Ukraine’s allies have good reasons for wanting to wash their hands of Russian oil. But that will not prevent debris from nearby wreckages floating to their shores.

One will be to further split the oil trade along sharp geopolitical lines.

All this suggests Russia will be unable to sell much of its refined oil, and will instead try to push as much crude as it can to the grey market.

Therefore Russia’s best bets may be the smaller markets of Brazil and Mexico, which will see their supplies dwindle as America exports more to Europe.

Insurance experts suspect some ports serving countries gorging on Russian crude—notably India—have lowered the level of coverage they require incoming tankers to have.

The liabilities from an oil spill can be so big that 90% of global p&i coverage is provided by clubs of shipowners, mostly in London, which pool premiums. Outside the West, no private market has the muscle to extend similar safety-nets, says Ulrich Kadow of Allianz, a German insurer.

Instead, the shadow trade appears to be fuelled by credit from the Russian state, with the middlemen only paying for the cargo once they have collected the proceeds. Increasingly, banks in the Gulf are signing cheques too. Locals think they decided to step in when adnoc, the uae’s state-owned energy giant, started receiving Russian crude in November.

The fleet Russia can use to dodge the price cap now counts 360-odd ships, equivalent to 16% of the global crude tanker inventory.

Most were “Aframax” and “Suezmax” tankers: with a maximum capacity of 1m barrels, these are the only ships small enough to dock at Russian ports. Demand for Aframaxes has been so strong that a few recently sold for $35m—the average price China paid last year to buy much larger vlccs, which can carry up to 2m barrels.

the trading arms of Russian producers, those of Western oil majors and Swiss commodity merchants. These were mostly based in Geneva

Some trade still uses the same Greek shippers, British insurers, and Dutch and Japanese banks that have long ruled the industry.

the new “shadow” shipping and financing infrastructure is robust and extensive. Rather than fade away, the grey market stands ready to expand when the next set of sanctions is enforced.

They are based not in Geneva, but in Hong Kong or Dubai

Democracy depends on citizens who can find compromises. Liberalism depends on taking an opponent’s argument seriously and learning from it. America needs institutions that can have these debates, rather than monocultural incubators of mutually exclusive ideologies

Yet if they are used as a filter for hiring, they will filter out anyone who fails to toe the campus-progressive line, and anyone who objects on principle to ideological litmus tests.

to remake institutions according to their preferences.

Students sometimes object to being exposed to ideas they deem troubling.

they are attempts to win arguments by controlling the institutions where those arguments take place.

those generated by the immigration debate (though, surprisingly, not by the policing debate) clearly divided them.

Both used functional magnetic-resonance imaging, which measures changes in blood flow as a proxy for neural activity, to look at groups of 44 and 34 volunteers respectively, from across the political spectrum.

to produce a single-crystalline membrane

At present, LEDs are made like silicon chips. The red, green and blue versions required for a full range of colours are grown on different wafers, then cut out and placed side by side, with microscopic precision, to form pixels.

To generate displays with higher and higher resolution, LED pixels have been getting smaller and smaller. But this makes them ever harder to manufacture reliably. Some in the industry think a practical limit will soon be reached.

“You could have a completely immersive experience and wouldn’t be able to distinguish virtual from reality,”

One reason is climate change. Almost one in 20 Britons said they experienced climate anxiety in 2022: shamanism places all things in nature on an equal footing. Paganism, another religion rooted in nature, is also on the rise. “It gives people a spiritual outlet for their political beliefs [about climate change],” says Mr Buxton.

Shamanism is rooted in animism, the idea that every entity in nature, whether plant, animal or rock, is alive. Trance is the core shared practice. Shamans (who are traditionally trained by other shamans) learn to enter trances—aided by drumming, singing, dancing or, occasionally, psychotropic drugs—to commune with spirits. Such beliefs date back to hunter-gatherer societies. “We talk about [prostitution being] the oldest profession but really, it’s shamanism,” says Simon Buxton of the Sacred Trust, a shamanic training centre.

Should your partner enjoin you to eat less salt, you can push the salad they have placed before you away. Salad, you can declare, comes after all from herba salata, Latin for salted vegetables. Alas, you will also have to swear off salsa (from the Latin for salted seasonings), and, for that matter, any sauce (which is just the French adaptation of salsa). You will further have to forgo sausage and salami (both descended from Latin’s salcisus, applied to salted meat).

The Oxford English Dictionary traces the gradual changes in a word’s form and meaning, buttressed by literary citations over centuries.

