‘Recent photos show Russia is dredging deep into its huge inventory of rusting Soviet armored vehicles to reactivate BTR-50P amphibious armored personnel carriers, which were built over a half century ago between 1954 and 1970.’
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/russia-desperate-armor-digging-ancient-140000541.html
Due to heavy losses, the Russians are increasingly sending obsolete BMP-1 armored vehicles to fight in Ukraine. It’s inferior in every way to the newer BMP-2. Russia knows of ways to upgrade the BMP-1’s weapons to make it more effective, but lacks the money to do so.
https://youtu.be/l5arYlXSVQA
The Russians are so hard up that they’re making tanks out of mixes of old spare parts. In the photo, that weird structure jutting up from the top of the vehicle is actually a turret from a small Soviet warship. The turret and its two heavy machine guns were made in the 1950s, and it was pulled out of some rusted hulk of a ship and plopped down into the top of an MT-LB tank (itself obsolete) that was missing its own gun.
https://youtu.be/v7NCo9T54U8
Critical parts shortages have forced Russia to send obsolete T-54s to fight in Ukraine. Russia might have 1,000 better T-72 tanks in reserve, but it can’t send them to fight at once because they have to be fixed up first, and there’s a bottleneck of some kind involving one or a few types of components. For all their deficiencies, the T-54s recently seen on the move towards Ukraine are fully operational.
https://youtu.be/uRboVa5zyUk
To be fair, other countries have been forced to raid military museums for parts to use in frontline military equipment.
https://youtu.be/B372GirZ3Cs
Russia’s winter offensive has failed to change the strategic balance and has just killed and exhausted large numbers of troops on both sides. In proportion to their population sizes, Ukraine and Russia have suffered about equally.
https://youtu.be/qPhycuLAtaw
Russia made slow progress in Bakhmut thanks to human wave attacks with its criminal units.
https://www.wsj.com/articles/russias-wagner-troops-exhaust-ukrainian-forces-in-bakhmut-b58e726c
However, heavy casualties seem to have drained Russia’s ability to make further gains in Bakhmut.
https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/30/world/europe/ukraine-bakhmut-russia.html
Ukraine used poorly armored M113 armored vehicles in a failed attack against Russian forces around Bakhmut. The M113 is no better than the BMP-1.
https://www.thedrive.com/the-war-zone/ukraine-situation-report-armored-personnel-carriers-make-a-charge-in-bakhmut
Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s prediction from a year ago that Russia’s invasion of his country might represent the start of WWIII has thankfully not proven true.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/world-war-iii-may-already-started-russian-invasion-zelenskyy-says-rcna19967
‘Slovakia will donate all 13 of its MiG-29 warplanes to Ukraine’
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ukraine-russia-war-latest-russia-091438332.html
Ukraine also has problems with poorly trained soldiers, inadequate supplies, and heavy frontline losses. We just don’t hear about it because the mainstream media and most YouTube vloggers only focus on Russia’s misfortunes.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/ukrainian-commander-revealed-true-scale-171152957.html
We still don’t know who blew up the Nord Stream gas pipeline last year.
https://www.politico.eu/article/vladimir-putin-kremlin-russia-who-blew-up-nord-stream-2/
Not all of USAF General Mike Minihan’s colleagues agree with his prediction that China will invade Taiwan in 2025.
https://www.military.com/daily-news/2023/03/16/some-air-force-leaders-disappointed-generals-prediction-of-2025-war-china.html
A rebel military force in Libya made a functional MiG-23 fighter out of parts cannibalized from three disabled planes.
https://www.military.africa/2019/08/libya-frankenstein-mig-23-flogger-fighter-jet-take-flight/
It’s all the more remarkable since the MiG-23 has a poor safety reputation even under normal conditions. Consider that the jet was built to replace the older MiG-21 fighter, but was retired from service sooner than the MiG-21.
https://youtu.be/A4LK6mtmZ3E
Recently, some interesting new guns–including this revolver/shotgun–have been invented, but whether they are BETTER than older, more common gun designs is questionable. Maybe “Late Stage Capitalism” has taken over the gun industry.
https://youtu.be/bvtLdKfsvSk
‘The fission weapons described above have a theoretical limit to their yield, and the largest such weapon ever developed had a yield of 500 kilotons. Fusion weapons have no such upper limit’
https://ee.stanford.edu/~hellman/sts152_02/handout02.pdf
People who think The Handmaid’s Tale is a plausible future for America should remember it was published in 1985 and set around 2005.
