deeply committed to one anothe

seekers, aware of and open about the areas in which we need to grow

meet their goals and commitments

not encumbered by hierarchy or control.

does not have silos

does not avoid conflict

an unspoken agreement to avoid conflict

have traditionally emphasized leadership competencies, not team competencies.

the rising star of social media could find itself similarly thwacked.

Spotify forks over a 15% commission on subscriptions purchased on iPhones—a tax so annoying that it has filed a complaint against Apple over it.

reliance on distribution platforms that are not their own.

low barriers to entry

try to capitalise on network effects, as data on the listening and viewing habits of similar users promised to deliver an unbeatable product.

Many developing countries see nothing magic about the year 1945, and have limited nostalgia for a time when the West dominated rulemaking

about foreigners who employ double standards to criticise other countries.

even stronger memories of suffering at the hands of colonial powers

explained why Europe’s dark past, notably the Holocaust, obliged its leaders to call out rights abuses, from China to Ukraine

This was “power politics”, Mr Wang retorted: a bid to “replace commonly accepted international laws and norms with the house rules of a few countries”.

a straw-man argument

China hates to be isolated, deploying diplomats to lobby and twist arms to build support.

A “shared future” is another way of saying “development first”, ie, rejecting any order guided by shared, universal values.

a “Global Security Initiative” or “A Community of Shared Future for Mankind”

Chinese leaders want to preserve elements of the current order that helped their country rise, such as world trade rules that fostered their export champions and encouraged inflows of foreign capital and technology

Its officials liken Western powers to missionaries, bossily imposing their own values, a trait they call particularly alien to Asia, a continent that respects diversity.

When its efforts meet resistance, it pushes for vaguer rules whose enforcement becomes a question of political bargaining. All too often, it seeks to revive old, discredited ways of running the world that put states first, at the expense of individual freedoms.

Recipient governments are pushed into higher environmental standards or to protect the rights of vulnerable minorities.

For decades tensions between national sovereignty and the protection of individuals lurked in the founding documents of this new order, from the UN Charter to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

Recalling the economic disasters and human miseries that paved the way to world war, the framers of this order built the UN and other international institutions to promote co-operation and development.

Most of all, China wants outsiders to admire its development and the political system that has overseen it. If China is “a bit allergic to universal values”, he says, the problem is not the notion of all countries agreeing to basic principles. It is that some Western countries apply a “special connotation” to universal values and such terms as democracy, so as to criticise China and other developing countries. This makes China “very uncomfortable”, he says.

He mentions relatively low education levels in Asia, and the risks of delaying good projects if local non-governmental groups—which have a right to speak out, he adds—are “hijacked by a very small group of people who put their very narrow interests above the community’s interests.”

faraway lenders were slow to grasp how soon infrastructure projects would pay off in booming Asia, for instance.

the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB)

Scenario planning, which became popular in the 1970s, encouraged executives to consider multiple future states in assessing strategic investments, rather than rely on a single, deterministic forecast. Monte Carlo simulation went even further, specifying a probability distribution for each critical variable and then running thousands of simulations so that executives would focus on the distribution of potential outcomes as much as on any prediction of the most likely one. Real options analysis emerged as a further refinement in the 1980s, explicitly incorporating flexibility in the consideration of strategic investments.

scenario planning, Monte Carlo simulation, and real options analysis

This is probably an example of kin selection, which favours the evolution of behaviour that assists the collateral passage of an individual’s genes alongside the more normal route of direct descent.

This list is familiar to zoologists as comprising groups of species known to have developed, independently of one another, high levels of intelligence, both individual and social.

Sometimes this bystander acted as a peacemaker, engaging with the aggressor and reducing the number of subsequent attacks compared with what might otherwise have been expected.

Most conflicts ended in seconds, but some lasted a minute or two.

“I like pigs,” Winston Churchill supposedly once said. “Dogs look up at us, cats look down on us, but pigs treat us as equals.”

Mr Xi may paint that as delivering yet more power to the people. His real aim is control.

The law of shijia lianzuo dates back to the Qin dynasty, which ruled from 221BC to around 207BC. It called for a ten-family unit to be punished for offences committed by any member of the group. The baojia system, created in the 11th century during the Song dynasty, organised Chinese families in groups of ten for mutual monitoring and defence.

It is a low-tech arm of a high-tech police state. Rwanda, a small African autocracy, has something similar.

