(Almost) Daily Interesting Links

2024-11-20 Wednesday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Ukrainian forces hit a Russian bunker in Marino with several Storm Shadow missiles
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces capture Rivnopil
      • This is worrying because Rivnopil is to the west of Velyka Novosilka
      • The last news out of this area was on October 25, when Russian forces advanced to the east of Velyka Novosilka at Shakhtarske
    • Russian forces attempt a water crossing near Kurakhove, but are stopped by Ukrainian drones
    • Fighting continues near Trudove
    • Fighting continues in eastern Kurakhove
      • It looks like Kurakhove will be under Russian control pretty soon, especially given the Russian advances on the north side of the reservoir, in Illinka and Berestky
  • Kharkiv region
    • Ukrainian forces launch a large attack near Lukyantsi, with unclear success
    • Kharkiv is interesting, because the Ukrainians have had some success in pushing the Russians back, but it appears to be just as slow going for them as it is for the Russians on Donetsk
  • The Biden administration moves to forgive $4.7 billion worth of loans to Ukraine (archive)
    • A funding bill passed in April included $9.4 billion worth of forgivable loans
    • The loan forgiveness can still be blocked by Congress
    • Sen. Rand Paul has put forward a motion of disapproval against the loan forgiveness
  • A profile of Kim Yong Bok, the general leading North Korean troops in Russia (archive)
    • Little is known about Gen. Kim
    • Is officially the leader of North Korea's special forces units
    • Has been seen close to Kim Jong Un in official photographs
    • North Korean troops have reportedly been issued with Russian uniforms and fake IDs to try to obscure their identities in Russia
    • Will likely be used to try to expel Ukrainians from their incursion into Kursk
    • The deployment of such an important figure in the North Korean government is a signal from Kim Jong Un to Vladimir Putin that North Korea takes its commitments seriously under their mutual defense pact (archive)
• European officials investigate a Chinese bulk carrier in relation with the severing of underwater cables in the Baltic Sea (archive)
  • Investigators are examining the movements of the Yi Peng 3
  • The Yi Peng 3 has been stopped by the Danish Navy (archive)
  • This ship passed close to both a Swedish-Lithuanian cable and a Finnish-German cable when each was cut
  • German officials have expressed confidence that the cause of the cable breaks was deliberate sabotage (archive)
  • However, Finnish officials are expressing caution and are warning against a rush to judgement
  • The Swedish state prosecutor has launched an investigation into the suspected sabotage
• The Department of Justice seeks to force Google to divest Chrome and possibly Android (archive)
  • On August 5, Google was found guilty of abusing its dominance in online search (archive) to keep itself as the default search engine and Chrome as the default browser on phones and other devices
  • As a remedy for Google's anticompetitive behavior, the Justice Department has proposed that Google be forced to divest Chrome and be prevented from re-entering the browser market for 5 years
  • Google would also have to end payments to Apple and other device manufacturers to be the default search engine
  • If these remedies failed to restore competition in search, the Justice Department also proposes that Google be forced to sell Android
  • I get why the Justice Department is seeking to have Google end its payments to device manufacturers to be the default search engine
  • I don't understand why they're trying to get Google to sell Chrome and Android
  • The antitrust allegations were that Google was securing its dominance in online search by paying device manufacturers and browser vendors, such as Firefox, to make Google the default search engine, unfairly earning a privileged position
  • How does forcing Google to sell Chrome help with that?
• SpaceX launches another Starship test flight (archive)
  • SpaceX flight controllers abandoned another attempt to catch the booster with the "chopstick" arms on the launch tower
  • Instead the booster splashed down into the Gulf of Mexico
  • Did demonstrate a re-light of the Starship upper stage engines
• xAI raises funds at a $50 billion valuation (archive)
  • Raised $5 billion worth of funds from several VC funds
    • Qatar's sovereign wealth fund
    • Valor Equity Partners
    • Andreesen-Horowitz
    • Sequoia Capital
  • Was previously negotiating with investors (archive) to raise funds at a $40 billion valuation
  • Reports that its revenue has reached $100 million on an annualized basis
  • xAI's Grok is competing with OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini, and Anthropic's Claude to capture chatbot users
• nVidia posts strong earnings as the AI boom continues (archive)
  • nVidia cites continued high demand for its latest AI processors, codenamed "Blackwell"
  • Although revenue growth is still strong, in percentage terms it has declined because nVidia has already grown so much
  • Trade restrictions that prohibit nVidia from selling its most advanced chips to China remain a persistent headwind
• Crypto entrepreneur Barry Silbert is launching a "decentralized AI" on a blockchain (archive)
  • Barry Silbert's Digital Currency Group had been a major investor in crypto
  • Was hit hard by the collapse in crypto prices in 2022, when his crypto lending business, Genesis Global went bankrupt
  • Now Silbert is launching Yuma, a "decentralized artificial intelligence company"
  • Company will provide capital for entrepreneurs to build on the Bittensor blockchain
  • I don't know what's AI specific about Bittensor
  • From reading its documentation, it looks like a cheap imitation of Ethereum
• Archegos founder Bill Hwang sentenced to 18 years for fraud and market manipulation (archive)
  • Bill Hwang was the founder of Archegos Capital Management, a large fund whose demise caused losses for many banks, notably Credit Suisse
  • Was found guilty (archive) on 10 out of 11 counts in July
  • Hwang misled banks about the size of his debts in order to borrow money to buy stocks
  • Large purchases created price increases that inflated the nominal value of his assets
  • However, when the market turned down, Archegos faced margin calls and was unable to meet its obligations
• Gautam Adani, chair of the Indian conglomerate, Adani Group, has been indicted in the US (archive)
  • Is accused of scheming to pay hundreds of millions in bribes to Indian regulators
  • The scheme to pay these bribes would have involved US investors, which is why he is being indicted in the US
  • So was Hindenburg Research actually right about the Adani Group?
• Comcast is planning to spin off its NBCUniversal television business (archive)
  • Comcast is planning to separate the MSNBC, CNBC, USA, E!, Oxygen, Syfy and Golf Channel television channels into a separate business
  • Will also spin off the Universal Studios film studio and theme parks
  • Will keep NBC, Bravo and the Peacock streaming service
  • Reflects the challenges that cable TV has faced with the rise of streaming and cord-cutting
• Ito-Kogyo announces that it expects to have financing for its buyout of 7-and-i finalized by December (archive)
  • Participating banks will be Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group, Sumitomo Mitsui Financial Group and Mizuho Financial Group
  • The buyout offer was announced on November 13, in response to Alimentation Couche-Tard's increased offer for the company (archive)
  • Ito-Kogyo's offer of $51.8 billion exceeds Alimentation Couche-Tard's $47 billion bid
  • Previous coverage

