The Ukraine War is now three years old.
https://www.twz.com/news-features/third-anniversary-of-ukraine-war-markedly-different-than-previous-years
President Trump has demanded Ukraine sign a deal to allow U.S. companies easier access to the country’s mineral resources.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/breaking-down-us-ukraine-minerals-deal
Russian forces continue their slow, costly advances across the frontline in Ukraine.
https://www.twz.com/news-features/russians-enter-last-major-ukrainian-stronghold-in-key-eastern-sector
In spite of Russia’s high losses in Ukraine and the related degradation in the quality of their replacement troops (most new recruits are in their 40s), the country has enough men to continue the war indefinitely.
https://youtu.be/Ja6-espHVSE?si=iZCf9h4OatN0O4G5
It will take Russia about ten years to rebuild its military to pre-2022 strength levels, but its force composition will be different thanks to lessons learned in Ukraine.
https://youtu.be/RfKNKbNET3U?si=f6RbM1F5dVL2UWLX
Here’s a good video of a Russian tank being destroyed.
The first suicide drone hit is directly on the engine, which is at the rear right under where the trunk of a car would be. Though that didn’t destroy the tank and probably killed no one, it caused fatal damage to the engine, forcing the vehicle to slow down and stop. The crewmen and the infantry clinging to the tank know they have a big problem, so they all get out and run.
The second hit is to the front of the tank, and is done with a guided suicide drone that I bet has an armor-penetrating explosive attached to it. They were clearly aiming for the open hatch, but even if they missed, the attack was still successful. The explosion sends a jet of molten metal into the tank’s interior. Just two seconds after that first blast, the molten metal ignites the ammunition stored inside the tank and there’s a secondary explosion (big puff of smoke and sheets of flames) coming out of the barrel and other open hatches.
https://x.com/front_ukrainian/status/1887137905459519607
Ukrainian troops say their North Korean enemies are rapidly learning from their mistakes and are very courageous and disciplined.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/1/27/more-north-korean-troops-headed-to-ukraine-as-conflict-goes-global
Israel and Gaza have been enjoying a temporary cease-fire while they trade prisoners and, in some cases, the bodies of dead prisoners. Even these gestures have been marred by machismo.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/2/15/palestinians-burn-shirts-forced-to-wear-upon-release-from-israeli-jails
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/20/middleeast/hamas-israel-hostages-release-bibas-intl-hnk/index.html
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/25/g-s1-44739/hamas-releases-4-more-hostages
Rwandan troops have invaded neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj91yy023dxo
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2gn417300o
It’s highly unlikely the U.S. could have retained ownership of the Panama Canal. Transferring it to Panamanian control was a long time coming.
https://www.history.com/news/panama-canal-return-panama-treaties-carter
China’s new stealth fighter is designed to destroy U.S. AWACS planes, aircraft carriers, and bases with ultra long-range missiles (can hit targets 250 miles away). It is unsuited for dogfighting due to lack of maneuverability.
https://youtu.be/exD-ZrG1XTA?si=A-CkNhu2wS_7O6dC
The Chinese spy balloon that floated over the U.S. in 2023 was packed with technology, including deployable gliders designed to get closer to targets and communications equipment designed to use American satellites to send data back to China.
https://www.newsweek.com/chinese-spy-balloon-new-report-american-technology-found-2027189
Here’s a fascinating video about the technical challenges in reverse engineering guns, and why knowledge of “tolerances” is critical for the task.
https://youtu.be/VBjwTc_vWo0?si=ZEbYE3JSHDDDQdNq
This thermal reflex gun sight is incredible. It’s like something from the movie Aliens.
https://youtu.be/kwo5fsCZBdQ?si=IhOAhL_EqbiQTGNb
The new U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth gave a pivotal address to America’s European allies in which he declared China was America’s primary threat, so Europe would have to shoulder more of its defense against Russia. He also said the restoration of Ukraine’s pre-2022 borders was an unattainable goal and that the U.S. would never send troops to defend Ukraine or allow Ukraine into NATO. This is a major win for Putin and represents a sharp break in outlook between Biden and Trump.
https://youtu.be/FlmihbH7JAQ?si=yyFR75rsCgk5HShB
Britain’s Prime Minister says he’s willing to send peacekeeping troops to Ukraine to enforce any ceasefire.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/02/16/keir-starmer-ready-to-put-british-troops-in-ukraine/
China is building a military headquarters that will be ten times bigger than the Pentagon.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/01/31/china-building-largest-military-command-centre-in-world/
A factory near Philadelphia that you’ve never heard of had an outsized role in the U.S. aerospace parts supply chain. It just burned down, creating huge problems for aircraft companies.
