Tag: military

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Interesting articles, November 2024

The pace of Russia’s territorial gains in eastern Ukraine has accelerated.
https://www.twz.com/news-features/ukrainian-defenses-in-east-are-buckling-russian-advance-is-accelerating

However, this is coming at the cost of enormous Russian casualties.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp3nv7j1xkxo

One of Russia’s biggest tank storage bases has 75% fewer tanks than it did before the Ukraine War, and most of the remaining vehicles are in such poor condition that they can’t be restored for combat.
https://youtu.be/mUzuAMp73I4?si=6E3JubyT_Xg8fh7B

The Red Army is so low on weapons that Russia’s biggest film studio donated to it dozens of antique tanks and other vehicles that it normally used for making war films.
https://www.twz.com/land/russias-largest-film-studio-donated-antique-tanks-to-the-military

With North Korean help, Russia is recapturing its land near Kursk.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ukraine-hoped-force-russia-pick-111953225.html

North Korean artillery pieces are making their way to Ukraine.
https://www.twz.com/land/north-korean-long-range-self-propelled-artillery-appears-in-russia

Russia is giving North Korea more advanced antiaircraft missiles in exchange for its help in Ukraine.
https://www.twz.com/land/north-korea-getting-new-air-defenses-in-return-for-supporting-russia-in-ukraine-official

Many Russians are enlisting in the Army solely for money. The pay is excellent. Problematically, the Russian government is paying for these salaries as well as most other war-related expenses by printing huge amounts of money and handing it out, which is causing very high inflation.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/economics-death-why-russians-poor-161637106.html
https://www.yahoo.com/news/putin-signs-law-allowing-russian-171726947.html

After Biden authorized Ukraine to fire advanced, U.S.-made missiles deep into Russia, Putin announced Russia might use nuclear weapons against Ukraine.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-nuclear-doctrine-putin-91f20e0c9b0f9e5eaa3ed97c35789898

Russia also fired an intermediate-range ballistic missile into Ukraine in revenge. This is the first time such a weapon has ever been used in anger.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-intercontinental-missile-war-putin-d50183ccfc28b10c71e93f3e68159a61

‘Ukraine’s drone units are inflicting 80% of the frontline casualties on Russia, report says’
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ukraines-drone-units-inflicting-80-121327010.html

Israel’s most recent airstrikes on Iran destroyed most of the latter’s missile fuel production facilities, which will effectively limit missile production for years. The jets also destroyed many of Iran’s S-300 antiaircraft missile sites, showing how inferior the Russian-made systems are to American technology. Most of China’s antiaircraft missiles have the same level of technology as the S-300, meaning a U.S.-China air war would probably be more one-sided than people think. The U.S. is unique in that its military pretends to be weaker than it is.
https://youtu.be/oQtRdL36FVs?si=lN40_YCEHMAHJ5i2

2% of Gaza’s population has been killed in the last 13 months.
https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-hamas-war-lebanon-hezbollah-iran-news-11-20-2024-5da3ce43df8662fe9eeab4ad804bdc0f

A U.N. analysis found that most of the people killed by Israeli attacks on Gaza have been women and children.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/partial-un-probe-gaza-war-094427985.html

Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince accused Israel of genocide in Gaza.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cp8x5570514o

The International Criminal Court issued arrest warrants for Benjamin Netanyahu and two top leaders in the Israeli and Hamas armed forces for war crimes.
https://apnews.com/article/icc-israel-hamas-warrants-netanyahu-palestinian-arrest-73c854d072e0a1a41b19b2cb2cdd07fa

This video shows how the Israeli Air Force practically destroyed Syria’s Air Force in 1982.
https://youtu.be/F33h9-oUfDU?si=c3yQos_YepVP9ald

The F-20 was the greatest fighter plane that never was.
https://youtu.be/5ypSn108HuY?si=J-cp60LpkDuyjPhd

Here’s an interesting and simple video about how artillery is aimed at targets. The “Fire Direction Center” (7:20) will be made obsolete by intelligent machines.
https://youtu.be/PrullIWGqX8?si=acW-XgN2SQ8a2Z_7

We know of ways to design better shotgun shells, but no one has tried to commercialize them due to path dependence. In other words, there are so many shotguns that use the old shells that we are locked in to continuing their use.
https://youtu.be/3iLSCNtogc8?si=0s8Uqt9nCXQD3YA-

In November of 1950, U.N. forces captured Pyongyang from North Korea’s battered army. At that point, there were two options: 1) Build a strong defensive line north of Pyongyang clear across the peninsula or 2) pursue the fleeing enemy and take over all of North Korea to the Chinese border. In retrospect, we should have chosen the first option because even if the Communists had retained control over the northern mountain region, they wouldn’t have had enough land, resources or people to make a viable country, and there’s no way it would have been able to build nuclear weapons 50 years later.

Halting our troops north of Pyongyang would have also left us much abler to repulse any Chinese counteroffensive, which some in the U.S. military high command correctly believed was coming. In any case, not advancing to the border would have signaled to the Chinese that our goal wasn’t to eventually invade them, and that we were willing to leave rump North Korea as a buffer zone. General MacArthur really blew it.
https://youtu.be/VWlZ6Xf4Bp8?si=5f1gtV8rRLvhzHAA&t=524

In a shocking turn of events, rebels captured the second-largest city in Syria, Aleppo, after just a day of fighting.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cly27r5p0yno

From this February: “There’s this very powerful and seductive narrative around a soft landing, and we’re just not seeing it in the data,” Citi’s chief US economist, Andrew Hollenhorst, said in a CNBC interview.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/no-soft-landing-us-economy-022146984.html

Does Joe Biden believe in the Singularity?
https://x.com/i/status/1838721620808208884

“Search engine optimization” worsens political polarization by providing people with political articles that support their existing biases.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20241031-how-google-tells-you-what-you-want-to-hear

Donald Trump defeated Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. The vast majority of polls showed a tied result up to the day of the vote, and were badly wrong: Trump won the popular vote and the electoral vote count by healthy margins. Here’s a roundup of right and wrong predictions.

The saga of veteran Democratic strategist James Carville:

Elon Musk’s 2023 prediction right after it was announced Trump would be charged with a felony in New York and forced to have his mugshot taken:

In September 2023, Tucker Carlson predicted Trump would be assassinated. In 2024, there were two attempts on his life, one of which nearly succeeded. “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. No-one will say that, but I don’t know how you can’t reach that conclusion.”
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

A robotic guard dog is patrolling Trump’s Florida estate.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c30p16gn3pvo

Trump has vowed to negotiate and end to the Ukraine War, even if it means forfeiting conquered territory. A cease-fire would allow Russia to rebuild its forces faster than Ukraine, and then attack again in a year with a large advantage. Trump should not substantially lower U.S. aid to Ukraine for the first year of his coming term to ensure that Russia burns through the remainder of its Soviet-era weapons stockpiles, making rapid rearmament after any cease-fire impossible.
https://youtu.be/cZoJKFfZ7nw?si=dzoVreJXTfp2EAlt

NVIDIA’s market cap is now over $3 trillion, making it the most valuable company in the world.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/nvidia-rides-ai-wave-pass-211002574.html

In his final book, Henry Kissinger warned of a future where technologically enhanced humans and machines rule the world. ‘In a section titled “Coevolution: Artificial Humans,” the three authors encourage people to think now about “trying to navigate our role when we will no longer be the only or even the principal actors on our planet.”’
https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2024/nov/19/henry-kissinger-final-warning-prepare-superhuman-p/

‘A painting by an AI robot of the eminent World War Two codebreaker Alan Turing has sold for $1,084,800 (£836,667) at auction.’
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpqdvz4w45wo

An online variant of the Turing Test showed humans can barely tell human-made art from AI-made art anymore.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/how-did-you-do-on-the-ai-art-turing

‘AI-generated poetry is indistinguishable from human-written poetry and is rated more favorably’
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-024-76900-1

AI-generated music is now as good as what most human musicians can make. The two are also indistinguishable in most cases.
https://youtu.be/qj1Sp8He6e4?si=JLpjUDh91kKkV4mY
https://youtu.be/u2pYNRNdcNc?si=ChwlfJj7bgk3jmYD

This high-res simulation of Rome is almost indistinguishable from reality.
https://youtu.be/Qhucdyzkeis?si=xJrIQElA53R7ru_K

Machines can recognize emotions from the facial expressions of goats. Someday, they will be able to empathize and communicate with animals better than humans.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/11/241107193106.htm

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei predicts machines will probably surpass humans in all areas of thinking by 2030. Roadblocks to that milestone are unlikely to appear.
https://youtu.be/GrloGdp5wdc?si=aGM_PDGv0vXNQqvr

The anonymous tech analyst “Gwern” predicts AGI could be invented as early as 2028.
https://youtu.be/a42key59cZQ?si=opLEiYab3pZmkAJr

Even the eternal pessimist Yann LeCun predicts AGI could be invented in as little as five years.
https://youtu.be/JAgHUDhaTU0?si=hpMZqC30F22U_EVM&t=4410

Greg Brockman has returned to OpenAI.
https://www.cnbc.com/2024/11/12/openai-co-founder-greg-brockman-returns-after-three-months-of-leave.html

There are rumors GPT-5 is not as good as was hoped, leading to questions about whether AI progress is slowing down.
https://techcrunch.com/2024/11/09/openai-reportedly-developing-new-strategies-to-deal-with-ai-improvement-slowdown/

“[Today’s investments in AIs and data centers are] the biggest gamble in business history”
https://www.economist.com/the-world-ahead/2024/11/18/will-the-bubble-burst-for-ai-in-2025-or-will-it-start-to-deliver

‘US government commission pushes Manhattan Project-style AI initiative’
https://www.reuters.com/technology/artificial-intelligence/us-government-commission-pushes-manhattan-project-style-ai-initiative-2024-11-19/

Despite all the jokes about it, the Tesla Cybertruck has rapidly become the #1 bestselling electric truck in America.
https://autos.yahoo.com/data-shows-tesla-cybertruck-dominating-110031477.html

The “Jellyfish UFO” was probably a bundle of party balloons.
https://youtu.be/ojotsKjshHc?si=80VvDR50SsQ4xIBq

The U.S. military says the “GoFast” UFO was probably a balloon and only seemed to be moving fast because the jet that filmed it was moving fast.
https://www.foxnews.com/video/6364948499112

‘Researchers can use this framework to answer complex questions, find gaps in current knowledge, suggest new designs for materials, and predict how materials might behave, and link concepts that had never been connected before.

The AI model found unexpected similarities between biological materials and “Symphony No. 9,” suggesting that both follow patterns of complexity. “Similar to how cells in biological materials interact in complex but organized ways to perform a function, Beethoven’s 9th symphony arranges musical notes and themes to create a complex but coherent musical experience,” says Buehler.’
https://news.mit.edu/2024/graph-based-ai-model-maps-future-innovation-1112

‘We took the standard human model (75kg), and made smaller and smaller models down to 100 grams. We also made the models bigger, up to 2,000kg, and challenged them to run as fast as they could.

Several fascinating things happened when we did this.

First, the 2,000kg model couldn’t move. Nor could the 1,000kg model. In fact, the largest model that could move was 900kg, suggesting an upper limit to the human form. Beyond this size we need to change shape in order to move.

We also found that the fastest model was not the biggest nor smallest. Instead, it was around 47kg, a similar weight to an average cheetah.

