The most dramatic loser, Meta, barely even counts as part of “big” tech any more—nearly two-thirds of its value was wiped out, leaving its market capitalisation at just over $300bn.

But digital firms have been hit harder, with the NASDAQ composite, a tech-heavy index, losing a third of its value.

The big hole in his strategy is the lack of an appealing economic and trade policy to bind allies and friends closer together. The US-EU Trade and Technology Council is a useful talking shop for emerging tech. The 14-country Indo-Pacific Economic Framework promises future initiatives on the digital economy, supply-chain resilience, clean energy and fairness (ie, rules on tax, money laundering and bribery). But these do not amount to substantial trade deals. America will not, for instance, heed Asian allies’ wish for it to join the 11-country Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (formerly the TPP).

Old geopolitical theories are being re-examined. In 1904 the British geostrategist Halford Mackinder argued that whoever controlled the core of Eurasia—roughly between the Arctic Sea and the Himalayas—could command the world. In that analysis, an alliance between Russia and China could pose a grievous threat. In contrast, Mackinder’s American contemporary Alfred Thayer Mahan reckoned that control of commercial sea lanes was the key to global power. Somewhere in between, Nicholas Spykman, another American, argued in 1942 that what mattered was not Eurasia’s heartland but its rim. He held that the maritime borderlands stretching from the Atlantic, through the Mediterranean, around south Asia to Japan were the vital ground. “Who controls the Rimland rules Eurasia,” he wrote. “Who rules Eurasia controls the destinies of the world.” In seeking to boost its alliances to counterbalance its Eurasian rivals, America seems to be hewing closest to Spykman’s thesis.

many commercial projects are based on tokamaks—an established approach that goes back to the 1950s. This heats the deuterium-tritium mixture into a plasma rather than freezing it into a pellet, and does the compressing magnetically. Breakthroughs in magnet technology, in particular, have enabled this renaissance

there are now real ideas and real firms with real money pursuing it in the private sector

fusion power is 30 years away—and always will be

observation that it releases no CO2 is true also of nuclear fission, solar energy and wind power, all of which are actual, developed technologies

which is radioactive and has a half-life of 12 years, has to be synthesised

But this approach can be a power source only if the energy released exceeds not merely that incident on the pellet, but rather that employed to generate the beams.

the NIF’s researchers have released more energy from an imploding pellet than was inserted by the laser beams

In one of NIF’s pellets it is done by the convergence on the pellet of 192 beams from a powerful laser. In both cases the aim is to overcome the mutual electrical repulsion of the positively charged nuclei of the atoms, and push those nuclei close enough to one another for a different fundamental force, the strong nuclear force (which operates only at short ranges) to take over.

Do this to enough pairs of atoms and you get a lot of energy—and a big bang

But a useful step towards electricity generation by fusion it is not

In the case of Ethiopia, perhaps the message to the African Union should be that while the solutions should be African, support for them should not be exclusively so.

there is still a risk that Ethiopia could disintegrate, an outcome that would have devastating consequences for Ethiopians and their neighbors and affect countries around the world.     

The more unified Ethiopia becomes, the less meddlesome outsiders will be able to exploit its divisions.

But expertise from the UN and elsewhere can help make the team as credible a confidence-building mechanism as possible.   

resolving differences among Egypt, Ethiopia, and Sudan over Ethiopia’s controversial Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam would give Afwerki fewer regional divisions to exploit.  

the Intergovernmental Authority on Development,

the lack of agreement among regional powers and other partners of Ethiopia on how to deal with Eritrea gives Afwerki much room to maneuver.

By interfering in Djibouti, Ethiopia, Somalia, and Sudan, Afwerki seeks to become the regional hegemon.

the Ethiopians deserve credit for agreeing to end the bloodshed. 

both sides blinked, halting the bloodshed and accepting an invitation from the African Union to attend peace talks in Pretoria, South Africa.  

The three rotating African members of the UN Security Council—ostensibly at the behest of Ethiopia—largely succeeded in keeping the war in Tigray out of council debates, despite the threat it posed to international peace and security.

But China, Turkey, and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) doubled down on backing Abiy, providing his government with military support, including sophisticated drones.

(Millions of Ethiopians already loathe the TPLF because it dominated the country’s repressive government from 1991 until 2018, when Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed came to power).

Up to 600,000 people, mostly ethnic Tigrayans, are estimated to have died, the majority from starvation and disease.

To combat crimes committed online or planned and communicated using digital services

the digital euro

Sweden will work to better integrate cyber diplomacy issues and the EU’s external digital policy into its overall foreign policy.

