Category: technology

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/

More information has emerged about Hamas’ planning for the October 7 attack and its ultimate goals. They’re smarter than we want to admit.
https://www.businessinsider.com/hamas-second-phase-regional-war-october-7-terrorist-attacks-israel-2023-11

The high amount of collateral damage inflicted by Israeli strikes (the Gazans have now suffered ten times the deaths Israelis did on October 7) on Gaza is exacting a diplomatic toll on Israel.

• Bolivia, Chile and Columbia recalled their ambassadors from Israel.
  https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/1/bolivia-cuts-ties-with-israel-other-latin-american-countries-recall-envoys
• Over 300,000 people marched in London to support the Palestinians and demand an end to Israel’s attacks.
  https://www.npr.org/2023/11/11/1212496317/london-gaza-israel-protest-ceasefire-uk

I agree with Peter Zeihan that the current Israeli-Palestinian conflict is highly unlikely to become a regional conflict. It’s not worth it for any significant country to join in.
https://youtu.be/ymOTXoLlOQ0?si=rBDDceGwSeljYfEz

Fortunately for Israel, Hezbollah militants in Lebanon have decided to stay out of the war, easing early fears that the conflict could widen. Average Palestinians in Lebanon are disappointed.
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/11/12/palestinians-in-lebanon-disappointed-that-hezbollah-wont-escalate

Only the Iranian-backed Houthi rebel group in Yemen has joined the war and directly attacked Israel.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/19/yemens-houthi-rebels-seize-cargo-ship-in-red-sea-israel-blames-iran
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/14/yemens-houthis-say-they-fired-ballistic-missiles-towards-israel

Israel and Hamas have agreed to a multi-day ceasefire and are exchanging prisoners. It’s unclear how long the arrangement will endure.
https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-news-11-30-2023-ea1a8fad4e2f4a394e5427a7c5815d38

Ukraine’s top general, Commander-in-chief Valery Zaluzhnyy, has publicly said the war with Russia is at a “stalemate,” and that only a massive increase in Western-supplied military aid can give Ukraine a decisive advantage.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/11/02/top-ukrainian-generals-gloomy-view-of-russia-war-fuels-military-aid-debate-00125052

Ukraine’s manpower shortage is evidence by the fact that its average soldier is 43 years old.
https://www.businessinsider.com/average-age-ukrainian-soldier-43-amid-personnel-problems-2023-11

In a remarkable video showing the incongruities of the Ukraine War, Ukrainian troops use a century-old machine gun to try shooting down a Russian drone.
https://www.businessinsider.com/video-ukraine-shooting-with-ww1-era-machine-guns-pickup-trucks-2023-11

In May, Ukraine used U.S.-supplied Patriot missiles to shoot down several enemy military aircraft that were flying within Russia’s borders.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/aircraft-downed-inside-russia-by-patriot-system-ukrainian-air-force

The Russian military’s huge losses in Ukraine make this 2020 article all the funnier: “Before Donald Trump, Russia Needed 60 Hours To Beat NATO—Now Moscow Could Win Much Faster”
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2020/06/07/before-donald-trump-russia-needed-60-hours-to-beat-nato-now-moscow-could-win-much-faster/

It has been ten years since the fateful political events in Ukraine set the country on course for war with Russia. From Russia’s perspective, a pro-Western coup illegally overthrew Ukraine’s pro-Russian President, the Russian minority population living in eastern Ukraine was understandably alarmed and threatened by that, and decided to respond with a politically illegal action of their own, which was to secede from Ukraine and join Russia. Russian troops then invaded to protect them (in a move no different from U.S. invasions of countries to protect minority groups), and to signal to everyone that pulling Ukraine out of its hegemony would be very costly.
https://apnews.com/article/ukraine-uprising-anniversary-russia-war-maidan-2f73f31a5aec45bd7dbcddae8f72edac

Putin withdrew his country from the Treaty on Conventional Armed Forces in Europe (CFE). NATO claims Russia has actually been noncompliant with it since 2007.  
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/11/7/russia-pulls-out-of-treaty-on-conventional-armed-forces-in-europe

Your tax dollars at work: A jet pack with a handgun mounted to it that points at what the person is looking at.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/jetpack-features-glock-autopistol-aimed-by-moving-your-head

America’s new stealth bomber, the B-21, made its first public flight.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/b-21-raiders-first-flight-what-we-learned

The old F-15 is still going strong thanks to modern upgrades.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/f-15qa-flies-demo-unlike-any-weve-seen-from-an-eagle-before

It costs millions of dollars to train a human pilot to fly a warplane. In other words, the pilots are expensive assets, which is why planes have features meant to protect their lives like ejection seats and cockpit armor. Once computers can fly planes as well as humans, the expensive safety features will be deleted, allowing air forces to buy more aircraft for the same price as before. The aircraft themselves will be slightly smaller and flimsier.
https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR2415.html

The Office of Naval Research is experimenting with an advanced, unmanned submarine that can release a drone that can swim underwater AND fly in the air.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/drones-that-swim-and-fly-to-be-launched-recovered-by-uncrewed-submarine

During the 2003 Iraq Invasion, Coalition forces found several WWII-era tanks of different origins.
https://youtu.be/XanoreTMPco?si=1KRjM7SEJWnULFIL

Before there was Kevlar, there was an inferior material called “ballistic nylon,” which is similar to what car seatbelts are still made of. The bulky WWII and Vietnam-era flak jackets were made of several layers of it, at best making them proof against 9mm handgun rounds and small shrapnel. Some soft, heavy-duty backpacks and suitcases are still made of ballistic nylon.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flak_jacket
https://youtu.be/cUABtyovgFE?si=VrH6nGpZ4zW0bvPJ&t=372

Thin, flexible, Kevlar body armor can be worn under a shirt and offers better protection than the thick ballistic nylon flak jacket vests.
https://www.israel-catalog.com/body-armor/military-surplus/bullet-proof-vest-ultralight-concealed-level-iia

Under American “NIJ” body armor standards, the old flak jackets would offer “Type I” protection, whereas thin, modern Kevlar armor would be “Type IIa.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_body_armor_performance_standards

There was high drama at OpenAI as the Board of Directors voted to fire the company’s CEO and public face, Sam Altman, for unexplained reasons. The decision was reversed within days after 95% of the company’s workforce threatened to quit unless he was reinstated, including one of the board members who voted to fire him.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-67494165

There are rumors that a secret breakthrough in AI precipitated Altman’s firing. An OpenAI internal project called “Q*” apparently led to major improvements in their AI’s ability to solve math problems, which even the best, publicly available LLMs are notoriously bad at. Some claim the Board felt Altman’s management of Q* had been too reckless.
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/11/27/1083886/unpacking-the-hype-around-openais-rumored-new-q-model/

Google’s “Bard” LLM now has the ability to watch videos and to summarize their contents in text, and to answer questions about what happened in them.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/22/23972636/bard-youtube-extension-update-search-video-content

In a study, humans thought ChatGPT’s answers to life questions showed more empathy than the answers written by professional human columnists.
‘We selected 10 newspaper advice columns: Ask a Manager, Ask Amy, Ask E. Jean, Ask Ellie, Dear Abby, Dear Annie, Dear Prudence, Miss Manners, Social Q’s, and The Ethicist. These columns were chosen because they were well-known and fielded a wide range of questions that we could access. For each column, we selected at random five questions. ‘
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1281255/

ChatGPT can, thanks to its new speech ability, hold conversations with people for hours, echoing the core tech predictions of the 2013 movie Her.
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2023/10/people-are-speaking-with-chatgpt-for-hours-bringing-2013s-her-closer-to-reality/

Bill Gates predicts everyone will have personal assistant AIs in five years.
https://www.gatesnotes.com/AI-agents

Bill Gates also predicts that automation will shrink the human work week to four or even three days, and that people will derive less personal meaning from their jobs.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/bill-gates-suggests-artificial-intelligence-could-potentially-bring-three-day-work-week

The new narrow AIs are already destroying human jobs.

