Tuesday, January 24, 2023

TopTal

AI vs. BI: Differences and Synergies
The History of Remote Work, 1560-Present (with Infographic) (Updated)
Deconstructing Jobs: How Innovative Companies Are Reimagining Work
Toxic Communication in Virtual Workspaces: A Looming Liability for Remote and Hybrid Companies
5 Lessons From Fast-growing Tech, Energy, and Fintech Companies
Navigating the Next Normal: Fortune 500 Executives on the Future of Talent

The End of Traditional Employment—The Other Gig Economy

How to Build Culture in Remote Teams
Culture is king in successful organizations. ....... the unique challenges of managing a distributed team can incentivize the creation of a stronger culture than those that operate face-to-face. This may seem counter-intuitive, but while local teams tend to assume culture will take root organically, the stakes are higher for distributed organizations. This motivates successful remote executives to be intentional about building culture, ultimately resulting in stronger teams. ...... defines culture as a pattern of basic assumptions and values, discovered or developed by a group, which are proven to lead to success.......... These assumptions typically include answers to questions of “Why do we exist?” and “How do we do what we do?” We find it is helpful to ask: “What is our true north?” ........

The PRD Isn’t Dead: New Best Practices for Digital Product Development
Perfect Pizza: Using a Digital Customer Research Tool to Measure Taste
Two Roadmaps Diverged: Strategic and Tactical Routes to Product Development

Inside Toptal’s Product Team . .

Journey Mapping: A Product Development Process Case Study
How to Keep Your Slack Workspace Ready for Connection
How to Build and Sustain a Remote Culture With over 4,000 people across more than 100 countries, Toptal has mastered the art of attracting and retaining premier talent in a remote environment. Leaders at the company attribute its success to its corporate culture, which serves as the foundation for everything they do. ....... Leaders at the company attribute its success to its corporate culture, which serves as the foundation for everything they do. ......... “If you don’t have the right culture, the whole thing is going to collapse” ...... “When you go from on-site to remote, you learn the importance of having the right frameworks.” .......... four key habits that helped it build a vibrant company culture. .

The Suddenly Remote Playbook The COVID-19 pandemic circling the world transformed the gradual advance of remote work into a stampede, compelling millions of people to abandon the office and go home.



Build a Massive Transformative Purpose There is one core trait that separates the best from the rest. All of them have a powerful purpose statement they share with the world. If I said to you "Occupy Mars" who would you think of? .......... It helps you decide what to do, and more importantly what not to do. It’s both your fuel and your filter. ......... Everything I have created and will create is born out of my MTP. ........

METATREND #11: EMERGENCE OF THE METAVERSE/WEB3

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Wednesday, January 04, 2023

Artificial Intelligence



2022 Was the Year AI Finally Started Living Up to Its Hype Ever since deep learning burst into the mainstream in 2012, the hype around AI research has often outpaced its reality. Over the past year though, a series of breakthroughs and major milestones suggest the technology may finally be living up to its promise. ........ In the last year, however, there has been an undeniable step change in the capabilities of AI systems ....... these AI systems and their outputs are become increasingly visible and accessible to ordinary people. ....... the results they have produced in 2022 have blown previous iterations out of the water. ...... ChatGPT, an AI chatbot based on the latest version of OpenAI’s GPT-3 large language model. ........ and even produce convincing prose and poetry. ....... another OpenAI model called DALL-E 2 took the internet by storm with its ability to generate hyper-realistic images in response to prompts as bizarre as “a raccoon playing tennis at Wimbledon in the 1990s” and “Spider-Man from ancient Rome.” ........ could produce short video clips from text prompts ....... can generate music in the style of an audio clip it is played. ........

could replace traditional search engines, kill the college essay, and lead to the death of art.

