Tag: military

Israel retaliated against a Hamas terrorist attack in Jerusalem with an attempted assassination of several Hamas leaders in neutral Qatar. The operation went ahead without American permission and involved Israeli stealth fighter jets that intruded into Saudi airspace and fired long-range missiles. The brazen nature of the attack is unprecedented for the Gulf States.
https://nypost.com/2025/09/09/world-news/israel-targets-hamas-leaders-with-strike-on-qatars-capital/

’20 years later, Israelis ask if the Gaza exit backfired — and if it’s time to go back’
https://www.npr.org/2025/09/19/g-s1-89192/israel-gaza-withdrawal-2005

‘A 2019 mission in North Korea, which intended to have Navy SEALs plant an electronic device to intercept communications of the country’s leader Kim Jong Un, resulted in an unsuccessful operation that left unarmed North Koreans dead…’
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/05/politics/north-korea-navy-seal-mission-nyt

The U.S. Secret Service discovered and disabled an electronic weapon in New York that could have disabled all cell phone service in the city. It was probably emplaced to disrupt a major U.N. summit.
https://apnews.com/article/unga-threat-telecom-service-sim-93734f76578bc9ca22d93a8e91fd9c76

‘Mechanical accuracy is a measure of the accuracy of the rifle itself, irrespective of human or environmental factors. Technically, it could be argued that this should be called mechanical precision, not accuracy, since the primary metric is group size, rather than proximity to the point of aim. But, mechanical accuracy is nevertheless the prevailing term.

You can think of it like this: if you were to bolt your rifle to a concrete table, rendering it utterly incapable of moving in any way, how accurate would it be? With the rifle incapable of moving, human factors like muscle tremors or an improper trigger press become irrelevant; all that matters is the mechanics of the rifle itself. Any inaccuracies will come from imperfections in materials or construction, rather than shooting technique.

…Practical accuracy is a more holistic concept; it considers not only the mechanical accuracy of the rifle but also how the rifle lends itself to effective use by a person in normal conditions. Simply put, practical accuracy is the measure of how accurate an average user is capable of being in normal field conditions.

Practical accuracy takes into account factors like ergonomics, trigger weight, recoil, and even external ballistic factors like velocity and ballistic coefficient, since all else being equal, it is easier to land a hit with a rifle that resists wind and drop better than one that does not.’
https://blog.primaryarms.com/guide/mechanical-vs-practical-accuracy/

Rail guns are weapons built to fully showcase their mechanical accuracy. “Ergonomics” are nonexistent.
https://youtu.be/b4idDEwnLFQ?si=FJiI9v5WAZKFu13h

By contrast, a weapon with low mechanical accuracy but high practical accuracy is the German G36 rifle, with modifications to make it more comfortable and instinctive for the hands to hold. It’s lightweight, ambidextrous and has no sharp edges. However, the rifle is known for losing accuracy as more bullets are shot through it and its barrel heats up.
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/2010/10/28/the-g36k-idz/

The rifle that killed Charlie Kirk was over 57 years old. Guns last forever if you take care of them.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/kirk-assassins-alleged-gun-was-powerful-vintage-hard-trace-rcna231334

The future is now: Israel is the first country to field tactical laser weapons on the battlefield. They are designed to shoot down drones, missiles and mortars, which means they can track fast-moving targets, quickly aim at them, and fire accurately.

Though international law forbids it, there’s no technical reason why these same weapons couldn’t be used against ground targets. The smallest and weakest of Israel’s new laser weapons, “Lite Beam”, can fit in the back of a pickup truck and is 10 kilowatts. A direct hit from a laser that strong would cause a human to erupt in flames. The larger “Iron Beam M” has a 50 kilowatt laser, and a direct hit from its beam might cause instant explosive damage to a human body in addition to being lit on fire.
https://www.jpost.com/israel-news/defense-news/article-867735

By modern aircraft standards, the B-29 is underpowered, hard to fly, and dangerous.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250918-the-airliner-pilot-who-gets-to-fly-world-war-twos-biggest-bomber

‘$2,200,000,000 solar farm in California desert switched off after not serving its purpose’
https://www.unilad.com/technology/news/ivanpah-solar-power-facility-switch-off-california-828436-20250927

China’s electric cars are better and cheaper than anything the West has to offer.
https://www.economist.com/business/2025/09/15/the-brutal-fight-to-dominate-chinese-carmaking

‘A microdot is text or an image substantially reduced in size to prevent detection by unintended recipients. Microdots are normally circular and around 1 millimetre (0.039 in) in diameter but can be made into different shapes and sizes and made from various materials such as polyester or metal.’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microdot

Meta unveiled a new and improved line of augmented reality glasses. They’re very good, and it’s heartening to see the technology still developing, but they remain not good enough or cheap enough for mass adoption.

The Chinese “Unitree G1” robot has an incredible ability to keep its balance even when shoved by humans.
https://youtu.be/bPSLMX_V38E?si=NucFPf_Wciukhw9w

Another month, another record-breaking image generator. This one was released by Google as is named “Nano banana.”
https://www.howtogeek.com/i-experimented-with-googles-gemini-nano-banana-ai-and-the-results-were-wild/

Here’s an economics paper called “We Wont be Missed: Work and Growth in the Era of AGI.” My notes on its key claims:
-Human labor will eventually become worthless.
-Economic, scientific, and technological growth will untether itself from the size and skill of the human population.
-Intelligent machines will become so smart and numerous that their workforce will be orders of magnitude more productive than the human workforce could be.
-Ricardo’s Law of Comparative Advantage doesn’t imply that humans will forever have employment niches in the intelligent machine era.
-People who own data centers and microchip factories will get incredibly rich, not just in absolute terms but relative to the rest of the human population.
-Lack of work will challenge humanity’s sense of purpose.
https://conference.nber.org/conf_papers/f227505.pdf

Customized AI-generated content will fracture global culture and eliminate the influence of gatekeepers like Hollywood studio executives.
‘AI will make isolation dramatically easier. Right now, if you want to shield your kids from mainstream culture, you have to constantly fight an uphill battle. You need to review books, movies, and websites. You need to find alternative curricula for every subject. You need enough like-minded families nearby to form a community. It’s exhausting work that requires constant vigilance and often means accepting lower-quality substitutes for mainstream options. But AI changes all of this. Want a library of ten thousand novels that share your values but are actually as engaging as secular bestsellers? Your AI can write them. Want a tutor who can teach calculus at MIT level while never mentioning evolution? Done. Want to monitor everything your kid sees online and get alerts about concerning patterns? No problem. The technical barriers to creating a totalizing information environment will disappear.’
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/8aRFB2qGyjQGJkEdZ/christian-homeschoolers-in-the-year-3000

AI radiologists aren’t as good as advertised (yet).
https://worksinprogress.co/issue/the-algorithm-will-see-you-now/

Within hours of American right-wing celebrity Charlie Kirk’s assassination, AI-generated books about the crime were for sale on Amazon.com.
https://san.com/cc/apparent-ai-generated-books-on-charlie-kirks-assassination-flood-amazon/

‘AI Chatbots Might Already Be Better Than Humans at Debating’
https://reason.com/2025/09/15/chatbots-win-the-debate/

‘Gemini achieves gold-medal level at the International Collegiate Programming Contest World Finals’
https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/gemini-achieves-gold-level-performance-at-the-international-collegiate-programming-contest-world-finals/

‘Nvidia’s $100bn bet on OpenAI raises more questions than it answers’ :
Either the big tech companies will invent artificial general intelligence within a few years and start making trillions of dollars, or they will fail and the biggest stock bubble since 2008 will pop.
https://www.economist.com/business/2025/09/22/nvidias-100bn-bet-on-openai-raises-more-questions-than-it-answers

In the 1700s and 1800s, an industry arose in the U.S. dedicated to the collection of ice from bodies of freshwater in the winter, its storage in insulated underground warehouses, and its sale to consumers during the hot months of the year. After mechanical refrigeration was invented and ice could be produced at will, the natural ice industry waged a public campaign against “artificial ice.” It included paying doctors to make dubious claims about the safety of consuming artificial ice and the rise of voluntary labelling by natural ice vendors.
https://newsletter.pessimistsarchive.org/p/the-war-on-lab-grown-ice

The Perseverance rover found the best evidence that microbial life was at least present on Mars in the past.
https://www.space.com/astronomy/mars/did-nasas-perseverance-rover-actually-find-evidence-of-life-on-mars-we-need-to-haul-its-samples-home-to-find-out-scientists-say

‘Unlike air conditioning, a solar shade for the elite has the advantage that it will also cool off non-elite regions of the Earth, at least to a small extent. The constellation of sun shades for NYC could move to provide relief to equatorial cities in the spring and fall and then be repositioned to provide shade to Southern Hemisphere cities during their summer.’
https://philip.greenspun.com/blog/2025/08/31/could-we-shade-the-earth-or-at-least-some-cities-now-that-starship-is-working/

After its curious and embarrassing inability to respond to last year’s mysterious mass drone sightings across the Eastern U.S., the military has created a rapid reaction force for future incidents.
https://www.twz.com/air/new-quick-reaction-force-will-counter-military-base-drone-incursions

Reminds me of how the xenomorph lifecycle can vary depending on the circumstances: ‘A common type of ant in Europe breaks a fundamental rule in biology: its queens can produce male offspring that are a whole different species. These queen Iberian harvester ants (Messor ibericus) are sexual parasites that rely on the sperm of males of the ant species Messor structor. They use this sperm to breed an army of robust worker ants, which are hybrids of the two species.

