NYTimes: “Competition in China is often far more cutthroat than in the United States. America has a handful of carmakers; China has more than 100 electric vehicle makers struggling for market share. China has so many solar panel makers that they produce 50 percent more than global demand. About 100 Chinese lithium battery producers churn out 25 percent more batteries than anyone wants to buy. This forces Chinese manufacturers to innovate, but it also leads to price wars, losses and bad debt — and that’s becoming a problem. China is heading toward deflation, the often catastrophic downward spiral of prices that sank Japan in the 1990s. Its leaders are blaming a culprit they call “involution” (“neijuan” in Mandarin), a term that has come to mean reckless domestic competition. They want to rein it in by browbeating companies into keeping prices steady and instructing local governments to scale back subsidies.”
Study Finds: “Defiance is not about being oppositional for its own sake. It’s about choosing to act in line with your values when there is pressure to do otherwise. That pressure can come from anywhere: a boss urging you to fudge the numbers, a friend nudging you toward something you don’t believe in, a culture telling you to stay in your place. Defiance in those moments might be as small as saying “no,” asking for clarification or simply pausing instead of rushing along with the group. Other times, it means speaking up, challenging authority or maybe walking away. Seen this way, defiance isn’t a fixed trait that some people are born with and others lack. It’s a practice: a skill you can strengthen over time. Some days you might comply, other days you might resist. What matters is that you have the awareness and the tools to make the choice consciously, rather than letting fear or habit decide for you.”
Mint: “I’m no longer sure if the train remains as much of a social melting pot of chatter and exchange, when our closest companions are handheld devices and watching reels without earphones is our favourite pastime. My last few train journeys—mostly short ones by chair cars—were memorable for the loud phone conversations that sometimes went for the entire duration of travel or wailing children being placated by electronic devices. Noise cancelling headphones are now a new normal, which not only drown out the ambient chaos but, sadly, also the clickety-clack of the wheels. [Monisha] Rajesh, too, admits that the quality of connections on trains have changed in the last 15 years she has been writing about her journeys. “I avoid using my phone on trains, except as a recording device or to take an occasional photograph. Ironically, now, even those who are taking trains because they want to experience ‘slow travel’ seem to be completely sucked in by their phones,” she says.” More: “Two hundred years after the first train plied, train travel endures despite being written off every now and then. The sway of carriages, the changing scenery through the windows and chance encounters make it the most enchanting form of travel.”
WSJ: “The key is enabling AI to learn from their environments and faithfully represent an abstract version of them in their “heads,” the way humans and animals do. To do it, developers need to train AIs by using simulations of the world. Think of it like learning to drive by playing “Gran Turismo” or learning to fly from “Microsoft Flight Simulator.” These world models include all the things required to plan, take actions and make predictions about the future, including physics and time. The world-model approach—which somewhat confusingly refers to both the simulated training environment and the abstract representation—is already having potentially huge effects on the real world. Drone warfare, new kinds of robots and safer-than-human self-driving vehicles all benefit from it, says Moritz Baier-Lentz, a partner and investor at Lightspeed, a venture-capital firm. There’s an almost unanimous belief among AI pioneers that world models are crucial to creating next-generation AI.”
