North Korea has sold hundreds of thousands of artillery shells to Russia, and it has been making a difference in the Ukraine War. However, North Korea will probably exhaust its stockpiles of surplus shells next year, after which point its transfers to Russia will slow to a trickle.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ghost-ships-reawakened-north-korea-210000233.html
Last March, the E.U. promised to give Ukraine 1 million artillery shells over the next year. It’s been eight months, and the actual number transferred is 300,000. The E.U. admits it will fall short of the 1 million goal by March 2024.
https://www.politico.eu/article/arms-makers-cant-drop-exports-to-meet-ukraine-ammo-target-says-defense-agency-chief/
Ukraine’s amphibious attacks across the Dnipro River have been expensive failures.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ukraine-situation-report-troops-question-dnipro-river-assault
A Ukrainian cruise missile attack sank a Russian warship that was docked. Dozens of sailors died.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/full-devastation-from-cruise-missile-attack-on-russian-ship-coming-into-view
The identities of 40,599 Russians who died fighting in Ukraine have been confirmed by third parties. The list of names is not exhaustive, and the true death count is probably around 50,000. That means Russia is on track to lose as many men in Ukraine in two years as America lost in Vietnam in 10 years.
https://en.zona.media/article/2022/05/20/casualties_eng
Israeli troops accidentally shot three of their countrymen dead in Gaza while they were fleeing from their Hamas captors, leading to protests on the home front and accusations that Israeli soldiers often kill Palestinian civilians in the same manner.
https://apnews.com/article/israel-hostages-gaza-hamas-war-52fa9628e6284cdad6d7f7db6cc30742
Israel’s warplanes have dropped several 2,000 lbs bombs on the Gaza Strip, probably leading to excess deaths considering how crowded it is there.
https://www.cnn.com/gaza-israel-big-bombs/index.html
New evidence shows that Hamas didn’t abduct Noa Argamani–a woman made infamous by footage of her being literally dragged into Gaza by a gang of men–a random group of Gazan men did. After hearing that Israel’s defenses were down on October 7, impromptu gangs of AVERAGE CITIZENS took advantage of the situation by going across the border to kill and kidnap people from Israel.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/noa-argamani-israel-hamas-hostages-nova-music-festival-rcna129792
At the highest levels, the U.S. government is turning against Israel’s invasion of Gaza.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/12/12/biden-says-netanyahu-has-to-change-00131399
153 out of 186 countries in the U.N. voted in favor of an immediate cease-fire between Israel and Gaza. The U.S. voted against because the language of the resolution didn’t also denounce Hamas’ violence against Israelis on October 7.
https://www.npr.org/2023/12/12/1218927939/un-general-assembly-gaza-israel-resolution-cease-fire-us
A majority of Venezuelans voted in favor of annexing the oil-rich western half of their neighbor, Guyana. However, Venezuela’s military is probably too weak to take it over. If it tried anyway, the diplomatic blowback and possible counterattack from the U.S. would cause too much damage to make it worth it.
https://youtu.be/mWSE9dPEx6Y?si=99L48-b1tNxCaFks
Italy has left China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/12/6/italy-leaving-chinas-belt-and-road-initiative-reports
The Turks committed mass murders of Armenians even before the 1915 Genocide.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hamidian_massacres
Twelve years after the fall of Qaddafi, Libya is still a mess. The populated, northwestern chunk is led by the “Government of National Accord,” most of the east and middle is controlled by General Haftar and a puppet government he created, and the far south is controlled by local tribes.
https://www.gisreportsonline.com/r/europe-mistakes-libya/
The threat of Trump withdrawing the U.S. from NATO if he wins reelection is real. Though the Constitution requires a 2/3 affirmative vote in the Senate for the U.S. to join an international treaty, it has no rules for leaving a treaty. In practice, the President can unilaterally do it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/09/us/politics/trump-2025-nato.html
The U.S. and Finland signed a defense treaty that gives U.S. troops extensive access to Finnish territory.
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202312/19/WS6580f130a31040ac301a862e.html
A man was almost killed when an RPG-7 he was firing as a YouTube stunt malfunctioned. The rocket exploded right in front of his face.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/25087438/horror-moment-youtuber-rocket-launcher-explode/
This video of a .50 caliber rifle bullet hitting a fake human torso shows the round’s devastating terminal ballistics. However, I’m actually surprised it isn’t worse.
https://youtu.be/fUOh7a0cdUw?si=vqMNW960m9Pciok0
The rise of social media has busted so many myths, including those about guns. The AR-15 got a reputation for unreliability in the Vietnam War, and is still considered to be less reliable than the AK-47 by average people. In fact, all of the former rifle’s problems were fixed decades ago, and it’s an excellent weapon and is better than the AK-47. Militaries of countries allied with the U.S. should just switch to using our rifle, without any modifications. To that end, in this video, a cheap ($399) AR-15 fires flawlessly in spite of being dunked in mud.
