Chart: Hong Kong GDP Compared with Top 10 GDP Cities in China

Source : 微信

Chart: U.S. Bank Stocks Dived Following the Banking Crisis

Source : Bloomberg

Chuckles of the Day

---

---

---

---

---

---

---

华为任正非座谈实录：未来在AI大模型上会风起云涌

记者: 周玲 . . . . . . . .

3月17日，澎湃新闻记者获悉，华为创始人任正非在“难题揭榜”火花奖公司内外的获奖者及出题专家座谈会上表示，华为现在还处于困难时期，但在前进的道路上并没有停步。2022年华为研发经费是238亿美元，几年后随着公司利润增多在前沿探索上还会继续加大投入。

谈到被美国制裁的三年，任正非表示，华为用三年时间内完成13000+颗器件的替代开发、4000+电路板的反复换板开发，“今年4月份我们的MetaERP将会宣誓，完全用自己的操作系统、数据库、编译器和语言……，做出了自己的管理系统MetaERP软件。MetaERP已经历了公司全球各部门的应用实战考验，经过了公司的总账使用年度结算考验，我们公司的账是业界中很复杂的，已成功地证明MetaERP是有把握推广的。许多设计工具也上华为云公开给社会应用，逐步克服了断供的尴尬。”

任正非还对参加座谈会的师生讲述，自己年轻时很崇拜西方，因为西方科技如此发达，而他那个时代，书是非常宝贵的，很难看到一本好书，想读书但买不到书。“创立华为以后，我也是亲西方的，当时我们提出一个口号‘要用世界上最好的零部件和工具造世界上最好的产品’，我们实现了。后来突然受到制裁，别人不能给我们提供零部件、工具……我们就傻了。当美国打我们一棒，狠狠制裁我们的时候，徐直军在办公会议上对我说了一句话：‘美国没有明白，他们这一棒打下去，把一个最亲美的人，变成了一个最反美的人’。当然，我现在也不反美，我们想成为最先进，就必须向一切先进的人学习。美国在科教上的软实力，还是我们用几十年时间达不到的。美国的政治家也是一轮一轮的，美国几百年的创新土壤，不会因他们而退化。”任正非说到。

任正非讲华为之所以能够度过这三年难关，是因为公司过去用了近二十年时间，在基础理论上作了准备，投了几千亿培养了一批研究基础理论的科学家、技术诀窍的专家，他们一直在爬科学的“喜马拉雅山”。当华为受打压时，就请这些科学家到“山脚”来“放羊”、“种地”……，拿着“手术刀”参加“杀猪”的战斗。

对于当前大火的人工智能，任正非认为，未来在AI大模型上会风起云涌，不只是微软一家。人工智能软件平台公司对人类社会的直接贡献可能不到2%，98%都是对工业社会、农业社会的促进，AI服务普及需要5G的连接，“ChatGPT对我们的机会是什么？它会把计算撑大，把管道流量撑大，这样我们的产品就有市场需求。”

在回答有关华为天才少年离职创业的问题时，任正非表示，“我们不能垄断人才，员工想出去创业或到其他公司去，人尽其才，发挥他的价值，对国家都是有用的。”任正非说，对人才机制也有反思，比如有些人进入公司以后，没有很好使用到他最擅长的地方，没有发挥作用等于浪费他的青春。

以下为任正非讲话全文：

---

“擦亮火花、共创未来”

——任总在“难题揭榜”火花奖公司内外的获奖者及出题专家座谈会上的讲话

2023年2月24日

首先感谢大家给华为公司做出的贡献。我们现在还属于困难时期，但在前进的道路上并没有停步。2022年我们的研发经费是238亿美元，几年后随着我们的利润增多，在前沿探索上还会继续加大投入。我们与高校的合作是在一定的技术边界内探索人类的未来；2012实验室是以基础理论及应用理论为基础，探讨现实性的可能，没有目标考核；产品线是对产品的商业成功负责。大致分为这三个阶段，随着我们经济实力的增长，我们会不断扩大对外合作的“喇叭口”。

