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.
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.
Front Line Shifts in Russia’s and Ukraine’s Battle for Bakhmut, Analysts Say Britain’s defense intelligence agency said that Russian forces had taken control of most of Bakhmut’s east, but advances farther west might be challenging....... Ukraine insisted on Saturday that its forces were fending off relentless Russian attacks in Bakhmut, even as Western analysts said that Moscow’s forces had captured most of the embattled city’s east and established a new front line cutting through its center. ...... Ukrainian officials say that Russian losses in Bakhmut are worse than their own, and they have signaled that they will pursue a strategy of bleeding the Russian Army before a planned Ukrainian counterattack. ....... Although Bakhmut’s strategic value is debatable, Moscow is looking for a victory after a series of setbacks. ....... The Bakhmutka River, which runs north to south through the city’s center, now marks the front line and could stymie further Russian advances west ...... the commander of Ukraine’s ground forces, Col. Gen. Oleksandr Syrsky, was at “the most important area” of the front line and taking the “necessary measures to keep Bakhmut under Ukrainian control.” ........ Both Ukrainian and Russian officials have suggested that the fall of Bakhmut could help pave the way for Moscow’s forces to make a broader push in eastern Ukraine. ....... Ukraine may try to approach the Russian-held port of Melitopol and drive a wedge between Moscow’s forces in the Crimean Peninsula and those in eastern Ukraine. ........ Each makes essentially the same assertion: that the fighting there is worth the cost because it is wearing down the opponent and depleting whatever resources might be available to push forward elsewhere. ....... Western officials estimate that up to 30,000 Russian soldiers have been killed or wounded in and around Bakhmut. Ukrainian casualties are also believed to be high ........ Kyiv’s forces are tearing through ammunition supplies — firing shells and rockets far faster than Western nations can supply them. .
Why Russia is afraid of Jehovah’s Witnesses as of now, Jehovah’s Witness gatherings and preaching are criminal offenses in Russia ........ The Russian government also has the legal authority to liquidate any property held by Jehovah’s Witnesses as an organization. ....... Russia, with a population of more than 150 million, has a total of 117,000 Jehovah’s Witnesses ........ The Russian Supreme Court maintains that the country needs to be protected from disloyal religious fanatics. ........ But given their commitment to God above all things, Jehovah’s Witnesses see themselves as being persecuted by those who value loyalty to country over any other principle. They also believe that the Russian government has “trampled on the guarantees of their own laws.” ....... April 20, the day the Russian Supreme Court first ruled against them, is also the birthday of Adolf Hitler. ....... Their memories of persecution have not faded with time. .
Francis is the first Jesuit pope – here’s how that has shaped his 10-year papacy “Who am I to judge?” he famously said about gay priests. “Nowadays there is an economy that kills,” he once declared – a comment that led critics to rather implausibly label the pontiff a Marxist. ........ The “Spiritual Exercises,” written by St. Ignatius, is a guide to spiritual development that Jesuits and others have used for centuries. It encourages participants to pay careful attention to the inner movements of the spirit or soul that shape their decisions and actions. ......... Without that more fundamental change, Francis wrote, codes and boards could merely be about meeting corporate-style “standards of functionalism and efficiency,” and the call to fundamentally mend relationships would go unheeded. Policies might indeed be necessary, but not before the bishops reminded themselves of their fundamental task to follow Jesus in building relationships with one another and laity. ......... “I see the church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask a seriously injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the level of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds.” ......... In 2015, he issued the first papal document dedicated exclusively to ecological degradation. It begins, said a key adviser to Francis, with “a spiritual listening to the results of the best scientific research on environmental matters available today,” which demonstrates that our environmental situation is bad and getting worse. ......... A superficial response is purely technological: Humans can gain ever greater control over the natural world and its changes. The structures resulting from that vision of domination stand at the root of environmental degradation because technology alone will always come up short, Francis argued . .............. the world needs an “ecological conversion,” he wrote – a spiritual shift so that people perceive how “everything is connected,” from honeybees and supply lines to compost and impoverishment. .......... because everything hangs together in Christ, the source of all creation, everything is interconnected. .
