The U.S. and Iran continued trading blows while simultaneously working on a peace deal:
- ‘US bombs Iranian military sites, then downs missiles Tehran fired at troops in Kuwait’
https://apnews.com/article/iran-us-irael-war-kuwait-strikes-88daa9f90b48baaa7beb18e35515c59d - Iranian attacks have damaged American bases more heavily than the Pentagon admits.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2l2yl7r8r2o
A schism has developed between America and Israel over the Iran War:
- President Trump curses at Prime Minister Netanyahu over the latter’s disinterest in ending the war.
https://abcnews.com/International/trump-cursed-netanyahu-call-lebanon-escalation-sources/ - Stopping the war now leaves Israel without any assurance of its long-term safety from Iranian missiles or nuclear weapons.
https://www.economist.com/middle-east-and-africa/2026/06/16/the-end-of-the-war-in-iran-threatens-glorious-failure-for-israel
The peace deal between the U.S. and Iran does not alter the fundamental balance of power that existed before the war and punts on the hardest issues (Iran’s nuclear program, missiles, and whether it can be recompensed in some form for the damage they suffered). It wasn’t worth it.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/18/world/middleeast/iran-deal-oil-strait-of-hormuz-nuclear.html
This guy has earned an early retirement: ‘Pilot of fighter jet downed over Iran was previously shot down in Kuwaiti friendly fire incident, sources say’
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/fighter-jet-pilot-downed-iran-previously-shot-down-kuwaiti-friendly-fire/
The pilot claims a swarm to Iranian drones, including some resembling jellyfish, tried attacking him before the crash.
https://www.cnn.com/2026/06/23/politics/iran-drones-f-15-pilot-intelligence
‘This is the first known instance of a drone boat being used to recover personnel as part of a search and rescue mission’
https://www.twz.com/sea/this-is-the-corsair-drone-boat-that-plucked-the-downed-apache-crew-out-of-the-gulf-of-oman
The U.S. retired the last of its iconic Harrier jump jets, leaving Italy and Spain as the only users.
https://www.twz.com/air/marines-av-8-harrier-jump-jet-takes-its-final-bow
European multinational defense projects have a poor track record: ‘Germany and France drop joint fighter jet project’
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/german-french-leaders-unable-resolve-fcas-fighter-jet-dispute-sources-say-2026-06-08/
Thailand still uses U.S.-made, WWII-era M41 Walker Bulldog light tanks. They’re so old that they have to be towed around by younger tanks. The Thais towed them to points along the Cambodian border during the recent conflict, covered them in sandbags, and used them as fixed defensive points.
https://x.com/AnnQuann/status/2042280939045470229
Something like “Operation Tracer” will become common once robots are more ubiquitous. Imagine small surveillance drones operating from a “nest” close to a military base, port, or other point of interest.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Tracer
‘Spy turtles’ and ‘spy fish’ being used to monitor Chinese waters, Beijing claims
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/jun/12/china-spy-turtles-spy-fish-monitor-waters-claims
A Ukrainian drone attack on an oil terminal in Moscow caused spectacular damage.
https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/moscow-oil-refinery-hit-by-drone-attacks-is-unlikely-resume-production-this-year-2026-06-24/
Ukrainian drones struck an oil terminal in St. Petersburg, Russia’s second-largest and second-most-important city.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-petersburg-oil-terminal-putin-drone-887969921c595f3a81c3b6c0b120b5f3
Ukraine claims the world’s first fully autonomous drone kill of a human. They say the incident happened two years ago.
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2529849-fully-autonomous-drones-have-killed-human-soldiers-for-the-first-time/
The Ukraine War is now longer than WWI.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/11/world/europe/ukraine-russia-world-war-i.html
‘Some say this is now the future of wars in which states seek to capture territory: two sides endlessly pinned down by small, cheap and all-seeing killers. General Valery Zaluzhny, Ukraine’s ambassador to London and formerly its commander-in-chief, says that large-scale manoeuvre warfare—armies moving with speed and shock, in contrast to frontal, attritional battles—is now “unattainable”. It will become possible again only when wars evolve into robot-on-robot fighting at machine speed.
