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“Many people in Silicon Valley have become obsessed with the simulation hypothesis, the argument that what we experience as reality is in fact fabricated in a computer; two tech billionaires have gone so far as to secretly engage scientists to work on breaking us out of the simulation.”

Ignore for a moment any objections you might have to the simulation hypothesis, and everything impractical about the idea that we could somehow break out of reality, and think about what these people are trying to do.

The two billionaires (Elon Musk is a prime suspect) are convinced that they’ll emerge out of this drab illusion into a more shining reality, lit by a brighter and more beautiful star. But for the rest of us the experience would be very different—you lose your home, you lose your family, you lose your life and your body and everything around you

The past 10 years have seen the global application of the institutional reforms that Mrs. Clinton and the tech companies pushed for — with a few notable exceptions, like China. Universal connectivity has been achieved faster than anyone thought possible. About one in three people on earth is a monthly active Facebook user.

We can now evaluate how this technology affects politics and the public sphere. More information has been flowing, circumventing traditional media, political and cultural establishments. But the result hasn’t been more democracy, stronger communities or a world that’s closer together.

Countries with weaker social institutions felt the effects of social media most violently and immediately

It’s fairly obvious that anyone who carries off one of these stunts is worth monitoring for future mass casualty attacks. Despite the claims about acclimating people to the ‘normalness’ of being around random civilians with military style weapons and the language of “rights”, the obvious the motivation behind these stunts is to feel power as evidenced by the ability to scare and terrorize people.

to experience the fear or terror or sense of powerlessness others feel when someone they don’t know or have any reason to trust is strutting around with an AR-15

The language and politics of extreme gun rights activists is consistently highly similar to those of far-right or white nationalist groups. They are of a piece both psychologically and ideologically.

In the clearest sign of his pivot toward Russia and away from NATO and the West, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan announced on Tuesday that Turkey had signed a deal to purchase a Russian surface-to-air missile system.

The deal comes as relations between Russia and the West are at a particularly low point. Tensions escalated in 2014 when Russia annexed Crimea and then began fomenting armed revolt in eastern Ukraine. They have grown still worse as evidence has mounted that Moscow was behind the hacking of the 2016 election in the United States and also tried to interfere in other nations’ elections.

The purchase of the missile system flies in the face of cooperation within the NATO alliance, which Turkey has belonged to since the early 1950s. NATO does not ban purchases of military hardware from manufacturers outside the American-led alliance, but it does discourage members from buying equipment not compatible with that used by other members.

Silicon Valley’s start-ups have always had a recruiting advantage over the industry’s giants: Take a chance on us and we’ll give you an ownership stake that could make you rich if the company is successful.

Now the tech industry’s race to embrace artificial intelligence may render that advantage moot — at least for the few prospective employees who know a lot about A.I.

Tech’s biggest companies are placing huge bets on artificial intelligence, banking on things ranging from face-scanning smartphones and conversational coffee-table gadgets to computerized health care and autonomous vehicles.

At worst, these fixes are too late. The vulnerabilities announced last week were found by three independent teams whose investigations converged on the same flaw at the same time. It is possible that less-responsible actors were also converging on this flaw and may have already succeeded in exploiting it.

There are better ways to make systems more secure. For example, you can build more isolation and separation into our systems, moving security functions to properly audited hardware and away from software (which is always more vulnerable).

This may mean that we have to sacrifice some speed for security.But the truth is that our computers are already quite fast.

The report is a collaboration of nonprofit partner organizations, including the environmental advocacy groups Toxic-Free Future, WE ACT for Environmental Justice and Defend Our Health.

This year's Toxic Hall of Shame includes the well-known brands of Starbucks, Subway, Publix, Nordstrom, Ace Hardware, 7-Eleven, Sally Beauty and Restaurant Brands International (RBI), the parent company of Burger King, Popeyes and Tim Hortons, a popular Canadian fast-food chain.

Called "forever" chemicals, because they do not degrade in the environment, PFAS are so widespread that levels have been detected in the blood of 97% of Americans, according to a 2015 report by the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

as part of a broad Chinese cybercampaign against India’s power grid, timed to send a message that if India pressed its claims too hard, the lights could go out across the country.

The discovery raises the question about whether an outage that struck on Oct. 13 in Mumbai

Until recent years, China’s focus had been on information theft. But Beijing has been increasingly active in placing code into infrastructure systems, knowing that when it is discovered, the fear of an attack can be as powerful a tool as an attack itself.

