This prediction from January was right:
“The Kremlin is likely preparing to conduct a decisive strategic action in the next six months intended to regain the initiative and end Ukraine’s current string of operational successes.”
It then goes on to say that “strategic action” could take the form of an offensive meant to capture the Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts in eastern Ukraine, or of a strong defensive action meant to defeat the expected Ukrainian counteroffensive. Russia did both of those things over the last six months.
Half of Donetsk remains in Ukrainian hands, though Russia has captured virtually all of Luhansk, including all its cities and large towns. Ukraine’s counteroffensive in the south has made insignificant progress thanks to competent Russian resistance and reinforcement.
It’s fair to say that Russia has, over the last six months, managed to “end Ukraine’s current string of operational successes.”
https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-january-15-2023
Ukraine’s counteroffensive has been a disappointment most because its troops don’t have the right training.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/a-sobering-analysis-of-ukraines-counteroffensive-from-the-front
In late July, Ukraine threw even more troops into its counteroffensive, leading to slightly more land recaptured from Russia. It’s unclear whether any breakthrough is coming.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ukraine-situation-report-main-thrust-of-counteroffensive-has-begun-report-states
The U.S. has agreed to give Ukraine cluster bombs. Though the move is controversial, Russia and Ukraine have already used cluster bombs against each other, and neither is party to the global ban on cluster bombs, nor is America.
https://www.hrw.org/news/2023/05/29/cluster-munition-use-russia-ukraine-war
The AMX-10 RC that France donated to Ukraine can’t be used in heavy combat due to their thin armor.
https://news.yahoo.com/thin-armoured-french-tanks-impractical-110407784.html
Russia captured a partly intact British Storm Shadow missile.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/crashed-storm-shadow-missile-falls-into-russian-hands
Contrary to the media’s alarmism, blowing up the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant would not release any radiation.
https://www.ans.org/news/article-5151/statement-from-american-nuclear-society-on-ukraines-zaporizhzhia-nuclear-power-plant/
The Wagner private military group has surrendered most of its tanks and heavy weapons to the Russian state military.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/wagner-turns-over-2000-heavy-weapons-including-tanks-sam-systems
Putin has appointed a new violent, ruthless man to run Wagner.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/putin-shows-off-grey-hair-173439507.html
Fifteen senior Russian military officers have been fired or suspended in the aftermath of last month’s aborted coup.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/top-russian-generals-killed-fired-112941056.html
Another Major General was fired for publicly complaining that the Kremlin was mishandling the Ukraine war.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/fired-russian-general-remarks-latest-190011683.html
In spite of losses, Russia still has enormous numbers of artillery pieces in reserve.
https://youtu.be/EVqHY5hpzv8
Ukraine has bombed the bridge that links Crimea to mainland Russia again, causing one of the lanes to collapse into the water. Two civilians died, and Russia has already retaliated by suspending its deal allowing Ukraine to export wheat by sea to other countries.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/russias-kerch-strait-bridge-closed-after-major-incident
Russian and Ukrainian troops are now welding cages made of chain link fence material around their tanks to block small kamikaze drones.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/photos-capture-crude-cages-russian-195802220.html
Neutral Switzerland and Austria have joined an integrated air defense network whose other members are all NATO countries.
https://apnews.com/article/switzerland-austria-missile-defense-essi-skyshield-germany-b809c3ec96c91407812b9cf4007255a1
There have been several incidents where Russian fighter planes have “harassed” U.S. aircraft over Syria. The Pentagon has played this up to depict Russia as an aggressive country, but in reality, Russian aircraft have a legal right to fly over Syria while American aircraft do not: the Syrian government formally invited Russian forces into its territory while it never did the same to U.S. forces. Syria has repeatedly told us to stop our air patrols over its airspace, which we have ignored.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/russia-harasses-us-drones-over-042500111.html
https://www.newsweek.com/syria-demands-end-americas-last-forever-war-1792298
https://www.cnn.com/2023/07/14/politics/us-russia-syria-surveillance/index.html
In WWI, the U.S. tried designing its own steel combat helmet. The project independently arrived at a design that was very similar to the German helmet. It was rejected partly because its use could lead to confusion on the battlefield.