我年轻时候很崇拜西方，因为西方科技如此发达，而我们那个时代，书是非常宝贵的，很难看到一本好书，想读书但买不到书。创立华为以后，我也是亲西方的，当时我们提出一个口号“要用世界上最好的零部件和工具造世界上最好的产品”，我们实现了。后来突然受到制裁，别人不能给我们提供零部件、工具……，我们就傻了。世界上最好的零部件很多是来自美国的，实际上我就是亲美的。当美国打我们一棒，狠狠制裁我们的时候，徐直军在办公会议上对我说了一句话：“美国没有明白，他们这一棒打下去，把一个最亲美的人，变成了一个最反美的人”。当然，我现在也不反美，我们想成为最先进，就必须向一切先进的人学习。美国在科教上的软实力，还是我们用几十年时间达不到的。美国的政治家也是一轮一轮的，美国几百年的创新土壤，不会因他们而退化。

幸亏我们过去用了近二十年时间，在基础理论上作了准备，投了几千亿培养了一批研究基础理论的科学家、技术诀窍的专家。他们一直在爬科学的“喜马拉雅山”。当我们受打压时，就请这些科学家到“山脚”来“放羊”、“种地”……，拿着“手术刀”参加“杀猪”的战斗。我们用三年时间内完成13000+颗器件的替代开发、4000+电路板的反复换板开发……。直到现在我们电路板才稳定下来，因为我们有国产的零部件供应了。今年4月份我们的MetaERP将会宣誓，完全用自己的操作系统、数据库、编译器和语言……，做出了自己的管理系统MetaERP软件。MetaERP已经历了公司全球各部门的应用实战考验，经过了公司的总账使用年度结算考验，我们公司的账是业界中很复杂的，已成功地证明MetaERP是有把握推广的。许多设计工具也上华为云公开给社会应用，逐步克服了断供的尴尬。

过去我们大量的研究都与西方国家大学合作，目前已开始和国内大学加强合作，这与我个人的指导思想变化有关系。我们往更前沿走的路上，逐步也会在国内加强这方面的合作。现在我们可以开始互相了解，有什么疑问，欢迎大家一起讨论。

[ . . . . . . . . ]

Read more at The Paper . . . . .

Infographic: Air Pollution by Economy

See large image . . . . . .

Source : Visual Capitalist

‘Woke’ Is a Political Term With a Long and Complicated History

Stephen L. Carter wrote . . . . . . . . .

I keep reading that 2022 was the year of peak woke. If true, the surmise will spark either joy or sorrow, depending on predisposition. For the wordsmith, however, the intriguing question is not whether wokeism is on the decline; it’s how the word acquired its current social and political significance.

As it turns out, most sources get the origin wrong.

Dictionaries tell us that woke refers to a sensitivity to injustice, racial and otherwise. This definition is incomplete. Yes, what divides the woke from the unwoke (and the fake woke) is often the tough question of what constitutes injustice; but experience suggests that the dividing line is more often about the appropriate response once injustice is spotted.

Like so many words we twist to political advantage — “patriotism” comes to mind; so does “un-American” — “woke” possesses a daunting fluidity. What the word encompassed yesterday will be enlarged when tomorrow dawns. Depending on where you sit, this aspect may be a feature or a bug. For the wordsmith, it presents an irresistible challenge.

Those who’ve searched for woke’s origin have coalesced around a particular story. In this tale, the trail stretches backward from the present day to a 1962 article in the New York Times Magazine by the novelist William Melvin Kelley, then to a 1940 quotation from a Black United Mineworkers official, next to a 1938 song by Huddie Leadbetter, known as Lead Belly, in which he advises his listeners to “stay woke” lest they run afoul of White authority, and then to a 1923 volume of Marcus Garvey’s aphorisms in which he beseeches his readers, “Wake up, Ethiopia! Wake up, Africa!”

