‘Mr Trump paused all military deliveries to Ukraine after a row with Volodymyr Zelensky in the Oval Office. But he has since grown frustrated with Vladimir Putin’s refusal to commit to a ceasefire and has withdrawn from formal peace negotiations.’
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/05/04/russia-ukraine-zelensky-putin-war-latest-news529/
“I’ve always had a very good relationship with Vladimir Putin of Russia, but something has happened to him. He has gone absolutely CRAZY!”
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-drones-missiles-b34e72f0856b0f19219076463cce0414
Trump’s warmth towards Putin has yielded no significant concessions from the latter. Trump might be starting to understand why the Ukraine War defies easy resolution.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/29/us/politics/trump-putin.html
A new front in asymmetric warfare: Russian secret agents burned down a large shopping mall in Poland last year.
https://apnews.com/article/poland-russia-420187f5755036f6f61c65122c11348f
Russia’s vast stockpile of Cold War-era self-propelled artillery has either been destroyed or is engaged in Ukraine. The artillery pieces that remain at bases deep inside of Russia are probably so worn-out that they’re not worth fixing up for field use.
https://youtu.be/iUbrWvCs3M8?si=p-gMpo9_2_61gjPj
If the Ukraine War ended today, with Ukraine effectively ceding its territory that is under Russian control, many Russians would consider it a defeat for their side.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/17/world/europe/russian-troops-peace-putin.html
Large parts of the Ukraine frontline are ensnared in leftover fiber optic cables left behind by drones from both sides.
https://youtube.com/shorts/wcMZWRJL_m4?si=FwioNXzTgxF1H1Wx
An Israeli airstrike killed the head of Hamas, Mohammed Sinwar. He took over the organization after its former head and his older brother, Yahya Sinwar, died at Israeli hands last October. The final minutes of Yahya’s life famously included a confrontation with an Israeli reconnaissance drone that flew into his wrecked house.
https://www.npr.org/2025/05/28/g-s1-69314/mohammed-sinwar-killed-hamas-gaza-netanyahu-israel
After billions of R&D dollars spent and only 80 vehicles manufactured, the U.S. Army has cancelled its M10 Booker light tank.
https://www.forcesnews.com/news/light-tank-isnt-why-us-armys-m10-booker-ended-being-shelved
America’s warships are too expensive because the Navy keeps demanding they be able to do too many things.
https://www.rebuilding.tech/posts/reforming-naval-shipbuilding
A new North Korean warship tipped on its side and nearly sank during a botched launching ceremony. Kim Jong-un was present and ordered several officials arrested for the mistake.
https://www.twz.com/air/aftermath-of-disastrous-north-korean-frigate-launch-seen-in-satellite-image
‘Kurdish PKK ends 40-year Turkey insurgency, bringing hope of regional stability’
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/kurdish-pkk-dissolves-after-decades-struggle-with-turkey-news-agency-close-2025-05-12/
India and Pakistan traded barbs this month in a series of cross-border skirmishes, though neither side proved willing to escalate.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/05/14/world/asia/india-pakistan-attack-damage-satellite-images.html
One of Pakistan’s Chinese-made fighter planes probably shot down one or two Indian fighters on Wednesday. The Chinese plane, the “J-10”, is similar to an American F-16.
https://www.reuters.com/world/india/global-militaries-study-india-pakistan-fighter-jet-battle-2025-05-08/
Two Chinese-made air-to-air missiles were recovered on the ground in India, largely intact.
https://www.twz.com/air/parts-of-a-pakistani-pl-15e-air-to-air-missile-came-down-relatively-intact-in-india-after-air-battle
Over 100 fighter planes were in the air at once, and the confrontation lasted over an hour.
https://youtu.be/aHY8t_SABC8?si=WCO33H-bAKmmkPok
Sudanese government forces probably used poison gas against rebels during the ongoing civil war.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwynkdyk14zo
Killer drone warfare has come to Haiti.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/05/haiti-fact-of-the-day-the-future-comes-to-haiti-first.html
‘Civil War Brought to Life: Haunting Photos Reawakened After 160 Years’
https://youtu.be/XksHYzSwI-o?si=0RU3Q-GZFhdRzTSo
‘The first driverless semis have started running regular longhaul routes’
https://www.cnn.com/2025/05/01/business/first-driverless-semis-started-regular-routes
For the first time in the 22-year history of the app, Google’s searches have declined in number. The reason? Chatbots.
https://www.platformer.news/safari-search-decline-apple-google/
Google is embedding its own chatbot into its search function.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cpw77qwd117o
Google just released an incredible video generation app called “Veo 3.” The CGI footage is almost perfectly lifelike.
https://youtu.be/McFChYae6p8?si=E9SIEfVbKumiyCoZ
Among other things, Veo 3 can make fake news broadcasts that look authentic.
https://youtu.be/Qn4SP5Z2wOY?si=SCWZ_do6sKObt70M
I’m reminded of this scene from the awesome 2011 game Deus Ex – Human Revolution, where the hero discovers that the world’s #1 news anchor, “Eliza,” is actually an AI, all her broadcasts have been hyper-realistic CGI footage, and she has been biasing the news to influence public opinion to further the agendas of sinister people. Things aren’t turning out EXACTLY like this, but there are creepy similarities now thanks to narrow AI chatbots on social media and elsewhere and to advanced CGI video generators becoming available to everyone. The game is set in 2027.
https://youtu.be/dUtpE8avcMg?si=Ojvu_WG0y–nk02X
‘Two years ago, prompt engineering was one of the buzziest jobs in tech, fetching salaries of up to $200,000 on the promise of becoming any company’s “AI Whisperer.”
