I have always taken it for granted that, just as my parents made sure that I could read and write, I would make sure that my kids could program computers. It is among the newer arts but also among the most essential, and ever more so by the day, encompassing everything from filmmaking to physics. Fluency with code would round out my children’s literacy—and keep them employable. But as I write this my wife is pregnant with our first child, due in about three weeks. I code professionally, but, by the time that child can type, coding as a valuable skill might have faded from the world.
I first began to believe this on a Friday morning this past summer, while working on a small hobby project. A few months back, my friend Ben and I had resolved to create a Times-style crossword puzzle entirely by computer. In 2018, we’d made a Saturday puzzle with the help of software and were surprised by how little we contributed—just applying our taste here and there. Now we would attempt to build a crossword-making program that didn’t require a human touch.
When we’ve taken on projects like this in the past, they’ve had both a hardware component and a software component, with Ben’s strengths running toward the former. We once made a neon sign that would glow when the subway was approaching the stop near our apartments. Ben bent the glass and wired up the transformer’s circuit board. I wrote code to process the transit data. Ben has some professional coding experience of his own, but it was brief, shallow, and now about twenty years out of date; the serious coding was left to me. For the new crossword project, though, Ben had introduced a third party. He’d signed up for a ChatGPT Plus subscription and was using GPT-4 as a coding assistant.
Something strange started happening. Ben and I would talk about a bit of software we wanted for the project. Then, a shockingly short time later, Ben would deliver it himself. At one point, we wanted a command that would print a hundred random lines from a dictionary file. I thought about the problem for a few minutes, and, when thinking failed, tried Googling. I made some false starts using what I could gather, and while I did my thing—programming—Ben told GPT-4 what he wanted and got code that ran perfectly.
Read the rest of this article at: The New Yorker
LISBON—On Nov. 7, the same day that Portugal’s Prime Minister António Costa resigned amid corruption allegations pertaining to lithium contracts, federal officers in Brazil raided the Portuguese Consulate in Rio de Janeiro.
The Brazil raids were not connected to the Lisbon investigation, a spokesperson said. Instead, according to Brazilian police, they were part of a separate investigation into the falsification of documents in collusion with applicants seeking Portuguese visas and citizenship. Since the 1990s, amid periods of economic downturn and social instability, large numbers of Brazilians have struck out for Portugal. When the country began its “golden visa” program in 2012, wealthy Brazilians became the second largest group to take advantage of it.
Portugal’s golden visa grants European Union access to foreigners in exchange for investment. From its inception in the wake of the 2008 global financial crisis, it has faced backlash, and the criticism has only grown more vocal in recent years. Chiefly, it is blamed for contributing to a severe housing crisis that has made affordable housing unattainable for most Portuguese.
In early October, Costa’s Socialist government finally passed a law that took aim at the issue, removing the real estate investment pathway from the golden visa program. Previously, people who invested in a qualifying property worth at least 280,000 euros (about $305,000) were eligible. The change, almost a year in the making, has ricocheted around the world of global elites, many of whom had come to regard Portugal as a foothold into Europe. Although more than 30,000 foreigners have benefited from Portugal’s golden visa, its benefits for the Portuguese themselves are less clear.
Nine other countries in Europe also offer golden visas, but Portugal’s is the most popular. The reason, insiders believe, is because it asks little of investors and provides a straightforward path to citizenship. “You have to live in Greece, fulltime, for seven years before getting citizenship,” said Lisbon-based Patricia Casaburi, director of investment migration firm Global Citizen Solutions. “Here, you just have to speak the language passingly and have a legitimate visa for five years.” Since Portugal’s golden visa is good for five years, requiring holders to spend an average of one week a year in the country, obtaining a passport is easy. What’s more, all of Portugal’s golden visa benefits extend to the holder’s immediate family—parents, spouse, and children.
So far golden visas have ushered in more than $7.3 billion, rescuing Portugal from a crippling recession. Last month, for the second time in nearly 50 years, Costa’s government announced a budget surplus for 2023. While the windfall is welcome, there’s no doubt that the influx of wealthy foreigners has transformed Portugal. As cited by Bloomberg, in the last decade, according to the National Statistics Institute, foreign residents have risen by 40 percent. Within that same period, the country became a top magnet for high-net-worth individuals. “It started slowly,” Casaburi said, “but it’s grown over time.” Last year, an estimated 1,300 millionaires moved to Portugal.
Read the rest of this article at: Foreign Policy
Sweary, Angry, Honest: Is Ridley Scott Hollywood’s Greatest Interviewee?
At this point, it doesn’t matter how Napoleon does. Critics might love it or critics might hate it. It might crater at the box office, or it might single-handedly resuscitate the theatrical viewing experience. It really doesn’t matter a jot. Because what does matter is that Napoleon is a Ridley Scott film, and this means that Ridley Scott has to talk in public again, and this by far the most important thing. Because Ridley Scott talking about anything in public is wonderful.
