Tuesday, June 13, 2023

13: Ukraine



Ron DeSantis Thinks Trump Didn’t Go Far Enough Ron DeSantis’s “The Courage to be Free.” It’s not a good book, exactly. But it is a revealing one. ......... what DeSantis wants to do, but hasn’t yet done. He thinks the federal government has become too “woke” and too liberal, and Congress should “withhold funding to the offending executive branch departments until the abuses are corrected.” ......... Schedule F that can reclassify around 50,000 federal employees to make them more like political appointees, enabling the president “to terminate federal employees who frustrate his policies.” .......... he has called for a national “reckoning” on Covid and promised to hold people like Dr. Anthony Fauci “accountable” for the damage he believes they’ve caused. ........ “For years, the default conservative position has been to limit government and then get out of the way,” DeSantis writes. Such reticence about using the power of government to fight back against the arrayed forces of the left — including Facebook, Disney, the government, the schools, the media and much else — means “essentially greenlighting these institutions to continue their unimpeded march through society.” .............. Trump often appears in DeSantis’s book as a faintly comic figure. When DeSantis requests federal aid after Hurricane Michael devastated the Panhandle, Trump says, according to DeSantis’s recounting, “They love me in the Panhandle. I must have won 90 percent of the vote out there. Huge crowds. What do they need?” It is left to Trump’s chief of staff, Mick Mulvaney, to beg DeSantis to delay announcing the aid because Trump “doesn’t even know what he agreed to.” .............. He describes winning Florida’s governorship and ordering his transition team to “amass an exhaustive list of all the constitutional, statutory, and customary powers of the governor.” Much of the rest of the book is an exhaustive, and at times exhausting, account of how he used them. ............ DeSantis is portraying himself as the figure liberals have long feared: a Donald Trump who plans, a Donald Trump who follows through. ............. Part of Trump’s appeal in 2015 and 2016 was his willingness to defy conservative orthodoxy. He promised to raise taxes on rich guys like himself, leave Medicare and Social Security alone, and make sure everyone had great health care. Polls showed he was viewed as a more centrist candidate than Hillary Clinton. .

Saudi Arabia and China Flaunt Growing Ties at Investment Forum The kingdom hosted a lavish Arab-China business conference days after a visit from the American secretary of state, inviting companies blacklisted by the United States. .......... “If you want a trusted partner in the world — one of the best partners in the world — it’s the People’s Republic of China,” Mohammed Abunayyan, the chairman of a Saudi renewable energy company, declared from the stage, to resounding applause. “China is a partner you can depend on,” he said on Sunday, the first of two days of meetings. ........... The event, attended by more than 3,000 people, came days after a visit to the kingdom by the U.S. Secretary of State, Antony J. Blinken, who reaffirmed the U.S.-Saudi relationship after a period of strained ties — including a blowup last year over oil production. Yet at the conclusion of Mr. Blinken’s visit on Thursday, the Saudi foreign minister said that while the kingdom values its close relationship with the United States, it has no plans to distance itself from China, its top trading partner. .............. Saudi officials often complain that they feel like they cannot rely on the United States, their historical security guarantor, and are seeking to forge a more independent foreign policy. ......... many Saudis can’t help but frame their growing ties with China in contrast to the waning influence of the United States in the kingdom. .......... In the newest terminals at Riyadh’s airport, directional signs include not only Arabic and English, but also Chinese. ......... “In human history, every 20 or 30 years there’s something big happening, and the last big economic thing that happened was perhaps the opening of China,” said Ronnie Chan, a Hong Kong real estate developer. “I am witnessing something today in the kingdom that reminded me of what happened 30 or 40 years ago in China.” .