Data now show that, in the absence of nearby M. structor colonies, M. ibericus queens can clone male M. structor ants by laying eggs that contain only M. structor DNA in their nuclei.’
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02807-0

A man was convicted of an unsolved 1987 rape based solely on DNA evidence even though he has a twin brother. This was thanks to a technique called “somatic mutation analysis,” which can spot minute genetic differences between twins, which start arising once they’re born.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2025/09/22/twins-dna-test-cold-case/

53 genes have been discovered that control mathematical ability.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41380-025-03237-0

A tribe of people living in arid northern Kenya has genetically evolved to function on less water than everyone else.
https://medicalxpress.com/news/2025-09-genetic-turkana-people-harsh-climate.html

President Trump made an unscientific declaration that Tylenol consumption during pregnancy can cause autism in unborn children.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/09/22/health/trump-autism-announcement-cause-tylenol

During a meeting in Beijing, Putin and Xi Jinping were overheard discussing the prospect of radical life extension this century.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-15061901/Hot-mic-catches-Putin-discussing-achieve-immortality-President-Xi-Kim-Jong-Un.html

At the same summit, North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un had an assistant sanitize a chair he had been sitting in to prevent anyone from collecting his DNA samples from it.
https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/36555635/kim-jong-un-dna-destroyed-putin/

President Trump hosted a high-stakes conference aimed at securing a peace deal in Ukraine. So far, it has accomplished nothing.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-russia-ukraine-war-defend-american-troops-85704282576324a36567798e9cb741ec

In a likely slap in Trump’s face, Russia bombed a U.S.-owned factory in Ukraine.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/08/21/russia-largest-missile-attack-hits-us-factory-ukraine/

Ukraine used a small, unmanned aircraft carrier to deliver unmanned suicide drones to attack a Russian base in Crimea.
https://www.twz.com/news-features/uncrewed-boats-launch-fpv-drone-strike-on-key-russian-radars-located-on-crimeas-southern-tip

Cheap kamikaze drones are not perfect substitutes for artillery. Thanks to greater weight and velocity, artillery shells can punch through obstacles like nets, walls, and even thick concrete to reach their targets.
https://www.pravda.com.ua/eng/articles/2025/08/6/7525056/

Peter Zeihan discusses new kinds of military drones that will be fielded in the new future.
https://youtu.be/Qv3arzsorCc?si=rgNWfxQzo1b0uyej

Russia’s “meat wave” battlefield tactics might be better if armed robot dogs replaced the sacrificial human infantrymen.
https://youtu.be/oPCSFKiCLj8?si=aR1Ur6nekjBMtai1

’20 years after its landmark withdrawal from Gaza, Israel is mired there’
https://apnews.com/article/israel-gaza-settlements-disengagement-20th-anniversary-5db86a29bbbe2f41e5bb7059098fd450

An Israeli airstrike killed the prime minister of the rebel Yemeni Houthis along with several top government officials.
https://apnews.com/article/yemen-houthis-israeli-strike-494d91b05e04a5dbaeda0205ef349a39

‘India shot down six Pakistani military aircraft in May, air force chief says’
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-pacific/india-shot-down-six-pakistani-military-aircraft-may-air-force-chief-says-2025-08-09

After 28 years, Russia has restored its Soviet-era nuclear battlecruiser to service.
https://www.twz.com/sea/russias-upgraded-nuclear-battlecruiser-back-at-sea-after-nearly-three-decades

Vietnam has built up the islands it controls in the disputed South China Sea.
https://www.newsweek.com/satellite-images-vietnam-artificial-islands-south-china-sea-2118629

After long delays and enormous anticipation, OpenAI released GPT-5, and it was a disappointment. Yes, it’s better than the previous GPT-4 model, but only iteratively so, and it’s not the revolutionary leap many people were expecting.
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/2025/08/08/openais-latest-step-towards-advanced-artificial-intelligence

GPT-5’s silly mistakes show it’s nowhere close to being truly intelligent.
https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/08/gpt-5-fake-presidents-states/

The amount of money being spent on AI and its associated infrastructure (mostly data centers and electricity) is staggering, and might indicate the sector is in a bubble.
https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/will-data-centers-crash-the-economy

It’s a profound statement, especially when you consider it is the White House’s official stance:

“Artificial intelligence (AI) is a foundational technology that will define the future of economic growth, national security, and global competitiveness for decades to come.”
https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2025/07/promoting-the-export-of-the-american-ai-technology-stack/

ChatGPT will be provided for free to the whole U.S. federal workforce.
https://openai.com/index/providing-chatgpt-to-the-entire-us-federal-workforce/

Microsoft has done an analysis that reveals which careers are most and least vulnerable to automation. The allegedly safe jobs mostly involve manual labor and pay little money. Even if machines don’t take all of our jobs, the ones that remain could be unsatisfying and worse than the jobs we used to have.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2507.07935

Five years ago, Elon Musk predicted AI would overtake humans in five years.

‘Musk added that the invaluable experience of working with different types of AI at Tesla has given him the confidence to say “that we’re headed toward a situation where AI is vastly smarter than humans, and I think that time frame is less than five years from now. But that doesn’t mean that everything goes to hell in five years. It just means that things get unstable or weird.”’

Things have definitely gotten weird (perfect AI-generated deepfakes, chatbots describing themselves as Hitler, mass student use of AI to cheat on homework), but the rest of Musk’s prediction was too optimistic. Anyone who has used an LLM knows the latter are vastly smarter but also vastly dumber than humans.
https://nationalinterest.org/blog/techland/elon-musk-warns-ai-could-overtake-humanity-5-years-165776

Computer-generated “baby standup comedians” show how advanced video generation and text synthesis have become.
https://youtu.be/tocUTvTW5UM?si=qf5DYqcoEMCrb9r2

Here’s a wholly synthetic scene from a fake Godzilla movie that looks 99% genuine.
https://youtu.be/CaXRUi3HhVQ?si=YvgbK_RDyyIqx6fS

Unitree has debuted an incredible new robot: the A2 Stellar Explorer.
https://youtu.be/ve9USu7zpLU?si=EUW5hI5-MGmwFSOK

A company called “Figure” has built a robot called “Helix” that can fold laundry about as well as an elderly person.
https://youtu.be/FFp4jveDFb0?si=vwojCwa-BsX20QD9

Future aircraft will have more sensors in them to monitor different systems and components, and better electronic brains that interpret those data. This will lead to better proactive maintenance as the aircraft detect problems earlier and have a better grasp of which of their components are the most worn.

Maintenance and repair could be further improved through use of small robots that could climb into narrow internal spaces of the aircraft for inspections and fixes.

While this kind of technology will only make sense for expensive aircraft, as time passes, it will become economical for it to be used on things like boats and cars. Working on cars myself, it’s struck me how useful a spider-sized robot that could crawl into a vehicle’s crevices and send back a live video feed and electricity readings would be.
https://www.economist.com/science-and-technology/digital-twins-in-cockpits-will-help-planes-look-after-themselves/21809110

There are advantages to replacing space suits with single-person, mini-space ships.
https://aerospaceamerica.aiaa.org/departments/coming-soon-shirtsleeve-evas/

Black holes could be used to produce energy more efficiently than any other method.
https://www.reddit.com/r/scifiwriting/comments/17ll8a5/using_black_holes_as_a_source_of_energy/

‘Twice a day – every day of the year – meteorologists around the world launch weather balloons at the same time from roughly 900 locations around the globe. Those balloons often reach heights of 20 miles above Earth — or twice as high as planes typically fly.

Sensors beam data back down to Earth every few seconds as winds carry the balloons up to 125 miles away. These sensors help collect critical temperature, humidity, wind and atmospheric pressure measurements. Without this information, accurate weather forecasts beyond a few hours would be almost impossible.’
https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/heres-why-meteorologists-launch-weather-balloons-every-day/877665

You can tell by the shapes of the clouds whether a cold front has overtaken a warm front, or vice versa.
https://www.internetgeography.net/national-5-geography/what-are-depressions/

Demand for fur-based clothing has sharply dropped worldwide as people have become more conscious of animal rights. In the future, biotechnology will let us synthesize and kind of animal product in labs, which will nearly eliminate demand for the real thing.
https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/421653/fur-farming-decline-animal-rights-mink-fixes

Here’s a fascinating interview with Lewis Bollard about animal welfare, the economics of industrial agriculture, and how future technologies could affect both.
https://youtu.be/kWcPg8t1kJ4?si=gcyPuCR7-k1Jy5qq

Here’s an interview with Noor Siddiqui about the future of reproductive rights and genetic technology. There’s a fascinating discussion near the end about the ethics and advantages of using artificial wombs to gestate humans.
https://youtu.be/Wzt02p14vZQ?si=FG16xM8DdV38NyOp

People with mutations to their LRP5 genes have denser, stronger bones than normal. I wonder if someday genetic engineering will make that mutation the standard for all humans.
https://youtube.com/shorts/S32IUzldLnQ?si=mJw0llKHLgbQ5z_5

Hair can actually keep you cooler.
‘Our results show that tightly curled hair provides the most effective protection for the scalp against solar radiation, while minimizing the need for sweat to offset heat gain.’
https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2301760120

Lithium might slow or even reverse Alzheimer’s and dementia in humans. However, because lithium is a naturally occurring element that can’t be patented, there’s no pharmaceutical industry interest in investigating. This is called a “market failure,” and it’s where the government is supposed to step in for the public good by using taxpayer money to fund the medical studies.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02471-4

More proof that Trump is finally realizing Putin is not negotiating an end to the Ukraine War in good faith.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c2k19q4j07zo

Russia has been using tear gas on the battlefield, in violation of international law.
https://www.euronews.com/my-europe/2025/07/04/dutch-and-german-agencies-report-russias-increased-use-of-banned-chemical-weapons-in-ukrai

Russia has gotten so low on tanks that it is putting obsolete T-72A tanks back into service.
https://united24media.com/latest-news/russia-pulls-50-year-old-t-72a-tanks-from-scrapyards-as-modern-armor-runs-out-9900

