
- 外刊精读245期:被困在算法牢笼中的美利坚,川普如何勾结科技寡头 (选自The Atlantic大西洋月刊)
Americans Are Trapped in an Algorithmic Cage The private companies in control of social-media networks possess an unprecedented ability to manipulate and control the populace. February 7th, 2025, The Atlantic 🌟完整外刊原文,请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 Shortly before President George W. Bush was reelected, in 2004, an anonymous Bush-administration source told The New York Times, “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.” Those in what the adviser called “the reality-based community” would be left “studying that reality—judiciously, as you will.” Then “we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out.” The newly inaugurated Trump administration bears many of the worst hallmarks of the Bush era. Like the Bush administration, the Trump administration seeks to purge the federal government of dedicated, competent civil servants in favor of sycophantic loyalists. Like the Bush administration, the Trump administration has little regard for constitutional or legal barriers to its authority. And like Bush supporters once did, the Trump administration’s underlings speak of their leader in cult-like tones of reverence, with the single-minded dogmatism of zealots on what they believe to be a holy mission. No longer confined to the Emerald City of the Baghdad Green Zone, imperial life has come back to haunt the capital, the lawlessness of the post-9/11 Bush era returned in an even more grotesque, exaggerated fashion as the governing philosophy of that administration’s Republican successors. This time, however, making reality falls within the confines of the imperator’s capabilities. The presence of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Apple CEO Tim Cook, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, and TikTok CEO Shou Zi Chew—dubbed the “broligarchs” by Scott Roxborough—at Trump’s inauguration was an ominous sign. Along with Elon Musk, the far-right billionaire and owner of X, who with Trump’s blessing appears to have illegally asserted control over parts of the federal government, these tycoons represent a tech elite that collectively controls the mediums through which Americans collect and assess information, and therefore determine much of what Americans see and hear on a daily basis. Before Trump was reelected, social-media companies had a profit motive to keep people attached to their screens as long as possible, which was bad enough. Now Trump has made clear with his threats that he expects them to use their power to prop up his administration. They have all, at least symbolically, demonstrated their loyalty. Bezos even interfered with the editorial independence of The Washington Post, the newspaper he owns, to prevent it from endorsing Trump’s opponent, and his underlings have proceeded to dismantle the institution piece by piece. Although many Trump allies spent much of his first term and all of the Biden administration complaining about “woke capital,” or corporate capture by liberal cultural forces, it was obvious from the beginning that they were never interested in curtailing corporate power, only in controlling it for their own purposes. The purpose now is to impose their version of reality on the public, even as they pursue an agenda that is nothing short of ruinous.
- 外刊精读244期:哪吒2登顶中国票房史上第一,中国动画崛起何以崛起? (选自SCMP)
Nezha 2: ancient Chinese stories prove a winning formula for animated film success Eight days after its release, Nezha 2 became China’s highest-grossing movie ever with its take on mythical figures February 9th, 2025, SCMP 🌟完整外刊原文,请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 China’s box office records were smashed this week as animated blockbuster Nezha 2 became the highest-grossing film in the country’s history following its January 29 release. Millions around the country flocked to cinemas over the Lunar New Year holiday to watch the latest instalment in the Nezha phenomenon, which is adapted from the epic tale of Nezha, a youthful deity who defied the dragons in Chinese mythology. That a story taken from Chinese history and folklore should be so popular with audiences is no surprise. Over recent years, amid China’s rapid economic growth and technological rivalry with the West, there has been an increase in national pride and a revival of traditional culture. This has seen old and new collide, with these ancient tales being retold using the latest in digital technology. It is this reignited passion for traditional Chinese culture that has also seen success for similar entertainment, including Tang dynasty-inspired blockbuster 30,000 Miles from Changan, and classic novel-based action game Black Myth: Wukong. Box office takings for Nezha 2 are touted to be the closest to international industry standards ever achieved. On Thursday, the film officially became China’s highest-grossing movie, reaching 5.8 billion yuan (US$796 million) in revenue, overtaking the previous record set in 2021 by The Battle at Lake Changjin, a patriotic account of the Chinese stand-off against the United States during the Korean war. It marks a new milestone for locally produced animation, which has been overtaking the shares of Disney and Japanese motion movies in the Chinese market in recent years. Nezha 2, or Nezha: Demon Child Conquers the Sea, explores how Nezha, a boy born with a demonic destiny and great strength, realises that the cosmic order has been manipulated by the deity leader Wuliang Xianweng to consolidate power and the superiority of his clan. While grappling with his self-image and identity, Nezha and his best friend Ao Bing unite the suppressed spirits in the sea to fight against the system. The film has sophisticated animation and a captivating plot, but industry experts have said its success still hinges on its use of traditional mythical figures.