Fear and Mayhem as Russia’s War Comes Home Attacks from Ukraine have killed at least a dozen Russian civilians and displaced thousands. But they have not fundamentally changed the calculus for Vladimir Putin. ............ Almost all of the 40,000 inhabitants had fled ......... Mounting attacks on the Russian side of the border have killed more than a dozen civilians and pushed tens of thousands of people into Belgorod, the capital of a region whose rich soil and manicured streets once earned it the sobriquet “little Switzerland.” ......... ‌If the intention has been to shake support for Mr. Putin, or Russian resolve in his war, or to make ordinary Russians feel the pain of the conflict for themselves, then the attacks from Ukraine may have had some marginal effect, but they have not changed anything fundamental. ......... he can still count on support from most of a population cowed by his increasingly repressive 23-year-old rule. ........ an estimated one million of those opposed to the war have fled the country. ‌ ............ None of the Russians interviewed drew a connection between their plight and the 8.2 million Ukrainian refugees who have fled Mr. Putin’s brutal war. Constant propaganda has twisted the conflict into a defensive Russian war against the “Nazis” and “Fascists,” backed by the United States and Europe, who, in the Russian telling, gave Moscow no choice but to take military action........ On the ghostly streets of Shebekino, Viktor Kalugin, 65, complained that Wagner mercenaries and Chechen fighters, both renowned for their ruthlessness, had not been allowed to take care of things. ............ “I hope our forces will not allow the Fascists to enter here,” he said. “As long as we have Putin, nobody will be able to take Russia. If only he could deal with the generals.” ............. An offer from local authorities of 50,000 rubles, or about $650, for those displaced by the fighting provoked flashes of outrage when it was announced on Thursday. ......... “They unleashed a war and now they want to close people’s mouths with pennies,” wrote Svetlana Ilyasova in a chat group of Shebekino residents on the Telegram messaging app. ......... “This is Russia against the collective West,” a senior official in Moscow, who declined to be named, said in an interview. “Ukraine is just the land where the performance is going on.” ......... has attributed the attacks, which had no apparent military target, to Russians fighting for two paramilitary groups, the Free Russia Legion and the Russian Volunteer Corps, that have embraced the Ukrainian cause as a means to “liberate” Russia from Mr. Putin. ............ Above him was a giant billboard declaring, “Glory to Our Air Defense!” Beside him, one man wore a dark blue NYC hat and another a T-shirt emblazoned with the words “Los Angeles.” Russia’s radical turn away from the West is still a work in progress. .

How to Use A.I. to Automate the Dreaded Office Meeting Generating a slide deck, talking points and meetings minutes can all be done in a snap. All you need are the right prompts........ As with text and image generators, the more detailed your prompts, the better. ....... A word of warning: Generative A.I. systems are vulnerable to a phenomenon called “hallucination,” where the model makes up plausible-sounding nonsense. Especially in a work setting, it’s vitally important to triple-check that no inaccuracies have crept in. .......... “act as if…” is one of the golden prompts for using generative A.I. ............ Zoom and Google include tools that use A.I. to automatically transcribe speech from a meeting into a text file, as long as the meeting is recorded with everyone’s permission. You can then paste the transcript into a chatbot and ask it to summarize it. ............. If you use Google Meet with a business license, meeting transcripts are turned on by default and a link to a Google Doc gets emailed to the host. ........ If you’re using Zoom, you will need a business, education or enterprise license with cloud recording enabled in the account settings. When the Zoom meeting starts, enable cloud recording. Once the meeting ends, the service will automatically generate the transcript. .

After a Rocky Year, Zuckerberg Lays Out Meta’s Road Map to Employees In an internal all-hands meeting, the chief executive explained his plans for artificial intelligence, the metaverse and rebooting Meta’s culture.......... Zuckerberg has spent the last nine months against the ropes ........ how Meta’s work in artificial intelligence would blend with its plans for the virtual reality it calls the metaverse. ......... Zuckerberg’s talk was an attempt to rally staff after the most tumultuous period in his company’s 19-year history. .......... Executives also spoke about Project 92, a long-rumored social app in development at Meta that will function similar to Twitter. .......... detailed plans for artificially intelligent assistants that aid people across all Meta’s apps, including WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram. .......... “Democratizing access to this has a bunch of value,” Mr. Zuckerberg said, according to the two people who shared remarks with The Times. “But it’s also aligned with the product vision of enabling a lot of different A.I.’s instead of just trying to consolidate this ourselves into one singular A.I. that’s going to try to rule everything.” ............. He envisioned A.I. assistants that help people “create content to express yourself and your ideas so much better,” or perhaps some artificially intelligent version of “a coach that gives you advice, encourages you.” .......... A.I. agents could serve customers in products like WhatsApp, the globally popular messaging app that Meta has been focused on turning into an important tool for business owners and customer service. And every business could use a personalized A.I. algorithm. ........ The company has spent billions over the past decade building systems to run A.I. and attracting top researchers to work on some of the world’s most difficult computer science questions around A.I. ........... Mr. Zuckerberg also said he hoped for a world where people could build as many different A.I. programs as they wanted, rather than relying on a few provided by two or three large technology companies. ............. Programs using new generative A.I. technology, he said, could eventually help people build new virtual world items and experiences. ............ “Our vision of the metaverse and presence is fundamentally social and about people interacting and feeling closer in new amazing ways. By contrast, every demo Apple showed was someone sitting on a couch by themselves.” .