…Interestingly, many of our fastest long distance runners such as Eliud Kipchoge weigh around 50kg.’
https://theconversation.com/not-too-big-not-too-small-why-modern-humans-are-the-ideal-size-for-speed-241668

China has now produced more greenhouse gas emissions than Europe has since the start of the Industrial Revolution.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/11/19/climate/china-emissions-fossil-fuels-climate.html

The FDA is finally prohibiting the sale of the decongestant “phenylephrine” because it doesn’t work. There were indications of its inefficacy as early as 2007. It took them this long to do anything.
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-proposes-ending-use-oral-phenylephrine-otc-monograph-nasal-decongestant-active-ingredient-after

Lead poisoning is pervasive among Afghans.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41370-022-00431-y

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Interesting articles, October 2024

The pace of Russia’s advance in Ukraine has accelerated. Ukrainian troops are falling back across the eastern front line.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/10/31/world/europe/russia-gains-ukraine-maps.html

After almost two years of costly attacks, Russia has captured the Ukrainian town of Vuhledar. This is bad news for Ukraine’s eastern defensive line.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/russian-troops-reach-centre-ukraines-vuhledar-east-ukrainian-governor-says-2024-10-01/

North Korea has sent somewhere between 3,000 and 10,000 of its troops to fight for Russia in Ukraine. North Korea is getting money, battlefield experience, and military technology from Russia for this.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/10/23/politics/lloyd-austin-north-korea-troops-russia/index.html

Manpower shortages probably also convinced the Russians to pay the North Koreans to fight.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/russia-cant-sustain-attack-ukraine-121503562.html

Russia might be re-importing 1940s howitzers that it sold to North Korea long ago.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/russia-rolled-soviet-howitzer-1940s-060646676.html

Russian second-line forces have been stripping obsolete 73mm cannons from obsolete BMP-1 armored vehicles and mounting them on little wagons they can tow to the front lines and fire at Ukrainians. I might understand mounting these old guns on the beds of pickup trucks, but if you’re so broke that you only have wagons for them…
https://armourersbench.com/2024/10/13/dismounted-2a28s-as-improvised-support-guns/

Russia has moved a captured German Leopard 2 tank to one of its tank factories for analysis.
https://www.defensenews.com/global/europe/2024/10/16/captured-leopard-2-resurfaces-at-russias-main-tank-factory/

Croatia will give some of its Soviet-era tanks to Ukraine if Germany gives tanks to Croatia.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/croatia-offers-ukraine-tanks-military-092743231.html

“Darwin’s War” profiles on of Ukraine’s best suicide drone pilots. It’s amazing how easily he shrugs off missions that end with probable kills of Russian troops and resets for the next one.
https://youtu.be/WipqeFgzdTc?si=owAUkjjdU-8pzZHa

Hezbollah has a larger and more advanced fighting force than Lebanon’s national army. Hezbollah is an Islamist terrorist group whereas Lebanon’s army is multireligious and recognized as the country’s legitimate military.
https://apnews.com/article/lebanese-army-laf-israel-hezbollah-78f6ad2da82d64d1ae266aa5394e6d4e

Iran launched a second mass missile attack on Israel in response to the latter’s invasion of Lebanon. The missile attach was more successful than the first, but still failed to do significant damage.
https://www.twz.com/air/clearer-picture-of-damage-to-israeli-airbase-from-iranian-ballistic-missiles-emerges

The only fatality from Iran’s missile attack against Israel was, ironically, a Palestinian man.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/gazan-buried-only-known-victim-iranian-barrage-against-israel-2024-10-02/

Did Iran actually pull its punch in the missile attack because it didn’t want to escalate the conflict?
https://thehill.com/opinion/4942123-iran-retaliation-israel/

An Iranian missile embedded in the ground somewhere in Israel, like something out of the Looney Tunes.

Israel hit back with airstrikes across Iran against its missiles and their support infrastructure. The attack appeared calibrated to avoid escalation but to also leave Iran vulnerable to future air strikes.
https://www.twz.com/news-features/israels-reprisal-strike-carefully-calculated-unclear-if-jets-ever-flew-over-iran
https://apnews.com/article/iran-israel-attack-shahroud-guard-base-satellite-photos-b9cdb18b252d6dd9014dc4dcb3dd4b2f

U.S. stealth bombers blew up several underground missile storage bases in Yemen as punishment for that country’s continued missile attacks on ships in the Red Sea. The attack was also meant to show Iran that America can also destroy the former’s underground nuclear and missile facilities.
https://www.twz.com/air/b-2-spirits-just-sent-a-very-ominous-message-to-iran-that-only-they-can

‘One year ago, Saudi Arabia and Israel were supposedly on the brink of a deal to normalize relations.

That deal has seemingly evaporated as Iran’s foreign minister visits the kingdom on Tuesday to discuss efforts to halt Israel’s incursions into Gaza and Lebanon.

“Our dialogue continues regarding the developments in the region to prevent the shameless crimes of the Zionist regime in Lebanon, in continuation of the crimes in Gaza,” Iran Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi said in a video broadcast on state media. ‘
https://www.foxnews.com/politics/iran-foreign-minister-saudi-arabia-deal-israel

The destruction of Gaza and its population is comparable to what some countries suffered in WWII.
https://apnews.com/article/israel-palestinians-hamas-war-anniversary-statistics-e61765035c725b3c8d4840e2bab565cd

Israel wants to build fortified roads across Gaza to separate it from Egypt and to separate it internally, allowing Israeli troops to control the population more easily and to respond to problems faster.
https://youtu.be/qZhD4G7ENSY?si=qHrDVn7aBTzYk47V

Israeli forces have killed the head of Hamas, Yahya Sinwar. In his final moments, he was trapped inside a wrecked house, injured and exhausted. An Israeli hover drone flew in through a broken window and filmed him from a few feet away. He impotently threw a stick at it and missed. An Israeli tank parked outside then shot the building, followed by a volley of gunfire, killing him.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/hamas-leader-sinwar-made-critical-100313977.html

An Israeli airstrike killed the new leader of Hezbollah, Hashem Safieddine, just a few weeks after it killed their old leader, Hassan Nasrallah.
https://apnews.com/article/hashem-safieddine-killed-obituary-hezbollah-leader-lebanon-8b74c45dc6b6028bc18c61a06db4233d

A Hezbollah kamikaze drone attacked Benjamin Netanyahu’s beach house in an apparent assassination attempt. He wasn’t there at the time.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/netanyahu-bedroom-window-hit-hezbollah-160653866.html

61% of Taiwanese think China is unlikely to invade in the next five years.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/most-taiwanese-believe-china-unlikely-040444122.html

People think Skynet will only replace soldiers with robots. Replacing the wasteful military bureaucrats working in offices will be just as important.

‘Cost overruns for cargo plane commodes have captured headlines in the past. In 2018, Defense One reported that the Air Force had spent $10,000 for a toilet seat cover on its C-5 cargo plane. Tuesday’s report redacted the price of individual soap dispensers.

One reason the Air Force overpaid for soap dispensers and other parts was that contracting officials failed to “review invoices to determine fair and reasonable prices before payment.”’
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/elections/2024/10/29/air-force-soap-dispenser-boondoggle/75914801007/

This prediction about the U.S. Vice Presidential debate was totally wrong.
This was totally wrong.
‘The takeaway: Expect a slugfest. Like his running mate Donald Trump, Vance prefers to go on offense, turning his opponents’ barbs against them and blurring the line between personal and political attacks. Walz, meanwhile, can get fiery when he attacks his opponents, but he tends to lean into his folksy demeanor to defuse tough questions about his record. Both men struggle at times to hide their tempers, and with plenty of bad blood between the two of them — stemming in large part from Vance’s attacks on Walz’s military record and Walz’s crusade to label Vance as “weird” — don’t be surprised if things turn personal.’
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/10/01/walzs-vance-previous-debate-slugfest-00181737

Nobel Prizes have been awarded to three scientists who did seminal work in AI:

  • Geoffrey E. Hinton: Physics
  • David Baker: Chemistry
  • Demis Hassabis: Chemistry
  • John Jumper: Chemistry

https://apnews.com/article/nobel-chemistry-prize-56f4d9e90591dfe7d9d840a8c8c9d553

Further testing reveals how powerful and intelligent OpenAI’s new “01” LLM is.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.18486
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03169-9

Anthropic demonstrates the Claude LLM’s impressive ability to code websites.
https://youtu.be/vH2f7cjXjKI?si=1W8dnU7JA-IVnUel

Apple has released a study that calls into question whether LLMs are actually “reasoning” in the same way humans are. By adding irrelevant text to question prompts, the team was able to decrease the accuracy of every LLM’s response. Notably, the performance hit and the newness of the model were inversely correlated.
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2024/10/llms-cant-perform-genuine-logical-reasoning-apple-researchers-suggest/

18 months ago, this guy (“David Shapiro”) predicted AGI would be created within 18 months.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YXQ6OKSvzfc

He doubled down on it 12 months ago.
https://youtu.be/M5eQwl4YmGU?si=bcRO93a3wreDFfOJ

A recent experiment measured whether GPT-4 could help doctors make better medical diagnoses. The results:

  • Doctors using GPT-4 made the right diagnosis 76.3% of the time
  • Doctors NOT using GPT-4 made the right diagnosis 73.7% of the time.

Does that mean GPT-4 is barely helpful? Not once you consider that GPT-4 WORKING BY ITSELF made the right diagnosis 89% of the time.

The doctors who were given GPT-4 as an assistant were ignoring its correct diagnoses some of the time in favor of their own. Things like this challenge the conventional wisdom that “Humans+AI” will be the best combination in the future, so there will always be some role for us. Machines might surpass us at everything.
https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.03.12.24303785v1.full.pdf

OpenAI has a financial incentive to declare that it has built an AGI. For a while, I’ve suspected that “the creation of the first AGI” will be a historical moment mired in controversy from the start, as it will fail to pass some tests of intelligence and will make mistakes uncharacteristic of an intelligent mind. The claim will nonetheless be defensible given our lack of an agreed-upon definition of what “intelligence” is.

‘Oddly, that could be the key to getting out from under its contract with Microsoft. The contract contains a clause that says that if OpenAI builds artificial general intelligence, or A.G.I. — roughly speaking, a machine that matches the power of the human brain — Microsoft loses access to OpenAI’s technologies.

The clause was meant to ensure that a company like Microsoft did not misuse this machine of the future, but today, OpenAI executives see it as a path to a better contract, according to a person familiar with the company’s negotiations. Under the terms of the contract, the OpenAI board could decide when A.G.I. has arrived.’
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/17/technology/microsoft-openai-partnership-deal.html

AI will accelerate scientific discovery and scientific fraud.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/helpful-robot-assistants-will-fake-it-you

There have been recent advances in robotics.

‘AI helps uncover hundreds of unknown ancient symbols hidden in Peru’s Nazca Desert’
When will all archeological sites be discovered and excavated?
https://www.cnn.com/2024/09/27/science/ai-nazca-geoglyphs-peru/index.html

An airborne scan of southern Mexico uncovered an unknown Mayan city hidden in the jungle.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crmznzkly3go

A Chinese company has unveiled the biggest and most powerful wind turbine ever made:
‘Dongfang on Saturday rolled out a 26-megawatt turbine off the production line, the company said in a statement. That’s 31% bigger than the previous record of 18 megawatts…It said the blades were 310 meters (1,017 feet) in diameter.’
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/chinese-firm-announces-huge-leap-043855364.html

Google says it will buy small nuclear reactors from “Kairos Power” by 2035 to power its planned data centers.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c748gn94k95o

Other big tech companies are also considering nuclear.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/16/business/energy-environment/amazon-google-microsoft-nuclear-energy.html

Samsung’s stock has sharply dropped because it has fallen behind in making AI chips.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/samsung-sudden-122-billion-wipeout-220000518.html

Bill Gates writes about the positive impact “digital public infrastructure” will soon have, particularly in poor countries.
https://www.gatesnotes.com/Digital-public-infrastructure

We’ll never run out of sand, but it will get more expensive.
https://youtu.be/SB0qDQFTyE8?si=LPBOhpUfqSXDWgyD

Computer modeling shows that, if you’re trying to optimize a beer glass so it keeps its contents cold for as long as possible, the best shape is to have a narrow base and a wider, flared-out opening at the top. Depending on the volume of the cup (e.g. – Imperial Pint, American Pint), the proportions change slightly.