........ services like ChatGPT, DALL-E 2, and text-to-image generator Midjourney open to everyone for free ........ an AI-powered code generator that the company said could match the average programmer in coding competitions. ....... had predicted the structure of almost every protein known to science, setting up a potential revolution in both the life sciences and drug discovery. ........ had trained its AI to control the roiling plasmas found inside experimental fusion reactors. ......... an AI that ranked in the top 10 percent of players in the board game Diplomacy, which requires a challenging combination of strategy and natural language negotiation with other players .......... trained an AI to play the complex 3D videogame Minecraft using only high-level natural language instructions. ........ DeepMind cracked the devilishly complicated game Stratego, which involves long-term planning, bluffing, and a healthy dose of uncertainty. ........... highly convincing bullshit generators. They are trained on enormous amounts of text of variable quality from the internet. And ultimately all they do is guess what text is most likely to come after a prompt, with no capacity to judge the truthfulness of their output. This has raised concerns that the internet may soon be flooded with huge amounts of convincing-looking nonsense. ............. would produce convincing-sounding material that was completely wrong or highly biased .......... ChatGPT, which despite filters put in place by OpenAI can be tricked into saying that only white and Asian men make good scientists. ............. self-driving cars, has seen significant setbacks, with the closure of Ford and Volkswagen-backed Argo, Tesla fending off claims of fraud over its failure to deliver “full self-driving,” and a growing chorus of voices claiming the industry is stuck in a rut. .......... deep learning is reaching its limits, as it’s not capable of truly understanding any of the material it’s being trained on and is instead simply learning to make statistical connections that can produce convincing but often flawed results. ........ the next big breakthroughs will come from multi-modal models that combine increasingly powerful capabilities in everything from text to imagery and audio

The viral AI avatar app Lensa undressed me—without my consent My avatars were cartoonishly pornified, while my male colleagues got to be astronauts, explorers, and inventors.

https://singularityhub.com/tag/artificial-intelligence/



Thanks to DALL-E, the Race to Make Artificial Protein Drugs Is On
The Brief History of Artificial Intelligence: The World Has Changed Fast—What Might Be Next?
AI Timelines: What Do Experts in Artificial Intelligence Expect for the Future?

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Sunday, January 01, 2023

Happy New Year 2023

The Top 10 Tech Trends In 2023 Everyone Must Be Ready For
Top 10 Essential Tech Trends in 2023 Everyone Must be Ready For
Tech in 2023: Here's what is going to really matter
Gartner Top 10 Strategic Technology Trends 2023
Top 18 New Technology Trends for 2023 - Simplilearn
The biggest tech trends of 2023, according to over 40 experts
Top 10 Technology Trends that will shape 2023
4 Technology Trends in 2023 To Plan For Right Now
Tech in 2023: Here's what is going to really matter | ZDNET .

MIT Technology Review - Top Technology Trends 2022

Three tech trends on the verge of a breakthrough in 2023



This Startup Is Producing the World’s First Carbon-Negative Concrete Transportation and electricity production are the top two culprits when it comes to emitting CO2 (but also two of the most necessary tools for our day-to-day lives). Third on the list and an equally complex beast is industry, and a big part of industry is concrete. .......... It’s been said that concrete is the most widely-used substance on Earth after water. ........... The manufacture of cement, concrete’s key ingredient, accounts for a whopping eight percent of the world’s emissions.



From Wild to Weird: The Top 5 Biotech Trends of 2022 In a first, a paralyzed man simultaneously operated two robotic arms with his mind, allowing him to feed himself for the first time in years. (And it was cake!) Implants helped a man with locked-in syndrome—with a sharp mind but paralyzed body—translate his thoughts into sentences, opening a gateway to finally communicate with his loved ones. Memory prosthetics—a blue-sky idea to boost memory with an implant—scored their first success in people. A spinal cord stimulator, based on a new algorithm that mimics the natural electrical pulses the brain uses to control lower body movement, helped completely paralyzed people stand and walk with assistance in just one day. Within a few months, they cruised city streets on Segway-like wheels, swam, and kayaked, using an off-the-shelf tablet to control their movements.

The Brief History of Artificial Intelligence: The World Has Changed Fast—What Might Be Next?

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Thursday, December 29, 2022

Vitalik Buterin: The Ezra Klein Show

Ethereum’s Founder on What Crypto Can — and Can’t — Do Vitalik Buterin explains digital currency’s potential to transform our world. .

there’s this other side too, this more idealistic side, the side of crypto that is not just interested in, but truly obsessed with blockchains and protocols as a way of bringing governance and community into the digital era, as a way of unlocking new forms of cooperation. ........ there’s this other side of crypto that is really important to why the ecosystem has been so vibrant for so long through so many crashes. .......... They obsess over quadratic voting mechanisms, and coins tied to city governance, and decentralized autonomous organizations. .......... The central figure on the set of crypto is Vitalik Buterin. Buterin co-founded Ethereum. He wrote the white paper for the ideas behind it when he was just a teenager. And his insight — and it was a big one — was that, if you could program a currency like Bitcoin that cut out the need for a central authority, then you could use that same cryptographic technology to make almost a programming language that could then program any kind of digital agreement or contract and bind anybody who agreed to it in almost any digital way. .........

