Posted on by Eddie

Interesting articles, April 2026

Israel and America traded more blows with Iran

The sides agreed to a cease-fire, but a permanent peace agreement remains elusive.

An American F-15 was shot down over Iran. After a daring, complex and expensive operation, both pilots were safely recovered.
https://apnews.com/article/iran-us-israel-trump-lebanon-april-5-2026-pilot-cf4a792196259d6e9c066d0be1c57962
https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/u-military-set-improvised-airfield-181145790.html
https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/iran-war-latest-news-updates-2026/card/second-mission-to-rescue-u-s-airman-took-155-aircraft-fAUuZAYswIDtWyz1E0hJ

A U.S. A-10 attack jet crashed during the rescue operation.
https://www.ndtv.com/world-news/us-a-10-warthog-fighter-jet-crashes-near-strait-of-hormuz-pilot-rescued-report-11308682

1) Though we have badly damaged Iran’s military while suffering very low losses, the war has been very expensive for us: an alarmingly high fraction of our missiles have been expended. It will take years and many billions of dollars to replace them.

2) Our Gulf allies failed to take basic measures to protect their expensive radar and missile launchers from Iranian attacks.

3) We are short on hardened aircraft shelters at our airbases. They would be cheap to build and would have a large ROI by averting aircraft losses and forcing enemies to use more expensive missiles to strike our planes on the ground.
https://youtu.be/ApIb-nTdoLU?si=H1LXXtLfLrcFGBHQ

If the Persian Gulf oil tanker blockade continues, economies in Europe and especially East Asia will suffer terribly.
https://www.economist.com/finance-and-economics/2026/04/21/global-energy-markets-are-on-the-verge-of-a-disaster

The Ukraine War has attracted considerable numbers of foreign soldiers, including some who claim they were tricked into fighting for Russia.
https://apnews.com/article/cameroon-soldiers-killed-russia-a2a3130018f378b73cc6167918b34b5d

In spite of terrible losses, Russia will probably never run out of tanks in Ukraine. Partly this is because they’re sending fewer into combat given how vulnerable they’ve proven to be.
https://youtu.be/519XMTijfCI?si=ERwfwRkCsNz1neHs

An awesome and historically accurate CGI video of an Argentine fighter plane attack on a British destroyer during the 1982 Falklands War.
https://youtu.be/RNjKfVH6XDI?si=sevEPGhCA3GZ6-av

German “diplomacy” during WWI was terrible.
https://youtu.be/41kYH51XYGw?si=nmyZlog_wI-Lpotc

‘For the first time in a decade, there are no U.S. bases in Syria.’
https://reason.com/2026/04/17/the-u-s-military-has-finally-left-syria/

‘Japan approves scrapping a ban on lethal weapons exports’
https://www.npr.org/2026/04/21/g-s1-118178/japan-ban-lethal-weapons-exports

A company has built a 10-shot crossbow that takes AR-15 accessories.
https://youtu.be/9UxfGf9WQO0?si=8QebSUSPFSp-lMPz

At a half-marathon in China, a robot beat the human record by seven minutes.
https://www.wired.com/story/a-humanoid-robot-set-a-half-marathon-record-in-china/

The AI singer “Eddie Dalton” has several songs on the iTunes Top 100.
https://www.showbiz411.com/2026/04/05/itunes-takeover-by-fake-ai-singer-eddie-dalton-now-occupies-eleven-spots-on-chart-despite-not-being-human-or-real-exclusive

Here’s a great essay about the overlooked benefits of “AI” so far.
https://www.clear-eyed.ai/p/ai-compared-to-what

Demand for AI services has grown so explosively that the tech companies can’t keep up with enough data centers or electricity.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/ai-is-using-so-much-energy-that-computing-firepower-is-running-out-156e5c85

The growth of the data center sector is comparable to rapid buildouts of earlier kinds of infrastructure.

Bill Gates recommends the book The Coming Wave for anyone who wants to glimpse AI’s future impact on the world.
https://www.gatesnotes.com/the-coming-wave

‘According to Anthropic, the capabilities of Mythos are “substantially beyond those of any model we have previously trained”. But the lab says it is particularly alarmed by the system’s ability to find software vulnerabilities and either fix them (if set to work as a defender) or exploit them (if acting as a hacker).

