"This distillation technique is just so extremely powerful and so extremely cheap, and it's just available to anyone," said Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi, adding that he expects to see innovation when it comes to how large language models, or LLMs, are built. "We're going to see so much competition for LLMs. That's what's going to happen in this new era we're entering."
Distillation is now enabling less-capitalized startups and research labs to compete at the cutting edge faster than ever before.
Using this technique, researchers at Berkeley said, they recreated OpenAI's reasoning model for $450 in 19 hours last month. Soon after, researchers at Stanford and the University of Washington created their own reasoning model in just 26 minutes, using less than $50 in compute credits, they said. The startup Hugging Face recreated OpenAI's newest and flashiest feature, Deep Research, as a 24-hour coding challenge.
DeepSeek didn't invent distillation, but it woke up the AI world to its disruptive potential. It also ushered in the rise of a new open-source order — a belief that transparency and accessibility drive innovation faster than closed-door research.
“Because of the protracted childcare in humans, a premium has been placed on post-partum parental investment, so female mate choice is governed by the desire to obtain resources from long-term mates, an objective that conflicts with man’s desire for multiple partners.”
These forces put man in a position of wanting it both ways – stable long term partners associated with producing heirs and secondary partners used outside the accepted relationship. Indeed, Scheidel asserts that the first monogamous societies (Greece and Rome) were socially imposed. By this he means there was social pressure to monogamous based on the increasing importance of cooperation among coalitions (peer groups), needed to deal with external challenges. This pressure led to a moral standard that monogamy should be the only acceptable marriage practice.
"Open source always wins in the tech industry," said Arvind Jain, CEO of Glean, which makes an AI-powered search engine for enterprises. "You cannot beat the momentum that a successful open-source project is able to actually generate."
OpenAI itself has walked back its closed-source strategy in the wake of DeepSeek's accomplishment.
"Personally I think we have been on the wrong side of history here and need to figure out a different open-source strategy," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in a post on Reddit on Jan. 31.
In both Greece and Rome there grew to be severe penalties for having sexual relations with someone else’s wife, but no penalties for relations with slaves or concubines.
Apple CEO Tim Cook (L) takes a selfie with a greets customers on arrival for the release of the Vision Pro headset at the Apple Store in New York City on February 2, 2024
For $4, Roszyk's Night Vision app lets a Vision Pro user tap the depth-sensing cameras of the device to see objects in the dark. If you spend $5, you can perform a chore in a Luigi's Mansion-like video game using the app Vacuume, which overlays virtual coins on your floor that you can vacuum up, along with any real dirt or dust. And for $6, Roszyk's app Scan Export lets users create a 3D digital scan of an entire building just by walking around, a useful tool for those in construction or real estate.
"We are still early, and we don't really know how it can be really useful in your life," Roszyk said. "There's so many different ideas that just come to your mind."
Aristotle wrote two short pieces on dreams and their meaning: On Dreams and On Prophesying on Dreams. In the first he presents arguments for the origin of dreams and their relationship to other aspects of human existence. In the second he analyzes whether dreams can foreshadow the future.
Aristotle approaches his subject as a scientist, looking for a practical explanation for an experience men found mysterious and frightful. Given that the only ways to acquire knowledge are through sense perception or intelligence, and that our senses are not operating during sleep, he asserts that the senses cannot contribute to dreaming. That means dreams must originate in our intellect. Of course the experiences in dreams are still based on sense perception (we see things when we dream), but that experience is disconnected from reality.
Roszyk continues to work on Vision Pro apps because he said he believes "spatial computing" — Apple's preferred terminology for headset and glasses technology that can integrate 3D objects with the world around them — will be the next big platform. Roszyk is betting that developing apps now can put him in prime position when more people are walking around with a Vision Pro or, perhaps some day, lightweight glasses.
"This type of computing is the future," Roszyk said. "I would definitely compare it to the first iPhones."
Residual perceptions are common in everyday life. If you look at the sun briefly and then look away, the image of the sun remains in your eye for a while. In the same way, Aristotle asserts that when the external object of a perception has been removed, there still remains an impression which itself is an object of perception. While we sleep, these impressions are re-created in dreams.
Sensory impressions present themselves when an individual is awake and asleep, but the senses work with the brain during the day to keep reality in perspective. At night there is no balance between impressions because the senses are not available, so dreams produce wild and obscure sensations.
Aristotle describes the dream sequence as “little eddies in a river forming and breaking into other forms by colliding with obstacles.” He believed there could be no dreaming immediately after a meal because the heat caused by digestion disturbed the flow of phantasms in the brain. Similarly, dreams that occur during a fever or intoxication reflect a disturbed state of the body in their weirdness of form and character.
Roszyk's efforts have made him money, but not enough for Vision Pro development to become his full-time job. His 17 apps have cleared about $4,000 on the App Store in the last three months. That number is growing as he releases more apps and more people find out about them, Roszyk said.
Apple updated its most recent Vision Pro app count in August, with CEO Tim Cook telling investors on an earnings call that the platform had 2,500 apps. That number covers fully immersive apps that overlay virtual objects over the real world as well as 2D apps with some spatial components.
In On Prophesying on Dreams, Aristotle contemplates what he calls the divination that takes place during sleep and whether it caused by dreams. Since there is no known cause of this divination it is normal to be skeptical about it. It cannot come from a god because these experiences occur in common people and god does not communicate to them. So is it merely that dreams act as causes or tokens of divination? Indeed, it may be that some of these representations are the causes of actions cognate to them. We may think and plan some activity during the day whose significance causes a vivid dream at night. In this case the activity has paved the way for the dream. But the converse is also true, because thoughts which occur first in sleep may be the starting points of something that occurs when we are awake.