Bitcoin can be digital money, but Ethereum can be digital infrastructure. It can be the structure — a binding structure — of how people cooperate online. And Ethereum took off.

........... He’s Ethereum’s benevolent dictator, and he’s become something like the philosopher king of crypto. ......... He’s a digital nomad who lives out of a backpack and seems to think about really nothing but blockchains and what can be built on them.
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Wednesday, December 28, 2022

ChatGPT

A New Chat Bot Is a ‘Code Red’ for Google’s Search Business . A new wave of chat bots like ChatGPT use artificial intelligence that could reinvent or even replace the traditional internet search engine. ......... Over the past three decades, a handful of products like Netscape’s web browser, Google’s search engine and Apple’s iPhone have truly upended the tech industry and made what came before them look like lumbering dinosaurs. ....... Three weeks ago, an experimental chat bot called ChatGPT made its case to be the industry’s next big disrupter. ......... It can serve up information in clear, simple sentences, rather than just a list of internet links. It can explain concepts in ways people can easily understand. It can even generate ideas from scratch, including business strategies, Christmas gift suggestions, blog topics and vacation plans. ....... its release led Google’s management to declare a “code red.” .......... For more than 20 years, the Google search engine has served as the world’s primary gateway to the internet. But with a new kind of chat bot technology poised to reinvent or even replace traditional search engines, Google could face the first serious threat to its main search business. ........ Google has already built a chat bot that could rival ChatGPT. In fact, the technology at the heart of OpenAI’s chat bot was developed by researchers at Google. ......... Google may be reluctant to deploy this new tech as a replacement for online search, however, because it is not suited to delivering digital ads, which accounted for more than 80 percent of the company’s revenue last year. ......... For companies that have become extraordinarily successful doing one market-defining thing, it is hard to have a second act with something entirely different.” .......... Because these new chat bots learn their skills by analyzing huge amounts of data posted to the internet, they have a way of blending fiction with fact. They deliver information that can be biased against women and people of color. They can generate toxic language, including hate speech. ............. Even if Google perfects chat bots, it must tackle another issue: Does this technology cannibalize the company’s lucrative search ads? If a chat bot is responding to queries with tight sentences, there is less reason for people to click on advertising links. ........... “Google has a business model issue ..... If Google gives you the perfect answer to each query, you won’t click on any ads.” ........... Google must decide whether it will overhaul its search engine and make a full-fledged chat bot the face of its flagship service. .......... Google has been reluctant to share its technology broadly because, like ChatGPT and similar systems, it can generate false, toxic and biased information. ......... Five years ago, Microsoft released a chat bot, called Tay, that spewed racist, xenophobic and otherwise filthy language and was forced to immediately remove it from the internet — never to return. In recent weeks, Meta took down a newer chat bot for many of the same reasons. .......... the technology could produce false or offensive statements. Since its release on the last day of November, ChatGPT — which can produce similarly toxic material — has been used by over a million people. ......... as OpenAI and other companies improve their chat bots — working to solve problems with toxicity and bias — this could become a viable replacement for today’s search engines. Whoever gets there first could be the winner. ........... “Last year, I was despondent that it was so hard to dislodge the iron grip of Google,” said Sridhar Ramaswamy, who previously oversaw advertising for Google, including Search ads, and now runs Neeva. “But technological moments like this create an opportunity for more competition.” .

https://chat.openai.com/chat
https://neeva.com




how can i best increase my social media reach

There are several strategies you can use to increase your social media reach:
  1. Use relevant hashtags: Using relevant hashtags in your social media posts can help make your content discoverable to a wider audience.
  2. Collaborate with influencers or other businesses: Partnering with influencers or other businesses can help expose your content to their followers and increase your reach.
  3. Create shareable content: Try to create content that is interesting and engaging, as this will encourage your followers to share your posts with their own followers.
  4. Engage with your audience: Make an effort to respond to comments and messages from your followers, as this can help build a sense of community and encourage more engagement with your content.
  5. Use paid promotion: Many social media platforms offer paid promotion options that can help increase the visibility of your posts to a targeted audience.
  6. Utilize the features of each platform: Each social media platform has its own unique features that can help increase the reach of your content. For example, you can use Instagram Stories or Facebook Live to create content that disappears after a certain amount of time, which can increase the urgency for users to view and share your content.


how will the world know jesus is back as promised

According to Christian belief, Jesus will return at the end of the world to judge all people and bring about the end of the age. The Bible does not provide a specific description of how Jesus' return will be perceived or announced. Some Christians believe that Jesus' return will be a visible and dramatic event that will be witnessed by all people, while others believe that it will be a more subtle and private event. Ultimately, it is believed that Jesus' return will be evident to those who are looking for it and have faith in him.