Some of the shapes that minimize heat transfer look so top-heavy that they would be prone to easily tipping over, so optimizing for one quality comes at the expense of optimizing for another one (stability). It’s an interesting and simple lesson in engineering tradeoffs.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2410.12043

In a spectacular display of technological prowess, SpaceX landed a giant Starship booster back on the landing pad, where two giant arms attached to the launch tower clasped around it. This ability will lower costs and shorten the time between missions of the reusable rocket.
https://spacenews.com/spacex-launches-fifth-starship-catches-super-heavy-booster/

Tattoos and piercings are more common among people who suffered child abuse (sexual, emotional, physical), and the more tattoos and piercings a person has, the more likely it is they are a victim.
https://bmcpsychology.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s40359-022-00811-x

Male facial features predict future leadership potential.
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11292-023-09554-0
https://www.economist.com/business/2014/09/27/the-look-of-a-leader

Update on something I posted before: ‘An 81-year-old Montana man was sentenced Monday to six months in federal prison for illegally using tissue and testicles from large sheep hunted in Central Asia and the U.S. to create hybrid sheep for captive trophy hunting in Texas and Minnesota.’
https://www.usnews.com/news/news/articles/2024-09-30/montana-man-to-be-sentenced-for-cloning-giant-sheep-to-breed-large-sheep-for-captive-trophy-hunts

Scientists have mapped the locations of every neuron in a fly brain.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-024-07686-5

AI-powered drug discovery has disappointed so far.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/ai-does-not-make-it-easy

For the first time in history, the American obesity rate has declined, almost certainly because of GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic. I predicted this. The people of the future will be thinner, healthier, stronger, and more beautiful than we are.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/obesity-rate-us-adults-cdc-data-map/

Here’s a list of ways human intelligence could be enhanced.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/jTiSWHKAtnyA723LE/overview-of-strong-human-intelligence-amplification-methods

‘[Heliospect Genomics] is offering to help wealthy couples screen their embryos for IQ using controversial technology that raises questions about the ethics of genetic enhancement.’
https://www.theguardian.com/science/2024/oct/18/us-startup-charging-couples-to-screen-embryos-for-iq

DNA tests have confirmed the skeleton interred in Cathedral of Seville in Spain belongs to Christopher Columbus, as most suspected. It also indicates he was Jewish and likelier to have been Spanish than Italian.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/columbus-was-sephardic-jew-western-europe-study-finds-rcna175188

“But surely human interactions with nature are increasing, and the chances of picking up viruses is therefore growing because of things like deforestation? No. Southern China is reforesting rapidly, not deforesting, as rural peasants migrate to the cities to work in factories and eat food bought from supermarkets, not hunted in the jungle.

The same is true throughout much of the world. Intimate contact with wild animals is on the decline, thanks to economic development and urbanisation. Rural populations are now shrinking for the first time. The more that Africans can afford to buy frozen chicken rather than hunt ‘bushmeat’ the better. And peak human exposure to bat droppings probably occurred thousands of years ago when many of our ancestors were, literally, ‘cavemen’.”
https://www.mattridley.co.uk/blog/is-another-pandemic-really-inevitable/

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What would a robot submarine look like?

In the same spirit as my previous essays “What would a robot aircraft carrier look like?” and “What would a robot tank look like?” I’d like to examine what a robot submarine would look like. Specifically, an attack submarine, which is a sub designed to destroy surface ships and other subs (though sub-on-sub combat is INCREDIBLY rare). And by “robot sub,” I mean it is fully autonomous, with only robots and machines aboard and no humans. 

And since there are many different kinds of attack subs in service across the world, I’ll focus on just one: the Virginia-class. This is the backbone of the American submarine fleet, and they’re among the most versatile and advanced in the world.

Regardless of country of origin, modern attack subs like the Virginias all share some basic design features: The vessels all have a cigar-shaped hull and a stubby wing-shape called the “sail” sticking up vertically. The rearmost 30 – 40% of the hull is dedicated to propulsion and fuel. The frontmost 10 – 20% of the hull is dedicated to the sonar and torpedoes. The remaining middle part of the ship is for the human crew and their needs, and consists of spaces like the control room, galley, kitchen, bunk rooms, bathrooms, and laundry room. 

All of those rooms for humans could be deleted, allowing the sub’s overall length to be shortened by at least 20%. A shortened Virginia would be faster, nimbler and longer-ranged as a result thanks to reduced weight and drag: fluid dynamics shows that subs have the least drag when their breadth-to-length ratios are between 1:6 and 1:8. The latest Virginia-class subs are 34 ft wide and 377 ft long, a ratio of 1:11. Deleting the middle 25% of a Virginia would make its ratio 1:8.3, which is close to ideal. 

An automated attack sub would still need robot “crewmen” to do maintenance and repairs, and as such would still need open spaces around important ship components like the engine and torpedo launchers that were spacious enough for the robots to move around them and access them. Additionally, the rooms would need to be connected to each other so robots could move around to meet the needs of the moment. As a result, the basic internal layout of a robot sub would be recognizable to a human submariner. 

However, since robots could be created in any shape or size and could be programmed for any environment, many aspects of the sub interior would be very different. Because it is built around human ergonomics, manned Virginia-class subs have three decks (plus a curved storage space under the lowest deck), and on all parts of the ship the ceilings are high enough even for tall people. Without humans, things could be very different. The decks could vary in number and height from one compartment of the vessel to the next. Some might be too low for an adult human to walk through them. 

This wouldn’t be a problem since robots of different shapes and sizes could be made for different parts of the sub: Robots the sizes of humans and cats could work alongside each other, and even tight, irregularly-sized areas would be accessible to them. Machinery, tools, cargo, and pipes would be arranged more space-efficiently than it is in human-crewed subs, and I imagine the interior being a bit like an ant colony. 

Weird deck layouts could also be possible to maximize the use of space. Instead of three, perpendicular decks with the same ceiling-to-floor heights, imagine a much more complex arrangement where different parts of the ship have different numbers of decks. A human would struggle to keep track of this, but machines wouldn’t. Some of the decks might not even be flat. 

The more efficient use of internal space could let us reduce sub’s volume without sacrificing anything. The shape of the hull could be transformed from the straight, cylindrical cigar-shape to a more streamlined shape that reduced drag. The rear half of the sub would taper down more sharply until it ended as a point where the propeller was. Internal volume would be lost in the rear, but the sub could still retain the same power and weapons.

An orangutan’s legs are almost the same as its arms.

As for the robots themselves, I can only be sure that their limbs will all be designed for grasping, like those of orangutans or spiders. In small, confined spaces, human legs are much less useful than a second pair of “bottom arms.” Filling the interior of the sub with metal gratings, handholds and ladders will make this body form even more useful. They could climb the walls and even ceilings to access everything, allowing better use to be made of the sub’s interior space. 

For obvious reasons, they would also be waterproof to great depths. A crew of them could continue working even if their sub sank, and they might be able to fix and refloat it. 

A Virginia-class sub on the surface.

The sail (often incorrectly referred to as the “conning tower”) could probably be made shorter, or even totally deleted, in an automated sub. The structure primarily serves as a lookout post and a place for submariners to shelter from the elements when their sub is on the surface. If automated, the sub could watch its surroundings on the surface by extending its periscope, and if its robot crewmen had to do something outside, they would be much less affected by rain, waves, and temperature extremes than humans. Attaching themselves to steel cables while working outside would probably be all that was needed to ensure their safety. 

A sail greatly increases a sub’s drag and creates a “wake” behind it that interferes with the propeller’s rotation. Therefore, deleting or at least shrinking the sails should boost the sub’s top speed and fuel efficiency. 

The lack of a sail would also make it easier for an attack sub to roll over like a log or like a football spinning through the air. This would let it make tighter turns, which would be useful in combat or when evading enemy attacks. Anyone who has turned around a curve too quickly in a car and felt it dangerously tilt is familiar with the effect of inertia in this context.

 

A boat tilting as it makes a sharp turn

While a rollover is disastrous on land, it wouldn’t have to be underwater if the vehicle didn’t make contact with any objects while spinning. Of course, even if a manned sub were technically capable of such a maneuver, it would wreak havoc since crewmen would be thrown around inside. Conversely, on an autonomous sub, the central computer could wirelessly alert all of the robots to upcoming rollovers, giving them time to brace themselves against surfaces and to grab handholds.

Measures would also need to be taken to ensure all the machinery and cargo was properly secured so it wouldn’t be thrown around inside the sub during rolls, but this is easy to do. A bigger problem would be dealing with the service interruptions in pieces of machinery not designed to operate inverted or on their sides, like the nuclear reactor and backup diesel generator. However, given the rarity of rolls (a sub would only need to turn very sharply in emergencies) and their short durations (a handful of minutes per sharp turn), it might not be an issue. Adding a backup electric motor and batteries that would kick in during rolls might be all that is necessary. (To be clear, an autonomous sub would still have a preferred “right side up” that it would be designed around, and under normal conditions it would be oriented in that way.)

Not having humans aboard also removes the need to keep the submarine interior full of oxygen. This is important since oxygen is corrosive and flammable. A robot sub would probably be filled with pure nitrogen gas instead because it lacks those qualities. As an inert gas, nitrogen protects computer chips, which would have obvious benefits for the robots and other machinery. 

If, by the future date when autonomous attack subs are being built, backup diesel generators are still being used, then they will need oxygen. The generator room might therefore be the only place in the sub with an oxygen atmosphere. 

Putting this all together, what does our robot attack sub look like? It would be a Virginia-class sub, but shorter, sailless, and with a visible taper from the middle of the ship to the propeller. The two horizontal steering fins on either side of the sail would be relocated to the sides of the hull. The robot sub would look like a hybrid of the unbuilt Soviet “Project 673” and American Conform-class attack subs, shown below.

The autonomous Virginia would have the same firepower, power plant, sensors, and stealth features as its manned variant, but it would be faster and more maneuverable, giving it an edge in combat and allowing it to attack targets across a larger geographic area. The deletion of the human crew would also greatly increase the ship’s mission endurance beyond the current 90 – 120 days, which is how long it takes for the food to run out. Thanks to the practically unlimited amount of energy provided by the nuclear reactor, an autonomous Virginia-class sub would only have to return to port if it expended all its weapons or had a serious mechanical problem.

The unmanned subs wouldn’t need to devote time to training missions since their central computers and robot crews could be reprogrammed in minutes as needed. The result of all of this would be a sharp improvement in submarine readiness rates and efficiency. Unmanned subs could patrol the same geographic area and do the same number of missions as a larger fleet of manned subs of the same type.

Links

  1. To minimize drag, a submarine’s width-to-length ratio should be between 1:6 and 1:8.
    https://www.marineinsight.com/naval-architecture/introduction-to-submarine-design/\
  2. It’s bad news if a submarine rolls over, but it’s probably a solvable engineering problem.
    https://www.quora.com/What-will-happen-if-a-submarine-rolls-upside-down-Will-that-ever-happen
  3. A history of sailless submarines.
    http://www.hisutton.com/Sailless_Submarines.html
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Interesting articles, September 2024

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

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Interesting articles, August 2024

Ukraine staged a successful surprise attack into Russia itself, capturing a significant amount of territory southwest of the city of Kursk.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/thousands-flee-russia-battles-major-123112611.html
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-kursk-fighting-80671ef80c36b94dc1114506770cdd56

The Russians are close to seizing a strategically important city in eastern Ukraine called “Pokrovsk.” If it falls, a large section of the Ukrainian frontline will become unsupportable and will crumble.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c785z8917leo

While Russia is derided in the Western press for sending poorly-trained men to fight in Ukraine, the fact is Ukraine is doing the same.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-new-recruits-pokrovsk-ed2d06ad529e3b7e47ecd32f79911b83

North Korea condemned Ukraine’s invasion as a terrorist act.
https://www.reuters.com/world/europe/north-korea-condemns-ukraines-incursion-into-russia-act-terror-2024-08-18/

Russia destroyed a Challenger II tank the British donated to Ukraine.
https://youtu.be/GnYcTWuhSEA?si=gqC3UVY-XBWn8Jf6

The first F-16 fighters have been delivered to Ukraine.
https://www.twz.com/air/f-16s-arrive-in-ukraine-report

And the first Ukrainian F-16 was also destroyed during a mission to shoot down Russian cruise missiles and drones.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ukraine-f-16-destroyed-during-200508160.html

Since October 7, 2% of Gaza’s population has been killed. That’s comparable to what some countries suffered in WWII.
https://apnews.com/article/gaza-war-hamas-dead-graves-40000-988d16b648e06e222f04964dc9440da0

Top U.S. officials say that though Israel has massively damaged Hamas, it’s unlikely that further attacks will destroy the organization. They’ve proven too adept at survival. Hamas is also so skillful at hiding the remaining Israeli hostages that rescuing them alive with commando raids is impossible. The huge civilian death toll has undermined Israel’s global image and diplomatic standing, and Hamas is so intermixed with the general population in Gaza that even the most surgical Israeli attacks will cause collateral damage.