Aristotle believes that most “prophetic” dreams are coincidences based on the fact that the dreamer has no real participation in the story of the dream. We often mention things during conversation that later come to pass and this same phenomena occurs in dreams. Because the engine of both wakefulness and dreams is the brain, we understand why this has to be so. Again, because god does not communicate to the common people, their visions must be a random result of their physical temperament – “excitable and garrulous”. The common people have chance experiences where visions play a part in their slumber, like the gambler who plays even and odd.
Prophetic dreams are caused by the condition of sleep; the fact that there is less to disturb the body than during the day. There is no wind at night to disturb the senses and compete with the visions of our dreams.
There are also about 1.5 million Vision Pro apps that are ported versions of iPhone and iPad apps. Apple automatically ports iPhone and iPad apps to the Vision Pro when they're uploaded, but companies can decline. Those apps can be used inside the headset but appear as 2D flat screens. Meta started to emulate that strategy last year with 2D Android apps for Quest, but the company doesn't have the same library of millions of existing mobile apps.
Apple doesn't publish Vision Pro sales, but one estimate from IDC suggests fewer than 1 million devices have been sold.
To Aristotle, the most skillful interpreter of dreams is the man who is able to observe resemblances in them. That is he can make sense out the forms in disturbed water; to put the pieces together which, to the common man, can only be seen when the water is calm.
Although many of those games are 2D, some are exclusive to the Vision Pro. In January, Apple released Gears & Goo, a Vision Pro app that enables the player to control an army of goofy frog-like characters on a table in the real world.
Meanwhile, Meta is actively courting VR developers with a promise that they can make money. Meta in January said that its payment volume for Quest headsets rose by 12% last year, although it didn't cite a total number. Meta has also said it has 200 apps that have made more than $1 million through software sales.
Ancient cultures, from Egyptian through late Roman times, paid as much attention to their nights in the arms of Morpheus as they did to their waking moments. They felt curiosity, awe, and sometimes terror at their dreams, at the strange symbolic language of the sleeper.
And they sought help. How do we know this? Ancient literature is littered with speculations and advice about dreams, along with insights about their medical use as diagnostic tools. Furthermore, a handful of millennia-old dream manuals have survived—to be gleefully recycled by cut-and-paste oneiromancy entrepreneurs today.
The Apple Vision Pro headset is displayed at the Fifth Avenue Apple store on Feb. 2, 2024 in New York City.
Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images News | Getty Images
The Vision Pro app gold rush has seen slower uptake than the iPhone's app boom.
A year after the iPhone App Store was launched in 2008, Apple was crowing about the platform having 50 million customers, 2 billion downloads and 85,000 apps. Apple regularly told investors and developers how much money it had paid from App Store sales — it hasn't released any similar stat for the Vision Pro.
In pre-Classical times, Homer wrote, “Dreams come from Zeus.” Because medicine was in its infancy, by circa 500 BC the wellbeing franchise was taken over by the healing god Asclepius. Although few would recognize him and his single-snake staff in a lineup today, Asclepius set up shop in Epidaurus, the first of what would be a chain of Mediterranean-wide healing centers that resembled today’s luxurious spas in natural settings.
In 293 BC, Asclepius gained further prominence. Summoned from Epidaurus to combat the plague in Rome, he appeared as a sacred snake aboard ship on the Tiber River. Slithering ashore, Asclepius took up residence on Tiber Island, where his temple was built; the plague obediently stopped.
In pre-Classical times, Homer wrote, “Dreams come from Zeus.” Because medicine was in its infancy, by circa 500 BC the wellbeing franchise was taken over by the healing god Asclepius. Although few would recognize him and his single-snake staff in a lineup today, Asclepius set up shop in Epidaurus, the first of what would be a chain of Mediterranean-wide healing centers that resembled today’s luxurious spas in natural settings.
In 293 BC, Asclepius gained further prominence. Summoned from Epidaurus to combat the plague in Rome, he appeared as a sacred snake aboard ship on the Tiber River. Slithering ashore, Asclepius took up residence on Tiber Island, where his temple was built; the plague obediently stopped.
Apple has not said if it will update the Vision Pro. According to analysts, the company is working on a successor. Developers want it to be lighter and less expensive. They welcome any improvements that would get it on more faces.
"Over time, everything gets better, and it too will have its course of getting better and better," Cook told The Wall Street Journal in October. "I think it's just arguably a success today from an ecosystem-being-built-out point of view."
Besides the incubation overnight chambers where patients sought Asclepian intervention to dream their cures, the facilities emphasized holistic healing, from diet and exercise to drama and the power of music. Aristocratic writers like Aristides, a career hypochondriac, heartily endorsed the Asclepieia, having spent lengthy periods of time at facilities in Pergamum, Epidaurus and elsewhere.
Yiu pulled out a pair of Meta's recently launched Ray-Ban branded glasses, which use AI to translate speech from one language to another or describe images for the visually impaired.
"This is a profound and very human application of the technology, and it is slow to arrive in Europe because of the issues that we have around regulation," Yiu said.
Meta only began rolling out AI features for its Ray-Ban Meta glasses in some European countries in November, after a delay the firm claimed was caused by the need to reach compliance with Europe's "complex regulatory system."
The AI Act was first introduced by the European Commission, the EU's executive body, in April 2021. OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022.
"There is a way to use policy to create a better investment environment when it's done in a way that promotes business" Chou said, referring to the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act as an example of policy that has led to benefits, like subsidies for electric vehicles.