Why I Can’t Bet Against Apple’s Mixed-Reality Prowess There are plenty of reasons the Vision Pro could flop. But we shouldn’t forget that Apple has a knack for entering a product category at just the right time......... I’ve been a virtual reality skeptic for years, and I have long wondered why the technology hasn’t gone mainstream, even as headset quality has improved. I was always dubious about Mark Zuckerberg’s pitch for the metaverse, which had “personal conquest” vibes more so than “actual market demand” vibes. ....... it could be a big deal, and possibly even the first hint of a revolutionary new computing platform. ......... there just aren’t a ton of people in the world who are interested in reading their emails in V.R. ........ (Apple is now the No. 1 watch brand in the world, and it sells an estimated 40 million watches every year. I wear one, as do many of my friends and relatives.) ........ Now, we assume that people who check their watches at dinner are probably trying to avoid pulling out their phones, which would be ruder and more disruptive. In other words, mass adoption killed the taboo. ......... Apple has a knack for entering a product category at just the right time. The iPhone wasn’t the first smartphone in 2007, or even the first touch-screen smartphone. The iPad wasn’t the first tablet. But in both cases, the company brought excitement and sex appeal to products that hadn’t previously had it. Apple let other companies make some of the expensive mistakes, and it focused on making a great product. .......... virtual and augmented reality are fundamentally bad ideas, and the market for these devices may be destined to remain small. But it could be that the market just needed Apple to arrive. .

The Hottest Thing in Real Estate Is a Loan From Two Years Ago Real estate agents are pushing sub-3 percent mortgages as an amenity, just like marble countertops or a view of the mountains. .



How Can ChatGPT Provide Data-Driven Insights Into Consumer Behavior And Trends?

Talk To Teachers In Kazakhstan (International Academy Of Sciences Kazakhstan)
100 Top Prompts For Teachers In English And Russian
How Can ChatGPT Help Create And Implement A Mobile Marketing Strategy?
How Can ChatGPT Analyze Data To Determine The Most Effective Lead Generation Strategies?




Asana CEO: ‘The way we work right now will soon look vestigial. Here’s how A.I. will make work more human’ employees at JPMorgan may already be suffering under that dynamic due to the company’s powerful employee monitoring tools........... a world where people are thriving in their jobs because of A.I., not in spite of it. ........ Software can help you screen notifications, for example, by intelligently analyzing whether an incoming alert is both important and urgent enough to interrupt your focus. It can organically synchronize your moments of collaboration with others, evolving us past today’s rigid system of recurring meetings and calendar blocks that fracture your days. Perhaps most importantly, it can encourage you to take breaks, even vacations, when you’ve been working too long (thus improving impact over longer cycles, in addition to well-being). .............. we’re at our best when we’re engaged in tasks that are distinctly human, the ones that allow us to infuse our creativity, empathy, and judgment into them. A.I. can enable our days to be filled with these, when we leverage its comparative advantage to do more of the “work about work” that slows us down, like compiling and sharing status updates. .......... A.I. can jump-start employees’ onboarding and institutional knowledge by becoming a personal tutor that brings every individual up to speed with expert patience and grace. Unfamiliar acronyms, custom Slack emojis, and project code names—all the tiny nuances that make up the connective tissue of culture—can be alienating to those unfamiliar. A.I. can decode company or team culture, replacing the uneasiness that accompanies transitions with a quickly achieved sense of belonging, and making it easy to start contributing to the team’s goals. Reducing this friction is empowering for individuals, making it easy to leave managers that don’t treat them well. ............. A world with more breakthroughs, bigger ideas, better execution, and faster progress. A world full of happy individuals, living their best lives at work.

at
Labels: ,

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)