Although in some parts of the country, the idea of putting kids in prison seems to elicit more enthusiasm than the idea of locking away the weapons.

Last year at least 371 children stumbled across a loaded gun and fired, causing 143 deaths and 243 injuries. In one case, a 3-year-old shot himself to death with a pistol that had fallen out of the pocket of a member of his family — apparently while the adults were playing cards.

Many Americans like to arm themselves to the teeth as protection from crime — and bleep over the danger that comes with all that hardware, especially in the hands of people who aren’t really equipped to use it.

The North is developing military drones, a nuclear-powered submarine and surveillance satellites, Mr. Kim said. Missiles will get smaller and lighter. Others will fly farther.

At a Thursday night military parade celebrating the Workers’ Party meeting, the North put a host of military hardware on display, including a submarine-launched ballistic missile that state media touted as the “world’s most powerful weapon.”

Pyongyang has been on relatively good behavior, having held off on nuclear tests and ICBM launches for more than three years. The Kim regime was waiting to see if Mr. Trump, whom Mr. Kim met three times, would win re-election and deliver on his promise to quickly broker a denuclearization deal during his second term.

Fewer people still knew that this piece of spook hardware was invented by a German (based on an idea by a Dutchman), that information about it was leaked to the French, and that it was first reconstructed by a Pole, before it was offered to Britain's codebreakers as a way of deciphering German signals traffic during World War Two

the Zimmermann telegram - a message from the German foreign minister to his ambassador in Mexico City informing him of plans to invade the United States. On being notified of these plans, officials in Washington were understandably perturbed, and hastened to effect the entry of the US into the war.

Dr Arthur Scherbius had developed his 'Enigma' machine, capable of transcribing coded information, in the hope of interesting commercial companies in secure communications. In 1923 he set up his Chiffriermaschinen Aktiengesellschaft (Cipher Machines Corporation) in Berlin to manufacture this product, and within three years the German navy was producing its own version, followed in 1928 by the army and in 1933 by the air force.

US Sen. Elizabeth Warren has written to US government agencies demanding answers after a CNN investigation revealed that American-made weapons in Yemen are being turned on the internationally recognized and US-backed government.

"These unauthorized diversions of American military hardware to armed groups ... undermine US national security objectives in securing a political settlement to the conflict in Yemen, which has no military solution and remains one of the world's worst humanitarian crises," reads Warren's letter, which was sent Monday and is addressed to US Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo.

This is the second time that Warren, a candidate for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination, has written to the US agencies about arms transfers in Yemen following CNN reporting.

The new missile systems China displayed in its national day parade last month will add to “global anxiety” about its rising military power and Beijing needs to explain itself to the world, Japan’s defence minister has warned

His comments highlight Tokyo’s delicate position as it seeks to maintain its security against China’s growing military might, while avoiding becoming a proxy for a US confrontation with Beijing.

The hardware was unveiled amid rising tensions in the region, from ballistic missile tests by North Korea to the US withdrawal from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty with Russia. The treaty banned land-based missiles with ranges of between 500km and 5,500km and the US is now keen to deploy such missiles in Asia. Some experts fear that could spark an arms race with China, which was not party to the INF treaty.

Conservatives have long loathed it as the axis of liberal politics and political correctness, but now progressives are carping, too. They mourn it for what has been lost, a city that long welcomed everyone and has been altered by an earthquake of wealth. It is a place that people disparage constantly, especially residents.

Real estate is the nation’s costliest. Listings read like typos, a median $1.6 million for a single-family home and $3,700 monthly rent for a one-bedroom apartment.

“This is unregulated capitalism, unbridled capitalism, capitalism run amok. There are no guardrails,” says Salesforce founder and chairman Marc Benioff, a fourth-generation San Franciscan who in a TV interview branded his city “a train wreck.”

There are at least three driving forces motivating Facebook and Co. to pursue the metaverse, and pursue it to the extent that one of our largest tech giants is willing to rename itself in its honor: Public-relations strategy, founder ego, and a growing, industry-wide business imperative.

The metaverse is likely propelled as much by the founder’s ego as it is by PR stuntery. Behind the opportunism is Zuckerberg’s desire to take a billionaire-size step into the unknown, à la Jeff Bezos or Elon Musk, something that can truly make a dent in the future, rather than running an ad-stuffed social-media feed that is no longer anyone’s idea of a bold new tomorrow.