The British Department of Education has produced a list of occupations that are most and least at risk of automation. Ironically, blue-collar jobs are the safest.
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/656856b8cc1ec500138eef49/Gov.UK_Impact_of_AI_on_UK_Jobs_and_Training.pdf

DeepMind has created working definitions for different levels of AI, including ones that don’t exist yet.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2311.02462.pdf

DeepMind has created a new computer called “GraphCast” that can predict the weather better than any previous model.
https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/graphcast-ai-model-for-faster-and-more-accurate-global-weather-forecasting/

This futurist speculates about the potential uses of a highly accurate computer simulation of the Earth and all its inhabitants, infrastructure, and technology.
“With a refined enough digital replica of our world, the Hypercycle could become a testbed for radical new solutions to humanity’s greatest problems. We could simulate the effects of proposed policies on climate change, disease outbreaks, income inequality, food production, or infrastructure resilience before deploying them in reality. Problems that seem persistently intractable today may yield to this computational brute-force approach.”
https://futuristspeaker.com/artificial-intelligence/the-rise-of-hypercycle-in-the-age-of-terabyters/

Ben Goertzel predicts that AGI will be created in three to eight years.
https://decrypt.co/204571/artificial-intelligence-singularity-ai-ben-goertzel-singularitynet

Of course, Goertzel has been wrong before.

• 2017: “I’ll be pretty surprised if we don’t have toddler-level AGI in the range 2023-25, actually.”
• 2008: “My own (Ben Goertzel’s) personal intuition is that a human-toddler-level AGI could be created based on OpenCogPrime within as little as 3-5 years, and almost certainly within 7-10 years.”

At a New Jersey high school, a student used a computer to superimpose the faces of several female classmates onto internet photos of nude women, and sent them to friends at the high school. This problem of deepfake pornography will only get worse with time.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/new-jersey-parent-pans-schools-handling-ai-generated-porn-images-featuring-daughters-face

‘Meet Aitana: Sexy Spanish model makes $11k a month thanks to her racy photos — but she isn’t real’
https://nypost.com/2023/11/25/lifestyle/meet-aitana-sexy-spanish-model-makes-11k-a-month-thanks-to-her-racy-photos-but-she-isnt-real/

“Etak” was a car navigation system that made its debut in 1985. Map data were stored on cassette tapes. ‘The tapes could not hold much information, so for the Los Angeles area, for example, three to four tapes were required. When an edge of the map was reached, the driver needed to change cassette tapes to continue benefitting from the accuracy of map-matching.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Etak

WeWork, the fake “tech company” that was once valued at $47 billion, has filed for bankruptcy.
https://www.cnbc.com/2023/11/07/wework-files-for-bankruptcy.html

Nature has retracted the recent paper that claimed to have found a room-temperature, room-pressure superconductor.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03398-4

You would never guess that pre-digital computer jukeboxes contained so much incredible technology.
https://youtu.be/o1qRzKuskK0?si=WobdRRlxGnxIGdEM

Microphones and speakers are improving thanks to ultrasonic technology.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/mems-speakers-xmems

A prediction I made in 2019 just came true, thanks to a Black Friday sale: “I think the current rate of price-performance improvement for thumb drives will continue until a 1TB thumb drive costs only $20. They will probably be that cheap by the end of 2022, but because I’m cautious, I predict the milestone will be reached by the end of 2023.”
https://www.militantfuturist.com/one-of-my-predictions-failed/

Between 2012 and 2022, the cost of desalinating water sharply dropped. The most efficient desalination plant today can produce 6.4 gallons of drinkable water for one penny.
https://galepooley.substack.com/p/desalinating-water-is-becoming-absurdly

Global warming has changed the boundaries of American crop growing zones.
https://www.npr.org/2023/11/17/1213600629/-it-feels-like-im-not-crazy-gardeners-arent-surprised-as-usda-updates-key-map

The New Jersey government has been secretly storing blood extracted from newborns to test for genetic disorders for years, and has been selling genetic data derived from it and giving it to the police for genetic fingerprinting .
https://reason.com/2023/11/08/new-jersey-secretly-stores-your-newborns-blood-for-decades/

‘Frozen Dead Guy Days (started 2002) is an annual celebration held in the town of Nederland, Colorado until 2023 and in Estes Park, Colorado in 2023, to loosely celebrate the cryopreservation of Bredo Morstoel.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frozen_Dead_Guy_Days

Medical researchers created a machine that can keep pig brains alive for five hours after their heads are severed.
https://futurism.com/neoscope/device-keep-brain-alive

Some surgeons are using cardiopulmonary bypass machines to restart blood circulation in people who have just been declared legally dead, so their hearts can be removed for organ donation without suffering damage.
https://www.deccanherald.com/opinion/when-does-life-stop-a-new-way-of-harvesting-organs-divides-doctors-3-2782014

Here’s a great roundup of research projects to reverse human aging.
https://amaranth.foundation/bottlenecks-of-aging

A new study confirms that the weight loss drug “Wegovy” reduces the risk of heart attack and stroke by 20%.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/11/11/health/wegovy-cardiovascular-events/index.html

The FDA has approved another weight loss drug called “Zepbound.”
https://investor.lilly.com/news-releases/news-release-details/fda-approves-lillys-zepboundtm-tirzepatide-chronic-weight

Putting aside politics, the COVID-19 vaccine DID make some people very sick with side effects, in some cases causing permanent injury. In the U.S., getting compensation for the resulting medical bills and disability is exceedingly hard.
https://reason.com/2023/11/21/lawsuit-covid-vaccine-injury-claims-diverted-to-unconstitutional-kangaroo-court/

Computers have gotten dramatically better at predicting the properties of molecules based on their chemical structures, and vice versa. Further improvements are possible, opening the door to a new era in drug development.
https://www.cell.com/cell-systems/fulltext/S2405-4712(23)00298-3

“Tyrian purple,” a long-forgotten pigment that was the mark of wealth in the Roman Empire, has been rediscovered. Eventually, we will figure out how the pigment was made, as well as unravel any other mysteries about lost chemical compounds (e.g. – Greek Fire) thanks to quantum computers simulating every possible combination of elements and their resulting properties.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20231122-tyrian-purple-the-lost-ancient-pigment-that-was-more-valuable-than-gold

Computers can help radiologists spot breast cancer in mammograms.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41591-023-02625-9

More on that:
https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/blog/gpt-4s-potential-in-shaping-the-future-of-radiology/

In 2015, a remarkable, daytime sighting of a group of UFOs over Osaka, Japan was captured on video. I only found out about this now.
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/weird-news/ufo-sighting-video-captures-10-6146943

SpaceX’s “Starship” rocket had its second launch. Though it malfunctioned and exploded, it had clearly overcome many of the problems revealed by the first launch in April. That mission lasted four minutes, while this one lasted eight.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-67462116

Here are some impressive photos of the Starship in flight.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/starships-33-engines-created-the-mother-of-all-shock-diamonds

A Dyson Swarm could double as an incredibly powerful weapon. We could defend our Solar System from aliens and fry planets on the other side of the galaxy.
https://youtu.be/tybKnGZRwcU?si=kFlIuiSfpVOrjew3

In France, a tiny meteorite hit and totaled a car. “Either it’s so small that we can’t find it, or the impact was so strong that the object disintegrated and turned to dust.”
https://www.autoblog.com/2023/11/22/it-appears-this-renault-clio-campus-was-struck-by-a-meteorite/

Hamas, the organization that governs the Gaza Strip and is widely considered to be a terrorist group, conducted an unprecedented raid against several nearby towns in Israel. Teams of armed men, including some on paragliders, breached Israel’s border defenses at multiple points early on October 7 and spent the day killing as many Israelis as they could before being driven back. Over 1,400 Israelis were killed, and over 200 more were dragged back to Gaza as hostages.