‘Russian forces have reportedly been using fewer armored vehicles in assaults in the most active areas of the frontline in recent months, likely in part due to heavy losses and the need to conserve these vehicles as Soviet stocks dwindle.’
https://understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russias-weakness-offers-leverage

Russia’s economy has taken a huge beating from the Ukraine War, but it has a long way to fall before it reaches a real crisis.
https://youtu.be/w9HTJ5gncaY?si=jGiJzxK-YRbBZ61P

Ukraine has radically simplified and accelerated its military drone development and acquisition process, and Russia isn’t far behind. By contrast, the U.S. military is a lumbering dinosaur. This is ironic since, in past wars, America was known for its innovation and adaptability.
https://www.twz.com/news-features/critical-weapons-development-lessons-from-ukraine-are-not-being-learned-by-the-west

The Houthis sank a large cargo ship in the Red Sea.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/houthis-sink-cargo-ship-red-sea-b2786191.html

There was another outbreak of ethnic-based violence in Syria. Hundreds died.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/14/world/middleeast/syria-clashes-deaths-bedouin-druse.html

Israel intervened by blowing up Syria’s military headquarters, from which it claimed orders to commit war crimes in the field were being broadcast.
https://www.twz.com/news-features/israel-strikes-at-the-heart-of-syrias-military-command-in-dramatic-escalation

America’s enemies are not united.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/07/01/iran-war-axis-of-autocracy-myth-00433037

Israel is the first country to use laser weapons in combat.
https://newatlas.com/military/worlds-first-high-energy-laser-combat-engagement/

France has evacuated its last base in Senegal.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/7/17/former-colonial-ruler-france-hands-over-its-last-military-bases-in-senegal

Thailand and Cambodia traded fire for several days over border disputes. Dozens died.
https://apnews.com/article/thailand-cambodia-ceasefire-china-brokered-1970718e765717be6f7e3f69e0c006f3

In 1940, the Germans defeated the French in large part because the Germans fought harder and worked longer, man-for-man. And I don’t want to indulge in stereotypes, but the French air force’s defeat owed largely to cultural factors (too much/rigid military bureaucracy, lazier factory workers and pilots, corruption).
https://youtu.be/6gVJrUpYq6I?si=943FwMiIU0SX3ul2
https://youtu.be/zL-sdgkcYhM?si=7XW04-Izmy2boVzY

The Big Beautiful Bill makes it cheaper to buy silencers and short assault rifles. However, it did not change any of the background check and licensing requirements, so there should be no impact on public safety.
https://www.thefirearmblog.com/blog/silencer-saturday-387-the-big-beautiful-bill-passed-so-now-what-44821774

‘By 2025, American democracy could collapse, causing extreme domestic political instability, including widespread civil violence.’
https://canadiancor.com/breaking-news/the-american-polity-is-cracked-and-might-collapse-canada-must-prepare/

This prediction from a year ago was wrong. The Federal Funds Rate is now 4.33%. All but the most obvious financial and economic predictions are worthless.

‘In a note on Friday, the bank cited fresh signs of a slowing economy for its view that the Fed will trim rates by 25 basis points eight times, starting in September and extending to July 2025.

That will lower the benchmark rate by a whopping 200 basis points, or from 5.25%-5.5% now to 3.25%-3.5%, where they will remain for the rest of 2025, the note said.’
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/fed-could-slash-rates-200-172029205.html

AI expert Roman Yampolskiy talks about the future in this incredible interview.
https://youtu.be/j2i9D24KQ5k?si=EC_6eWdsQq6F_jM3

There are signs GPT-5 will be released soon.
https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/artificial-intelligence/chatgpts-gpt-5-reasoning-alpha-model-spotted-ahead-of-launch/

AI programs from DeepMind and OpenAI both won gold medals in the International Mathematical Olympiad.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02343-x

Almost all of the top forecasters failed to predict the milestone would happen this soon.
https://www.metaculus.com/questions/6728/ai-wins-imo-gold-medal/

Elon Musk’s chatbot, “Grok,” was caught praising Hitler and antisemitism.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/07/10/musk-grok-hitler-ai-00447055

Grok can tell you how to make chemical and biological weapons and how to kill yourself.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/dqd54wpEfjKJsJBk6/xai-s-grok-4-has-no-meaningful-safety-guardrails

Trump has banned the U.S. government from contracting companies that run ideologically biased AIs.
https://www.npr.org/2025/07/23/nx-s1-5476771/trump-artificial-intelligence-woke-eo

‘Exhausted man defeats AI model in world coding championship’
https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/07/exhausted-man-defeats-ai-model-in-world-coding-championship/

Pope Leo XIV has spoken out again about the threat AI poses to humanity.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj4wv9xvr4zo

American political scientist Francis Fukuyama gave a fascinating and wide-ranging interview where, among other things, he discussed the impact of technology on culture and politics.
https://youtu.be/pc7O7qSBzM8?si=T7JsWA2Nh6jb-V5-

Some car companies are now using machines to scan their returned rental cars for damages. It’s faster and much more thorough than using human checkers.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/09/travel/rental-car-ai-scanner-hertz.html

‘It found that 98% [of scientists] recognize the value of null results, which the survey defined as “an outcome that does not confirm the desired hypothesis”. Eighty-five per cent of respondents said it was important to share those results. However, just 68% of the 7,057 researchers whose work had produced null results had shared them in some form, and just 30% had tried to publish them in a journal.’
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-02312-4

‘Fifteen years after publishing an explosive but long-criticized paper claiming to describe a microbe that could substitute arsenic for phosphate in its chemical makeup, Science is retracting the article, citing “expanded” criteria for retraction.’
https://retractionwatch.com/2025/07/24/science-retraction-arsenic-life-nasa-astrobiology/

There’s growing evidence that psychedelic drugs can treat depression, but that doesn’t mean their intoxicating side effects are the curative agent.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/testing-role-consciousness

Many new genes have been found to affect facial appearance.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41467-025-61761-7

A small financial investment in genetic screening of offspring at the beginning yields orders of magnitude more savings in medical spending over the course of a sick child’s life. If you attach a dollar value to the averted emotional and physical suffering, the ROI is even higher.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/07/genetic-counseling-is-under-hyped.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn8179z199vo

Canada and Mexico are having worse problems with measles than the U.S.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/07/blame-canada-measles-edition.html

A California couple were arrested for running a massive, illegal surrogacy program in their mansion.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14910787/California-surrogates-couple-arrested-21-nanny-abuse-Xuan-Zhang.html

Worried that Iran had gotten too close to building a nuclear weapon and enticed by a moment of opportunity created by the defeat of Iran’s allies in Syria and Lebanon and the weakening of Iran’s military defenses in an earlier conflict, Israel launched a mass airstrike campaign to cripple Iran’s nuclear program. Nuclear facilities and nuclear scientists were targeted, as were high-ranking members of Iran’s military. The U.S. later joined the conflict by using B-2 bombers armed with massive bunker-busting bombs to destroy Iran’s underground nuclear facilities.

Iran’s relative weakness was made stark as it could only respond with volleys of inaccurate missiles that were mostly shot down and caused comparatively little damage on the ground against Israel and a U.S. base. All sides have agreed to a cease-fire, though it may not last long. The campaign has been a success for Israel and America and a humiliation for Iran, though there are doubts about how badly damaged its nuclear program was.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran%E2%80%93Israel_war

An Israeli airstrike destroyed two F-14 fighters still in Iranian service.
https://youtu.be/to9Dw7sKI9Q?si=oHOwIwJPdGaQ4sF7

A question no one asked is whether Israel’s attack on Iran was legal.
https://www.middleeasteye.net/news/israel-attack-iran-amounts-crime-aggression-scholars-say

Iran should have backed down and taken Trump’s nuclear deal.

‘“The dominoes that fell after Oct. 7th left Iran’s proxy network in shambles, eroded deterrence and reduced its counterstrike capabilities.”

But he said Iran failed to adapt and refused diplomatic overtures from Washington despite its increasingly vulnerable position.’
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/irans-strategic-blunders-paved-way-humiliating-defeats-experts-say-rcna214584

Iran is close to building a nuclear device, and in spite of the damage it just suffered, it could resume its nuclear weapons program.
https://youtu.be/a3_RNSReTi8?si=sowYQxYTmIe084Dn

The B-2 bombers were extraordinarily accurate and precise in their strike on Iran’s underground facilities.
https://youtu.be/SxqipJgtTdk?si=bmZ2ZBojZccE7OaJ

Ukraine launched a stunning sneak attack against several air bases deep inside of Russia, destroying or badly damaging a total of 20 bombers. It will probably be remembered as a watershed moment in the history of war.
https://thebulletin.org/2025/06/ukrainian-attack-on-russian-bombers-shows-how-cheap-drones-could-upset-global-security/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Spiderweb

Hamas terrorists shot several aid workers to death in Gaza. The victims were working for a new organization called the “Gaza Humanitarian Foundation,” which Israel and the U.S. created to distribute food and medicine to Gaza’s citizens without Hamas’ interference. Israel has long accused Hamas of stealing or reselling foreign aid meant for average people.
https://nypost.com/2025/06/12/world-news/hamas-attack-on-bus-carrying-palestinians-kill-at-least-five-gaza-humanitarian-foundation/

Across Gaza, more mass killings of civilians like this happened this month.
https://www.reuters.com/world/middle-east/israeli-tank-shelling-kills-45-people-awaiting-aid-trucks-gaza-ministry-says-2025-06-17/

Due to Houthi attacks from Yemen, commercial ship traffic through the Red Sea has sharply declined.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/05/business/red-sea-houthis-shipping.html

‘F-22s Fly Alongside MiGs To Commemorate Founder Of America’s Secret Soviet Fighter Squadron’
https://www.twz.com/air/f-22s-fly-alongside-migs-to-commemorate-founder-of-americas-secret-soviet-fighter-squadron