Mr Xi praises the Fengqiao model, which he has redefined as a way of empowering people. He talks of qunfang qunzhi, or “mass prevention and mass governance”. In reality he is using people to supplement the Communist Party’s other tools of control.

Around 900 of its 65,000 residents were called out by their neighbours in public “denunciation rallies”.

Indonesia is relying on resources, surgical protectionism, big-tent politics and neutrality. Both are giant bets.

India is opting for tech- and manufacturing-led development, fuelled by subsidies, chauvinistic politics and decoupling from China.

a convener and peacemaker.

it wants to be neutral.

has developed that emphasises compromise and social harmony

With a fifth of global reserves of nickel, used in batteries, the country is a vital link in electric-vehicle (ev) supply chains

A source of dynamism is digital services, which are helping create a more integrated consumer market, with over 100m people collectively spending $80bn a year on everything from e-payments to apps for on-demand trucking.

It is the world’s largest Muslim-majority state, its third-biggest democracy and its fourth-most-populous country.

Isaac Asimov

Advertisers are becoming more cautious, despite the pausing of a service introduced by Mr Musk that allowed anyone to buy a verified account, which led to problems with impersonation.

Truth Social,

Cohost

Many are flocking to Mastodon, a decentralised social network founded in 2016 by Eugen Rochko, a German developer and its only employee.

There’s a man who could stop Twitter’s decline if he wanted to. And if we wanted to, we could consider what of Twitter we need to mourn, and what we might want to save or re-create.

We’ve learned that everything is shocking, unbelievable, unprecedented—and, simultaneously, that nothing really matters.

the way to be heard and make a difference is to amplify other ideas instead of coming up with our own, especially ideas that stoke lulz or predict a civilization-ending crisis

Twitter taught us things

But it’s most likely that Twitter will shamble on for a long time, like the Colosseum did, and we’ll never quite know if we’re participating in its glorious and hilarious finale. I actually think the prospect of Twitter’s rapid demise—in weeks or months—is functioning, right now, as fantasy.

bid not to lose followers inevitably comes off as shamefully status-seeking, their pleas are often ignored.

as pleas for the sake of some greater good or community.

the way to be heard and make a difference is to amplify other ideas instead of coming up with our own.

Hundreds of thousands of people's careers are now driven principally on Twitter. Many academics have built popular audiences entirely on Twitter, as well as enriched their professional networks.

But if Twitter died, that devastation would be everywhere.

But people like Jong-Fast—who hosts regular A-list parties at her multimillion-dollar Upper East Side apartment—have some prior networks of wealth and status to fall back on.

In recent years, Twitter worked notably hard to ban menacing bots bought by regimes like Rwanda’s and Zimbabwe’s. And so it has made Moyo sad—and frightened—to notice a certain kind of hateful, pro-regime account reemerging after “the advent of Elon Musk.” Worse, he has noticed that some have come back with a blue check.

Moyo credits his release to the global Twitter outcry his lawyer ignited. He also credits Twitter with preserving his sanity, which might surprise you. When Moyo’s lawyer visited him in prison, he’d always give Moyo a rundown of what people were saying on Twitter about his arrest.

So they become “very prolific on Twitter. The only thing they have is Twitter. It’s a space for fantasy and for articulating despair.

Zimbabwe

It doesn’t silo people into friend circles like Facebook or promote groupthink quite like Reddit.

Twitter has enabled phenomenal reporting, including by people who never would have been heard in the old publishing system

It would be like the 2008 recession, but for status.

But I’ve realized that Twitter’s death could be, to reputation, to the concept of “expertise,” the equivalent of Goldman, Barclays, and Citigroup all failing at once, with no bailout option

“clout chasing.

@AutismCapital has gathered some of the best news and analysis about the collapse of FTX, a crytocurrency exchange.

Take Substack: According to a WIRED analysis, the authors of the top 50 paid news and politics Substacks who listed their Twitter profiles had 387,046 followers on average when they launched their newsletters

his blue check

Jon Katz, a freelance writer, estimates that “most” of his income is now generated with Twitter’s help.

Twitter’s death could be, to reputation, to the concept of “expertise,” the equivalent of Goldman, Barclays, and Citigroup all failing at once, with no bailout option.

his own praise of and DMs to blue-check writers.

a function of momentum that ultimately built on itself rather than of courage or genius.

super-users became the unacknowledged class that determined which events and ideas were considered important

would be judged by “impact points,” which would be determined in part by how much “huge” Twitter commentators interacted with them

Twitter’s evil

Twitter currently functions as perhaps the world's biggest status bank, and the investments stored in it are terrifyingly unsecured.