According to ancient sources, for the first five years of his reign, Nero slept like a baby, suffering no qualms about his homicidal activities. After the murder of his mother, however, she began to haunt Nero, whereupon he brought in a Persian exorcist to call off her vengeful ghost.
But rest was no longer to be found. As Lives of the Twelve Caesars author Suetonius noted, Emperor Nero began to have extravagant nightmares. In one, Nero was buried under a mass of winged ants. In another dream, he was terrorized by the sight of his favorite Spanish horse, with only its head still in equine form—the rest having turned into a hairy ape. (The first “Godfather” film took this nightmare idea and ran with it, to staggering effect.)
"I think what's difficult is when you are regulating on a time scale that doesn't match the technology," Chou added. "I think what we need to do is both regulate to ensure that there is responsible application of technology, while also ensuring that the industry is thriving it all the right ways."
Big Tech ups the ante
Big Tech firms more generally have been upping their rhetoric against the EU's approach to tech regulation and ramping up lobbying efforts in an attempt to soften aspects of the AI Act.
Kent Walker, Google's president of global affairs, told Politico last month that the EU's code of practice for general-purpose AI (GPAI) models — which refers to systems like OpenAI's GPT family of large language models, or LLMs — was a "step in the wrong direction."
The EU AI Office, a newly created body overseeing models under the AI Act, published a second-draft code of practice for GPAI systems in December.
Earlier this month, Meta's newly appointed Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan suggested in a live-streamed interview at an event in Brussels that the tech giant would not sign up to the code in its current form.
Tech giants' pleas for softer EU tech regulation have been emboldened of late by President Donald Trump's new administration.
At the international AI Action Summit in Paris last week, U.S. Vice President JD Vance blasted Europe for being too heavily focused on regulating artificial intelligence rather than embracing the technology's growth potential.
Tech giants' pleas for softer EU tech regulation have been emboldened of late by President Donald Trump's new administration.
At the international AI Action Summit in Paris last week, U.S. Vice President JD Vance blasted Europe for being too heavily focused on regulating artificial intelligence rather than embracing the technology's growth potential.
The Battle without Tears
In 369 B.C, while Sparta was trying to recover from Leuctra, the rest of Greece came under attack from Thebes, who saw itself as the next great power. Aligned with Athens, the Spartans debated with their ally how to overcome this new aggressor. At the same time, Thebes was aligned with the Arcadians and Argives, giving them assets in the Peloponnese which could threaten Sparta. But that alliance did not survive the ascendancy of Lykomedes of Mantineia who argued that the Arcadians and Argives were great in their own right and did not need an alliance with anyone. He convinced the Arcadians and Argives to break away from Thebes and act on their own.
Meanwhile, Dionysios, King of Syracuse, sent an armed force to the aid of Sparta. The Athenians wanted them to be used against Thessaly, but the Spartans successfully argued they were needed in Laconia to fight the Arcadians.
Harmonizing EU rules for startups
Big Tech weren't alone in calling for a more simplified regulatory regime for technology firms operating in Europe.
Several venture capitalists investing in European tech startups also decried complex regulatory compliance burdens on their portfolio companies.
Antoine Moyroud, a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, said that whereas the U.S. has been pushing forward initiatives such as the $500 billion Stargate investment project that strike a "hopeful" message around AI," Europe's narrative tends to be more "dramatic."
The King of Sparta, Archidamos, joined the Syracusans with his own force, and began a campaign against the Arcadians. As he was attacking Parrasia, the Arcadians and Argives started to apply pressure and he retreated to the hills above Melea. At this point, the Syracusan commander, Kissides, said that his appointed time had expired and he departed with his army. As he marched south, The Messenians blocked him so he sent to Archidamos for help. Then, while the Spartan Army was marching to join him, they were cut off by the Arcadians and Argives, who had inserted themselves between the two allies.
Archidamos placed the Spartan Army in battle formation and exhorted his troops to fight saying,
“Let us no longer feel shame before our children and wives, elders and
foreigners, those very people in whose eyes we were in past time the
most renowned of all Greeks.”
For example, there's a European Company Statute under the 28th regime that makes it simpler to set up public limited liability companies in the EU.
The likes of Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and Wise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus are among the startup founders looking to set up a new entity under the 28th regime, called "EU Inc."
"Europe is a fragmented place, and what you want to do is [to] be able to hire across any country," Luke Pappas, a London-based partner for venture capital firm NEA, told CNBC in an interview on the sidelines of Techarena.
The subsequent attack was a rout and the Spartans achieved a great victory. Archidamos sent a message to Sparta telling of the great victory and how it was achieved without a single Spartan being killed. All in Sparta wept for joy making the Spartan victory “tearless” from grief even though it brought many tears of joy.
A key issue with attracting talent in this way, according to Pappas, is that currently "the process of giving equity cross border in Europe is not very easy."
"If we can standardize equity, for example, that will dramatically help," he added.
"DeepSeek demonstrates that China is at or near the cutting edge of AI development, which boosts the prestige of China's economy and tech ecosystem, making them more attractive for global investors," said Gabriel Wildau, managing director at Teneo.
The company's launch of a cheaper and more efficient AI model came as a timely confidence boost as the Chinese leadership faces a prolonged economic gloom, partly owed to the slump in its property market, while the specter of a fierce trade war with the U.S. looms large.