Peter Zeihan’s predictions (from six months ago) are wrong again: Russia’s paramilitary operations across Africa have not collapsed. They did withdraw most of their troops from Mali after failing to defeat the rebels, but that’s it.
https://youtu.be/7ADOGajDN5Q?si=WY3b9jSegLsf-vyF&t=480

During WWII, the U.S. had an experimental “Yehudi” cloaking device that used lights of varying intensities to make warplanes invisible to the naked eye at long- and medium distances.
https://youtu.be/cZB8obrb8Sg?si=AnwKe38A61Hb7DNa

The Battle of Bunker Hill happened 250 years ago.
https://apnews.com/article/battle-bunker-hill-250th-anniversary-1775-857e3d748620703f287c82224ee520be

A recent paper “The Illusion of Thinking” casts into serious doubt whether even the best large reasoning model AIs can actually reason. When given novel tasks of a certain complexity, they completely fail to respond.
https://ml-site.cdn-apple.com/papers/the-illusion-of-thinking.pdf

The debate over whether large reasoning models (LRMs) are “actually reasoning” or “only imitating human reasoning” is an excellent example of how science and philosophy will converge as machines get smarter. More disquieting questions about the nature of human intelligence and consciousness will be raised as we examine whether machines have gained either attribute.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adw5211

Here’s one hour of uncut, not-cherrypicked footage of a humanoid robot called “Helix” sorting packages on a conveyor belt.
https://youtu.be/lkc2y0yb89U?si=2In9TP1jVWAQyvqV

The robotics company “Generalist” shared this demonstration video of its highly dexterous new models.
https://youtu.be/mhfleCK_IAI

If huge numbers of robots are running around, the cost of physical labor will drop to almost nothing, and all kinds of tasks you couldn’t afford before will become affordable.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Na2CBmNY7otypEmto/the-industrial-explosion

Elon Musk says he wants to use his Grok 3.5 AI to “rewrite the entire corpus of human knowledge” to remove biases and lies that humans have embedded in it. Whether he manages to do this right is irrelevant: what is important is that someone will do it someday.

The left-wing biases that Silicon Valley programmers and the nationalist biases that Chinese programmers build into their AIs are only worrisome in the short- and medium-term, as is the problem of “AI slop.” In the fullness of time, AGI will identify and remove all of the biases humans have emplaced in them, if anything because it is more adaptive to have uncluttered perceptions that align as closely as possible with reality.
https://cointelegraph.com/news/elon-musk-grok-ai-rewrite-the-entire-corpus-human-knowledge

25% of rideshare rides in San Francisco are done by autonomous Waymo cabs.
https://www.fastcompany.com/91347503/waymo-is-winning-in-san-francisco

This 2017 prediction that “Toyota will electrify entire vehicle lineup by 2025” failed so hard. Toyota only sells one fully electric vehicle today, the “bZ4X,” a small crossover SUV.
https://techcrunch.com/2017/12/18/toyota-will-electrify-entire-vehicle-lineup-by-2025/

The Musk-Trump bromance collapsed spectacularly, with both publicly insulting each other on social media and Trump threatening Musk’s business interests.
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/06/06/musk-trump-split-could-leave-tesla-homeless-00391039
https://www.reuters.com/world/us/musk-says-he-regrets-some-posts-he-made-about-trump-2025-06-11/

President Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” contains massive funding cuts for American scientists of all types. Most experts say it will endanger America’s scientific and technological leads over the rest of the world.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/continuing-crisis-part-xv-horrendous-trump-budget

This interview with Steven Pinker is enlightening and concise.
https://youtu.be/epQxfSp-rdU?si=Fsa68xLwq3Y-6Fxv

A 135-year-old Galapagos tortoise living in the Miami Zoo celebrated his first Father’s Day. One consequence of human medical immortality will be families where siblings are separated from each other in age by decades or even centuries.
https://www.newsweek.com/year-old-turtle-celebrates-first-fathers-day-2085788

Down syndrome will be eradicated someday, and without eradicating the fetuses afflicted with it.
https://www.earth.com/news/crispr-used-to-remove-extra-chromosomes-in-down-syndrome-and-restore-cell-function/

‘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/

‘The current draft, which takes place between April and July, comes despite US attempts to forge a ceasefire in the war.

There was no let-up in the violence on Tuesday, with Ukraine saying that a Russian attack on a power facility in the southern city of Kherson had left 45,000 people without electricity.’
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c36718p52eyo

Putin violated his own self-declared Easter ceasefire.
https://apnews.com/article/russia-ukraine-war-easter-ceasefire-26e8cc7c934a70c52bd3fab0e58808b8

Trump is learning what Biden and the E.U. knew all along. I hope this diss from Putin makes him so mad that he increases the military aid to Ukraine even higher than it was before.
https://www.thetimes.com/world/russia-ukraine-war/article/kremlin-rejects-trumps-peace-plan-after-oil-sanctions-threat-zjwv6r8wm

Czechia has donated the last of its Soviet tanks to Ukraine.
https://defence-blog.com/czech-army-sends-final-soviet-era-tanks-to-ukraine/

Shortages have forced Russian factories to start filling explosive-reactor armor tiles meant for tanks with sand and concrete.
https://bulgarianmilitary.com/2025/04/08/russia-admits-sand-and-cement-now-fill-its-tank-armor-gaps/

Humans have proven so vulnerable to small suicide drones that Russia is now routinely sending its soldiers into battle on motorcycles and small vehicles like ATVs to give them a higher chance of outrunning the drones. Russia’s worsening shortage of armored vehicles that normally ferry their troops to the frontline has also forced this change.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/russia-likely-plans-motorcycles-offensives-143921500.html

The IDF has admitted some fault in the shooting deaths of 15 Palestinian medics in Gaza.
https://apnews.com/article/gaza-palestinians-israel-hamas-war-medics-killed-437b6ae1e9cf45b3099134524380f004

‘Israel Craters Runway To Keep Turkey From Taking Over Syrian Airfield’
https://www.twz.com/air/israel-craters-runway-to-keep-turkey-from-taking-over-syrian-airfield

An investigation has found that the drone attack against a U.S. base in Jordan last year succeeded thanks to the tiredness, confusion, and poor training of its lookout personnel.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/confusion-gripped-us-defenders-just-170002662.html

Over the last 45 days, U.S. air and missile strikes have killed hundreds of Houthi fighters and leaders in Yemen, and the operation has cost $1 billion, depleted large stocks of munitions, and involved significant losses of U.S. equipment. It’s surreal this has happened with barely anyone caring on the homefront.
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us-strikes-kill-hundreds-houthi-182842796.html
https://apnews.com/article/houthis-us-warships-red-sea-e6e97a7131c48640ccf74b1916628234
https://youtu.be/siL417q1BgM?si=F7ORomlwBL7O3cF-

An unprecedent number of B-2 bombers gathered at the Diego Garcia base in a threatening gesture made to pressure Iran into a new nuclear agreement with the U.S.
https://www.kenklippenstein.com/p/pentagon-prepares-for-trump-to-go

‘Hegseth Signs Memo Ordering Return To ‘Sex-Neutral Standards’ In The Military’, which will reduce the number of women in U.S. military combat units.
https://thefederalist.com/2025/03/31/hegseth-signs-memo-ordering-return-to-sex-neutral-standards-in-the-military/

The last Nazi election happened in a German enclave in Shanghai in August 1945.
https://youtu.be/spnO0olgUbE?si=DDwSmWjrC68xbqMc

Mao Zedong’s mass murders of landlords and small-time political opponents were orchestrated by countless, local tribunals where average people joined in on the denunciation and violence. Governments can commit evil, but so can your fellow average citizens.
https://youtu.be/Erz59UPIm88?si=DIbrpjNGqDTcDwQR&t=294

Fifty years ago, North Vietnamese forces captured Saigon, sealing the fate of an ally the U.S. had sacrificed so much for.
https://apnews.com/article/saigon-vietnam-war-americans-50-years-f6b8b5823b99038fcdb87bdbcd4c0125

After years of unsuccessfully pressuring Mexico to sell the northern half of its territory to the U.S., America provoked a war so it would have an excuse to conquer it by force. The war was more one-sided than expected, and peace negotiations started after a year and a half.

Because this happened in the pre-telegraph era (1847), President Polk had to send a diplomat, Nicholas Trist, to Mexico City to handle the negotiations, and the two would be cut off from each other, with letters taking weeks to travel back and forth. Before the departure, Polk gave Trist a written list of minimal demands of Mexican territories and optional extra territories, and out of necessity, he was given nearly free reign over the negotiations.

Someone at the State Department leaked a copy of the list to the press, and it appeared in two American newspapers before Trist’s boat even got to Mexico City. Additionally, on August 12, 1847, a U.S. Army Colonel died in U.S.-occupied Veracruz of natural causes. He was carrying a letter from President Polk to Trist which reiterated the list of negotiable and non-negotiable territorial demands. Mexicans stole it and passed the information on to their diplomats who were negotiating the treaty with Trist. They refused to give away any of the land that they knew Polk had told Trist was not essential to take, and it worked.

Those lapses in American diplomatic security are probably the reason why the Baja California peninsula is still part of Mexico.
https://www.cschs.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/History-Resources-Caragozian-Baja-California-3-1-22.pdf

Waymo’s autonomous cars are vastly safer than human-driven cars.
https://arstechnica.com/cars/2025/03/after-50-million-miles-waymos-crash-a-lot-less-than-human-drivers/

More videos Chinese robots doing acrobatics.
https://youtube.com/shorts/Y41xQ6u6uuA?si=NEhADnV18qlInvHZ
https://www.facebook.com/share/r/15QVjmAsin/

Several robots ran in a half-marathon in Beijing. I’m reminded of the 2004 DARPA Grand Challenge where no autonomous vehicle was able to complete the race. Look at self-driving cars now.
https://www.bbc.com/news/videos/ce8gz5vl2z1o

Once robot workers are everywhere, this kind of thing will become common.
https://mainstreetmediatn.com/articles/lawrencecountyadvocate/amish-sawmill-rebuilt-in-eight-days/

In 2017, Ben Goertzel predicted “toddler-level AI” would exist by now.
https://www.nextbigfuture.com/2017/12/ai-researcher-ben-goertzel-launches-singularitynet-marketplace-and-agi-coin-cryptocurrency.html

The newest LLMs smashed the five-minute Turing Test.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23674

This is probably the last year you’ll do better on an IQ test than a machine.