Now, the role is basically obsolete thanks to the breakneck speed of AI development and companies’ own maturity in terms of understanding how to use the technology.
The concept of prompt engineers was to have an expert crafting the exact right inputs to generate the best responses out of large language models. But today, AI models are much better at intuiting user intent and they can ask follow-up questions when they’re unclear on it. ‘
https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-hottest-ai-job-of-2023-is-already-obsolete-1961b054
ChatGPT’s new o3 model has an extraordinary ability to correctly guess a location based on a photograph of it. It’s better at this than the best humans (yes, this has been a competitive game among nerds for several years).
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/testing-ais-geoguessr-genius
LLMs can diagnose health problems better than human doctors.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2412.10849
Based on improvements in AI performance, it is conservative to predict they will be able to finish high-level projects better than all but the very best humans within 10 years.
https://www.tobyord.com/writing/half-life
In this remarkable response, Claude 4 explains why its mental architecture leads it to making some kinds of mistakes that a human never would.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/05/why-llms-make-certain-mistakes.html
‘So what would it be like to interact with a “bigger brain”? Inside, that brain might effectively use many more words and concepts than we know. But presumably it could generate at least a rough (“explain-like-I’m-5”) approximation that we’d be able to understand. There might well be all sorts of abstractions and “higher-order constructs” that we are basically blind to. And, yes, one is reminded of something like a dog listening to a human conversation about philosophy—and catching only the occasional “sit” or “fetch” word.’
https://writings.stephenwolfram.com/2025/05/what-if-we-had-bigger-brains-imagining-minds-beyond-ours/
Tesla’s Optimus robot can now dance better than most humans.
https://youtu.be/T-NCFSEHTnM?si=HkOGK1YHonkatuyA
A remarkable, four-legged robot that can play badminton against humans has been built.
https://youtu.be/zYuxOVQXVt8?si=843-MlLKblPPZJOA
The first American Pope was sworn in. He chose the moniker “Leo XIV” to draw a parallel with Pope Leo XIII, who ruled from 1878 to 1903 and is known for preaching against the excesses of capitalism during a time of rapid industrialization. The new Pope expressed the same concern about AI today undermining the dignity and financial stability of humans.
https://apnews.com/article/pope-leo-vision-papacy-artificial-intelligence-36d29e37a11620b594b9b7c0574cc358
Most of the people who bought the Apple Vision Pro VR glasses a year ago don’t use them anymore. The technology still isn’t ready for mass adoption.
https://www.wsj.com/tech/they-paid-3-500-for-apples-vision-pro-a-year-later-it-still-hurts-496de341
A recent blackout in Spain and Portugal shows the perils of overreliance on solar power.
https://reason.com/2025/05/13/spains-grid-collapsed-in-5-seconds-the-u-s-could-be-next/
The “Thatcher Effect” shows how strongly hardwired the human brain is to recognizing faces and noticing their smallest details, and how rigidly structured that ability is.
https://youtu.be/NnDBHhRLyBo?si=63aUn6BvFLIUpBFL
There’s a negative correlation between IQ score and violent behavior.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/30058504/
The exoplanet that, last month, was claimed to have the strongest evidence of extraterrestrial life of all is actually probably barren.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2025/05/30/life-signs-planet-k2-18b-exoplanet/83879481007/
A photo of an alleged UFO hovering over the ground was dramatically presented to Congress during a hearing yesterday. In under 24 hours, an internet sleuth debunked it–it’s just a photo of two circular farms in eastern Colorado.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-14672283/shocking-truth-ufo-image-released-pentagon-whistleblower.html
‘A whale fall occurs when the carcass of a whale has fallen onto the ocean floor, typically at a depth greater than 1,000 m (3,300 ft), putting them in the bathyal or abyssal zones.[1] On the sea floor, these carcasses can create complex localized ecosystems that supply sustenance to deep-sea organisms for decades.’
If we created artificial whale falls by dumping weighed down organic waste into the deep ocean, we’d be kind of like advanced aliens seeing barren planets with life just to see what arises.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Whale_fall
‘New RSV vaccine, treatment linked to dramatic fall in baby hospitalizations’
https://arstechnica.com/health/2025/05/baby-hospitalizations-from-rsv-fell-up-to-71-with-new-vaccine-treatment/
‘A promising genetic treatment tailor-made for a baby born with a rare disorder’
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/05/15/nx-s1-5389620/gene-editing-treatment-crispr-inherited
New drugs have sharply raised survival rates for people with skin cancer.
https://www.nejm.org/doi/full/10.1056/NEJMoa2407417
Bird flu continues to mutate and to spread among mammals. The jump to humans gets more likely every day.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adq0900
‘In a cohort study of French children, those born later in the year within the same grade were more likely to start speech therapy.’
https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/fullarticle/2834366
‘In basketball, baseball and ice hockey, players born in the first quarter of their selection year — the cutoff for which age-group teams are picked, which is normally the school year — are overrepresented both in youth and professional sports. In soccer, players born in the first quarter of their selection year are overrepresented throughout major leagues in Europe and South America.
This phenomenon, called the relative age effect, impacts almost every sport. It has been demonstrated in both men’s and women’s sports, although the effect seems to be less pronounced in women’s sports.’
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-athletes-birthdays-affect-who-goes-pro-and-who-becomes-a-star/