At this point, Israel should declare victory, end military operations in Gaza, and switch to diplomacy to get its hostages back and to diminish Hamas’ remaining power as much as possible.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/gaza-israel-military-reached-end-113642816.html

‘Planted Bomb Was Used To Kill Hamas Leader In Tehran’
https://www.twz.com/news-features/planted-bomb-was-used-to-kill-hamas-leader-in-tehran-report

The U.S. Navy announced it was sending a cruise missile sub to the Persian Gulf to deter Iran from retaliating against Israel.
https://www.businessinsider.com/us-sending-powerful-submarine-middle-east-loud-warning-to-iran-2024-8

‘Mali’s northern Tuareg rebels said they had killed at least 84 Russian Wagner mercenaries and 47 Malian soldiers during days of fierce fighting in late July.’
https://www.yahoo.com/news/russians-pay-homage-wagner-fighters-125657362.html

This gives me an idea for a future weapon: robotic insects that are programmed to crawl into the fuel systems of enemy aircraft and, once they sense the aircraft have taken flight, to clog the fuel lines with some injected gluey substance.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ntsb-investigation-said-wasps-nest-132603368.html

An Air Force investigation concluded that the crash of a $450 million B-1B bomber earlier this year was due to crew error, and that poor discipline and lax standards in their unit set the stage for the disaster. Keep in mind that machines will never forget anything, suffer from skill degradation, or need to spend any time retraining.
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2024/07/25/report-unhealthy-culture-ellsworth-air-force-base-units-contributed-b-1b-lancer-crash.html

The Indian Army’s INSAS assault rifle is, along with the British SA80, one of the worst in its class. Some of its problems owe to manufacturing defects rather than design faults.
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/indian-army-plans-to-upgrade-the-insas-rifle-part-1-history-44815417
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/indian-army-plans-to-upgrade-insas-rifle-part-2-my-experience-44815429

China is abandoning its “minimum deterrence” nuclear strategy.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/20/us/politics/biden-nuclear-china-russia.html

The question isn’t whether the Germans COULD have won the Battle of Stalingrad (the answer is “no”), it’s whether they SHOULD have started the battle at all. They should have lurked west of the city in favorable open ground to destroy any Soviet forces that came out to fight them.

In reality, the symbolism of controlling the city bearing Josef Stalin’s name overrode military logic in Hitler’s mind, so he sent his army into a disaster.
https://youtu.be/zSah-7yvaE8?si=KEycNUPVyPM7er2r

Jacob Schiff was one of the richest men in America around the turn of the century, and a powerful advocate for Jews like himself. In the late 1800s, antisemitic violence within the Russian Empire started driving large numbers of Jews to leave. In 1903, Christian fanatics in Moldova murdered 49 Jews and raped many of their women. Schiff was outraged, and in response, he loaned Japan the equivalent of $5.3 billion in 2023 dollars–half of the country’s entire wartime military budget–to finance its war against Russia in 1905. Russia suffered a humiliating loss that resounds to this day, though Japan was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy by the end. Without Schiff, Russia might have won.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Schiff

Pavel Durov, the founder and CEO of the social media messaging app Telegram, was arrested in France because some of the app’s users used it to commit crimes. This has major free speech implications.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2x5yw8z7yo

‘Zuckerberg regrets bowing to Biden ‘pressure’ over Covid’
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czxlpjlgdzjo

A new mod for the video game Cyberpunk 2077 has been released which upgrades it graphics into being nearly lifelike.
https://www.techeblog.com/cyberpunk-2077-dreampunk-2-graphics-mod/

Google Deepmind CEO Demis Hassabis just gave an interview. Key points:

  • He freely uses the term “AGI,” which he used to be reluctant to utter.
  • He thinks AGI could be invented as early as 2030.
  • He also believes computers could invent cures for most or all diseases within 10 years, including individualized medicines.
  • In spite of that, he thinks the media is overhyping the short-term potential of the AI industry. Massive progress will happen, but slower than the media and self-interested startups imply.
    https://youtu.be/pZybROKrj2Q?si=4gHyTisaMR4SmKAb

Peter Thiel also gave an interview, and echoed Hassabis’ view that the AI industry is in a bubble. Specifically, he used the analogy that AI today is where the internet was in 1999: poised for a world-changing breakout but also in a huge bubble that will pop.
https://youtu.be/klRb0_BAX9g?si=GywdTwE3DVyw63VW

This analysis makes reasonable assumptions about growth in training data sets, data centers, electricity availability, and training efficiency, and concludes there’s no roadblock to building GPT-6 by 2030. However, a company the size of Microsoft would have to be willing to pay up to $100 billion to create it, and it would consume up to five gigawatts of electricity. (A gigawatt of electricity can power 300,000 – 750,000 homes, and an average nuclear reactor produces 1 gigawatt of electricity. [Note that one nuclear POWER PLANT can have multiple nuclear REACTORS in it.]) They could actually afford that and could even build their own power plants by the deadline.

As I wrote a few months ago, the near future of the AI industry hinges on how good GPT-5 is. If it’s a very impressive and instantly profitable product, then many big tech companies will find it worth the gamble to take the next step and build GPT-6 equivalents. If GPT-5 disappoints, then they won’t. I think GPT-5 will be released shortly after the U.S. election.

I don’t know if GPT-6 would be a “general intelligence,” but at a minimum, it would be able to replace large numbers of human jobs and to handle very complex tasks. People and organizations will get access to it through a subscription model, for example, you’ll pay $100 a month to have GPT-6 perform a job at your company that you’d have to pay a human $5,000 a month to do.
https://epochai.org/blog/can-ai-scaling-continue-through-2030

‘Our future AI overlord has determined that putting cold air inside a duct will raise the temperature of the outside of the duct above the ambient temperature of the attic.’
https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2024/08/25/chatgpt-4o-tackles-the-challenge-of-ac-ducts-sweating-in-an-attic/

This ancient Egyptian wooden lock is so simple that only a genius could invent it.
https://youtu.be/3I25Te0qNEM?si=UN6AI-sQU4DGJDiP

A Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode that aired in 1995 has caught up with reality.
https://youtu.be/F4x_8miSN9k?si=tCVe50ArSrL5eXdQ
https://youtu.be/Ni8LvECFoiM?si=xC1lVPDNbt5X8BVf

Stanford University mathematics professor Keith Devlin has said, “like a Shakespearean sonnet that captures the very essence of love, or a painting that brings out the beauty of the human form that is far more than just skin deep, Euler’s equation reaches down into the very depths of existence”.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Euler%27s_identity

Eight years on, and China’s project to build an international power grid has gone nowhere.
https://www.nbcnews.com/business/energy/china-unveils-proposal-50-trillion-global-electricity-network-n548376

‘According to our baseline estimates (Table 1), over the past 38 years, Chernobyl reduced the total number of NPPs worldwide by 389, which is almost entirely driven by the slowdown of new construction in democracies. Our calculations thus suggest that, globally, more than 318 million expected life years have been lost in democratic countries due to the decline in NPP growth in these countries after Chernobyl.’
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/08/the-unseen-fallout-chernobyls-deadly-air-pollution-legacy.html

Geologists have found a place where it is possible to drill down into the Earth’s mantle.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/scientists-drilled-deep-center-earth-163300616.html

A large meteorite impact crater under Greenland’s ice sheet has been dated to 58 million years ago, squashing earlier claims that it was created 13,000 years ago and triggered the last Ice Age.
https://news.ku.dk/all_news/2022/03/giant-impact-crater-in-greenland-occurred-a-few-million-years-after-dinosaurs-went-extinct/

Published 20 years ago: ‘If intelligent life exists elsewhere in our galaxy, advances in computer processing power and radio telescope technology will ensure we detect their transmissions within two decades. That is the bold prediction from a leading light at the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence Institute in Mountain View, California.’
https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn6189-et-first-contact-within-20-years/

The Pentagon’s former lead UFO hunter Luis Elizondo just published an autobiography that includes a lot of detail about his old job and what the government secretly knows about aliens.
‘He claims that his D.C.-area home was “invaded,” The Times reported, by green, glowing, basketball-sized orbs. They could pass through walls and appeared to be “under intelligent control…his wife, their two daughters and their neighbors witnessed the green orbs, which they called “our friends from out of town.”’
https://www.thedailybeast.com/pentagon-alien-hunter-luis-elizondo-glowing-green-ufos-invaded-my-home

Elizondo also sat down for a long interview about himself and his book. He’s surprisingly smart.
https://youtu.be/9gLPtRwXgCM?si=nK2GJ-OZ1nQbCpOf

Crazy ways to get into space: “Lofstrom loop, StarTram and Space Cannons”
https://youtu.be/gIYpDSs8vsM?si=Dc3Jfmkoc4_f0WVo

Mars probably has liquid water several miles underground, flowing through cracks in rocks. Microbial life could be there.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/12/science/mars-crust-water-reservoir-insight/index.html

It’s very rare to find a dog with the right attributes to serve with special forces units or elite bodyguards. For that reason, it would probably be cheaper to keep cloning the best dogs instead of relying on the genetic crapshoot.
https://gwern.net/clone

Ten years on, and there’s been very little follow-up about this suspended animation procedure. It’s actually the norm for a supposedly revolutionary breakthrough in medicine or some other technology to rock the news media for a few days only to be never heard from again.
https://www.economist.com/technology-quarterly/2014/09/04/the-big-sleep

‘US government report says fluoride at twice the recommended limit is linked to lower IQ in kids’
https://apnews.com/article/fluoride-water-brain-neurology-iq-0a671d2de3b386947e2bd5a661f437a5

You can change the color of your eyes through plastic surgery. The only problem is it might make you slowly go blind.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/22/health/permanent-eye-color-change-surgery/index.html

There was controversy at the Paris Summer Olympics when gold medals were awarded to to two female boxers with genetic abnormalities that gave them male physical characteristics and male XY chromosomes.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/crlr8gp813ko

The FDA rejected an ecstasy-based drug that was touted as a treatment for PTSD because there wasn’t enough proof it worked.
https://www.wsj.com/health/pharma/fda-rejects-ecstasy-based-drug-cfc4b4b5

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Interesting articles, July 2024

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 math problem the DeepMind LLM solved

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.

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“Frontlines: Fuel of War” review

Plot:

It’s the summer of 2024, and the world is in crisis. Twenty years of rising international tensions and competition for dwindling oil have split the strongest countries into two blocs: the Euro-American “Coalition” and the Sino-Russo “Red Star Alliance.” You are the leader of an elite American special forces squad fighting under the banner of the Coalition, and over the course of the video game, you’ll lead your men from the oil fields of Turkmenistan all the way to the heart of Moscow as your side fights to capture the remaining oil reserves and end the Russian threat once and for all. In your missions, you use futuristic guns and drones, and command weapons of war like jeeps, tanks, and helicopters to destroy the enemy. Not even nuclear strikes can stop you. It’s victory…or nothing!

THAT is the awesomest recap of the 2008 first person shooter game Frontlines: Fuel of War that I can muster, and I hope it grabbed your attention because the game actually wasn’t so epic. Putting aside the scarily evocative storyline, it was a paint-by-the-numbers FPS game with generic weapons, the occasional combat vehicle for you to commandeer, and mediocre AI enemies. Anyone who played Halo 2, which was released four years before this, will recognize all the same game elements.

Frontline’s missions are not imaginative and you don’t need any real tactics to beat them: Rely on your ability to absorb inhuman amounts of lead and keep blasting until all the bad guys are dead. The game has Black Hawk Down / Iraq War vibes, which is understandable given the time when it was made. I don’t have a good memory for this, but the graphics were probably above average for 2008. 

Of course, I’m not reviewing Frontlines for its qualities as a video game; instead, I want to examine how well it predicted the future–which is now our present time–16 years ago. For better or worse, video games are a hugely popular medium that shapes global culture and how even our views of what the future will be like. The game is a work of science fiction since it’s set in the then-future and features technologies that didn’t exist yet, and like a typical work of this sort, it’s a time capsule that shows what the anxieties of its moment in history were.

The game was released in February 2008, near the height of an alarming, multi-year spike in the price of oil and only a year after the Iraq War–which some claimed was a secret oil grab perpetrated by U.S. leaders who had insider knowledge that Peak Oil was nigh–hit its bloody climax. Fears were widespread that oil would just keep getting more expensive and that the root cause was a global shortage. In fact, it proved to be a temporary problem caused by Saudi Arabia’s failure to pump more oil out of the ground to keep pace with rising global demand (particularly from China). This led to a temporary imbalance between supply and demand, which caused the 2004-08 global price spike. The U.S. occupation of Iraq also ended without the latter turning into an oil-producing colony of the former. 

It’s important to keep the failures of works like Frontlines: Fuel of War in mind when contemplating how today’s science fiction films, books, TV shows, and games depict the future. The common themes in such recent works are American decline and internal strife (Civil War, The Forever Purge), rise of a fascistic American dictatorship (The Handmaid’s Tale, The Creator), the masses suffering under the cruel yoke of megacorporations and the rich (Snowpiercer), and disastrous climate change (also Snowpiercer). If you take anything away from this essay, let it be a strong skepticism of whatever future doomsday movie or book makes the rounds next.