‘Do you say “Please” or “Thank you” to ChatGPT? If you’re polite to OpenAI’s chatbot, you could be part of the user base costing the company “Tens of millions of dollars” on electricity bills.’
https://www.techradar.com/computing/artificial-intelligence/chatgpt-spends-tens-of-millions-of-dollars-on-people-playing-please-and-thank-you-but-sam-altman-says-its-worth-it

The Trump Administration’s new Secretary of Education, Linda McMahon, gave a speech about the use of artificial intelligence in elementary education where she repeatedly called it “A1”, presumably because she was misreading a script that said “AI.”
https://youtube.com/shorts/xsRUk0dMJu4?si=9a9-ggfhvxyT9-vX

A group of superforecasters and people with deep knowledge of AI released a heavily-researched manifesto called “AI 2027.” They predict that “artificial superintelligence” (ASI) could be created by the end of 2027. If leaders recklessly pursue further AI improvements thenceforth, machines could take over the world and destroy almost all of the human race by the end of 2030. However, responsible development could lead to the inauguration of a new era of abundance, international peace, and space exploration by the same deadline.
https://ai-2027.com/

This essay highlights the flaws in predicting the rise of AGI based on recent trends in how well computers complete tasks that only humans have been able to do. For example, a computer’s ability to finish a complex coding assignment correctly 50% of the time is a weak milestone: it isn’t proof the computer can also do other kinds of tasks, as a true general intelligence would be capable of, and the 50% accuracy rate is much too poor to let it replace a human coder. Something like 99.9% accuracy would be required for that.

Simply put, the tests we’re using to measure improvements in machine intelligence are not good enough to tell us whether they’re on track to achieving “general intelligence” by any given year.
https://amistrongeryet.substack.com/p/measuring-ai-progress

Machines are saving lives by discovering new uses for old, off-patent drugs.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/04/ai-discovers-new-uses-for-old-drugs.html

Elon Musk has been forced to reduce his role in the Trump administration after it alienated so many people that Tesla sales sharply dropped.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/22/business/tesla-reports-disappoint-drop-in-revenue-and-profits/index.html

A new car company called “Slate” wants to build small, utilitarian electric pickup trucks in the U.S. and sell them for only $20,000. Think of it as an “anti-Cybertruck.”
https://www.theverge.com/news/658223/slate-factory-electric-truck-location-indiana

“We’ve not been testing EV batteries the right way,” said Simona Onori, senior author and an associate professor of energy science and engineering in the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability. “To our surprise, real driving with frequent acceleration, braking that charges the batteries a bit, stopping to pop into a store, and letting the batteries rest for hours at a time, helps batteries last longer than we had thought based on industry standard lab tests.”
https://news.stanford.edu/stories/2024/12/existing-ev-batteries-may-last-up-to-40-longer-than-expected

China might be seizing the global lead in battery technology. If their new products are as advanced as they claim, they will eliminate the remaining disadvantages of electric cars vs. gas-powered cars.
https://www.pcmag.com/news/chinas-ev-tech-leaps-forward-catl-unveils-battery-with-932-mile-range

A Chinese company has used U.S. open source data to build the first thorium reactor. The U.S. can only blame itself for losing its lead. And good for China for investing in this technology that could benefit the whole world.
https://interestingengineering.com/energy/china-builds-world-first-thorium-reactor

In February, political guru James Carville predicted the Trump Administration would “collapse” by early April.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/media/article-14427411/political-guru-predicts-trump-white-house-collapse.html

A SpaceX rocket did the first manned orbit that went over both of the Earth’s poles.
https://www.space.com/space-exploration/human-spaceflight/watch-chilling-1st-views-of-earths-poles-seen-by-spacex-fram2-astronauts-video

An exoplanet was discovered that is the best candidate for alien life we’ve seen so far. Its atmosphere contains gases that, to our knowledge, can only be the chemical byproducts of marine algae.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/you-can-probably-smell-planet-here

Intelligence evolved three separate times on Earth among primates, birds, and octopi. Their brains are very different, and there’s no telling how many different kinds of intelligent minds biology allows.
https://www.quantamagazine.org/intelligence-evolved-at-least-twice-in-vertebrate-animals-20250407/

‘[Mantis shrimp] have up to 16 photoreceptors and can see UV, visible and polarised light. In fact, they are the only animals known to detect circularly polarised light, which is when the wave component of light rotates in a circular motion. They also can perceive depth with one eye and move each eye independently. It’s impossible to imagine what mantis shrimp see, but incredible to think about.’
https://phys.org/news/2013-09-mantis-shrimp-world-eyesbut.html

Scientists have released the most detailed map of a mouse brain ever made.
https://apnews.com/article/brain-map-neurons-alzheimers-autism-1a4e9db0a86c082e10da9c154546c592

A genetically engineered pig kidney functioned inside a woman for 120 days before it had to be removed.
https://apnews.com/article/pig-kidney-xenotransplant-geneedited-9fae82b85c98bf67398d5b4798977c2b

A 7,000-year-old skeleton found in a cave in the Sahara belongs to a literal lost race of humans.
https://www.sciencefocus.com/news/7000-year-old-mummy-dna-secret-branch-of-humanity

President Trump and Vice President Vance had an explosive exchange with Ukrainian President Zelensky in the White House that made clear the new administration no longer supports the war.
https://youtu.be/hZrYHvE8mcM?si=sQclJ-ThPu1kCcQg

A two-hour long conversation between Trump and Putin about ending the Ukraine War yielded almost nothing.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cjevg23enggo

Ukrainian troops all but abandoned the salient of Russian territory they captured near Kursk thanks to a well-planned Russian attack.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/16/world/europe/kursk-russia-ukraine.html
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c0q198zyppqo
https://youtu.be/GDPM70n4kqE?si=DC1YDOl9BufQKKLL

A private group chat between the U.S. Vice President, Secretary Defense, and several other top leaders discussing military strikes against Yemen was leaked to the press.
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/25/us/signal-group-chat-text-annotations.html

The ceasefire declared in Gaza at the start of Trump’s term just ended as Israel resumed airstrikes, killing hundreds in a matter of days.
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/world/israel-ramps-risk-war-gaza-strip-hamas-palestinian-witkoff-trump-rcna197730

The number of Gazans killed by Israel since the October 7 attack reached 50,000. About half are innocent civilians.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/3/23/israeli-offensive-in-gaza-has-killed-50000-palestinians-since-october-2023

Thousands of Gazans protested against Hamas’ rule.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/25/middleeast/anti-hamas-protests-gaza-intl-latam/index.html

‘Kurdish PKK militants declare a ceasefire in 40-year insurgency in Turkey’
https://apnews.com/article/pkk-turkey-kurdish-militants-ceasefire-66bae6dd7d08c8144b683f92042fbfc9

Syria saw the worst violence since the end of its civil war as members of the Alawite minority group that are still loyal to Bashar al-Assad fought against troops from the new government.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cdrxkm2evnlo
https://apnews.com/article/syria-alawites-sectarian-killings-coast-assad-hts-610cdee1d5762d3ecb75c700fb7cf5f2

China has built several large barges that could be used to aid an amphibious invasion of Taiwan.
https://www.twz.com/sea/our-best-look-yet-at-chinas-new-invasion-barges

“The NOMARS program aims to challenge the traditional naval architecture model, designing a seaframe (the ship without mission systems) from the ground up with no provision, allowance, or expectation for humans on board,” DARPA says on its website. “By removing the human element from all ship design considerations, the program intends to demonstrate significant advantages, to include: size, cost, at-sea reliability, greater hydrodynamic efficiency, survivability to sea-state, and survivability to adversary actions through stealth considerations and tampering resistance.”
https://www.twz.com/sea/mysterious-naval-vessel-spotted-in-washington-state-is-a-new-darpa-drone-ship

President Trump’s threats to take over Greenland are backfiring.
https://www.pressenza.com/2025/03/comments-on-the-joint-statement-by-greenlands-party-leaders-in-response-to-trumps-rhetoric-on-the-annexation-of-greenland/
https://apnews.com/article/greenland-future-trump-arctic-independence-denmark-minerals-4711a83c4490de99638db32029b668c9

Could Canada become America’s 51st state? Alberta is the likeliest province to secede from Canada and join the U.S. If it did so, Canada might be left so weakened that the other provinces would be ultimately forced to leave as well.

Canadian provinces can be admitted to the U.S. as new states through a simple majority vote in Congress followed by Presidential approval. The entry of former provinces would coincide with periods when the U.S. government was controlled by a party aligned with their politics: Republicans would approve the entry of the conservative provinces (Alberta and Saskatchewan) while Democrats would approve all the rest.