2024-11-18 Monday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces launch an unsuccessful assault near Andriivka
      • Note: this isn't the same Andriivka that's west of Kurakove, that's a different Andriivka
      • This one is south of Bakhmut
    • Russian forces have entered Berestky
      • Russians are continuing their advance westward from Illinka
    • Russian forces are spotted west of Trudove
      • This area has been under attack ever since Russians captured Bohoyavlenka on October 27
    • Ukrainian forces push Russian forces back near Kostiantynopolske
    • Two Ukrainian tanks raid into Novooleksiivka, and fire at Russian positions before retreating
      • Novooleksiivka had been captured on November 4, so the front line is still pretty close to the village
  • Biden allows Ukraine to strike targets on Russian territory with US-supplied long-range weapons (archive)
    • While the US had supplied ATACMS to Ukraine, the supply was conditional on Ukraine not attacking targets on Russian territory with those missiles
    • That restriction has now been removed
    • Previously the US had been concerned about escalation, but with Russia's increasing cooperation with North Korea has convinced the Biden administration that Russia has already escalated the conflict
    • Too little, too late, as with all US decisions in this war
  • Russian forces have been fortifying airfields since October
    • The Russian military has constructed a significant number of new bunkers at, e.g. Kursk airbase
    • While these bunkers cannot withstand a direct hit from an ATACMS missile, they can prevent shrapnel from a successful hit from affecting nearby planes
    • Also work to limit the spread of fires
  • Russia launches a major attack on Ukrainian energy infrastructure (archive)
    • Russia fired 120 missiles and 90 drones at various targets across the country
    • Out of the 210 targets, 144 were intercepted
    • However, the missiles and drones that made it through did severe damage to electricity generation and water infrastructure
    • Attacked cities such as Kyiv and Odesa, which had been spared in recent attacks
  • Ukraine marks 1000 days since Russia's renewed invasion in 2022 (archive)
  • The Estonian foreign minister argues that EU nations should stand ready to provide peacekeepers to enforce a potential peace deal in Ukraine (archive)
    • The best option would be NATO membership for Ukraine
    • However, that appears to be off the table for now, because of opposition from the Trump administration
    • If a peace deal is negotiated, the EU should stand ready to provide peacekeepers to enforce it
    • This is complicated by the fact that the countries that would provide peacekeepers are themselves NATO members
• Spirit Airlines files for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection (archive)
  • Spirit seeks to restructure its debts in bankruptcy
  • Will keep flying in the interim
  • Is planning to exit bankruptcy in the first quarter of 2025
  • Spirit's financial position has been precarious since Frontier dropped a merger bid (archive)
• Northvolt faces bankruptcy as it seeks additional funding (archive)
  • The European manufacturer of electric vehicle batteries is considering Chapter 11
  • Northvolt was seen, at one point, as Europe's answer to Chinese battery manufacturers
  • However, recently Northvolt has struggled, especially since BMW withdrew a $2 billion contract
  • Is working to scale up production at its factory in Skellefteå, where output remains well below theoretical capacity

2024-11-15 Friday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Russian forces have entered Obukhovka
      • Obukhovka is near Darino, which Russian forces entered on Monday
      • The last report from this area was on October 13, where there was fighting south of the town
    • Fighting continues near Zelenyi Shlyakh
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces make a small advance in Toretsk
    • Fighting continues around Yuriivka
    • Russian forces have started to advance into Kurakhove itself
      • Previous fighting in the area was in the fields outside of the town
  • Kupyansk region
    • Fighting continues on the northern outskirts of Kupyansk, with the Ukrainians taking Russian prisoners
• Russia will end natural gas deliveries to Austria tomorrow (archive)
  • The cut-off is the result of Ukraine failing to renew a gas transit arrangement with Russia's Gazprom
  • Ukraine argues that it's not in its best interests to renew an arrangement that is helping to finance Russia's war
  • Russia will continue to supply Slovakia and Hungary
  • Austria's largest energy company, OMV, has said that it has been preparing for the end of Russian gas shipments and that its storage facilities are adequately full to supply Austrian homes through the winter
• Elon Musk adds additional claims to his lawsuit against OpenAI (archive)
  • Elon had initially filed a lawsuit (archive) against OpenAI in February, accusing it of abandoning its founding non-profit mission to make open source AI
  • That lawsuit was dropped (archive) on June 12, without much explanation
  • Then Elon re-filed the lawsuit (archive) on August 5, adding some additional allegations of racketeering and self-dealing
  • The amendment filed today adds anti-trust complaints to the lawsuit, arguing that OpenAI has pursued a "de-facto" merger with Microsoft
• Microsoft is launching industry-specific language models (archive)
  • Working with other companies such as Bayer, Rockwell Automation, Siemens, Fidelity and others
  • Provide customized versions of its Phi "small language model" (archive) for specific industries
  • Will be available as part of the Azure AI model catalog
  • Models will help answer questions about subject-matter topics specific to particular businesses
  • Examples:
    • Bayer's model will answer questions about crop science and agronomy
    • Fidelity's model will answer questions about financial compliance
  • Goal is to make it easier for businesses to pick up and use off-the-shelf AI models rather than having to spend time and money customizing models
  • I get how this benefits Microsoft — having more and better AI models available on Azure helps drives customers towards Azure
  • But how do Microsoft's partners benefit?
  • Perhaps the benefit for them is that the AI models will help standardize their tools and terminology?
• Yum Brands, owner of Taco Bell and KFC, is using AI to improve its marketing (archive)
  • Use AI to personalize emails
  • The AI doesn't currently write the emails, but selects from a menu of pre-written messages
  • AI is also being used to customize discounts that are presented to customers at checkout kiosks in restaurants

2024-11-14 Thursday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • No specific territorial changes, but fighting continues around Plekhovo, and also near Pogrebki
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces capture Antonivka
      • This isn't too unexpected, unfortunately
      • The neighboring city of Katerynivka had been captured on October 28
  • A Ukrainian soldier writes about Russian operations near Kupyansk (translation)
    • Says that Russians have successfully moved past initial Ukrainian defensive positions in multiple places
    • Ukrainian defenses have become more disorganized and chaotic — not clear why
    • Russian tactics result in severe losses — Russian troops are not allowed to retreat even if they're injured
    • However, Russia has more soldiers and the "no retreat, no surrender" approach allows them to maintain constant pressure on Ukrainian units until weaknesses can be identified and exploited
  • North Korea has sent self-propelled howitzers to Russia
    • The gun is the M1989 Koksan, a 170mm cannon
    • The howitzers are the North Korean counterpart to the Russian 2S7 Pion
    • The 2S7 is the largest self-propelled cannon in the world, currently, with a 203mm bore
    • However, none have been produced since the end of the Cold War, and Russia has lost a substantial fraction of its existing stock in Ukraine
    • Furthermore, the 2S7 uses different ammunition than Russia's other artillery systems, and Russia may not be able to manufacture sufficient 203 mm ammunition
    • The M1989 allows Russia to supplement its 2S7 systems with another system that has similar range and ballistics
    • Also allows Russia to rely on North Korean ammunition supplies
  • Tatarigami writes about whether there's any point in allowing Ukraine to launch ATACMS strikes into Russia
    • Although Russia has moved a large number of planes outside of ATACMS range, there are still plenty of targets should Ukraine be given permission to use ATACMS against Russia
    • Russia has moved the majority of its fighter jets out of range of ATACMS
    • However, helicopters, which have shorter range, are still located at bases that could be struck
    • Russia also has forward arming and refueling points where helicopters can temporarily land, rearm and refuel before proceeding with missions — this infrastructure could be struck
    • There are numerous warehouses and ammunition depots still within ATACMS range
    • Trains carrying ammunition and supplies could also be hit by ATACMS
    • The primary US concern with allowing ATACMS strikes into Russia isn't nuclear escalation, it's that Russia could support US adversaries in other locations, such as in the Middle East and on the Korean peninsula
    • However, this "horizontal escalation" has already occurred
      • Russia is providing targeting data to the Houthis
      • Has deep cooperation with North Korea, and is providing assistance to North Korean missile and space programs in exchange for ammunition, equipment, and troops
    • Given that, there are no real downsides to the US allowing Ukraine to strike Russia with the ATACMS
    • There aren't any downsides, but the US still won't give permission
  • The M2 Bradley has been a standout performer in this war
    • There are lots of videos of Bradleys taking on Russian armored vehicles that are supposedly equivalent and winning, even when outnumbered
    • Ukrainian troops also praise the Bradley's durability (archive), specifically noting its ability to withstand explosions from Russian antitank mines
• China displays its newest stealth fighter, the J-35A (archive)
  • Aircraft was unveiled at the Zhuhai Air Show
  • The "A" designation indicates that this J-35 is the land based model
  • A naval version is forthcoming
  • The J-35 is thought to be China's answer to the US's F-35, and, like the F-35 is designed to be oriented more towards ground attack
  • However, unlike the F-35, the J-35 has a twin engine configuration
  • China also displayed the latest version of its CH-7 stealth surveillance drone and its HQ-19 missile defense system
• The FTC launches an investigation of Microsoft's Azure cloud platform (archive)
  • The FTC is investigating whether Microsoft engaged in anticompetitive business practices by imposing punitive terms for businesses who sought to move their data out of Azure
    • Exit fees
    • Increased subscription fees for businesses who've left Azure
    • Making Office 365 deliberately incompatible with other cloud platforms
  • The investigation comes after the FTC sought feedback from businesses and the public about competition concerns with cloud platforms
  • Feedback highlighted concerns with
    • Egress fees
    • Minimum spend requirements
  • Microsoft was also under investigation (archive) by the EU competition authority, but avoided formal charges by coming to a settlement (archive) with other cloud providers
  • That settlement involved Microsoft agreeing to build a tool to allow its software to run on rivals' infrastructure
• Boeing starts issuing layoff notices as it seeks to cut 10% of its workforce (archive)
  • Staff receiving layoff notices will remain on Boeing's payroll until January
  • Notice comes as Boeing is trying to improve its financial position after the strike and ongoing quality issues with the 737 Max