Once the long walls were destroyed the Athenian assembly was asked to choose thirty men to rewrite their laws. The names of the chosen were Polychares, Kritias, Melobios, Hippolochos, Eucleides, Hieron, Mnesilochos, Chremon, Theramenes, Aresias, Diokles, Phaedrias, Chaireleos, Anaitios, Peison, Sophocles, Eratosthenes, Charicles, Onomacles, Theognis, Aeschines, Theogenes, Cleomedes, Erasistratos, Pheidon, Dracontides, Eumathes, Aristoteles, Hippomachos, and Mnesitheides. Of these men, twenty-five are obscure, three are known only by anecdote, and two were major players in the drama that would follow.
Beijing's stamp of approval
In a well-choreographed meeting earlier this week, Chinese President Xi Jinping warmly greeted DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng and granted him a coveted front-row seat next to leaders of the country's biggest private enterprises.
That showed Beijing is eager to support the company, said Huiyao Wang, founder and president of Center for China and Globalization, a Beijing-based think tank.
Theramenes, who had been to Sparta as part of the negotiation team to end the war, opposed this step as unlawful and immoral. He demanded that The Thirty allow more participation in the Athenian government so they responded by drawing up a list of three thousand who would participate in the government. All other Athenians were disarmed and excluded from the system. Now The Thirty began their reign of terror against the rich and all who opposed them.
Kritias, the unofficial leader of the group, was again opposed by Theramenes, who was denounced and forced to take poison. This caused a general revolt that saw a rebel group located in Peiraieus defeat the army of The Thirty killing Kritias and Hippomachos. The remainder of The Thirty retreated to Eleusis and begged for Spartan help.
"DeepSeek represents exactly what Beijing is keen to see by 'new-quality productive force' that will push China forward," Wang added, referring to a strategy coined by Xi last year that bets on technological breakthroughs to fuel growth and productivity gains across the economy.
Chinese leadership last year vowed "a leap forward" by spurring new growth drivers based on innovation in advanced sectors, such as AI and semiconductors, as U.S. export controls on advanced equipment and the most advanced semiconductors thwarted its ability to make major tech breakthroughs.
With Beijing signaling support for the startup, a growing number of local governments, from Hohhot in northern China to the southern city of Guangzhou and Shenzhen, are launching DeepSeek-powered "public servants" to automate governance, handling requests from administrative paper work to general public services.
This time fortune favored the oppressed. Lysander, the Spartan Admiral sympathetic to The Thirty, was preparing to defend their interests when the Spartan king Pausanias overruled his attack fearing that Lysander was becoming too powerful. He also believed that blind support for the ultra-conservatives was a mistake. After a skirmish with the rebels, Pausanias decided to use them to broker a peace with Athens. In the end a new government was formed and The Thirty were banished to Eleusis.
One year after the Spartan/Athenian treaty created The Thirty, it was gone – destroyed by its oppression and ruthlessness. This same model had been employed by the Spartans in other Poleis, typically with a ten man oligarchy, but the notion of a Spartan garrison backing a group of local henchman did not go down well with the oppressed any place where it was tried.
Meta approves plan for bigger executive bonuses following 5% layoffs
Meta's executive officers could earn a bonus of 200% of their base salary under the company's new executive bonus plan, up from the 75% they earned previously.
Executives at Meta stand to get bigger bonuses this year.
The company said in a corporate filing Thursday that it had approved "an increase in the target bonus percentage" for its annual bonus plan for executives. Meta's named executive officers could earn a bonus of 200% of their base salary under the new plan, up from the 75% they earned previously, according to the filing.
The updated bonus plan doesn't apply to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the filing noted.
The disclosure of the new executive bonus plan comes a week after Meta began laying off 5% of its overall workforce. The company had previously said this would impact its lowest performers.
Meta also slashed its annual distribution of stock options by about 10% for thousands of employees, according to a report published Thursday by the Financial Times. The report noted that the stock option reduction may differ based on where the workers live and their position at the company.
Meta shares are up more than 47% over the past year and closed Thursday at $694.84, underscoring investor enthusiasm over the social media company's growing sales in the digital advertising market and the potential for its artificial intelligence investments to eventually generate big returns.
The company said in January that its fourth-quarter revenue grew 21% year over year to $48.39 billion.
What can we conclude about the Spartan Army during this period?
There is no question that the traditions of the agoge were degraded after Leuctra. It must have disappeared at some point because we know that Cleomenes tried to revive it in 236 B.C. It is likely that the few Spartiates and commanders retained the style of Spartan armor and weapons over time with some exceptions. Torso armor was replaced with a tunic during the fifth century. The Doru (six foot spear) was replaced by the Macedonian sarissa during the time of Cleomenes, as the Macedonian Phalanx became the accepted model for a battle formation. What the auxiliaries and mercenaries wore is unknown. Perhaps they wore whatever they owned because war was their profession and they needed to be prepared for it.
Block shares fall on profit, revenue miss
Block, formerly known as Square, got off to a sluggish start on Wall Street this year after underperforming the Nasdaq in 2024.
Block reported fourth-quarter results on Thursday that fell short of Wall Street expectations. The stock dropped more than 6% in extended trading.
Here is how the company did, compared to analysts' consensus estimates from LSEG.
Earnings per share: 71 cents adjusted vs. 87 cents expected
Revenue: $6.03 billion vs. $6.29 billion expected
Revenue increased about 4.5% from $5.77 billion a year earlier.
"This distillation technique is just so extremely powerful and so extremely cheap, and it's just available to anyone," said Databricks CEO Ali Ghodsi, adding that he expects to see innovation when it comes to how large language models, or LLMs, are built. "We're going to see so much competition for LLMs. That's what's going to happen in this new era we're entering."
