have an equal say in every decision making body. #IHaveADream pic.twitter.com/xxjGqOG6z0

— Assemblywoman Jenifer Rajkumar (@JeniferRajkumar) March 9, 2023

बझाग-झापासम्म भारु नेरु १३०-१५५मा खरिद बिक्रि हुदैछःक्यासिनोले?नेपालका सीमा बजारमा मदिरा सेवन र विवाहका समारोहले,हुण्डिले,यताको धान उता अनुदानमा बेचेर,उताको अनुदानको ग्यास र मल यता बिक्रिले? सीमामा दुबैतिरका सुरक्षा र कर्मचारीको मिलोमतोमा ठुलो अबैध ब्यापार,नेपाली राजश्व स्वाहा🤔

— Govind Raj Pokharel 🇳🇵 (@grpokharel) March 9, 2023

I don’t know what’s happening with the bay bridge right now but it is total gridlock in downtown SF. No one is getting to east bay. Horns blaring. Total standstill

— Peggy Mangot (@peggymangot) March 8, 2023

I’m ready for the next crypto bull. Crypto people are so fratty & fun. All you have to do is buy some stuff and you’re in the cult.

The AI people are snobby and intellectual. You have to go to Stanford & have worked at Scale. Much less inclusive, much less fun.

— Samuel Spitz (hiring SWEs!) (@samuel_spitz) March 9, 2023

Do you ever work all day... for so many days... that you feel yourself turning into a robot?

What do you do to turn yourself back into a human?

— James Mishra (@rishmishra) March 9, 2023

When will Congress make schools safe for our kids? pic.twitter.com/se9CCoQpgd

— Peter Lombard (@tutticontenti) March 8, 2023

Open editions result in incredible participation, but it's hard to engage with your collectors when the drop ends!

We're trying to fix this with Subscribe to Mint! https://t.co/AkKSzmXe7e

— nis.eth (@Iiterature) March 8, 2023

1/ Introducing ✨Subscribe to Mint ✨

A new way for creators to transform their collectors into an engaged web3 community. pic.twitter.com/9DCUN5Zapo

— Mirror (@viamirror) March 8, 2023

2/ Subscribe to Mint works like an open edition drop, but with a Mirror-native twist.

In order to mint, a collector needs to subscribe to your project via email.

It's a powerful way for creators to bootstrap a communication channel to engage collectors on a recurring basis.

— Mirror (@viamirror) March 8, 2023

Introducing Subscribe to Mint . In order to mint, a collector needs to subscribe to a creator’s Mirror publication with their email, bootstrapping a communication channel for creators to engage collectors on a recurring basis.

Introducing Web3 Subscriptions Mirror takes subscriptions a step further by centering it around a web3 wallet, rather than an email address. We believe wallets are the fundamental representation of identity in web3, and creators will want to build a community represented by wallets rather than emails. A "hello world" post, whitepaper, or manifesto that marks the genesis of any important project on Mirror can now enable its audience to subscribe, creating a social and economic link between community and project. ......... Socially, wallets are evolving into the means by which everyone in web3 communicates, interacts, and follows each other. Blurring the lines between social and economic identity presents a completely new design space with enormous opportunities for the next generation of social applications. At Mirror, our mission is to build great publishing tools at this junction. ......... For creators and projects that don't yet have a community of wallets, we believe publishing on Mirror should be the first step in that direction. Every big idea that sparks a movement begins with a story, and now it can inspire a reader to subscribe and join yours. ........... Twitter just wasn’t the right place for that. Mirror is the right place to engage with an on-chain community at scale, because it is purposefully built to be. On Mirror, you could generate the same level of attention, but the end result will be the foundation of your community, all starting with the delivery of your post directly to their inboxes.

को बन्लान् राष्ट्रपति ? https://t.co/ofYeEahNyE

— Annapurna Post (@Annapurna_Post) March 9, 2023

it's amazing how much you can get done when you put your phone out of sight / out of mind

— Meagan Loyst 🧚‍♀️ (@meaganloyst) March 8, 2023

tiktok is literally my enemy when it comes to productivity

— Meagan Loyst 🧚‍♀️ (@meaganloyst) March 8, 2023

Well, I do 70% of my SaaS business work on the phone and on the go …go meaning between bedroom and bathroom haha. 😃

— 👋 Arjun Rai | 👉$99+/year at HelloWoofy.com (@arjunraime) March 9, 2023

In college I worked with a Soviet-trained mathematician. Her university had a single PC in the mid 80's, not connecting to anything. It was chained to a desk and guarded 24/7 by KGB thugs with Kalashnikovs.