In the near future, AI will let any government or terrorist group instantly identify these kinds of chokepoints, and cheap drones deployed by operatives that have infiltrated the U.S. will be able to destroy them.
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/aerospace-industry-scrambles-deal-with-fallout-huge-us-factory-fire-2025-02-27/
The Japanese battleship Yamato was designed to destroy American and British battleships and was well-engineered. Its flaws were lower tech radar and computers, which made its guns less accurate.
https://youtu.be/kBQP6A_BmQs?si=ayMqdtEhgdAIypke
A small Chinese tech company released a powerful LLM called “DeepSeek,” shaking their American competitors’ confidence and causing turmoil in the U.S. stock market.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd643wx888qo
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/27/nvidia-falls-10percent-in-premarket-trading-as-chinas-deepseek-triggers-global-tech-sell-off.html
OpenAI released “GPT-4.5.” Either it or GPT-5 will be the company’s last LLM that is not a “reasoning model.” Early users noted that OpenAI’s “o3” reasoning model was smarter than GPT-4.5 in some areas.
https://www.wired.com/story/openai-gpt-45/
Trump signs executive order on developing artificial intelligence ‘free from ideological bias’
https://apnews.com/article/trump-ai-artificial-intelligence-executive-order-eef1e5b9bec861eaf9b36217d547929c
LLMs are discovering universal features of all human languages.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.06346v1
AlphaGeometry2 can solve Olympiad geometry problems at a superhuman level.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.03544
‘AI cracks superbug problem in two days that took scientists years’
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyz6e9edy3o
‘Remember good old Grok 3, all 200,000 GPUs worth, advertised by Elon Musk a few days ago as the “smartest AI on earth”, and demoed on livestream last night as “a maximally truth-seeking AI”?
I just took it for a spin. It got my first question right (a comparison between two decimals, 56.1012 vs 56.90) but things went rapidly downhill from there.’
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/grok-3-beta-in-shambles
Economic arguments in favor of AI “slow takeoff.”
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/02/why-i-think-ai-take-off-is-relatively-slow.html
Conflicting with our intuitions again, it turns out machines might be better than humans at jobs requiring empathy and emotional intelligence.
https://journals.plos.org/mentalhealth/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pmen.0000145
I don’t think this is right, but it’s worth reading.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/01/29/net-zero-risks-leaving-britains-ai-strategy-dead-on-arrival/
I don’t claim to understand most of this essay, but it provides a good example of how pure math research can unexpectedly solve real-world problems.
One argument for continuing to invest in building better AIs even after they’ve passed the point of being able to satisfy all human needs is that better AIs will be able to explore more of the unbounded space of mathematics, which could lead to many unexpected benefits.
I think war gaming/making and economic modeling are two other areas where the gains from better AI will never top out. Both deal with systems that are so complex and random that perfect modeling will never be possible, so you’ll always gain an advantage from that nth bit of extra compute you have over your competitors.
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2025/02/23/closing-the-green-gap-from-the-mathematics-of-the-landscape-function-to-lower-electricity-costs-for-households/
NVIDIA has important advantages that will prevent any upstart from challenging its dominance of the AI computer chip industry for years.
https://www.economist.com/business/2024/05/19/can-nvidia-be-dethroned-meet-the-startups-vying-for-its-crown
EngineAI — the world’s first humanoid robot to perform a front flip!
https://youtu.be/N_ALMlOipCI?si=4abvIWFT5MsWQ1gK
Google is now willing to build killer robots.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy081nqx2zjo
Here’s a pretty incredible essay by a futurist titled “A History of the Future, 2025-2040.” It mainly focuses on the future of AI and the effects on humans, the economy, and geopolitics. I don’t agree with all of it, but I applaud the effort and imagination it took to write this and recommend you read it.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CCnycGceT4HyDKDzK/a-history-of-the-future-2025-2040
A wrong earthquake prediction from nine months ago.
‘He suspects the next quake will hit at Parkfield this year, he said, but the epicenter may not be in the same place as it was in 2004, meaning these measurements will look different.’
https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/earthquakes/part-of-the-san-andreas-fault-may-be-gearing-up-for-an-earthquake
An argument for artificially dimming the sun to slow global warming: “the reduction in mortality from cooling—a benefit—is roughly ten times larger than the increase in mortality from air pollution and ozone loss—a harm.”
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/01/make-sunsets.html
I predicted something like this would happen. Someday, storing and preserving the totality of useful knowledge produced by humans will be trivial.