- 外刊精读242/243期:Deepseek与梁文锋,开启“中国创新,美国模仿”新时代(Financial Times)
With DeepSeek, China innovates and the US imitates The start-up’s breakthrough confounds outworn prejudices about the two countries January 30th, 2025, Financial Times 🌟完整外刊原文,请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 Triumphalist glee lit up the Chinese internet this week. Just as Google DeepMind’s victory over China’s strongest Go player in 2017 showcased western brilliance in artificial intelligence, so DeepSeek’s release of a world-beating AI reasoning model has this month been celebrated as a stunning success in China. DeepSeek’s smarter and cheaper AI model was a “scientific and technological achievement that shapes our national destiny”, said one Chinese tech executive. The start-up had become a key player in the “Chinese Large-Model Technology Avengers Team” that would counter US AI dominance, said another. China’s delight, however, spelled pain for several giant US technology companies as investors questioned whether DeepSeek’s breakthrough undermined the case for their colossal spending on AI infrastructure. US tech and energy stocks lost $1tn of their market value on Monday, although they regained some ground later in the week. The stereotypical image of China abroad may still be that of a state-subsidised, capital-intensive manufacturing economy that excels at churning out impressive low-cost hardware, such as smartphones, solar panels and electric vehicles. But, in truth, China long ago emerged as a global software superpower, outstripping the west in ecommerce and digital financial services, and it has invested massively in AI, too. DeepSeek’s emergence confounds many of the outworn prejudices about Chinese innovation, although it is far from a typical Chinese company. It certainly invalidates the old saw that while the US innovates, China imitates and Europe regulates. In several ways, DeepSeek resembles a bootstrapped Silicon Valley start-up, even if it was not founded in a garage. Launched in 2023, the company has the same high-flown ambition as OpenAI and Google DeepMind to attain human-level AI, or artificial general intelligence (AGI). But its founder Liang Wenfeng runs one of China’s leading hedge funds, meaning the company has not had to raise external financing. In an interview republished in the China Talk newsletter, Liang explained that DeepSeek operated more as a research lab than a commercial enterprise. When recruiting, it prioritised capabilities over credentials, hiring young Chinese-educated researchers. Liang said these people were given the space to explore and the freedom to make mistakes. “Innovation often arises naturally — it’s not something that can be deliberately planned or taught,” he said.
- 外刊精读241期:年轻一代美国人为什么越来越孤独?(选自大西洋月刊)
The Anti-Social Century Americans are now spending more time alone than ever. It’s changing our personalities, our politics, and even our relationship to reality. January 8, 2025, The Atlantic 🌟完整外刊原文,请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 Over the past few months, I’ve spoken with psychologists, political scientists, sociologists, and technologists about America’s anti-social streak. Although the particulars of these conversations differed, a theme emerged: The individual preference for solitude, scaled up across society and exercised repeatedly over time, is rewiring America’s civic and psychic identity. And the consequences are far-reaching—for our happiness, our communities, our politics, and even our understanding of reality. Phonebound If two of the 20th century’s iconic technologies, the automobile and the television, initiated the rise of American aloneness, the 21st century’s most notorious piece of hardware has continued to fuel, and has indeed accelerated, our national anti-social streak. Countless books, articles, and cable-news segments have warned Americans that smartphones can negatively affect mental health and may be especially harmful to adolescents. But the fretful coverage is, if anything, restrained given how greatly these devices have changed our conscious experience. The typical person is awake for about 900 minutes a day. American kids and teenagers spend, on average, about 270 minutes on weekdays and 380 minutes on weekends gazing into their screens, according to the Digital Parenthood Initiative. By this account, screens occupy more than 30 percent of their waking life. Some of this screen time is social, after a fashion. But sharing videos or texting friends is a pale imitation of face-to-face interaction. More worrisome than what young people do on their phone is what they aren’t doing. Young people are less likely than in previous decades to get their driver’s license, or to go on a date, or to have more than one close friend, or even to hang out with their friends at all. The share of boys and girls who say they meet up with friends almost daily outside school hours has declined by nearly 50 percent since the early 1990s, with the sharpest downturn occurring in the 2010s. The decline of hanging out can’t be shrugged off as a benign generational change, something akin to a preference for bell-bottoms over skinny jeans. Human childhood—including adolescence—is a uniquely sensitive period in the whole of the animal kingdom, the psychologist Jonathan Haidt writes in The Anxious Generation. Although the human brain grows to 90 percent of its full size by age 5, its neural circuitry takes a long time to mature. Our lengthy childhood might be evolution’s way of scheduling an extended apprenticeship in social learning through play. The best kind of play is physical, outdoors, with other kids, and unsupervised, allowing children to press the limits of their abilities while figuring out how to manage conflict and tolerate pain. But now young people’s attention is funneled into devices that take them out of their body, denying them the physical-world education they need. Socially underdeveloped childhood leads, almost inexorably, to socially stunted adulthood. A popular trend on TikTok involves 20‑somethings celebrating in creative ways when a friend cancels plans, often because they’re too tired or anxious to leave the house. These clips can be goofy and even quite funny. Surely, sympathy is due; we all know the feeling of relief when we claw back free time in an overscheduled week. But the sheer number of videos is a bit unsettling. If anybody should feel lonely and desperate for physical-world contact, you’d think it would be 20-somethings, who are still recovering from years of pandemic cabin fever. But many nights, it seems, members of America’s most isolated generation aren’t trying to leave the house at all. They’re turning on their cameras to advertise to the world the joy of not hanging out. Phones mean that solitude is more crowded than it used to be, and crowds are more solitary. “Bright lines once separated being alone and being in a crowd,” Nicholas Carr, the author of the new book Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, told me. “Boundaries helped us. You could be present with your friends and reflective in your downtime.” Now our social time is haunted by the possibility that something more interesting is happening somewhere else, and our downtime is contaminated by the streams and posts and texts of dozens of friends, colleagues, frenemies, strangers.