Prime Minister Modi recognizes the potential that collaboration with SCO members holds for improving India’s trade relations in the region and cementing itself as a reliable trade partner, especially since East Asia is poised to become the new center of development of world economy.

“democracy, dialogue, and diplomacy”

And with the recently announced National Logistics Policy—a national initiative to reduce logistics costs, digitalize the logistics sector, and increase supply chain efficiency—India could become globally competitive on a scale comparable to China and the United States.

to take a people-centric development model, an approach that will in turn transform the population into a competitive workforce and will also value the spread of technology.

Trade cooperation was a hot topic at the summit. India pressed on the need to address the major disruptions caused to trade, supply chains, food security, and the energy sector as a result of the Ukraine crisis and Covid-19. India’s interests in having stronger supply chains coincides with the country’s ambitions to become a manufacturing hub, which, therefore, requires it to collaborate with the region’s major economies. In this vein, Prime Minister Modi pressed for transit rights at the summit in order to facilitate stronger supply chains through enhanced connectivity; previously, India has struggled to access Central Asian markets without transit rights across Pakistan’s territory.

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Promptology, Or The Art Of Creating Good Prompts

People using the stimulator and their physicians could no longer access the proprietary software needed to recalibrate the device and maintain its effectiveness.

TechChina is about to get tougher on deepfakes in an unprecedented way.

has readers fretting about space debris and traffic management. Given the attention to the problem, it’s unfair to say that this will sneak up on us, but the lack of urgency around addressing space safety might leave us with a nasty surprise. The leak in the Soyuz spacecraft at the ISS, likely caused by a micrometeroid impact, may be a warning for congested space lanes to come. It’s a champagne problem, in the sense that space junk worries us because of the growing value of space activity. But as I will ruefully attest on Jan. 1, champagne problems can still hurt.

Robots are headed for the moon en masse: Attempted landings from companies including Japan’s iSpace, Intuitive Machines (two different missions!), Astrobotic, plus robots built by space agencies in Japan, India, and Russia.

China’s new space station will be complete, and western researchers have already started signing up to collaborate there. Will we see a non-Chinese astronaut visit?

Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine, for example, has been a debacle, but it put an incredible spotlight everything changing in space. One of Russia’s first acts of war was hacking satellite communications networks, while SpaceX’s Starlink network became a vital tool for Ukrainian resistance. The public, along with intelligence agencies and militaries, relied on satellite data to understand and prosecute the fighting. Drones and missiles that rely on satellite navigation and communications have become central to the conflict. AdvertisementIt’s not the first “space war”—the 1990 Gulf War typically gets that distinction—but never before have space assets been so front and center.

Realise the OECD Global Forum on Technology Governance to foster multi-stakeholder collaboration on digital and emerging technology policy, to facilitate future-facing strategic discussions on technology governance and inform the development and use of technology in line with shared democratic values.

Yes. Go to Settings -> Modern Footnotes and choose the “Display footnote list at bottom of posts” option. Or, if you only want the footnotes at the bottom of the post when printing, choose the “When printing, list footnotes at the bottom of posts” option.

Musk is baiting mainstream media companies to cover a manufactured scandal about something that happened years ago and it is still not yielding returns. So far, the media largely isn’t taking the bait, showing that news coverage doesn’t just happen simply because a billionaire tries to engineer it. Silence is still the editor’s best kept weapon in the content wars.

Over at Twitter, Musk has given privileged access to some ideologically friendly journalists who must publish their findings on his platform.

But that same morning, Twitter staff assigned to evaluate tweets had quickly concluded that Trump had not violated Twitter’s policies.

multiple tweeps [Twitter employees] have quoted the Banality of Evil suggesting that people implementing our policies are like Nazis following orders.” 

“A lot of times, SI [Twitter’s Site Integrity team] has used technicality spam enforcements as a way to solve a problem created by Safety [team at Twitter] under-enforcing their policies.”In a follow-up message with a colleague, Roth said he was looking for ways to marginalize accounts that had fallen into disfavor without banning them outright.

Site Integrity Policy-Policy Escalation Support team, or SIP-PES

trategic Response Team-Global Escalation Team, or SRT-GET. It handled up to 200 cases a day.

Do Not Amplify

Search Blacklist

Trends Blacklist

a set of tools that include locking users out of searches and preventing some users’ tweets from trending—which is how countless other users discover what’s popular or being talked about on Twitter.

visibility filtering

What “shadow banning” has long meant to lay critics of Twitter was not that no one on the platform could see their posts, but that far fewer people could. They meant something fishy was happening, screens were being thrown up, the air let out of their tires, so that posts by conservative or non-woke thinkers never seemed to reach as many eyeballs as those that espoused left-approved ideas.

shadow banning.