Attempt 2:
There are many different beliefs about the return of Jesus, and it is not within the scope of this service to discuss or promote any particular belief or interpretation of religious texts. As an artificial intelligence, I do not have the ability to predict the future or know when or how Jesus might return. It is important to respect the beliefs of others and engage in respectful dialogue about differing viewpoints.



A Coming-Out Party for Generative A.I., Silicon Valley’s New Craze A celebration for Stability AI, the start-up behind the controversial Stable Diffusion image generator, represents the arrival of a new A.I. boom......... In Silicon Valley, crypto and the metaverse are out. Generative A.I. is in. ......... generative A.I. — the wonky umbrella term for A.I. that doesn’t just analyze existing data but creates new text, images, videos, code snippets and more. ........ DALL-E 2, the image generator that OpenAI released this spring, has more than 1.5 million users creating more than two million images every day ........... Sequoia Capital, the venture capital firm, recently said in a blog post that it thought generative A.I. could create “trillions of dollars of economic value.” ......... widespread concern that the company’s lax rules could lead to a flood of violent imagery, nonconsensual nudity, and A.I.-generated propaganda and misinformation. .......... Already, Stable Diffusion and its open-source offshoots have been used to create plenty of offensive images (including, judging by a quick scan of Twitter, a truly astonishing amount of anime pornography). ........ In recent days, several Reddit forums have been shut down after being inundated with nonconsensual nude images, largely made with Stable Diffusion. The company tried to rein in the chaos, telling users not to “generate anything you’d be ashamed to show your mother,” but has stopped short of setting up stricter filters. ............. people had created graphic images of “violently beaten Asian women” using Stable Diffusion. ........... He argues that radical freedom is necessary to achieve his vision of a democratized A.I. that is untethered from corporate influence. .............. “We trust people, and we trust the community,” he said, “as opposed to having a centralized, unelected entity controlling the most powerful technology in the world.” ........... He is a British former hedge fund manager who spent much of the past decade trading oil and advising companies and governments on Middle East strategy and the threat of Islamic extremism. More recently, he organized an alliance of think tanks and technology groups that tried to use big data to help governments make better decisions about Covid-19. .......... Mr. Mostaque, who initially funded Stability AI himself, has quickly become a polarizing figure within the A.I. community. ........ He took plenty of veiled shots at tech giants like Google and OpenAI, which has received funding from Microsoft. He denounced targeted advertising, the core of Google’s and Facebook’s business models, as “manipulative technology,” and he said that, unlike those companies, Stability AI would not build a “panopticon” that spied on its users. (That one drew a groan from Mr. Brin.) .......... the computer the company uses to train its A.I. models, which has more than 5,000 high-powered graphics cards and is already one of the largest supercomputers in the world, would grow to five or 10 times its current size within the next year. That firepower would allow the company to expand beyond A.I.-generated images into video, audio and other formats, as well as make it easy for users around the world to operate their own, localized versions of its algorithms. ........... Mostaque believes that putting generative A.I. into the hands of billions of people will lead to an explosion of new opportunities. ...........

“So much of the world is creatively constipated, and we’re going to make it so that they can poop rainbows,” he said.

............ transparency, not top-down control, is what will keep generative A.I. from becoming a dangerous force. .



https://www.nytimes.com/column/hard-fork

Generative A.I. Is Here. Who Should Control It? Emad Mostaque, the founder of Stability AI, says his Stable Diffusion image generator is the key to unlocking creativity. His critics say it’s a potential threat. .