In English, the great majority of them descend from a stock of roots shared among the Indo-European family of languages. Some reached English as part of its Germanic Anglo-Saxon bedrock. Others arrived with the French of the Norman conquest, or were coined from Latin and Greek in the 16th and 17th centuries.

Roman soldiers were given an allowance of salt, or paid in it entirely.

They prompted a tremendous scramble to invent new ideas and institutions, to make sure that radical economic change translated into broad-based prosperity rather than chaos.

ai will break the historic mould

If ai boosts productivity and lowers costs in medicine, for example, that might lead to much higher demand for medical services and professionals.

And in the 1980s and 1990s, automation of routine work on factory floors and in offices displaced many workers of modest means, while boosting employment for both high- and low-skilled workers.

despite epochal technological and economic change, fears of mass technological unemployment have never before been realised.

Measured productivity growth may actually decline in the years or decades after a new technology appears, as firms and workers divert time and resources to studying the tech and designing business processes around it.

The gap between innovation and economic impact is in part because of fine-tuning.

It must be used in many industries, have an inherent potential for continued improvement and give rise to “innovational complementarities”

The gpt in its name stands for “generative pre-trained transformer”

As in the 1990s, when search engines first appeared, a hugely valuable prize—to become the front door to the internet—may once again be up for grabs.

If chatbots’ main value is as a layer on top of other digital services, though, that will favour incumbents which provide such services already.

But it is unclear whether chatbots are a competitor to search engines, or a complement.

But will people use them if their objectivity has been compromised by advertisers? Will they be able to tell? Behold, another can of worms.

Running a chatbot requires more processing power than serving up search results, and therefore costs more, reducing margins.

As tech firms decide which topics are too sensitive, they will have to choose where to draw the line. All this will raise questions about censorship, objectivity and the nature of truth.

how to build a bomb

for medical advice

Chatbots must also grapple with bias, prejudice and misinformation as they scan the internet.

Unlike search engines, which mostly direct people to other pages and make no claims for their veracity, chatbots present their answers as gospel truth.

moral choices, monetisation and monopoly economics.

called Ernie,

in Anthropic, a startup founded by ex-OpenAI employees, which has built a chatbot called Claude.

Google has announced Bard, its own chatbot, as a “companion” to its search engine.

Many things that people use search engines for today, in short, can be done better with chatbots.

ChatGPT can write essays in various styles, explain complex concepts, summarise text and answer trivia questions. It can even (narrowly) pass legal and medical exams.

By the end of January, two months after its launch, ChatGPT was being used by more than 100m people, making it the “fastest-growing consumer application in history”, according to UBS, a bank.

Google is not merely a household name; it is a verb.

he should answer Mr Biden’s calls for a relationship with guardrails.

two-way trade between China and America runs at about $2bn a day

“Both in China and the US, there are still some people working for stable bilateral relations, but they are in a minority,” he worries.

Mr Da sees this year as a window of opportunity for talks, before American elections in 2024. He pins cautious hopes on “reasonable” officials, business bosses and academics on each side who still seek co-operation.

Mr Russel sees the two countries in “uncharted” territory as they feel their way towards a new equilibrium, balancing often-incompatible goals and worldviews with deep economic integration.

For good measure, it accused America of “hyping up” the story, as if a free society could cover up a house-sized enemy balloon visible from the ground.

mid-air crash in 2001 between an American EP3 spy plane and a Chinese fighter jet

When an American missile burst the balloon, the main injury was to China’s pride.

Its App Store policies protect its users from fraudsters, hackers and the like, it has said. Its ad-tracking restrictions protect privacy.

to innovate in order to “keep on their feet, on ground that is slipping away from under them”

It is Apple’s vast, and vitally important, supply chains in China, from which it will struggle to extricate itself as Sino-American relations deteriorate.

Even ChatGPT, Microsoft’s weapon in the fight, could not describe creative destruction with more Schumpeterian eloquence.

That left no one safe from disruption. As he put it, even a monopoly was “no cushion to sleep on”.

he believed that creative destruction blew through the economy like a perennial gale, destroying old structures and building new ones.

Though Facebook and Google get most of the antitrust attention, so much of their content depends on Apple’s platforms that some describe it as the 800-pound gorilla in the background.

Apple has become just the sort of big-business innovation engine that late-in-life Schumpeter admired and perceived as best-placed to produce revolutionary change.

Such developments, says Mr Dediu, are not about “eureka moments”. They are about turning new technologies into products that eventually will be accessible to millions.