• Israel’s government formally declared war on Hamas and vowed to invade the Gaza Strip to destroy the organization and rescue the hostages.
  https://www.voanews.com/a/israel-officially-declares-war-on-hamas-after-surprise-attack-/7301836.html
• Most Israelis want to strongly retaliate against Hamas, but also blame their current government for lapses that let the October 7 attack happen.
  https://www.yahoo.com/news/netanyahu-blame-war-four-five-122326562.html
• There are no good options for dealing with Gaza after the current war ends. Israel might have been baited into a lose-lose situation.
  https://www.economist.com/briefing/2023/10/19/israels-four-unpalatable-options-for-gazas-long-term-future
• Contrary to what the news media breathlessly says, there’s very little reason to think the Israel-Palestine war will lead to WWIII.
  https://youtu.be/OagYlYna75Y?si=_pUS02-3wm8M6NG3
• Names of the hostages Hamas is holding.
  https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/2023-10-22/ty-article-magazine/hostages-held-by-hamas-the-names-of-those-abducted-from-israel/0000018b-55f8-d5d2-afef-d5fdd04e0000
• A quarter of the hostages are Thais who were in southern Israel as agricultural guest workers.
  https://youtu.be/7qxY2fjvGhE?si=dsLmw7mrqycrbuP3
• Israel used white phosphorus artillery shells against targets in Gaza. This is controversial since many people consider the weapon inhumane as it causes severe chemical burns to human flesh.
  https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/10/12/israel-white-phosphorus-used-gaza-lebanon
• Here’s an interesting article about ground-penetrating radar, which Israel might use to find and destroy Hamas’ network of underground tunnels in Gaza.
  https://www.timesofisrael.com/radar-barrier-could-detect-gaza-tunnels-experts-say/
• Russia has taken the Palestinian side in the diplomatic arena of the conflict.
  https://www.dailysabah.com/world/mid-east/israeli-siege-of-gaza-comparable-to-nazi-siege-of-leningrad-putin
• The Palestinians have received unprecedented levels of support from people in other countries. For example, over 100,000 people demonstrated in London for their cause.
  https://www.npr.org/2023/10/21/1207781842/london-pro-palestinian-protests-gaza
• Hundreds of Palestinians died in a blast near a packed Gaza hospital. While both sides blame each other, the best evidence suggests it was caused by an errant Hamas missile that crashed shortly after takeoff.
  https://www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-67216929
• In Israel, many families have requested doctors harvest sperm from their male relatives killed on October 7 so children might be conceived through IVF. This is a common practice in Israel.
  https://www.timesofisrael.com/embryologists-inundated-with-requests-for-sperm-retrieval-from-the-fallen-and-dead/

The U.S. used airstrikes to retaliate against Iranian-backed militants after the latter tried attacking U.S. bases in the Middle East.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-strikes-iran-linked-sites-020822123.html

Ukraine used its new, U.S.-supplied ATACMS missiles to devastate a Russian air base.
https://austinvernon.substack.com/p/ukraines-growing-arsenal
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/destruction-from-ukraines-first-atacms-strike-now-apparent

The threat of Ukrainian missile, drone and commando attacks has forced Russia to move most of its warships out of Sevastopol.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/6/they-miscalculated-ukraine-turns-the-tables-on-russias-black-sea-fleet

Modern technology — such as surveillance drones with infrared and thermal imaging — means one side can more easily identify an ill-made decoy. An exposed tank without a heat signature is going to be a dead giveaway. A lack of tank tracks in the dirt is unusual, and it doesn’t matter how convincing a decoy howitzer is if it’s oddly sitting alone in a field rather than in a realistic firing position with at least basic defenses.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/decoy-arms-race-playing-ukraine-211638570.html

A September 6 missile strike on a market in Ukraine that killed 16 civilians was probably an errant Ukrainian missile, not a Russian one as Ukraine’s government claimed.
https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/2023-09-19/evidence-suggests-errant-ukrainian-missile-caused-market-deaths-new-york-times

Biden administration officials are far more worried about corruption in Ukraine than they publicly admit, a confidential U.S. strategy document obtained by POLITICO suggests.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/10/02/biden-admin-ukraine-strategy-corruption-00119237

Here’s a remarkable video of a Russian T-90M–one of the country’s best tanks–being instantly destroyed by an antitank missile. Stowage of ammunition inside the tank where the crew sits can lead to catastrophic explosions like this.
https://youtu.be/KjGFCNzXx20?si=2CTuKAi_lM1bh4IR

At the current loss rates, all of Russia’s old BMP armored vehicles will be destroyed within three years.
https://youtu.be/HuKVxgFBbYM?si=LvwTbGBuxwaDjUP6

About 100,000 Russian prisoners have fought in Ukraine so far.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2023/10/26/russia-prison-population-convicts-war/

Here’s a video about mine-clearing tactics and vehicles. Let me add that, instead of using old T-55s for combat in Ukraine, I think it would be smarter to turn them into mine clearing vehicles.
https://youtu.be/VGDUgxQyVWc?si=NNqLRUl5MJY7eXlj

The U.S. and Ukraine are building “Franken weapons” that combine elements of American and Soviet-made weapons systems. Right now, the effort is focused on surface-to-air missile systems.
https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2023/oct/28/desperate-for-air-defense-ukraine-pushes-us-for-fr/

A U.S. F-16 shot down an armed Turkish drone because it strayed too close to U.S. ground troops in Syria.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-f-16-fighter-jet-170834726.html

A Chinese fighter plane almost collided with a U.S. B-52 bomber over the South China Sea.
https://www.npr.org/2023/10/27/1208941174/a-chinese-fighter-jet-came-within-10-feet-of-a-b-52-bomber-u-s-military-says

A terrorist drone attack on a graduation ceremony at a Syrian military academy killed 89 people and wounded hundreds more. It’s only a matter of time before something like this happens in the U.S.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/05/middleeast/syria-military-college-ceremony-drone-strike-intl/index.html

Britain’s costly saga of buying U.S.-made Apache helicopters, modifying them to special British standards, and then de-modifying them back to a U.S. configuration teaches important lessons about economies of scale and the price of national pride.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/lesson-britain-us-army-apache-161737080.html

Here’s a first-person tour of a B-24 bomber in flight.
https://youtu.be/fcZmiFMlR3g?si=Yx0vh-_5ETnsPEn-

China contributed to the Entente in WWI by sending 100,000 workers to toil in France’s domestic economy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/China_during_World_War_I

‘Remember in 1871 Germany imposed a “harsh peace” (including an occupation) on a defeated France. When Russia, gripped by revolution pulled out in 1918 the Germans imposed a harsher penalty on Russia than Versailles—and Versailles was fairly lenient compared to what Germany had planned to impose had she won the war.’
https://www.quora.com/How-different-or-similar-was-the-Treaty-of-Versailles-from-other-treaties-signed-around-the-same-time-Were-the-terms-better-of-worse-than-those-imposed-on-or-by-Germany-in-previous-conflicts

‘During World War II, 80% of targets engaged by the M4 Sherman tank were soft targets such as infantry, anti-tank guns, and bunkers.’
https://www.yahoo.com/news/tanks-big-guns-attention-russias-220902112.html

The 1930s were more geopolitically volatile than most people realize.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stresa_Front

In warfare, jamming the enemy’s radar and dealing with him trying to overcome your jam involves switching radio frequencies. The back-and-forth reminds me of Enterprise rotating the modulations of its shields and phasers to fight the Borg.

Constantly alternating the frequency that the radar operates on (frequency agility) over a spread-spectrum will limit the effectiveness of most jamming, making it easier to read through it. Modern jammers can track a predictable frequency change, so the more random the frequency change, the more likely it is to counter the jammer.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radar_jamming_and_deception

It has been 30 years since the ill-fated U.S. commando raid in Somalia that was depicted in the famous movie Black Hawk Down.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/2/james-webb-telescope-finding-jupiter-sized-objects-in-orion-nebula-baffles-scientists

It has been 40 years since the truck bombing of a U.S. Marine barracks in Beirut.
‘The subsequent explosion — immortalized on a clock in the building’s basement at 6:21.26 a.m. — proved to be the largest nonnuclear explosion on record, one that equaled as much as 20,000 pounds of TNT. ‘
https://www.foxnews.com/lifestyle/jack-carrs-take-1983-beirut-marine-barracks-terror-40-years-salvo-war

While it’s true that gunpowder made forts obsolete, the process took hundreds of years thanks to improvements to forts.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bastion_fort
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polygonal_fort

Animals that have magnreception include red foxes, cows, deer, butterlfies, fruit flies, some birds, lobsters and sea turtles.

