As civilian casualties mount, Israel is paying a growing diplomatic price for continuing the war in Gaza.
https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-68658973
It’s interesting to look back on this essay by a Russian blogger from two years ago. The war hasn’t ended yet, but out of the six possible outcomes he forecast, #2 seems the likeliest right now. He predicted there was a 90% chance it WOULDN’T end that way.
2. Bloody slog, “draw” (10%) — Russia’s military tries for months, but proves simply unable to take and control Kiev. Russia instead contents itself with taking Ukraine’s south and east (roughly, the blue areas in the election map above) and calls it a win. In this case, western Ukraine likely later joins NATO.
https://www.maximumtruth.org/p/understanding-russia
Inside accounts from Avdiivka show how Russian artillery superiority and a willingness to accept high casualties gradually wore its Ukrainian defenders down. On the battlefield, sometimes quantity and determination win.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-avdiivka-2e827b4cae4698b3f6b80a421447fab8
Russian forces have destroyed several U.S.-made M1 Abrams tanks operated by Ukraine.
https://youtu.be/HYOx1ggl1ZQ?si=XU7Ojd1tKPO9gU4n
Russia produced almost three times more artillery shells last year as the U.S. and E.U. combined.
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/10/politics/russia-artillery-shell-production-us-europe-ukraine/index.html
A U.S. general says the Ukraine War shows towed artillery will soon be obsolete on the battlefield thanks to threats posed by drones and fast, accurate counterbattery fire. Only self-propelled artillery pieces that can rapidly move to new positions will be able to survive.
https://breakingdefense.com/2024/03/towed-artillery-has-reached-end-of-the-effectiveness-army-four-star-declares/
Russia has started making common use of “glide bombs” against Ukraine, which are devices that are added to dumb bombs to give them precision strike capabilities. After being dropped from a plane, they can glide as much as 40 miles to a target.
https://youtu.be/ThNxRoDbuDE?si=9UR21d61L1jB7bDH
Ukrainian drones sank a new, 300-foot long Russian warship, the Sergei Kotov, in the Black Sea.
https://www.twz.com/sea/ukrainian-drone-boats-sink-russian-navy-patrol-ship
This video filmed by Russian sailors on another doomed ship, the Caesar Kunikov, shows them using machine guns to try fending off Ukrainian drones. They learn the same lesson that Allied bomber gunners and antiaircraft gunners learned in WWII: humans suck at shooting moving targets.
https://youtu.be/oLOCGWn65T4?si=h2VAOW61JyX_cWZh
A group of ISIS-K terrorists from Tajikistan attacked a Moscow concert hall, killing over 100 people.
https://www.npr.org/2024/03/24/1240488528/isis-k-moscow-concert-attack-explained
Sweden just completed the final step to joining NATO.
https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-68506223
The Red Sea crisis shows no signs of ending: Houthi militants sank a large cargo ship.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/3/2/rubymar-cargo-ship-earlier-hit-by-houthis-has-sunk-yemeni-government-says
In WWII, the Electrolux home appliance company converted bolt-action rifles to semi-auto using the ugliest and most complicated setup I’ve seen.
https://youtu.be/iMKwDHPkRLw?si=4nlY5V7MGnq9E2HW
Germany’s feared 88mm flak gun was actually not a particularly advanced weapon and was designed for ease of manufacture more than anything.
https://youtu.be/WLNAKUvefCQ?si=wwstnsqA8Ef9aTsw
Alcatraz has been digitally preserved after the island and all its structured were scanned using computers. As the costs of the technology drop, it will make sense to scan more places, until the whole planet has been modeled.
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/28/us/alcatraz-island-3d-map.html
Since 2006, electricity demand in the U.S. has been flat overall, leading to hopes that we were on-track to decarbonize the economy by steadily reducing per capita electricity consumption. However, the recent, explosive growth in cryptocurrency mining and AI technology has led to the construction of more data centers, which consume huge amounts of electricity. The switch to electric cars is also putting more strain on the power grid in tandem with decreases to gasoline consumption. The latest projections show a 35% national increase in electricity demand between now and 2050.
Unfortunately, it’s unclear how well the supply side will be able to cope with this surge in demand. The construction of new power plants and power lines is made slow and expensive by government procedures, NIMBY people, and the need to acquire land and rights of way for it all. America’s greenhouse gas emission goals will also not be met due to this expansion of the electric grid.
https://liftoff.energy.gov/vpp/
‘Because of these challenges, Obama Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz last week predicted that utilities will ultimately have to rely more on gas, coal and nuclear plants to support surging demand. “We’re not going to build 100 gigawatts of new renewables in a few years,” he said. No kidding.
The problem is that utilities are rapidly retiring fossil-fuel and nuclear plants. “We are subtracting dispatchable [fossil fuel] resources at a pace that’s not sustainable, and we can’t build dispatchable resources to replace the dispatchable resources we’re shutting down,” Federal Energy Regulatory Commissioner Mark Christie warned this month.’
https://www.wsj.com/articles/electric-grid-crisis-biden-administration-climate-policy-energy-artificial-intelligence-cfc10b68
Top Microsoft leadership have reportedly agreed to spend up to $100 billion to build massive, new data centers to support OpenAI’s future work. The facilities could be finished as early as 2028.
https://www.reuters.com/technology/microsoft-openai-planning-100-billion-data-center-project-information-reports-2024-03-29/
The size of the investment and its timetable for completion suggest the goal is to create GPT-6 or an equivalent AI at the same pace that past versions of the GPT series have been released.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/sam-altman-wants-7-trillion
“I would put media reporting at around two out of 10,” he says. “When the media talks about AI they think of it as a single entity. It is not.
