In an ingenious and remarkably precise mass attack, Israeli detonated the personal pagers and walkie-talkies of thousands of Hezbollah members in two waves. Thirty-seven of them were killed and thousands injured, many severely. Hezbollah adopted the old-fashioned communication devices due to fears that Israel was tapping and tracking their cell phones.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/27/middleeast/israel-pager-attack-hezbollah-lebanon-invs-intl/index.html
A few days later, Israel launched fearsome air- and missile strikes against Hezbollah targets across Lebanon.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp3wy8kpy3eo
https://www.timesnownews.com/world/middle-east/did-israel-nuke-lebanon-videos-spark-theories-article-113557573
In a colossal blow to the organization, one of the airstrikes killed the head of Hezbollah, Hassan Nasrallah.
https://apnews.com/article/lebanon-israel-hezbollah-airstrikes-28-september-2024-c4751957433ff944c4eb06027885a973
Israeli ground forces have invaded southern Lebanon. It’s unclear what the objectives are or what the scope of the operation will be.
https://www.cnn.com/world/live-news/israel-lebanon-war-hezbollah-09-30-24-intl-hnk/index.html
‘Israel destroyed a secretive missile production facility in northwest Syria last week in an attack that included inserting special operations forces by helicopter to retrieve equipment and documents, media outlets are reporting. The new details shed light on an attack initially described as only an airstrike. Not only did the raid strike at the heart of the Iranian military presence in Syria, but it also sent a clear message to Tehran that the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) can and will attack deep underground complexes with ground troops that it otherwise cannot destroy from the air.’
https://www.twz.com/news-features/israeli-commando-raid-in-syria-sends-a-message-to-iran-that-its-on-underground-bases-are-not-untouchable
‘Rafah a ghost town as Israeli military claims victory in Gaza’s southernmost city’
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/rafah-gaza-israel-military-victory-destruction-rcna170991
The Houthi rebels are surprisingly advanced: they shot down two U.S. Reaper drones.
https://apnews.com/article/yemen-houthi-rebels-american-mq9-reaper-drones-2ca2dc1c5316ca5473c3843d97780b2b
NATO might soon let Ukraine use their missiles against targets deep inside Russia. Is Putin’s threat over this another bluff?
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/putin-warns-russia-war-west-ukraine-long-range-missiles-biden-starmer-rcna170980
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/09/26/us/politics/us-ukraine-strikes.html
Ukraine has debuted a brutal new weapon: drones that spew thermite down on Russian positions.
https://youtu.be/h8Noy-_A9-U?si=D4XZn_fjgOPB-7Oe
Glimpse the future: Russians cowering in fear as a Ukrainian suicide drone enters the ruin they are hiding in and searches for them.
https://www.twz.com/news-features/this-ukrainian-drone-hunting-a-russian-inside-a-building-has-big-horror-movie-vibes
“Eagle Eyes” drones navigate to their targets by sight: their cameras compare footage of the landscape to reconnaissance maps saved to their hard drives. Because they aren’t being guided by GPS or radio signals, they’re much harder for Russia to jam. As a matter of fact, besides blinding their cameras with powerful lasers, I don’t see how the new drones could be non-kinetically stopped at all.
https://www.unmannedairspace.info/counter-uas-systems-and-policies/ukraine-develops-software-to-allow-drones-to-fly-without-gps/
Ukrainian suicide drones hit a base deep in Russia where many missiles and bombs were stored. Those weapons were ignited by the attack, causing massive secondary explosions and fires.
https://youtube.com/shorts/pLPXYKGhesU?si=fqszz3gv3u6ZoqWy
https://www.twz.com/news-features/satellite-images-show-massive-devastation-at-russian-ammo-storage-sites-struck-by-ukrainian-drones
A minimum of 66,000 Russians have died fighting in Ukraine.
https://en.zona.media/article/2022/05/11/casualties_eng
The Russians don’t have enough money to build high-quality applique armor and drone jammers and install them on all their tanks. That’s a microcosm for Russia writ large: Greatness foiled by a lack of money, and the problem largely owes to a culture of corruption.