The new myth that needs to be busted is the existence of anything but a weak correlation between the price of a gun and its quality. For example, an $800 AR-15 is not twice as accurate, twice as durable, or half as heavy as the $399 AR-15 shown in this video. Past a certain price point, you’re purely wasting your money. A lot of gun nuts who like bragging about their boutique weapons will be disturbed to discover how low that price cutoff is.
https://youtu.be/27R5bKu5Myo?si=0RVvEUUA4P0fgO9Q
The inventor of the Glock handgun died at 94. Replacing metal with plastic for the major parts of guns was the last, big innovation in firearms technology.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12906249/Glock-handguns-reclusive-inventor-Gaston-Glock-94-dies-Billionaire-knocked-professional-wrestler-assassin-sent-kill-aged-70-revolutionised-world-small-arms.html
In WWI, the different sides had different kinds of artillery pieces with their own strengths and weaknesses.
https://youtu.be/aPfZ84RB2AA?si=wIc-u6WWBFIr-z14
The video game Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 has a multiplayer combat mode called “Swarm Killstreak,” in which players fight with a swarm of air-dropped mini-drones. It depicts something I envisioned years ago, and which takes a page from the WWII “Bat Bomb” concept.
https://youtu.be/_Fl1XJhmf0k?si=lf7PDh9aZ9LEnDXW
The 2011 game Crysis 2 was set in 2023.
‘The player assumes the control of a Force Recon Marine named “Alcatraz”, who gains ownership of the Nanosuit 2.0 from Army Delta Force officer Laurence “Prophet” Barnes, who returns from the original Crysis. CryNet Systems has been hunting Prophet to retrieve the suit, inadvertently pursuing Alcatraz, believing he is Prophet. The aliens seen in the original game have undergone a major redesigning, abandoning the ancient, tentacled exosuits seen in the first game for high-tech humanoid armored war machines that stalk Alcatraz through the ravaged New York City.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crysis_2
The 2000 game Perfect Dark was also set in 2023.
‘Perfect Dark is set in an alternate 2023 against the backdrop of an interstellar war between two alien races:[18] the Maians, who resemble the archetypal Grey alien, and the Skedar, reptile-like creatures who use a cloaking device to appear human. On Earth, there is an ongoing rivalry between two companies: The Carrington Institute, a research centre founded by Daniel Carrington that secretly operates an espionage group in league with the Maians; and dataDyne, a defence contractor corporation headed by Cassandra de Vries. In exchange for creating an AI with code-breaking abilities to access an ancient alien spacecraft at the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, the Skedar agree to supply dataDyne with enough alien technology to become the biggest corporation on Earth.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perfect_Dark
100 years ago, a British book series called To-day and To-morrow made a large number of predictions about the future, some of which were very accurate.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20231212-to-day-and-to-morrow-the-100-year-old-series-that-predicted-a-wild-and-wonderful-future
Here’s a roundup of the worst political predictions of 2023.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2023/12/29/2023-worst-political-predictions-00132568
In November 2022, Bank of America Global Research predicted that the S&P 500 would not rise beyond 4,000 by the end of 2023. At the time, it was 3,963.94.
In reality, the S&P 500 is now 4,773.50, so if you’d done the opposite of what “the experts” had said, you would have increased your money by almost 20% in just a year.
https://news.yahoo.com/bank-of-america-us-equity-outlook-stock-market-165556408.html
Now, Bank of America Global Research predicts the S&P 500 will reach 5,000 by the end of 2024, and that an economic “soft landing” will be achieved, meaning no recession.
https://newsroom.bankofamerica.com/content/newsroom/press-releases/2023/11/bofa-global-research-calls-2024–the-year-of-the-landing–.html
UBS, which is no less credible than Bank of America, predicts the U.S. will fall into a recession by mid-2024.
https://www.businessinsider.com/stock-market-outlook-2024-recession-fed-interest-rate-cuts-ubs-2023-11
In reality, the experts probably have no clue how the economy will perform in 2024.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/23/business/wall-st-loves-to-guess-but-nobody-knows-what-the-market-will-do-in-2024.html
There are industrial scale clothes washers that are like a huge Archimedes’ Screw divided into smaller internal compartments.
https://youtu.be/_amWLDj9H6o?si=-1ZQjHaiMJDUVoiz
This series of animations shows how the first steam engines evolved from even simpler designs.
https://rootsofprogress.org/steam-engine-origins
‘Electrified vehicles – either fully electric models, plug-in hybrids or full hybrids – accounted for over 47.6% of all new passenger car registrations in the EU as of November, up from 43% in the same period last year, the European Automobile Manufacturers Association (ACEA) said.’