— Marc Andreessen (@pmarca) March 9, 2023

Hosted a great "build back better" dinner in NY with some crypto company founders. This crypto industry has plenty of strong and compliant companies (even if the headlines would make one think otherwise).

Doing the work year after year isn't always sexy, but it's important.… https://t.co/DwblPKes0V pic.twitter.com/sLx2nWuYuD

— Brian Armstrong (@brian_armstrong) March 8, 2023

#Pray💙🩶
Dear Lord God
I'm lifting up parents who are praying for their lost child to be saved
I believe in my Spirit that you are drawing that lost child to you
I thank you that as you execute authority over the enemy, strongholds are broken for your glory#InJesusNameAmen pic.twitter.com/YIzlBw1h4u

— Sunita Hines, PhD🙏 (@SunitaHines) March 8, 2023

Insurrection or no insurrection: You be the judge https://t.co/ryNDom9seO

— Dinesh D'Souza (@DineshDSouza) March 8, 2023

People around us can only create situations. How we experience them is always generated by us. #SadhguruQuotes pic.twitter.com/x4gx7LT9EQ

— Sadhguru (@SadhguruJV) March 9, 2023

Biden's border desperation is showing via MSNBC https://t.co/pgXb0E1qPn

— Jeffrey Levin 🇺🇦 (@jilevin) March 8, 2023

It's not that people don't want to go back to the office.

It's that people don't want to commute.

— Allison Braley 🦊 (@allisonbraley) March 8, 2023

🥳 Happy Women's International Day and @ganasvc's public launch anniversary! pic.twitter.com/qMLEzCHhaA

— Lolita Taub (@lolitataub) March 8, 2023

बढो उपयोगी र मेरो लागि ज्ञानवर्धक लेख। ‘ज्ञान सत्ता’ वारे झेरै कुरा जानियो, यो बुढेसकालमा।

— Devendra Raj Panday (@DRP39) March 9, 2023

7: India

All three governments are applying the 21st century concept of economic security while carrying the memory of 20th century exploitation. They are trying to manage security dilemmas, ideological differences and a bifurcating global order as the world departs from the postwar era of globalization and free trade. .

Sri Lanka says IMF aid in reach after year of anger, hunger and fear President hints new China letter will seal deal; local elections in focus ......... the worst crisis since independence from Britain in 1948. ....... "As a family, we have done a lot for Sri Lanka and blaming our family is not fair. If [critics] have proof that we are the cause [of the crisis], they must show it," Namal Rajapaksa, Mahinda's eldest son and a member of parliament ......... average Sri Lankans hit by a 66% electricity tariff hike in February, on top of last year's 75%, and new income taxes as high as 36%. Last week, the central bank raised its key interest rates again to try to curb inflation hovering around 50%, while public-sector workers stormed out of hospitals, banks and ports to protest the cost of living. ......... half of Sri Lankan families have been forced to reduce the amount they feed their kids. ........ Sri Lanka's ratio of tax revenues to gross domestic product was only 7.3% in 2021, among the lowest in the world. They said that "tax reforms are needed to correct this imbalance" as well as to regain creditor confidence. ......... the severity of the economic crisis has compelled many Sri Lankans to do extra overtime, take second jobs or find side projects to put food on the table, leaving little time to demonstrate. .......... last year's protests resulted in regime change but did not "follow through" on demands for reform of the entire system. ........ the ruling party is "very scared" of a disastrous outcome and thinks this could mark the beginning of a very serious crisis for it. .......... a true transformation is not possible with the current set of lawmakers in Parliament. She said this is why it is critical to defend the electoral process. .

Tech giants look for ways to cash in on ChatGPT boom From Qualcomm to Microsoft to SK Telecom, ambitions high for AI-powered computing .