Becoming a hero in the metaverse feeds Zuck’s ambitions the way aspiring to space travel feeds Bezos and Musk.

the history of venture capital is replete with partnerships that bestrode the Valley and then lost their footing. In 2001, the top two investors at the storied firm of Kleiner Perkins were ranked first and third on the Forbes Midas List of the top 100 V.C. investors. Twenty years later, only one Kleiner partner was ranked, and he came 77th.

Spend time with other sophisticated V.C. shops, and their deliberate methods become clear. Accel, the partnership best known for backing Facebook, developed an approach known as “prepared mind.” You study a coming technology shift — for example, the migration of data from customer devices to the cloud. You figure out the implications: new hardware configurations, new software business models, new security vulnerabilities. Then, when you come across a start-up that is poised to surf the new wave profitably, you are primed to react quickly.

“The U.S. has essentially declared war on China’s ability to advance the country’s use of high-performance computing for economic and security gains,” Paul Triolo, a China and tech expert at Albright Stonebridge, a consulting firm, told The Financial Times. Or as the Chinese Embassy in Washington framed it, the U.S. is going for “sci-tech hegemony.”

regulations issued Friday by President Biden’s Commerce Department are a formidable new barrier when it comes to export controls that will block China from being able to buy the most advanced semiconductors from the West or the equipment to manufacture them on its own.

The new regulations also bar any U.S. engineer or scientist from aiding China in chip manufacturing without specific approval, even if that American is working on equipment in China not subject to export controls. The regs also tighten the tracking to ensure that U.S.-designed chips sold to civilian companies in China don’t get into the hands of China’s military

Taiwan is now on pace to spend more than $19 billion on defense in 2023. But China spends more than $200 billion a year

Instead of building large, conventional hardware (airplanes, tanks, submarines), military experts have urged Taiwan to focus on so-called asymmetric capabilities (anti-ship weapons, surface-to-air missiles, stockpiles of small arms and ammunition), which have served Ukraine well in repelling a larger invader. That, combined with a bigger force of civilian reserves, could make the cost of an invasion too high for China. This approach has earned a nickname in global defense circles: “the porcupine strategy.”

China now has the world’s largest navy, with more than 350 ships and submarines. Its rocket force maintains the world’s largest arsenal of land-based missiles, which would feature in any war with Taiwan.

G.M., Ford and numerous charging companies and equipment suppliers have agreed to work with Tesla because they desperately need the company’s help. In addition to selling more electric cars in the United States than all other automakers put together, Tesla operates the country’s largest fast-charging network.

the decision to work with Tesla comes with big risks for the rest of the auto industry, which will be relying on Mr. Musk, a mercurial leader, for an essential technolog

Tesla’s system is known for being easy to use and reliable, while C.C.S. chargers can be finicky. Frustration with the existing charging network is clearly one reason Ford and G.M. decided to throw in their lot with Tesla.

I gave a talk to a class at Northeastern University earlier this month, concerning technology, journalism, and the cultural professions. The students were bright and inquisitive, though they also reflected the current dynamic in higher ed overall - three quarters of the students who showed up were women, and the men who were there almost all sat moodily in the back and didn’t engage at all while their female peers took notes and asked questions. I know there’s a lot of criticism of the “crisis for boys” narrative, but it’s often hard not to believe in it.

we’re actually living in a period of serious technological stagnation - that despite our vague assumption that we’re entitled to constant remarkable scientific progress, humanity has been living with real and valuable but decidedly small-scale technological growth for the past 50 or 60 or 70 years, after a hundred or so years of incredible growth from 1860ish to 1960ish, give or take a decade or two on either side

I will recommend Robert J. Gordon’s The Rise & Fall of American Growth for an exhaustive academic (and primarily economic) argument to this effect. Gordon persuasively demonstrates that from the mid-19th to mid-20th century, humanity leveraged several unique advancements that had remarkably outsized consequences for how we live and changed our basic existence in a way that never happened before and hasn’t since. Principal among these advances were the process of refining fossil fuels and using them to power all manner of devices and vehicles, the ability to harness electricity and use it to safely provide energy to homes (which practically speaking required the first development), and a revolution in medicine that came from the confluence of long-overdue acceptance of germ theory and basic hygienic principles, the discovery and refinement of antibiotics, and the modernization of vaccines.