Tweets or accounts or hashtags that offended the powers that be were not publicly shamed, but quietly throttled, meaning users frequently did not know they were being deprived of arguments or data that did not support the prevailing wisdom or the politically favored narrative.

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usage guidelines, enforcing those guidelines, documenting known vulnerabilities and weaknesses and proactively disclosing harmful behavior and misuse scenarios.

choose the smallest model that will provide the accuracy and performance needed to reduce operational complexity, lower energy consumption and optimize total cost of ownership.

Use cases where output is reviewed by humans are preferred.

owever, they also pose risks and ethical concerns, including those associated with: 

Success depends on identifying the applications for these technologies that offer meaningful benefits to the organization.

two current ‘hot’ AI topics: chatbots and GPT3.

are still a work in progress

In The Tangle, each network participant has to validate others’ transactions before their own transactions can be validated. This means there is no need for “miners” and no cost for participating.

t does not use the proof-of-work validation system that has led to bitcoin’s soaring energy consumption.

So far, the best bet is a blockchain called EW Chain, developed by Energy Web Foundation, a Swiss non-profit organisation.

the Cambridge Centre for Alternative Finance

“I think everyone five years ago assumed that blockchain was the answer, but I don’t think they knew what the question was,”

“The hype surrounding blockchain technology will recede sharply in 2018 as the cost and complexity of implementing blockchain solutions becomes apparent,”

were surfing on a wave of interest created by bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies

By March 2018, analyst firm GTM Research (now Wood Mackenzie) was tracking 122 energy-related blockchain start-ups

a digital platform that would cheapen energy by bypassing the complexities of electricity trading, tracking transactions with nimble blockchain technology instead of bulky centralised trading systems.

Some analysts claimed blockchain could revolutionise everything from finance to democracy.

Some analysts claimed blockchain could revolutionise everything from finance to democracy.

emrush is a very powerful tool for SEO but it won't do the job itself, you have to play around with it yourself.

Check if the main source of your new site’s traffic is either your old links or direct traffic recorded when users type your old URL into their browsers. If this is the case for you, then it’s highly advisable to keep the 301 redirect forever. It would be too risky to suddenly get rid of your old domain especially if your old links are bringing in so much traffic from users who still find them relevant.

Themes of the OECD Digital Economy Ministerial Meeting 

The so-called request for consultations is the first step in a long procedure at the global trade body. The United States has blocked appointments to the WTO's top ruling body on trade disputes, meaning some rows never get settled.

The so-called request for consultations is the first step in a long procedure at the global trade body.

"China takes legal actions within the WTO framework as a necessary way to address our concerns and to defend our legitimate interests,"

o have signed all five of the core space treaties

the use of gender-neutral language such as ‘piloted’ or ‘automated’ rather than ‘manned’ or ‘unmanned’ when referring to spacecraft

on gender mainstreaming in all security issues,

Australia is already known as a leader in advancing the WPS agenda

There is increasing evidence that women’s participation in decision-making results in more durable peace agreements, increased trust and collaboration across political agendas, and more comprehensive and nuanced information gathering to better inform decision-making.

Australia is a signatory to the WPS agenda, first codified in 2000 by UN Security Council resolution 1325.

UN women, peace and security (WPS) agenda

From Australia’s participation in the UN open-ended working group on reducing space threats,

Australia signed a bilateral security agreement with Vanuatu on Tuesday which will include cooperation over cybersecurity matters, the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) announced. The agreement was signed as Australian Foreign Minister Penny Wong visited the island nation in the wake of a severe ransomware attack in November. The attack left the Pacific island’s government in disarray; internal systems were completely unavailable impacting a host of emergency services, alongside schools and hospitals. The Sydney Morning Herald reported that officials from the Australian Cybersecurity Centre assisted Vanuatu’s government in rebuilding the systems following the attack. The two countries have historically had strong diplomatic ties. The pact involves cooperation in a range of areas, including humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, as well environmental and resource security, maritime and aviation safety and security, as well as defense and policing, according to DFAT. It “reflects Australia and Vanuatu’s ongoing commitment to working together as members of the Pacific family to address shared security challenges,” said Australia’s deputy prime minister Richard Marles. Australia, which is rewriting its own national security strategy following the ransomware attack on health insurance business Medibank, has ramped up its diplomatic work in the region as it competes with China. Beijing attempted — although ultimately failed in May — to sign regional trade and security agreements with the 10 Pacific Island states it has diplomatic relations with. An unexpected security deal between China and the Solomon Islands in April provoked enormous concern — particularly plans that would permit China to create a military base just 2,000 km from Australia itself.  Following the announcement of the agreement, the Solomon Islands’ prime minister Manasseh Sogavare stressed that he would not allow a Chinese military base in the country. He said the agreement covered the contingency of “a gap” in the kinds of security that Australia can provide: “When it comes to security issues in the region, we will call on them [the Australians] first.” The details of China’s agreement with the Solomon Islands have not been published, although a leaked draft was posted online revealing broad access to the Solomon Islands was being offered to China’s military and police. Australia’s agreement with Vanuatu “will be publicly available,” said Wong on Tuesday, because both nations are “committed to democracy, accountability and transparency.”