Huawei returns to global stage with focus on 5G and the cloud China tech giant courts global clients at MWC as it battles U.S. crackdown ........ Huawei Technologies is in Spain pitching its cloud services and 5G technologies to global clients, emerging from three years of COVID restrictions and working around multiple U.S. trade sanctions that have hindered its expansion ambitions. ......... Huawei has the biggest exhibition space at this year's Mobile World Congress, which kicked off in Barcelona on Monday, and its booth at the telecom industry event is packed with crowds from morning to evening. An army of executives have flown in from China, set on wooing customers from Europe, Latin America, Africa and other Asian countries -- in other words, anywhere but the U.S. ......... rotating chairman Eric Xu said the company had pulled itself out of crisis mode and was "back to business as usual." The U.S. sanctions, he said, had become a "new normal" for the telecom giant. ....... To get back into foreign markets without its once-famous smartphones, the Chinese telecom giant is leaning heavily on cloud services and 5G communications for corporate clients. ......... Global cloud services are dominated by U.S. players, namely Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. The only Chinese provider in the top 5 is Alibaba Cloud. ....... using 5G technology to help companies go digital. ......... "The [5G] opportunities in B2B are significantly larger than the B2C stuff" .......

Huawei has set up a mining business group that is dedicated to using 5G technologies to automate mines.

......... "Latin America and Africa will be key markets for us," Xu said, as those regions are rich in mining resources. .

My trip to India in pictures Why my travels in India made me optimistic about the future. ........

What has three wheels, zero emissions, and makes no noise? This electric rickshaw I drove in Delhi.

.



Building a New Canon of Black Literature Which older novels, plays and poems by African American writers are being — or should be — rediscovered? ........ Before that, while growing up in Salt Lake City in the 1980s and ’90s,

I looked to Black literature as a lifeline

; I read every book I could find ....... I didn’t come across Cooper in the pages of a scholarly journal; I saw her name on Instagram. ......... Although canons may enshrine the past, they are instruments of the present. ........ what do readers require of Black American literature today? Works that confront the resurgence of white supremacy. Works that challenge orthodoxies of racial representation. Works that unsettle assumptions about gender and sexual identity. Works that expand the frames of formal experimentation. Works that imagine Black futures. ........ Du Bois’s conviction that the only responsible Black literature is propaganda, marshaling a benevolent Blackness as an antidote to white supremacy’s pernicious specters......... For all the radical political energies expressed in Black American literature, the literary mainstream has often been marked by formal conservatism. ........ Being Black in America is work enough; it’s all right for reading to be funny and fun, controversial and straight up scandalous. ........

One of the things I often want to tell beginning Black studies scholars: Don’t assume the archives don’t exist simply because they haven’t been collected. There is so much unculled material in the world. This is *still* an archaeological project.

— Imani Perry (@imaniperry) April 26, 2020

... अनि राउत होमिए विद्रोहमा

Ukraine Signals It Will Keep Battling for Bakhmut to Drain Russia Gradual Russian advances and high Ukrainian casualties have fueled talk of a retreat from the eastern city, but Ukrainians say Russian losses are worse, a reason to keep them fighting. .

The Cousins Who Ruled 19th-Century Europe, Miserably “Empty Theatre,” a novel by Jac Jemc, reimagines the lives of two eccentric royals, King Ludwig II of Bavaria and Empress Elisabeth of Austria. ....... Behind the obscene privileges of royalty — as the Windsors too have taught us — lies deep, sometimes debilitating loneliness........ Sisi, meanwhile, endures the woman’s lot; after marrying the Austrian emperor, she is reduced to childbearing and staying thin. .

When War Came to Ukraine, She Took Up a Diary and a Camera In photographs and journal entries, Yevgenia Belorusets captures Kyiv in the early days of Russia’s invasion. ......... Robert Stone called the Vietnam War “a mistake 10,000 miles long.” In Ukraine, the front lines of the unwanted war with Russia extend about 600 miles. Surely that distance seems vastly longer to Russian troops stymied there. It must also seem longer to Ukraine’s citizens, for whom the war is immoral, illegal, stupid, concussive and terrifying. .......... The terror mostly came in over news broadcasts, and the messaging app Telegram. There were rumbles in the distance. .......... Belorusets carries a camera, which makes her suspect to both sides. Armed men leap out of cars and ambush her; citizens report her, fearing she is spying for Russia. She is dragged to checkpoints. A friend tells her, “A sniper can catch the glint from your lens and aim to shoot.” ......... The big emotional takeaway from “War Diary” is a sense of abandonment. Belorusets can’t believe that the world is watching these atrocities, right out on Ukraine’s streets, and not stepping in more forcefully.