Analysis:

The world is nearly out of oil. In the game, the world hit “Peak Oil” shortly after 2008 and oil production collapsed over the next few years. By around 2020, oil had become so expensive due to its scarcity that even rich countries like the U.S. were afflicted with chronic electricity, food and water shortages. The in-game reporter character who accompanies the Coalition unit even says at one point that mass riots had become common in U.S. cities, and hundreds would die in the disorder in one night. By 2024, the only remaining oil wells on Earth are in Central Asia, and the world’s major powers are so desperate to control it that they start WWIII over it. Obviously, none of this happened. 

What saved us? Hydraulic fracking, an advanced method of recovering oil from underground deposits, which was pioneered in the U.S. It sharply increased the country’s oil output over the 2010s. By 2018, America was the world’s biggest oil producer, and it has held that title ever since. More than any other factor, the advent of fracking has kept oil cheap globally since 2008. The biggest pie in Frontline’s face is the fact that oil prices are actually much LOWER in 2024 than they were when the game was released, and that Peak Oil DEMAND could happen as early as 2030 thanks to the rise of electric cars and solar power.

But even if global oil production had peaked in 2008, output levels never would have fell as sharply as they did in the game: the collapse was so total that just 16 years later, Turkmenistan was the only country with oil left (in fact, it is actually not even one of the top 10 oil producers in the world today). In reality, the decline would have been much more gradual, and the world would have largely compensated by using more coal and natural gas (and in some countries, greater use of nuclear power). Instead of mass blackouts and nightly, murderous mayhem, America would be swept by mass complaining and people having to make do with slightly smaller houses and cars. Likewise, the world’s major nations wouldn’t be so desperate for energy that they’d be willing to start WWIII with each other to get it.

A pandemic happened in recent memory. Though only spoken of briefly in the game, an avian flu pandemic swept the world in 2009. The game’s narrator was a youth at that time, and he mentions that his parents withdrew him from school because they couldn’t get him a vaccine. This was partly accurate: the COVID-19 virus outbreak started in 2019 and, among its many ill effects, forced closures of schools across the world.

Hospital ward full of people sick with bird flu in 2009

Russia and China have formed a military alliance. The bad guys in the game are the “Red Star Alliance,” a military pact between Russia, China and a few smaller countries that border them. While Russia and China have closer relations than they did in 2008, it owes to shared hostility towards and exclusion by the West and not to any fondness of each other, and there is no mutual defense component to it. 

A Red Star Alliance soldier and the organization’s emblem

China views Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as a mistake and a potential flashpoint for a larger war that China would gain nothing from. As such, China has refused to sell Russia weapons for use in Ukraine, though it has provided large amounts of other goods (microchips, jet engines, etc.) that Russia used to build weapons of its own. Given the different temperaments and strategic priorities of the countries’ leaders, it is highly unlikely they will form a mutual defense arrangement unless there’s a major change to the global order. They don’t want to get dragged into the other’s wars: Russia doesn’t want to fight against Taiwan and China doesn’t want to fight against Ukraine. 

U.S. troops don’t use the M-16 series rifle anymore. The Coalition troops that we see all have American accents and use a smoothly contoured, plasticky rifle that resembles the aborted “XM-8.” This means the U.S. military has abandoned the M-16 series as its standard rifle. This hasn’t happened, and the XM-8 was canceled before entering service because, though it was slightly better than the M-16 series in some ways, the advantage was not so great that it justified the cost of replacing millions of the older rifles. 

An American soldier circa 2024, with futuristic rifle, holographic eyepiece, but strangely no e-cigarette.

There are now plans to replace the M-16 series with a heavier, more powerful rifle called the “XM-7,” but I’m skeptical the plan will be carried to completion and instead expect it will find a role as a specialist weapon. 

All infantrymen, including the Russians and Chinese, have holographic eyepieces. Every soldier seen in the game has a square, holographic eyepiece jutting down from the bottom of his helmet rim and over one eye. Coalition eyepieces glow blue while Red Star eyepieces glow red, presumably because the two sides have an agreement to differentiate themselves according to who is good or evil. It’s unclear what the eyepieces display over their wearers’ fields of vision, though a fair guess would be the overhead battlefield map with objectives and enemy positions highlighted that the player sees at the top of the screen.  

A U.S. Army unit testing Microsoft Hololens augmented reality goggles meant for soldiering tasks in late 2023
A Ukrainian drone operator, 2024

While augmented reality eyewear keeps making appearances at military trade shows across the world, and all modern militaries have some program dedicated to evaluating them, they are not in common field use. A notable exception to this is short-range drone pilots, many of whom wear virtual reality goggles to remotely fly their craft. However, they don’t wear those goggles when engaged in rifle combat with the enemy like in the game. 

View through a U.S. military-standard EO Tech red dot rifle scope

Rifle scopes are much more common and more advanced than they were in 2008, and duplicate one aspect of the game’s eyepieces: when looked through, the scopes show glowing reticles over the shooter’s field of view, indicating where their bullets will hit. This makes target acquisition faster and more accurate, and the scopes have become standard equipment in several major militaries. In that sense, “augmented” or “holographic” visioning devices are common on the battlefield in 2024.

There are hand-launched attack drones. In the game, you can launch handheld, hovering drones that you then remotely pilot to enemy targets whereupon you detonate them. They are small enough to fly through open windows and hallways and are best suited for attacking fortified positions like machine gun pillboxes. A drone’s explosive load is about the same a grenade. This is probably the game’s most important and prescient prediction about 2024.

The Ukraine War has seen mass use of drones by both sides. This includes countless, small quadcopter drones that closely resemble those in the game. Some are kamikazes that are sacrificed upon use while others are reusable and drop mini-bombs. They’re so effective and cheap that they’re commonly used to hunt down lone infantrymen and don’t have to be reserved just for valuable targets like tanks. If anything, the game UNDERestimated how pervasive and transformative aerial drones would be on the 2024 battlefield.

There are small ground drones. However, the game’s prediction that small ground drones would be in common use has failed for several reasons. First, small vehicles with little wheels and low ground clearances can’t negotiate the uneven terrain found on typical battlefields: a barbed wire fence, log, or pile of rubble that a human could easily step over could be an impassable barrier to mini-tank the size of a coffee table. Sizing them up to overcome these issues results in them no longer being small enough for infantrymen to carry into the field. Second, since ground vehicles move slowly and basically in just two dimensions, they’re easy targets for enemy troops (contrast this with aerial drones, which can move fast and in three dimensions). This means they’re less survivable and might need some kind of armor, adding to their cost and bulk. Third, small ground drones are expensive because they require more material for their manufacture than flying drones. Above a certain unit price point, it doesn’t make sense to use them sacrificially like you can with aerial drones.

There’s a particularly unrealistic moment in the game where you use a skateboard-sized, remote controlled suicide drone to drive under an enemy tank and blow it up. Again, this would only work if the route to the tank were over flat, hard ground with no debris in the way, which you would never count on being the case in combat. The real 2024 solution would be to use a shoulder-launched missile or a small aerial kamikaze drone loaded with a shaped charge explosive. Those missiles and drones can also target the thin armor on the top sides of tanks, which is almost as vulnerable as the belly armor that a skateboard drone’s explosion would tear into.

A legged robot with the same speed, agility, size, and balance as a dog could be a potent weapon of war

That said, future advances in robotics will eventually fix the problem: small ground robots with legs instead of wheels would be able to quickly negotiate difficult terrain and attack other ground targets. This draws inspiration from history: during WWII, both sides experimented with bomb-laden dogs that were trained to run across the battlefield, dive under enemy tanks and then explode. While the dogs were fast and nimble enough to do it, problems like the animals being spooked by gunfire foiled its viability. It will surely take decades, but dog-like robots will become a reality, and I’m sure they’ll have combat niches, but can’t say whether they will be preferred to other kinds of futuristic weapons for specific tasks like destroying tanks.

Russian troops are bad at fighting. From the start of the game, in every mission where you fight Russia, you do nothing but drive them back. For a country with such a fearsome reputation, this seems paradoxical, but it actually isn’t: The ongoing Ukraine War, the first Chechen War, the first year of WWII, and the Russo-Finnish War bear out the fact that the Red Army fights poorly (sometimes disastrously so) when the stars align in the wrong way. Though Russians are more courageous and brutal than average on the battlefield and have great skill improvising, poor training, bad leadership, and supply shortages perennially undermine their overall performance. The problem gets worse when the war involves a place and an objective that average Russians don’t care about. 

Russian POWs in Ukraine, 2022

Russia’s military reputation has taken a major hit due to its poor performance in Ukraine since 2022: appalling losses have forced it to fall back on antiquated weapons drawn from Soviet stockpiles and on convict troops and paid foreign mercenaries. The Russians have made strategic blunders, and on the battlefield rely on uncreative tactics (mostly wearing down the Ukrainians with mass artillery strikes and frontal attacks with infantry). Aside from their tenacity, there’s little to be impressed with, and in a direct conventional war with U.S. troops like the “Coalition” team you lead in the game, the Russians would badly lose in peripheral places like Central Asia. However, they would fight much harder inside Russia itself, as it is their sacred homeland. 

Russia used nuclear weapons to defend itself from land invasion. After beating up the Russians in Central Asia, the Coalition decides to keep going with a land invasion across the Kazakhstan border into Russia itself, with the objective of conquering the latter. This makes little sense since the Coalition had already accomplished its goal of capturing the last remaining oil well in the world, and since an organization composed of democratic Western governments would never behave so recklessly. The response is predictable: Russia launches nuclear missiles against the Coalition armored force, causing major damage to it. (That mission is the most stunning in the game as it involves you fighting a tank battle punctuated by nearby nuclear explosions)

Thankfully, no one has tried invading Russia since 1941, so it has never used nuclear weapons in self-defense. And let there be no doubt they would: Russia clearly states in its defense doctrine that it will use nuclear weapons if its territory is threatened. The game’s depiction of how this would play out is accurate: Instead of launching an all-out nuclear attack against all Coalition’s cities, Russia started by only using smaller, tactical nuclear weapons against the Coalition’s military forces that were crossing the border, and in a remote area with few or no civilians. This wasn’t mentioned in the game, but it would surely be preceded by top-level warnings from Russia to the Coalition governments about what was coming. 

I think Russia, the U.S., and China are the world’s three “unconquerable countries” because of their sheer size and nuclear arsenals. The armies of other countries might be able to defeat them on foreign soil, but it would be hopeless to invade any of the three in an attempt to take them over since too many troops would be needed and they have enough nuclear weapons to annihilate any attacker. The final mission of the game is the storming of downtown Moscow, and in it, mushroom clouds are visible in the distance, meaning Russia has been using nuclear weapons against Coalition troop concentrations during their travels through its territory. I can’t fathom how any army could survive repeated nuclear attacks like that, nor do I see how the home fronts in the Coalition countries would avoid falling into chaos over widespread panic that Russia would nuke them at any moment as well.

Big tank battles are happening in Europe. As mentioned, the Coalition invasion of Russia is spearheaded by a large number of tanks. In the first invasion mission and subsequent ones set deeper in Russia, there are instances where your character must command a tank and fight with Russian tanks. To the surprise of people in 2008, this turned out to be accurate. 

The Ukraine War has seen many tank battles since 2022, with a series of particularly large ones happening in early 2024 for control of the town of Avdiivka. Up to this point in the War, 17,168 of Russia’s armored vehicles have been destroyed and 2,925 captured by Ukraine.

China has conquered Taiwan. The game focuses on the European theater of the war, so almost all of the combat is against Russian troops. Midway through the game, it is mentioned that China invaded and quickly took over Taiwan. Thankfully, this didn’t happen, so Frontlines: Fuel of War can be added to the enormous trash heap of sources that have wrongly predicted such an invasion since at least the 1980s. Additionally, the insinuation that Chinese ground troops could easily take over the island is almost certainly wrong: while China’s army is massive, its amphibious forces are small, which creates a major bottleneck for getting its troops across the Taiwan Strait and providing them with supplies.

