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The global role English plays today as a lingua franca—used as a means of communication by speakers of different languages—has parallels in the Latin of pre-modern Europe.

Having been spread by the success of the Roman Empire, Classical Latin was kept alive as a standard written medium throughout Europe long after the fall of Rome. But the Vulgar Latin used in speech continued to change, forming new dialects, which in time gave rise to the modern Romance languages: French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian, and Italian.

Similar developments may be traced today in the use of English around the globe, especially in countries where it functions as a second language. New “interlanguages” are emerging, in which features of English are mingled with those of other native tongues and their pronunciations.

The number of people killed by law enforcement in the US this year has reached 1,000 after officers in Oakland, California, shot dead a man who allegedly pointed a replica gun at them.

Authorities said several officers opened fire on the man on Sunday evening when he walked toward them as they towed away cars that had been used to perform so-called “sideshow” stunts in east Oakland. Officers discovered later that the gun was a replica, police said.

The man shot in Oakland became the 1,000th database entry in The Counted, an ongoing investigation by the Guardian to record every fatality caused by police and other law enforcement officers in 2015, to monitor the demographics of the people who died and detail how and why they were killed.

While we are used to approaching America’s gun culture as a singular phenomenon, it is worth considering how it relates to those other headlines about immigration.

— from President Trump’s assertion that Mexican immigrants are rapists to the language of the original travel ban, which targeted Muslim-majority countries and was titled “Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States.”

a powerful narrative persists that immigrants are preternaturally violent and that our safety is best guaranteed by closing our doors to anyone with brown skin.

GOP group 'Stop Stacey' targets Abrams ahead of expected 2022 run By Julia Manchester - 02/01/21 09:19 AM EST 863 17,083 AddThis Sharing ButtonsShare to FacebookFacebookFacebookShare to TwitterTwitterTwitter Share   Just In... Fauci: CDC will release new guidance for vaccinated Americans 'very soon' Healthcare — 2m 39s ago Veteran PAC slams Tucker Carlson for comments on female service members BriefingRoom BlogRoll — 24m 3s ago US officials debating sending millions of AstraZeneca doses awaiting clearance overseas: report Administration — 48m 11s ago Biden denounces hate, violence against Asian Americans: 'It must stop' News — 1h 29m ago Biden administration to implement testing programs in schools as part of reopening effort field

publican strategists aligned with Georgia Gov. Brian KempBrian KempGeorgia Senate votes to repeal no-excuse absentee voting Two Republicans can stop voter suppression Trump fires back at WSJ editorial urging GOP to move on MORE (R) on Monday launched an outside group aimed at stopping a potential 2022 gubernatorial run by Democrat Stacey Abrams.

"We will do whatever it takes to expose Stacey Abrams’ radical network, highlight her dangerous agenda, and ultimately defeat her — and her left-wing candidates — at the ballot box," the group's senior strategist, Jeremy Brand, said in a statement. "There is no time to waste: We must stand up, fight back, and Stop Stacey.”

The new online privacy changes are a massive pivot from the decades-long practice of selling hyper-targeted ads to users based on their web history. Many big web publishers rely on targeted ads to support their businesses.

Apple on Monday began rolling out its long-awaited app tracking transparency feature that asks Apple iOS users whether they would like to opt out of having their data tracked by third-party apps.

Apple's tech rivals — especially Facebook — nervous about the impact that the update will have on their advertising businesses.

The abandonment of iTunes heralded a broader shift in how Americans are assumed to approach their digital lives. You could call it the victory of Gmail.

it encouraged an approach that, anywhere else, would be called hoarding. “With tons of storage space, you’ll never need to delete an email,” said a recent Gmail tutorial. “Just keep everything and easily find it later.”

The computing realities of the 2000s have displaced the dreams of the ’90s. Instead of the libertarian-communitarian global village that Wired magazine and other prophets of the California ideology once imagined—where people control their individual digital domicile, then freely distribute the fruits of their orchard—we have been displaced to a kind of rentier’s frontier, where there’s enough space for everyone as long as you pay a low monthly fee.