Russia’s troops, to her, seem more like terrorists than soldiers.

........ An air-raid siren sounds to her like elephant language. She writes a good deal about pets that are left behind. .......... As she waits and worries, you sense her heart just idling out there, like a car parked in an underpass during a storm. .

America Has Lost the War on Drugs. Here’s What Needs to Happen Next.
There’s a Menace Hanging Over Brazil . The tenure of Jair Bolsonaro, a former army captain, brought the military back to the heart of government. He might have grudgingly left office, but Brazil’s military — privileged, preponderant and unaccountable — remains a constant threat to the country’s democracy. ....... The republic, after all, was established by a military coup in 1889. “Military officers,” as the eminent Brazilian lawyer Heráclito Sobral Pinto once said, “never accepted not being the owners of the republic.” In the 130 years since, the military has hovered over Brazil — as the political scientist Adam Przeworski wrote, referring to democracies afflicted by overweening militaries — “like menacing shadows, ready to fall upon anyone who goes too far in undermining their values and their interests.” ........... With no war in sight, Brazil has the 15th-largest standing army in the world, with 351,000 active personnel, 167,000 inactive officers and 233,400 pensioners ........ the federal government spends more on defense than it does on education — and almost five times more than it spends on health ........ The expected budget of the Defense Ministry for this year is $23 billion, 77 percent of which is earmarked to pay personnel......... In 2019, the average remuneration for a retired member of the military was more than six times that of a retired civilian. ......... 137,900 unmarried daughters of military members will receive their father’s pensions for the rest of their lives ........ After Mr. Bolsonaro became president in 2019, the military flooded into the civilian administration. In 2020, 6,157 military officers — half of them on active duty — worked for the federal government, more than twice the number in 2018. At one point, 11 of the 26 ministers in Mr. Bolsonaro’s administration were current or former officers .

Ukraine Claims Bakhmut Battle Is Wagner’s ‘Last Stand’ Ukrainians say Russia’s Wagner mercenary group is running low on fighters recruited from prisons, used in attacks on Bakhmut, where Ukraine has also endured heavy losses. ........ Ukrainian officials have claimed that nearly 30,000 of Wagner’s 50,000 troops have deserted or been killed or wounded, many around Bakhmut. That number could not be independently verified, and Ukraine has not disclosed its own losses in the region. Russia’s defense minister, Sergei Shoigu, claimed on Tuesday that Ukraine had lost more than 11,000 troops in February. .......... Wagner's founder, Yegveny V. Prigozhin, has repeatedly said that his group’s triple-digit daily casualty rates are sucking experienced Ukrainian units into what he calls the “Bakhmut meat-grinder,” upsetting their offensive plans elsewhere. ........ Ukraine would send reinforcements into Bakhmut, where Ukrainian commanders say the fighting has tied down enormous Russian forces. ........ if Ukraine can eliminate Russia’s prisoner soldiers in Bakhmut, they will not have to face their attack waves elsewhere. ........ Wagner units were shifting toward higher-quality special forces because of the high losses suffered by prison recruits. ....... On Monday, Mr. Prigozhin himself appeared to sound an alarm, calling for urgent reinforcements and ammunition to withstand a potential Ukrainian counteroffensive he said could not only relieve Bakhmut’s besieged defenders, but even cut off the Wagner attackers. “Otherwise, we’re all in” trouble, he said, using an expletive in an audio message published on social media. ......... Mr. Prigozhin has suggested that his growing public feud with Russia’s Defense Ministry last month has cost him access to Russian prisons, where since July he was able to enlist tens of thousands of inmates with a promise of high salaries, social rehabilitation and freedom — if they survive their deployments. He had called the loss of prison recruitment an attempt to “bleed out” Wagner of its “offensive potential.” ........... Wagner comprised about 10,000 professional soldiers, recruited mostly from veterans of Russia's security forces, and 40,000 former inmates. .......... used mostly to charge Ukrainian positions in small, unprotected groups, in order to expose the location of enemy fire and dig foxholes for subsequent assault waves. ......... The soldier said that of about 170 inmates who enlisted from his penal colony in Russia’s Ivanov region last fall, about 80 have returned home without major injuries. ............ the Russian military, itself, has recently started recruiting inmates........... The Russian prison service still had more than 400,000 inmates at the start of the year ......... the fighting in Bakhmut is starting to sap Ukrainian strength before an expected counteroffensive. .