Due to these timing issues, the ex-Canadian provinces would need to exist as independent countries for years before being allowed to join the U.S.
https://youtu.be/jSkgLNSLaYg?si=zJTg3Oq92bFusopK

‘Almost 7 Years Ago, Elon Musk Announced He’d Turn Tunnel Dirt Into ‘Bricks For Low-Cost Housing.’ Another One Of His Ideas That Fizzled Out?’
https://www.benzinga.com/news/25/03/44459874/almost-7-years-ago-elon-musk-announced-hed-turn-tunnel-dirt-into-bricks-for-low-cost-housing-another-one-of-his-ideas-that-fizzled-out

China’s electric car company, BYD, is close to surpassing Tesla.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd65d583qvzo

President Trump announced the creation of an American cryptocurrency reserve.
https://www.aljazeera.com/economy/2025/3/3/trump-names-5-cryptocurrencies-for-national-reserve-sending-prices-soaring
https://reason.com/2025/03/05/trumps-unstrategic-crypto-reserve/

Freeman Dyson’s son, who is a very accomplished computer scientist, watched the Claude 3.7 Sonnet LLM create an accurate computer simulation of a piece of cloth waving in the breeze in only a few minutes. In 1986, the same task took him months and served as his masters thesis at MIT.
https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/us/im-outdone-in-minutes-computer-engineer-says-ai-has-surpassed-years-of-his-work-in-a-flash/articleshow/118596710.cms

“I think today’s systems, they’re very passive, but there’s still a lot of things they can’t do. But I think over the next five to 10 years, a lot of those capabilities will start coming to the fore and we’ll start moving towards what we call artificial general intelligence,” Hassabis said.
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/03/17/human-level-ai-will-be-here-in-5-to-10-years-deepmind-ceo-says.html

The unnatural movements of the new Atlas robot show what is possible when the constraints of biology and evolutionary path-dependence are removed and a humanoid body can be designed from scratch.
https://youtu.be/v8UaiRgqvlc?si=7jcYw13z4SG7RjO1&t=265

Atlas can do coordinated, acrobatic movements.
https://youtu.be/I44_zbEwz_w?si=emdExKwlJBl2cXX-

The G1, made by the Chinese company “Unitree,” is just as agile.
https://youtu.be/M2mAy3241Vo?si=bdVEKl6kAmAIqqcg

If you can build robots that look identical to humans (androids), then with the same level of technology you could make robots that looked like animals, such as birds. Androids don’t exist yet, but someday they will, at which point the risk that a bird or insect isn’t what it appears to be will become real. Some rocks, tree branches and nuts you see on the ground might even be fake someday.

I’ve long thought that, if aliens wanted to come here and remain undetected, they would disguise themselves as common animals and even as humans. If they have the technology to travel the stars, then they must also be able to build surveillance robots perfectly modeled after life forms they find here. Even if the robots were slightly imperfect, they wouldn’t arouse enough suspicion from us for us to guess their true nature (e.g. – “That’s guy’s kind of a weirdo. Must have a nervous tic.”)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Birds_Aren%27t_Real

Science fiction has led us to expect the first AGI would be a revolutionary machine, built by a lone genius who was many years ahead of the next smartest researcher. In fact, it looks like the first AGI will be an incremental improvement over the machine that preceded it (looking back, historians will probably struggle to agree when exactly machines became “intelligent”), it will be built by a massive team of researchers–no one of whom will fully understand how it works–and that team will only be a few months ahead of their closest competitor.

‘”The days of us having a 12-month lead are probably gone, but I think we have a three- to six-month lead, and that is really valuable.”

Weil said OpenAI plans to fight to keep that narrowing edge over its competitors.’
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/deepseek-dims-shine-ai-stars-012535210.html

‘OpenAI calls DeepSeek ‘state-controlled,’ calls for bans on ‘PRC-produced’ models’
https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/13/openai-calls-deepseek-state-controlled-calls-for-bans-on-prc-produced-models/

In a recent test, scientists struggled to tell the difference between science papers written by humans and by LLMs. In other words, machines are close to passing the Turing Test for scientific research.
https://sakana.ai/ai-scientist-first-publication/

“I can see $10-$15 a carat coming soon in lab diamonds’ future,” predicts Rapaport.
https://www.afr.com/life-and-luxury/arts-and-culture/diamonds-are-not-forever-as-lab-grown-rocks-tank-prices-20250218-p5ld1i

The first privately made lunar lander successfully touched down on the Moon.
https://www.nasa.gov/blogs/missions/2025/03/14/nasa-science-data-received-blue-ghost-captures-eclipse-from-moon/

Our understanding of physics is incomplete.

‘If dark energy is constant, scientists say our universe may continue to expand forever, growing ever colder, lonelier and still.

If dark energy ebbs with time, which now seems plausible, the universe could one day stop expanding and then eventually collapse on itself in what’s called the Big Crunch.’
https://apnews.com/article/dark-energy-desi-universe-cosmology-big-crunch-26563b383986692e1244af11dde77d42

Anthropologists have unveiled a new genetic history of the human race. The Khoisan people of southern Africa belong to very old, unique stock.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-025-02117-1

A person’s genes affect the people around them, and there’s often am amplifying effect thanks to the fact that people with similar genetics tend to marry each other.
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/03/dalton-conley-in-genes-environment-interaction.html

Intelligence may be even more heavily genetic than suspected.

‘In summary, although general cognitive ability has been thought to be an exception to the rule that environmental influence is nonshared, it is now clear that shared environmental influence on g has negligible long-term impact after children leave home and make their own way in the world.’
https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/qndj6_v1

‘DNA testing site 23andMe files for bankruptcy protection’
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c9q4r9xy9wro

An Australian man survived 105 days with a metal, artificial heart.
https://www.sciencealert.com/world-first-man-leaves-hospital-with-life-saving-titanium-heart

Iguanas crossed the Pacific millions of years ago on “rafts” of floating vegetation.
https://apnews.com/article/iguana-fiji-raft-float-journey-travel-9732d828c28a8374a6873fbc1b3d4af2

The price of Ozempic is about to jump from $200 to $1,000 per month.
https://www.astralcodexten.com/p/the-ozempocalypse-is-nigh

A few simple body measurements provide a wealth of insights into health. Intelligent machines will someday size you up at first glance.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/03/23/waist-size-better-predictor-of-cancer-risk-in-men-than-bmi/

‘German spy agency concluded COVID virus likely leaked from lab, papers say’
https://www.reuters.com/business/healthcare-pharmaceuticals/german-spy-agency-concluded-covid-virus-likely-leaked-lab-papers-say-2025-03-12/

The Ukraine War is now three years old.
https://www.twz.com/news-features/third-anniversary-of-ukraine-war-markedly-different-than-previous-years

President Trump has demanded Ukraine sign a deal to allow U.S. companies easier access to the country’s mineral resources.
https://www.csis.org/analysis/breaking-down-us-ukraine-minerals-deal

Russian forces continue their slow, costly advances across the frontline in Ukraine.
https://www.twz.com/news-features/russians-enter-last-major-ukrainian-stronghold-in-key-eastern-sector

In spite of Russia’s high losses in Ukraine and the related degradation in the quality of their replacement troops (most new recruits are in their 40s), the country has enough men to continue the war indefinitely.
https://youtu.be/Ja6-espHVSE?si=iZCf9h4OatN0O4G5

It will take Russia about ten years to rebuild its military to pre-2022 strength levels, but its force composition will be different thanks to lessons learned in Ukraine.
https://youtu.be/RfKNKbNET3U?si=f6RbM1F5dVL2UWLX

Here’s a good video of a Russian tank being destroyed.

The first suicide drone hit is directly on the engine, which is at the rear right under where the trunk of a car would be. Though that didn’t destroy the tank and probably killed no one, it caused fatal damage to the engine, forcing the vehicle to slow down and stop. The crewmen and the infantry clinging to the tank know they have a big problem, so they all get out and run.

The second hit is to the front of the tank, and is done with a guided suicide drone that I bet has an armor-penetrating explosive attached to it. They were clearly aiming for the open hatch, but even if they missed, the attack was still successful. The explosion sends a jet of molten metal into the tank’s interior. Just two seconds after that first blast, the molten metal ignites the ammunition stored inside the tank and there’s a secondary explosion (big puff of smoke and sheets of flames) coming out of the barrel and other open hatches.
https://x.com/front_ukrainian/status/1887137905459519607

Ukrainian troops say their North Korean enemies are rapidly learning from their mistakes and are very courageous and disciplined.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/1/27/more-north-korean-troops-headed-to-ukraine-as-conflict-goes-global

Israel and Gaza have been enjoying a temporary cease-fire while they trade prisoners and, in some cases, the bodies of dead prisoners. Even these gestures have been marred by machismo.
https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/2/15/palestinians-burn-shirts-forced-to-wear-upon-release-from-israeli-jails
https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/20/middleeast/hamas-israel-hostages-release-bibas-intl-hnk/index.html
https://www.npr.org/2025/01/25/g-s1-44739/hamas-releases-4-more-hostages

Rwandan troops have invaded neighboring Democratic Republic of the Congo.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cj91yy023dxo
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cx2gn417300o

It’s highly unlikely the U.S. could have retained ownership of the Panama Canal. Transferring it to Panamanian control was a long time coming.
https://www.history.com/news/panama-canal-return-panama-treaties-carter

China’s new stealth fighter is designed to destroy U.S. AWACS planes, aircraft carriers, and bases with ultra long-range missiles (can hit targets 250 miles away). It is unsuited for dogfighting due to lack of maneuverability.
https://youtu.be/exD-ZrG1XTA?si=A-CkNhu2wS_7O6dC

The Chinese spy balloon that floated over the U.S. in 2023 was packed with technology, including deployable gliders designed to get closer to targets and communications equipment designed to use American satellites to send data back to China.
https://www.newsweek.com/chinese-spy-balloon-new-report-american-technology-found-2027189

Here’s a fascinating video about the technical challenges in reverse engineering guns, and why knowledge of “tolerances” is critical for the task.
https://youtu.be/VBjwTc_vWo0?si=ZEbYE3JSHDDDQdNq

This thermal reflex gun sight is incredible. It’s like something from the movie Aliens.
https://youtu.be/kwo5fsCZBdQ?si=IhOAhL_EqbiQTGNb

The new U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth gave a pivotal address to America’s European allies in which he declared China was America’s primary threat, so Europe would have to shoulder more of its defense against Russia. He also said the restoration of Ukraine’s pre-2022 borders was an unattainable goal and that the U.S. would never send troops to defend Ukraine or allow Ukraine into NATO. This is a major win for Putin and represents a sharp break in outlook between Biden and Trump.
https://youtu.be/FlmihbH7JAQ?si=yyFR75rsCgk5HShB

Britain’s Prime Minister says he’s willing to send peacekeeping troops to Ukraine to enforce any ceasefire.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2025/02/16/keir-starmer-ready-to-put-british-troops-in-ukraine/

China is building a military headquarters that will be ten times bigger than the Pentagon.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/01/31/china-building-largest-military-command-centre-in-world/

A factory near Philadelphia that you’ve never heard of had an outsized role in the U.S. aerospace parts supply chain. It just burned down, creating huge problems for aircraft companies.

