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