https://youtu.be/X79ar5qpvzk?si=WIH0r_l9Wame3rnK
Russia has proven itself surprisingly adept at keeping its economy and war machine going in spite of sanctions and other challenges. However, the combination of massive government spending, autarky, exhaustion of Soviet-era weapons, and other factors leaves the country vulnerable to domestic economic crisis and loss of arms export clients once the Ukraine War ends. The War has accelerated Russia’s decline in every dimension of power.
https://youtu.be/8tHkwLSS-DE?si=he339Bho2ONh4hem
Russia’s economy is being buoyed by relatively high global oil prices, which could lead to economic problems over the next ten years as oil demand drops thanks to the clean energy transition. China will never buy enough Russian natural gas to replace what Europe consumed before the Ukraine War embargo. EVERYTHING I’ve seen indicates that Russia’s decision to invade Ukraine was a negative inflection point for the former in every way (political, cultural, economic, diplomatic, technological) and accelerated its decline. However, it will take several years for the full scope of the disaster to be made apparent in Russia.
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2024/05/02/russias-gas-business-will-never-recover-from-the-war-in-ukraine
1) Russia has been very effective at jamming Western-made precision missiles given to Ukraine so they miss their targets.
2) Russia’s airborne tanks, which have thin armor so they can be light enough to be dropped out of cargo planes, have proven useless.
3) Attack helicopters are becoming obsolete because antiair weapons have improved so much.
https://youtu.be/eWE1h0GA5fk?si=lvLkxvJl4Lfp7Qfi
This analysis from a month before Russia invaded Ukraine was spot-on: It identified their likely goals of establishing a land bridge to Crimea and destroying Ukraine’s regime, and predicted some fraction of their forces would attack from Belarus. It also predicted that Ukraine would be a tougher opponent than most people assumed, and that the war could turn into a quagmire for Russia if it strove for anything but very limited aims.
https://www.economist.com/europe/what-are-russias-military-options-in-ukraine/21807240
The NATO leadership’s early 2023 prediction that the Ukraine War would drag on indefinitely was right.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-nato-politics-mircea-geoana-e178af41a4f93ead9a427484ea06dbaf
The Russians have light tanks that can be airdropped onto the battlefield with their crewmen inside! This is as close to the Aliens dropship experience as you can get.
https://youtu.be/4RoISC1pI2Y?si=2ZimbV2-iMQPQ9-1
Some of the Russian mercenaries killed in the recent ambush in Mali have been identified.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/exclusive-wagner-lost-veteran-fighters-071731167.html
China’s newest nuclear sub sank during a construction accident.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/26/politics/chinese-nuclear-powered-submarine-sank/index.html
After WWII, the Germans creatively reused their leftover military supplies for civilian ends.
https://youtu.be/YHs9OLgt8vI?si=UUB9vDi6KV-WvCDj
Looking back on the 80th anniversary of Operation Market Garden, it seems that if it had succeeded, it might have set the Allies up for a big defeat right after.
https://youtu.be/62GJdIRE9c0?si=vt0hdMYwQYXIswHe
‘Mahan agreed with Angell that the disruption of the international economic system caused by a major war would also strike back at the aggressor. Yet even this would not mean the end of war, for “… ambition, self-respect, resentment of injustice, sympathy with the oppressed, hatred of oppression” were more than enough reasons why war would not disappear.’
https://www.nato.int/docu/review/articles/2019/01/14/the-end-of-the-great-illusion-norman-angell-and-the-founding-of-nato/index.html
The top economists, banks and hedge fund managers were terrible at predicting how the economy would perform during 2023. The consensus that raised interest rates would push the U.S. into a recession, and that rates would have to be sharply cut, was wrong. China’s post-COVID recovery was also much weaker than expected.
https://www.businessinsider.com/wall-street-2023-predictions-wrong-recession-inflation-stocks-europe-china-2023-1
Three years ago, Donald Trump said “We’re not going to have a country left in three years.”
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-9994303/Trump-predicts-America-come-end-2024-election.html
Trump’s other extreme predictions have also failed.