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/35957
In anticipation of wartime shortages, China would build up its stockpiles of energy (mostly oil), key metals, and food (commodities like wheat and soybeans) if it believed war was imminent. This would be the case whether China was planning to attack, or if it believed another country was about to attack it.
China hasn’t done these things yet.
https://www.economist.com/podcasts/2023/07/26/the-ways-to-predict-a-chinese-invasion-of-taiwan-long-before-troops-take-up-arms
This prediction from Bank of America was hilariously wrong.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/bofa-warns-us-economy-start-170000414.html
Peter Thiel, one decade ago: “If I had to sort of project in the next decade ahead, I think we have to at least be open to the possibility that the computer era is also at risk of decelerating. We have a large ‘Computer Rust Belt’ which nobody likes to talk about. But it is companies like Cisco, Dell, Hewlett-Packard, Oracle, IBM, where I think the pattern will be to become commodities, no longer innovate. Correspondingly, cut through labor force and cut through profits in the decade ahead. There are many companies that are on the cusp: Microsoft is probably close to the Computer Rust Belt. One that’s shockingly and probably in the Computer Rust Belt is Apple Computers.”
Microsoft’s market cap is now $2.5 trillion, and Apple’s is $3 trillion (the first company to cross that threshold). Microsoft has the lead in A.I. technology, and Apple just unveiled the best augmented reality glasses ever made. Out of the tech companies that Thiel named in that quote, only IBM has seen a decline in its stock value since 2013. If you’d bought $10,000 worth of stock in each of those seven companies back then, you’d have like four or five times as much money overall today.
https://youtu.be/VtZbWnIALeE?t=549
https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/30/tech/apple-3-trillion-market-valuation/index.html
Meta’s algorithm is essential for getting users to log in to their social media platforms. And unexpectedly, the algorithm does not make users more politically biased than they already were.
https://apnews.com/article/facebook-instagram-polarization-misinformation-social-media-f0628066301356d70ad2eda2551ed260
Elon Musk has renamed Twitter as “X” and wants to turn it into a multipurpose app that copies China’s WeChat.
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-66333633
This review of M3GAN makes a brilliant case that the evil robot’s actions were much smarter and more calculated than anyone realized.
https://thezvi.substack.com/p/movie-review-megan
Another smart person (Douglas Hofstadter) says they’re afraid of AI.
https://youtu.be/lfXxzAVtdpU?t=1739
OpenAI predicts that superintelligent AI might be created by 2030.
https://openai.com/blog/introducing-superalignment
ChatGPT can pass the tests to get a medical license, and outperforms Stanford medical school students when answering medical questions.
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article-abstract/2806980
Apple is copying GPT.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-07-19/apple-preps-ajax-generative-ai-apple-gpt-to-rival-openai-and-google
Hollywood actors and writers have gone on strike for the first time in 43 years. Partly they’re worried that entertainment studios will replace them with CGI clones and machine-written scripts.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-66200334
Thanks to voice cloning, we can hear Frank Sinatra sing “Gansta’s Paradise.”
https://youtu.be/W7SQ4uf9GmA
A ChatGPT mod allows NPCs in the video game Skyrim to hold conversations with human players. The result is impressive, and leads me to think that games are about to become even more addictive and that a market for creating and preserving custom NPC “friends” is about to arise.
https://youtu.be/0svu8WBzeQM
Machines are now as good at telemarketing as humans. Listen to this phone conversation between “Alexander from Tesla Motors” and a real person.
https://twitter.com/LinusEkenstam/status/1680314562753490949
Seven years ago, AI expert François Chollet Tweeted: “the belief that we are anywhere close to human-level natural language comprehension or generation is pure DL hype.”
“Foundation models” are the newest AIs. They are not narrow AIs but also not fully general AIs (AGIs). They can do a limited number of different tasks.