U.S. attack subs lurking underwater and long-range antiship missiles fired from Taiwan and by U.S. warplanes might fatally damage a Chinese landing fleet before it reached the beaches. More generally, marshalling a naval fleet for a D-Day scale invasion is sure to be an extremely risky and high-casualty endeavor in today’s age of 24/7 spy satellite surveillance and long-range precision missiles. While the world has been primed to expect a future Chinese invasion of Taiwan to be an inevitable and unstoppable juggernaut, it could actually be the most legendary naval defeat since the loss of the Spanish Armada.

Links:

  1. Fracking sharply boosted U.S. oil production starting in the 2000s.
    https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=25372
  2. Thanks to fracking, the U.S. has been the world’s biggest oil producer since 2018.
    https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=37053
  3. Peak Oil Demand could come as early as 2030.
    https://www.iea.org/news/slowing-demand-growth-and-surging-supply-put-global-oil-markets-on-course-for-major-surplus-this-decade
  4. In WWII, both sides experimented with using bomb-laden dogs to blow up enemy tanks.
    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-tank_dog
  5. In the Ukraine War, ground drones have proven far less effective than flying drones.
    https://www.rferl.org/a/ground-drones-war-russia-invasion-ukraine/32911118.html
  6. The U.S. Army is experimenting with battlefield applications of augmented reality goggles, but the devices aren’t close to being approved for common use.
    https://www.gizchina.com/2023/09/14/us-army-orders-more-microsoft-ar-glasses-as-new-version-works-well/
  7. ‘In One Brutal Tank Battle Outside Avdiivka, The Russians Lost As Many As 21 Tanks. The Ukrainians Lost Two.’
    https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidaxe/2023/12/28/in-one-massive-tank-battle-outside-avdiivka-the-russians-lost-as-many-as-21-tanks-the-ukrainians-lost-two/
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Interesting articles, June 2024

Israel’s army staged a daring rescue of four of their citizens who had been held hostage in Gaza since October 7. During the sudden and ferocious attack, one Israeli commando and over 200 Gazans (mostly civilians) were killed.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/israel-hostage-rescue-new-details-gaza-operation-nuseirat-rcna156273

The expensive military pier the U.S. built to supply Gaza with aid has been rebuilt.
https://www.twz.com/sea/gaza-pier-repaired-aid-to-flow-soon

Israel’s high court has ruled that military draft exemptions for Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men must end.
https://apnews.com/article/israel-politics-ruling-military-service-orthodox-e2a8359bcea1bd833f71845ee6af780d

A Ukrainian drone attack deep inside of Russia destroyed one of the latter’s prized Su-57 stealth fighters on the ground.
https://www.twz.com/air/su-57-felon-targeted-in-ukraine-strike-seen-in-new-higher-resolution-satellite-images

Russian defense missiles intercepted U.S.-made missiles that Ukraine fired at Crimea. The midair explosions from the two groups of missiles colliding hurled shrapnel down onto a packed beach, killing five Russian civilians and injuring more.

The Ukrainians almost certainly weren’t targeting civilians, and their missiles were probably headed for Russian warships or bases. Nevertheless, Russia has sworn revenge.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c6pppr719rlo

‘One year after Wagner uprising, Putin more powerful than ever’
https://www.yahoo.com/news/one-wagner-uprising-putin-more-063929686.html

Russia now has three captured M1 Abrams tanks. Each one is damaged in a different way. I bet their working parts could be combined to make one working tank.
https://youtu.be/yBhYcMb8Tng?si=kYf17lu3a_eyjV2e

The carousel autoloader found in Soviet and Russian tanks isn’t necessarily a fatal design flaw. If the Russians copied the gunpowder from the advanced ammunition they found in the captured German Leopard 2 tank, then their own tanks would become much less likely to blow up thanks to their own ammo cooking off.
https://youtu.be/6A4CqxGMBQw?si=DUc_wyPlbWI7QgHv

This is from 2008. Six years later, Russia invaded and annexed Crimea.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/7583810.stm

According to a new agreement, North Korea will supply Russia with weapons and guest workers in exchange for Russian technology and hard currency.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-north-korea-putin-kim-agreement-7221909867dbb999de8adb23604e3c79

The third variant of the British WWII Sten sub machine gun was one of the simplest and cheapest guns ever made. It’s interesting to see how those factors hurt its reliability and longevity, even compared to other Sten variants. The Mark III was truly a throwaway weapon.
https://youtu.be/W0qlOOE8G_k?si=LNbw1XOwYr5urr5A

The man who invented a small add-on device that turns any Glock into a full-auto weapon is a mechanical genius from Venezuela. He created the first device in the late 1980s while he was still a teenager and working at a gun shop. Only in recent years has the device started becoming common among criminals.
https://www.yahoo.com/gma/feel-terrified-inventor-glock-switch-090429902.html

A photo of the top secret U.S. “Manta Ray” submarine was captured by a private satellite.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13567175/Top-secret-aquatic-drone-weapon-Manta-Ray-spotted-Google-Maps.html

‘Russia develops its first chipmaking tool — outdated by 30 years from day one’
https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/russia-develops-its-first-lithography-tool-outdated-by-30-years-from-day-one

Nvidia briefly became the world’s most valuable company, with a market cap over $3.4 trillion. It was worth $418 billion just two years ago.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cyrr40x0z2mo

Within days, Nvidia lost 16% of its stock value, resulting in a market cap loss of $500 billion.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/06/25/business/dealbook/nvidia-stock-wipeout.html

Without using the term “singularity,” math whiz and high-ranking OpenAI staff member “Leopold Aschenbrenner” published a paper claiming that milestone is upon us. Radical changes thanks to AI will happen in just the next ten years.
https://situational-awareness.ai/

Here’s a counterpoint to his claims from Sabine Hossenfelder.
https://youtu.be/xm1B3Y3ypoE?si=FAZ30WLfCjA9i74T

Between 2026 and 2032, LLMs will gobble up all the written content humans have ever created.
https://apnews.com/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-training-data-running-out-9676145bac0d30ecce1513c20561b87d

Apple has made a major deal with OpenAI to install ChatGPT on its iPhones.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4nn5mejl89o

An internet writer describes how LLMs destroyed his workplace in 18 months and totally changed his own daily roles.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240612-the-people-making-ai-sound-more-human

Ah, memories…

‘In February, AI-based forgery reached a watershed moment–the OpenAI research company announced GPT-2, an AI generator of text so seemingly authentic that they deemed it too dangerous to release publicly for fears of misuse. Sample paragraphs generated by GPT-2 are a chilling facsimile of human- authored text. Unfortunately, even more powerful tools are sure to follow and be deployed by rogue actors.’
https://hbr.org/2019/03/how-will-we-prevent-ai-based-forgery

After quitting OpenAI, Ilya Sutskever has set up a company called “Safe Superintelligence Inc.,” whose goal it is to safely create an AI.
https://apnews.com/article/openai-sutskever-altman-artificial-intelligence-safety-c6b48a3675fb3fb459859dece2b45499

According to the 1999 movie The Thirteenth Floor, by June 21, 2024 we were supposed to have had AGI, full immersion virtual reality like The Matrix, lifelike digital worlds, and really cool-looking glass skyscrapers in L.A.
https://youtu.be/UCsR9iPvX0I?si=iLM31LuQMMcC5Q1u

This prediction was accurate:

“I think Joe Biden will run again in 2024 and I think he will run against someone with the last name ‘Trump.’ I do not know whether that is Trump or Trump Jr…”

Saagar said that in March 2021, when it was unclear whether Trump had a political future and whether Biden would want to stand for reelection.
https://youtu.be/grceJbuPUXI?si=JMZFlNQ-dRCHVMvc&t=5851

Engineering and logistics impose limits on how big wind turbines can get; physics does not.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-theoretical-maximum-size-of-a-wind-turbine

Corrugated steel sheets are a construction wondermaterial.
https://www.economist.com/christmas-specials/2021/12/18/the-rise-and-rise-of-corrugated-iron

There’s a reason why the classic Spielberg movies have slightly “off” colors that make them look old fashioned in a subtle way: the film stock used back then had a limited color range. It would be interesting to use AI to reverse those distortions and create rereleases of those films that are true to the actual colors on set.
https://youtu.be/kQmIPWK8aXc?si=7L2nPuUZ9aaVU_EM

A lack of passive safety features doomed the Fukushima nuclear reactors.
https://youtu.be/YBNFvZ6Vr2U?si=sCm_zthCZHgm12g_

Some forest fires are actually caused by bacteria. Just like a human-made compost pile, underground peat deposits can get extremely hot due to the metabolisms of bacteria that inhabit and eat them. Furthermore, sudden jumps in surface temperature caused by heat waves can cause the bacteria to raise the peat temperature by even more. The result is spontaneous combustion.
https://theconversation.com/zombie-fires-in-the-arctic-smoulder-underground-and-refuse-to-die-whats-causing-them-221945

‘Breeders also value posture, hoof solidity, docility, maternal ability and beauty. Those eager to level up their livestock’s genetics pay around $250,000 for an opportunity to collect Viatina-19’s egg cells.

“She is the closest to perfection that has been attained so far,” Martins said. “She’s a complete cow, has all the characteristics that all the proprietors are looking for.”’
https://apnews.com/article/brazil-cow-cattle-breeding-zebu-nelore-amazon-deforestation-9d58844f3e695ce878da838c10280f0d

For the first time, more aquatic animals were farmed than were caught wild through fishing.
‘Experts say the milestone in human history had been expected, as the hauls from fisheries have largely stagnated over the last three decades — largely because of limits in nature.’
https://apnews.com/article/fisheries-aquaculture-fao-united-nations-84a92a43387a4bea79dcdb278da14a59

And there are other ways the Drake Equation could be tweaked to result in humans being the only intelligent species in the galaxy. ‘According to Stern and Gerya, it’s likely quite rare for planets to have both continents and oceans along with long-term plate tectonics, and this possibility needs to be factored into the Drake Equation.’
https://gizmodo.com/drake-equation-update-fermi-paradox-intelligent-life-1851503974

Here are three, technically feasible megaweapons that aliens could use to destroy Earth from light years away.
https://youtu.be/tybKnGZRwcU?si=CFzXWpxbCRDdRkfP

The fourth test of the SpaceX “Starship” rocket was fully successful.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/06/science/spacex-starship-launch-fourth-test-flight-scn/index.html

Elon Musk has revolutionized the space rocket industry.
https://youtu.be/effFp6AnCWo?si=Dy_tsekGVR-vQAzw

Boeing’s troubled “Starliner” space capsule has had serious problems during its maiden crewed flight. The two passengers could be stranded on the ISS for weeks until it is known whether the capsule can safely bring them back home.
https://www.livescience.com/space/space-exploration/astronauts-stranded-in-space-due-to-multiple-issues-with-boeings-starliner-and-the-window-for-a-return-flight-is-closing

An unmanned Chinese probe returned rocks to Earth from the dark side of the Moon.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c04447venm1o

The 1997 “Phoenix Lights” incident was one of the most credible mass UFO sightings ever.
https://youtu.be/GdAz93WL5To?si=Hl1di4ApIPBX5CTy

The FDA has rejected the first MDMA drug for treating PTSD because the medical studies supporting the drug were flawed.
https://www.nbcnews.com/health/health-news/fda-panel-rejects-first-mdma-treatment-deep-concerns-flawed-trials-rcna155325

Lung cancer, once a death sentence, has become more treatable thanks to new drugs.
https://www.wsj.com/health/healthcare/lung-cancer-treatment-deaths-5cfeb6fd

Researchers have discovered a gene that causes obesity in some people. Genetic engineering and new medical interventions will end the global obesity problem in the future. The average person will be taller, thinner, stronger, and healthier.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/06/20/health/obesity-genetic-wellness/index.html

A woman endured eight years of excruciating leg surgeries to increase her height from 5′ 5″ to 6′.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/health/28700728/model-frankenstein-surgery-shows-off-results/

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Interesting articles, May 2024

Russia is slowly moving forward at multiple parts of the frontline.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-fortifications-8a72981dfdb755de6f8011b13f4d062e
https://www.yahoo.com/news/russia-takes-100-square-miles-140010022.html

Ukraine claims it foiled a Russian attempt to assassinate President Zelensky.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68968256

Russia’s odd “turtle tanks” are artefacts of the peculiar nature of the Ukraine War and don’t herald a permanent type of new vehicle.
https://youtu.be/PCrAve7ynhw?si=IQigNgfs1_rEFXVt

Russia has now lost 3,000 tanks and 1,300 lighter armored combat vehicles in the Ukraine War. Furthermore, thousands of their artillery pieces, trucks, and armored vehicles not meant for direct combat have also been lost.
https://www.oryxspioenkop.com/2022/02/attack-on-europe-documenting-equipment.html

