Posted on by Eddie

Interesting articles, November 2023

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.

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/

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