After a Hezbollah rocket attack that killed 12 Israeli civilians, Israel used airstrikes to kill senior leaders of Hezbollah and Hamas. The bold reprisal carried out the assassinations in Beirut and Tehran.
https://apnews.com/article/haniyeh-shukur-israel-lebanon-hamas-5d3ec9b048ef77b6b8196c6c08755dbd
Israel retaliated against Yemen for a drone attack that killed one person in Tel Aviv with an airstrike that practically crippled Yemen’s most important seaport. The distances are remarkable: southern Israel and the port are 1,200 miles apart.
https://www.twz.com/news-features/details-of-israels-long-range-strike-that-decimated-yemeni-port-emerge
The U.S. military dismantled its floating pier that was meant to deliver aid to Gaza. The failure makes me wonder how badly it would fare under the stress of warfare when it would be needed to deliver supplies to our troops after they secured a beachhead.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/bidens-floating-pier-off-gaza-wound-disappointment/story
In spite of a resurgence in U.S. military aid, Ukraine’s forces are slowly falling back at multiple parts of the front line.
https://www.politico.eu/article/kremlin-troops-push-kyivs-underequipped-soldiers-frontline-russia-ukraine-war-zelenskyy/
The Russian “MT-LB” armored tractor fleet has suffered so much attrition in the Ukraine War that it’s on track for extinction.
https://youtu.be/KSvawAjav1k?si=z8cdh4l7JEumq4D3
A U.S. company has developed an upgrade package for Ukraine’s kamikaze drones that lets them home in on their targets using cameras and image recognition. This makes them jam-proof against Russia’s current electronic weapons.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2024/07/10/destroying-russian-tanks-is-just-the-start-for-us-ai-drone-autopilot/
Defensive lasers that can be mounted on tanks and which can blind the sensors of enemy drones are “an untapped countermeasure.”
https://www.twz.com/land/laser-dazzlers-for-defending-tanks-against-marauding-drones-are-an-untapped-countermeasure
A U.S. soldier in 1944 holding a captured German “Panzerschreck” (left) and an American Bazooka (right). Both weapons were designed to penetrate the thick armor of tanks and to blow them up, but the larger Panzerschreck was more powerful. The Germans based the Panzerschreck on Bazookas they captured from U.S. POWs in 1942 in North Africa.
Islamic fighters ambushed and killed dozens of Russian “Wagner” mercenaries in Mali.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/dozens-wagner-fighters-killed-russian-192007431.html
Some of the Mexican army’s guns and armored vehicles are from WWII.
https://youtu.be/Q8R32wuYVe4?si=d6Y_qzuIwXlLxToD
Influential “effective altruists” mostly living in Silicon Valley are trying to get California and the U.S. federal government to impose restrictions on AI development out of fear it might destroy the human race.
https://reason.com/2024/07/05/the-authoritarian-side-of-effective-altruism-comes-for-ai/
Like any other technology, AI will stay largely ignored until its capability surpasses that of humans or some other common technology, whereupon it will be rapidly adopted.
https://www.oneusefulthing.org/p/gradually-then-suddenly-upon-the
A DeepMind LLM secured a silver medal in the 2024 International Math Olympiad.
“The fact that the program can come up with a non-obvious construction like this is very impressive, and well beyond what I thought was state of the art.”
-Prof Sir Timothy Gowers, IMO gold medalist and Fields Medal winner
https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/ai-solves-imo-problems-at-silver-medal-level/
LLMs are getting much more computationally efficient.
https://openai.com/index/gpt-4o-mini-advancing-cost-efficient-intelligence/
Maybe managers will be automated before line workers.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c03lgz2zrg1o
After his shockingly bad debate against Donald Trump, President Joe Biden ended his 2024 reelection bid. At least two pundits predicted this:
- “I predict the kingmaker who saved Biden’s campaign in the 2020 primary, South Carolina Congressman Jim Clyburn, will this time be the king slayer. After Biden insists that he is running for re-election, Clyburn, a respected elder statesman with gravitas, will tell Biden his defeat of Trump in 2020 was enough, and now it’s time for another candidate, without Biden’s baggage, to lead the way. Biden, a stubborn man, will eventually agree. By spring 2023, more than 20 Democrats will enter the contest and the party in 2024 will emerge with a newer, younger leader.”