Such claims ought normally to be taken with a pinch of salt. Anthropic built the model, ran the tests—and stands to benefit from the perception that its system is far more brilliant than anything to have come before it. The lab has been on a roll lately. On April 6th it announced that its annualised revenue had reached $30bn, up from just $9bn at the end of last year. It is surely eager to maintain its momentum.

Yet there are reasons to take Anthropic’s latest warnings seriously. The first is their gravity: Anthropic says that Mythos has already found severe vulnerabilities in “every major operating system and web browser”, including one that had gone undetected for 27 years.

The second is the response of other companies. Alongside the pause, Anthropic announced Project Glasswing, an effort to help companies use Mythos to boost cyber-defences before it is widely released. The participation of leading software developers—including Apple, the Linux Foundation and CrowdStrike, as well as Google, which competes directly with Anthropic in AI—suggests the threat is credible.’
https://www.economist.com/business/2026/04/08/how-dangerous-is-mythos-anthropics-new-ai-model

Here’s an excellent and long analysis of where AI technology currently stands and how it will drive geopolitics and the economy. One tidbit:

‘For the last 10 years or so, our geopolitical landscape has been formed more and more by the US-China power competition. Building frontier AI also happens to be so expensive and talent-intensive that only two countries can build it at the frontier.

The boundary conditions for frontier AI are: deep talent pools, massive compute infrastructure, close-to-infinite energy, and capital markets that can finance it. Only the US and China have the economic muscle to spend hundreds of billions of dollars on the computational and energy infrastructure that AI requires. Even if a third player wrote that check, they would still be years behind, because the US and China have been compounding since the beginning.

The result is a simple structure: the two superpowers at the center, each building its own intelligence stack. The US overwhelmingly closed-source, China overwhelmingly open-weight. Around them, a small number of countries that hold critical inputs: lithography in the Netherlands, critical minerals in Australia, energy and capital in the Gulf Countries, fabrication in Taiwan. Two planets and a handful of moons. The moons have leverage because they supply something that cannot be routed around.

Everyone else faces a simpler, less comfortable reality. If you do not control a critical input, you do not have a term sheet. You have a menu. And the menu has two items: rent the intelligence from China, which will come with a certain set of conditions, or rent the intelligence from the United States, which comes with a different set of conditions. Every country will have to go through a sorting function of choosing what they want.’
https://chamath.substack.com/p/2025-annual-letter

‘If recent trends in AI capability growth persist, this pace of AI improvement implies that LLMs will be able to complete most text-related tasks with success rates of, on average, 80%–95% by 2029 at a minimally sufficient quality level. Achieving near-perfect success rates at this quality level or comparable success rates at superior quality would require several additional years. These AI capability improvements would impact the economy and labor market as organizations adopt AI, which could have a substantially longer timeline.’
https://futuretech.mit.edu/publication/crashing-waves-vs-rising-tides-preliminary-findings-on-ai-automation-from-thousands-of-worker-evaluations-of-labor-market-tasks

‘Given the inherent unknowability of this era, what would some of the signs be that we are in it? They might look like this: in 5 years,1) There are high-profile disagreements among leading AI researchers on whether AGI is here. 2) Reputable economists can’t determine if productivity has increased or decreased. 3) Lower public confidence in media platforms and established institutions. 4) The US and China cannot decide whether they are allies nor adversaries. 5) There are ambiguous spikes in employment rates in both directions. 6) Medical levels of anxiety increase. 7) Major court decisions leave as many questions as answers. 8) Commitments (marriage, work) are postponed even later in life. 9) Investing, capital allocation becomes more expensive. 10) Nihilism gets respect.’
https://kevinkelly.substack.com/p/our-uncertain-uncertainties

The Jacquard loom, introduced in France circa 1805, used a chain of punched cards to control which threads were raised for each pass of the shuttle. The ability to change the pattern of the loom’s weave by simply changing cards was an important conceptual precursor to computer programming. Babbage borrowed the idea directly for the Analytical Engine in the 1830s.