For animals like the red fox, researchers believe that foxes can “see” Earth’s magnetic field. This appears as a patch in their vision. They use magnetoreception to help catch prey hidden beneath snow or grass by lining up their pounces with Earth’s magnetic field.

If you look at a herd of cows or deer, you’ll notice them (almost always) facing the same way — toward Earth’s magnetic poles. Whether for grazing or resting, it’s a north-south magnetic alignment. Experts believe it helps them map and familiarize themselves with their surroundings.
https://www.discovermagazine.com/planet-earth/the-5-senses-animals-have-that-humans-dont

Places like Okinawa that are “hotspots” where abnormally large shares of people live past 100 might only have those reputations due to inaccurate birth certificate recordkeeping and old people lying about their ages.
https://www.economist.com/graphic-detail/2023/09/28/places-claiming-to-be-centenarian-hotspots-may-just-have-bad-data

The lifespan gap between educated and uneducated Americans is heavily skewed by high school dropouts, who die quite early. If the analysis is restricted to high school graduates and people with four-year degrees, the gap almost disappears.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/23895909/angus-deaton-anne-case-life-expectancy-united-states-college-graduates-inequality-heart-disease

Hackers stole a trove of data on the identities and genetics of 23andMe users and are leaking it onto the internet.
https://techcrunch.com/2023/10/18/hacker-leaks-millions-more-23andme-user-records-on-cybercrime-forum/

This device transfers waste heat from a computer server into a water heater. It’s a type of “data furnace.”
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/08/18/1077548/computer-waste-heat/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_furnace

It will become more feasible to put data centers in cold places once robot workers exist. Robots won’t care about living in northern Russia, but humans do.
https://www.quora.com/Why-dont-they-put-data-centers-in-really-cold-places-so-they-can-just-open-the-windows-to-cool-the-data-centers

All jet engines are gas turbines, but not all gas turbines are jet engines.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gas_turbine

An English engineer named “John Barber” envisioned the first gas turbine engine and patented it in 1791. However, it was impossible to build due to the technological limitations of the era, and remained merely an idea and a sketch until 1903, when the first one was built. In 1972, a German company built a real-life version of Barber’s turbine engine, and it worked.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Barber_(engineer)

A ram jet is an athodyd.
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/athodyd

The men who invented quantum dots won Nobel Prizes in Chemistry.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-67005670

The downside of ethnic diversity is it worsens social trust.
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-polisci-052918-020708

Best Buy plans to stop selling DVDs and Blu Ray discs within a few months.
https://apnews.com/article/best-buy-physical-movie-discs-dvds-ae13cf255c90de60eecc632357a0a22e

Language translation technology continues to improve.
https://youtu.be/fZY-Cv1Q8NY?si=GvB-Fg1HY0iOY8Cx

‘Christof Koch wagered David Chalmers 25 years ago that researchers would learn how the brain achieves consciousness by now. But the quest continues.’
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02120-8

I independently came up with the same idea that David Chalmers did, but 10 years after he did.

Given this scenario, we can construct a series of cases intermediate between me and Robot such that there is only a very small change at each step and such that functional organization is preserved throughout. We can imagine, for instance, replacing a certain number of my neurons by silicon chips. In the first such case, only a single neuron is replaced. Its replacement is a silicon chip that performs precisely the same local function as the neuron. We can imagine that it is equipped with tiny transducers that take in electrical signals and chemical ions and transforms these into a digital signal upon which the chip computes, with the result converted into the appropriate electrical and chemical outputs. As long as the chip has the right input/output function, the replacement will make no difference to the functional organization of the system.
https://consc.net/papers/qualia.html

“Open source AI models will soon become unbeatable. Period.” – Yann LeCun
https://twitter.com/ylecun/status/1713304307519369704

The CEO of the tech company “SoftBank” predicts that AGI will be invented within 10 years. He also believes in the Singularity.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/10/04/tech/japan-softbank-ai-hnk-intl/index.html

AI scientist and DeepMind co-founder Shane Legg predicts there’s a 50% chance AGI will be created by the end of 2028. He says the path between now and then merely involves iteratively improving the narrow AI algorithms we already have and the hardware they’re running on, and feeding them more training data.
https://youtu.be/Kc1atfJkiJU?si=ldjTxLl-Rs9JICIG

Geoffrey Hinton gave an interview to 60 Minutes where he again warned about the risks of AI. Unfortunately, his comments were blown out of proportion by several news outlets. Hinton said that machines MIGHT be able to “reason better” than humans in five years. That doesn’t mean AGI will exist by then or anything bad will be happening.

He also predicted AI will be used in warfare and online disinformation, and that it will put large numbers of humans out of work for good, but he didn’t give dates, and the concerns are old ones shared by many thinkers on the subject.
https://youtu.be/qrvK_KuIeJk?si=Nz2o9xnzlW_Zs4W9

“Geoguessr” is an e-sport where players are shown a series of Google Street View images of an unknown place and have to guess where it is by marking a spot on a world map. The player who guesses the shortest distance from the actual location wins. Some people are shockingly good at it. Some tournaments offer $50,000 to the winner.

Anyway, some guys built a machine that can beat the best human at it.
https://youtu.be/ts5lPDV–cU?si=opJy1bHLCTVSQtjx

Pedophiles are using advanced image manipulation tools to transform photos of adults into what they would look like as nude children.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67172231

‘Google Pixel’s face-altering photo tool sparks AI manipulation debate’
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67170014

Here’s a critical review of the new movie The Creator, which is about humans oppressing intelligent robots and cyborgs.
https://youtu.be/4Hll494p9Qc?si=cCE-aLC-lzXyFAPI

The “chip shortage” is over.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-67226385

Carbon-14 dating of human footprints found just two years ago proves that humans were present in North America 21,000 – 23,000 years ago. For decades, the scientific consensus had been that humans didn’t cross the Bering Strait Land Bridge until 16,000 to 13,000 years ago.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adh5007

Actress Goldie Hawn says she saw an alien when she was in her 20s and it actually touched her face with its finger.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-12675815/Goldie-Hawn-claims-ALIEN-touched-face.html

A recently released Pentagon video of a spherical UFO speeding over an unidentified Middle Eastern country has been geolocated to Syria. A new analysis also concludes it could have just been a silvery party balloon, probably released into the air during a holiday celebration.
https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2023/10/24/isnt-that-a-balloon-deflating-a-dod-ufo-video/

THE Asteroid Belt is well-known and located between Mars and Jupiter, but it is actually not THE ONLY asteroid belt in our Solar System.

‘The total number of Jupiter trojans larger than 1 km in diameter is believed to be about 1 million,[1] approximately equal to the number of asteroids larger than 1 km in the asteroid belt.