73rd Annual ICA Conference Theme Call for Papers

Twitter dissolves Trust and Safety Council

If a search engine sees a glut of raw AI content, then the page will receive a penalty point.

Google is paying more and more attention to video content, this is a truth that you just need to come to terms with

the U.S. intelligence apparatus has made quantum decryption a priority, regardless of market fluctuations.

Even the most optimistic analysts believe that quantum computing will not earn meaningful profits in the next five years, and pessimists caution that it could take more than a decade.

The Quantum Insider, an industry trade publication, has tallied more than six hundred companies in the sector, and another estimate suggests that thirty billion dollars has been invested in developing quantum technology worldwide.

“We have good reason to believe that a quantum computer would be able to efficiently simulate any process that occurs in nature,” Preskill wrote, a few years ago.

Kitaev’s error-correction scheme is one of the most promising approaches to building a functional quantum computer,

Entanglement is to computing what nuclear fission was to explosives: a strange property of the subatomic world that could be harnessed to create technology of unprecedented power. If entanglement could be enacted at the scale of everyday objects, it would seem like a magic trick. Imagine that you and a friend flip two entangled quarters, without looking at the results. The outcome of the coin flips will be determined only when you peek at the coins. If you inspect your quarter, and see that it came up heads, your friend’s quarter will automatically come up tails. If your friend looks and sees that her quarter shows heads, your quarter will now show tails. This property holds true no matter how far you and your friend travel from each other. If you were to travel to Germany—or to Jupiter—and look at your quarter, your friend’s quarter would instantaneously reveal the opposite result.

​Earlier this year, the Biden Administration announced that it was moving toward new, quantum-proof encryption standards that offer protection from Shor’s algorithm.

the physicists realized that whether an electron behaved more like a particle or more like a wave depended on whether or not someone was observing it.

A full-scale quantum computer could crack our current encryption protocols, essentially breaking the Internet.

Quantum computers, like the ones Google is building, use qubits, which can take a value of zero or one, and also a complex combination of zero and one at the same time.

Concern as US media hit with wave of layoffs amid rise of disinformation

Outer space talks are a welcome addition to the US-Africa Leaders Summit - what’s on the table

“The Banshees of Inisherin”

from rule-breaker to rule-maker, he will need to defy both the business challenges to his super-app ambitions and expectations of what he might do as the boss of one.

it is neither as vast as Meta nor as staid as Microsoft.

requires trust from regulators, consumers and the developers who choose to operate their businesses within a platform

Another obstacle is trust

to bypass the Apple ecosystem in the first place.

According to The Information, a news website, Microsoft has considered building its own super-app, a platform combining shopping, messaging and web search that would dip further into consumers’ wallets as its business customers slow spending.

By contrast it is hard to imagine WeChat’s users abandoning the app if it was removed from Apple’s iPhones in China.

Twitter will need to be far bigger before it can begin giving orders to the rule-makers.

any attempt to expand Twitter to integrate a payments system or create a platform for “mini programs” to run within the app would ignite a more fundamental conflict.

The total fees it collects from its app store are not disclosed but are thought to make up a large chunk of a services segment with revenues of $78bn a year.

Apple, which makes more than half of America’s smartphones, is the incumbent gatekeeper to the country’s eyeballs

The greatest impediment to super-apps are, unsurprisingly, app stores

Most involve fitting as many closely related services inside the same app as possible.

in 2017 cemented the platform as the real operating system of the Chinese internet

Launched in 2011, WeChat rode the wave of Chinese smartphone adoption. Today it boasts 1.3bn users and stunning ubiquity

provides a surprisingly upbeat history of death

The Equality Machine. By Orly Lobel. PublicAffairs; 368 pages; $30 and £25

she argues that the answer is

This author agrees with

Beyond Measure. By James Vincent. W.W. Norton; 432 pages; $32.50. Faber; £18.99

An Immense World. By Ed Yong. Random House; 464 pages; $30. Vintage; £17.99

this book lifts the shroud on

Elusive. By Frank Close. Basic Books; 304 pages; $26. Allen Lane; £25

A compelling account of

A tour d’horizon of cell theory, by

Papyrus. By Irene Vallejo. Translated by Charlotte Whittle. Knopf; 464 pages; $35. Hodder & Stoughton; £25

The author makes a powerful case

clear thinking is the key.