Schumpeter drew up a checklist of ways to create new “combinations”, as he called entrepreneurial firms; Jobs used many of them. He created new goods (Macs, iPods, etc), a new method of production (the Cupertino-to-China supply chain) and new markets (the app economy).

his famous term “creative destruction”,

unless Mr Macron can persuade the French of its merits, he could end up with a successful reform to his name, but a bitterly resentful country.

French workers actually on average these days put in a longer week (37 hours) than Germans (35 hours), and are nearly as productive per hour worked.

In 1880 Paul Lafargue, a socialist thinker, published “Le Droit à la Paresse” (“The Right to be Lazy”), arguing for a three-hour working day and denouncing the “madness of the love of work”.

A 2% tax on the assets of French billionaires, suggested a report from Oxfam France, would wipe out the pension deficit overnight.

This was highlighted by his rejection of the distinction between discovery and justification (denying that we can distinguish between the psychological process of thinking up an idea and the logical process of justifying its claim to truth) and his emphasis on incommensurability (the claim that certain kinds of comparison between theories are impossible

A crisis in science arises when confidence is lost in the ability of the paradigm to solve particularly worrying puzzles called ‘anomalies’

European space officials like the Artemis program and are seeking areas for greater involvement. This is drawing them closer to NASA.

However, the more significant reason is probably a political one

anuary, Josef Aschbacher, director general of the European Space Agency, said his focus remains on the International Space Station Partnership with NASA, Russia, Canada, and Japan. "For the moment we have neither the budgetary nor the political, let’s say, green light or intention to engage in a second space station—that is participating on the Chinese space station,"

Nearly six years ago the European Space Agency surprised its longtime spaceflight partners at NASA, as well as diplomatic officials at the White House, with an announcement that some of its astronauts were training alongside Chinese astronauts. The goal was to send European astronauts to China's Tiangong space station by 2022.

A new study argues that the boundary between Earth's atmosphere and outer space—known as the Kármán line—is 20 kilometers, or about 20%, closer than scientists thought

Until now, most scientists have said that outer space is 100 kilometers away.

World Air Sports Federation (FAI) in Lausanne, Switzerland, the keeper of outer space records

A country’s sovereign airspace theoretically extends to the (disputed) boundary with space.

More serious challenges for balloons might be regulatory and political.

This kind of technology could eventually be a threat—or a complement—to existing space data businesses.

The benefits include higher resolution imagery: World View’s investor presentation claims sensor resolutions of 3 to 5 centimeters per pixel, compared to the 50 cm per pixel resolution that is top of line in space-based Earth observation. The balloons also offer more persistent monitoring by floating above one location for weeks at a time, whereas Earth observation satellites can typically gather data a few times a day at most. World View already has a partnership with Maxar, a leading satellite firm with an extensive remote-sensing business.

it wafted through US skies before

Politics is the art of gaining (and maintaining) leadership, while strategy, in the words of Alexander Suvorov, is the science of victory.

Local government, which should be as open as possible to citizens and capable of dealing with problems, constitutes a solid popular basis for the whole power structure.

A key part of this journey is the formation of an elite committed to serving the state and not just itself.

It requires a dynamic economy and its own technological base that is absolutely essential for real sovereignty in a 21st century world, an educated and healthy population, a society based on values shared by the majority of the people, and the principles of solidarity and justice

The stakes for Russia in the current conflict are therefore existential and fundamentally higher than those of the US and its allies.

The quasi-ideology of pragmatism and the cult of money, which dominated the country after the collapse of the USSR, proved to be flawed and harmful. In short, the end of the historical orientation towards integration with the Western world logically requires Russia to reorient itself.

They are guided primarily by national interests and are deeply integrated into the global economy and the Western-centric institutions that serve it, which significantly limits interaction with Moscow.

Cultural, scientific, sporting and humanitarian ties have been severely curtailed, the information war has reached maximum intensity, and the Iron Curtain in Europe has been rebuilt - this time by the West.

the politician must observe issues in the here and now.

to first identify the prevailing trends in global development

So, it follows that the strategist (planner and navigator) and the politician (the pilot) must work together and in very close contact with each other.

geopolitical with an acute phase of great power rivalry and the emergence of new players on the global stage, economic with the regionalization of economics and finance, values including the inability of modern Western obsessions to become universal and the struggle between tradition and innovation within the West itself

Strategy increasingly came to be understood as higher politics, while politics was often understood as political tactics.

the specific details of moving towards the goal belong to tactics.

the goal the subject is aiming for, and the general path it has chosen to reach the goal.