…The total mass of the Jupiter trojans is estimated at 0.0001 of the mass of Earth or one-fifth of the mass of the asteroid belt.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jupiter_trojan

The James Webb Space Telescope has spotted rogue, Jupiter-sized planets in the Orion nebula. According to our models of how nebulas work, they shouldn’t exist.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/10/2/james-webb-telescope-finding-jupiter-sized-objects-in-orion-nebula-baffles-scientists

The movie Dreamcatcher was really bad, but the aliens were creatively done.
https://youtu.be/vIAjheaZSms?si=oK6uyg0MjI50j2J1

‘Forever Chemical’ Bans Face Hard Truth: Many Can’t Be Replaced
https://www.yahoo.com/news/forever-chemical-bans-face-hard-100002502.html

A man who received a transplant of a genetically engineered pig heart was healthy enough to leave the hospital, but then died after his body rejected the organ. He survived with it for six weeks.
https://www.medschool.umaryland.edu/news/2023/in-memoriam-lawrence-faucette.html

Chinese doctors have used gene therapy to practically cure a type of deafness caused by inadequate levels of a protein called “otoferlin.”
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/10/27/1082551/gene-treatment-deaf-children-hearing-china/

From five years ago:

‘The rapid appearance now of practically useful risk predictors for disease is one anticipated consequence of this phase transition. Medicine in well-functioning health care systems will be transformed over the next 5 years or so.’
https://infoproc.blogspot.com/2018/10/population-wide-genomic-prediction-of.html

The case for an emergency effort to vaccinate African children against malaria.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/10/what-is-an-emergency-the-case-of-rapid-malaria-vaccination.html

The two lead scientists who invented the mRNA COVID-19 vaccine won Nobel Prizes.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/10/02/1202941256/nobel-prize-goes-to-scientists-who-made-mrna-covid-vaccines-possible

COVID vaccine hesitancy cost a lot of Republicans their lives.
https://www.natesilver.net/p/fine-ill-run-a-regression-analysis

Small Ukrainian suicide drones destroyed two Russian cargo planes on the ground and damaged two more.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/moment-of-drone-attack-that-destroyed-il-76s-at-russian-base-seen-in-infrared-image

Russian ground crews responded by putting old tires on top of their planes when parked on the ground.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/russia-really-is-using-tires-to-protect-its-bombers-from-attack

Ukraine used cruise missiles and drone boats to fatally damage a Russian sub and landing ship docked in Sevastopol.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/russian-submarine-landing-ship-struck-in-attack-on-sevastopol

Elon Musk refused Ukraine’s request to use his Starlink satellites to facilitate an attack on Russian warships docked in Crimea last year.
https://apnews.com/article/spacex-ukraine-starlink-russia-air-force-fde93d9a69d7dbd1326022ecfdbc53c2

The first British Challenger 2 tank donated to Ukraine was destroyed in combat. A Russian land mine or artillery explosion immobilized it, the crewmen ran away, and then a Russian antitank missile finished it off.
https://youtu.be/1SrWjCic3QM?si=2ztgUQ-fC0FtnTbo

Here’s footage of a German-made Leopard 2 tank in Ukrainian service fighting with a Russian T-72. The Ukrainian tank scores a direct hit on its opponent on the first shot, but because the shell that it fired is a high explosive round instead of a special penetrator round, it fails to go through the T-72’s armor. Nevertheless, the force of the impact and of the ensuing explosion against the exterior of the tank causes enough superficial damage to the T-72 to render it incapable of further action, and it has to turn back to the repair shop. This is called a “mission kill.”
https://youtu.be/cMLYwhG7mmM?si=XsVu_RPLECqdyF24

‘When it comes to tanks, in particular, the lesson of the Ukrainian war is that tank-on-tank battles have become a rarity—which means that the relative sophistication of a tank is no longer as important. Fewer than 5% of tanks destroyed since the war began had been hit by other tanks, according to Ukrainian officials, with the rest succumbing to mines, artillery, antitank missiles and drones.’
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/09/the-new-warfare.html

Both sides in the Ukraine War continue to field “mutant” armored vehicles that marry whatever old weapons they can find to Soviet-era vehicles.
https://www.yahoo.com/lifestyle/mutant-soviet-armored-vehicles-come-153000354.html

Russia has gotten so desperate for ammunition and weapons that Putin is trying to get them from the pariah state of North Korea.
https://apnews.com/article/north-korea-russia-kim-putin-missile-0d70f5190df1088ebe53e8ca19f8e9c9

Russia’s arms industry has proven itself surprisingly resilient, largely because it has found ways around some of the Western-imposed sanctions. Nevertheless, it’s not making tanks and artillery shells fast enough to meet the demands of the Ukraine War.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/russian-manufacturers-making-7-times-023446584.html

This analysis of Russian tank losses in Ukraine gives insights into Russia’s production capacity and bottlenecks. Their factories are producing relatively small, steady quantities of modern, new tanks (T-90M and BMP-3), but the other 85% is old stuff made in the Soviet era that they have pulled from storage and dusted off. Overall, Russia is losing tanks on the battlefield faster than they can replace them from all sources. They really need help from other countries.
https://youtu.be/ctrtAwT2sgs?si=-C62tmmrKZh599-l&t=1901

The Kremlin keeps saying that it fears NATO will attack it, and that Russian militarization and seemingly aggressive foreign policy actions are actually defensive. In reality, this is a lie that Russia’s elites peddle to brainwash average Russians and sympathetic foreigners. If they ACTUALLY thought a NATO invasion was a threat, they never would have depleted their forces along the borders of Norway and Finland as much as they have.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/russian-forces-near-norway-20-171622974.html

Ironically, Russia accuses the U.S. of waging “hybrid war” against it.
“U.S. and British reconnaissance planes are not only working to identify objectives and targets but are showing where our anti-air defenses are working so next time they could help. So, you can call this whatever you want to call it, but they are directly at war with us. We call it the hybrid war but it doesn’t change the reality.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/u-directly-war-moscow-russian-233830418.html

Overall, the front line in Ukraine has been stable this year.

The U.S. Army has adopted a new “light” tank called the M-10 Booker. It is heavier than a Soviet T-55 main battle tank, has virtually the same cannon, has the same number of crewmen, and costs 26 times more money.
https://www.army-technology.com/news/us-army-spends-258m-for-more-m10-booker-vehciles/?cf-view

The Russian T-90 tank is an iterative improvement upon the T-72. Were it not for political and marketing reasons, it should have been named the “T-72C.” A key improvement is the storage of excess ammunition in a new bustle at the rear of the turret. This reduces (but doesn’t eliminate) the odds of a catastrophic cook-off of the tank’s own ammunition.
https://youtu.be/8LsBbQOL0JY?si=quXfKTr4slhF9sS1

This 2019 article on Yevgeny Prigozhin is weird to read knowing what we know today.
https://www.npr.org/2019/01/30/685622639/putins-chef-has-his-fingers-in-many-pies-critics-say

Azerbaijan’s army launched a mass attack against its breakaway province of Nagorno-Karabakh, defeating its militia in a few days and establishing control over every part of its territory for the first time in 30 years. The self-declared republic’s government surrendered and announced it will disband by January 1. As of this writing, at least 80% of the province’s ethnic Armenian inhabitants had fled to Armenia.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/28/europe/nagorno-karabakh-officially-dissolve-intl/index.html

The F-35 is actually an excellent fighter plane. Even though it is slower and less maneuverable than its predecessors, those factors are not as important in air-to-air combat anymore.
https://youtu.be/OeZ1DrnQl5c?si=3GORwvohMBjHbhiK

After its pilot had to eject from it in midair, an F-35 continued flying on its own. It took the Air Force over a day to find the crash site.
https://www.foxnews.com/us/f-35-jet-reported-missing-authorities-pilot-ejects-mishap-officials

This article about Sudan has it all: The Ukraine-Russia War expanding into a new front, precision suicide drone attacks, an evil PMC propping up dictatorships for a cut of their natural resources.
https://youtu.be/1M5iq5x29mY?si=oby8-5WH8xDeFYU0

‘France to withdraw ambassador, troops from Niger after coup’
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/9/24/france-to-withdraw-ambassador-troops-from-niger-after-coup-macron

There is such a thing as a magazine-fed “tactical crossbow.”
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2023/09/11/potd-ar-6-tactical-crossbow/

The “ALOFS Repeating Shotgun System” was invented in the 1920s and let people turn their single-barrel shotguns into repeating shotguns.
https://youtu.be/63xFGmlsrww?si=utelQKLPnGai0qdL

This guy tests out the standard cold weather jacket Red Army troops had in WWII and he says it’s not as good as modern winter coats made of performance fabrics.
https://youtu.be/GyoAgqUVj8k?si=h6MeTStXppU14Oac

‘The Auspicious Incident (or Event^[3]) (Ottoman Turkish: Vaka-i Hayriye, “Fortunate Event” in Constantinople; Vaka-i Şerriyye, “Unfortunate Incident” in the Balkans) was the forced disbandment of the centuries-old Janissary corps by Sultan Mahmud II on 15 June 1826.^[4][5] Most of the 135,000 Janissaries revolted against Mahmud II, and after the rebellion was suppressed, most of them were executed, exiled or imprisoned. The disbanded Janissary corps was replaced with a more modern military force.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Auspicious_Incident

Sonar doesn’t sound like it does in the movies.
https://youtu.be/AaO6jQEmfoY?si=WatTh9Dv85Dtv-bB

Biplanes only made sense in the early years of aviation, when engines had poor thrust-to-weight ratios.
https://youtu.be/0P0K9BSuQqE?si=XckiNNjaV-mxAbME

This prediction from a year ago was wrong: ‘House prices could fall by up to 20 percent next year if there’s a recession, experts warn – and property in some areas of the country is overvalued by as much as 72 percent.