- 外刊精读240期:AMD总裁苏姿丰,《时代周刊》2024年度CEO专题
Lisa Su, 2024 CEO of the Year Dec 10, 2024, TIME 🌟完整外刊原文,请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 Lisa Su apologizes if she seems tired. It’s the day after the U.S. presidential election, and like much of the nation she was awake until the early hours, transfixed as the results came in, only tearing herself away once it became clear that Donald Trump had won. “I wanted to know,” Su explains as she takes her place at the head of a conference table in the Santa Clara, Calif., headquarters of Advanced Micro Devices (AMD). “It’s relevant information.” The identity of the next President is pertinent news to most of America’s CEOs, but few more so than the leader of a top semiconductor company. Semiconductors, or chips, are the engines of our computers, phones, cars, internet services, and—increasingly—our artificial intelligence (AI) programs. The relentless rise of the chip over the past seven decades has grown economies, transformed lives, and helped cement the U.S., where most chips get their start, as the globe’s postwar hegemon. AMD is one of the world’s leading designers of the CPU chips that power both personal computers and data centers, the vast warehouses of servers that make possible the likes of Google, Meta, Amazon, and Microsoft. It’s also a top designer of graphics processing units, or GPUs, the specialized chips used to create and run AI programs like ChatGPT. When you send an email, stream a movie, buy something online, or chat with an AI assistant, chances are an AMD chip is providing some of the computing power needed to make that happen. In November, a supercomputer that runs on AMD chips displaced another AMD-based machine to become the world’s most powerful, Which is thanks in large part to Su’s leadership. When she became CEO a decade ago, AMD stock was languishing around $3, its share of the data-center chip market had fallen so far that executives rounded it down to zero, and the question on everybody’s lips was how long the company had left. An engineer by training, Su spearheaded a bottom-up redesign of AMD’s products, repaired relationships with customers, and rode the AI boom to new heights. In 2022 the company’s overall value surpassed its historical rival Intel’s for the first time. AMD stock now trades at around $140, a nearly 50-fold increase since Su took over. This fall, Harvard Business School began teaching Su’s stewardship of AMD as a case study. “It really is one of the great turnaround stories of modern American business history,” says Chris Miller, a historian of the semiconductor industry and the author of Chip War. For all its progress, AMD remains the semiconductor industry’s distant No. 2. As Su’s team was speeding past Intel, both companies were lapped by Nvidia, run by Su’s cousin Jensen Huang, which in two years has risen from industry also-ran to become the most valuable company in the world. Nvidia got a jump on its rivals by realizing that its chips, initially made for rendering graphics, happened to be perfectly suited for training neural networks, the programs that underpin modern AI. Of the $32 billion worth of AI data-center GPUs sold in the third quarter of 2024, Nvidia’s accounted for some 95%. In November, AMD announced that it would lay off 4% of its global workforce in what it framed as a restructuring to focus on the opportunities from AI. Meanwhile, big tech customers, like Microsoft, Meta, and Amazon, are now designing their own specialized chips for AI workloads, which could reduce their reliance on AMD products. And AMD’s continued growth relies on a host of factors outside its control: continued progress in AI; the security of Taiwan, where the vast majority of its top chips are manufactured; and the actions of a notoriously unpredictable U.S. President. Trump’s return to the White House will bring new turbulence to an industry that has barely caught its breath from a half-decade of geopolitical showdowns, shortages, and an AI-fueled market boom. A lot rides on Su’s ability to steer the company through these obstacles. People who know her describe Su as a shrewd strategist who invests in talented people and jettisons those who aren’t pulling their weight. “I don’t believe leaders are born. I believe leaders are trained,” she tells TIME, ahead of a strategy meeting where she delivers blunt feedback to her executives and urges them to move faster and delegate more. Su, 55, holds meetings on weekends and is known among her executives for wanting to talk on morning calls about the finer points of long documents that were circulated after midnight. When prototype chips get delivered from the factory, she often personally goes down to the lab to help scrutinize them. It’s a hard-charging style that isn’t for everyone and makes it difficult for people who don’t meet their commitments to survive at the company, according to Patrick Moorhead, a tech-industry analyst and a former AMD executive who left before she joined.