Even better, it seems as though Ridley Scott has got wind that, while most people seem to love Napoleon, some people don’t. As such, he has become a little defensive. This is the best possible news for all of us.
The headline from Ridley Scott’s Napoleon charm offensive came during an interview with the BBC this weekend. Scott was informed of some less than stellar French reviews of his film – French GQ called it “deeply clumsy” and “unintentionally funny” – to which Scott replied with the following solid gold banger: “The French don’t even like themselves.”
Read the rest of this article at: The Guardian
When my older sister, G, was a child, she bought a pet chick from a street vender near our family’s home in Ankara, Turkey. The bird had a pale-yellow coat and tiny, vigilant eyes. G would place him on her shoulder and listen to him cheep into her ear. But he soon grew into a rooster, shedding feathers and shitting on the furniture, so our grandfather had a housekeeper take him home to kill for dinner. In a school essay, my sister described this experience as her “first confrontation with death.”
I wrote my own essay about the chick many years later, for a high-school English class. The assignment was to interview relatives and retell a “family legend.” G’s tale, which she repeated often, hinted at a strange, wondrous chapter of our past, before our parents immigrated to the United States and had me. I read G questions from a how-to handout on oral history, relishing the excuse to pry. But there was another encounter with death that I didn’t dare ask about, an untold story that involved the two of us. One night in August of 1999, on a summer trip back to Ankara, our dad was murdered. G was twelve and I was three. We were both there when it happened, along with our mom, but I was too young to remember.
The Turkish language has a dedicated tense, sometimes called the “heard past,” for events that one has been told about but hasn’t witnessed. It’s formed with the suffix “‑miş,” whose pronunciation rhymes—aptly, I’ve always thought—with the English syllable “-ish.” The heard past turns up in gossip and folklore, and, as the novelist Orhan Pamuk has written, it’s the tense that Turks use to evoke life’s earliest experiences—“our cradles, our baby carriages, our first steps, all as reported by our parents.” Revisiting these moments can elicit what he calls “a sensation as sweet as seeing ourselves in our dreams.” For me, though, the heard past made literal the distance between my family’s tragedy and my ignorance of it. My dad’s murder was as fundamental and as unknowable as my own birth. My grief had the clumsy fit of a hand-me-down.
As far as I can recall, no one in the family explained his death to me. My mom considered my obliviousness a blessing. “He’s a normal boy,” she’d tell people. From a young age, I tried to assemble the story bit by bit, scrounging for information and writing it down. But G always seemed protective of her recollections from that night and skeptical of my self-appointed role as family scribe. She, too, had written about our dad over the years, and she’d point to the chick story as an early sign of my tendency to cannibalize her experiences. We’d quibble over the specifics—had my writing filched details from hers?—but to me it was an epistemological problem. I wanted what she had, which was firsthand access to the defining tragedy of our lives.
Read the rest of this article at: The New Yorker
Outside Healy Chapel on the campus of Saint Joseph’s College of Maine, the American flag swayed at half-staff. Inside, candles flickered, and the dying autumn light filtered softly through stained glass. A nursing student sobbed as a small group of mourners read aloud the names of the 18 people slaughtered with an assault-style rifle in late October at a bowling alley and a restaurant up the road in Lewiston. The college had shut down for two days as police sought the killer, whose body was found in the woods after he turned a gun on himself.
Saint Joseph’s is sponsored by the Sisters of Mercy, a 192-year-old society of nuns that has accused the firearms industry of “profiting from these killings.” Toward the end of the vigil, a graduate assistant asked the mourners to pray for political leaders.
“Give them insight, wisdom and courage,” she implored, “to address the epidemic of gun violence.”
Several months earlier on the same campus, as fog enveloped Sebago Lake and rain poured down in sheets, a larger crowd celebrated the life of a man who did as much as anyone to make assault-style rifles — like those used in Lewiston and other massacres — ubiquitous in America. After cocktails and crudites, they bid farewell to one of Maine’s own, Richard E. Dyke.
As a digital photo tribute flashed images from his life, family members, friends and former employees praised Dyke’s kindness and generosity. Beside a framed proclamation by Maine’s state Legislature declaring that Dyke would be “long remembered and sadly missed,” they recounted his rise from mill-town poverty to multimillionaire philanthropist and friend of powerful politicians.
“When he walked into a room, it became his room,” a former colleague told the packed hall. “It’s difficult to drive around Maine and not see something that Dick touched. … He touched thousands of people’s lives.”
What the heartfelt tributes to Dyke that day omitted were the human costs of the industry that allowed him to be so generous — costs that the fellow residents of his beloved home state would soon be the latest to bear.
When the public asks, “How did we get here?” after each mass shooting, the answer goes beyond National Rifle Association lobbyists and Second Amendment zealots. It lies in large measure with the strategies of firearms executives like Dyke. Long before his competitors, the mercurial showman saw the profits in a product that tapped into Americans’ primal fears, and he pulled the mundane levers of American business and politics to get what he wanted.
Read the rest of this article at: Propublica