Distillation is now enabling less-capitalized startups and research labs to compete at the cutting edge faster than ever before.
Using this technique, researchers at Berkeley said, they recreated OpenAI's reasoning model for $450 in 19 hours last month. Soon after, researchers at Stanford and the University of Washington created their own reasoning model in just 26 minutes, using less than $50 in compute credits, they said. The startup Hugging Face recreated OpenAI's newest and flashiest feature, Deep Research, as a 24-hour coding challenge.
DeepSeek didn't invent distillation, but it woke up the AI world to its disruptive potential. It also ushered in the rise of a new open-source order — a belief that transparency and accessibility drive innovation faster than closed-door research.
“Because of the protracted childcare in humans, a premium has been placed on post-partum parental investment, so female mate choice is governed by the desire to obtain resources from long-term mates, an objective that conflicts with man’s desire for multiple partners.”
These forces put man in a position of wanting it both ways – stable long term partners associated with producing heirs and secondary partners used outside the accepted relationship. Indeed, Scheidel asserts that the first monogamous societies (Greece and Rome) were socially imposed. By this he means there was social pressure to monogamous based on the increasing importance of cooperation among coalitions (peer groups), needed to deal with external challenges. This pressure led to a moral standard that monogamy should be the only acceptable marriage practice.
"Open source always wins in the tech industry," said Arvind Jain, CEO of Glean, which makes an AI-powered search engine for enterprises. "You cannot beat the momentum that a successful open-source project is able to actually generate."
OpenAI itself has walked back its closed-source strategy in the wake of DeepSeek's accomplishment.
"Personally I think we have been on the wrong side of history here and need to figure out a different open-source strategy," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman wrote in a post on Reddit on Jan. 31.
In both Greece and Rome there grew to be severe penalties for having sexual relations with someone else’s wife, but no penalties for relations with slaves or concubines.
The combination of distillation's newfound traction and open source's rise in popularity is completely altering the competitive dynamics in AI.
Apple CEO Tim Cook (L) takes a selfie with a greets customers on arrival for the release of the Vision Pro headset at the Apple Store in New York City on February 2, 2024
For $4, Roszyk's Night Vision app lets a Vision Pro user tap the depth-sensing cameras of the device to see objects in the dark. If you spend $5, you can perform a chore in a Luigi's Mansion-like video game using the app Vacuume, which overlays virtual coins on your floor that you can vacuum up, along with any real dirt or dust. And for $6, Roszyk's app Scan Export lets users create a 3D digital scan of an entire building just by walking around, a useful tool for those in construction or real estate.
"We are still early, and we don't really know how it can be really useful in your life," Roszyk said. "There's so many different ideas that just come to your mind."
Aristotle wrote two short pieces on dreams and their meaning: On Dreams and On Prophesying on Dreams. In the first he presents arguments for the origin of dreams and their relationship to other aspects of human existence. In the second he analyzes whether dreams can foreshadow the future.
Aristotle approaches his subject as a scientist, looking for a practical explanation for an experience men found mysterious and frightful. Given that the only ways to acquire knowledge are through sense perception or intelligence, and that our senses are not operating during sleep, he asserts that the senses cannot contribute to dreaming. That means dreams must originate in our intellect. Of course the experiences in dreams are still based on sense perception (we see things when we dream), but that experience is disconnected from reality.
Roszyk continues to work on Vision Pro apps because he said he believes "spatial computing" — Apple's preferred terminology for headset and glasses technology that can integrate 3D objects with the world around them — will be the next big platform. Roszyk is betting that developing apps now can put him in prime position when more people are walking around with a Vision Pro or, perhaps some day, lightweight glasses.
"This type of computing is the future," Roszyk said. "I would definitely compare it to the first iPhones."
Residual perceptions are common in everyday life. If you look at the sun briefly and then look away, the image of the sun remains in your eye for a while. In the same way, Aristotle asserts that when the external object of a perception has been removed, there still remains an impression which itself is an object of perception. While we sleep, these impressions are re-created in dreams.
Sensory impressions present themselves when an individual is awake and asleep, but the senses work with the brain during the day to keep reality in perspective. At night there is no balance between impressions because the senses are not available, so dreams produce wild and obscure sensations.
!summarize #tesla #india #hiring #gigafactory
Aristotle describes the dream sequence as “little eddies in a river forming and breaking into other forms by colliding with obstacles.” He believed there could be no dreaming immediately after a meal because the heat caused by digestion disturbed the flow of phantasms in the brain. Similarly, dreams that occur during a fever or intoxication reflect a disturbed state of the body in their weirdness of form and character.
Roszyk's efforts have made him money, but not enough for Vision Pro development to become his full-time job. His 17 apps have cleared about $4,000 on the App Store in the last three months. That number is growing as he releases more apps and more people find out about them, Roszyk said.
Apple updated its most recent Vision Pro app count in August, with CEO Tim Cook telling investors on an earnings call that the platform had 2,500 apps. That number covers fully immersive apps that overlay virtual objects over the real world as well as 2D apps with some spatial components.
In On Prophesying on Dreams, Aristotle contemplates what he calls the divination that takes place during sleep and whether it caused by dreams. Since there is no known cause of this divination it is normal to be skeptical about it. It cannot come from a god because these experiences occur in common people and god does not communicate to them. So is it merely that dreams act as causes or tokens of divination? Indeed, it may be that some of these representations are the causes of actions cognate to them. We may think and plan some activity during the day whose significance causes a vivid dream at night. In this case the activity has paved the way for the dream. But the converse is also true, because thoughts which occur first in sleep may be the starting points of something that occurs when we are awake.