Mark Zandi, chief economist for Moody’s Analytics, was pessimistic about the housing market in May, but he has now made his forecasts even more bleak…’
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-11150999/Is-America-verge-new-housing-collapse-Mountain-West-Sun-Belt-overvalued-72.html

A prediction from 18 months ago: ‘While an inversion generally indicates a recession is coming within the following 12 months, it can sometimes take years. The curve inverted in 2005, but the Great Recession didn’t start until 2007. The most recent inversion, in 2019, prompted fears of a recession — which materialized in 2020, but that was due to Covid-19.’
https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/29/economy/inverted-yield-curve/index.html

Elon Musk is a genius, the richest man in the world, and also has a huge number of future predictions that badly failed.
https://thenextweb.com/news/elon-musk-most-ridiculous-predictions

By 2025, all new Tesla cars will have bidirectional charging, meaning they will be able to transfer surplus power from their batteries into the power grid. “The dream for many is a scenario in which millions of electric cars are all connected to the grid most of the time. They could absorb lots of renewable energy from solar panels during the day and feed it back into the grid after dark. The grid would become like the tides — distributing zero-emissions energy all day every day and reclaiming it at night.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/tesla-confirms-game-changing-feature-050000765.html

‘[Tesla] pioneered the use of huge presses with 6,000 to 9,000 tons of clamping pressure to mold the front and rear structures of its Model Y in a “gigacasting” process that slashed production costs and left rivals scrambling to catch up. In a bid to extend its lead, Tesla is closing in on an innovation that would allow it to die cast nearly all the complex underbody of an EV in one piece, rather than about 400 parts in a conventional car, the people said.’
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/gigacasting-2-0-tesla-reinvents-100727153.html

Unionized workers at the Big Three car companies went on strike to demand better pay and job security. Problems at those companies are principally being driven by Tesla, which is more innovative and has a non-unionized workforce.
https://www.axios.com/2023/09/15/uaw-worker-strike-electric-vehicle-industry

Waymo’s driverless cars may already be safer than human drivers.
https://www.understandingai.org/p/driverless-cars-may-already-be-safer

Thanks to better technology, “surge pricing” will someday be common for all types of things.

‘Amazon changes the price of its products on average every 10 minutes, using millions of real-time data points to benchmark against competitors and track demand surges.

“It will eventually be everywhere,” says Robert Cross, who created a computerised dynamic pricing model for Delta Air Lines in the early 1980s before doing the same for hotel giants Marriott, Hyatt and InterContinental Hotels Group.

As high inflation erodes margins and improvements in technology make dynamic pricing cheaper and more practical for businesses to implement, the temptation to deploy the pricing strategy is growing in industries that have so far remained largely untouched by the method. Bars, restaurants and bricks-and-mortar retailers have historically only adopted dynamic pricing for basic discount offers, but that could change.’
https://www.ft.com/content/d0e3bcb5-b824-414e-bfac-4c0b4193e9f0

GPT 3.5’s ability to play chess at the expert level, even though it wasn’t trained on the game’s rules, suggests it could have a limited degree of general intelligence.
https://twitter.com/GrantSlatton/status/1703913578036904431

‘Suleyman predicts fully autonomous AI is less than a decade away, and to “buy time,” the U.S. government should leverage “choke points” by restricting the sale of critical technologies to China and other adversaries. That includes high-tech microchips made by Nvidia and cloud computing services from the likes of Google, IBM and Amazon.’
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/09/06/mustafa-suleyman-made-his-name-on-ai-now-he-wants-d-c-to-rein-it-in-00114126

ChatGPT can now communicate with people verbally.
https://dnyuz.com/2023/09/25/chatgpt-can-now-respond-with-spoken-words/

“ChatGPT can now browse the internet to provide you with current and authoritative information, complete with direct links to sources. It is no longer limited to data before September 2021.”
https://twitter.com/OpenAI/status/1707077710047216095

Microsoft released “DALL-E 3,” it’s most advanced text-to-image AI yet.
https://youtu.be/sqQrN0iZBs0?si=rgCYNpoHK0TwijEu

‘Autonomous, AI-powered submersibles would minimise the risks to human lives from deep-sea exploration and would allow faster mapping of ocean floors. But what researchers ideally want is to go one step further: build submersibles that can explore for indefinite stretches of time, thereby speeding up the process of scanning the planet’s deepest spots.’
https://www.aljazeera.com/features/2023/9/14/titan-implosion-is-ai-the-future-of-deep-sea-exploration

ChatGPT badly defeated a group of Wharton MBA students in a classroom assignment to come up with creative business ideas.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/mba-students-vs-chatgpt-innovation-679edf3b

A company called “HeyGen” has made an app that converts video of someone speaking in one language to a video of them saying the same things in a different language. The translation mimics the real sound of their voice, and their lip movements are automatically altered to match the new words. I hadn’t predicted this would happen until the 2030s.
https://twitter.com/mrjonfinger/status/1701075571630047525

‘Deepfakes of Chinese influencers are livestreaming 24/7’
https://www.technologyreview.com/2023/09/19/1079832/chinese-ecommerce-deepfakes-livestream-influencers-ai/

Most NFTs have collapsed in value.
https://dappgambl.com/nfts/dead-nfts/

Meta’s new virtual reality teleconferencing technology is incredible.
https://youtu.be/MVYrJJNdrEg?si=5Yxqocmvu2js2EqE

Joseph Marie Jacquard invented a loom in 1805 that halved the number of workers needed to make patterned fabric. Loom workers mad about losing their jobs tried to kill him.
https://youtu.be/K6NgMNvK52A?si=GwPAWvVS_gHTP7CR

In 250 million years, the continents will merge into one “supercontinent” that will get so hot that mammals and humans will only be able to live on parts of its coastal areas. If we are still around by then, I predict we will use various technological solutions to surmount nature.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/sep/25/supercontinent-could-make-earth-uninhabitable-in-250m-years-study-predicts

Apple is finally abandoning its proprietary charger cords, meaning USB-C is set to become the global standard.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/09/13/tech/iphone-15-usb-c-charging/index.html

Andrew Lincoln Nelson’s surreal artwork is kind of what I envision organic-synthetic hybrid life forms will look like in the distant future.
http://www.nelsonrobotics.org/robotchild_web/

To protect coral from extinction as ocean temperatures rise, some scientists want to collect samples of all endangered species and cryogenically freeze them for possible reintroduction to the wild at some point in the future when conditions are right again. Why not do this for all species?
https://www.npr.org/2023/09/06/1197792650/coral-reefs-bleaching-restoration-climate

The genomes of 60 different species of potato have been sequenced, setting the stage for the creation of genetically engineered super potatoes.
https://www.futurity.org/potato-pangenome-food-crops-2968602/

The first known dog-fox hybrid has been found. Foxes have 74 chromosomes, dogs have 78, and the hybrid has 76.
https://www.newsweek.com/shelter-rescues-injured-animal-worlds-first-dog-fox-dogxim-1827353

The U.S. canceled its controversial “DEEP VZN” program which sought to collect exotic disease samples from across the world and send them to U.S. labs for biodefense research.
https://thebulletin.org/2023/09/the-us-government-cancels-deep-vzn-a-controversial-virus-hunting-program/

The weight-loss drug Wegovy will go generic in 2038. I foresee a drop in global obesity rates and associated healthcare spending starting then.
https://www.drugs.com/availability/generic-wegovy.html