Others treat this as fanciful. Stephen Biddle, a professor at Columbia University, argues that the scale of the sensor revolution is “easy to exaggerate”. As new counter-drone systems—lasers are especially promising—appear, and as jammers and dazzlers blind satellites, the balance may tilt again, bringing some relief to ground forces.
…’When Mr Lee says Ukraine is in a “world-war-one moment”, it is tempting simply to understand him in terms of immobility and attrition. But he is also thinking about the new tactics of 1918 which, by combining surprise, right-first-time “predicted” artillery fires and small, well-drilled assault teams, made decisive breakthroughs possible again and brought the trench warfare to an end. “Defensive capabilities have taken the advantage,” he says. “Now we’re going to see the demands for technology and tactics that will help re-establish manoeuvre.”’
https://www.economist.com/interactive/essay/2026/05/28/the-dangerous-delusion-of-modern-warfare
Geoffrey Hinton, who won Nobel Prize for AI research, says AIs are already conscious.
https://youtu.be/OV_WXmuHaiI?si=_JWYMlWPLL4JWqnI
‘Microsoft AI chief [Mustafa Suleyman] walks back comments about AI taking over white-collar work’
https://www.theverge.com/tech/946879/microsoft-mustafa-suleyman-ai-white-collar-jobs
The U.S. government forced Anthropic to sharply restrict usage of its newest and most powerful LLM, “Mythos”, after a client figured out how to override its safety guardrails. Mythos’ ability to hack into other computers is as good as or better than elite human hackers. Ideological and personality differences between Trump and Anthropic’s founder may have also played a role in the move.
https://www.economist.com/briefing/2026/06/18/anthropics-astonishing-commercial-success-makes-it-a-target
Machines have gotten so good at writing computer code that they may soon be able to build improved versions of themselves, with each new generation rapidly building the next. This phenomenon, called “recursive self-improvement,” could lead to true AI being created abruptly and without enough human influence of its values and goals. The cofounder of Anthropic thinks this could happen as early as 2028.
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2026/06/07/how-artificial-intelligence-got-better-at-building-itself
More about the implications of recursive self-improvement.
https://www.economist.com/by-invitation/2026/06/15/humanity-isnt-ready-for-the-coming-intelligence-explosion
Claude Code is a sloppy coder. So are most humans:
‘Current AI coding tools are deeply imperfect and prone to faults, but so are most coders and coding teams. Assign programmers the output of other programmers, and almost to a `T’ they will declare it unmaintainable, unintelligible, and that the best course of action is rewriting from scratch. Yet suddenly when you introduce AI into the equation, an imaginary panacea arises about traditional humanoid coding teams.
Could good developers make code at the same level or better with the proper effort and consideration? Of course! But often we’re throwing together something as quickly as possible to solve an immediate problem or under tight deadlines (//TODO – fix this hack later!), don’t want to bother “premature optimizing” design or performance considerations until it reaches a critical problem level, or we’re putting in minimal effort while we browse Indeed on the other monitor.
The real world conditions most developers generate code in does not promote top quality code. From which most code out there is not top quality code.’
https://dennisforbes.ca/blog/microblog/2026/06/on_ai_criticism/
As an experiment, a Twitter user posted an image of one of Monet’s lesser-known paintings but claimed he had used an AI image generator to create it. A large number of other Twitter users responded by claiming they could tell the image was artificial and inferior to Monet’s real work. I love this meta-reply to the thread:
‘It’s funny how people say s**t like “AI will never be useful to anyone because it could just randomly start talking confidently about something that it actually has absolutely no understanding of” and then they proceed to do exactly the same f**king thing.’