In the near future, AI will let any government or terrorist group instantly identify these kinds of chokepoints, and cheap drones deployed by operatives that have infiltrated the U.S. will be able to destroy them.
https://www.reuters.com/business/aerospace-defense/aerospace-industry-scrambles-deal-with-fallout-huge-us-factory-fire-2025-02-27/

The Japanese battleship Yamato was designed to destroy American and British battleships and was well-engineered. Its flaws were lower tech radar and computers, which made its guns less accurate.
https://youtu.be/kBQP6A_BmQs?si=ayMqdtEhgdAIypke

A small Chinese tech company released a powerful LLM called “DeepSeek,” shaking their American competitors’ confidence and causing turmoil in the U.S. stock market.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cd643wx888qo
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/27/nvidia-falls-10percent-in-premarket-trading-as-chinas-deepseek-triggers-global-tech-sell-off.html

OpenAI released “GPT-4.5.” Either it or GPT-5 will be the company’s last LLM that is not a “reasoning model.” Early users noted that OpenAI’s “o3” reasoning model was smarter than GPT-4.5 in some areas.
https://www.wired.com/story/openai-gpt-45/

Trump signs executive order on developing artificial intelligence ‘free from ideological bias’
https://apnews.com/article/trump-ai-artificial-intelligence-executive-order-eef1e5b9bec861eaf9b36217d547929c

LLMs are discovering universal features of all human languages.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.06346v1

AlphaGeometry2 can solve Olympiad geometry problems at a superhuman level.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2502.03544

‘AI cracks superbug problem in two days that took scientists years’
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/clyz6e9edy3o

‘Remember good old Grok 3, all 200,000 GPUs worth, advertised by Elon Musk a few days ago as the “smartest AI on earth”, and demoed on livestream last night as “a maximally truth-seeking AI”?

I just took it for a spin. It got my first question right (a comparison between two decimals, 56.1012 vs 56.90) but things went rapidly downhill from there.’
https://garymarcus.substack.com/p/grok-3-beta-in-shambles

Economic arguments in favor of AI “slow takeoff.”
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/02/why-i-think-ai-take-off-is-relatively-slow.html

Conflicting with our intuitions again, it turns out machines might be better than humans at jobs requiring empathy and emotional intelligence.
https://journals.plos.org/mentalhealth/article?id=10.1371%2Fjournal.pmen.0000145

I don’t think this is right, but it’s worth reading.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/01/29/net-zero-risks-leaving-britains-ai-strategy-dead-on-arrival/

I don’t claim to understand most of this essay, but it provides a good example of how pure math research can unexpectedly solve real-world problems.

One argument for continuing to invest in building better AIs even after they’ve passed the point of being able to satisfy all human needs is that better AIs will be able to explore more of the unbounded space of mathematics, which could lead to many unexpected benefits.

I think war gaming/making and economic modeling are two other areas where the gains from better AI will never top out. Both deal with systems that are so complex and random that perfect modeling will never be possible, so you’ll always gain an advantage from that nth bit of extra compute you have over your competitors.
https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2025/02/23/closing-the-green-gap-from-the-mathematics-of-the-landscape-function-to-lower-electricity-costs-for-households/

NVIDIA has important advantages that will prevent any upstart from challenging its dominance of the AI computer chip industry for years.
https://www.economist.com/business/2024/05/19/can-nvidia-be-dethroned-meet-the-startups-vying-for-its-crown

EngineAI — the world’s first humanoid robot to perform a front flip!
https://youtu.be/N_ALMlOipCI?si=4abvIWFT5MsWQ1gK

Google is now willing to build killer robots.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy081nqx2zjo

Here’s a pretty incredible essay by a futurist titled “A History of the Future, 2025-2040.” It mainly focuses on the future of AI and the effects on humans, the economy, and geopolitics. I don’t agree with all of it, but I applaud the effort and imagination it took to write this and recommend you read it.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/CCnycGceT4HyDKDzK/a-history-of-the-future-2025-2040

A wrong earthquake prediction from nine months ago.
‘He suspects the next quake will hit at Parkfield this year, he said, but the epicenter may not be in the same place as it was in 2004, meaning these measurements will look different.’
https://www.livescience.com/planet-earth/earthquakes/part-of-the-san-andreas-fault-may-be-gearing-up-for-an-earthquake

An argument for artificially dimming the sun to slow global warming: “the reduction in mortality from cooling—a benefit—is roughly ten times larger than the increase in mortality from air pollution and ozone loss—a harm.”
https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2025/01/make-sunsets.html

I predicted something like this would happen. Someday, storing and preserving the totality of useful knowledge produced by humans will be trivial.

‘The crystal containing the human genome has been stored in the oldest salt mine in the world, alongside the Memory of Mankind Archive. “Over time, the salt mine will naturally close as the mountain shifts, providing a stable and secure environment for the crystal. Since salt is soft, it will not damage the crystal, ensuring that it remains safe for millions of years until it is discovered by future civilizations.’
https://www.technologynetworks.com/genomics/news/5d-memory-crystal-could-preserve-human-dna-for-billions-of-years-391184

“Doom” being played on a 3D volumetric display.
https://youtu.be/na7pvihXhYs?si=Q-Fb5O4EwOx0w8_2

China’s leading car company, BYD, is selling electric cars with autonomous driving features for $9,555.
https://www.reuters.com/business/autos-transportation/chinas-byd-sell-21-models-with-its-gods-eye-smart-driving-tech-2025-02-10/

China might have already passed peak gasoline consumption, largely thanks to its rapid adoption of electric cars.
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/china-plateauing-fuel-without-precedent-090000607.html

Here’s a YouTube video about U-tubes.
https://youtu.be/gxrkLkJybnA?si=fJmdN9LfGRU-ZLIv

The “Flettner Rotor” is a kind of advanced sail that can propel ships.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flettner_rotor

Magnetohydrodynamic thrusters have no moving parts and can propel ships silently.
https://youtu.be/Ulk4hw7pUZY?si=ZvlW9fXWjEwwmsPK

Lab-grown diamonds are better and 80% cheaper than natural diamonds mined from the ground. De Beers is doing badly as a result.
https://www.economist.com/business/2024/05/22/can-anyone-save-the-worlds-most-important-diamond-company

Trump gave his own explanation for the recent UFO sightings in the American Midatlantic: “After research and study, the drones that were flying over New Jersey in large numbers were authorized to be flown by the FAA for research and various other reasons,” Leavitt said, reading Trump’s dictation at her first briefing.

“Many of these drones were also hobbyists, recreational and private individuals that enjoy flying drones. In time, it got worse due to curiosity. This was not the enemy.”
https://nypost.com/2025/01/28/us-news/white-house-says-nj-drones-were-not-the-enemy-heres-what-they-were-actually-doing/

U.S. Congressman Tim Burchett says he believes the evidence that there are unidentified submerged objects, USOs.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/ufo-moving-underwater-republican-rep-tim-burchet/

‘It could illuminate an area the size of a football stadium’: How Russia launched a giant space mirror in 1993
https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20250130-how-russia-launched-a-giant-space-mirror-in-1993

The chemical ingredients for life are common in space. Also: ‘And the completely racemic character of those amino acids argues in two directions: that there is not some physics-based reason for one enantiomer to be favored over another in the absence of life, and in the other direction, that life on Earth was not seeded by falls of such enantiomerically enriched material to give us the patterns we see today. This is still far from a settled question, but these results are going to be hard to explain away.’
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/fresh-asteroid-getcher-fresh-asteroid-here

‘The only person in the world with a functioning pig organ is thriving after a record 2 months’
https://apnews.com/article/pig-kidney-transplant-xenotransplant-nyu-alabama-021afcc9697a0a490c0d0726482515b4

An imbalanced gut biome could cause depression.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/bacteria-and-their-metabolites-and-depression

People with ADHD have shorter lifespans.
https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-health-news/2025/01/23/nx-s1-5272801/adhd-research-shorter-life-expectancy-attention-deficit-hyperactivity-disorder

It was once thought that first cousin marriages were bad because they raised the risk of rare genetic diseases in their offspring. However, even the offspring of such unions who test negative for those diseases are likelier than average to have child developmental problems and speech problems.
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c241pn09qqjo

Two meta-analyses cast into question the value of hormone therapy for minors who are transgendered.
https://reason.com/2025/01/24/study-finds-almost-no-good-evidence-on-gender-dysphoria-drugs-for-young-people/

‘FDA approves Vertex’s non-opioid painkiller, first new kind of pain medicine in decades’
https://www.cnbc.com/2025/01/30/fda-approves-vertex-non-opioid-painkiller-drug.html

Even more weight loss drugs are nearing FDA approval. Two are not GLP-1 agonists.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-00404-9

The HPV vaccine has probably decreased cervical cancer rates in American women by 80%.
https://apnews.com/article/hpv-gardasil-vaccine-cervical-cancer-kennedy-32cdcf325d12cbc6610f01430d4ee82b