‘The crystal containing the human genome has been stored in the oldest salt mine in the world, alongside the Memory of Mankind Archive. “Over time, the salt mine will naturally close as the mountain shifts, providing a stable and secure environment for the crystal. Since salt is soft, it will not damage the crystal, ensuring that it remains safe for millions of years until it is discovered by future civilizations.’
https://www.technologynetworks.com/genomics/news/5d-memory-crystal-could-preserve-human-dna-for-billions-of-years-391184
“Doom” being played on a 3D volumetric display.
https://youtu.be/na7pvihXhYs?si=Q-Fb5O4EwOx0w8_2
China’s leading car company, BYD, is selling electric cars with autonomous driving features for $9,555.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/chinas-byd-sell-21-models-with-its-gods-eye-smart-driving-tech-2025-02-10/
China might have already passed peak gasoline consumption, largely thanks to its rapid adoption of electric cars.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-plateauing-fuel-without-precedent-090000607.html
Here’s a YouTube video about U-tubes.
https://youtu.be/gxrkLkJybnA?si=fJmdN9LfGRU-ZLIv
The “Flettner Rotor” is a kind of advanced sail that can propel ships.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flettner_rotor
Magnetohydrodynamic thrusters have no moving parts and can propel ships silently.
https://youtu.be/Ulk4hw7pUZY?si=ZvlW9fXWjEwwmsPK
Lab-grown diamonds are better and 80% cheaper than natural diamonds mined from the ground. De Beers is doing badly as a result.
https://www.economist.com/business/2024/05/22/can-anyone-save-the-worlds-most-important-diamond-company
Trump gave his own explanation for the recent UFO sightings in the American Midatlantic: “After research and study, the drones that were flying over New Jersey in large numbers were authorized to be flown by the FAA for research and various other reasons,” Leavitt said, reading Trump’s dictation at her first briefing.
“Many of these drones were also hobbyists, recreational and private individuals that enjoy flying drones. In time, it got worse due to curiosity. This was not the enemy.”
https://nypost.com/2025/01/28/us-news/white-house-says-nj-drones-were-not-the-enemy-heres-what-they-were-actually-doing/
U.S. Congressman Tim Burchett says he believes the evidence that there are unidentified submerged objects, USOs.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ufo-moving-underwater-republican-rep-tim-burchet/
‘It could illuminate an area the size of a football stadium’: How Russia launched a giant space mirror in 1993
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20250130-how-russia-launched-a-giant-space-mirror-in-1993
The chemical ingredients for life are common in space. Also: ‘And the completely racemic character of those amino acids argues in two directions: that there is not some physics-based reason for one enantiomer to be favored over another in the absence of life, and in the other direction, that life on Earth was not seeded by falls of such enantiomerically enriched material to give us the patterns we see today. This is still far from a settled question, but these results are going to be hard to explain away.’
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/fresh-asteroid-getcher-fresh-asteroid-here
‘The only person in the world with a functioning pig organ is thriving after a record 2 months’
https://apnews.com/article/pig-kidney-transplant-xenotransplant-nyu-alabama-021afcc9697a0a490c0d0726482515b4
An imbalanced gut biome could cause depression.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/bacteria-and-their-metabolites-and-depression
People with ADHD have shorter lifespans.
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/01/23/nx-s1-5272801/adhd-research-shorter-life-expectancy-attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder
It was once thought that first cousin marriages were bad because they raised the risk of rare genetic diseases in their offspring. However, even the offspring of such unions who test negative for those diseases are likelier than average to have child developmental problems and speech problems.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c241pn09qqjo
Two meta-analyses cast into question the value of hormone therapy for minors who are transgendered.
https://reason.com/2025/01/24/study-finds-almost-no-good-evidence-on-gender-dysphoria-drugs-for-young-people/
‘FDA approves Vertex’s non-opioid painkiller, first new kind of pain medicine in decades’
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/30/fda-approves-vertex-non-opioid-painkiller-drug.html
Even more weight loss drugs are nearing FDA approval. Two are not GLP-1 agonists.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00404-9
The HPV vaccine has probably decreased cervical cancer rates in American women by 80%.
https://apnews.com/article/hpv-gardasil-vaccine-cervical-cancer-kennedy-32cdcf325d12cbc6610f01430d4ee82b
The CIA now says COVID-19 probably leaked from the Chinese disease lab.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/25/us/politics/cia-covid-lab-leak.html
COVID-19 is now killing fewer Americans than the flu for the first time.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-14389303/Covid-officially-deadly-seasonal-flu.html
Paxlovid, a drug that eases the symptoms of COVID-19 infections, does not help people who have already gotten the vaccine.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/paxlovid-you-d-have-expected-more