Given this origin story, some observers have berated progressives for appropriating a term coined by Black activists. Kelly’s 1962 essay in the Times addressed this very subject. Titled, “If You’re Woke You Dig It,” the piece argued that Black people living in a White world needed a way to talk to each other that outsiders would not understand. Each time a word entered the mainstream, he wrote, “the Negro knows that part of his code is being broken.”

Kelly’s point is powerful, but the etymology of “woke” doesn’t quite fit his thesis. Even granting the proposition that a race can “own” a word, a better description of where the term came from would acknowledge that it’s been traded back and forth.

To begin with, Garvey isn’t relevant. True, the phrase appears in the aforementioned 1923 volume, but there’s no evidence that “woke” was associated with him by the Black public of the day. Small wonder, given that Garvey was merely borrowing a term Black leaders had long ago adopted. Examples abound. “Wake up, wake up!” cried a 1904 editorial in the Baltimore Afro-American on the subject of voting rights. “Race in Chicago Must Wake Up!” was the headline on a 1912 essay in the Chicago Defender, arguing that there was more Black activism in Florida than Illinois.

As for Lead Belly, his 1938 usage of “woke” was likely a repurposing of the key line in “Sawmill Moan,” a song recorded a decade earlier by the great blues artist Willard “Ramblin’” Thomas:

“If I don’t go crazy, I’m sure gonna lose my mind ‘Cause I can’t sleep for dreamin’,sure can’t stay woke for cryin.’”

Although on the surface the song laments a lost love, historians have suggested that the lyrics were a veiled protest against the atrocious conditions faced by Black workers in Southern sawmills, where Thomas and other blues artists often performed.

This interpretation makes sense, and not only because blues songs often included hidden meanings representing opposition to cultural norms, particularly norms about race. The timing is also right. Black mill workers had previously been transients whose principal occupation was farming, but by 1928, when Thomas’s song was released, they were flooding into the permanent workforce in the Southern lumber industry. There they suffered exactly the indignities one would predict. As the historian William P. Jones notes, mill owners believed “that the only way to secure labor from a Black man was to ‘keep him broke.’”

There’s an additional reason to give Thomas rather than Lead Belly the credit. The worry about pain so great that one cannot “stay woke” is consistent with the idiom of the labor movement of the day, which well before the song became popular had already adopted “wake up” as a common trope. A 1903 editorial in a socialist paper urged the working class to “wake up” and recognize “that you have nothing that they may have much.” In 1918, a union magazine celebrated a new contract with these words: “[A]fter being asleep for a long time, like Rip Van Winkle, we finally woke up.” And again, the time line fits: When Thomas’s song was released on the eve of the Depression, the 1912 massacre of protesting mill workers in Bon Ami, Louisiana, was still fresh in memory.

Thus, the proper way to understand the history of our current usage of “woke” is that the metaphor was popularized by the labor movement, then borrowed by Black activists early in the 20th century before bursting into blues music in the 1920s. But the word remained a part of labor discourse all along, and is still used by organizers today. Moreover, for all that we identify the metaphor with a particular politics, it carries much the same meaning in everyday conversation. (“Wake up and smell the coffee.”)

We study etymologies so that we might use language to unlock history. Here the history is far more complex than the commonly accepted origin story suggests. So whether or not wokeness has passed its peak, understanding how the word first came to be adopted by activists more than a century ago suggests it will remain a part of our political conversation in 2023 — and for decades to come.

Source : The Washington Post

---

Read also at Heterodox

The “Great Awokening” of Scholarship May Be Ending . . . . .

Chart: Origins and Timeline of the Word Woke

See large image . . . . . .

---

Read more at Legal Defence Fund

HOW WOKE WENT FROM “BLACK” TO “BAD” . . . . .

---

Read also at Politifact

• “Woke” began in Black vernacular as a warning to be wary of racism.
• It was adopted by liberal social justice advocates during the Black Lives Matter and Me Too movements in 2020. But conservatives have co-opted the term and used it as an all purpose condemnation of the left.
• Because definitions of “woke” vary, polling on the term becomes dicey, polling experts say.

What does it mean to be ‘woke’? . . . . .