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/apocalypse-delayed-trump-promising-doom-never-comes-rcna170151
Election forecasts are less accurate than people know.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/09/03/election-forecasts-data-00176905
Here’s a montage of politicians telling Americans “this is the most important election in history,” year after year.
https://youtu.be/hrRLhdDFhN0?si=szjMmlugZJG7MN5U
‘Three Mile Island nuclear plant will reopen to power Microsoft data centers’
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/20/nx-s1-5120581/three-mile-island-nuclear-power-plant-microsoft-ai
OpenAI has released “01,” it’s most advanced LLM yet.
https://openai.com/index/learning-to-reason-with-llms/
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/09/strawberry-has-been-announced.html
https://www.maximumtruth.org/p/massive-breakthrough-in-ai-intelligence
Machines are now in the low end of the human range of performance across many common tasks.
‘Questions like Is that image AI, or is it just sort of ugly? Is my student’s essay AI-generated, or is it just repetitive, low effort, and full of clichés? Is this menu AI, or is the food just kind of disgusting? Is this photo AI, or is her face just that symmetrical? Is this book AI, or was it just written by a cheap ghostwriter? (Or both?) Is that post from a stranger on social-media AI, or are people really just that dull? Is this email AI, or has my co-worker started taking lots of Adderall? ‘
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/is-that-ai-or-does-it-just-suck.html
Helen Toner, one of the OpenAI board members who was removed after she voted to fire Sam Altman last year just testified in front of the Senate that some high-level people in that company think they might create the first AGI in as little as 1 – 3 years. To be fair, even more of them think it could still be 20 years away.
https://www.youtube.com/live/WVU7Awba3VM?si=wtgNjWx9lJNuINGz&t=1039
Meta has unveiled its first augmented reality glasses, “Orion.”
https://about.fb.com/news/2024/09/introducing-orion-our-first-true-augmented-reality-glasses/
In 2019, Samsung patented a smartphone whose screen could be extended like a paper scroll. It was never mass-produced, and thus serves as a good reminder that not every piece of technology that a company releases a sketch of or even builds a working prototype of turns out to be viable.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-7136591/Samsungs-vertical-rolling-phone-prototype-extend-60-CENT.html
The “water jet loom” is an incredible piece of technology.
https://youtu.be/SVWkZiHjreI?si=khKLvKiUUjIKpfV3
A cool roundup of “futuristic mega projects.”
https://web.archive.org/web/20240525195043/https://www.pinktentacle.com/2010/06/futuristic-mega-projects-by-shimizu/
‘The tsunami waves — some at least as tall as the Statue of Liberty — ran up the steep rock walls lining the fjord. Because the landslide struck the waterway at a nearly 90-degree angle, waves bounced back and forth across it for nine days — a phenomenon scientists call a seiche.
…In 2017, four people were killed and 11 houses were destroyed after a landslide touched off a tsunami that struck the village of Nuugaatsiaq in west Greenland. The wave was likely at least 300 feet tall. ‘
https://www.yahoo.com/news/650-foot-tsunami-greenland-fjord-180212833.html
‘Earthworms have “completely scrambled” genomes.’
https://www.science.org/content/article/earthworms-have-completely-scrambled-genomes-did-help-their-ancestors-leave-sea
Not everything that comes out of the RAND Corporation (or any other esteemed think tank) is right.
‘The following appear to be the most significant effects and issues:
-Increased quantity and quality of human life. A marked acceleration is likely by 2015 in the expansion of human life spans along with significant improvements in the quality of human life. Better disease control, custom drugs, gene therapy, age mitigation and reversal, memory drugs, prosthetics, bionic implants, animal transplants, and many other advances may continue to increase human life span and improve the quality of life. Some of these advances may even improve human performance beyond current levels (e.g., through artificial sensors). We anticipate that the developed world will lead the developing world in reaping these benefits as it has in the past.