Jesuits as science missionaries for the Catholic Church A Catholic, a Jesuit and a scientist walk into a bar. What do they have to talk about? ....... This scenario is no joking matter. Conflict as well as collaboration have characterized the historical relations between these three parties since the founding of the Society of Jesus, nearly 500 years ago. How do these three interact today in an era of “War on Science” that tends to politicize so many scientific issues? .......... it is still the largest single Catholic religious order of men, with over 17,000 members worldwide in 2013. ........ When the Society was suppressed in 1773, some 700 educational institutions were under its supervision. Jesuits are still active in education today, with 28 colleges and universities in the United States alone. ........ And Riccioli examined 126 arguments that could be made about Copernicus’ sun-centered system: 49 for, 77 against. ....... An overarching institutional commitment to science is visible in the globe-spanning networks of seismological stations and the 74 observatories the Society of Jesus operated following its restoration in 1814. It continues to provide qualified personnel for the Vatican Observatory, staffing both its facility outside Rome as well as the Vatican Advanced Technology Telescope, the latter part of the Mount Graham International Observatory in southeastern Arizona. ........ But Jesuit investment in scientific work has not always been celebrated. Jesuit directors of the Imperial Astronomical Bureau in Beijing in the 17th and 18th centuries faced heavy criticism from Protestants, their co-religionists, and even their confreres for what many saw as a role incompatible with their apostolic duties and spiritual character. .......... Last year Consolmagno received the Carl Sagan Memorial Award for Public Understanding of Science from the American Astronomical Society, given for his work as a “voice of the juxtaposition of planetary science and astronomy with Christian belief, a rational spokesperson who can convey exceptionally well how religion and science can coexist for believers.” He’s even filled Stephen Colbert in on the Vatican position on extraterrestrial life..........
physics research was akin to the search for God.
......... “honesty” in “confronting data, even when they might contradict my previous experience and expectations” and in recognizing “the tentative quality of both our knowledge and our ignorance” was critical to “Ignatian discernment,” the process through which discoveries – scientific as well as spiritual – are made. ............ the Big Bang and evolution are settled issues for this pope ......... While this pope’s leadership on specific scientific issues will not suit everyone, it promises to give the world an illuminating example of how science and religion might progress together. .
Pope Francis prioritises the poor, channels Marx in new ‘manifesto’ Pope Francis has openly attacked capitalism in his recently released Apostolic exhortation ........ While Francis has called for the radical decentralisation of the Vatican, and decided that gay people are not agents of Satan, it is his outcry against savage capitalism that creates the biggest interest. Much of it could have come from the hand of Karl Marx himself ......... Just as the commandment “Thou shalt not kill” sets a clear limit in order to safeguard the value of human life, today we also have to say “thou shalt not” to an economy of exclusion and inequality. Such an economy kills. .......... “No to an economy of exclusion”, “No to the new idolatry of money”, “No to a financial system which rules rather than serves” and “No to the inequality which spawns violence”. ......... Not since the papacy of Paul VI in the 1960s has a pope openly declared the need to rebel against unjust capitalism. ......... Under Francis, European Church attendance is ever so slowly on the rise for the first time in decades. Two-thirds of Catholics seem to view Francis’ overall focus on human harmony as a positive thing. ......... a reading of the scripture that looks at sin in social problems, not individual ones. ....... Today everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest, where the powerful feed upon the powerless. ........ Just like Marx wrote over 100 years ago, Francis understands capitalism’s manner of turning everything into a commodity, even humans. ........... The culture of prosperity deadens us; we are thrilled if the market offers us something new to purchase; and in the meantime all those lives stunted for lack of opportunity seem a mere spectacle; they fail to move us. ........ the Catholic Church has huge, undisclosed wealth that is closely tied with the global usury system of unethical loans that Jesus condemned .