The Luddites lost–they were violently suppressed by the UK military–but more generally they lost because programmable looms brought patterned clothes to the masses.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/04/the-luddites-were-the-first-to-attack-ai.html

Carbon capture programs are failing. ‘So far, various projects in the industry have removed 1.3 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere, according to CDR.fyi. That is a minuscule fraction of the roughly 40 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide that the world emits each year.’
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/16/climate/microsoft-carbon-removal.html

Improvements to battery energy density and cost mean that Americans can now buy electric cars for less than $40,000 (the $7,500 federal tax credit no longer exists) that get over 300 miles of range per full charge.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/27/upshot/cheap-electric-cars-gas-prices.html

Last year, an astronomy paper was released documenting apparent UFO sightings from Palomar Observatory in the early 1950s. A new German astronomy paper confirms similar sightings from one of their observatories during the same timeframe.
https://phys.org/news/2026-03-unexplained-sky-1950s-independent-analysis.html

The Artemis II mission flew four U.S. astronauts around the Moon for the first time since 1972. Among them were the first black astronaut, first female, and first Canadian.
https://www.nasa.gov/centers-and-facilities/johnson/artemis-ii-mission-milestones-an-image-and-video-recap/

“I’m not really a religious person but there was no other avenue for me to explain anything or experience anything,” he said.

“So I asked for the chaplain on the Navy ship to just come visit us for a minute. When that man walked in – I’d never met him before in my life – but I saw the cross on his collar and I just broke down in tears.”
https://www.dailymail.com/sciencetech/article-15741363/NASA-astronaut-finds-GOD-returning-Earth.html

The “Black Irish” are erroneously claimed to be the descendants of shipwrecked sailors from the 1588 Spanish Armada who interbred with local people. In fact, the Black Irish are the island’s original inhabitants, and they can trace their lineages back in Ireland to prehistoric times.
https://youtu.be/Y5zUSkqMb7o?si=ir1ePIpx6P6bhsDT

A new study provides the strongest evidence ever of evolutionary pressure in the Near East and Europe as a result of the rise of agriculture starting around 10,000 years ago.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-026-10358-1

A new study shows magic mushrooms are an effective treatment for depression.
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2026/02/19/a-psychedelic-medicine-performs-well-against-depression

Donald Trump has fast-tracked research into hallucinogenic treatments for mental illness.
https://apnews.com/article/ibogaine-psychedelic-trump-fda-ptsd-veterans-kennedy-a9940fa57fa1457fc064eb5165003524

Trump as reclassified marijuana to a lower level of hazard.
https://apnews.com/article/medical-marijuana-rescheduling-justice-department-trump-cannabis-1d6722d3aae122b1a91f8e4b6c690268

The hallucinogen “DMT” is the most effective cure known for cluster headaches. ‘Because DMT is so fast-acting, patients can easily titrate it: take a puff from a vape pen, wait 30 seconds, take another puff — until the attack is gone completely, and before DMT’s psychedelic effects kick in. DMT has a very short half-life of 5–15 minutes, so even if you accidentally overdid it, you’d only need to wait a few minutes for the psychoactive effects to subside.’
https://psychotechnology.substack.com/p/near-instantly-aborting-the-worst

‘Gene therapy for a rare type of deafness shows lasting results’
https://www.npr.org/2026/04/22/nx-s1-5791478/gene-therapy-deafness-hearing

Titan of genetics, J. Craig Venter, is dead at 79.
https://www.jcvi.org/media-center/j-craig-venter-genomics-pioneer-and-founder-jcvi-and-diploid-genomics-inc-dies-79

‘Man Traveled 10,000 Miles and Spent Nearly $40,000 to Cryogenically Freeze His Sick Dog So They Can Reunite in the Future’
https://people.com/australian-man-spent-nearly-40000-dollars-to-cryogenically-freeze-his-sick-dog-11930160

There’s a new human cryopreservation company called “Nectome.”
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/3i5GMhpGbDwef9Rns/nectome-all-that-i-know

Human lifespan is about 50% heritable, which is more than previously thought.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adz1187

Transgendered people have extremely high rates of mental illness and suicidality. Unfortunately, there’s no evidence that getting sex change operations during their teen years improves their mental health later on.
https://dailydeclaration.org.au/2026/04/07/after-gender-reassignment/

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