2024-11-13 Wednesday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Heavy fighting continues near Zelenyi Shylakh
    • The Russians seem to have stepped up their attacks on Zelenyi Shlyakh and Novoivanovka lately
    • Russian forces attack Plekhovo
    • This is worrying because success here could cut off lines of retreat for Ukrainian troops in Kursk
  • Kupyansk region
    • Russian forces launch a major attack on Kupyansk itself, reaching the outskirts of the city
  • Zaporizhzhia region
    • Russian forces launch an attack on Lyubymivka, on the border between Donetsk and Zaporizhzhia oblasts
  • Emil Kastehelmi has an update on the overall situation
    • Donetsk
      • Russians are attacking Kurakhove from multiple directions and it seems likely that the town will fall soon
      • The imminent fall of Kurakhove puts at risk Ukrainian positions between Uspenivka and Yelyzavetivka
      • Ukrainian forces in the region are outnumbered and can't easily conduct counterattacks to repel Russian advances
      • Russian attacks are very costly for them, but it's a price they seem capable of paying
    • Kursk
      • Russian forces are attacking the northern and western flanks of the Ukrainian incursion
      • Kastehelmi claims that Pogrebki and Plekhovo have both been captured by Russia, however I'm not sure
      • The Russian government has stated that it will not begin any negotiations until Ukrainian forces have been completely driven from Russian territory
      • This means that either the Russian military is either
        • Prioritizing political goals over military successes elsewhere
        • Calculating that they can drive Ukrainian forces from Russia without taking up so many resources as to jeopardize their offensive operations elsewhere
      • They might be right about that
      • It's not as if Ukrainian forces are having great success fending off Russian attacks in Donetsk
  • Ukraine braces for a Russian assault in advance of Donald Trump's inauguration (archive)
    • Russia is seeking to gain as much territory as it can in order to have a more favorable position ahead of anticipated negotiations
    • Ukraine is seeking to blunt Russian offensives in order to prove that it can be a "fighter" and "winner"
    • Western officials anticipate that Russia will soon deploy North Korean troops to the Kursk region, where it is seeking to retake the territory that Ukraine captured in its incursion
    • Ukraine continues to face challenges with recruiting and manpower
    • Western analysts estimate that Russia is taking heavy casualties — the UK's adviser to the Minister of Defense, Adm. Tony Radakin estimated that Russian forces were taking 1500 casualties per day
    • Russia is able to sustain these losses by paying significant sums to volunteers to enlist in its military
• 7-and-i has received a second buyout offer (archive)
  • $58 billion buyout offer comes from Ito-Kogyo, a company linked to 7-and-i Vice President Junro Ito
  • Represents a "white-knight" bid from its current management that represents an alternative to Alimentation Couche-Tard's offer (archive)
  • Going private with Ito-Kogyo would allow 7-and-i to continue with its current management and would remove shareholder pressure to divest assets
  • The story thus far:
    • On August 19, 7-and-i, the owner of 7-11, was approached by Alimentation Couche-Tard (archive), owner of Circle K, with a takeover offer
    • On September 6, 7-and-i rejected the offer (archive), stating that it didn't value 7-and-i's business appropriately
    • On October 9, Alimentation Couche-Tard returned with a 20% higher offer (archive)
    • On October 10, 7-and-i announced that it would be divesting some of its non-convenience store businesses (archive) such as supermarkets, specialty stores and the Denny's restaurant chain into a separate company
• The FTC's antitrust lawsuit against Meta over its acquisition of Instagram and WhatsApp will go to trial (archive)
  • Complaint was originally filed in 2020, under the first Trump administration
  • According to the FTC, Facebook paid over market price for WhatsApp and Instagram in order to eliminate them as rivals to its primary social networking experience
  • A related claim, that Facebook had restricted developers' access to Instagram and WhatsApp unless they agreed not to compete with its core services, was dismissed by the judge
  • A date for the trial has not yet been set
• Bitcoin rises above $90,000 as investors expect the forthcoming Trump administration to loosen regulations on cryptocurrencies (archive)
• Amazon seeks to build a datacenter in Minnesota (archive)
  • Purchased a 348 acres of land near Xcel Energy's power plant in Becker, MN
  • Has not submitted any project applications yet
  • Amazon purchased the land from Elk River Technologies, a privately held firm associated with a different data center developer, Diode Ventures

2024-11-12 Tuesday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces have advanced beyond Hryhorivka and are attacking Petrivka and Pustynka
    • It doesn't look like they've captured any of the towns, but they're advancing in the fields just outside those towns and are mounting attacks from multiple directions into the towns
    • North of Novooleksiivka, which had been captured about a week ago, Russian forces have advanced to Yuriivka
  • Kupyansk region
    • Russian forces are attacking northwards from Kruhlaykivka towards Kolisnykivka
  • Russian forces have are accused of damaging the dam holding the Kurakhove reservoir
    • Kyiv Independent's coverage of the story
    • There were multiple reports of the dam being attacked
    • Russian pro-war Telegram channels accuse Ukraine of damaging the dam
    • The status of the dam cannot be checked because of fierce fighting in the area
• Germany's major parties agree to hold early elections on February 23 (archive)
  • The German government collapsed (archive) on November 7 when Olaf Scholz removed finance minister Christian Lindner from his government
  • Scholz was initially targeting January 15 for a vote of confidence
  • Has agreed to move that vote forward to December 16 after the opposition Christian Democratic Union (CDU) party said that the confidence vote should be held earlier in order to prevent uncertainty
• Greg Brockman returns to OpenAI (archive)
  • On August 6, the President of OpenAI, Greg Brockman announced that he was taking a sabbatical for the remainder of the year (archive)
  • So he's back early?
  • Today Brockman announced that he was returning to his duties at OpenAI
  • Brockman's return comes in the wake of some high profile departures from OpenAI
    • Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati
    • Chief Scientist Ilya Sutskever
    • Co-founder John Schulman
• The FAA has barred all US airlines from flying to Haiti for at least 30 days (archive)
  • Yesterday a Spirit Airlines planes was struck by bullets (archive) as it landed in Port-au-Prince, Haiti
  • Today American Airlines revealed that one of its planes had also been struck
  • Post flight inspections also revealed that a JetBlue plane had been struck by gunfire
  • The FAA ban prohibits US airlines from flying below 10,000 feet in Haitian airspace for 30 days
• COMAC rebrands its regional jet as the C909 (archive)
  • Jet was previously called the ARJ21
  • Was the first Chinese airliner to reach production
  • The rebrand brings the naming of the aircraft in line with COMAC's C919 narrow-body jet and C929 wide body
  • There are 124 ARJ21s in service, mostly with domestic Chinese airlines, who receive substantial government incentives to purchase aircraft from COMAC
  • The only overseas operator to use the ARJ21 is TransNusa, an Indonesian regional airline
  • COMAC is seeking to position its 9X9 aircraft as alternatives to Boeing and Airbus, both of whom are struggling to scale-up production to meet increased demand for airliners
  • However COMAC aircraft have not met American or EU airworthiness standards, limiting their appeal in the global market
• Spirit Aerosystems gets a financial lifeline from Boeing and Airbus (archive)
  • Boeing has agreed to make $350 million in advance payments
  • Airbus has agreed to make $107 million in advance payments
  • Spirit is an important supplier to Boeing, Airbus, and smaller aircraft manufacturers like Bombardier
  • Was especially affected (archive) by the halt in production of Boeing 737, 767 and 777 aircraft caused by the machinists strike
• Spirit Airlines moves towards bankruptcy as Frontier drops its merger bid (archive)
  • Spirit and Frontier restarted merger discussions (archive) on October 23, after Spirit's prospective merger with JetBlue was blocked on antitrust grounds
  • Spirit's low cost model has come under increasing pressure as other airlines have adopted elements of Spirit's strategy, such as checked bag fees and seat assignment fees
• A New Zealand startup claims a breakthrough with an unconventional fusion reactor design (archive)
  • Existing designs for fusion reactors place magnets on the outside of the reactor to contain and channel the extremely hot plasma inside into a ring shape
  • This is difficult because the interactions between the magnetic fields of the magnets and the magnetic field of the plasma itself are complex
  • OpenStar's reactor, by contrast is a levitated dipole design, which puts a superconducting electromagnet in the center of the ring
  • Solves the problem having to design extremely complex magnetic fields to keep the plasma contained
  • However, a levitated dipole design requires a superconducting magnet, chilled to within a few degrees of absolute zero, to be suspended in the middle of a very hot plasma cloud
  • Currently OpenStar solves the problem by pre-chilling the magnet, which gives them about 80 minutes of operation time before the magnet warms up and loses superconductivity
  • Future designs will place batteries and a liquid helium supply inside the magnet in order to improve runtime
  • OpenStar announced today that they had successfully generated and contained plasma in their reactor
  • However, this is still a long way away from achieving fusion reaction that can generate energy
• Jack Teixeira is sentenced to 15 years in prison (archive)
  • Teixeira had plead guilty (archive) to leaking classified documents related to the invasion of Ukraine on Discord
  • Worked in cybersecurity in the Massachusetts Air National Guard
  • In addition, the Air Force moved to discipline 15 others who it says should have detected and stopped Teixeira's leaks
• Genetics testing company 23-and-me reports that its survival is in jeopardy unless it can raise new funds (archive)
  • The company reported revenue of $44 million, down from $50 million from the same period last year
  • The company has never reported a profit
  • Announced a restructuring on Monday
    • Laid off 40% of the workforce
    • End in-house drug development efforts, instead focusing on licensing genetic data to existing drug companies
  • Founder Anne Wojcicki has been attempting to take the company private (archive)
• The head of Saudi Arabia's NEOM project resigns abruptly (archive)
  • Nadhmi Al-Nasr has been head of Crown Prince Muhammad Bin Salman's project to build a new city on the west coast of Saudi Arabia since 2018
  • Will be replaced by officials from Saudi Arabia's sovereign wealth fund, the Public Investment Fund
  • Aiman al-Mudaifer has been named acting CEO
  • NEOM has seen repeated delays and cost overruns, forcing it to scale back its developments
  • Most notably, The Line, a pair of long skyscrapers, has seen its first phase downsized from 10 miles to approximately 1.5 miles
  • NEOM is competing for funding (archive) with other megaprojects under bin Salman's Vision 2030 umbrella