The enzyme, dubbed Huc, was extracted from Mycobacterium smegmati, a fairly common — and wildly resilient — soil bacterium. According to the study, it was discovered through a series of advanced molecular-mapping techniques. .......... Huc is "astonishingly stable" and could one day be used as a tiny, sustainable, bacteria-powered battery for small devices. ......... "When you provide Huc with more concentrated hydrogen, it produces more electrical current," Grinter told LiveScience
. the existing links between traditional banks and crypto "show how easily a cryptocurrency crisis might spill over." ..... "Contrary to what its marketing wizards tell us, crypto is neither money nor a vehicle for finance," they expounded. "It’s an elaborate simulation of finance that produces gains and losses." ........ Comparing crypto to casino chips, the two experts argued that crypto is actually worse than gambling because, while people can pretty well guess the odds in a casino, "the odds in crypto are subject to gross manipulation." ........ Comparing crypto to casino chips, the two experts argued that crypto is actually worse than gambling because, while people can pretty well guess the odds in a casino, "the odds in crypto are subject to gross manipulation." ........ "Regulating crypto would encourage denser, deeper connections, generating systemic risks," the pair wrote — and as such, they think the entire industry needs to be kiboshed by the government. ......... likening crypto to ozone-depleting chemical compounds, antiquated trash bonds, and, well, the financial industry's recreational drug of choice in the 1980s. ....... "Crypto is part chlorofluorocarbon, part cocaine and part bearer bond" ....
"It isn’t the future of finance. More than malign neglect, the US needs policies that will eliminate cryptocurrencies and their metastases."
FLORIDA MAN PLOTTING TO BUILD WEB SERVERS ON THE MOON Lonestar Data Holdings announced that it had secured an additional $5 million in funding as it marches ever closer to its ambitious experiment of running data centers on the Moon. .
NOAM CHOMSKY: AI ISN'T COMING FOR US ALL, YOU IDIOTS "THAT DAY MAY COME, BUT ITS DAWN IS NOT YET BREAKING." ....... While currently available AI chatbots may seem to mimic human creativity and ingenuity, they are doing so only based on statistical probability, and not as a result of the kind of deeper knowledge and understanding that belies all human thought processes and are thusly "stuck in a prehuman or nonhuman phase of cognitive evolution," Chomsky argued. ......
machine learning systems can learn both that the earth is flat and that the earth is round
.......... mini-brains are already building blocks for a plug-and-play biocomputing system that readily connects with biological brains. So why not leverage them as processors for a computer?......... Microfluidic systems, which act as “nurseries,” also need to improve. These high-tech bubble baths provide nutrients and oxygen to keep burgeoning mini-brains alive and healthy while removing toxic waste, giving them time to mature. The same system can also pump neurotransmitters—molecules that bridge communication between neurons—into specific regions to modify their growth and behavior........ learning changes neural circuits on multiple levels. .
5 tips for women to negotiate a higher salary women anticipating backlash from attempting to negotiate “hedge their assertiveness, using fewer competing tactics and obtaining lower outcomes.” ....... The fear of backlash is reasonable. Men and women alike say they are less willing to work with women who ask to be paid more. ......... You might start with a focus on a salary increase, but what you really want is an accelerated promotion track. ........... A positive mindset also means approaching negotiations with curiosity. Make it about trying to work out a problem, not winning a fight. .......... Small talk before the negotiation helps build the relationship and can have a positive effect on your negotiations.
🇳🇱Our farmers are fighting against the worst kind of injustice: a government that has turned on its own people.
The government created a lie to rob our farmers of their land. But we won’t let it happen. Our #DutchFarmers are an example to the world.
Silicon Valley Bank’s shareholders and executives lose it all, as they should. Depositors in good faith, however, should recover and have access to their deposits in order to meet their payrolls, pay their suppliers, and to prevent contagion.
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. #IHaveADreampic.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
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.
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.
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).