-Eugenics and cloning. By 2015 we may have the capability to use genetic engineering techniques to “improve” the human species and clone humans. These will be very controversial developments—among the most controversial in the entire history of mankind. It is unclear whether wide-scale efforts will be initiated by 2015, and cloning of humans may not be technically feasible by 2015. However, we will probably see at least some narrow attempts such as gene therapy for genetic diseases and cloning by rogue experimenters. The controversy will be in full swing by 2015 (if not sooner).’
https://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1307.html
This is interesting, though it makes no sense to only enhance women with the technology. Also, if the synthetic cells and organelles are so superior to natural ones, what’s the point of keeping the original tissue around? Why not completely transform your body so it is 100% synthetic cells and organelles?
https://timeguide.wordpress.com/2024/08/03/synthetic-organelles-the-future-of-medicine-and-human-enhancement-the-eternal-woman/
If machines will surpass humans in every area, it must include moral behavior and making moral judgements.
https://futuristspeaker.com/artificial-intelligence/silicon-whistleblowers-when-autonomous-robots-become-our-moral-compass/
If AI will become better than humans at everything, that means it will also be better at matching humans with jobs. H.R. offices are staffed with incompetent people anyway, so what would we lose by replacing them with machines?
https://work.mercor.com/faq
The transition to electric cars has proceeded slower than most of the big car companies predicted just a few years ago, forcing them to make costly adjustments to their product lineups.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/economy/volvo-reverses-goal-make-only-evs-2030
https://youtu.be/ODG59UjBiGg?si=7uU66hC_R1CzHgD9
OpenAI’s CTO Mira Murati is the latest senior member of the company to quit, raising questions about Sam Altman’s leadership and the direction of the company.
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/openais-slow-motion-train-wreck
‘Seurat Technologies has invented a novel area printing approach which has the potential to break through the limits of today’s metal Additive Manufacturing. Rather than increasing the number of laser sources, this new technology uses a completely new method of beam manipulation to increase melted volume per time. While the usual metal AM system works with a spot diameter of 100 μm, the Seurat system delivers two million points of laser light into a 15 mm square area, with each point of light having a roughly 10 μm diameter. With this method, Seurat can simultaneously increase build rate massively, while also improving resolution. Seurat TechnologiesTM increases the build rate up to 1000x compared to other single laser system.’
https://www.seurat.com/single-post/seurat-insights-volume-1-a-new-era-in-metal-part-production
Boeing’s troubled “Starliner” space capsule returned to Earth, sans the two astronauts it was supposed to carry due to fears it would malfunction and kill them. We now know they would have survived, but it wasn’t worth risking it.
https://www.nasa.gov/news-release/nasa-boeing-welcome-starliner-spacecraft-to-earth-close-mission/
The first spacewalk on a private spacecraft took place.
https://apnews.com/article/spacex-private-spacewalk-polaris-dawn-e5635c75b15b2f298e426b4992bcde86
Elon Musk says he will send his first, unmanned rocket to Mars by the end of 2026, and if that mission goes well, a second rocket will carry humans there in 2028.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/technology/elon-musk-predicts-crewed-spacex-flights-mars-2028-hopes-self-sustaining-city-planet
Of course, he has been wrong before.
‘Elon Musk is aiming to land spaceships on Mars in 2022. The hard-charging tech mogul said his rocket company, SpaceX, aims to land at least two cargo ships on the Red Planet in 2022 in order to place power, mining and life support systems there for future flights.’
https://money.cnn.com/2017/09/29/technology/future/elon-musk-spacex-mars-iac-conference/index.html
‘Robot Metalsmiths Are Resurrecting Toroidal Tanks for NASA’
Every lost trade skill will be resurrected by AI through a sort of reverse-engineering process. They will probably even discover more efficient techniques than our ancestors knew.
https://spectrum.ieee.org/metal-forming-robot
Yes, “what if?” And what if energy is superabundant, along with intelligence thanks to AGI, and labor thanks to robots? All kinds of things will become possible.
‘Terraform says that a cheap-electrolyser/off-grid-solar demonstrator it has built along these lines shows it can generate hydrogen at a cost of $2.5 per per kg, and that it has a roadmap for getting to $1 per kg, the level which analysts reckon hydrogen must reach in order to compete with fossil fuels. That it is well-suited to developing markets is not a coincidence. Mr Handmer thinks people should be able to “throw solar panels on the ground and hook up some equipment, anywhere on Earth”, in order to make any hydrogen they need.
Once you start to think in terms of energy being really copious and all-but free, at least at some times and in some places, brute-force approaches to all sorts of problems begin to appear. One way to drastically reduce the spread of airborne disease is to speed up the rate at which the air in the world’s buildings is vented and refreshed. If energy is expensive this is not feasible. But what if…? One way to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere is to grind certain sorts of rock into fine dust that is then dispersed across the oceans. Given that this needs to be done at a scale of billions of tonnes a year, again the energy requirement is incredible. And again, what if…?’
https://www.economist.com/interactive/essay/2024/06/20/solar-power-is-going-to-be-huge
Sam Altman, head of OpenAI, just wrote an important essay about the future of AI.