- 外刊精读239期:TikTok难民涌入小红书,中美网友互动太有爱了 (选自Wired)
With a TikTok Ban Looming, Users Flee to Chinese App ‘Red Note’ Some say they joined Xiaohongshu, which translates to “little red book,” to spite the US government after a ban on TikTok became more likely. Jan 13, 2025, Wired 🌟完整外刊原文,请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 As TikTok anxiously awaits a Supreme Court decision that could determine whether it will be banned in the United States, users are preemptively fleeing the app and migrating to another Chinese social media platform called Xiaohongshu, which literally means “little red book” in Mandarin. As of Monday, Xiaohongshu was the number one most-downloaded app in Apple’s US App Store, despite the fact that it doesn’t even have an official English name. The second app on the list is Lemon8, another social media app owned by TikTok’s parent company, ByteDance, that is also experiencing a traffic surge from exiled TikTok users. Over the weekend, thousands of people began swarming to Xiaohongshu, which is known in China as a platform for travel and lifestyle content and has over 300 million users. The newcomers, who refer to the app as “Red Note” or “the Chinese version of Instagram” and call themselves “TikTok refugees,” are relying on translation tools to navigate Xiaohongshu’s mostly Chinese ecosystem. Some say they are hoping to rebuild communities they had on TikTok, while others say they joined the app out of spite and to undermine the US government’s decision to ban TikTok “I would rather stare at a language I can't understand than to ever use a social media [platform] that Mark Zuckerberg owns,” said one user in a video posted to Xiaohongshu on Sunday. There are a countless number of similar clips in which TikTok refugees introduce themselves and explain why they decided to come to Xiaohongshu, many raking up thousands of likes and comments each. A spokesperson for Xiaohongshu could not immediately be reached for comment. The Supreme Court heard oral arguments on Friday from TikTok and the US government, which respectively made their cases for and against a law passed last year that would force TikTok to sell its US operations or be banned by January 19. Experts said the justices appeared to think the law was constitutional and would likely allow it to stay, leaving many users feeling that the app’s days are numbered. While TikTok is unlikely to immediately disappear from the phones of people who have already downloaded it, it could be deleted from US app stores, causing many to panic and look for the next place to go.
- 外刊精读238期:史诗级加州山火毁天灭地,谁是罪魁祸首?(选自BBC)
What's the latest on the Los Angeles wildfires and what caused them? Jan 13, 2025, BBC 🌟完整外刊原文,请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 At least 24 people have died in the Los Angeles fires as two major blazes continue to burn across the sprawling Californian city. Firefighters had made progress by Sunday - containing one smaller fire and nearly containing another - but the two largest blazes are still raging. With strong winds expected to continue until Wednesday, the fire threat remains "very high", LA county officials said. The fires are being marked as the most destructive in the city's history with officials warning the death toll could rise. Cadaver dogs and crews are continuing to search the scorched rubble of razed homes in neighbourhoods. What's the latest? The largest fire, in the Palisades, has now burnt through more than 23,000 acres although thousands of firefighters have made some progress in containing about 11% of it. Crews were doing "everything they can" to stop its spread, said LA City Fire Chief Kristin Crowley on Sunday. The blaze was moving east, threatening the exclusive neighbourhood of Brentwood, home to the Getty Center, a world-famous art museum that has now evacuated its staff. Students at the nearby University of California, Los Angeles were also awaiting updates from officials, while classes are being held remotely. Chief Crowley said favourable winds on Saturday had helped, but warned northerly gusts up to 50mph (80km/h) and low humidity were expected on Sunday. A red flag warning - indicating a high level of fire danger - will be in place until 18:00 (02:00 GMT) on Wednesday, with the strongest Santa Ana winds expected on Tuesday. 16 of the dead were found in the Eaton fire zone, while eight were found in the Palisades area. Another 16 people are reported as missing. As of Sunday, more than 105,000 people were under evacuation orders in Los Angeles County, while another 87,000 face warnings. Those numbers have decreased since Saturday. More than 12,000 structures - homes, outbuildings, sheds, mobile homes and cars -have been destroyed including 7,000 in the Eaton fire. The Palisades fire has destroyed about 5,300 structures, including at least 426 houses. Following reports of looting, authorities say they're also enforcing a curfew from 18:00 local time (02:00 GMT) to 06:00 within the areas affected by the Palisades and Eaton fires. Police have so far made 29 arrests - 25 in the Eaton fire area and four in the Palisades fire zone. These included two individuals caught posing as firefighters and entering properties. On Saturday night, police arrested one person for curfew violation in the Palisades and six people in Eaton - three for violating curfew and three for additional charges, including carrying a concealed firearm and narcotics-related charges.
