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Since 2014, the U.S. has spent tens of millions of dollars toward arming Ukraine with hardware, software and training to secure its critical infrastructure. Those efforts have ramped up in recent months.

But Russian disinformation has become less effective

When war broke out in eastern Ukraine in 2014, fake news from Russia flooded over the border with the aim of instilling panic in parts of the country with greater sympathy for Russia, like Crimea, turning them away from the Ukrainian government and toward Russia.

Russian state-owned TV broadcast false stories about "fascists" in the streets of Kyiv, a ban on the Russian language in Ukraine, and looming food riots and rationing. One story, broadcast on Russian state TV, claimed that Ukrainian soldiers had brutally murdered and crucified a three-year-old boy.

Authorities in Kyiv are working to prepare the city

One example: A series of bomb scares were called into Ukrainian schools in recent weeks, but many parents shrugged them off.

Although an invasion feels unlikely to many who live in Kyiv, city officials say they are not as prepared as they'd like to be.

Kyiv has thousands of bomb shelters that date back to the Soviet era, when some of the USSR's nuclear arsenal was based in Ukraine. Over the past several months, authorities have been working to bring as many shelters as possible back into operation. But many are still unusable. Some have been flooded, others are inaccessible. Some shelters have even been taken over by barbershops or bakeries that have set up shop inside. "Authorities will have to take care of this situation and take it more seriously," Mykhailova said.

Ukraine's military has strengthened since 2014

"Ukrainian troops are well-trained, they're well-equipped and they're very motivated. Ukrainians in general and the Ukrainian military are very patriotic. They love Ukraine. They're willing to fight to save it," said Kristina Kvien, the top U.S. diplomat in Kyiv, in an interview with All Things Considered on Friday.

That improvement has come with major help from international donors, primarily the United States. The U.S. has committed more than $5.4 billion in aid to Ukraine since 2014, according to the State Department. About half that total has been security assistance, with the Biden administration announcing another $200 million on Wednesday. Over the years, that military aid has taken many forms: Humvees, patrol boats, counter-artillery radar, a joint training center in western Ukraine.

it underscores that Instagram, WhatsApp and, increasingly, Reality Labs — the division tasked with developing virtual and augmented reality hardware and software — are the company’s future.

Facebook’s “imperative,” in Bosworth’s telling — its raison d’etre — was to be that product that everyone used, the tool that unified at last a fragmented human race in a single, vast network. And the company would pursue that imperative at any cost, even the cost of users’ lives, “because that’s what we do,” he wrote. “We connect people.”

“The natural state of the world is not connected,” Bosworth wrote in the memo, which was leaked and published by BuzzFeed in 2018. “It is not unified. It is fragmented by borders, languages, and increasingly by different products. The best products don’t win. The ones everyone use [sic] win.”

To understand how integral growth was to Facebook’s identity, it’s worth revisiting a memo that executive Andrew “Boz” Bosworth, now Meta’s CTO, sent to the company in 2016.

Wednesday’s earnings report showed that Facebook’s ascent has stalled just about everywhere. The biggest decline in daily usage was not in the United States but in a category that it calls “rest of world,” including Latin America and Africa.

Zuckerberg knew before just about anyone else that social media was no longer enough to keep the company on top. Now he’s trying to will into existence a grand new vision of a digital world in which we all have second lives that play out through avatars inhabiting virtual spaces and realms.

Several years ago, the company realized that it had saturated among U.S. and Canadian users, and it overhauled its core news feed algorithm to prioritize engagement — getting existing users to spend more time on the network.

losing users does not necessarily mean losing money in the short term: Facebook’s revenue per user also continued to grow last quarter.

Yet the end of Facebook’s growth era marks a turning point in the history of social media and the Internet. If Zuckerberg couldn’t connect the whole world with Facebook, given all the resources and momentum and desire one could ask for, he may have to confront the possibility that no single network ever will.

Spotify doesn’t have those things to turn to. So it’s been turning to podcasts. Besides enticing new subscribers with Spotify-branded podcasts—Rogan and Gimlet Media at the forefront of these—Spotify gets a new place to run ads. The podcast-advertising ecosystem is still lush enough to support additional harvesting. Spotify is betting that what used to be known as the music industry is in fact dead but that maybe the company can make money in the “audio industry.” But that shift involves decisions that disappoint even people jaded by years of experience with the recording business.

In the context of the devaluation of so many artists’ work, the backing of Rogan feels like a particularly nihilistic move. Spotify didn’t sign him for his talent or care at all about his impact—good or ill—on the world; with a heartless, almost video-game sensibility, they signed him to take market share from Apple and Google

Complaints against bloodless businessmen are hardly new. But what’s happening in music today feels less like individual acts of exploitation and more like the razing of an ecosystem.

When Rogan announced his signing, he emphasized that Spotify would have no creative control over his podcast. He was agreeing to a licensing deal, but he wouldn’t be an employee. “It will be the exact same show,” Rogan claimed

His comments fell somewhere between the gentle vibe of “Look, man, they’re offering me $100 million, so, uh, what am I supposed to do?” and a more aggressive “Spotify doesn’t own me, man. They are renting me for a certain period of time for $100 million—that’s different.” It’s infuriating that Rogan’s podcast has the trappings of counterculture while finding itself in such particular proximity to money and tech power. But I don’t know that, if I were Rogan, I would do much different.

Others in the “audio industry” face more discouraging trends. I suspect that the big record companies would dissolve if they weren’t still making so much money off the music of the 20th century.