#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#InJesusNameAmenpic.twitter.com/YIzlBw1h4u
Inside the ‘Blood Sport’ of Oscars CampaignsWar rooms. Oppo dumps. Eight-figure budgets. How the quest for awards-season glory got so cutthroat....... No one predicted Riseborough’s nomination. She did not appear on pundits’ shortlists. There were no profiles of her in glossy magazines. “To Leslie,” the film about an alcoholic West Texas lottery winner for which she was nominated, had earned just $27,322 at the box office. ........ It turned out that a small army of movie stars had championed Riseborough. Charlize Theron, Jennifer Aniston, Sarah Paulson and Gwyneth Paltrow hosted screenings. Others praised Riseborough’s performance on social media and beyond, including Edward Norton, Susan Sarandon, Helen Hunt, Patricia Clarkson, Pedro Pascal, Demi Moore, Jamie Lee Curtis, Bradley Whitford, Jane Fonda, Mia Farrow, Kate Winslet, Alan Cumming, Rosanna Arquette and even Blanchett. The campaign was described as organic and grass roots, but some celebrities had posted suspiciously identical language, describing “To Leslie” as “a small film with a giant heart.” That Viola Davis (“The Woman King”) and Danielle Deadwyler (“Till”) were not nominated despite predictions to the contrary made it look as if a bunch of actors campaigned on behalf of a white actress, leading to the exclusion of Black actresses. ........... A couple joked that it was a little like the Jan. 6 insurrection: President Donald Trump may not have personally stormed the Capitol, but he encouraged others to do so. ........
the votes — in Hollywood as in Washington, D.C. — are a result of a highly contingent, political process, handed down not from movie gods but from the very people who stand to benefit from it
............ Oscar campaigns are often run by professional strategists, essentially a specialized breed of publicist. Their job begins as early as a year before the awards, sometimes before a film is even shot. They advise on which festival a film should premiere at, shape a campaign platform and hope that the film gains enough momentum to propel it into awards season. Sometimes several strategists work on a single film, and the war room of an Oscars campaign can grow to be as many as 10 or 20 people. All the stops along the campaign trail — screenings, events, other award shows — are an opportunity to workshop talking points and gauge the competition. And unlike the Golden Globes, which are voted on by 199 entertainment journalists, the Oscars electorate is a voting body of about 10,000 industry peers ........... The Oscars race is split into Phases 1 and 2: before and after the nominations, which is akin to the divide between the presidential primaries and the general election. ........ “Top Gun: Maverick” saved the movie business with its nearly $1.5 billion at the box office. ............. “They try to change someone else’s narrative by adding dirt to the layer,” Angellotti told me, citing the old rumor that Matt Damon and Ben Affleck didn’t really write “Good Will Hunting.” ......... The film still won, but many believe another best-picture campaign planted the story. ........ how opportunistic it was for the “Everything Everywhere All at Once” cast to visit the site of the Monterey Park shooting on the eve of the nomination announcements ........... “We prefer to be invisible,” a strategist working on several films this year told me. And yet here they were, seemingly sparring out in the open. .......... Oscars campaigning has been around as long as there have been Oscars, but the modern playbook was invented by Harvey Weinstein at Miramax in the late 1980s and early ’90s. Weinstein popularized the practice of sending out VHS screeners, demanded that actors clear their schedules for awards season and relentlessly lobbied academy members. Studios generally held their noses at aggressive campaigning, but Weinstein, unable to compete with their budgets, wasn’t above a shameless publicity stunt. .......... For “My Left Foot,” one of his first Oscar campaigns, he got Daniel Day-Lewis to go to Capitol Hill to speak with lawmakers about the Americans With Disabilities Act. For “Il Postino,” a 1994 Italian-language film about a mailman who befriends the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, he persuaded more than a dozen celebrities, including Julia Roberts, Samuel L. Jackson and Madonna — none of whom appeared in the film — to record poetry readings for the film’s soundtrack........ Weinstein was widely rumored to wage whisper campaigns against his competitors. The last time Spielberg won a best-director Oscar was in 1999 for “Saving Private Ryan,” which lost an epic behind-the-scenes battle for best picture to Miramax’s “Shakespeare in Love.” ............. Whereas a major studio might spend anywhere from $5 million to $25 million on an Oscars campaign, Netflix was estimated to deploy upward of $40 million on “Roma” in 2019, more than double the film’s production budget. ........ A nomination means that an actor’s or director’s fee goes up considerably. .......... “It’s gotten to a place where every single filmmaker thinks their movie is an award contender.” ........... Much of the criticism leveled at the Riseborough campaign has been about how strategic it seemed despite being described as organic. ......... She posted about Riseborough almost every day during the week of nominations voting. “Hello actors branch of the academy!” Fisher wrote on Instagram, addressing the voters directly. ......... A best-actress campaign can run to $5 million. ....... “Hand-to-hand combat,” as this style of campaigning is known.......... The thing with actors is they tend to like a certain kind of performance — big, physical and full of interesting “choices,” all of which Riseborough’s is. (Kate Winslet called it the greatest performance by a female actor she had ever seen.) ............ Have you seen what happens when actors come together for a cause? It can be clueless, but it is usually well intentioned. .......... The academy’s regulations are a bit like the Talmud: maddeningly specific in certain places ............ At the end of the day, the campaign game is about finding the most compelling narrative, one that inspires people to root for you. ......... “This town doesn’t move without actors,” one veteran strategist told me. “If they came down on this campaign, well, that’s an indictment of Charlize Theron, Kate Winslet, Edward Norton. But the truth is, if I did it, I would be in academy jail.” ............ It is worth remembering that the Academy Awards were created as a marketing device to entice people to see movies and, like football, used to air on Monday nights to boost ratings. “This is not the Nobel Peace Prize,” Lundberg told me. That doesn’t necessarily stop some Oscar winners from acting as if it is. ......... (Theatrical attendance has shrunk by half in the last four years.) .