‘We need to act wisely but with conviction. The dawn of the Intelligence Age is a momentous development with very complex and extremely high-stakes challenges. It will not be an entirely positive story, but the upside is so tremendous that we owe it to ourselves, and the future, to figure out how to navigate the risks in front of us.
I believe the future is going to be so bright that no one can do it justice by trying to write about it now; a defining characteristic of the Intelligence Age will be massive prosperity.
Although it will happen incrementally, astounding triumphs – fixing the climate, establishing a space colony, and the discovery of all of physics – will eventually become commonplace. With nearly-limitless intelligence and abundant energy – the ability to generate great ideas, and the ability to make them happen – we can do quite a lot.’
https://ia.samaltman.com/
Here are proposed infrastructure projects that we could execute given more resources.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Proposed_canals
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Proposed_transport_infrastructure
Building a Dyson Sphere is technically feasible, but building a Dyson Swarm would be much easier.
https://youtu.be/zU_R2ghfsBE?si=wwDvUwifcgOpoAvk
This critique of the “Grabby Aliens” theory is so deep that I can’t understand much of it. Basically, it’s quite plausible that we don’t see aliens because we humans, warts and all, are the first intelligent species to arise in our galaxy and perhaps our whole part of the universe.
https://youtu.be/tR1HTNtcYw0?si=Q0eypYM22RHV4MLw
Bob Lazar is probably the most polarizing figure in the UFO community. He became famous in the early 1990s after going public with claims he worked on an alien space ship at Area 51 and had circumstantial supporting evidence. However, an investigation into Lazar’s personal history reveals a long pattern of dishonesty and lawbreaking.
https://youtu.be/hRbkOGu6Z78?si=_OYefQwEuvgzGU9N
Donald Trump says he will release any secret footage the U.S. government has of UFOs if he wins reelection.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/30246387/trump-release-pentagon-ufo-videos-lex-fridman/
An important but overlooked benefit of global warming is the lengthening of growing seasons in colder climates. The already-vast farmlands of Canada and Russia will get larger and more productive.
https://www.npr.org/2024/09/13/nx-s1-5002049/climate-change-farming-alaska-native
John Kerry’s 2009 prediction that the Arctic Ocean would be free of ice by 2014 was wrong, and climatologists now think it won’t start happening until the middle of this century.
https://youtu.be/z3WR4_am-3Y?si=Pytiyl1LHtQfW391
In the U.S., construction of structures in flood-prone areas has continued unabated, with expensive consequences.
https://news.miami.edu/rosenstiel/stories/2024/09/over-two-million-acres-of-floodplain-development-occurred-in-us-in-last-two-decades-study-finds.html
A person’s birthdate affects their academic and athletic performance, which has lifelong consequences.
https://www.stevestewartwilliams.com/p/youngest-kid-in-class-syndrome
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-athletes-birthdays-affect-who-goes-pro-and-who-becomes-a-star/
This drug researcher claims Pfizer could have released Ozempic in the 1990s.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/missing-out-glp-1
More evidence that the drug metformin probably slows human aging.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/small-molecule-drugs-and-longevity
The research that identified specific parts of the world where people had abnormally long lifespans was probably flawed.
https://www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/news/2024/sep/ucl-demographers-work-debunking-blue-zone-regions-exceptional-lifespans-wins-ig-nobel-prize
‘Of the 1060 small molecules that are theorized to exist, most are likely extremely challenging to create.’
https://www.owlposting.com/p/generative-ml-in-chemistry-is-bottlenecked
“So for these reasons, I (unfortunately) do not expect any big AI-driven breakthroughs in biological understanding any time soon.”
It sounds like we need to build automated labs to do experiments and fill in the data that he says are missing.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/ai-and-biology
Bill Gates says world health authorities have failed to fully learn the lessons of COVID-19 that are needed to prepare for the next pandemic.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bill-gates-says-world-facing-104029833.html