“And when people ask me if AI is good or bad, I always say it is both. So what I would like to see is more nuanced reporting.”
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-68488924
This NBER paper, “Scenarios for the transition to AGI”, was just published and contains very fascinating conclusions.
Using different sets of equally plausible assumptions about the capabilities of AGIs and constraints on economic growth, the same economic models led to very different outcomes for economic growth, human wages, and human employment levels. I think their most intriguing insight is that the automation of human labor tasks could, in its early stages, lead to increases in human wages and employment, and then lead to a sudden collapse in the latter two factors once a certain threshold were reached. That collapse could also happen before true AGI was invented.
Put simply, GPT-5 might increase economic growth without being a net destroyer of human jobs. To the contrary, the number of human jobs and the average wages of those jobs might both INCREASE indirectly thanks to GPT-5. The trend would continue with GPT-6. People would prematurely dismiss longstanding fears of machine displacement of human workers. Then, GPT-9 would suddenly reverse the trend, and there would be mass layoffs and pay cuts among human workers. This could happen even if GPT-9 wasn’t a “true AGI” and was instead merely a powerful narrow AI.
The study also finds that it’s possible human employment levels and pay could RECOVER after a crash caused by AI.
That means our observations about whether AI has been helping or hurting human employment up to the current moment actually tell us nothing about what the trend will be in the future. The future is uncertain.
https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w32255/w32255.pdf
‘[Thanks to improvements in algorithms] While it took the supercomputer “Deep Blue” to win over world champion Gary Kasparov in 1997, today’s Stockfish program achieves the same ELO level on a 486-DX4-100 MHz from 1994.’
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/75dnjiD8kv2khe9eQ/measuring-hardware-overhang
I don’t like how this promo video blends lifelike CGI of robots with footage of robots in the real world (seems deceptive), but it does a good job illustrating how robots are being trained to function in the real world. The computer chips (“GPUs”) and software engines like “Unreal” that were designed for computer games have found important dual uses in robotics.
The same technology that can produce a hyperrealistic virtual environment for a game like Grand Theft Auto 6 can also make highly accurate simulations of real places like factories, homes, and workshops. 1:1 simulations of robots can be trained in those environments to do work tasks. Only once they have proven themselves competent and safe in virtual reality is the programming transferred to an identical robot body that then does those tasks in the real world alongside humans. The virtual simulations can be run at 1,000x normal speed.
https://youtu.be/kr7FaZPFp6M?si=2ujpWALvTi-Qfbxi
‘Robotic police dog shot multiple times, credited with avoiding potential bloodshed’
https://apnews.com/article/massachusetts-cape-cod-robot-dog-police-f63586d5286750702f396109c9a81836
Sci-fi author and futurist Vernor Vinge died at 79. In 1993, he predicted that the technological singularity would probably happen between 2005 and 2030.
https://file770.com/vernor-vinge-1944-2024/
More on terrible “expert” predictions about the economy.
Jamie Dimon and Ray Dalio Warned of an Economic Disaster That Never Came. What Now?
Many experts thought high interest rates would break the economy and inflation couldn’t be tamed
https://www.wsj.com/economy/jamie-dimon-and-ray-dalio-warned-of-an-economic-disaster-that-never-came-what-now-315ee487
And another from two years ago. Where’s the recession?
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2022-03-29/is-a-recession-coming-the-fed-has-made-it-inevitable
If you had done the opposite of what this article advised and bought Costco gold the same day it was published, you would have turned a 5% profit by today. Not bad for two months.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/why-gold-costco-terrible-investment-151259921.html
Another failed prediction from October 2022: “These trends will accelerate when the real energy crisis hits in 2023 and 2024.”
https://www.yahoo.com/news/think-energy-crisis-bad-wait-100036670.html
Here is some interesting data on how self-righting boats work.
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/GiDBDERGi/Issue_6/Self-righting_boat_design
The most exhaustive U.S. government internal investigation about secret UFO and alien programs has found nothing. Most if not all of the recent claims that the government has alien ships and corpses owe to a classified DHS program called “Kona Blue.” It was meant to prepare the government for recovery and analysis of aliens or their ships that ever came into its custody in the future. Kona Blue existed briefly and was then canceled.
Several government people with passing knowledge of it wrongly assumed it was proof that the government ALREADY had aliens and their spaceships in custody. They leaked this to Congress and the public a few years ago, causing an uproar.
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/03/08/us-alien-spacecraft-program-pentagon-report-00146013
The third test of the SpaceX Starship rocket was the most successful so far, but it still ended with an explosion.
https://apnews.com/article/spacex-starship-launch-musk-bb8bd2b8c20d9aa5920aea93e9bbfee6
NASA released stunning new images of Jupiter.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/12-years-nasa-launched-juno-231744710.html
An elderly Montana man was just arrested for running a crude fertility lab that aimed to produce “giant sheep hybrids.” He actually made some of the animals and sold them to hunting preserves.
https://apnews.com/article/wildlife-trafficking-giant-sheep-montana-texas-7afaa046c051287ba7f322b6732e31be
‘World’s First Genetically-Edited Pig Kidney Transplant into Living Recipient’
https://www.massgeneral.org/news/press-release/worlds-first-genetically-edited-pig-kidney-transplant-into-living-recipient
The first human with a Neuralink brain implant shows off how it lets him use his thoughts to move a mouse cursor on a computer screen.
https://youtu.be/LfwzfP8cp3A?si=i3h-DUTlWHWyYcnk
These five behavioral traits are heritable, and form the basis of personal moral behavior, meaning morality is also partly heritable: Harm/Care; Fairness/Reciprocity; Ingroup/Loyalty; Authority/Respect; and Purity/Sanctity.
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/08902070221103957