I knew a lot of bands in the early 2000s whose members could quit their day job for a few years and make a living on relatively small amounts of record sales coupled with touring

Today, fewer artists are crossing the bar of being able to live purely off making and performing music. A lot of artists are failing to find a place in an “audio industry” that ever more efficiently mines smaller veins for what little cash can be extracted, or in a broader entertainment industry that has more in common with Marvel-movie spectacle than any particular sort of artistry.

My deep dread, though, is that this ability to tune out and focus on art becomes an aristocratic luxury; that a lack of money for music means a lack of money for musicians; that new ways of doing business are destroying the possibility of a creative middle class.

Solidarity is a tempting response to technological change, but my tired brain just can’t see the mechanism for it in this era. I honestly feel like a master sock weaver at the start of the industrial revolution. People will still get their socks, maybe worse than the ones before. And in the end, technology will plow us over.

“No one believed me that working for Elon was the way it was until they saw how he operated Twitter,” Bernal said, calling Twitter “just the tip of the iceberg on how he operates Tesla.”

In April 2019, at a showcase dubbed “Autonomy Investor Day,” Musk made perhaps his boldest prediction as Tesla’s chief executive. “By the middle of next year, we’ll have over a million Tesla cars on the road with full self-driving hardware,” Musk told a roomful of investors. The software updates automatically over the air, and Full Self-Driving would be so reliable, he said, the driver “could go to sleep.”

Investors were sold. The following year, Tesla’s stock price soared, making it the most valuable automaker and helping Musk become the world’s richest person

To deliver on his promise, Musk assembled a star team of engineers willing to work long hours and problem solve deep into the night. Musk would test the latest software on his own car, then he and other executives would compile “fix-it” requests for their engineers.

Those patchwork fixes gave the illusion of relentless progress but masked the lack of a coherent development strategy, former employees said. While competitors such as Alphabet-owned Waymo adopted strict testing protocols that limited where self-driving software could operate, Tesla eventually pushed Full Self-Driving out to 360,000 owners — who paid up to $15,000 to be eligible for the features — and let them activate it at their own discretion.

Tesla’s philosophy is simple: The more data (in this case driving) the artificial intelligence guiding the car is exposed to, the faster it learns. But that crude model also means there is a lighter safety net. Tesla has chosen to effectively allow the software to learn on its own, developing sensibilities akin to a brain via technology dubbed “neural nets” with fewer rules, the former employees said. While this has the potential to speed the process, it boils down to essentially a trial and error method of training.

Radar originally played a major role in the design of the Tesla vehicles and software, supplementing the cameras by offering a reality check of what was around, particularly if vision might be obscured. Tesla also used ultrasonic sensors, shorter-range devices that detect obstructions within inches of the car. (The company announced last year it was eliminating those as well.)

Musk, as the chief tester, also asked for frequent bug fixes to the software, requiring engineers to go in and adjust code. “Nobody comes up with a good idea while being chased by a tiger,” a former senior executive recalled an engineer on the project telling him

Toward the end of 2020, Autopilot employees turned on their computers to find in-house workplace monitoring software installed, former employees said. It monitored keystrokes and mouse clicks, and kept track of their image labeling. If the mouse did not move for a period of time, a timer started — and employees could be reprimanded, up to being fired, for periods of inactivity, the former employees said.

Some of the people who spoke with The Post said that approach has introduced risks. “I just knew that putting that software out in the streets would not be safe,” said a former Tesla Autopilot engineer who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation. “You can’t predict what the car’s going to do.”

Some of the people who spoke with The Post attributed Tesla’s sudden uptick in “phantom braking” reports — where the cars aggressively slow down from high speeds — to the lack of radar. The Post analyzed data from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to show incidences surged last year, prompting a federal regulatory investigation.

The data showed reports of “phantom braking” rose to 107 complaints over three months, compared to only 34 in the preceding 22 months. After The Post highlighted the problem in a news report, NHTSA received about 250 complaints of the issue in a two-week period. The agency opened an investigation after, it said, it received 354 complaints of the problem spanning a period of nine months.

“It’s not the sole reason they’re having [trouble] but it’s big a part of it,” said Missy Cummings, a former senior safety adviser for NHTSA, who has criticized the company’s approach and recused herself on matters related to Tesla. “The radar helped detect objects in the forward field. [For] computer vision which is rife with errors, it serves as a sensor fusion way to check if there is a problem.”

Even with radar, Teslas were less sophisticated than the lidar and radar-equipped cars of competitors.“One of the key advantages of lidar is that it will never fail to see a train or truck, even if it doesn’t know what it is,” said Brad Templeton, a longtime self-driving car developer and consultant who worked on Google’s self-driving car. “It knows there is an object in front and the vehicle can stop without knowing more than that.”

Musk’s resistance to suggestions led to a culture of deference, former employees said. Tesla fired employees who pushed back on his approach. The company was also pushing out so many updates to its software that in late 2021, NHTSA publicly admonished Tesla for issuing fixes without a formal recall notice.

Tesla engineers have been burning out, quitting and looking for opportunities elsewhere. Andrej Karpathy, Tesla’s director of artificial intelligence, took a months-long sabbatical last year before leaving Tesla and taking a position this year at OpenAI, the company behind language-modeling software ChatGPT.

One of the former employees said that he left for Waymo. “They weren’t really wondering if their car’s going to run the stop sign,” the engineer said. “They’re just focusing on making the whole thing achievable in the long term, as opposed to hurrying it up.”