In spite of these heavy losses, Russia has so many weapons left over from the Soviet era that it won’t run out of them, even at current loss rates, for two or three years. As the shortages near the critical threshold, I predict Russia will make up for it by starting to import old Soviet and Soviet-compatible weapons from friendly countries like North Korea.
https://www.iiss.org/online-analysis/military-balance/2024/02/equipment-losses-in-russias-war-on-ukraine-mount/

The Moscow Victory Day Parade only had one Russian tank–a WWII-era T-34.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/russia-again-had-only-one-173044546.html

The Russian public’s support for the Ukraine War remains steady. Predictions that the economy would collapse and Putin would be overthrown aren’t close to coming true.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/russians-coming-terms-putin-war-000029755.html

‘Several Russian financial, economic, and military indicators suggest that Russia is preparing for a large-scale conventional conflict with NATO, not imminently but likely on a shorter timeline than what some Western analysts have initially posited.’
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-march-20-2024

Glimpse the future: A Russian kamikaze drone attacks a Ukrainian drone ship in the Black Sea.
https://www.twz.com/news-features/russian-fpv-drone-seen-attacking-ukrainian-uncrewed-surface-vessel-for-the-first-time

‘ATACMS Obliterates Russian Air Defense System As It Desperately Tries To Defend Itself’
https://www.twz.com/news-features/atacms-obliterates-russian-air-defense-system-as-it-desperately-tries-to-defend-itself

Russian troops can consistently jam U.S.-made Excalibur guided howitzer shells.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-gave-sending-ukraine-excalibur-130324037.html

Ukraine destroyed two, expensive MiG-31 interceptors on the ground at a Russian air base in Crimea.
https://www.twz.com/news-features/mig-31-foxhounds-confirmed-destroyed-in-new-imagery-of-belbek-air-base

Missiles and artillery fired from within Russia have been hitting targets inside of Ukraine. The Ukrainians have Western-made weapons with the ranges to destroy those Russian sites, but donors like the U.S. refuse to let Ukraine use them against Russian territory for fear it will lead to an expansion of the fighting. There’s a growing consensus among Western leaders that they should ease the rule and let Ukraine use their weapons to attack Russian soil. Putin is warning that this would lead to “serious consequences.” 

Is it another bluff? Maybe. Regardless, we’re entering unknown territory. 
https://www.themoscowtimes.com/2024/05/28/putin-says-western-weapons-striking-russia-would-have-serious-consequences-a85248

‘Biden secretly gave Ukraine permission to strike inside Russia with US weapons’
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/30/biden-ukraine-weapons-strike-russia-00160731

In spite of the colossal damage it has suffered, Hamas still exists and its troops are killing Israeli troops. Eradicating the organization may be impossible.
https://apnews.com/article/israel-hamas-war-end-insurgency-0fcb4e20821ba8c0e49edf6571486d3b

Prosecutors at the International Criminal Court requested arrest warrants for several leaders in Hamas and Israel’s government, including Benjamin Netanyahu, for their roles orchestrating violence against civilians. Both sides are outraged at being equated with the criminals on the other side.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/20/politics/biden-denounce-icc-warrant-israel-hamas/index.html
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/gazans-hamas-see-false-equivalence-icc-charges-2024-05-20/

President Biden has said he will withhold some military aid to Israel if it sends ground troops into the last Palestinian-controlled city in Gaza, Rafah. There are widely held fears that such an operation would kill large numbers of civilians.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/08/politics/joe-biden-interview-cnntv/index.html

An Israeli bombing raid killed 45 people and severely burned many more in a crowded Gaza refugee camp, drawing international condemnation. The bomb was made in the U.S.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/05/29/rafah-strike-us-munition-israel/

The $300 million pier the U.S. military built in Gaza to deliver humanitarian aid broke apart during a storm. It only operated for a few weeks.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/28/politics/us-gaza-pier-broken-apart/index.html

Israeli troops seized control of Gaza’s land border with Egypt. They claimed it was necessary to shut down secret tunnels that were being used to smuggle things across the border.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c1994g22ve9o

Russia has successfully convinced Niger to kick out American and French troops and to lets its own troops take over their bases.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/05/10/pentagon-orders-all-us-combat-troops-to-withdraw-from-niger-00157329

A group of American civilians were arrested in the Democratic Republic of the Congo for supporting a failed coup.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13437171/congo-malanga-drc-coup-cia-utah-tiktok.html

Iran’s President and foreign minister died in an accidental helicopter crash. It will have no real effect on their government in the long run.
https://apnews.com/article/iran-president-ebrahim-raisi-426c6f4ae2dd1f0801c73875bb696f48

Right after Taiwan swore in a pro-independence candidate that Beijing hates, the Chinese Navy and Air Force staged massive military drills that encircled the island.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/22/asia/china-military-drills-taiwan-punishment-intl-hnk/index.html

Peter Zeihan’s dour 2019 predictions about the future of China’s economy have proven accurate:

“So I would argue that fixing this [by] deflating the bubble, I think that I think that ship sailed 20 years ago, and so the question becomes ‘is this triggering going to be internal or external?’ Let’s start with internal. Demographically, we are going to be seeing a contraction in Chinese domestic economic activity simply because of demographics within the next five years.”

An economic “contraction” doesn’t necessarily mean negative growth; it can mean a sharp decrease in the positive growth rate. For example, if my personal income rises by $5,000 per year, but then one year the growth rate shifts down to only a $1,000 increase each year, in economic terms I’ve experienced a contraction. China’s GDP growth rate and domestic spending growth rate are both way down from where they were in 2019 when Zeihan made his prediction.   

The “Madsen M50” was simple as a WWII submachine gun, but better, and it was made by Denmark of all countries.
https://youtu.be/95YPVQR_7yw?si=rkwiFMCd_6rUx_Ks

Anglo-American troops raped thousands of women during the liberation of France. Tens of thousands of French civilians were also accidentally killed by Allied bombers and artillery strikes during the War.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/taboo-french-women-speak-rapes-143322935.html

Several major U.S. military laser weapon programs have been recently canceled.
https://www.twz.com/news-features/u-s-military-laser-weapon-programs-are-facing-a-reality-check

The U.S. Navy has failed to learn from its past procurement mistakes.
https://www.twz.com/sea/navys-new-constellation-class-frigate-is-a-mess

‘Report: 14,000+ Google Search Ranking Features Leaked’
https://www.seroundtable.com/google-search-data-leak-37462.html

‘Nvidia’s profits soar as AI boom shows no sign of slowing down’
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2024/5/23/chk-nvidias-profits-soar-as-ai-boom-shows-no-sign-of-slowing-down

OpenAI unveiled it’s latest and most advanced LLM, “GPT-4o”. At the demo, the machine was able to carry on a conversation with a human presenter in a totally natural and intelligent manner.
https://www.youtube.com/live/DQacCB9tDaw?si=GPXXv9mHoh5NcA1d

Actress Scarlett Johansson claimed OpenAI had cloned her voice without her permission to synthesize GPT-4o’s voice, and quickly sued the company. Though they say they didn’t break the law and used a different human to create the voice, OpenAI nonetheless disabled the voice feature indefinitely. Scarlett Johansson famously voiced “Samantha,” a sentient AI character in the 2013 movie Her.
https://www.foxbusiness.com/entertainment/openai-accused-mimicking-scarlett-johansson-tech-company-pauses-chatgpt-voice

GPT-4 has passed the five-minute Turing Test.
“GPT-4 was judged to be a human 54% of the time, outperforming ELIZA (22%) but lagging behind actual humans (67%).”
https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.08007

ChatGPT is one of the fastest-growing digital services in history. In less than a year, it accumulated 100 million weekly users.
https://www.theverge.com/2023/11/6/23948386/chatgpt-active-user-count-openai-developer-conference

That said, only 2% of British people use LLMs on a daily basis.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c511x4g7x7jo

A large number of AI safety staff quit OpenAI nearly at once. While NDA’s prevent most of them from talking about it, people in the know say they were unhappy with Sam Altman’s dishonesty and lack of commitment to their mission.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ASzyQrpGQsj7Moijk/openai-exodus

The founder of the dating app Bumble predicts that personal AIs will match humans with romantic partners in the future.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-13407769/Bumble-founder-future-dating-AI-interview.html

Someday, machines will be better than humans at everything, including creating entertainment products.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68897555

‘AI might wreak havoc on traditional studio moviemaking, with its massive budgets and complex technical requirements. But in the process, it is likely to make high-quality filmmaking much less expensive and logistically arduous, empowering smaller, nimbler, and less conventional productions made by outsiders with few or no connections to the studio system.’
https://reason.com/2024/05/25/ai-is-coming-for-hollywoods-jobs/

An important lesson from the last few years is that job automation will sweep across the workforce in unexpected ways. For example, no one believed jobs involving artistry would be automated before jobs involving simple physical labor, like flipping burgers. It might prove more profitable for companies to replace their leaders with AIs sooner than they replace their assembly line workers.

Regardless, keep in mind there’s probably no limit to how far job automation can go. In 50 years, if you’re part of that lucky 1% of the adult human population that still has a “real job,” don’t gloat at the unemployed masses because it will only be a few years before your position is also taken by a machine.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/28/technology/ai-chief-executives.html

A roundup of famous American economists’ future predictions from 1980 is full of huge misses.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2024/05/economists-predictions-from-1980.html

Here’s a gem from 2010: “‘CIBC’s former chief economist Jeff Rubin has touted peak oil for years, and his price estimates have been dead on. Lately, he predicted $225 oil by 2012 and rising.’
https://www.businessinsider.com/jeff-rudin-i-know-a-place-where-demand-for-oil-grows-even-faster-than-china-2010-2

Here’s a very fascinating case study of a young Mexican man who was born deaf and whose parents never taught him sign language. As a result, he never developed any kind of linguistic ability and had a totally different way of thinking (he lacked “symbolic thinking” and couldn’t conceive of attaching names to objects) and dealing with people. After illegally immigrating to the U.S., a linguist stumbled upon him and slowly taught him sign language.

‘As part of her discussion of the human rights of the deaf, Schaller makes the argument, familiar also from Benjamin Whorf (and also brought up in the commentary on Henrich’s WEIRD article) that language diversity itself is an insight into human cognitive diversity: ‘Every language is an outcome of how the human brain works. We don’t know how much we can do with our one brain, even, and each language has used the brain in a slightly different way.’ However, there’s an even deeper and more profound cognitive diversity in her discussion of Ildefonso: the possibility of language-less human thought, something that theorists like Merlin Donald have attempted to discuss.’
https://neuroanthropology.net/2010/07/21/life-without-language/

Tesla has abandoned its effort to make cars through a “gigacasting” process because it was too expensive and they weren’t able to master it.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/tesla-retreats-next-generation-gigacasting-manufacturing-process-2024-05-01

Something that makes no sense in Star Wars and many other space movies is the inability of spacecraft to quickly point in any direction to bring their guns to bear on the enemy. Usually there’s a good guy fighter plane being pursued by a bad guy fighter plane, and the good guy yells out “I can’t see him because he’s behind me! Help!”