2024-11-11 Monday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Russian forces enter Darino
      • Russian forces in this area had last been spotted west of Nikolaeyvo-Darino, a neighboring village, on September 17
      • This represents a small advance, but an advance nonetheless
    • Fighting continues near Novoivanovka
    • Russian forces attack Pogrebki, without much initial success
      • Ukrainian forces had captured Pogrebki on September 9
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces mount an attack on Dalnje, with unclear success
    • Russian forces take control of Novoselydivka
      • This isn't all that signficant because Hirnyk had been captured on October 29 and Tsukurnye had been captured on October 13
      • Furthermore, Russian forces are advancing into Sontsivka
      • It's likely that Ukrainian forces had long since retreated out of Novoselydivka
      • Seems more like a consolidation of positions than an advance
  • Kupyansk region
    • Fighting continues near Kruhlaykivka
    • I think, however, the Russians have largely consolidated their positions here, and it's going to be very hard for Ukrainians to drive them out
  • Ukraine is scrambling to ensure that it has enough electricity generation capacity for the winter (archive)
    • Is dismantling power plants that are near areas under occupation in eastern Ukraine to provide spare parts for power plants further west
    • Struggling to deal with the consequences of Russian strikes targeting power plants and energy infrastructure
    • Winter will make Ukraine's power situation worse as more people rely on electricity for heat
    • The way to ensure that Ukraine's grid doesn't collapse is to provide it with adequate air defenses to protect against Russian missile and drone strikes
  • The Russian government denies that Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin spoke (archive)
    • Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov categorically denied that a phone call had taken place (archive) between Trump and Putin
    • Trump spokesman Stephen Cheung said that the Trump campaign does not comment on the specifics of calls between Trump and world leaders
    • So while the Kremlin is categorically denying that the phone call ever took place, the Trump campaign's position is a noncommittal statement
  • A Russian Shahed drone hits a Russian apartment building in Belgorod
    • Probably a malfunction of some sort
• Taiwan considers making large purchases of US defense equipment (archive)
  • Taiwan is considering making further purchases US defense equipment, such as Aegis destroyers, E2 Hawkeye early warning aircraft, and missiles for its Patriot batteries
  • May request F-35 fighter jets and retired Ticonderoga-class cruisers
  • Additional spending would serve to convince Trump that Taiwan is serious about its own defense while serving to redress Taiwan's trade deficit with the US
  • The problem is that the big, expensive platforms that Taiwan is considering are not the systems that it would need to defend against China
  • Taiwan needs cruise missiles and fast attack boats to launch them, not large, expensive cruisers which it will never be able to accumulate large numbers of
  • A Ticonderoga-class cruiser is designed to sail halfway around the world and bring a large number of missiles into the fight — it's overkill for a country that just needs to defend its own coastline
  • Unfortunately, the US defense industry specializes in large, expensive systems, so if Taiwan wants to spend more money on US-built defense equipment specifically, it'll have to buy systems that are suboptimal for its needs
  • I would prefer that Taiwan buy a bunch of NASAMs and Naval Strike Missiles than F-35s and Ticonderoga-class cruisers
• The bankruptcy estate of FTX sues Binance for $1.76 billion
  • FTX transferred $1.76 billion to Binance in 2021 to buy Binance out of its ownership stake in Alameda Research
  • FTX's bankruptcy estate says that, because both FTX and Alameda Research were insolvent at the time, this transfer was fraudulent and Binance must pay the money back
  • Lawsuit alleges that, after the buyout, Binance sought to "destroy" FTX as it saw FTX as a market competitor
  • Binance replies that the buyout was conducted legitimately and FTX's claims are meritless
• The story of the scientists and engineers who launched the deep learning boom
• Airlines are now required to issue refunds for canceled or changed flights (archive)
  • New rules from the Department of Transportation that took effect on October 28 now require airlines to issue refunds if you do not accept alternative transportation arrangements or travel credits if your flight is canceled or significantly changed
  • Significant changes include changes in departure or arrival times of more than three hours for domestic flights or six hours for international flights
  • Mishandled baggage reports entitle you to a refund of your checked bag fee if the bag is not returned to you within 12 hours of arrival for domestic flights or 30 hours for international flights
  • Refunds must be issued within 7 days for credit card payments and within 20 days for other forms of payment
• US airlines suspend flights to Haiti after a Spirit Airlines plane is hit by suspected gunfire in Port-au-Prince (archive)
  • The plane was hit by suspected gunfire while it was attempting to land in Port-au-Prince
  • Diverted to the Dominican Republic where an inspection found damage consistent with gunfire
  • Spirit announced that it was suspending flights to Haiti until further notice
  • American Airlines and JetBlue, the other airlines serving Haiti announced that they were also suspending flights until at least Thursday
  • Haiti has seen persistent unrest since the assassination of President Moïse (archive) in 2021
  • The US embassy in Haiti advises Americans against travel to the country