https://www.cosmopolitan.com/entertainment/tv/a9261839/handmaids-tale-facts-explainer-atwood-hulu-adaptation/
The Lathe of Heaven was written in 1971, set around 2002, and described a planet wracked by extreme heat and industrial pollution, and in a state of near-famine due to overpopulation at 7 billion people.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lathe_of_Heaven
Mafia members are better at recognizing fear in other people than regular criminals and non-criminals.
https://www.psychnewsdaily.com/fear-face-organized-crime-detecting-fear/
The EIA says that, in spite of the rise of electric cars, demand for gasoline and diesel fuel will stay high until at least 2050, and the U.S. will remain a net oil exporter until then. We’re never going to run out of oil, as countless “experts” and sci-fi authors predicted from the 1970s to the 2010s.
https://www.eia.gov/todayinenergy/detail.php?id=55840#
‘Vinyl records outsell CDs for first time in decades’
https://www.bbc.com/news/64919126
Donald Trump’s March 18 prediction that he would be arrested on March 21 was wrong.
https://www.politico.com/news/2023/03/18/trump-protest-arrest-tuesday-00087738
Jim Cramer is the worst financial futurist imaginable: Just a few weeks before Silicon Valley Bank collapsed, he urged his viewers to invest in it.
https://www.foxnews.com/media/cnbcs-jim-cramer-eviscerated-touting-silicon-valley-bank-weeks-disastrous-collapse
A year since the U.S. Treasury bond yield curve inverted, America has still not fallen in a recession.
https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/29/economy/inverted-yield-curve/index.html
Gordon Moore, computer pioneer and discoverer of the eponymous Law of processor price-performance improvement, is dead at 94.
https://www.intc.com/news-events/press-releases/detail/1611/gordon-moore-intel-co-founder-dies-at-94
Computers can reconstruct the images people saw based on their fMRI data.
https://sites.google.com/view/stablediffusion-with-brain/
Bill Gates says the recent pace of AI advancement has surprised him, that the chatbots the public has access to now (like ChatGPT) actually use technology that is a generation old, and that he’s privately interacted with much more advanced variants. He also says the chatbots that are being created aren’t threats to humankind, and probably won’t lead to true AGI.
https://www.ft.com/content/4078d407-f021-464a-a937-11b41a4afb91
https://www.gatesnotes.com/The-Age-of-AI-Has-Begun
OpenAI released GPT-4, the most advanced chatbot ever made.
https://openai.com/product/gpt-4
GPT-4 is better than GPT-3 on the Winograd Schema Challenge.
https://d-kz.medium.com/evaluating-gpt-3-and-gpt-4-on-the-winograd-schema-challenge-reasoning-test-e4de030d190d
Economist Bryan Kaplan just lost a public bet that no computer would be able to pass one of his Economics midterm tests (he’s a professor) before January 2029. GPT-3 got a “D” on the test this January, but GPT-4 just got an “A.”
https://betonit.substack.com/p/gpt-retakes-my-midterm-and-gets-an
“How well does the AI perform clinically? And my answer is, I’m stunned to say: Better than many doctors I’ve observed.”—Isaac Kohane MD
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/03/gpt-4-does-the-medical-rounds.html
A research team at Microsoft claims that GPT-4 has some elements of an artificial general intelligence (AGI). It’s able to do things that exceed what is in its training set of data, meaning it has some ability to reason and to make inferences.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.12712
Microsoft will integrate ChatGPT into all of its applications, including Word and Excel.
https://www.bbc.com/news/technology-64970062
Unanticipated abilities are emerging from GPT-3. It seems that, once a computer reaches its degree of complexity, it becomes able to do some things on its own, even if it wasn’t programmed to do so.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/the-unpredictable-abilities-emerging-from-large-ai-models-20230316
Here’s a needed reality check on “AI.” While the systems we now have are powerful and can be made much more so, they’re not actually “intelligent” and never will be.
https://youtu.be/GzmaLcMtGE0
Elon Musk thinks humanoid robots may someday outnumber humans. I think robots designed for labor will outnumber humans eventually, though its unclear whether those of them that have humanoid body layouts will be more numerous than we.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/elon-musk-says-humanoid-robots-221414098.html
Dr. Geoffrey Hinton, the “godfather of AI,” says that recent advancements have made him accelerate his prediction for the invention of the first AI to 20 years or less, and he says that AIs might exterminate humans someday.
https://www.foxnews.com/tech/artificial-intelligence-godfather-ai-possibly-wiping-humanity-not-inconceivable
An appeal to a future AGI on why it should not destroy humankind (this repeats many ideas of my own that I published on this blog).