https://www.reddit.com/r/singularity/comments/1td046p/twitter_user_posts_a_real_monet_and_says_its_ai/#lightbox
Machines are now better at debating than professional human debaters.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.16475
The “Europe 2031” report predicts the Continent, caught between the U.S.-China AI race, could slide into irrelevance.
https://europe2031.ai/summary/
A new paper from Google Deepmind, “From AGI to ASI”, says the proto-AIs we have now have no independent drives, but that won’t be true for future AIs. They’ll be subject to the same, fundamental evolutionary pressures as organic life forms, and the ones that adapt the best will turn out to be the dominant ones.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2606.12683
Elon Musk has become the world’s first trillionaire. I predicted this milestone would not happen until the 2040s!
https://apnews.com/article/musk-spacex-tesla-ipo-trillionaire-billionaire-worth-rockets-7723f82b6063a9a17c194e25982cd66d
SpaceX has bought the AI startup Cursor to reinvigorate its own AI technology.
https://www.cnbc.com/2026/06/16/spacex-spcx-cursor-acquisition-ipo.html
Oracle is laying off 21,000 workers thanks to automation.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c4gy0x0j5deo
The U.S. government declassified more UFO files. As I thought, none of them contains real evidence of aliens, and none is fundamentally different from other, equally credible UFO reports that have long been in the public domain.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-ufo-file-release-third-batch-34c2a9b294e94a972f352df42c4a17ae
The woman who won a Nobel Prize for co-discovering the CRISPR gene editing technique believes AI will accelerate some areas of medical research, but is deeply skeptical of the claims from “tech bros” that machines will soon achieve breakthroughs thanks to running computer simulations of cells and human bodies. These grandiose predictions include things like curing all cancers and reversing the aging process.
https://youtu.be/n-hWHV2ZKOA?si=ejJRXttJns6_jxYL
Autism is much more common in trans people than in cis people.
https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10313553/
‘Olympic gold medalist Julia Krajewski, who piloted [racehorse] Chilli Morning II and once competed against the original Chilli Morning, said the clones are eerily similar, and seem to share not just physical characteristics and capabilities, but also quirks.
“They’re all not big fans of sunken roads,” Krajewski said, referring to a combination of jumps on cross-country courses that test a horse’s ability to jump down, rock back and jump up again.
…In 2024, Kheiron also produced the world’s first genetically-edited horses using Crispr technology. Those horses, clones of the Polo Hall of Fame mare Polo Pureza, have an edit in a gene that regulates muscle development.’
https://www.msn.com/en-us/sports/general/more-top-horses-are-being-cloned-rattling-the-world-of-equestrian-sports/ar-AA24Zq9X
A round of IVF will produce many zygotes that have major genetic defects. Today, they are thrown out. In the future, when fixing them is a simple matter, things will be different.
https://www.techexplorist.com/extra-chromosome-causes-down-syndrome/103237/
A new method of genetically altering human embryos with fewer errors than CRISPR has been found: ‘Efficient base editing and development in human embryos without chromosomal alterations’
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.05.30.728989v1
This makes some strong points against mass genetic health screening:
1) What is the use in screening for deadly incurable diseases?
2) What is the use in screening for diseases where genetics are not destiny? For example, if a gene leaves you with a 20% risk of eye cancer, that means you’re 80% likely to NOT get it. Telling you that you have the gene will saddle you with a lifetime of worry and ultimately needless and expensive precautionary treatments.
3) Mass screening programs that require people to share the genetic data with public health agencies for broader genetics research raise concerns about personal privacy and state coercion.
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2026/06/29/should-every-babys-dna-be-sequenced
A new pancreatic cancer drug extended patient survival times by six months.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy82l435171o
GLP-1 drugs lower the risk of breast cancer.
https://www.goodmorningamerica.com/wellness/story/doctor-breaks-study-showing-glp-1s-lower-breast-133551460
The shingles vaccine reduces dementia rates.
https://erictopol.substack.com/p/spotlight-on-the-shingles-vaccineagain
The HPV vaccine has eliminated cervical cancer deaths among young British women.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c621z28z138o