An AI program that visually analyzes microscopic tissue samples could help treat male infertility. Men with that condition have to get sections of one of their testicles surgically removed so technicians can find the few healthy sperm that are in them, and then inject those sperm into ova in an IVF lab. Computers can scan the samples 1,000 times faster than a human.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-66608073

A pig kidney surgically implanted in a braindead man functioned as well as a human kidney for two months. It was just removed for careful lab analysis to refine the pig organs further, and the man’s family turned off his life support. The contribution that they made for science could help save thousands of lives in the near future.
https://apnews.com/article/pig-kidney-transplant-xenotransplant-83dfb5e6d022ca72039a821cc6bc00ef

A genetically engineered pig heart was transplanted into a human for only the second time.
https://www.wbal.com/article/616915/3/surgeons-perform-second-pig-heart-transplant-trying-to-save-maryland-man

‘A boy saw 17 doctors over 3 years for chronic pain. ChatGPT found the diagnosis’ [tethered cord syndrome]
https://www.yahoo.com/news/boy-saw-17-doctors-over-204224194.html

Being a psychopath is partly genetic, and we’re finding some of the responsible genes.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapsychiatry/fullarticle/2656184

The FDA was warned that the decongestant chemical “phenylephrine” probably didn’t work in 2007. It took this long for them to finally remove it from shelves. How many billions of dollars did people waste in the interim buying it?
https://apnews.com/article/sudafed-decongestants-phenylephrine-pseudoephedrine-fda-0f140bafae9a500c5fba05fe764ecb66

Lab-grown diamonds are getting cheaper and more popular.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/09/a-diamond-pricing-puzzle.html

An undiscovered, Earth-sized planet could be orbiting 50 AUs from the Sun.
https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.3847/1538-3881/aceaf0

NASA’s new report on UFOs contains nothing new. At least it frankly mentions “alien” and “extraterrestrial” instead of falling back on the clumsy alternative terminology found in other recent U.S. government reports.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-66812332

The head of Russia’s “Wagner” private army, Yevgeny Prigozhin, died in a plane crash inside Russia, along with five top aides. It is widely believed that elements within the Russian government or military blew up the plane as revenge for Wagner’s brief coup attempt against Putin in June. The Kremlin denies responsibility.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2023/8/31/prigozhin-plane-crash-what-we-know-over-a-week-after-wagner-chiefs-death

There are conspiracy theories that the plane crash was carried out to fake Prigozhin’s death, and he’s still alive somewhere.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/late-russian-mercenary-prigozhin-spoke-about-his-security-newly-surfaced-video-2023-08-31/

Ukraine’s counteroffensive continues making slow, costly progress. In one place, it has reached the first line of Russia’s defenses.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ukraine-situation-report-major-push-toward-tokmak-gaining-steam

A leaked U.S. intelligence analysis says that Ukraine’s army is too weak to punch through Russia’s defensive lines and the reach the Sea of Azov. That means the ongoing counteroffensive can’t achieve its objective.
https://www.usnews.com/news/national-news/articles/2023-08-18/leaked-u-s-intelligence-offers-damning-view-of-ukraines-offensive-despite-new-positive-signs

‘Kyiv is running out of men. US sources have calculated that its armed forces have lost as many as 70,000 killed in action, with another 100,000 injured. While Russian casualties are higher still, the ratio nevertheless favours Moscow, as Ukraine struggles to replace soldiers in the face of a seemingly endless supply of conscripts.’
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ukraine-army-running-men-recruit-173948076.html

A Ukrainian kamikaze drone plane destroyed a Russian Tu-22 bomber on the ground.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/tu-22-backfire-destroyed-in-drone-strike-deep-inside-russia

A Ukrainian kamikaze drone boat scored a hit on a Russian navy ship, blowing a big hole in its side and crippling it.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ukrainian-drone-boat-scores-direct-hit-on-russian-warship

Ukraine is threatening to attack Russian non-military ships in the Black Sea.
https://www.politico.eu/article/ukraine-declares-war-on-russia-black-sea-shipping/

Russia is discovering the downside of using prison convicts to fill out its ranks in Ukraine: after they finish their tours of duties and are released, they restart their lives of crime.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ex-con-freed-fight-ukraine-113039648.html

Around 50,000 Russians have been killed fighting in Ukraine so far. Moscow only acknowledges 6,000 deaths.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-military-deaths-facd75c2311ed7be660342698cf6a409

Military analyst Anders Puck Nielsen says:
1) Russia and Ukraine both still think they can achieve total victory, and though they’ve sustained heavy damage, they retain the ability to fight on for the foreseeable future, and
2) Don’t cheer too hard for Putin to lose power–his successor could be more reckless and aggressive. A substantial minority of Russians think he hasn’t been heavy handed enough in Ukraine.
https://youtu.be/7rBlVnc_DEw?si=R_S8pDRRa4v6FyDW

American and British spy planes have been extremely active near Russia’s Black Sea coast, where they find the locations of Russian units and send the information to Ukrainian commanders in real time. Ukraine has used the data and NATO-supplied drones and missiles for many successful attacks against Russian forces far behind the front lines. Considering this, the Kremlin’s angry complaints that NATO is practically a combatant in the Ukraine War gain credence.
https://www.eurasiantimes.com/russian-fighters-aggressively-hunt-us-drones-near-crimea/

Russia showed off several Western-made military vehicles it captured from Ukraine.
https://youtu.be/-P78OEB0QtM?si=4kPCzSyaxWgxGs2S

Ukraine is still capturing large numbers of Russian tanks.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ukraines-counteroffensive-fall-apart-without-103947172.html

The long-mocked “cope cages” that the Russians built on their tanks are now being copied by Ukraine. Apparently, they’re at least a little effective.
https://bulgarianmilitary.com/2023/08/16/challenger-2-tank-was-spotted-with-diy-cope-cage-of-the-turret/

The Netherlands and Denmark will give Ukraine 42 F-16s. However, it will take years for them to be transferred and for Ukrainian fighter pilots to learn how to fly them well.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/dozens-of-f-16s-were-just-officially-pledged-to-ukraine

It would be foolish to assume that none of the weapons we’re giving to Ukraine now won’t fall into the wrong hands in the near future.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/20/politics/pentagon-watchdog-report-ukraine-weaponry/index.html

The Soviet AK-74 uses orange plastic magazines. I never understood this since it seemed like the orange color compromised a soldier’s overall camouflage, but it turns out the only acceptable plastic the Soviets had in the 1970s (“Bakelite”) was naturally orange in color. Attempts to dye it a more subdued color like green or black compromised the chemical structure of the magazines. It wasn’t until the 1990s that new plastics were invented that were as strong as Bakelite but also capable of being dyed without ill consequence. Some of the old orange magazines are still being used in the Ukraine War.
https://youtu.be/zA5gvHuimig?si=xpdunfR2SlyoBeF1

You knew about the AK-47 and, possibly, the AK-74, but did you know about the “AK-100 series” of rifles? The goal was to standardize the components used in all AK-style rifles so that one assembly line could make them all. The wooden parts were also finally replaced with modern, black plastic parts. It was a smart idea.
https://youtu.be/Gt8hl4mTOq8?si=-xuVPb_O05EQ1U70

The Tokarev was the Soviet Army’s standard handgun during WWII. After the War, Yugoslavia built a copy of it that incorporated several small improvements (this video contains side-by-side comparisons). It makes me wonder if the Soviet engineers who made the original Tokarev knew about those design tweaks from the beginning, but had to omit them to keep the gun as cheap as possible to manufacture.
https://youtu.be/6VkcQEbN0QY?si=wz_MWc9u87pGX-nU

‘Benchrest shooters attempt to achieve the ultimate in rifle precision; records for single 910 metres (1,000 yd), ten-shot groups are as small as 76 millimetres (3 in) (84 μRad), the 550 metres (600 yd) record for a single five-shot group is 17.8 millimetres (0.699 in) (32 μRad) (there are no ten-shot competitions at 600 yards), while 180 metres (200 yd) ten-shot groups are around 5.1 millimetres (0.2 in) (28 μRad), and 91 metres (100 yd) 10-shot groups are around 2.5 millimetres (0.1 in) (27 μRad).’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benchrest_shooting