How to Set Boundaries With a Difficult Family MemberIt’s tricky but doable, says Nedra Glover Tawwab, a therapist and best-selling author. Here are her strategies for getting started........ “Set Boundaries, Find Peace: A Guide to Reclaiming Yourself” and a popular Instagram therapist whose 1.7 million followers devour her pithy nuggets. (A recent example: “The silent treatment isn’t teaching them a lesson; it’s showing you can’t handle conflict.”) ......... she offers practical strategies for dealing with toxic family dynamics — and ways to successfully disconnect from a person when you decide to do so. ........ as an adult you get to choose who you want to be in relationships with and how,” Ms. Tawwab said. “Even with family.” ......... To begin, identify the issues that are affecting your dynamic with this family member, she said. Then decide what type of relationship you can realistically have, and want to have, with that person, taking those dynamics into account. ....... “success” may mean that you accept the way your in-laws are and stop trying to change the family culture ........... you cannot change your family members ........... “When the solution to the problem is ‘they need to change,’ the problem will never go away,” she writes. “You can only control your side of the street.” ......... If this person did not change a single thing, what — if anything — could I do to make the relationship different? Write it all down in a list, she said: “These are the issues in this relationship. These are the parts of those issues that I can change, and these are the parts that are not my stuff.” ........... coping strategies within her control, like letting his calls go to voice mail so she can return them if and when she is ready, and letting him know that certain topics, like rants about siblings or parents, are off-limits. ............. Changing a dysfunctional relationship will invariably require you to say hard things to a family member. But that is a skill that anyone can develop .......... being assertive about your needs and your boundaries is not rude ........ It’s OK to say something like “I don’t want you yelling at me anymore” ........ “We have tricked ourselves into thinking that we’re supposed to always feel comfortable, so even as we’re saying hard things our goal is to say it without the other person feeling upset or mad or wanting a further explanation,” she said. “And that’s not realistic.” ......... In dysfunctional families, change is almost always seen as a rejection ........ “boundaries in unhealthy families are a threat to the system of dysfunction.” ........... Your call for change might be met with disapproval (“You’re wrong for changing; everything was going well until you intervened”), shame (“You’re a terrible person”), or resentment (“I’m upset because you want something different”), she writes. You could also encounter general pushback, which might involve your family member continuing to behave as though you said nothing or pressuring you to change your mind. ........... the strategic power of distance and its importance in preserving certain bonds while still establishing a healthier dynamic. ........... Distancing might mean putting time and space between you and your relative ......... Distancing could also mean engaging less with the person on an emotional level ......... If you want to maintain a relationship with a difficult family member because it ultimately feels worth it to you, acceptance — and strategic distancing — can give you some peace .