The old strategy, beginning with Peter the Great, to Europeanize the country and take its place in that world, is no longer relevant.

rather a deep, protracted conflict with long-lasting consequences

In November 2020, I wrote an article about creating a topic cluster boosting my website traffic by 1000%.

People want to feel special, not reduced to a data point.

The credentials of those behind an AI matter.

Late last year Horizon Worlds, Meta’s main metaversal attraction, was reportedly losing users.

Meta still faces other—more serious—challenges from regulators at home (where another FTC lawsuit calls for its break-up) and in Europe (where tough new rules on large digital platforms are being finalised).

But China does have a vital interest in discrediting American-led alliances, because those may threaten China one day in its East Asian backyard.

it is making digital technology governance a centerpiece of its G-20 presidency.

By declining to use the G-20 as a platform for meaningfully challenging digital authoritarianism, it may reduce its own ability to capitalize on its international stature as the world’s largest digital democracy.

the Indian presidency is increasing its prospects of crafting at least basic consensus – maybe even a ministerial declaration

Evidently, this approach differs from the G-7 countries’ commitment to promoting cross-border “data free flow with trust.”

In the digital realm, that translates into an approach centering on “data sovereignty” and countering “data colonialism.”

locally developed 5G technology

“India stack” digitization project. It comprises four technology layers designed to provide individuals with digital identities, an interoperable payments system, virtual documents and verification, and personal data management through regulated intermediaries.

to generate jobs, facilitate citizen-centered inclusive growth, and enhance connectivity.

According to a study by the Reserve Bank of India, India’s digital economy grew 2.4 times faster than the overall economy.

its “human-centric approach to technology” to the grand diplomatic stage are in full swing.

But digital is among those areas where careful optimism still prevails.

advancing inclusive cooperation on digital trade, expanding affordable and high-quality digital infrastructure, enabling cross-border data flows and developing digital skills and literacy.

The tanks are expecte

Axiom, a space company that flies passengers to the International Space Station and is developing its own space station, said this week that most of the demand for passenger services is coming from governments without their own space programs, not tourists with deep pockets.

the project is still on the drawing board, with hopes to finalize its design by 2025. The goal is to fly the vehicle in 2027—but, as with most space technology forecasts, that’s an optimistic projection.

The US has only put a nuclear reactor in space once before, through an Air Force program called SNAPSHOT.

But the dream of space fanatics is a proper nuclear rocket, one using a fission reactor to run an engine two to three times more powerful than any motor dependent on combusting fossil fuels. Launched into space on a conventional rocket, it could shorten trips to Mars or give the Space Force unprecedented maneuverability. Last week, NASA and DARPA, the US military’s advanced tech lab, announced a collaborative project called DRACO to build and test exactly such a vehicle.

Deep space missions regularly rely on nuclear power, using the heat emitted by radioactive substances to generate electricity without an atom-splitting chain reaction. NASA’s Perseverance rover, currently exploring the surface of Mars, is powered by one of these devices.

“dramatically reduce the need to scale up”. And novel methods to do more with less are being developed all the time.

Epoch, a non-profit research institute, estimates that at current rates, big language models will run out of high-quality text on the internet by 2026 (though other less-tapped formats, like video, will remain abundant for a while).

That in turn is generating tonnes of user data that could make its models better (“reinforcement learning with human feedback”, if you must know)—and thus attract more users.

As a result of all this, reckons Yann LeCun, Meta’s top AI boffin, “Nobody is ahead of anybody else by more than two to six months.”

Neither AI was clearly superior. Google’s was slightly better at maths, answering five questions correctly, compared with three for ChatGPT. Their dating advice was uneven: fed some actual exchanges in a dating app each gave specific suggestions on one occasion, and generic platitudes such as “be open minded” and “communicate effectively” on another. ChatGPT, meanwhile, answered nine SAT questions correctly compared with seven for its Google rival. It also appeared more responsive to our feedback and got a few questions right on a second try. Another test by Riley Goodside of Scale AI, an AI startup, suggests Anthropic’s chatbot, Claude, might perform better than ChatGPT at realistic-sounding conversation, though it performs worse at generating computer code.

Meta’s “Diplomacy” player, Cicero, gets kudos for its use of strategic reasoning and deception against human opponents

the world’s biggest natural-language model, Wu Dao 2.0

The Chinese labs, for example, appear to have a big lead in the subdiscipline of computer vision, which involves analysing images, where they are responsible for the largest share of the most highly cited papers. According to a ranking devised by Microsoft, the top five computer-vision teams in the world are all Chinese.