2024-11-10 Sunday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Fighting continues north of Selydove, as Russian forces continue to push towards Hryhorivka
    • Ukrainian forces launch another counterattack near Novohrodivka
    • Near Toretsk, Ukrainan forces continue to occupy positions in Druzhba, despite repeated Russian attacks seeking to drive them out
    • Russian forces have advanced further into Sontsivka, which they initially gained a foothold in on November 4
  • Kursk region
    • Fighting continues near Novoivanovka and also near Zelenyi Shlyakh
    • The intensity of the fighting has picked up, but it's not clear to me that Russian forces have made much more progress here recently than they made in mid-October
  • President-elect Donald Trump speaks with Vladimir Putin regarding the war in Ukraine (archive)
    • Phone call took place at Trump's resort in Florida, Mar-a-Lago
    • Trump reportedly warned Putin not to escalate the war
    • Reminded him that the US maintains a sizeable military presence in Europe
    • Ukraine denies that it was informed in advance (archive)
  • Ukrainian forces attack Moscow with drones (archive)
    • Forced airport closures and flight diversions
    • 5 were injured, but drones had little impact otherwise
  • A Ukrainian drone also hits a Russian base in Bryansk
• India defends its purchases of Russian oil (archive)
  • India's crude oil imports from Russia have risen significantly (archive) over the past two months
  • India's oil minister Hardeep Singh Puri claims that if India is not allowed to purchase oil from Russia, global oil prices would increase signficantly
• TSMC's ceasing production of 7nm chips for Chinese customers was reportedly done at the behest of the US Commerce Department (archive)
  • After TSMC components were found in a Chinese phone, the US Commerce Department sent TSMC a letter with additional export restrictions
  • As a result, TSMC announced that it was ceasing production of chips at a 7nm or smaller process for all Chinese customers
• China offers tariff relief to US allies in order to reduce diplomatic support for US tariffs (archive)
  • China is offering EU countries reduced tariffs if they don't go along with Trump's plan to impose additional tariffs on Chinese imports
  • Has removed visa requirements on citizens of US allies such as South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, Finland and Denmark
• Sweden signs a deal with Embraer for military cargo aircraft (archive)
  • Sweden will modernize its military transport fleet with the Embraer C-390
  • Is the first northern European country to buy transport aircraft from the Brazilian firm
  • Joins Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Netherlands and Portugal in adopting the C-390
  • Sweden and Brazil share a close defense relationship, with Brazil having bought Saab Gripen fighter jets in the past
  • The C390 is a medium transport aircraft, with a 26 metric ton payload capacity, putting it somewhere between a Lockheed Martin C-130 and an Airbus A400M
  • Uses jet engines rather than turboprops, which is interesting — both the C-130 and A400M use turboprops because they're more suited to operations from unpaved airstrips
  • I'm surprised that Sweden chose to go with the Embraer rather than the Europe-native A400M
• Boeing is close to a funding agreement which will bail out Spirit Aerosystems (archive)
  • The machinists strike caused Boeing to call an immediate halt (archive) to orders with suppliers for the 737, 767, and 777
  • One of the suppliers most affected (archive) was Spirit Aerosystems, which makes fuselages for these planes
  • Spirit had to furlough workers and halt production of 767 and 777 fuselages
  • On Tuesday, Spirit Aerosystems issued a liquidity warning (archive) raising doubts about its ability to continue doing business due to insufficient cash reserves
  • Boeing is working out a deal where it will provide financing to Spirit, as it finalizes its acquisition of the company
  • Another possible source of cash for Spirit is selling Fiber Materials Inc, a defense composites manufacturer that it acquired in 2020
• Anthropic partners with Palantir to bring Claude to military and intelligence customers
  • The partnership makes Claude available within Palantir's Impact Level 6 environment, a system that is certified to handled data classified up to the "secret" level
  • Claude will be used to identify patterns and trends
  • Builds on Claude's integration into AWS GovCloud
  • Conflicts with Anthropic's public image, which emphasizes uses of AI that are beneficial to all
  • Anthropic's terms of service with Palantir prohibit uses such as disinformation, censorship and domestic surveillance
  • Outside observers have concerns about AI hallucinations in analyses of data that may be used to plan military operations
• Amazon seeks to more closely integrate Whole Foods and Amazon Fresh (archive)
  • While Amazon has a strong position in online retail, it has struggled with groceries, where shoppers still prefer interacting with products before purchasing
  • Amazon is testing new formats that bring together Amazon Fresh and Whole Foods to allow shoppers to order some goods online and pick the rest up in person
  • Shoppers would also be able to place orders for certain Amazon Fresh items as they shop in Whole Foods and pick up the goods at checkout
  • This "micro-fulfillment center" concept allows Whole Foods, which is primarily a grocery, to carry a greater variety of items and compete more with Walmart

2024-11-08 Friday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Russian forces attack towards Kruglenkoe, without success
    • No sign of the North Koreans yet
  • Donetsk region
    • No major territorial changes today, however intense fighting continues in Toretsk, around Shakhtarske and around Terny
  • Zaporizhzhia region
    • Ukrainian forces make some minor advances near Kopani
  • President Putin reiterates his invasion goals, but indicates that he is ready to negotiate with Trump (archive)
    • Putin indicated that he is ready to negotiate a conclusion of the war with Donald Trump
    • Putin reiterated the conditions (archive) he set out on June 14
      • Ukraine must cede Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts
      • Must never join NATO
      • Must pursue "demilitarization" and "denazification"
      • Must forego nuclear weapons
  • The US agrees to send a small number of contractors to Ukraine to help Ukraine maintain weapons systems (archive)
    • Contractors will focus on maintenance of Ukraine's F-16s
    • Will also aid with repairs to air defense equipment
    • The presence of on-site contractors is expected to reduce the need for Ukraine to send equipment long distances to Poland or Slovakia for maintenance
  • The strains of war negatively affect training for Ukrainian troops in the EU (archive)
    • Ukrainian troops undergo a much shorter training rotation than soldiers in EU and US armies
    • "Train the trainers" approach to build out a native Ukrainian training system is hampered by Ukraine's need to send all available manpower to the front, which means that trainers are often assigned to combat units
    • Ukraine also splits batallions up into component companies and assigns companies piecemeal to units as they're needed, which destroys unit cohesion
    • The quality of incoming troops for EU training varies widely
• China unveils a Rmb 10 trillion ($1.4 trillion) economic stimulus package (archive)
  • Will be financed by a bond issuance by the national government
  • Money will be used to restructure the debts of provincial and local governments, which had become heavily overleveraged during the Chinese property boom
  • Follows up on the Chinese central bank reducing interest rates and announcing a funding mechanism for share buybacks (archive) in order to increase lending and help boost the stock market
  • While this announcement was long expected, it is suspected that Chinese officials waited until after the US election to announce it in order to reassure Chinese businesses concerned about tariffs from the incoming Trump administration
• TSMC announces that it will cease production of 7nm chips for Chinese customers
  • Announcement comes in the wake of the discovery of TSMC chips in a Huawei phone
  • TSMC is under investigation for not complying with US export restrictions as a result
• Microsoft adds AI-enabled features to Notepad and Paint
  • Notepad is gaining a generative AI feature named "Rewrite" allows the user to use AI to change the length and tone of highlighted text
  • Paint is getting AI features to allow users to erase background objects and fill backgrounds with AI-generated content
  • These AI features appear to use Microsoft's cloud-based service, Copilot, rather than a local GPU or NPU