- 外刊精读237期:特鲁多辞职下台,加拿大分崩离析 (选自经济学人)
Justin Trudeau leaves a wrecked party and divided Canada Mark Carney and Chrystia Freeland are among those tipped as the next Liberal leader Jan 6, 2025, The Economist 🌟完整外刊原文,请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 On January 6th Justin Trudeau, Canada’s prime minister, announced his resignation after weeks of speculation and a mounting political crisis. The Liberal Party has won three successive elections since 2015 under his leadership. But over the past year he has become an isolated and deeply polarising figure as supporters have abandoned the party, angry that it has failed to tackle inflation, housing costs and the strains from high immigration. In the coming weeks the Liberals will be gripped by a leadership struggle. Canada faces an election which must be held by October. It will be fought over his deeply flawed legacy, and how the next government responds to a looming trade war, geopolitical risks and a sluggish economy. “This country deserves a real choice in the next election,” Mr Trudeau said. “It has become clear to me that if I am having to fight internal battles, I cannot be the best option in that election.” He joins a growing list of progressive leaders done in by their failure to address the anxieties of ordinary voters, many of whom are shifting to populist parties. Among those crowing over his exit will be President-elect Donald Trump whose contempt has been laid bare recently in a stream of social media posts, dismissing Mr Trudeau as the “governor” of “the Great State of Canada”, and urging Canadians to consider becoming the 51st member of the United States. The rampant Conservative Party, led by Pierre Poilievre, will be watching who the Liberals pick next, and eyeing a landslide election victory.
- 外刊精读236期:资本主义毁掉了《鱿鱼游戏》(选自TIME时代周刊)
Capitalism Killed Squid Game Dec 26th, 2024, TIME 🌟完整外刊原文,请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 In an early episode of Squid Game 2, the series’ working-class hero Seong Gi-hun (Lee Jung-jae) is summoned to a dance club on Halloween night. Weaving among revelers dressed as sexy nurses, cops, and skeletons, he eventually spots the masked figure he’s been pursuing, clad in the hot-pink tracksuit of a Squid Game guard. The scene may well be a nod on the part of creator Hwang Dong-hyuk to the ubiquity of Squid Game Halloween costumes in 2021, when the holiday fell roughly six weeks after Netflix’s Korean megahit debuted and quickly became the platform’s most-watched series of all time. Regardless of Hwang’s intentions, the immediate connection that fans will surely make between this moment and the show’s instant commodification speaks to how drastically the latter phenomenon has shifted its meaning. Squid Game—you know, the blood-spattered thriller about how capitalism pits desperate people against one another in a battle royale for the entertainment of depraved elites—has been a brand for as long as it has been a global sensation. Viewers buy Squid Game merch, pay to participate in Squid Game simulations, and tune in to Squid Game spin-off reality competitions. When you consider that the show is a product of the world’s biggest streaming service, this trajectory is as predictable as it is ironic. But now, as the long-awaited second of three planned seasons premieres, it’s clear that the Squid Game-industrial complex has undermined Squid Game the work of political art, in ways both tangential to Hwang’s storytelling and intrinsic to it. When we last saw Gi-hun, the guilt-ridden victor had been en route to the airport to reunite with his young daughter in the U.S. when he spotted Squid Game’s recruiter (Gong Yoo) approaching new victims in a subway station and realized he couldn’t just walk away with his 45.6 billion won. So much for a fresh start. In a brief intro to the Season 2 premiere, Gi-hun leaves the airport, vows to find Squid Game’s mysterious masterminds “no matter what it takes,” and cuts out the tracking device they inevitably implanted under his skin. Two years later, he’s holed up in the seedy Seoul hotel that has become his personal fortress, still obsessed with taking down the monsters who made him rich. To that end, he’s paying a sketchy search party millions to scour the transit system for the White-Rabbit-esque recruiter. Meanwhile, police detective Hwang Jun-ho (Wi Ha-jun) has recovered from an attempted murder at the hands of his older brother, In-ho (Lee Byung-hun). His Season 1 search for that sibling, who’d disappeared years earlier, led him to Squid Game island, where In-ho revealed to Jun-ho that he was the deadly playground-game tournament’s diabolical Front Man—and then shot Jun-ho after he refused to join In-ho in the annual slaughter of 455 unwitting debtors. Now a disillusioned traffic cop, Jun-ho gets drawn into Gi-hun’s unofficial investigation, which sends Gi-hun to the arena for Squid Game 2024 as Jun-ho and his motley team try to follow him and end the game forever. Like the castaways of Lost, they have to go back to the island. It takes too long—two plodding episodes out of just seven this season—to get them there. As it stalls, the show unnecessarily reiterates Gi-hun’s broadsides against the bored billionaires for whom Squid Game is a spectator sport and burns time on characters who don’t end up being especially important. Once Gi-hun is back in his green tracksuit, we meet the new players who give the season its emotional stakes, but the plot feels too much like a rehash of Season 1: play, murder, rage, repeat. (In that sense, Squid Game 2 is extremely similar to another super-popular death-game sequel, The Hunger Games: Catching Fire.) It’s pure fan service when the giant, creepy robot doll Young-hee returns for another round of Red Light, Green Light. Yes, there are new games, but their candy-colored, nursery-rhyme-soundtracked killing fields aren’t meaningfully different from the violent spectacles viewers saw last time. Once the games have begun, Jun-ho’s search for the island becomes an afterthought. And the finale’s cliffhanger ending is so abrupt, it leaves the disjointed season feeling frustratingly unfinished.