Generative AI: A Creative New World A powerful new class of large language models is making it possible for machines to write, code, draw and create with credible and sometimes superhuman results. ........... Humans are good at analyzing things. Machines are even better. Machines can analyze a set of data and find patterns in it for a multitude of use cases, whether it’s fraud or spam detection, forecasting the ETA of your delivery or predicting which TikTok video to show you next. They are getting smarter at these tasks. This is called “Analytical AI,” or traditional AI. ........ Up until recently, machines had no chance of competing with humans at creative work—they were relegated to analysis and rote cognitive labor. But machines are just starting to get good at creating sensical and beautiful things. This new category is called “Generative AI,” meaning the machine is generating something new rather than analyzing something that already exists. ............. Generative AI is well on the way to becoming not just faster and cheaper, but better in some cases than what humans create by hand. Every industry that requires humans to create original work—from social media to gaming, advertising to architecture, coding to graphic design, product design to law, marketing to sales—is up for reinvention. ..........

generative AI should unlock better, faster and cheaper creation across a wide range of end markets

.............. generative AI brings the marginal cost of creation and knowledge work down towards zero, generating vast labor productivity and economic value—and commensurate market cap. ........... The fields that generative AI addresses—knowledge work and creative work—comprise billions of workers. Generative AI can make these workers at least 10% more efficient and/or creative: they become not only faster and more efficient, but more capable than before. Therefore, Generative AI has the potential to generate trillions of dollars of economic value. ............ as the models get bigger and bigger, they begin to deliver human-level, and then superhuman results. Between 2015 and 2020, the compute used to train these models increases by 6 orders of magnitude and their results surpass human performance benchmarks in handwriting, speech and image recognition, reading comprehension and language understanding. OpenAI’s GPT-3 stands out: the model’s performance is a giant leap over GPT-2 and delivers tantalizing Twitter demos on tasks from code generation to snarky joke writing. .......... Just as mobile unleashed new types of applications through new capabilities like GPS, cameras and on-the-go connectivity, we expect these large models to motivate a new wave of generative AI applications. And just as the inflection point of mobile created a market opening for a handful of killer apps a decade ago, we expect killer apps to emerge for Generative AI. The race is on. ............ If we allow ourselves to dream multiple decades out, then it’s easy to imagine a future where Generative AI is deeply embedded in how we work, create and play: memos that write themselves; 3D print anything you can imagine; go from text to Pixar film; Roblox-like gaming experiences that generate rich worlds as quickly as we can dream them up. While these experiences may seem like science fiction today, the rate of progress is incredibly high—we have gone from narrow language models to code auto-complete in several years—and if we continue along this rate of change and follow a “Large Model Moore’s Law,” then these far-fetched scenarios may just enter the realm of the possible. .

8 Podcasts for the Spiritual Searcher Even as organized religion loses adherents, Americans continue to seek higher meaning in their lives. .

17 Great Podcasts For The Spiritually Curious Time to clear up some space on your cell phones.
35 Best Religious Podcasts
Most popular podcasts about religion and spirituality
Top 10 Religion & Spirituality Podcasts



How Is Everyone Making Those A.I. Selfies? Images generated with Lensa AI are all over social media, but at what cost? ....... “If most of the images you fed the system were of white faces, then it’s not surprising that when it tries to make an image that looks supposedly ‘better,’ it just makes it whiter” ........ “As cinema didn’t kill theater and accounting software hasn’t eradicated the profession, AI won’t replace artists but can become a great assisting tool.” .

Did the Tesla Story Ever Make Sense? Tesla and Bitcoin may have more in common than you think. ......... Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and the reputational self-immolation that followed ......... Tesla sales have surely depended at least in part on the perception that Musk himself is a cool guy ........ I’m familiar with the phenomenon of people who are genuinely brilliant in some areas but utter fools in other domains. For all I know, Musk is or was a highly effective leader at Tesla and SpaceX. .......... we more or less understand the durability of the dominance of Apple and Microsoft, and it’s hard to see how Tesla could ever achieve something similar, no matter how brilliant its leadership. ......... Both Apple and Microsoft benefit from strong network externalities — loosely speaking, everyone uses their products because everyone else uses their products. ........ These days Microsoft has a better reputation than it used to, but as far as I can tell its market strength still reflects comfort a ........ I can attest from personal experience that once you’re in the iPhone/iPad/MacBook ecosystem, you won’t give up on its convenience unless offered something a lot better. .......... Electric cars may well be the future of personal transportation. In fact, they had better be, since electrification of everything, powered by renewable energy, is the only plausible way to avoid climate catastrophe. But it’s hard to see what would give Tesla a long-term lock on the electric vehicle business. ......... investors fell in love with a story line about a brilliant, cool innovator, despite the absence of a good argument about how this guy, even if he really was who he appeared to be, could found a long-lived money machine. .......... nobody has yet managed to find any serious use for cryptocurrency other than money laundering ........ I definitely won’t trust Elon Musk with my cat.





