Startups Think They Can Beat Wildfires, But Insurance Companies Aren’t Buying It Yet | A.I. May Not Get a Chance to Kill Us if This Kills It First | What is Hizbullah? | What Happened to San Francisco, Really?

View online | Unsubscribe (one-click).
For inquiries/unsubscribe issues, Contact Us

?

?

?

?

?

?

Want to accelerate software development at your company? See how we can help.

Want to accelerate software development at your company? See how we can help.

Startups Think They Can Beat Wildfires, But Insurance Companies Aren’t Buying It Yet - Forbes

For venture capitalist Bill Clerico, the risk of wildfire is personal. Five years ago, the Peach Fire came perilously close to his second home in Boonville, California, burning along the only road to his property.

Horrified by that experience, Clerico began working as a local volunteer firefighter, and started pondering the role that tech could play in firefighting. Late last year, he founded Convective Capital, a $35 million fund with a portfolio of 10 startups, and the first venture capital firm to focus solely on so-called "firetech" startups, with the goal of "solving our wildfire crisis."

Recently, even places that haven't had historical wildfires are starting to experience destructive blazes. The Maui wildfires have killed at least 99 people and damaged or destroyed over 2,000 structures, with local authorities estimating that the cost of rebuilding will be over $5.5 billion.

Continued here

?

?

?

?

?

?

Don't like ads? Go ad-free with TradeBriefs Premium

Want to accelerate software development at your company? See how we can help.

Want to accelerate software development at your company? See how we can help.

A.I. May Not Get a Chance to Kill Us if This Kills It First - Slate Magazine

The brain that wrote your favorite novel consumed Dickens and Austen, Pynchon and Didion. The brain that wrote this article devoured Bradbury and Orwell, Ishiguro and Octavia Butler. But the “brain” that powers that chatbot you played around with over the weekend ingested 170,000 books, all so it can spit out language that sounds smart, colorful, or helpful—even if it’s really not.

Copyright law is well equipped to differentiate between slightly derivative human ingenuity and reductive copycatting. But language-guzzling artificial intelligence models, which need to “train” on existing works, present a bigger challenge. A.I. companies are currently racking up lawsuits accusing them of training their powerful models on copyrighted materials. In July, a group of writers including comedian Sarah Silverman and novelist Michael Chabon filed suits against OpenAI and Meta, alleging that the companies improperly trained their models on the authors’ books.

OpenAI, Meta, Microsoft, and Google are all facing legal complaints—a barrage of them, in fact. So are A.I. upstarts like Midjourney and Stability AI, which make popular A.I. image generators.

Continued here

?

?

?

?

?

?

What is Hizbullah? - The Economist

ISRAEL IS AMASSING troops at its border with the Gaza Strip ahead of an expected ground invasion. At the same time it is evacuating villages near its border with Lebanon for fear that a second front could open in the north. Hizbullah, an Iran-backed Shia militant group based in Lebanon, has exchanged fire with Israel. Troops on both sides, a journalist and at least two Lebanese civilians have been killed. Iran warns that a “pre-emptive action” against Israel by proxies could be imminent. Hizbullah has gone to war before in support of Hamas, the militant group that runs Gaza. Its involvement in the current conflict would mark a significant escalation. What is Hizbullah, and how great is the threat?

After Lebanon gained independence from France in 1943, political power was divided on the basis of sect. The three religious groups with the most adherents—Sunni Muslims, Maronite Christians and Shia Muslims—agreed to allocate government positions in proportion to their size. Political representation for smaller sects was also guaranteed. After 1948 an influx of Palestinians caused a shift in Lebanon’s demography; in 1975 sectarian tensions sparked a 15-year civil war. During that time Israel twice sent troops into Lebanon to repel raids by Palestinian militias based in the country. By 1982 it occupied most of southern Lebanon and parts of the capital, Beirut.

Hizbullah, or the “Party of God”, as its name means in Arabic, emerged during that period. In 1982 Iran began training young Shia militants to harass the Israeli soldiers then occupying southern Lebanon and to fight for the Shia cause in the civil war. By the mid-1980s Hizbullah was a coherent organisation, backed by both Iran and Syria. In an open letter published in 1985, it promised to fight Israel and the West—and urged its countrymen to establish an Islamic state. The group honed its guerrilla tactics, including the use of car-bombs and assassinations.

Continued here

?

?

?

?

?

?

What Happened to San Francisco, Really? - The New Yorker

The change has been unsettling because the city’s broad project is widely shared. Since the end of the industrial period, the main path of the U.S. metropolis has been what’s often called urban renewal: transforming old frameworks into beautiful, dynamic settings for prosperous middle-class life. No city excelled at the assignment more than San Francisco. It invested in lush, landscaped parks, tree-lined boulevards, and world-class museums where there had been none. It grew rich, and seemed to climb out of the Great Recession with both influence and a mandate. “There’s a lot of pent-up envy of San Francisco from a lot of other cities that think of themselves as more important,” one local told me recently. For a long time, that envy inspired mostly emulation. Universities spent millions to reorient themselves around the Bay Area’s style of thinking. Success across industries today is measured by virality, optimization, and unceasing growth. In San Francisco, the nation saw its dreams, and now it thinks it sees its nightmares. The question is what caused so swift a change.

A new story described widespread flight. Downtown San Francisco has seen its highest retail vacancy rate since 2006. In the past few months, Christian Louboutin, Lululemon, Nordstrom, Old Navy, and Williams-Sonoma all began an exodus from the area; so did Office Depot and Whole Foods. In late summer, the owner of Gump’s, an upscale shop that opened in the eighteen-sixties, released a testy open letter, threatening to close in response to “a litany of destructive San Francisco strategies, including allowing the homeless to occupy our sidewalks, to openly distribute and use illegal drugs, to harass the public and to defile the city’s streets.” Urbanists had already begun to circulate a paper by the economist Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh that traced a post-pandemic spiral of collapsing retail and declining safety leading to less public revenue and fewer public services—what he called an “urban doom loop.” The phrase became a shorthand around town, where many took it as Cassandra’s vision of their fate.

One afternoon in June, I went to see Sarah Dennis Phillips, the official charged with rehabilitating San Francisco’s businesses. “I’m confident,” she said. “It’s just a question of how long it takes.” A few weeks earlier, she had been appointed the executive director of San Francisco’s Office of Economic and Workforce Development—effectively, the trauma surgeon for downtown—after a career spent bringing the downtowns of small, quiet, boring Northern California suburbs to life. Of one city, Livermore, she explained, “We had to create a ‘Right to Live Downtown’ ordinance that everyone moving into a residential building would sign, acknowledging they would not get upset that things weren’t quiet at 7 p.m.” Now she faced the inverse problem: a city worried that its downtown was too quiet.

Continued here

?

?

?

?

?

?

You are receiving this mailer as a TradeBriefs subscriber.
We fight fake/biased news through human curation & independent editorials.
Your support of ads like these makes it possible. Alternatively, get TradeBriefs Premium (ad-free) for only $2/month
If you still wish to unsubscribe, you can unsubscribe from all our emails here
Our address is 309 Town Center 1, Andheri Kurla Road, Andheri East, Mumbai 400059 - 93544947