2024-11-07 Thursday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Russian forces have reportedly started a major counteroffensive
    • Russian troops are attacking Novoivanovka, which is near Zelenyi Shlyakh, a town that was recaptured by the Ukrainians on October 22
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian troops have advanced to Illinka, just west of Vovchenka, which they captured on November 5
  • The Biden administration seeks to increase the amount of aid sent to Ukraine (archive)
    • President Biden has $4.3 billion that was authorized earlier this year by Congress for aid to Ukraine, but which has yet to be spent
    • Biden is looking to transfer as much as he can under that authority before he leaves office and makes way for Donald Trump
    • Donald Trump has been vocally critical of sending military aid to Ukraine, and may choose to not send further aid even if appropriated money is still available
  • Long-range Ukrainian drones attack the Russian Caspian sea flotilla
• Germany's coalition government collapses (archive)
  • Olaf Scholz removed finance minister Christian Lindner from his cabinet
  • Lindner was the leader of the Free Democratic Party (FDP), which formed one of the three parties (Scholz's SPD, the Green Party and the FDP) which comprised the German coalition government
  • Scholz said the proximate cause of the dismissal was Lindner's refusal to support a relaxation of the German debt brake (archive) to support greater infrastructure investment and support for Ukraine
  • However tensions between the SPD and FDP had been growing for several months as the German economy faces recession for the second year running
  • Scholz will call a confidence vote on the government on January 15
  • He is expected to lose this vote, and will ask President Frank-Walter Steinmeir to dissolve the government and call for early elections
• Australian legislators consider banning all social media for users under 16 (archive)
  • Australia will require age verification for users seeking to create social media accounts
  • Ban is supported by both the Labor Party, which is in government, and the Liberal Party, which is the leading opposition
  • Ban will not have exemptions for parental consent and will not grandfather in kids who already have accounts
  • Platforms impacted include Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and TikTok, and YouTube
  • The details of the age verification system have yet to be published
• Canada dissolves TikTok's local corporate entity (archive)
  • The Canadian government has ordered that TikTok's business unit in the country be dissolved
  • Cites national security risks posed by ByteDance, TikTok's owner
  • The app is not banned, but TikTok is effectively banned from investing or expanding its operations in Canada
  • TikTok will challenge the decision in court
• JD Power and Associates expects a large number of used EVs to hit the market in 2026, depressing prices
  • The Inflation Reduction Act revised the IRS's clean vehicle tax credit rules to make leased vehicles eligible for the clean vehicle tax credit
  • This led to a surge in the number of EVs being leased
  • Many of these EVs will come off lease in 2026, and will be available on the used car market

2024-11-06 Wednesday

• Donald Trump defeats Kamala Harris and will become the 47th President of the United States (archive)
• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces capture Vovchenka
    • The loss of Vovchenka is sadly expected after the loss of Kurakhivka
    • Russian forces mount an attack against Hryhorivka
      • This is expected, unfortunately
      • Russian forces entered Vyshneve on October 27
      • They captured Novooleksiivka yesterday
      • Hryhorivka is the next town along their line of advance
    • Ukrainian forces once again repel an attack near Maksymilyanivka
    • Russian forces attack Ivano-Darivka
      • This area of the front had been relatively quiet since late 2022, compared to Bakhmut and other areas farther south
      • Now the Russians are beginning to press here as well
  • The pace of Russian advances is concerning
    • They're not being held back for weeks or even months at a time over individual towns, instead towns are falling by the day
    • I think this is the fastest the Russians have advanced since March 2022
• Boeing machinists vote to end their strike (archive)
  • Machinists accept Boeing's offer of a 38% wage increase
  • Workers will return to their posts on Wednesday
  • However, restarting production and getting back to full production will take weeks
• Anthropic launches Claude 3.5 Haiku, at a higher price
  • "Haiku" is the smallest variant of Anthropic's model
  • The previous version, Claude 3 Haiku cost $0.25 per million input tokens and $1.25 per million output tokens
  • The new version, Claude 3.5 Haiku, will cost $1 per million input tokens and $5 per million output tokens, a 4x increase
  • Anthropic justifies this price increase by claiming that in testing, Claude 3.5 Haiku outperformed the largest variant of the Claude 3 models, Claude 3 Opus
  • The pricing for Claude 3.5 Haiku is significantly greater than that of its competitors, OpenAI's GPT-4o mini and Google's Gemini 1.5 Flash
• Apple will be fined by the EU under the Digital Markets Act (archive)
  • Apple did not allow app developers to advertise alternative ways of subscribing outside the app store
  • Penalty comes after Apple was fined €1.8 billion for similar practices involving Spotify under the EU's existing competition rules
  • This would be the first penalty levied against a big tech corporation under the Digital Markets Act
• Donald Trump's favored tariff policy could lead to significant price increases for technology products
  • China is a major manufacturer of electronic components
  • When he was in office, Trump implemented tariffs on many imports from China
  • Biden made these tariffs permanent
  • However, many consumer goods, such as game consoles and laptops were exempted from these tariffs
  • In his second term, Trump has promised that he will implement a 60% tariff on all goods from China
  • This could lead to e.g. laptop prices doubling, as laptop manufacturers often have no alternative to Chinese suppliers for many components, according to the Consumer Technology Association, a trade group
  • Game console prices could rise by 40%
• The European Commission opens an antitrust investigation into Corning
  • The EC is investigating whether Corning abused its dominant position in the manufacturing of aluminosilicate glass ("Gorilla glass")
  • The EC accuses Corning of requiring electronics manufacturers to sign anticompetitive exclusivity agreements if they wanted to buy glass from Corning
  • These intent of these exclusivity agreements was to make it difficult for alternative glass suppliers to enter the market

2024-11-04 Monday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces attack Vyimka and are repelled with heavy losses
    • Russian forces capture Maksymivka
    • Heavy fighting continues in Toretsk
    • Russian infantry were spotted near Sontsivka, indicating a further westward advance from Novodmytrivka
    • Kreminna Balka, Voznesenka and Novoselydivka are all at imminent risk
    • Russian forces capture Novooleksiivka
  • Kupyansk region
    • Russian forces advance near Terny
    • Russian forces advance near Anriivka, just south of Stelmakhivka
    • It's so depressing to see the towns that Ukraine liberated in 2022 come under attack once again
• Russia begins importing butter from Turkey and the UAE (archive)
  • The price of butter has risen by 25.7% (archive) in Russia since last December
  • Russia is seeking alternative sources of butter after imports from Latin America fell due to increasing US sanctions
  • Russia is also seeking to import butter from Iran and India
• Facebook's plan to build a new data center powered by nuclear energy thwarted by an unexpected obstacle: bees
  • Facebook had planned to become the first big tech company to unveil a datacenter powered by nuclear energy
  • Had struck a deal with an unnamed nuclear power operator
  • However endangered bees were discovered on the land that Facebook had earmarked for the project, leading to the project's cancellation
• France pushes the EU to delay fines on automakers who haven't made sufficient progress on electrification (archive)
  • As of 2026, the EU is set to start enforcing penalties on auto manufacturers who haven't met decarbonization goals
  • These goals become increasingly stringent, with new sales of fossil-fuel powered vehicles being banned entirely by 2035
  • However, growth in EV sales has fallen below expectations, based on concerns about high prices and lack of charging infrastructure
  • The fines would be especially damaging to Renault and Volkswagen, the largest automakers in France and Germany, respectively
  • This has prompted the French finance minister, Antoine Armand, to petition the EU to reconsider phasing in the penalties in 2026
• Chinese logistics operators expand their warehouse space in the US (archive)
  • The growth of Chinese online retailers Shein and Temu has prompted logistics operators which handle sales on their platforms to expand the amount of warehouse space they hold in the US
  • Another factor is the impending end (archive) of the "de minimis" exemption which allowed shipments to come into the US without facing tariffs as long they were valued at less than $800
  • The growth of warehouses related to these two retailers is bright spot in a sector that is still grappling with persistent oversupply caused by the large amount of additional warehouse space that was built during the pandemic
• Twitter changes how blocking works
  • Currently blocking a user prevents them from seeing your posts if they're logged in
  • Twitter will be changing the block functionality so that all users can see public posts, including those that the author has blocked
  • Blocked users will still be prohibited from replying to or interacting with posts
  • This makes sense to me, because blocking was always a low hurdle, as blocked users could always log out and view posts

2024-11-01 Friday

• I wrote an essay, Party on the Bridge: Political Commissars in the Chinese Navy, looking at how the Chinese Navy's command structure is radically different from the US Navy's
• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russia has not made substantial progress north of Bakhmut, as evidenced by the fact that the Ukrainians still hold Serebryanka
    • Russian forces continue to push forward between Maksymilyanivka and Kurakhove and also near Maksymivka, northwest of Vuhledar
• Microsoft delays rollout of Windows Recall
  • Windows Recall is an AI-powered system that takes periodic screenshots to help the user find old work and resume where they left off
  • The initial launch was delayed after it was discovered that Recall had serious privacy and security problems
  • The furor over those issues led to Recall being delayed until October
  • Now that October has passed Microsoft has announced that Recall is delayed once again, this time until December
• Boeing makes another offer to the machinists (archive)
  • The International Association of Machinists rejected the previous offer (archive) that Boeing had made in a vote held on October 24
  • That offer had a 35% wage increase
  • The new offer increases the raise to 38%, and further increases Boeing's 401(k) contributions
  • Also restores annual bonuses
  • However, it does not restore pensions, which had been a key demand of the union
  • The vote on the latest offer will take place on Monday and results will be known on Tuesday