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What These 13 Jewish Americans Are Proud of and Afraid Of Others, though, felt that America was more accepting of Jews than ever and that their ancestors would be amazed. “I think they would be completely shocked by how successful we are,” said Joel, a 59-year-old in the group. ......... Things used to be easier even 10 years ago. It feels like we’re at the fall of the Roman Empire. ............. Wherever I work, I’m almost always working in a Christian environment. And every year, the same people come up to me and ask me to explain the Seder and explain Hanukkah. I feel like I’m the only voice of the Jews. I’m really tired of it. .......... But we also do the menorah. And to me, that’s tradition. And this is the first year my great-grandchildren wanted to know all about it, about the lighting of the menorah. And we went through the whole thing, and they really enjoyed it. And that made me just so happy. In fact, it made me cry at the time. .
Noam Chomsky: The False Promise of ChatGPT Optimism because intelligence is the means by which we solve problems. Concern because we fear that the most popular and fashionable strain of A.I. — machine learning — will degrade our science and debase our ethics by incorporating into our technology a fundamentally flawed conception of language and knowledge. ........... Roughly speaking, they take huge amounts of data, search for patterns in it and become increasingly proficient at generating statistically probable outputs — such as seemingly humanlike language and thought. ............ These programs have been hailed as the first glimmers on the horizon of artificial general intelligence — that long-prophesied moment when mechanical minds surpass human brains not only quantitatively in terms of processing speed and memory size but also qualitatively in terms of intellectual insight, artistic creativity and every other distinctively human faculty........... the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations. .......... For instance, a young child acquiring a language is developing — unconsciously, automatically and speedily from minuscule data — a grammar, a stupendously sophisticated system of logical principles and parameters. This grammar can be understood as an expression of the innate, genetically installed “operating system” that endows humans with the capacity to generate complex sentences and long trains of thought. .......... the grammar that the child builds instinctively and with minimal exposure to information ........... Their deepest flaw is the absence of the most critical capacity of any intelligence: to say not only what is the case, what was the case and what will be the case — that’s description and prediction — but also what is not the case and what could and could not be the case. Those are the ingredients of explanation, the mark of true intelligence. ............ “The apple would not have fallen but for the force of gravity.” That is thinking. ...........
machine learning systems can learn both that the earth is flat and that the earth is round
........... The correct explanations of language are complicated and cannot be learned just by marinating in big data. ......... True intelligence is demonstrated in the ability to think and express improbable but insightful things. ........... In the absence of a capacity to reason from moral principles, ChatGPT was crudely restricted by its programmers from contributing anything novel to controversial — that is, important — discussions. It sacrificed creativity for a kind of amorality. .
If We Want More Babies, Our ‘Profoundly Anti-Family’ System Needs an Overhaul more generous family leave, more affordable child care, student loan forgiveness, child tax credit, a mortgage rebate and earlier retirement ....... Among the ideas offered, the most popular was more affordable child care, and what surprised me about the responses was that they weren’t just from Americans. I have endlessly covered the outrageous expense of and lack of government support for child care in the United States, but parents from Canada, Germany, Britain and the United Arab Emirates all reported that child care costs were prohibitive for them, too......... Our household earns a good wage — we’re on about $150,000 a year — and yet I cannot really afford to send two children to day care. ........ She described the lack of affordable child care as “one of the greatest failures of policymaking in modern history.” ........... A dad in Seattle who is a teacher and has one child described our entire economic system as “profoundly anti-family.” A mom of four in South Carolina said the modern expectations of parenting make her life harder: “For example: keeping your eye on every kid at all moments (or else you’re an irresponsible parent and child protection services may be called on you), signing up for sports where the schedule is different for every single age.” .
“We seek a strategic competition with China, we do not seek conflict.” ......... the administration still does not support independence for Taiwan. ........ “He’s trying to foster the country’s high-tech firms both for economic growth and to handle decoupling at a time when China is facing severe economic headwinds. Beating the nationalist drum is a politically savvy way to achieve these goals.” ........ “It clearly indicates that they understand that China’s relations with the Western world will be very difficult in the coming years.” .
It’s Ursula von der Leyen’s Europe—for Now Europe’s president has won high marks from everyone—except the allies she might need for a second term. ...... In the four years since she became European Commission president, Ursula von der Leyen has mostly been praised by Brussels insiders and top officials around the world. Many say her record—which has put the EU significantly closer to becoming a coherent United States of Europe—already qualifies her as the best Commission president since the celebrated French politician Jacques Delors three decades ago. A 99-year-old Henry Kissinger recently acknowledged that she is Europe’s undisputed leader, and thus provides the EU with the single telephone number that he as U.S. Secretary of State is famously (though perhaps erroneously) quoted as saying that the bloc lacked. ........ VDL, as she is widely referred to in Brussels .