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nearly-half-passenger-cars-eu-070341617.html
“Hyperloop One,” which sought to revolutionize transit by building vacuum tubes wide enough to fit car-sized vehicles, is shutting down. Elon Musk and Richard Branson were directly involved with the concept.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67801235
The Xprize has been mostly successful spurring innovation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xprize_Foundation
The U.S. is now producing more oil than any country in history.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/12/19/business/us-production-oil-reserves-crude/index.html
It might be possible to defuse volcanoes to prevent them from erupting.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20231221-volcano-geoengineering-eruption-lava-iceland-reykjanes
Because the Earth spins on its axis, it isn’t a perfect sphere: the equatorial belt bulges out. This imperfection in turn means that the distance between two neighboring parallels of latitude increases as you travel from the equator towards either pole.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-distance-between-the-parallels-of-latitude
From 2014. “Automated hypothesis generation” has been around for awhile, and was allegedly useful even nine years ago.
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2014/10/04/computer-says-try-this
“Nudify” apps that can “digitally undress” people in photos are becoming widespread. It won’t be long before deep learning algorithms can deduce with high accuracy what a person’s nude body looks like based on photos of them with clothes on. The more photos you upload, the more accurate the simulation will get. And if you could get a DNA sample from a napkin they threw away or something, it would be super accurate.
https://time.com/6344068/nudify-apps-undress-photos-women-artificial-intelligence/
During a live press conference open to members of the public, a deepfake version of Putin asked the real Putin a question.
https://youtu.be/bhyKblF2NB4?si=RS8Yw24FzrqBKyaA
Pakistan’s former prime minister is using an AI voice clone to campaign from prison
https://www.theverge.com/2023/12/18/24006968/imran-khan-ai-pakistan-prime-minister-voice-clone-elevenlabs
This video’s prediction that there will be “artificial actors” who are composites of traits from human actors, optimized for specific character roles, is intriguing. Imagine those invented AI characters being so appealing that we eventually transplant them into android bodies so they can walk among us. And at a more basic level, since machines are already super strong and it’s widely accepted they will also be super smart someday, why not also assume they will be superior in the domains of personality? Super noble, super empathetic, super courageous, super funny? They’ll be more interesting and desirable than fellow humans, and if we put their minds in android bodies, those will be more appealing that average human bodies as well.
https://youtu.be/V2b5ScHpmKo?si=juAyBuWUuCvlDVQL
Google unveiled its “Gemini” narrow AI, though some wind was taken out of their sails when it was revealed that the very impressive demo video was largely faked.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/12/google-admits-it-fudged-a-gemini-ai-demo-video-which-critics-say-misled-viewers/
ALL of today’s advanced chatbots have a left-leaning bias except for Mistral.
https://trackingai.org/
The CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amodei, seems to believe that the Turing Test will be passed in 2 – 3 years.
https://youtu.be/Nlkk3glap_U?si=GKVpaA1mf4rCS_Kz&t=1671
Meta’s Chief AI Scientist Yann LeCun talks about the future of artificial intelligence
https://youtu.be/Ah6nR8YAYF4?si=FrZ_LUEKDWXJT-Mr
The Midjourney image generator was first released in February 2022. Its outputs were coarse at first, but have rapidly improved thanks to upgrades to its programming and training data. The latest version of it can create nearly lifelike, accurate images.
From 10 years ago: “Mars One wants to land the first group (two men and two women, ideally from four different continents, says CEO Bas Lansdorp) on the red planet in 2023, with the other groups following one at a time, every two years. Applications close August 31, 2013.”
https://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-04/apply-now-one-way-trip-mars/
Jokes aside, I think the 2040s is an achievable timeframe for landing the first humans on Mars. It’s been made possible by Elon Musk bringing down the cost of space flight so much, and his development of the Starship rocket, which could transport a space ship with room for several astronauts to Mars.