Parler is one of the hottest apps in the world, a social network that has attracted millions of far-right conservatives over the past year with its hands-off approach to policing users’ posts. And with the news that President Trump had been kicked off Twitter and Facebook, Parler was the odds-on bet to be his next soapbox.

A day earlier, John Matze, Parler’s chief executive, had said in an interview with The Times about Wednesday’s melee that he didn’t “feel responsible for any of this and neither should the platform, considering we’re a neutral town square that just adheres to the law.”

The edicts from Apple and Google were a stark illustration of the power of the largest tech companies to influence what is allowed on the internet, even on sites and apps that are not their own

The U.S. Justice Department and 11 state attorneys general have filed a blockbuster lawsuit against Google, accusing it of being an illegal monopoly because of its stranglehold on Internet search.

The government alleged Google has come by its wild success — 80% market share in U.S. search, a valuation eclipsing $1 trillion — unfairly. It said multibillion-dollar deals Google has struck to be the default search engine in many of the world's Web browsers and smartphones have boxed out its rivals.

Google's head of global affairs, Kent Walker, said the government's case is "deeply flawed." The company warned that if the Justice Department prevails, people would pay more for their phones and have worse options for searching the Internet.

It has even started ripping off other apps’ best features, an art pioneered by Facebook that ByteDance is taking to another level. TikTok Stories was announced earlier this month.

ts videos were once no more than 15 or 60 seconds long. Now they can last up to three minutes. Until February, TikTok was predominately a mobile app. Now you can watch videos through your web browser, or even your smart TV. It once had a single video format, then incorporated live streaming. It allows you to buy products through the app, and to tip your favourite creators.

With its 732 million monthly active users, TikTok is the app of the moment, and likely the app of the future. It’s the new Facebook.

He believed A.G.I. would bring the world prosperity and wealth like no one had ever seen. He also worried that the technologies his company was building could cause serious harm — spreading disinformation, undercutting the job market. Or even destroying the world as we know it.

“I try to be upfront,” he said. “Am I doing something good? Or really bad?”

In 2023, people are beginning to wonder if Sam Altman was more prescient than they realized.

Google’s employees were shocked when they learned in March that the South Korean consumer electronics giant Samsung was considering replacing Google with Microsoft’s Bing as the default search engine on its devices.

Google’s reaction to the Samsung threat was “panic,” according to internal messages reviewed by The New York Times. An estimated $3 billion in annual revenue was at stake with the Samsung contract. An additional $20 billion is tied to a similar Apple contract that will be up for renewal this year.

A.I. competitors like the new Bing are quickly becoming the most serious threat to Google’s search business in 25 years, and in response, Google is racing to build an all-new search engine powered by the technology. It is also upgrading the existing one with A.I. features, according to internal documents reviewed by The Times.

Mensch, who started in academia, has spent much of his life figuring out how to make AI and machine-learning systems more efficient. Early last year, he joined forces with co-founders Timothée Lacroix, 32, and Guillaume Lample, 33, who were then at Meta Platforms’ artificial-intelligence lab in Paris. 

hey are betting that their small team can outmaneuver Silicon Valley titans by finding more efficient ways to build and deploy AI systems. And they want to do it in part by giving away many of their AI systems as open-source software.

Eric Boyd, corporate vice president of Microsoft’s AI platform, said Mistral presents an intriguing test of how far clever engineering can push AI systems. “So where else can you go?” he asked. “That remains to be seen.”

Sequoia Capital, calculated that investments in A.I. were running short of projected profits by a margin of at least several hundred billion dollars annually. (He called this “A.I.’s $600 billion question” and warned of “investment incineration.”)

In a similarly bearish Goldman Sachs report, the firm’s head of global equity research estimated that the cost of A.I. infrastructure build-out over the next several years would reach $1 trillion. “Replacing low-wage jobs with tremendously costly technology is basically the polar opposite of the prior technology transitions I’ve witnessed,” he noted. “The crucial question is: What $1 trillion problem will A.I. solve?”

that trillion-dollar A.I. expenditure, more than the United States spends annually on its military, and think: What exactly is that money going toward?