That encompasses the cash people make out of connections or prestige they develop on Twitter, but also the intangible wealth now vested in its communities and in the sense it offers to people of having a place in the world.

But if we judge Twitter’s influence by its active users, we underestimate it massively. It has no peer as a forge of public opinion. In political analysis, publishing, public health, foreign policy, economics, history, the study of race, even in business and finance, Twitter has come to drive who gets quoted in the press. Who opines on TV. Who gets a podcast. In foreign affairs and political analysis, especially, it often determines whom we consider an authority. Almost every academic and journalist I know has come to read Twitter, even if they don’t have accounts.

Data Scientist:

“Sanction”, for example, can mean both “to approve of” and “to lay a penalty upon”. “Fast” can mean speedy or stuck in place. “Cleave” can mean to split, or to cling tightly. “Fulsome” praise can be full-throated and genuine, or cloyingly insincere. One class of Janus words is particularly troublesome: those that mean different things on opposite sides of the Atlantic. “Moot”, for instance, means “that which can be argued; debatable” in Britain; it means “not worthy of discussion” in America.

contronyms, auto-antonyms or, most poetically, “Janus words”, named for the two-faced Roman god who looks in opposite directions (and so gave his name to January, which faces back into the old year and forward to the new).

“the whole comprises the parts, and the parts compose the whole”

A messy, fragmented trade order might be brutal for small, open economies. But if rulers in Beijing thought it would give them leverage and security, they might take it.

Soon afterwards the People’s Bank of China began developing the Cross-Border Interbank Payment System (CIPS), a network that could one day replace SWIFT for Chinese financial institutions. China is working on a digital yuan that could further reduce its vulnerability to sanctions.

Western governments and business lobbies accuse China of using standards as sneaky barriers to trade.

In the West, standards are a form of private-sector self-regulation. In China, the state is the guide.

China’s government wants to be better represented in international bodies that set industrial and technical standards, determining everything from how the internet works to the steel used in railway tracks.

Perhaps a self-assured China might loosen controls on cross-border data flows and grant more access to foreign internet firms, he suggests—as long as WTO digital standards ensure that companies like Huawei cannot be excluded from Western markets just for being Chinese.

Rich economies advocated free trade in industries where they enjoyed a competitive advantage, at least before the rise of China and other Asian tigers, he says.

That is industrial policy, he concedes, but so is the basic research that underpins much rich-world innovation.

Western leaders predicted that growing Chinese prosperity would lead to ideological convergence with the rich world, as a rising middle class demanded accountable government and individual rights

China says it is now the largest trade partner of more than 120 of the world’s countries.

Today's game-theory software is not yet sufficiently advanced to mediate between warring countries.

The “principle of convergence”, as it is known, holds that armed conflict is, in essence, an information-gathering exercise.

Dr Ponsatí, now head of the Institute of Economic Analysis at the Autonomous University of Barcelona, says such “mediation machines” could lubricate negotiations by unlocking information that would otherwise be withheld from an opponent or human mediator.

But game-theory software can also work well outside the sphere of economics.

Sorting out people's motivations is much easier, however, when making money is the main object.

go astray when people unexpectedly give in to “non-rational emotions”, such as hatred, rather than pursuing what is apparently in their best interests.

Numerical values are placed on the goals, motivations and influence of “players”—negotiators, business leaders, political parties and organisations of all stripes, and, in some cases, their officials and supporters

ceos who play moralists with respect to Vladimir Putin are hard-pressed to justify—in ethical terms, if not financial ones—why they embrace realpolitik when it comes to Xi Jinping.

global expansion would not just be good for business; it would be good for peace and democracy, too. But reality has turned out differently

While bosses are busy encroaching on foreign affairs, foreign affairs are gradually encroaching on them

Yet the belief that the pursuit of profit will always benefit society as a whole is also sadly erroneous,

Ford’s cult of efficiency morphed into creepy control over his workers—parodied in Aldous Huxley’s “Brave New World”, in which dates are measured from the “Year of Our Ford”

The Ford Motor Company was organised “to do as much good as we can, everywhere, for everybody concerned”

For much of corporate history, serving society was part of their charter.

Making deals palatable to 27 national governments with their own electorates is a messy business. While it attempts to do this, th

This is thankless but necessary work, best done out of the public gaze.