The opposition has stated that it plans to return Turkey to a parliamentary system, undoing a switch to a presidential system that Mr. Erdogan used in 2018 to drastically expand his control of the state. .
The inside story of how ChatGPT was built from the people who made it Exclusive conversations that take us behind the scenes of a cultural phenomenon. .......... Certainly, nobody inside OpenAI was prepared for a viral mega-hit. The firm has been scrambling to catch up—and capitalize on its success—ever since. ........... four people who helped build what has become one of the most popular internet apps ever. .......... OpenAI is still bemused by the success of its research preview ......... a technique called adversarial training to stop ChatGPT from letting users trick it into behaving badly (known as jailbreaking). ......... Successful attacks are added to ChatGPT’s training data in the hope that it learns to ignore them. ........... OpenAI has also signed a multibillion-dollar deal with Microsoft and announced an alliance with Bain, a global management consulting firm, which plans to use OpenAI’s generative AI models in marketing campaigns for its clients, including Coca-Cola. Outside OpenAI, the buzz about ChatGPT has set off yet another gold rush around large language models, with companies and investors worldwide getting into the action. ........... I was checking Twitter a lot in the days after release, and there was this crazy period where the feed was filling up with ChatGPT screenshots. I expected it to be intuitive for people, and I expected it to gain a following, but I didn’t expect it to reach this level of mainstream popularity............ I would love to understand better what’s driving all of this—what’s driving the virality. Like, honestly, we don’t understand. We don’t know......... As it turned out, the conversational data had a big positive impact on ChatGPT. .......... users can get to what they want by going back and forth. ......... a technique called reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). This is ChatGPT’s secret sauce. The basic idea is to take a large language model with a tendency to spit out anything it wants—in this case, GPT-3.5—and tune it by teaching it what kinds of responses human users actually prefer. ............. you want it to be—you know—nontoxic ........... if the user’s query isn’t clear, it should ask follow-up questions. It should also clarify that it’s an AI system. It should not assume an identity that it doesn’t have, it shouldn’t claim to have abilities that it doesn’t possess, and when a user asks it to do tasks that it’s not supposed to do, it has to write a refusal message. ........ everybody at OpenAI sat down and tried to break the model. And we had external groups doing the same kind of thing. We also had an early-access program with trusted users, who gave feedback............ Our biggest concern was around factuality, because the model likes to fabricate things. But InstructGPT and other large language models are already out there, so we thought that as long as ChatGPT is better than those in terms of factuality and other issues of safety, it should be good to go. ............. tens of millions of users who may be looking to test its limits and find its flaws. .......... what ChatGPT can produce—from songs about God’s love for rapist priests to malware code that steals credit card numbers— ............. we think we can make a lot of the jailbreaking a lot more difficult. .......... In January, Microsoft revealed Bing Chat, a search chatbot that many assume to be a version of OpenAI’s officially unannounced GPT-4. ....... I think we just have to be very up-front, and manage expectations, and make it clear this is not a finished product. .
'Thrilled To Join This Community': Hudson Valley's Hillary Clinton Reveals New Teaching Gig. she will serve as a professor of practice at the university's School of International and Public Affairs (SIPA) and a presidential fellow at Columbia World Projects. In these roles, she hopes to help the world's next generation of leaders face upcoming obstacles, Clinton said. ........... Thrilled to join this community," Clinton tweeted on Thursday, Jan. 5. ........ She will also lead an effort to gather policy leaders from around the globe to develop "innovative policy solutions," Columbia officials said. .