Stability AI, a startup that has assembled an open-source consortium of other small firms, universities and non-profits to pool computing resources, has created a popular model that converts text to images.

In 2017 Ashish Arora, an economist, and colleagues examined the period from 1980 to 2006 and found that firms had moved away from basic science towards developing existing ideas.

When Alphabet, its parent company, presents quarterly earnings on February 2nd, investors will be listening out for its answer to ChatGPT.

Brazil Justice Moraes fines Telegram for not complying with court order

by IARPA, the research hub of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, which oversees America’s spies.

Wi-Fi signals undergo subtle shifts when they encounter objects—human beings included.

to turn any building’s Wi-Fi network into a mini panopticon

interactive gaming and exercise monitoring.

to “monitor the well-being of elder people”

this work employed standard antennas of the sort used in household Wi-Fi routers.

describes how they ran Wi-Fi signals from a room with appropriate routers in it through an artificial-intelligence algorithm trained on signals from people engaging in various, known activities.

Technology is advancing and courtroom rules are very outdated."

The AI tools developed by DoNotPay, which remain completely untested in actual courtrooms, require recording audio of arguments in order for the machine-learning algorithm to generate responses.

"This could've shifted the balance and allowed people to use tools like ChatGPT in the courtroom that maybe could've helped them win cases."

focus on assisting people dealing with expensive medical bills, unwanted subscriptions and issues with credit reporting agencies.

Earlier this month, he claimed on Twitter that the company would pay any lawyer $1 million to argue in front of the U.S. Supreme Court wearing AirPods that would pipe AI-generated arguments from its "robot lawyer."

By contrast, the center-left is pushing for an overall increase of the sanctions and for removing size and market share consideration from the criteria authorities consider when imposing a penalty. 

Conservatives want to give the European Artificial Intelligence Board additional autonomy in setting its own agenda. The Greens want the European Data Protection Supervisor to provide the Board’s secretariat for the Board – and act as the supervisory authority for large companies.   

The Green group added a paragraph to add a transparency requirement to counter deceptive practices called dark patterns. 

he rules applied to providers not located or operating in the EU under certain circumstances. 

Liberals have introduced a new article to put them in the scope of the regulation, including a reference to blockchain-backed currencies.

Green MEPs extended the high-risk category to media recommendation software, algorithms used in the health insurance processes, payments, and debt collection. 

Obligations for high-risk applications should be partially or completely removed if programmers mitigate the risk with countermeasures or built-in features.  

But high-risk requires programmers to take a series of precautions to make sure their plans are safe. 

the majority look set to prohibit biometric recognition.

Green MEPs want to ban biometric categorization, emotion recognition, and all automated monitoring of human behavior.

the center-right European People’s Party insists on the definition agreed upon at the OECD.

Left-of-center parliamentarians are pushing for a broad general definition of artificial intelligence (AI) rather than accepting a narrow list of AI techniques.

topics is on definitions.

“requiring students to leave all their backpacks and electronics at the front of the exam room.”

some of whom are revamping their courses as a result.

Mostofi said student assignments will continue to be designed to “support students in developing linked thinking and writing skills,” including the drafting and revising processes, as well as citing sources.

Among other districts that have cracked down on its use, New York City’s education department has blocked the site on its networks, citing “concerns about negative impacts on student learning, and concerns regarding the safety and accuracy of content,” according to education department spokesperson Jenna Lyle in a statement to Chalkbeat New York.

“Students are expected to complete coursework without unpermitted aid,” wrote spokesperson Dee Mostofi. “In most courses, unpermitted aid includes AI tools like ChatGPT.”

The US is lobbying hard to dilute Europe’s AI regulation, aiming to narrow Europe’s definition of risky AI. In Washington’s view, it is too early to regulate a technology that they struggle to define. Europeans themselves are divided over the text, which is now the subject of negotiations in the European Parliament and the EU Council.

rather than get a direct answer to a query from a dubious source, readers are linked with an authoritative website.

it lacks a critical spirit:

Switzerland ranks 9th for countries with most trademark applications per 100,000 people

A python module to generate optimized prompts, Prompt-engineering & solve different NLP problems using GPT-n (GPT-3, ChatGPT) based models and return structured python object for easy parsing

when the entire thing might have been avoided by judicious diplomatic engagement?

And for a short time, the “Vietnam Syndrome,” (shorthand for a wariness and suspicion of unnecessary and unsupportable foreign interventions) occasionally informed policy at the highest levels and manifested itself in the promulgations of the Wienberger and Powell Doctrines which, in theory anyway, were set up as a kind of break on unnecessary military adventures.