The best way to colonize Venus might be to build floating cloud cities.
https://youtu.be/Y7Q2lCrZY6Q?si=VgSyidJNkFCOIGRz
Sabine Hossenfelder thinks faster-than-light travel could be possible.
https://youtu.be/9-jIplX6Wjw?si=j_INh_pduzlTVzr3
The famous “Gimbal” UFO video shows an object with anomalous flight characteristics.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uoORs8rVfOGUYHTAOWn32A5bLA0jckuU/view?
The UFO sighted by U.S. Navy ships and fighter pilots in a different 2004 encounter violated the known laws of physics and engineering.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1WgURI1Fzrkij3utVvcPISGTyEUNX4Z0J/view
A computer program called “X-Raydar” proved itself as good as human radiologists at correctly interpreting chest X-ray images.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/ckdpg5p820xo
‘The estimate is that AlphaFold structures have somewhere between 7 and 20% of the side chain residues in an incorrect orientation – sometimes slightly off, sometimes way off. Those percentages seem to be the same for functional side chains as well as ones that are away from the action.
…That makes the current state of the art in protein structure prediction very useful as a hypothesis generator (and far beyond anything we had before), but it also means that, at least as we move into 2024, that it cannot replace experimental data, either. My own guess is that improvements in accuracy may turn out to be a sort of “last mile” problem that is unlikely to be solved by the sort of sudden advances that got us this far. ‘
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/alphafold-s-place-world
Thanks to a phenomenon called “crossing over” that occurs during the production of sperm and eggs, the amount of DNA you share with any individual ancestor can deviate from the expected quantum. For example, while 50% of your DNA is from your father and 50% is from your mother, you might share 24% with your paternal grandfather and 26% with your paternal grandmother.
A slight, multigenerational skewing of the inheritance ratio can result in you actually sharing no DNA with some famous ancestor that you brag about being connected to.
https://gcbias.org/2017/12/19/1628/
https://www.genome.gov/genetics-glossary/Crossing-Over
It’s actually not true that all siblings share 50% of their genes. Thanks to the random reassortment of genes that happens during meiosis (the biological process that makes sperm and eggs), it’s possible for two full siblings to share as little as 40% and as much as 60% of their DNA (though that’s only the case for about 1% of sibling pairs). 50% is merely the population-wide average.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/why-siblings-differ-differently
A lesbian couple that wanted to have kids used IVF to fertilize both of their eggs with sperm from the same male donor. To better achieve closeness with their children, the women then impregnated themselves with one of the other partner’s zygotes.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12897223/Couple-expecting-sons.html
Over 1 million unused fertilized human eggs are in cold storage at IVF clinics.
https://www.wsj.com/lifestyle/relationships/adoption-invitro-foster-care-surrogacy-17400499
‘The world’s largest collection of full human genomes has just gone live. UK Biobank — a repository of health, genomic and other biological data — today released complete genome sequences from every one of the 500,000 British volunteers in the database.’
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03763-3
For the first time, the FDA has approved gene editing treatments for disease. Both of them target sickle cell anemia. Just one treatment is probably enough to cure someone permanently, but it costs $2-3 million.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/12/08/1217123089/fda-approves-first-gene-editing-treatments-for-human-illness
Contrary to the mainstream narrative, people with mental disorders are more likely to be the victims of violence AND the perpetrators of violence than mentally healthy people. Even having anxiety or depression–two very common mental illnesses–raise the odds you will commit violence against someone.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2758324
The human body contains several vestigial parts. Whenever radical genetic engineering becomes available, I bet we will eliminate them.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/health/25029504/pointless-body-parts-never-heard-of/
‘Last month, in Fresno, California, police arrested a Chinese national, who had changed his name multiple times, on charges of selling misbranded Covid-19 tests. That allegation is the tip of the iceberg. According to a report from a congressional committee, the man – part of a transnational criminal enterprise funded from China and on the run from a court ruling in Canada – was operating a large, chaotic, secret laboratory in which were found samples of viruses including Covid, HIV, hepatitis B and C, dengue and rubella, plus, according to a label on a freezer, ebola. Oh, and a thousand genetically engineered mice.
…Even if he was just a rogue criminal with no connection to the Chinese government, it is alarming because, as the congressional committee put it, ‘a disturbing realisation is that no one knows whether there are other unknown biolabs in the US because there is no monitoring system in place [and] the US currently does not conduct oversight of privately funded research, including enhancement of potential pandemic pathogens’. There could be labs like this all over America, let alone Asia.’
https://www.mattridley.co.uk/blog/virology-poses-a-far-greater-threat-to-the-world-than-ai/
The COVID-19 lab leak theory won’t die.
https://usrtk.org/covid-19-origins/american-scientists-misled-pentagon-on-wuhan-research/