Coreper, short for Comité des représentants permanents, sounds to outsiders like a car body shop, but is in fact the powerful forum where national governments thrash out deals behind closed doors

They “assist” meetings instead of attending them. They “externalise” a task rather than merely outsourcing it. If they talk of an “actual” situation, they mean the current one.

National governments write in a way that a typical high-school pupil can understand. Eurocrats befuddle anyone who lacks a university education.

Most organisations, from the most gargantuan government to the tiniest start-up, develop their own jargon

how can we act sensibly when we cannot know what the consequences will be in the distant future?

Derek Parfit, a British philosopher who died in 2017, raised the question of whether future generations can hold the current one responsible for their suffering: if our generation had acted differently those people would not have been born.

For long-termists like Will MacAskill, a philosopher at Oxford University who provided EA with many of its founding ideas and helped turn it into a movement, “distance in time is like distance in space”.

Effective altruists claim to use evidence and reason to maximise the good they do for others, no matter where the beneficiaries live or when they are born

Stani Kulechov, the creator of Aave, a decentralised-lending protocol, is building a social-media platform that would allow people to port their followers from application to application, thus allowing them to quit a platform without losing clout.

fficient, scalable blockchains are beginning to emerge

It is an indictment that, almost 14 years after bitcoin was created, there are only a handful of use cases for crypto, such as firms paying workers in countries suffering from hyperinflation, like Argentina, or efficient decentralised exchanges and lending tools. Even the

Stablecoins, which are meant to hold their value in real-world currency, should be regulated as if they were payment instruments at banks.

regulating the institutions that act as gatekeepers for the cryptosphere

to keep the mainstream financial system insulated from further crypto-ructions.

theft and fraud are minimised, as with any financial activity

regulators should be guided by two principles

An upgrade to Ethereum’s blockchain in September radically reduced its energy consumption, paving the way for it to handle high transaction volumes efficiently.

Vast quantities of money, time, talent and energy have been used to build what amount to virtual casinos.

The disappointment is that, 14 years after the Bitcoin blockchain was invented, little of this promise has been realised.

As at the end of any mania, the question now is whether crypto can ever be useful for anything other than scams and speculation. The promise was of a technology that could make financial intermediation faster, cheaper and more efficient. Each new scandal that erupts makes it more likely that genuine innovators will be frightened off and the industry will dwindle. Yet a chance remains, diminishing though it is, that some lasting innovation will one day emerge. As crypto falls to Earth, that slim chance should be kept alive.

Never before has crypto looked so criminal, wasteful and useless.

He also claims that the fall is no big deal as it represents 0.2% of GDP. He reckons that bitcoin boosts tourism.

his association with the “Chicago school” of economics, his growing influence on the political right and the hardening of his pro-market views as he aged. That there is still so much to learn about Hayek hints at the biggest problem with this biography: its size.

DeFi still has much room for improvement, but through its transparency and self-custody it has begun to prove the utility of new forms of consumer protection for a digital world.

FTX operated out of the Bahamas yet people around the world have been affected by the fallout of its implosion

That contains any risks from interdependency. Over time, both centralised finance and traditional finance would benefit from a similar degree of segregation

In DeFi, where data and analytics are free and publicly accessible, the balance sheets supporting lending or trading are transparent.

But because FTX is a CeFi company, there was no visibility into how much was owed to customers and where those withdrawn funds were going.

Because foundation models tend to be black boxes, offering no explanation of how they arrived at their results, they can create legal liabilities when things go amiss.

“random bullshit generator”

“It’s all about writing prompts these days,”

PromptBase is a marketplace where users can buy and sell prompts that produce particularly spiffy results from the large image-based generative models, such as DALLE-2 and Midjourney.

on “a Copilot for knowledge workers”, says Kelsey Szot, a co-founder.

CodeWhisperer, its own version of the tool. Alphabet is reportedly using something similiar, codenamed PitchFork, internally.

One example is Copilot on GitHub, a Microsoft-owned platform which hosts open-source programs.

Jasper and Copy.AI both pay OpenAI for access to GPT3, which enables their applications to convert simple prompts into marketing copy.

Stability AI and Midjourney

Ali Ghodsi, boss of Databricks, a company that helps customers manage data for AI applications, see an explosion of such “boring AI”.

deep slump

A survey by McKinsey Global Institute, the consultancy’s in-house think-tank, found that this year 50% of firms across the world had tried to use AI in some way, up from 20% in 2017.