-Ari Fleischer, May 2, 2022
https://www.foxnews.com/opinion/joe-biden-wont-run-in-2024-ari-fleischer - ‘Steve Forbes made a bold prediction Friday morning while sitting with Fox News’ Bill Hemmer and Jacqui Heinrich on “America’s Newsroom”: President Joe Biden will not be the Democrats’ 2024 nominee, despite announcing his reelection campaign in April.’
-May 26, 2023
https://www.yahoo.com/entertainment/joe-biden-not-democrats-2024-231657505.html
Presidential contender Donald Trump narrowly avoided assassination during a speech to supporters in Pennsylvania. Conservative news pundit Tucker Carlson predicted this last September.
‘Speaking with Adam Carolla on the comedian’s eponymous YouTube show, Carlson said: “They indicted him three times, and every single time his popularity rose. If you begin with criticism, then you go to protest, then you go to impeachment, then you go to indictment, and none of them work, what’s next? Graph it out, man! We’re speeding toward assassination, obviously.”‘
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-12470861/Tucker-Carlson-breathlessly-says-speeding-Trump-assassination-liberal-establishment-running-options-stop-president-Russian-propagandist-says-ex-Fox-News-host-dead-man-walking.html
Here’s a list of science fiction works that were set in the future at the time they were published, but which now took place in the past.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_stories_set_in_a_future_now_in_the_past
“Redbox” has shut down, bringing down the curtain on the movie disc rental era. I remember when DVD vending machines were high tech.
https://www.ign.com/articles/redbox-officially-shutting-down
‘Europe’s first Ariane 6 flight achieved most of its goals, but ended prematurely’
https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/07/europes-first-ariane-6-flight-achieved-most-of-its-goals-but-ended-prematurely/
Instead of crashing the ISS back to Earth, why not boost it to a higher orbit where it will stay for decades?
https://spacenews.com/transferring-the-international-space-station-into-the-future/
NASA’s Perseverance rover may have found evidence of extinct microbial life on Mars.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/26/science/nasa-perseverance-rover-cheyava-falls-rock/index.html
There is a fine line between genius and insanity.
‘Musk, 53, has directed SpaceX employees to drill into the design and details of a Martian city, according to five people with knowledge of the efforts and documents viewed by The New York Times. One team is drawing up plans for small dome habitats, including the materials that could be used to build them. Another is working on spacesuits to combat Mars’ hostile environment, while a medical team is researching whether humans can have children there. Musk has volunteered his sperm to help seed a colony
…The Boring Co., a private tunneling venture founded by Musk, was started in part to ready equipment to burrow under Mars’ surface, two of the people said. Musk has told people that he bought the social platform X partly to help test how a citizen-led government that rules by consensus might work on Mars. He has also said that he envisions residents on the planet will drive a version of the steel-paneled Cybertrucks made by Tesla, his electric vehicle company.’
https://www.yahoo.com/news/thermonuclear-blasts-species-inside-elon-114134734.html
A new study finds evidence that the brain patterns involved in gender identity are distinct from the brain patterns that reveal biological sex at birth. The study used fMRI brain scans of children aged 9 and 10, along with survey questions meant to find how they viewed their gender. “These gender-associated brain networks were distinct from those associated with assigned sex at birth.”
https://www.science.org/content/article/brain-imaging-study-children-shows-sex-and-gender-operate-different-networks-brain
Another person has been cured of HIV thanks to a stem cell transplant.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-13648387/German-man-seventh-person-HIV-cured.html
New genetics research shows that Americans with ADHD and anxiety/depression disorders have been reproducing the most, while people with high educational attainment have been reproducing the least.