‘The next wave in AI looks to replace the task-specific models that have dominated the AI landscape to date. The future is models that are trained on a broad set of unlabeled data that can be used for different tasks, with minimal fine-tuning. These are called foundation models, a term first popularized by the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. We’ve seen the first glimmers of the potential of foundation models in the worlds of imagery and language. Early examples of models, like GPT-3, BERT, or DALL-E 2, have shown what’s possible. Input a short prompt, and the system generates an entire essay, or a complex image, based on your parameters, even if it wasn’t specifically trained on how to execute that exact argument or generate an image in that way.’
https://research.ibm.com/blog/what-are-foundation-models
New kinds of tests show that GPT-4 lacks general intelligence.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-02361-7
“Peak Phosphorus” has been delayed by decades thanks to the discovery of a massive phosphate deposit in Norway.
https://www.euractiv.com/section/energy-environment/news/great-news-eu-hails-discovery-of-massive-phosphate-rock-deposit-in-norway/
‘Sulphur particles contained in ships’ exhaust fumes have been counteracting some of the warming coming from greenhouse gases. But lowering the sulphur content of marine fuel has weakened the masking effect, effectively giving a boost to warming.
…While this will contribute to warming and make it even more difficult to avoid exceeding 1.5C in the coming decades, a number of other factors are likely contributing to the ocean heatwave.
These include a massive eruption of an underwater volcano in the south Pacific, an unusual absence of Saharan dust and a growing El Niño.’
https://www.carbonbrief.org/analysis-how-low-sulphur-shipping-rules-are-affecting-global-warming/
In 250 million years, the Earth’s continents will have combined again to form one supercontinent. This, along with other factors, will have a massive and negative effect on the global climate. (From episode 79 of Naked Science)
https://www.bilibili.com/video/BV1qb411a7tu/
“A hypercane is a hypothetical class of extreme tropical cyclone that could form if sea surface temperatures reached approximately 50 °C (122 °F), which is 13 °C (23 °F) warmer than the warmest ocean temperature ever recorded.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypercane
New incandescent light bulbs have been banned in the U.S. because they waste so much electricity.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/07/27/incandescent-light-bulb-led-00107935
Europe’s Ariane-5 space rocket has been retired.
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-66116894
Three credible men testified before Congress that secret U.S. government programs know UFOs are real, and even have crashed alien spaceships and dead alien pilots.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ufo-whistleblower-claims-massive-coverup-retribution-in-sworn-testimony
The documentary Moment of Contact explores a famous UFO and alien sighting in the town of Varginha, Brazil in 1996. There’s no hard proof it happened, but it’s compelling to see so many credible witnesses still so adamant about what they saw. I don’t like that the filmmakers never mentioned the Brazilian government’s explanation or tried to debunk it.
https://youtu.be/0WlbfaMU-Qs
Smarter people shoot guns more accurately.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0160289623000491
A man who spent 28 years working as a truck driver is now living proof of how sunlight accelerates aging. The left side of his face was constantly exposed to sunlight since it was next to a window, but the right side was protected. The wrinkling and sagging of the skin on his face is correspondingly asymmetrical. The ultraviolet rays in sunlight damage the DNA inside human skin cells.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/health/22972152/shocking-photo-shows-sun-damage-face/
Machines are speeding up our ability to design new proteins.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/protein-design-ai-way
Transfusing blood from young mice into old mice boosted the latter’s health and lifespan.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s43587-023-00451-9
The FDA has approved a new Alzheimer’s drug called “Leqembi.” It only slows the disease’s progression by a few months but costs $26,500 per patient per year.
https://apnews.com/article/alzheimers-drug-fda-approval-medicare-leqembi-a9c8b770aa1868a59889143c3bc9d127
Deer have become a reservoir for COVID-19 and have spread it to humans multiple times.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/covid-19-spread-from-deer/
In the U.S., the number of “excess deaths” went to zero in mid-January and has stayed there, indicating the COVID-19 pandemic ended then.
https://conversableeconomist.com/2023/07/24/end-of-covid-pandemic-in-the-us-the-excess-deaths-measure/