2024-10-31 Thursday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • According to the US government, 8,000 North Korean troops are now in the Kursk region
      • Troops are currently receiving final training
      • Are expected to join combat shortly
  • Kupyansk region
    • Russian forces capture Kruhlyakivka
    • This is dangerous for Ukraine, because it means the Russians have a crossing point across the Oskil River
    • Also means that Russian forces have rolled back a significant portion of the gains that Ukraine made in their successful Autumn 2022 counteroffensive
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces capture Novoukrainka
    • Since the capture of Bohoyavlenka on October 27, the capture of Novoukrainka was just a matter of time
  • The Ukrainian government places a large order for drones (archive) from Texas-based Shield AI
    • Ukrainians generally prefer locally-made drones, as those are better able to withstand the electronic countermeasures used by Russian forces
    • However, even those drones are starting to succumb to ever increasing Russian jamming, with Ukrainian drone losses reaching 10,000 a month
    • This is leading Ukraine to invest in AI technologies to allow drones to fly and seek out targets even when they're cut off from communications with their operators
    • Shield AI's longer-range V-BAT drones can conduct missions that are beyond the capabilities of Ukraine's home-grown UAVs, which often only have a range of 10-15 km
    • The V-BAT, by contrast, has a range of approximately 965 km
    • Has been tested in missions along the front line in Ukraine
    • Funding for V-BAT drones would need to come from the US or EU
    • However the election in the US and softening support for the war in EU nations are raising questions as to whether Shield AI will receive sufficient funding to build a large number of drones for Ukraine
• OpenAI launches ChatGPT with search
  • ChatGPT with Search is an AI-powered search engine
  • Uses ChatGPT to find sources on the internet and present them to users as citations
  • Runs on a fine-tuned version of GPT-4o
  • Pulls data from a blend of sources, including OpenAI's own content partners and Bing search engine results
  • OpenAI has content partnerships with a large number of prominent publishers, such as Condé Nast, News Corp, Vox, The Atlantic, Reuters and Axel Springer
• Perplexity proposes revenue sharing agreements with publishers (archive)
  • Perplexity is facing lawsuits (archive) from Dow Jones and the New York Post for allegedly copying content and using it to generate AI-powered answers to search queries
  • The New York Times has sent Perplexity a cease and desist (archive) stating that Perplexity has been circumventing technical restrictions to scrape copyrighted content
  • Perplexity's CEO, Aravind Srinivas, vetoed the suggestion that Perplexity enter into OpenAI-style licensing deals where it pays publishers directly for their content
  • Instead he proposed a revenue sharing deal, analogizing it to the deal that Spotify offers artists
  • Perplexity would share advertising revenue with publishers
  • He also suggested that Perplexity could supply AI-powered chatbots to publishers
  • The problem for Srinivas is that Dow Jones already has a much more lucrative deal (archive) with OpenAI, which just launched its own competitor to Perplexity's search engine (see above)
  • Why would they jeopardize $250 million in guaranteed revenue for a revenue sharing agreement that may or may not amount to anything?
  • This just seems like a cynical ploy by Perplexity to claim that they were trying to be reasonable and that it's the publishers who are actually acting unfairly
• Skydio, a US-based drone manufacturer, faces a supply chain crisis after China imposes sanctions (archive)
  • Skydio is the largest manufacturer of drones in the US
  • Also supplies the Ukrainian military
  • The Chinese government has prohibited manufacturers from providing Skydio with critical components, such as batteries
  • Sanctions were imposed in retaliation for the US government's approval of attack drone sales to Taiwan
  • Skydio suspects that it was targeted specifically because it is a competitor to DJI, the leading Chinese drone manufacturer
• Taiwan seeks satellite internet service without Starlink
  • The war in Ukraine has demonstrated the utility of high-speed satellite internet as a tool to aid military communications and logistics
  • The current leading provider of high-speed satellite internet is SpaceX's Starlink service
  • However, Starlink is prohibited from operating in Taiwan
  • Taiwan has regulations that state that all internet service providers must be locally majority owned
  • In addition, Taiwanese officials have concerns about Elon Musk's ties to China and cordial relationships with Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin
  • Musk was reportedly asked personally (archive) by Putin to not offer Starlink in Taiwan, as a favor to Xi Jinping
  • Instead, Taiwan has sought deals with other satellite internet providers, such as OneWeb
  • However OneWeb's service doesn't have enough bandwidth for Taiwan's military needs in the event of a conflict
  • Taiwan is seeking to supplement OneWeb's service with a small satellite network of its own, consisting of approximately 120 satellites
  • Will launch the first of these in 2027
• Boiling 54 Eggs: China's Approach To Africa (archive)
  • It is a mistake to think of China as having a single unified Africa policy
  • Instead, China deals with African states individually, through bilateral arrangements
  • This allows China to have relations with African nations that are at odds with one another
    • China maintained relations with both Ethiopia and Eritrea even when the two were fighting a war against each other
    • China has relations with both Ethiopia and Egypt, even though Ethiopia has raised tensions with Egypt by building a dam on the Nile river and recognizing Somaliland's independence in exchange for port access
  • The US has, in recent years, made progress in checking China's influence in Africa
    • A US sponsored railway infrastructure project, from the Democratic Republic of Congo to Angola's Atlantic port, Lobito, has recently come online
    • Western firms prefer the US project, and, as a result a competing China-sponsored rail corridor from Tanzania to Zambia has been sidelined
  • China has spent a lot of money on African nations, but the piecemeal nature of its investments has limited their cumulative impact
  • China's diplomatic efforts aren't focused on the same countries that Chinese investors are putting money into
  • Chinese firms' approach to Africa, focused on building elite support, has complicated its efforts to build infrastructure when elite interests and local interests conflict
  • Public opinion of China in many countries where Chinese firms are engaged in resource extraction has turned negative
  • The weakening of China's economy, its dependence on African mineral resources and having to negotiate increasingly complicated relations between African nations will limit China's ability to have an impact on Africa
• Dropbox lays off 20% of its staff
  • Layoffs will hit 528 employees
  • Previously cut 500 employees in 2023
  • Dropbox CEO Drew Houston says that Dropbox's core business of cloud storage and file synchronization has matured
  • Dropbox is working on an AI-powered search tool, Dash, targeting business customers
  • Houston says that Dropbox needs to execute better, and, as a result he's making cuts in areas where the company is underperforming
  • The enshittification (archive) of Dropbox has started
• Nishad Singh, former head of engineering at FTX, is spared jail time (archive)
  • Singh pleaded guilty to fraud and campaign finance violations
  • Cooperated with prosecutors against the FTX's former CEO, Sam Bankman-Fried
  • Also cooperated with FTX's bankruptcy administrator, John Ray III, who stated that Singh's assistance had been valuable in helping recover assets for creditors
  • As a result, he is allowed to serve his sentence under supervised release rather than in jail
  • Will have to give up his share of $11 billion in assets, including shares in an AI company and a home in the San Juan islands
  • Caroline Ellison, Sam Bankman-Fried's former romantic partner and head of Alameda Research, a hedge fund closely associated with FTX, was sentenced to two years in jail (archive)
  • A third FTX collaborator, Gary Wang, will be sentenced later this year
• The Open Source Initiative publishes its Open Source AI definition
  • A new definition of Open Source is necessary for AI models
  • Unlike software, AI models are comprised of multiple interdependent parts
    • Code to run the models
    • Model architecture
    • Model weights
    • Hyperparameters
    • Training data
  • The OSI's Open Source AI requires that the following be open source
    • Code required to train and execute the model
    • Model hyperparameters and other configuration settings
    • Model weights
  • Does not require model training data to be disclosed
  • Instead, model authors only have to release a detailed description of the training data, such that a skilled practicioner could build a substantially equivalent system
  • Allowing open source models to be trained on closed source data is a controversial choice
  • Tom Callaway argues that allowing any proprietary components in an open source system dilutes the meaning of "open source"
  • Stephen O'Grady states that the term "open source" should be restricted to traditional software, and a new term should be coined to describe AI models that have publicly distributed and modifiable components
• Amazon workers speak out against the new RTO policy
  • On September 16, Amazon published a new policy (archive) that required all employees to return to the office five days a week
  • This week more than 500 employees signed a letter indicating their opposition to this policy
  • Argue that the return to office mandate is not supported by productivity data
  • If only there were some kind of organization that could allow workers to collectively bargain with management regarding pay and working conditions