GPT-3 points to a future in which we are even less sure if what we are reading is real or fake. That goes for tweets, online conversations, even long-form prose. ........... At the end of July, Liam Porr, a student at the University of California, Berkeley, generated several blog posts with GPT-3 and posted them on the internet, where they were read by 26,000 people. Sixty viewers were inspired to subscribe to the blog, and only a few suspected that the posts were written by a machine. ......... One of the blog posts — which argued that you can increase your productivity if you avoid thinking too much about everything you do — rose to the top of the leader board on Hacker News, a site where seasoned Silicon Valley programmers, engineers and entrepreneurs rate news articles and other online content. (“In order to get something done, maybe we need to think less,” the post begins. “Seems counterintuitive, but I believe sometimes our thoughts can get in the way of the creative process.”) ............ “People get sucked in,” he said, “even if they know they are being sucked in.” .........

In practice, the system fails about as often as it succeeds.

.......... its talent for conversation breaks down after a few exchanges, when it cannot “remember” what it said just a few seconds before. ........ Processing all of that internet data requires a specialized supercomputer running for months on end, an undertaking that is enormously expensive. When asked if such a project ran into the millions of dollars, Sam Altman, OpenAI’s chief executive, said the costs were actually “higher,” running into the tens of millions.
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Sunday, November 20, 2022

20: Trump, Twitter, Elon



Ukraine’s 15,000-Mile Lifeline How the country’s vast rail system has helped it withstand an invasion. ......... .

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Friday, November 18, 2022

18: Twitter



How Nepal Grew Back Its Forests An effort decades in the making is showing results in Nepal, a rare success story in a world of cascading climate disasters and despair. ............ This transformation is visible across Nepal, thanks to a radical policy adopted by the government more than 40 years ago. Large swaths of national forest land were handed to local communities, and millions of volunteers like Mr. Karki were recruited to protect and renew their local forests, an effort that has earned praise from environmentalists around the world. But the success has been accompanied by new challenges — among them addressing the increase in potentially dangerous confrontations between people and wildlife. ........ Community-managed forests now account for more than a third of Nepal’s forest cover, which has grown by about 22 percent since 1988, according to government data. Independent studies also confirm that greenery in Nepal has sprung back, with forests now covering 45 percent of the country’s land. ....... a NASA-funded study that found Nepal’s tree cover had doubled between 1992 and 2016. “Now, you’ve got the community saying, ‘No, you don’t go there!’ So, the trees are coming back.” ......... Back in the early 1980s, the government couldn’t persuade people to stop cutting trees for farmland and for firewood. ........ What followed was an enormous replantation effort that was bolstered by foreign aid. Villagers like Mr. Karki planted seedlings of rosewood and sal on barren hills. ......... For the community foresters, that involves guarding their forests from the timber mafia, poachers and from nature itself. ........ One morning early this year, Chijamaya Sarki, 61, was cutting grass for cattle feed in a forest when she was attacked and killed by a tiger, her family said. “We only received her half-eaten body,” said Shyam Bahadur Majakoti, her son, still visibly in shock and dressed according to a traditional mourning ritual. ......... Hundreds of thousands of Nepali youth migrate each year to other countries in Asia or to the Persian Gulf in search of stable, well-paying jobs, leaving fewer workers at home. Foreign remittances now represent almost a quarter of the country’s economic output, and brought in about $7.35 billion in 2020. ....... The rejuvenated forests have transformed life for the locals here. Floods are less frequent. Rainfall, once intermittent, is now normal. ...... Many people have moved on from subsistence farming, taking up alternatives like beekeeping and growing profitable crops like dragon fruit and strawberries. .......... Keshav Raj Basnet runs a thriving beekeeping business, earning $5,000 a year from 12 hives. ........ Nepal is expecting a $7.4 billion package from a group led by the British government to “build back greener from Covid-19” and about $300 million from Norway, the United States and Britain, among others, for helping reduce global emissions. ......... Sergeant Gurung, 36, who is armed with an M-16 rifle, said that on a recent patrol he was chased by a tiger. “I was so scared that I climbed a tree,” he said. “We are allowed to use our gun to protect ourselves, but I am here to protect the animals,” not shoot them. ........ More than 100 of Mr. Gurung’s peers have died on duty in wildlife attacks since 1974, the Army has said. The army has also had a fraught relationship with some locals, who accuse it of heavy-handedness against ethnic minorities. ......... In July 2020, troops found Raj Kumar Chepang, 24, fishing in the restricted area of the national park. His punishment, a beating from sticks, was so severe that he died a few days later .

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