In reality, since there’s no air resistance to deal with in space, the good guy could instantly flip his fighter plane around and shoot the bad guy. You see two examples of that in the movie “Oblivion.”
https://youtu.be/zRvXcyznOsQ?si=86sSlxUQHrvnw4Nc

Blue Origins launched six tourists into space.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/19/world/blue-origin-rocket-ns-25-mission-scn/index.html

In 1999, the Space Shuttle Columbia nearly suffered a catastrophe that would have forced it to attempt an emergency landing back on Earth right after it lifted off.
https://youtu.be/qiJMdfj9NmI?si=g-PHc0zHoyTXtF0M

One cubic millimeter of human brain tissue contains 1,400 terabytes of data about the neurons, supporting cells, and connections between them.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/15/world/human-brain-map-harvard-google-scn/index.html

‘AlphaFold 3 predicts the structure and interactions of all of life’s molecules’
https://blog.google/technology/ai/google-deepmind-isomorphic-alphafold-3-ai-model/

‘Overall, this is very impressive performance, although I should note that it is not up to the various headlines of “AlphaFold 3 Predicts All The Molecules of Life!” and so on. In almost every area it’s a significant improvement over anything that we’ve had before – including previous AlphaFold versions – and in some of them (protein-antibody and protein-RNA) it appears to be (for now!) the only game in town, even though it’s not an infallible oracle in those cases by any means.’
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/alphafold-3-debuts

Most of the new drugs “discovered by AI” actually weren’t, and they’re not likelier to work than drugs discovered by humans.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/ai-drugs-so-far

‘These results strongly suggest Neanderthal-derived DNA is playing a significant role in autism susceptibility across major populations in the United States.’
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-024-02593-7

Alzheimer’s is partly genetic. Though this bit of information helps, the amount we still DON’T know about the disease or how to treat it is shocking.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/06/health/alzheimers-apoe4-gene-risk/index.html

Even more evidence has arisen that Ozempic treats serious health problems aside from obesity.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/24/health/ozempic-benefits-diabetic-kidney-disease/index.html

1/8 of American adults have taken the weight-loss drug Ozempic or one that is similar.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/05/10/health/ozempic-glp-1-survey-kff/index.html

1/3 of American adults are obese.
https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/obesity-prevention-source/obesity-rates-worldwide/

The recipient of a genetically engineered pig kidney died after two months. It’s still unclear whether his death was due to a problem with the organ.
https://www.theguardian.com/science/article/2024/may/12/pig-kidney-xenotransplant-patient-dies-two-months-later

There are many types of mental disability and they have many different causes. Among them are mutations to single genes. A new gene that causes it, RNU4-2, has just been discovered. 0.41% of mentally disabled people have the condition due to it. 

Better knowledge of the human genome and cheaper prenatal DNA screening will let us reduce the population prevalence of mental and physical disorders in the future. 
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/38645094/

Sony has created a tiny robot that can do precise microsurgeries. In this video, it makes an incision in a corn kernel and then stitches it up.
https://youtu.be/bgRAkBNFMHk?si=LmjjLDkwgHp4zbgp

Posted on

Interesting articles, April 2024

After decades of building tensions and proxy warfare, Israel and Iran exchanged direct fire with each other for the first time.

An Israeli airstrike killed the leader of Hamas’ three sons.
https://www.bbc.com/news/68783840

A Ukrainian kamikaze drone struck a building 1,200 kilometers inside of Russia. This is the deepest such strike conducted so far in the war.
https://youtu.be/rvhLrIWNCWg?si=ko4IecuKLR_tPtu-

A glimpse into the future of warfare: A Ukrainian quadcopter drone destroys a Russian ground vehicle drone.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/video-captures-rare-drone-drone-170705950.html

Russia’s use of “turtle tanks” shows how dire the threat posed by kamikaze drones has become.
https://youtu.be/s7p2-tMS4UE?si=O_Z1tP3tKkgXY86I

Ukraine just captured a Russian T-72 tank with the most ghetto drone jamming system tied to its roof.
https://www.twz.com/news-features/ukraine-situation-report-russian-anti-drone-electronic-warfare-tank-captured

Russia copied a damaged M1 Abrams tank the U.S. gave to Ukraine.
https://www.twz.com/land/first-confirmed-abrams-tank-variant-captured-by-russia-seen-with-inner-armor-exposed

Russia also captured one of the high tech German tanks donated to Ukraine.
https://youtu.be/LjXuTWfthRI?si=otGZUFRRqo6solmL

Compared to its losses of tanks and land weapons, Russia has lost few aircraft.
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/russian-air-force-has-only-lost-10-percent-of-fleet-in-ukraine-us-officials-say/

Soviet tanks were better than American tanks in the 1970s and 80s.
https://youtu.be/GOJLKOKCxWc?si=OUNQYG8ua0qx64tj

However, the Soviet 1970s-era T-62 is now obsolete on the modern battlefield. Russia is using them in Ukraine anyway due to shortages of better tanks like the T-72.
https://youtu.be/cJfvIOAs-2o?si=MKQ09SDfnwtCqVGi

The Germans had the best telescopic gun sights of WWII.
https://youtu.be/VFzNtqJ7tpY?si=Q_o_oD0ioCr656RE

Here’s an idea for a cheap terror weapon: Release helium balloons that have some steering ability and that carry small, guided bombs. Once the balloon gets above a target, it drops the bomb. It would cost more money to shoot one down than it would cost to build one.
https://www.twz.com/news-features/ukraines-explosive-laden-balloon-operations-against-russia

A massive cyberattack that would have had global consequences was narrowly averted.
https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2024/04/backdoor-in-xz-utils-that-almost-happened.html

DARPA held the first simulated dogfight between an F-16 piloted by a machine and one flown by a human.
https://www.darpa.mil/news-events/2024-04-17

Jerome Powell was right about the U.S. avoiding a recession in 2023. Does that mean he is really smart, or that he just got lucky this one time?
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/26/fed-hikes-rates-again-and-leaves-options-open-for-more-00108303

Good Lord, these predictions from 2022 were totally wrong:

‘House prices in the United States — which rose during the pandemic by the most since the 1970s — are falling too. Economists at Goldman Sachs expect a decline of around 5%-10% from the peak reached in June through to March 2024.

In a “pessimistic” scenario, US prices could plunge as much as 20%, Dallas Fed economist Enrique Martinez-Garcia wrote in a blog post recently.’
https://www.cnn.com/2022/11/23/business/global-house-price-slump/index.html

Reality: Aside from the briefest of moments in mid-2023 when the average U.S. house price dropped by a tiny amount, prices have only increased since the CNN article was published.
https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/documents/indexnews/announcements/20240326-1471289/1471289_cshomeprice-release-0326.pdf

James Cameron released remastered 4K versions of Aliens, True Lies, and The Abyss. He used new computer technology to radically sharpen the images by removing the grains of the 35mm filmstock and tuning the colors. I predicted this would happen, but not until the 2030s:

‘Computers will also be able to automatically enhance and upscale old films by accurately colorizing them, removing defects like scratches, and sharpening or focusing footage (one technique will involve interpolating high-res still photos of long-dead actors onto the faces of those same actors in low-res moving footage). Computer enhancement will be so good that we’ll be able to watch films from the early 20th century with near-perfect image and audio clarity.’
https://www.joblo.com/james-cameron-4k-restoration-defense/

An algorithm transformed a bland software licensing agreement into a convincing, sad song. Do YOU have the musical ability to do this?
https://youtu.be/pGbodliLFVE?si=Uug-40eT5uO7ENN8

GPT-4 is as good at diagnosing eye problems as average human doctors.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2024-04-ai-doctors-accurately-eye-problems.html

We need an expert consensus on what tests a machine must pass to be deemed a “general intelligence.” Right now, there is no agreement, so a computer could be declared to be an “AGI” if it passed one set of tests favored by one group of experts while failing other sets of tests favored by others.

Without a consensus on this issue, we’re headed for a multi-year, contentious period where different tech companies and labs will unilaterally declare they’ve built “the first AGI” while everyone else disagrees with them. This is part of why I say we’ve entered “The Era of Fake AI.” I think we’ll need the benefit of many years of hindsight to be able to say for sure when the first AGI was created.
https://apnews.com/article/agi-artificial-general-intelligence-existential-risk-meta-openai-deepmind-science-ff5662a056d3cf3c5889a73e929e5a34

Famed philosopher Daniel Dennet died. He recently said this about the future of AI:
‘AIs are likely to “evolve to get themselves reproduced. And the ones that reproduce the best will be the ones that are the cleverest manipulators of us human interlocutors. The boring ones we will cast aside, and the ones that hold our attention we will spread. All this will happen without any intention at all. It will be natural selection of software.”‘
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20240422-philosopher-daniel-dennett-artificial-intelligence-consciousness-counterfeit-people

Boston Dynamics has retired its old model “Atlas” humanoid robot.
https://youtu.be/-9EM5_VFlt8?si=9oFPyFZZUK9hP_JC

Simultaneously, the company announced it had a made a new type of Atlas robot that was nimbler and more advanced.
https://youtu.be/29ECwExc-_M?si=6odXeLFnpXH7c-ng

The British retail company Ocado, already famous for the heavy automation of its warehouses, has roboticized even more work functions.
https://youtu.be/COBDSmx9QDw?si=oa1JaWuy9OkyrnCB

Humans are so optimized for a narrow set of living conditions. As with space, intelligent machines will beat us to colonizing underwater regions.

‘Key problems include low temperatures, high pressure and corrosion. The change in gases – such as an increase in helium – also breaks electrical equipment and makes people feel cold; the Sentinel habitat will need to be heated to 32 degrees to make it feel like 21. High humidity also creates the potential for a lot of bacteria build-up, with people at risk of getting skin and ear infections, and the pressure also means people’s taste buds stop working – so those of the Sentinel will be eating food loaded with spices.’
https://www.yahoo.com/tech/inside-300-long-project-live-190000639.html

Mark Zuckerberg is richer than Elon Musk for the first time in four years.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2024-04-05/zuckerberg-is-world-s-third-richest-person-passing-his-arch-rival-elon-musk

Here’s a video that shows how a “continuously variable transmission” (CVT) works. They’ve become very common in cars, for better or worse.
https://youtu.be/xHWqlfDZnmQ?si=_vhLVEgsI4FZKOvR

A Chinese company has invented a diesel engine with a record-breaking 53.09% thermal efficiency. A typical, commercial diesel engine is only 46% efficient.
https://interestingengineering.com/innovation/china-diesel-engine-thermal-efficiency

‘The Space Shuttle launching from Cape Canaveral in Florida (28.5° north of the equator) is a 0.3% energy savings compared to the North Pole. If we move it to around the equator, such as the European Space Agency’s spaceport in French Guiana, we’d get about 0.4% savings. Maybe that doesn’t seem like a big deal, but every bit helps.

…Launching from the top of Mount Everest would give you a 0.2% savings in energy per kg.’
http://ifsa.my/articles/space-launch-equator-vs-mountains

During the last Ice Age, the planet wasn’t just colder, it was drier. Because so much water was locked up in the enlarged ice caps and glaciers, the atmosphere was drier and it rained less in the parts of the world closer to the equator. The deserts were larger than they are now and the rain forests were smaller. The equatorial regions were more clement to human life, but that wasn’t saying much.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Last_Glacial_Maximum

Whenever there is a climate disaster, the media always announces it with trumpets. However, whenever a disaster gets fixed or when there are extraordinarily clement climactic conditions, it gets buried on the back page.
https://www.redding.com/story/news/local/2024/03/28/lake-shasta-could-fill-by-end-of-april-finally-after-drought-years/73118853007/

‘Watch your garden glow with new genetically modified bioluminescent petunias’
https://www.npr.org/2024/04/08/1242346659/genetically-modified-bioluminescent-petunias-make-their-own-light

1% of people have “extreme aphantasia,” meaning they can’t visualize ANYTHING in their minds.
6% of people have lesser degrees of aphantasia.
3% of people have “hyperphantasia,” meaning they can see mental images that are so vivid they can’t tell them apart from real images they’re seeing in front of them.
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-68675976

Anti aging therapies are entering mainstream medicine.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/rejuvenating-blood-cell-population

French Canadians have high rates of genetic defects due to inbreeding in the distant past.
https://blog.23andme.com/articles/french-canadian-health

The first “conversation” between humans and a whale happened, though we don’t know what exactly was said.
https://www.seti.org/press-release/whale-seti-groundbreaking-encounter-humpback-whales-reveals-potential-non-human-intelligence

‘Amphibians use scream inaudible to humans for self-defense against predators’
How much experience do humans miss because we can’t hear or see outside of narrow bands of sound and light?
https://phys.org/news/2024-04-amphibians-inaudible-humans-defense-predators.html

‘“The textbooks say nitrogen fixation only occurs in bacteria and archaea,” says ocean ecologist Jonathan Zehr at the University of California, Santa Cruz, a co-author of the study. This species of algae is the “first nitrogen-fixing eukaryote”, he adds, referring to the group of organisms that includes plants and animals.’
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-01046-z

‘Experts suggest the discovery of rare variants in the BSN and APBA1 genes are some of the first obesity-related genes identified for which the increased risk is not observed until adulthood.’
https://www.walesonline.co.uk/news/health/scientists-find-genes-can-raise-28934600

Brain scans that map the structure and activity of a brain can predict whether it belongs to a biological male or female with 99.7% accuracy.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.07096

Men are likelier to be gay if they have an older brother.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2024/04/15/1243861703/sexuality-birth-order-gay-siblings

He Jiankui, the Chinese scientist who created the first genetically engineered humans, has finished his prison sentence and is again working on genetics research.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-13259289/Disgraced-scientist-genetically-editing-babies.html