- 外刊精读235期:量子计算机,带领生成式人工智能开启第四次工业革命 (选自TIME时代周刊)
Gen AI Has Already Taken the World by Storm. Just Wait Until It Gets a Quantum Boost May 13, 2024, Time Magazine 🌟完整外刊原文,请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 When Lawrence Gasman was looking for a PhD topic back in the 1970s, computing labs were already abuzz with smart people proposing clever studies in artificial intelligence. “But the problem was we had nothing to run them on,” he says. “The processors needed just didn’t exist.” It took half a century for computing power to catch up with AI’s potential. Today, thanks to hi-powered chips such as GPUs from California-based Nvidia, generative artificial intelligence, or Gen AI, is revolutionizing the way we work, study, and consume entertainment, empowering people to create bespoke articles, images, videos, and music in the blink of an eye. The technology has spawned a bevy of competing consumer apps offering enhanced voice recognition, graphic design, and even coding. Now AI stands poised to get another boost from a radical new form of computing: quantum. “Quantum could potentially do some really remarkable things with AI,” says Gasman, founder of Inside Quantum Technology. Rather than relying on traditional computing’s binary “bits”—switches denoted as 1s and 0s—quantum use multivariant “qubits” that exist in some percentage of both states simultaneously, akin to a coin spinning in midair. The result is exponentially boosted computing power as well as an enhanced ability to intuitively mimic natural processes that rarely conform to a binary form. Whereas Gen AI’s consumer-targeted applications have made its impact more widespread and immediate, quantum is more geared towards industry, meaning several recent milestones have slipped under the radar. However, they stand to potentially turbocharge the AI revolution. “Generative AI is one of the best things that has happened to quantum computing,” says Raj Hazra, CEO of Colorado-based quantum start-up Quantinuum. “And quantum computing is one of the best things to happen to the advance of generative AI. They are two perfect partners.”
- 外刊精读234期:吉米.卡特逝世,从花生农到美国总统,到诺贝尔和平奖得主 (选自BBC)
Jimmy Carter: From peanut farmer to one-term president and Nobel winner Dec 30, 2024, BBC 🌟完整外刊原文,请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 Jimmy Carter, who has died at the age of 100, swept to power promising never to lie to the American people. In the turbulent aftermath of Watergate, the former peanut farmer from Georgia pardoned Vietnam draft evaders and became the first US leader to take climate change seriously. On the international stage, he helped to broker an historic peace agreement between Egypt and Israel, but he struggled to deal with the Iran hostage crisis and the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. After a single term in office, he was swept aside by Republican Ronald Reagan in the 1980 election, winning just six states. Having left the White House, Carter did much to restore his reputation: becoming a tireless worker for peace, the environment and human rights, for which he was recognised with a Nobel Peace Prize. The longest-lived president in US history, he celebrated his 100th birthday in October 2024. He had been treated for cancer and had spent the last 19 months in hospice care. James Earl Carter Jr was born on 1 October 1924 in the small town of Plains, Georgia, the eldest of four children. His segregationist father had started the family peanut business, and his mother, Lillian, was a registered nurse. Carter's experience of the Great Depression and staunch Baptist faith underpinned his political philosophy. A star basketball player in high school, he went on to spend seven years in the US Navy - during which time he married Rosalynn, a friend of his sister - and became a submarine officer. But on the death of his father in 1953, he returned to run the ailing family farm. The first year's crop failed through drought, but Carter turned the business around and made himself wealthy in the process. He entered politics on the ground floor, elected to a series of local school and library boards, before running for the Georgia Senate. Civil rights campaigner American politics was ablaze following the Supreme Court's decision to desegregate schools. With his background as a farmer from a southern state, Carter might have been expected to oppose reform - but he had different views to his father. While serving two terms in the state Senate, he avoided clashes with segregationists - including many in the Democratic party. But on becoming Georgia governor in 1970, he became more overt in his support of civil rights. "I say to you quite frankly," he declared in his inaugural speech, "that the time for racial discrimination is over."