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/azRwPDbZfpadoL7WW/an-appeal-to-ai-superintelligence-reasons-to-preserve
‘More than 30,000 people—including Tesla’s Elon Musk, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, politician Andrew Yang, and a few leading AI researchers—have signed an open letter calling for a six-month pause on training AI systems more powerful than GPT-4. ‘
https://www.vice.com/en/article/qjvppm/the-open-letter-to-stop-dangerous-ai-race-is-a-huge-mess
Members of Google and Deepmind might have signed the aforementioned petition because their own AI programs have fallen behind, and they want Microsoft to slow down development of its GPT series of machines so they can catch up.
https://www.theinformation.com/articles/alphabets-google-and-deepmind-pause-grudges-join-forces-to-chase-openai
Even more AI stuff.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2023/03/thursday-assorted-links-398.html
A computer program called “VALL-E X” can allegedly translate recordings of spoken words from English to Mandarin, while preserving all the unique vocal characteristics of the speaker, including their accent. I have predicted something like this would have to wait until the 2030s to be invented!
https://vallex-demo.github.io/
An extinct civilization that reached our level of technology before collapsing would have left enough evidence of its existence for us to have found it by now, even if they died out millions of years ago. If the extinct civilization had merely reached Industrial Revolution levels of development within the past several tens of thousands of years, we would have also found evidence. The only plausible type of yet-undiscovered “lost civilization” is a pre-Ice Age group of people about as advanced and as numerous as the Celts who built Stonehenge. Their impact would have been small enough that all traces of them could have been wiped out, or at least obscured so much that we have yet to find the evidence. While the discovery of such an extinct group would be interesting, it wouldn’t revolutionize archaeology or provide us with new types of science or technology.
https://astralcodexten.substack.com/p/against-ice-age-civilizations
Partisan political content, overwhelmingly left-wing in character, has crept into leading scientific journals like Science and Nature over the last 20 years.
https://researchersforimpartiality.substack.com/p/political-activism-in-prestige-scientific
‘Mathematicians discover shape that can tile a wall and never repeat’
https://www.newscientist.com/article/2365363-mathematicians-discover-shape-that-can-tile-a-wall-and-never-repeat/
There’s an important lesson here about the difference between median and mean.
In the Gulf States, some camel races are full of clones of past champions, spurred on by robotic jockeys.
https://www.cnn.com/travel/article/camel-cloning-dubai-spc-intl-scn/index.html
https://youtu.be/wTgWVcizvCQ
A lab-grown meat company made a meatball comprised of wooly mammoth flesh.
https://apnews.com/article/oddities-mammoth-meatball-30e0731838f52cc18fb22d1faee1f8ce
The brain of the fruit fly larva has been mapped.
https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2023/03/09/1161645378/scientists-first-wiring-map-fruit-fly-brain-connectome-human-learning
‘A predatory songbird, the Northern Shrike sits quietly, often in the top of a tree, before swooping down after insects, mice, and small birds. It kills more than it can eat, impaling the prey on a thorn or wedging it in a forked twig. On lean days it feeds from its larder.’
https://www.borealbirds.org/bird/northern-shrike
Men with high testosterone are more aggressive, less reliable, and likelier to abandon their children. Sons who grow up without fathers are likelier to have elevated testosterone as well, and then to go on to be absent fathers like their own dads. This is a case where genetics, biological development (epigenetics?), and social factors amplify each other.
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2022/06/01/fatherless-sons-have-more-testosterone
A woman who managed to led a normal life in spite of being born without a large portion of her brain shows the organ’s remarkable ability to rewire itself. I wonder if genetic path dependence has left humans saddled with brains that are fundamentally inefficient in some way(s). It would be interesting to see an AGI design a perfect organic brain from scratch.
https://news.mit.edu/2023/studies-of-unusual-brains-reveal-insights-brain-organization-function-0221
The human limit: ‘Even heat-adapted people cannot carry out normal outdoor activities past a wet-bulb temperature of 32 °C (90 °F), equivalent to a heat index of 55 °C (130 °F). The theoretical limit to human survival for more than a few hours in the shade, even with unlimited water, is a wet-bulb temperature of 35 °C (95 °F) – equivalent to a heat index of 70 °C (160 °F).’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wet-bulb_temperature
‘Mental-health crisis from Covid pandemic was minimal – study’
https://www.bbc.com/news/health-64890952
The COVID-19 pandemic failed to lead to widespread job automation, as some predicted at its start.
https://www.yahoo.com/now/pandemic-triumph-luddites-160049222.html