Aristotle believes that most “prophetic” dreams are coincidences based on the fact that the dreamer has no real participation in the story of the dream. We often mention things during conversation that later come to pass and this same phenomena occurs in dreams. Because the engine of both wakefulness and dreams is the brain, we understand why this has to be so. Again, because god does not communicate to the common people, their visions must be a random result of their physical temperament – “excitable and garrulous”. The common people have chance experiences where visions play a part in their slumber, like the gambler who plays even and odd.
Prophetic dreams are caused by the condition of sleep; the fact that there is less to disturb the body than during the day. There is no wind at night to disturb the senses and compete with the visions of our dreams.
There are also about 1.5 million Vision Pro apps that are ported versions of iPhone and iPad apps. Apple automatically ports iPhone and iPad apps to the Vision Pro when they're uploaded, but companies can decline. Those apps can be used inside the headset but appear as 2D flat screens. Meta started to emulate that strategy last year with 2D Android apps for Quest, but the company doesn't have the same library of millions of existing mobile apps.
Apple doesn't publish Vision Pro sales, but one estimate from IDC suggests fewer than 1 million devices have been sold.
To Aristotle, the most skillful interpreter of dreams is the man who is able to observe resemblances in them. That is he can make sense out the forms in disturbed water; to put the pieces together which, to the common man, can only be seen when the water is calm.
Although many of those games are 2D, some are exclusive to the Vision Pro. In January, Apple released Gears & Goo, a Vision Pro app that enables the player to control an army of goofy frog-like characters on a table in the real world.
Meanwhile, Meta is actively courting VR developers with a promise that they can make money. Meta in January said that its payment volume for Quest headsets rose by 12% last year, although it didn't cite a total number. Meta has also said it has 200 apps that have made more than $1 million through software sales.
Ancient cultures, from Egyptian through late Roman times, paid as much attention to their nights in the arms of Morpheus as they did to their waking moments. They felt curiosity, awe, and sometimes terror at their dreams, at the strange symbolic language of the sleeper.
And they sought help. How do we know this? Ancient literature is littered with speculations and advice about dreams, along with insights about their medical use as diagnostic tools. Furthermore, a handful of millennia-old dream manuals have survived—to be gleefully recycled by cut-and-paste oneiromancy entrepreneurs today.
The Apple Vision Pro headset is displayed at the Fifth Avenue Apple store on Feb. 2, 2024 in New York City.
Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images News | Getty Images
The Vision Pro app gold rush has seen slower uptake than the iPhone's app boom.
A year after the iPhone App Store was launched in 2008, Apple was crowing about the platform having 50 million customers, 2 billion downloads and 85,000 apps. Apple regularly told investors and developers how much money it had paid from App Store sales — it hasn't released any similar stat for the Vision Pro.
Greek dream treatments
In pre-Classical times, Homer wrote, “Dreams come from Zeus.” Because medicine was in its infancy, by circa 500 BC the wellbeing franchise was taken over by the healing god Asclepius. Although few would recognize him and his single-snake staff in a lineup today, Asclepius set up shop in Epidaurus, the first of what would be a chain of Mediterranean-wide healing centers that resembled today’s luxurious spas in natural settings.
In 293 BC, Asclepius gained further prominence. Summoned from Epidaurus to combat the plague in Rome, he appeared as a sacred snake aboard ship on the Tiber River. Slithering ashore, Asclepius took up residence on Tiber Island, where his temple was built; the plague obediently stopped.
Greek dream treatments
In pre-Classical times, Homer wrote, “Dreams come from Zeus.” Because medicine was in its infancy, by circa 500 BC the wellbeing franchise was taken over by the healing god Asclepius. Although few would recognize him and his single-snake staff in a lineup today, Asclepius set up shop in Epidaurus, the first of what would be a chain of Mediterranean-wide healing centers that resembled today’s luxurious spas in natural settings.
In 293 BC, Asclepius gained further prominence. Summoned from Epidaurus to combat the plague in Rome, he appeared as a sacred snake aboard ship on the Tiber River. Slithering ashore, Asclepius took up residence on Tiber Island, where his temple was built; the plague obediently stopped.
Apple has not said if it will update the Vision Pro. According to analysts, the company is working on a successor. Developers want it to be lighter and less expensive. They welcome any improvements that would get it on more faces.
"Over time, everything gets better, and it too will have its course of getting better and better," Cook told The Wall Street Journal in October. "I think it's just arguably a success today from an ecosystem-being-built-out point of view."
Oracles and other competition for Asclepius
Besides the incubation overnight chambers where patients sought Asclepian intervention to dream their cures, the facilities emphasized holistic healing, from diet and exercise to drama and the power of music. Aristocratic writers like Aristides, a career hypochondriac, heartily endorsed the Asclepieia, having spent lengthy periods of time at facilities in Pergamum, Epidaurus and elsewhere.
Yiu pulled out a pair of Meta's recently launched Ray-Ban branded glasses, which use AI to translate speech from one language to another or describe images for the visually impaired.
"This is a profound and very human application of the technology, and it is slow to arrive in Europe because of the issues that we have around regulation," Yiu said.
Meta only began rolling out AI features for its Ray-Ban Meta glasses in some European countries in November, after a delay the firm claimed was caused by the need to reach compliance with Europe's "complex regulatory system."
The AI Act was first introduced by the European Commission, the EU's executive body, in April 2021. OpenAI launched ChatGPT in November 2022.