- 外刊精读233期:路易吉火爆全美,一个经典美式反英雄的诞生
Luigi Mangione and the Making of a Modern Antihero The support for the alleged shooter is rooted in an American tradition of exalting the outlaw. 🌟完整外刊原文,请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 Dec 13, 2024, The New Yorker He is from a wealthy and prominent Maryland family, the valedictorian of a prestigious private school, an Ivy League graduate. His family and friends speak of him fondly, and they worried about him when he fell off the grid, some months ago. His reading and podcast habits, as gleaned from his Goodreads account and other traces of his online footprint, can be summed up as “declinist conservativism, bro-science and bro-history, simultaneous techno-optimism and techno-pessimism, and self-improvement stoicism,” according to Max Read, who writes on tech and Internet culture. In other words, a typical-enough diet for a contemporary twentysomething computer-science guy, and certainly not the stuff of alarm. He is, by consensus, handsome, and jacked. “Holy happy trail, Batman!” Stephen Colbert enthused, over an en-plein-air portrait of a shirtless and beaming Luigi Mangione, who was briefly America’s most wanted man, and perhaps still is. “You know that guy’s Italian, because you could grate parmesan on those abs,” Colbert went on. (His fellow late-night host Taylor Tomlinson was more succinct: “Would.”) In his mug shot, Mangione, chiselled and defiant, appears ready for his closeup in a reboot of “Rocco and His Brothers.” He wears a hoodie well. On Monday night, a friend texted me a photograph of police escorting a dramatically backlit Mangione to his arraignment, and added, “Even the cops are trying to get him acquitted.” Last week, Internet citizens were making dark, cathartic jokes about the fatal shooting, on December 4th, in Manhattan, of Brian Thompson, the chief executive officer of UnitedHealthcare, which is the insurance arm of the world’s largest health-care company. Now that Mangione has been provisionally identified as Thompson’s assailant, and has been arrested and charged with Thompson’s murder, the terminally online are decorating Mangione’s picture with glittery graphics and heart emojis, sharing fancams of Mangione scored to Charli XCX’s “Spring Breakers,” and editing Mangione into time-stamped snapshots to try and provide him with an alibi.
- 外刊精读232期:牛津2024年度单词——brain rot 脑腐 (选自牛津出版社 & NPR)
‘Brain rot’ named Oxford Word of the Year 2024 Dec 2, 2024, Oxford University Press 🌟完整外刊原文,请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 Why ‘brain rot’? ‘Brain rot’ is defined as “the supposed deterioration of a person’s mental or intellectual state, especially viewed as the result of overconsumption of material (now particularly online content) considered to be trivial or unchallenging. Also: something characterized as likely to lead to such deterioration”. Our experts noticed that ‘brain rot’ gained new prominence this year as a term used to capture concerns about the impact of consuming excessive amounts of low-quality online content, especially on social media. The term increased in usage frequency by 230% between 2023 and 2024. The first recorded use of ‘brain rot’ was found in 1854 in Henry David Thoreau’s book Walden, which reports his experiences of living a simple lifestyle in the natural world. As part of his conclusions, Thoreau criticizes society’s tendency to devalue complex ideas, or those that can be interpreted in multiple ways, in favour of simple ones, and sees this as indicative of a general decline in mental and intellectual effort: “While England endeavours to cure the potato rot, will not any endeavour to cure the brain-rot – which prevails so much more widely and fatally?” The term has taken on new significance in the digital age, especially over the past 12 months. Initially gaining traction on social media platform—particularly on TikTok among Gen Z and Gen Alpha communities—’brain rot’ is now seeing more widespread use, such as in mainstream journalism, amidst societal concerns about the negative impact of overconsuming online content. In 2024, ‘brain rot’ is used to describe both the cause and effect of this, referring to low-quality, low-value content found on social media and the internet, as well as the subsequent negative impact that consuming this type of content is perceived to have on an individual or society.