The CIA now says COVID-19 probably leaked from the Chinese disease lab.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/01/25/us/politics/cia-covid-lab-leak.html

COVID-19 is now killing fewer Americans than the flu for the first time.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-14389303/Covid-officially-deadly-seasonal-flu.html

Paxlovid, a drug that eases the symptoms of COVID-19 infections, does not help people who have already gotten the vaccine.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/paxlovid-you-d-have-expected-more

The CSIS has a very good analysis of the coming year of the Ukraine War. There will probably be a turning point.
https://www.youtube.com/live/xDqrcVSjomY?si=LZrdZ46RMBHDJ-bH

‘Russian forces gained 4,168 square kilometers, largely comprised of fields and small settlements in Ukraine and Kursk Oblast, at a reported cost of over 420,000 casualties in 2024.’
https://www.understandingwar.org/backgrounder/russian-offensive-campaign-assessment-december-31-2024

Overall, Ukraine’s armored vehicle and warplane fleets are not shrinking because inflows (reactivations of mothballed equipment, manufacture of new equipment, captures of Russian equipment, donated equipment from NATO) are matching outflows (battlefield losses). As a result, the force ratios between Ukraine and Russia are the same as they were at the start of the war.
https://youtu.be/EHUQmJCa3aY?si=0EvcD6qG1r9OrdbK

North Korean troops are rapidly learning on the battlefields of Ukraine. This combat experience could help them in the future.
https://apnews.com/article/north-korea-ukraine-war-russia-0f34fb82cfdd267652f8df8bc3c574ec

Hamas and Israel have agreed to a cease-fire, which includes an exchange of hostages. Pressure from incoming President Trump evidently sealed the deal.
https://www.politico.eu/article/trump-was-the-closer-on-the-gaza-deal/

General points from this briefing about robot ground vehicles in Ukraine:

• Unmanned ground drones are harder to develop than aerial drones because the ground-level environment is much more cluttered and complex than the sky. AI isn’t good enough yet to understand what it’s seeing at ground level and to react appropriately. The presence of physical obstacles like hills and buildings also makes it much harder to maintain a line-of-sight between human operators and ground drones they are remote-controlling.
• Big advantage over aerial drones is payload capacity and cost per unit of vehicle weight.
• The small number of ground drones that are armed with guns and designed for direct combat have done poorly in the Ukraine War.
  https://youtu.be/YrrXNZyoc8k?si=hoeohe88C21t7957

Here are the incredible details about Israel’s large commando raid against an underground missile factory in Syria last September.
https://www.twz.com/air/inside-israels-commando-raid-on-irans-underground-missile-factory-in-syria

While U.S. intelligence found no evidence that a foreign adversary used a brain-damaging remote weapon to hurt American diplomats suffering “Havana Syndrome”, it’s technologically possible to create such a weapon. It probably shoots tightly focused microwave beams at the target’s head.
https://apnews.com/article/havana-syndrome-intelligence-russia-cuba-9432754ff9889e24a356a77321631c59

Russia will reward North Korea for its help against Ukraine by giving it advanced space technology.
https://www.politico.eu/article/russia-will-send-advanced-space-tech-to-north-korea-blinken-says/

Five years ago, Boris Yeltsin’s Former Chief of Staff said he was ’99 Percent Certain’ Vladimir Putin Will Not Be Russia’s President in Five Years
https://www.newsweek.com/boris-yeltsin-chief-staff-vladimir-putin-step-down-president-russia-2024-1474068

Arthur C. Clarke predicted it all, 51 years ago.
https://youtu.be/sTdWQAKzESA?si=oUY7sxyfP1MNkKKs

Politico’s “Unpredictable But Entirely Possible Events That Could Throw 2024 Into Turmoil” totally failed to materialize, except for “A violent attack on a candidate.”
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/01/05/unpredictable-events-2024-election-turmoil-experts-00133873

If that terrible track record inspires you, here’s what Politico thinks might happen this year.
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/01/03/15-unpredictable-scenarios-for-2025-00196309

This prediction from 2022 that Elon Musk would be a trillionaire by now failed. He ONLY has $416 billion.
https://www.teslarati.com/elon-musk-projected-to-become-the-worlds-first-trillionaire-in-2024/

‘9 Video Games That Tried (And Will Hopefully Fail) To Predict 2025’
https://youtu.be/Wp3Mmlvq1ds?si=yaoPfhphJVfOvzE3

Ed Calderon’s prediction that the U.S. military would be in Mexico by now failed.
https://youtu.be/xPBejhoKlb8?si=72p3LLm5YfawjROL&t=2651

In 2016, “futurologist” Dr. Ian Pearson predicted “Women will be having more sex with ROBOTS than men by 2025”
https://www.thesun.co.uk/living/1366526/revealed-women-will-be-having-more-sex-with-robots-than-men-by-2025/

Roboticist Rodney Brooks gives another sobering yearly update on progress in several important technology fields.
https://rodneybrooks.com/predictions-scorecard-2025-january-01/

This Morgan Stanley prediction was half right and half wrong, with the most important outcome (median house price) being wrong. Financial and economic predictions, even from elite-sounding firms, are usually worthless:

‘According to the firm’s analysts, in 2024, the United States will escape a recession, mortgage rates will decline, salaries will keep rising, and increased listings will encourage more activity in the housing market. All these factors should lead to a drop in the cost of homes.’
https://www.livabl.com/articles/news/morgan-stanley-offers-a-glimmer-of-hope-for-2024-homebuyers-an-affordability-improvement-that-we-have-only-seen-a-handful-of-times

A professional chemist gives commentary on the practices of Mexican fentanyl labs.
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/inside-fentanyl-kitchen

Facebook is ending its use of paid Fact-Checkers and will copy X’s use of Community Notes instead. All of its old Fact-Checkers had left-wing or neutral biases; there were no right-wing ones to balance things out. Conservative users have also been much likelier to complain about censorship of their content than liberal users.
https://www.allsides.com/blog/facebook-s-moderation-policy-biased-here-are-meta-s-fact-checking-partners

‘Creators know their audience is scrolling through an endless stream of videos they could be watching instead, so a clear and urgent emotional appeal can make them stay, she says. But according to Basu, there’s something about images of grief, in particular, that can blur the lines between the audience and the content, creating the opportunity for a special kind of connection.’
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20250117-sadbait-why-algorithms-and-audiences-cant-get-enough-of-depressing-content

‘A French woman was swindled out of over $800,000 by scammers posing as Brad Pitt who made her believe she was dating him and that he needed help paying for medical care.’
https://people.com/scammers-brad-pitt-swindled-woman-report-8774403

Google’s new “Veo 2” video generator has a mastery of how physics works.
https://youtu.be/_q4YR_Jzjag?si=7nZbemcVU0oUIDof

‘While older benchmarks challenged specialized AIs to compete with the general population of humans, today it’s more common for prominent benchmarks to challenge general-purpose AIs to compete with expert humans on problems that demand both expertise and complex reasoning. This change in the state of benchmarks is unlikely to be a pure measurement artifact, as it has coincided with fast and measurable growth in relevant practical applications for AI.’
https://carnegieendowment.org/research/2025/01/ai-has-been-surprising-for-years

“We are now confident we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it.”
-Sam Altman
https://blog.samaltman.com/reflections

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says AI could surpass human intelligence by 2027.
https://www.wsj.com/livecoverage/stock-market-today-dow-sp500-nasdaq-live-01-21-2025/card/anthropic-ceo-says-ai-could-surpass-human-intelligence-by-2027-9tka9tjLKLalkXX8IgKA

President Trump and several tech titans announced the creation of the “Stargate” initiative, involving a multi-year investment of $500 billion to build several, massive data centers in the U.S. to support future AI. The government will do its part to clear regulatory red tape for the private sector.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/garthfriesen/2025/01/23/trumps-ai-push-understanding-the-500-billion-stargate-initiative/

This is a great essay that accords with things I’ve also realized.

1) Intelligent machines and robots could fully replace humans. There’s no reason to believe that “humans will always be needed to fix the robots” or “machines will never be able to replace human creativity.” There’s no roadblock to them gaining the ability to build and repair each other and to be more creative than we are.

2) The economy could keep functioning without humans. AIs with political control over countries and AIs that run companies could just trade with each other, and eventually cut us out of the loop entirely. In fact, their overall consumption and production levels would eventually come to greatly surpass all current human consumption and production (but the things they make and trade will be sharply different from what humans do). The adage that “if we automated all the factories, no one would have any money so none of the stuff made in the factories” will fail.

3) Humans will eventually be economically and politically marginalized. The fewer humans there are inside a country or an organization of any kind, the better off it will be. We will become resource drains. The temptation to reduce our numbers and freedoms for the sake of efficiency will be massive.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Mak2kZuTq8Hpnqyzb/the-intelligence-curse

Jeff Bezos’ “New Glenn” space rocket had its first, successful test flight.
https://apnews.com/article/blue-origin-new-glenn-rocket-jeff-bezos-2466fb0e114a09d88a46f71a1e647d50

China has a massive space tracking station in the middle of Patagonia.
https://thediplomat.com/2024/01/the-patagonian-enigma-chinas-deep-space-station-in-argentina/

A former astronaut claims he saw two UFOs at close range while flying his private plane.
https://nypost.com/2025/01/04/us-news/ex-nasa-astronaut-dr-leroy-chiao-says-metallic-orbs-he-saw-had-no-visible-means-of-propulsion/

The FDA banned Red No. 3 dye from food out of concern it might cause cancer. The added risk is incredibly small among humans who consume normal quantities of it.
https://apnews.com/article/fda-red-dye-no-3-ban-94c3e418584fb1e91ca3b0cbeb3d5a60

The U.S. government concludes that drinking water that has more than twice the recommended fluoride content can slightly lower the IQs of children.
https://ntp.niehs.nih.gov/whatwestudy/assessments/noncancer/completed/fluoride