Dr Harnett says, “is a lever for us to get into understanding learning in adults and how potentially we can get access to make it not degrade over the course of ageing or disease”.

Silent synapses—which, as their name suggests, transmit no signal from one nerve cell to another—are often found on the ends of slender, immature protrusions from nerve cells, called filopodia.

Each connection between nerve cells, called a synapse, is a tiny gap between the ends of branches ramifying from such cells. Messages jump across these gaps in the form of molecules called neurotransmitters. Current estimates suggest there are 600 trillion synapses in a human brain.

Learning is a result of changes in the pattern of neural connectivity in the brain

strike the right balance between stability and flexibility

These firms can use them to create content, such as articles, blog posts and entire books. They can help with customer service, providing quick and accurate responses to queries. And they can be used to help with research, providing insights into consumer behaviour and preferences.

The Allied decryption of Germany’s Enigma cipher machines in the second world war did not come to light until the 1970s. The ultimate impact of cyber-operations in Ukraine may remain obscure for years.

The Allied decryption of Germany’s Enigma cipher machines in the second world war did not come to light until the 1970s. The ultimate impact of cyber-operations in Ukraine may remain obscure for years.

One further point is that the most destructive cyber-operations, like Stuxnet, are actually most useful in peacetime, when missiles are off the table. In war, munitions can often do the job more easily and cheaply. Probably, the most important wartime cyber-activity, on both sides, is that aimed at intelligence gathering or psychological warfare rather than destruction.

Lennart Maschmeyer of ETH Zurich showed that GRU’s attack on Ukraine’s power grid in 2015 had taken 19 months of planning, while that in 2016 had required two and a half years. Launching such attacks also reveals to an enemy the tools (ie, code) and infrastructure (servers) being used, resulting in attrition of their effectiveness.

Mr Zhora singles out Microsoft and ESET, a Slovakian firm, as being particularly important for their large presence on Ukrainian networks and the “telemetry”, or network data, that they collect as a result.

“arguably…the most effective defensive cyber-activity in history”.

“Russian cyber-forces as well as their traditional military forces underperformed expectations.”

its computer hackers brought down the satellite communications system run by Viasat, an American firm, on which its opponents were relying.

The urgency and pressure are implied.

“Get this done as soon as possible!”

people often interpret a long deadline as permission to delay

only 5.5% of the people who were given a monthlong deadline returned our survey, compared with 6.6% of those who were given just a week

it often means that we postpone it over and over until eventually we forget all about it

America intends to send astronauts to the Moon in the next few years, with the long-term goal of establishing a permanent base there. As part of its Artemis programme it intends to put a space station, called the Lunar Gateway, in orbit around the Moon to act as a communications hub, science laboratory and short-term living space; it is due to launch in 2024. A series of preparatory robotic missions to the Moon will blast off in 2023. Things are hotting up in “cislunar” space—as the space between Earth and the orbit of the Moon is known.

Passkeys are a new technology, supported by tech giants including Apple, Google and Microsoft, that replace passwords with biometrically validated tokens that are automatically generated and cannot be guessed or forgotten.

A big question for 2023 is what Apple will choose to call the technology when it announces its first AR/VR/XR headset—which is rumoured to be powered by software called “realityOS”.

Mixed reality (XR or MR) goes a step further by allowing real and virtual items to interact.

To protect against this possibility, new “post-quantum” cryptography standards, designed to be invulnerable even to quantum computers, were approved in 2022, and preparations for their implementation will begin in earnest in 2023.

European governments want American tech firms to fund improvements to Europe’s digital infrastructure, claiming they are free-riders. Whether the EU will act, and risk damaging the West’s united front against China’s tech dominance, is uncertain. But EU regulators will tighten the noose around big tech anyway. The Digital Markets Act, due to take effect in early 2023, aims to help new players compete with the tech oligopolies.

Nigeria, for instance, is aiming for 50% penetration by 2023. Still, wobbly economies will curb telecoms operators’ spending.

The spread of 5G technology to middle-income countries such as Argentina, India and Vietnam will take 5G subscriptions past 1bn (though East Asia and North America will still boast more 5G users).

But retailers such as Amazon and Walmart, which own oodles of data on shoppers, will gain: other companies will want to use their websites to target consumers better.

Suffering most from the backlash will be Meta, which depends more than its peers on third-party data.