- 外刊精读231:《时代周刊》2024年度人物专题——川普
Donald Trump 2024 TIME Person of the Year 🌟完整外刊原文,请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 Dec 12, 2024, Time Magazine Mar-a-Lago was quiet three days before Thanksgiving. Donald Trump’s Moorish palace seemed all but deserted late that morning, the seaside estate’s cavernous living room traversed intermittently by a junior staffer or silent aide. Totems to Trump were displayed everywhere. Framed magazines with him on the cover hung by the front door. On a table near the fireplace sat a cast-bronze eagle awarded him by the singer Lee Greenwood. In the men’s lavatory, a picture of him with Arnold Palmer hung near the urinals. Adorning a wall in the library bar, a painting titled The Visionary depicted Trump in a tennis sweater, trim and youthful. The empty rooms felt less like a millionaire members’ club than a museum. By midafternoon, the President-elect’s imminent arrival had stirred signs of life. Discreetly placed speakers offered up selections from Trump’s personally curated 2,000-song playlist. A handful of transition honchos and soon-to-be Administration officials arrived, perching on overstuffed sofas and huddling in corners. Incoming chief of staff Susie Wiles conferred with Trump’s designated National Security Adviser, Mike Waltz. Vice President–elect J.D. Vance strode in with a retinue of staffers. An aide posted up near a window overlooking the patio, setting down Trump’s personal cell phone, which lit up occasionally with calls and texts from favored media personalities and Cabinet picks. You could sense Trump before you could see him, the small group of senior aides rising to their feet in anticipation. The world’s most powerful man entered with an air of unhurried bonhomie. Dressed in his trademark navy suit and red tie, Trump, 78, appeared a little older than he had some seven months earlier, when he last met with TIME—more subdued, less verbose, the same discursive speech patterns but with the volume turned down. Sitting under bright lights for a 30-minute photo session ahead of a 65-minute interview, he’s asked to explain the bruising on his right hand. “It’s from shaking hands with thousands of people,” he says. Trump’s political rebirth is unparalleled in American history. His first term ended in disgrace, with his attempts to overturn the 2020 election results culminating in the attack on the U.S. Capitol. He was shunned by most party officials when he announced his candidacy in late 2022 amid multiple criminal investigations. Little more than a year later, Trump cleared the Republican field, clinching one of the fastest contested presidential primaries in history. He spent six weeks during the general election in a New York City courtroom, the first former President to be convicted of a crime—a fact that did little to dampen his support. An assassin’s bullet missed his skull by less than an inch at a rally in Butler, Pa., in July. Over the next four months, he beat not one but two Democratic opponents, swept all seven swing states, and became the first Republican to win the popular vote in 20 years. He has realigned American politics, remaking the GOP and leaving Democrats reckoning with what went awry. Trump has a ready explanation for his improbable resurrection. He even has a name for its climactic final act. “I called it 72 Days of Fury,” he says as the interview gets under way. “We hit the nerve of the country. The country was angry.” It wasn’t just the MAGA faithful. Trump harnessed deep national discontent about the economy, immigration, and cultural issues. His grievances resonated with suburban moms and retirees, Latino and Black men, young voters and tech edgelords. While Democrats estimated that most of the country wanted a President who would uphold the norms of liberal democracy, Trump saw a nation ready to smash them, tapping into a growing sense that the system was rigged. If America was craving change, it is about to see how much Trump can deliver. He ran on a strongman vision, proposing to deport migrants by the millions, dismantle parts of the federal government, seek revenge against his political adversaries, and dismantle institutions that millions of people see as censorious and corrupt. “He understands the cultural zeitgeists,” says his 2016 campaign manager Kellyanne Conway, who remains a close adviser. “Donald Trump is a complicated person with simple ideas, and way too many politicians are the exact opposite.”
- 外刊精读230:叙利亚独夫阿萨德,从眼科医生到屠夫暴君
From doctor to brutal dictator: the rise and fall of Syria’s Bashar al-Assad Toppled president came to power keen to show he was different from his father but proved to be as repressive Dec 8, 2024, The Guardian 🌟完整外刊原文,请加V: HLSHW666 进学习群免费获取 On the face of it at least, the Bashar al-Assad of 2002 presented a starkly different figure from the brutal autocrat he would become, presiding over a fragile state founded on torture, imprisonment and industrial murder. He had been president then for just two years, succeeding his father, Hafez, whose own name was a byword for brutality. For a while the gawky former ophthalmologist, who had studied medicine in London and later married a British-Syrian wife, Asma, an investment banker at JP Morgan, was keen to show the world that Syria, under his leadership, could follow a different path. Reaching out to the west, he pursued a public relations campaign to show the young Assad family as somehow ordinary despite the palaces and the ever visible apparatus of repression. Visiting Damascus that year before Bashar’s state visit to the UK, arranged by the then prime minister, Tony Blair – the high point of that engagement – I was invited for a private coffee with Assad, who sat on a white sofa in an expensively tailored suit. Suggesting some uncertainty, he was curious about how Syria was seen in the world, floating possibilities for a change, including a reset in the relationship between Damascus and Israel. It was a constructed iteration of the Assads – highlighting Asma’s much-vaunted “charitable” works and Bashar’s brief embrace by the west – that nodded to an ambition to transform Hafez’s Syria into something more like a version of Jordan’s paternalistic royal family. More manicured. Certainly more PR-savvy. A dictatorship all the same. In the midst of the conversation, however, Bashar proffered a chilling and almost throwaway line as he reflected on the previous year’s 9/11 attack on the US by al-Qaida and the subsequent American invasion of Afghanistan. The world should know, Bashar insisted, that his father had been “right” all along in his brutal crushing of Islamist insurgents.