A novel about

The Serpent Coiled in Naples.

how close to inhumanity humanity always is

The broad subject of this poignant book is what happens

Mostly it confirms the view that

An elegant account of

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Its story makes clear how

A monumental study

it provides insights into how

Written with wit, style and a formidable command of detail

A magnificent history of corporations

For Profit. By William Magnuson. Basic Books; 368 pages; $32 and £25

In this authoritative book a former journalist

Books about

This timely book

Chip War. By Chris Miller. Scribner; 464 pages; $30. Simon & Schuster; £20

The author, a journalist at the Financial Times, was

The dramatic story

A fortuitously timed history of

It is striking

It reads like

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personal account

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But that analysis underestimates how deeply neoliberal ideas took root across both the left and the right, at least in the Anglosphere.

In Mr DeLong’s version of history, key events are often the product of chance rather than structural forces.

a duel between the insights of Friedrich von Hayek, an Austrian economist who extolled the power of the free market, and Karl Polanyi, a Hungarian thinker who warned that the market was there to serve man, not man the market.

Yet building harmonious societies out of material abundance has proved maddeningly difficult.

a land of plenty that prior generations could scarcely have imagined.

the modern corporation, the research laboratory and globalisation

Mr DeLong, by contrast, argues that the period from 1870 to 2010 is best seen as a coherent whole: the first era, he argues, in which historical developments were overwhelmingly driven by economic ones.

It turns out that gpus, which were first designed in the 1990s to improve video games, are also excellent at running artificial-intelligence (AI) models. Intel recently launched its first set of stand-alone gpus to compete with Nvidia as well as amd, which also makes them.

But there was a twist: the number of tweets about protests and rallies increased. Like death, taxes are certain. Their effects are not.

This kind of messy bargaining could eventually strengthen the contract between citizens and states.

In Uganda the total value of mobile-money transactions dropped by a quarter when the state imposed a 1% tax on them in 2018, taking 18 months to recover

Ghana’s e-levy, in force since May, imposes a 1.5% tax on most electronic money transfers, such as those that citizens zap through their phones. Cameroon brought in a similar charge in January. Nigeria is considering a 5% levy on calls, messages and mobile internet.

African countries have proposed that a tax convention be developed at the un, where they hope to have more of a say.

But many African countries worry it is too complex and would be difficult to implement in countries with low administrative capacity, says Thulani Shongwe of the African Tax Administration Forum, a network of tax officials.

A global tax deal was agreed to by 130 countries last year with the aim of forcing multinational companies to pay more tax in the places where they make their sales, irrespective of where they register their assets.

Now they see untapped potential in new sectors which barely existed 20 years ago, including social media, e-commerce, mobile internet and mobile money.

Levies on mobile and internet services have sparked street protests in Uganda, cabinet squabbles in Nigeria and a parliamentary brawl in Ghana.

And China imports $400bn-worth of chips a year, more than any other country. Though private companies and allied countries might be happy to go along with the Americans now, the amount of money being left on the table by not selling to Chinese customers may start to rankle.

The list includes chips used for artificial intelligence (ai), software to design advanced chips and the machine tools to manufacture them. Selling such things to China is now barred without explicit permission from America’s government. Rulebreakers risk being cut off from American tech themselves.

China’s growing isolation—both self-imposed and enforced by restrictions like America’s new rules on tech exports—is far more severe.

American politicians do not seem to understand the advantage conferred by their country’s openness, however.

Less than half as many Chinese received visas to study abroad in the first half of 2022 as in the first half of 2019. This pulling apart is bad for the world, but China may suffer more. It does not have as diverse a pool of researchers as the West. According to data from MacroPolo, a think-tank, although 60% of the world’s best AI researchers work in America, over two-thirds of them are foreign (and over a quarter of them Chinese). In contrast, China draws overwhelmingly on domestic talent: almost all its best ai researchers are Chinese, and 70% of them have studied only in China.

he West is ahead on biotech, cloud computing and AI

China is dominant in some industries, such as 5G telecoms. It makes some 80% of the world’s lithium batteries.

what is called juguo tizhi or the “whole-of-the-nation system”.