Ukraine’s Top Generals Want to Keep Fighting for Bakhmut
Small Bedroom Ideas: The Best Ways to Maximize Your Tiny Space
‘A Decade of Fruitless Searching’: The Toll of Dating App Burnout Ten years after the launch of Tinder, some long-term online daters say endless swiping has been bad for their mental health. ........ A committed user, she can easily spend two or more hours a day piling up matches, messaging back and forth, and planning dates with men who seem promising. ....... the swiping, the monotonous getting-to-know-you conversations and the self-doubt that creeps in when one of her matches fizzles. Not a single long-term relationship has blossomed from her efforts. ........ she has regularly felt pressured to have sex with others ........ 37 percent of online daters said someone continued to contact them after they said they weren’t interested, and 35 percent had received unwanted sexually explicit texts or images. ........ Yet despite all of it — the time, the tedium and the safety concerns — Abby feels compelled to keep scrolling, driven by a mix of optimism and the fear that if she logs off, she’ll miss her shot at meeting someone amazing. ......... “It really is almost like this part-time job.” ......... people in the throes of burnout tend to feel depleted and cynical. .......... 12 percent of Americans have married or been in a committed relationship with someone they met online ......... many people had used them to successfully find community and connection. ......... “After a decade of fruitless searching, I started to ask myself: What has all that time, all that effort, all that money, actually given me?” said Shani Silver, 40, a podcaster and the author of “A Single Revolution,” whose work focuses on changing negative societal narratives about being single. ......... Ms. Silver deleted her apps (Tinder, Bumble and Hinge), a decision she described as a kind of epiphany that was the “culmination of a decade of misery.” ........ The improvement in her mood and energy levels was swift and profound. Before she deleted the apps, she spent any moments of downtime swiping; after, she found she had time throughout the day to rest. She realized she had been feeling anger and resentment toward the happiness of others, and emotionally, mentally and physically drained by existing in a state of constant anticipation. ......... “Existing in that state of ‘any day now’ for an extremely extended period of time is incredibly unhealthy.” .......... “Are you using the apps to self-soothe anxiety and inadvertently making your anxiety worse? Are you afraid you can’t attain love, so you’re settling for hookups, and that’s making you unhappy?” ............ it can help to meet matches virtually before deciding whether it is worth the time and energy to meet in real life........ At first, the apps tended to give him an emotional boost — a rush of validation that temporarily masked feelings of boredom, isolation and loneliness. .......... “But actually what it was doing was eroding my mental health slowly” ....... “You start to feel very disposable. You start to feel like the promise of connection is just out of reach.” ...... “To me,” he said, “the fear is, ‘Oh gosh, if this relationship doesn’t work out, I’m back to square one of trolling dating apps, and putting myself through that nauseatingly tedious process all over again.’” .

From the Trenches in Ukraine, We Know Our Enemy Is in Shock Sometimes enemy forces are close enough that we can see them without binoculars. Sometimes they’re a few hundred feet away. ........ When the enemy begins to shell, its infantry starts to advance. ........ A large fragment of a 120-millimeter mortar round is about half the size of the palm of your hand, and heavy. It can punch through a bulletproof vest. ..... But the small, almost invisible pieces of shrapnel that get into the body are worse. ....... At the front line, emotions run the gamut. The adrenaline makes the eyes of some of the men almost glow. In others, the life seems to fade away. They stop being afraid but they also stop rejoicing. I’ve met soldiers with nothing but emptiness and indifference in their eyes. Soldiers in the trenches care deeply for one another, but the level of tension is so high that usually nobody cries when someone is injured or killed. ........... Anyone can be afraid. But the courageous master their fear and do not let others give in to it. .