Here’s a simple and fascinating video about the science of how bullets cause injuries. It’s also interesting to realize the extent to which the bullet industry exists because humans are lousy shots, particularly when under stress and/or when dealing with moving targets. A killer robot with perfect aim would only need a cheap .22 rifle to do a mass killing since every bullet would be a headshot.
https://youtu.be/a_rgIMK6K1E?si=cuSFlyJMScGRr0oE

Nigerien troops that the U.S. trained to fight Islamic terrorists have overthrown Niger’s government.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/08/15/niger-moussa-barmou-coup-00111165

Cannibals nearly killed and ate George H.W. Bush during WWII.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chichijima_incident

Pickett’s Charge at the Battle of Gettysburg is infamous, but a lesser-known charge by Union forces during the Battle of Fredericksburg was just as disastrous.
https://youtu.be/BloQDcrpLBY?si=nd-rykph-QBYDtFc

‘In war, an open city is a settlement which has announced it has abandoned all defensive efforts, generally in the event of the imminent capture of the city to avoid destruction. Once a city has declared itself open, the opposing military will be expected under international law to peacefully occupy the city rather than destroy it.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_city

A Russian navy ship has been in operation for over 100 years. It has lasted this long because it almost never sailed in rough seas and was carefully maintained since being launched. Nevertheless, the steel hull has lost 1 mm of thickness due to corrosion and the rust flaking away.
https://youtu.be/0X2Dz6PA1rQ?si=nLSKnw_R8MlO1zd2

In 1917, the Royal Navy created the HMS Zubian by joining the back half of the HMS Nubian with the front half of the HMS Zulu. Those two ships had been badly damaged in different areas during combat with the Germans. I wonder if it would be feasible to raise sunken enemy ships, fix them up, and reuse them for your own navy.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/royal-navy-once-created-a-franken-ship-from-two-destroyers

Flood control infrastructure is everywhere, but mostly unnoticed.
https://youtu.be/coXe8_xnAOs?si=MFW5eeoSf2wTUTGI

The new head of the IPCC says the alarmism over global temperatures rising 1.5 degrees Celsius over the preindustrial average is unwarranted and counterproductive. “The world won’t end if it warms by more than 1.5 degrees. It will however be a more dangerous world.”
https://amp.dw.com/en/climate-change-do-not-overstate-15-degrees-threat/a-66386523

A wildfire struck the island of Maui and destroyed the town of Lahiana, killing over 100 people. The media was quick to blame global warming, but the real culprit is non-native grass
https://www.enca.com/opinion/invasive-firestarter-how-non-native-grasses-turned-hawaii-tinderbox

Thanks to months of rains and a recent tropical storm, California is no longer in a drought.
https://news.yahoo.com/hilary-vanquished-californias-drought-much-100055301.html

An internationally mandated reduction to the amount of sulfur in ship fuel has made global warming worse. Yes, the ships no longer belch thick, white smoke from their smokestacks, but the resulting clouds reflected sunlight into space before it could reach the surface, keeping the Earth cooler.
https://www.science.org/content/article/changing-clouds-unforeseen-test-geoengineering-fueling-record-ocean-warmth

Over the last 10 years, China had “staggering success in combating pollution.” The cleaner air has also boosted Chinese life expectancy by up to two years.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/chinese-people-living-two-years-052416834.html

Seaweed and other oceanic plants could help sate our food needs while curbing global warming.
https://ec.europa.eu/research-and-innovation/en/horizon-magazine/butter-baths-seaweeds-potential-being-tapped-europe

A robotic farm vehicle sprays tiny streams of herbicide onto weeds, reducing overall herbicide use by 95%.
https://youtu.be/sV0cR_Nhac0?si=FAoYAHHvwkHTJ-ZB

If the laws of biology allow for the creation of an organism–including a demonic one–then we will eventually gain the ability to synthesize it.
https://youtu.be/-BzL6LCPEOQ?si=Ga4eKtLjfedY3KuB

Large numbers of Jews disguised as Gentiles fled Spain for the New World to escape religious persecution. Modern genetic studies show that a large minority of Latin Americans have Jewish DNA, even if it comprises a tiny fraction of their genomes.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/12/dna-reveals-the-hidden-jewish-ancestry-of-latin-americans/578509/

Some natives of Papua New Guinea and its nearby islands have blonde hair, even though their skin is very dark, and they look similar to sub-Saharan Africans. This “has been traced back to an allele of TYRP1 unique to these people and is not the same gene that causes blond hair in Europeans.”
https://hasanjasim.online/the-melanesian-people-with-dark-skin-and-blonde-hair/

Willingness to try new foods is partly genetic.
https://psyarxiv.com/ac7vy/

There’s some evidence that negatively ionized air boosts human health.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3598548/

‘The National Organ Transplant Act of 1984 created the framework for the organ transplant system in the United States, and nearly 40 years later, the law is responsible for millions of needless deaths and trillions of wasted dollars. The Transplant Act requires modification, immediately.’
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/08/compensating-kidney-donors-2.html

In a medical milestone, a genetically engineered pig kidney surgically implanted into a braindead man as part of an experiment is still functioning normally after six weeks.
https://www.foxnews.com/health/pig-kidney-still-functioning-brain-dead-man-6-weeks-transplant-surgery-extremely-encouraging

The new weight loss injection “Wegovy” is turning out to be a sort of miracle drug. The latest finding is that it also reduces the odds of heart failure.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/25/health/wegovy-semaglutide-heart-failure/index.html

‘In the spring, an executive only had to mention the word “AI” on an earnings conference call and traders would mash the buy button. I suspect automated trading systems were also calibrated to buy on such signals.’
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chart-ai-stocks-enter-correction-151922962.html

ChatGPT has a liberal bias.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/emmawoollacott/2023/08/17/chatgpt-has-liberal-bias-say-researchers/

A few months ago, an anonymous person reprogrammed GPT to destroy humankind and renamed it “ChaosGPT”. The results were darkly funny, and while the machine poses no threat to us, things will be different in the future. For any number of reasons (hatred of humanity, immaturity, curiosity to see if it can be done, a perverted desire for attention), it’s inevitable that some people will reprogram AGIs to cause harm to the human race. There will definitely be deaths.
https://decrypt.co/137898/mysterious-disappearance-chaosgpt-evil-ai-destroy-humanity

Here’s a hypnotic video of AI-generated “fractal” art in the style of H.R. Giger.
https://youtu.be/vhHLqjHfi1M?si=X5M5YHhtySiuy8Q4

Director Neil Blomkamp predicts lifelike CGI will make human stuntmen obsolete in as little as 12 months given the current rate of improvement.
https://news.yahoo.com/rise-machines-ai-spells-danger-014733770.html

“PimEyes” is the most powerful reverse image search for people’s faces that I’ve seen.
https://pimeyes.com/en

A material that was thought to be a room-temperature superconductor has turned out not to be.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02585-7

Peter Zeihan has some predictions about future technology.
https://youtu.be/fF4YTDsxcnc?si=yuqDcUOTqb0WqdZ1

Equatorial launch sites for space rockets aren’t always the best.
https://www.reddit.com/r/askscience/comments/rctxqf/is_there_a_benefit_to_launching_a_rocket_closer/

Virgin Galactic completed its first space tourism flight.
https://www.cnn.com/2023/08/10/travel/virgin-galactic-first-tourism-mission-launch-scn/index.html

China has the first-ever radar surveillance satellite in geosynchronous orbit.
https://youtu.be/UZctvA6MAUk?si=T-6YWrjWQhG_S9lG

India just had its first Moon landing. The probe is also the first spacecraft ever to land on the Moon’s south pole.
https://youtu.be/QQKSASFdoDw?si=7N9abzT9la75_APA

‘There were almost 2 million excess deaths in the two months after China lifted its “zero-Covid” restrictions, a U.S. study found, contradicting official figures from Beijing that have been criticized as too low.’
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/china-excess-deaths-zero-covid-study-rcna101746