SHOCKING STUDY FINDS 99 PERCENT OF THE WORLD POPULATION IS BREATHING HARMFUL AIR "ALMOST NO ONE IS SAFE FROM AIR POLLUTION." only 0.001 percent of the global population live in areas with levels of PM 2.5 below the safe threshold recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO), which accounts for less than 0.18 percent of available land on the planet. ....... PM 2.5 is a fine air particulate that's no more than 2.5 microns in width — over thirty times smaller than a grain of sand — allowing it to easily invade our lungs and bloodstream. Lung cancer is an obvious fear, but PM 2.5's potential to cause and exacerbate heart disease should not be overlooked, either. ........ exposure to PM 2.5 as brief as a few hours can be enough to trigger "cardiovascular disease-related heart attacks and death." Long-term exposure can lead to an "increased risk of cardiovascular mortality and decreases in life expectancy." ..........
99 percent of the global population is exposed to high PM 2.5 levels
....... while daily levels have dropped in North America and Europe over the past two decades, it continues to climb in other regions, including Southern Asia, Latin America, and Australia. ........ the global average level of PM 2.5 was extremely high between 2000 and 2019 at 32.8 micrograms per cubic meter, over six times the recommended threshold. ........
air pollution was responsible for nine million premature deaths in 2015.
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10 Breakthrough Technologies 2023 Every year, we pick the 10 technologies that matter the most right now. You’ll recognize some; others might surprise you. .
2022’s seismic shift in US tech policy will change how we innovateThree bills investing hundreds of billions into technological development could change the way we think about government’s role in growing prosperity. ......... The dollar amounts are jaw-dropping. The bills include $550 billion in new spending over the next five years in the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, $280 billion in the CHIPS and Science Act (which prompted Intel to go ahead on the Ohio construction), and another roughly $390 billion for clean energy in the Inflation Reduction Act. Among the investments is the most aggressive federal funding for science and technology in decades. But the greatest long-term impact of the legislative flurry could come from its bold embrace of something that has long been a political third rail in the US: industrial policy....... Think of US support for semiconductor manufacturing in the 1980s or the creation during the Cold War of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), which led to the internet and GPS. ......... for the most part, it has seemed foreign to US political thinking: it was something China does, something Japan, South Korea, and France used to do (remember the Concorde?). ......... experts have begun identifying a handful of superstar cities, including San Francisco, Seattle, and Boston, that are booming while the rest of the country suffers. ........ After decades of declining federal investment in R&D, which dropped from 1.2% of GDP in the late 1970s to below 0.8% in recent years, the CHIPS and Science Act alone authorizes some $174 billion for research at places like the National Science Foundation. .......... After decades, he says, it’s time the US government got back in the game of “understanding the importance of merging innovation strategy with industrial policy.” ............ industrial policy ...... Instead of being embarrassed by the topic, he says, politicians are now touting it as a strategy. ........... For every Solyndra (a solar company that received a half-billion-dollar federal loan guarantee before flaming out, and the favorite example of a disastrous losing pick), there is a Tesla—funded around the same time by a federal loan. But the criticism does have some truth to it; industrial policy requires, well, policies. It requires choices. ......... today’s advanced manufacturing is highly automated, and facilities tend to employ relatively few workers. .......... opportunities to increase the capabilities of people working in long-term care, an area that is exploding as the population ages, by giving them digital tools. ......... The tech industry gave us Zoom to survive the pandemic, and Amazon went on a hiring spree, but none of this led to a widespread economic expansion. We’re still waiting for the long-anticipated economy-wide productivity boom from AI. ........... “Two hundred cities in the US are all trying to look like Silicon Valley,” Breznitz says, adding, “I don’t know why. Maybe they’ve never been to Silicon Valley?” ........... today’s technologies, especially artificial intelligence, robotics, genomic medicine, and advanced computation, provide vast opportunities to improve our lives, especially in areas like education, health care, and other services. .
The original startup behind Stable Diffusion has launched a generative AI for video Runway’s new model, called Gen-1, can change the visual style of existing videos and movies. ....... can transform existing videos into new ones by applying any style specified by a text prompt or reference image. ........ Gen-1, can turn clips of people on a street into claymation puppets, or books stacked on a table into a cityscape at night. Runway hopes that Gen-1 will do for video what Stable Diffusion did for images. ...........
“I truly believe that 2023 is going to be the year of video.”
.......... “We’re really close to having full feature films being generated,” he says. “We’re close to a place where most of the content you’ll see online will be generated.” .