City Life, Culture Wars and Conspiracy Theories Most of what you might want to do or buy is within easy walking distance. ....... walkable cities that take advantage of the possibilities of density. ........ What people who haven’t experienced a real urban lifestyle generally don’t get is how easy life is. Running errands is a snap; because you walk most places, you don’t worry about traffic jams or parking spaces. ....... the reality is that New York is one of the safest places in America. ........ there’s an unwritten rule in American politics that it’s OK for politicians to disparage big cities and their residents in a way that would be considered unforgivable if anyone did the same for rural areas. ......... There seems to be a widespread sense that only people living a car-centered lifestyle, or a pickup truck-centered lifestyle, are real Americans. ......... ......... But of course none of this is about rational argument. .

Bollywood's gender revolution: Women are rewriting the rules Exclusive Nikkei data analysis points to slow but significant change in India's prolific film industry ........ Bollywood superstar Deepika Padukone, playing a headstrong 14th-century Hindu queen clad sumptuously in red brocade and gemstones, commands dozens of women to follow her into a pit of fire in the finale of the 2018 blockbuster "Padmaavat.” ......... “Padmaavat” was the most expensive movie made with a female lead, it was massively successful at the box office, and it catapulted Padukone into a league of superstardom seldom held by women anywhere in the world. ........ an industry long known for portraying women as one-dimensional or secondary to the male stars, paying them a fraction and giving them a shelf life that rendered most unemployed by the age of 30. ........

a flagship industry that is the biggest cultural export of the world's most populous country.

........... Released in January 2018, "Padmaavat" retains the record for the biggest budget, and the highest revenue, for an Indian movie driven by a female lead. Made for $26.2 million, it raked in $66.7 million at the box office. ........ Speaking to Nikkei via Google Meet, she was modest, thoughtful and deliberate. “For me, it’s a little bit of the athlete mentality, I play the game and then I move forward, not thinking about the previous performance," the former national-level badminton player said......... "It had the right director, right cast, right story – the film got what it deserved." ........ India is home to more than 1.4 billion people, and its movies sell more than 2 billion tickets annually around the globe. Topping its myriad of religions are two that garner the most passion: cricket and film. ....... The nation’s three biggest male superstars are Muslim, including Shah Rukh Khan, whose six-story sea-facing mansion in the star-studded Mumbai neighborhood of Bandstand is the cause of frequent pedestrian traffic jams. Thousands throng to it each day hoping for a glimpse of their beloved “hero” – the preferred moniker for Bollywood’s male stars. .......... “It’s not that I’m thinking of writing a feminist story when I write,” Katariya said. “You write who you are and what you know. And I’ve never seen women around me who don’t have agency.” ........ For decades, female actors would stop being professionally relevant after their 30th birthday. But as more women are flooding into roles that write, roles that greenlight scripts and roles that finance those movies, women are reentering the spotlight and enjoying a midlife career renaissance. ........... But between the mushrooming of multiplex theaters and the maturing of streaming was a shift that was neither industrial nor technological – the evolution of the “three Khans.” ......... Fifteen years after her Bollywood debut in “Om Shanti Om,” where she was paired opposite a seasoned Shah Rukh Khan, Padukone is now fresh off the record-breaking success of “Pathaan,” once again with him. She is 37; he is 57. ............ “Even just in terms of value, respect…when a male actor asks for something [like an entourage], it gets done. When a female actor asks for the same thing, she’s being starry or throwing a tantrum. Or if a male star wants more time to prepare for a shoot, he’s professional. If a woman wants the same, she’s being unprofessional,” said Padukone, who has more than 30 movies under her belt. “I do command equality and respect, but it has taken time and years of effort to get to that place.” ......... The pandemic, with its monthslong lockdowns in India, accelerated the consumption of streaming content. And when India reopened, the country’s notoriously cheap data plans meant that everyone from the security guard on the graveyard shift to the domestic help traveling long distances by train to people’s homes, were all hooked to their screens. ........... “Streaming has helped a lot of progress in terms of narratives led by women,” said “Lipstick Under my Burkha” director Shrivastava. “It has opened up the space for much more nuanced and complex female characters even in shows [and movies] that are led by men.” ......... Shows like “Bombay Begums” on Netflix, written and directed by Shrivastava, and “Hush Hush” on Prime have also brought back female stars from the 1990s who were considered past their prime and are now delivering magnificent work in their 40s and 50s. .......... The first female supercop, “Lady Singham,” will be played by Padukone. .