"There is a way to use policy to create a better investment environment when it's done in a way that promotes business" Chou said, referring to the U.S. Inflation Reduction Act as an example of policy that has led to benefits, like subsidies for electric vehicles.
According to ancient sources, for the first five years of his reign, Nero slept like a baby, suffering no qualms about his homicidal activities. After the murder of his mother, however, she began to haunt Nero, whereupon he brought in a Persian exorcist to call off her vengeful ghost.
But rest was no longer to be found. As Lives of the Twelve Caesars author Suetonius noted, Emperor Nero began to have extravagant nightmares. In one, Nero was buried under a mass of winged ants. In another dream, he was terrorized by the sight of his favorite Spanish horse, with only its head still in equine form—the rest having turned into a hairy ape. (The first “Godfather” film took this nightmare idea and ran with it, to staggering effect.)
"I think what's difficult is when you are regulating on a time scale that doesn't match the technology," Chou added. "I think what we need to do is both regulate to ensure that there is responsible application of technology, while also ensuring that the industry is thriving it all the right ways."
Big Tech ups the ante
Big Tech firms more generally have been upping their rhetoric against the EU's approach to tech regulation and ramping up lobbying efforts in an attempt to soften aspects of the AI Act.
Kent Walker, Google's president of global affairs, told Politico last month that the EU's code of practice for general-purpose AI (GPAI) models — which refers to systems like OpenAI's GPT family of large language models, or LLMs — was a "step in the wrong direction."
The EU AI Office, a newly created body overseeing models under the AI Act, published a second-draft code of practice for GPAI systems in December.
Earlier this month, Meta's newly appointed Chief Global Affairs Officer Joel Kaplan suggested in a live-streamed interview at an event in Brussels that the tech giant would not sign up to the code in its current form.
Tech giants' pleas for softer EU tech regulation have been emboldened of late by President Donald Trump's new administration.
At the international AI Action Summit in Paris last week, U.S. Vice President JD Vance blasted Europe for being too heavily focused on regulating artificial intelligence rather than embracing the technology's growth potential.
Tech giants' pleas for softer EU tech regulation have been emboldened of late by President Donald Trump's new administration.
At the international AI Action Summit in Paris last week, U.S. Vice President JD Vance blasted Europe for being too heavily focused on regulating artificial intelligence rather than embracing the technology's growth potential.
The Battle without Tears
In 369 B.C, while Sparta was trying to recover from Leuctra, the rest of Greece came under attack from Thebes, who saw itself as the next great power. Aligned with Athens, the Spartans debated with their ally how to overcome this new aggressor. At the same time, Thebes was aligned with the Arcadians and Argives, giving them assets in the Peloponnese which could threaten Sparta. But that alliance did not survive the ascendancy of Lykomedes of Mantineia who argued that the Arcadians and Argives were great in their own right and did not need an alliance with anyone. He convinced the Arcadians and Argives to break away from Thebes and act on their own.
Meanwhile, Dionysios, King of Syracuse, sent an armed force to the aid of Sparta. The Athenians wanted them to be used against Thessaly, but the Spartans successfully argued they were needed in Laconia to fight the Arcadians.
Harmonizing EU rules for startups
Big Tech weren't alone in calling for a more simplified regulatory regime for technology firms operating in Europe.
Several venture capitalists investing in European tech startups also decried complex regulatory compliance burdens on their portfolio companies.
Antoine Moyroud, a partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, said that whereas the U.S. has been pushing forward initiatives such as the $500 billion Stargate investment project that strike a "hopeful" message around AI," Europe's narrative tends to be more "dramatic."
The King of Sparta, Archidamos, joined the Syracusans with his own force, and began a campaign against the Arcadians. As he was attacking Parrasia, the Arcadians and Argives started to apply pressure and he retreated to the hills above Melea. At this point, the Syracusan commander, Kissides, said that his appointed time had expired and he departed with his army. As he marched south, The Messenians blocked him so he sent to Archidamos for help. Then, while the Spartan Army was marching to join him, they were cut off by the Arcadians and Argives, who had inserted themselves between the two allies.
Archidamos placed the Spartan Army in battle formation and exhorted his troops to fight saying,
“Let us no longer feel shame before our children and wives, elders and
foreigners, those very people in whose eyes we were in past time the
most renowned of all Greeks.”
For example, there's a European Company Statute under the 28th regime that makes it simpler to set up public limited liability companies in the EU.
The likes of Stripe CEO Patrick Collison and Wise co-founder Taavet Hinrikus are among the startup founders looking to set up a new entity under the 28th regime, called "EU Inc."
"Europe is a fragmented place, and what you want to do is [to] be able to hire across any country," Luke Pappas, a London-based partner for venture capital firm NEA, told CNBC in an interview on the sidelines of Techarena.
The subsequent attack was a rout and the Spartans achieved a great victory. Archidamos sent a message to Sparta telling of the great victory and how it was achieved without a single Spartan being killed. All in Sparta wept for joy making the Spartan victory “tearless” from grief even though it brought many tears of joy.
A key issue with attracting talent in this way, according to Pappas, is that currently "the process of giving equity cross border in Europe is not very easy."
"If we can standardize equity, for example, that will dramatically help," he added.
"DeepSeek demonstrates that China is at or near the cutting edge of AI development, which boosts the prestige of China's economy and tech ecosystem, making them more attractive for global investors," said Gabriel Wildau, managing director at Teneo.
The company's launch of a cheaper and more efficient AI model came as a timely confidence boost as the Chinese leadership faces a prolonged economic gloom, partly owed to the slump in its property market, while the specter of a fierce trade war with the U.S. looms large.
Once the long walls were destroyed the Athenian assembly was asked to choose thirty men to rewrite their laws. The names of the chosen were Polychares, Kritias, Melobios, Hippolochos, Eucleides, Hieron, Mnesilochos, Chremon, Theramenes, Aresias, Diokles, Phaedrias, Chaireleos, Anaitios, Peison, Sophocles, Eratosthenes, Charicles, Onomacles, Theognis, Aeschines, Theogenes, Cleomedes, Erasistratos, Pheidon, Dracontides, Eumathes, Aristoteles, Hippomachos, and Mnesitheides. Of these men, twenty-five are obscure, three are known only by anecdote, and two were major players in the drama that would follow.
Beijing's stamp of approval
In a well-choreographed meeting earlier this week, Chinese President Xi Jinping warmly greeted DeepSeek founder Liang Wenfeng and granted him a coveted front-row seat next to leaders of the country's biggest private enterprises.
That showed Beijing is eager to support the company, said Huiyao Wang, founder and president of Center for China and Globalization, a Beijing-based think tank.
Theramenes, who had been to Sparta as part of the negotiation team to end the war, opposed this step as unlawful and immoral. He demanded that The Thirty allow more participation in the Athenian government so they responded by drawing up a list of three thousand who would participate in the government. All other Athenians were disarmed and excluded from the system. Now The Thirty began their reign of terror against the rich and all who opposed them.
Kritias, the unofficial leader of the group, was again opposed by Theramenes, who was denounced and forced to take poison. This caused a general revolt that saw a rebel group located in Peiraieus defeat the army of The Thirty killing Kritias and Hippomachos. The remainder of The Thirty retreated to Eleusis and begged for Spartan help.
"DeepSeek represents exactly what Beijing is keen to see by 'new-quality productive force' that will push China forward," Wang added, referring to a strategy coined by Xi last year that bets on technological breakthroughs to fuel growth and productivity gains across the economy.
Chinese leadership last year vowed "a leap forward" by spurring new growth drivers based on innovation in advanced sectors, such as AI and semiconductors, as U.S. export controls on advanced equipment and the most advanced semiconductors thwarted its ability to make major tech breakthroughs.
With Beijing signaling support for the startup, a growing number of local governments, from Hohhot in northern China to the southern city of Guangzhou and Shenzhen, are launching DeepSeek-powered "public servants" to automate governance, handling requests from administrative paper work to general public services.
This time fortune favored the oppressed. Lysander, the Spartan Admiral sympathetic to The Thirty, was preparing to defend their interests when the Spartan king Pausanias overruled his attack fearing that Lysander was becoming too powerful. He also believed that blind support for the ultra-conservatives was a mistake. After a skirmish with the rebels, Pausanias decided to use them to broker a peace with Athens. In the end a new government was formed and The Thirty were banished to Eleusis.
One year after the Spartan/Athenian treaty created The Thirty, it was gone – destroyed by its oppression and ruthlessness. This same model had been employed by the Spartans in other Poleis, typically with a ten man oligarchy, but the notion of a Spartan garrison backing a group of local henchman did not go down well with the oppressed any place where it was tried.
Meta approves plan for bigger executive bonuses following 5% layoffs
Meta's executive officers could earn a bonus of 200% of their base salary under the company's new executive bonus plan, up from the 75% they earned previously.
Executives at Meta stand to get bigger bonuses this year.
The company said in a corporate filing Thursday that it had approved "an increase in the target bonus percentage" for its annual bonus plan for executives. Meta's named executive officers could earn a bonus of 200% of their base salary under the new plan, up from the 75% they earned previously, according to the filing.
The updated bonus plan doesn't apply to Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, the filing noted.
The disclosure of the new executive bonus plan comes a week after Meta began laying off 5% of its overall workforce. The company had previously said this would impact its lowest performers.
Meta also slashed its annual distribution of stock options by about 10% for thousands of employees, according to a report published Thursday by the Financial Times. The report noted that the stock option reduction may differ based on where the workers live and their position at the company.
Meta shares are up more than 47% over the past year and closed Thursday at $694.84, underscoring investor enthusiasm over the social media company's growing sales in the digital advertising market and the potential for its artificial intelligence investments to eventually generate big returns.
The company said in January that its fourth-quarter revenue grew 21% year over year to $48.39 billion.
What can we conclude about the Spartan Army during this period?
There is no question that the traditions of the agoge were degraded after Leuctra. It must have disappeared at some point because we know that Cleomenes tried to revive it in 236 B.C. It is likely that the few Spartiates and commanders retained the style of Spartan armor and weapons over time with some exceptions. Torso armor was replaced with a tunic during the fifth century. The Doru (six foot spear) was replaced by the Macedonian sarissa during the time of Cleomenes, as the Macedonian Phalanx became the accepted model for a battle formation. What the auxiliaries and mercenaries wore is unknown. Perhaps they wore whatever they owned because war was their profession and they needed to be prepared for it.
Block shares fall on profit, revenue miss
Block, formerly known as Square, got off to a sluggish start on Wall Street this year after underperforming the Nasdaq in 2024.
Block reported fourth-quarter results on Thursday that fell short of Wall Street expectations. The stock dropped more than 6% in extended trading.
Here is how the company did, compared to analysts' consensus estimates from LSEG.
Earnings per share: 71 cents adjusted vs. 87 cents expected
Revenue: $6.03 billion vs. $6.29 billion expected
Revenue increased about 4.5% from $5.77 billion a year earlier.