2024-10-30 Wednesday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian troops have advanced into Kurakhivka
    • There is video of a Ukrainian counterattack near Zolota Nyva, however, the date of the video is unclear — might be old footage from around October 7 when the town was taken
    • Emil Kastehelmi has another good thread detailing the overall situation in Donetsk
      • Russians are attacking in two directions
        • Westwards, towards Selydove and Kurakhivka
        • Northwards, between Shakhtarske and Bohoyavlenka
      • Selydove and Hirnyk have been captured in short order — Ukrainian defenses were not well prepared
      • There aren't many natural obstacles in the area, and the Russians are close to breaking past the last of Ukraine's prepared defenses
      • One possible objective for the Russian offensive is to use the offensive from the east to pin forces around the Kurakhove Reservoir while the southern attack moves northwards through relatively unfortified fields to hit Andriivka
      • Attacking towards Andriivka is a relatively high-risk, high-reward strategy
        • If it works, it would cut off a large section of Ukrainian fortifications
        • Avoids a long, grinding battle
        • However, it would require Russian commanders to commit significant forces and continue to have the same level of success that they've had thus far
      • Another possible option for the Russians is for the southern offensive to attack towards Dachne
      • This would still entail the loss of Kurakhove for Ukraine, but would be a better scenario than Russians advancing towards Andriivka, because there would still be some preexisting fortifications for Ukrainian forces to use
      • It's important to note that although the Ukrainians are retreating, the Russians still haven't achieved breakthrough
      • Ukrainian forces are retreating in good order and are still able to stay in front of the Russians
      • Ukraine can still reinforce with reserves
      • However, as the Economist article below points out, Ukraine may not have recruited enough manpower to build a substantial set of reserve units with which to reinforce
  • Kupyansk region
    • Russian forces attack Stepova Novoselivka, as they try to expand the salient around Kruhlyakivka
  • The Economist has another summary on the current state of the war (archive)
    • Pokrovsk is holding, but Russia has penetrated the Ukrainian defensive line in other locations
      • Kurakhove is under increasing pressure from two directions
      • Russian forces have crossed the defensive line that Ukrainians drew at the canal just outside Chasiv Yar
      • Vuhledar has been captured
    • However, the main problem for Ukraine is not territory, but manpower
    • New mobilization has not worked well
    • The fact that the Ukrainian military does not have fixed tours of duty means that people are reluctant to sign up for what they perceive to be a one-way trip
    • The Ukrainian military is suffering from a lack of short-range air defense
    • This allows Russian drones to establish persistent surveillance across the front line, which, in turn allows the Russians to find weak points for its motorcycle attacks (archive)
    • The war is unsustainable for Russia in the long term
      • Russia is now spending over a third of its national budget on the military
      • While the official rate of inflation is 8%, actual inflation is roughly double that
      • Russia is running low on stocks of Soviet-era vehicles and weapons to refurbish and send to the front
    • However, in the short run, Russia will be able to sustain the war
      • Is recruiting enough to keep its army functional, even though it's taking severe losses in eastern Ukraine
      • Russian supplies of ammunition are boosted by shipments from North Korea
    • The worry in the West is that Ukraine will reach its breaking point before Russia does
    • Western planners have shifted to focusing on Ukrainian survival rather than Ukrainian victory
• Github Copilot adds support for Claude 3.5, with Gemini support forthcoming
  • Github Copilot is Microsoft's AI coding assistant
  • Until now it used OpenAI's ChatGPT 4 exclusively
  • The latest update adds support for Anthropic's Claude 3.5
  • Forthcoming updates will add support for Google's Gemini as well as OpenAI's other model, ChatGPT-o1
  • With support for these additional models, developers will be able to switch models on the fly in order to use the one that's best at whatever task they're trying to accomplish
  • Github also announced Spark, a tool that can build applications from natural language descriptions using AI
  • Multi-model strategy reduces Microsoft's exclusive dependence on OpenAI
  • However, Microsoft Copilot, the AI assistant built into Office is still exclusively using ChatGPT-4 and no plans have been announced to add support for additional models
• ARM seeks to build its own AI accelerators to compete with nVidia (archive)
  • Masayoshi Son, whose Softbank investment firm still owns approximately 90% of ARM, would like ARM to capture more value
  • Designing and building its own hardware would be a new step for ARM, which has traditionally been a neutral "Switzerland", licensing designs for instruction sets and chip components to a variety of customers
  • However, under Son, ARM has been more aggressive about moving up the chip design value chain
  • Another manifestation of this is ARM's legal dispute with Qualcomm, one of its customers
  • ARM's focus on building energy efficient designs, as a result of its background in making designs for embedded and mobile processors, could prove helpful for AI as AI datacenter power consumption grows exponentially
  • Currently, ARM is a partner for nVidia, which includes an ARM-designed CPU on its AI accelerator boards
  • nVidia had sought to acquire ARM, but that deal was thwarted by regulators for antitrust reasons
  • Many analysts are skeptical of ARM's ability to compete against nVidia to build AI accelerators in the short or even medium term
    • ARM does not have any expertise in designing GPUs or AI accelerators
    • In addition to competing with nVidia, ARM will have to compete with companies like Microsoft, Google and Amazon, all of whom are also designing their own custom AI accelerators for their cloud offerings
    • nVidia's advantage rests not only with its hardware designs but also its CUDA software and ARM doesn't have any equivalent
• Elon Musk's xAI is in talks to raise funding at a $40 billion valuation (archive)
  • xAI was founded about 18 months ago by Elon as a competitor to OpenAI
  • Was valued at around $24 billion in its last fundraising round (archive) in May
  • xAI has created Grok chatbot, available to Twitter premium users
  • Elon has diverted resources from his other businesses, including Tesla, to help xAI get off the ground, raising conflict of interest concerns among investors
• Google posts strong earnings, despite increasing its spending on AI (archive)
  • Profit jumped by 34% in the third quarter
  • Strong growth in cloud computing and services used to train and operate artificial intelligence models
  • Search and ads revenue was up by approximately 10%
  • YouTube's revenue grew by 12% and subscriber growth was reported as strong
  • However, ever increasing capital expenditures for AI remain a drag on growth
  • Google also faces the prospect of fines or even a break-up of the company as a result of its loss in an antitrust case (archive) on August 5 regarding payments it made to device and browser vendors to ensure that Google was the default search engine
  • Google is also in the midst of a second anti-trust case (archive) over its dominance of search advertising
• Microsoft posts strong quarterly earnings as well, on the basis of increased demand for its cloud services (archive)
  • Azure sales grew by 33% on the basis of increased demand for AI compute
  • Microsoft's share price has lagged that of other big tech corporations, up only 15% compared to a 68% increase for Meta
• Over 25% of new code at Google is AI generated, according to CEO Sundar Pichai
  • Pichai says that AI assistance has made Google engineers significantly more productive
  • Code is still reviewed by humans before being accepted
• Supermicro shares decline sharply as its auditor, Ernst & Young, resigns (archive)
  • Supermicro is a manufacturer of servers for datacenters
  • Stock had appreciated significantly on demand for new servers as a result of the AI boom
  • Ernst & Young had raised concerns about Supermicro's governance and financial controls
  • Supermicro has been under scrutiny after a Hindenburg Research report accusing it of "accounting manipulation"
• Florida accidentally bans banks from selling securities in the state (archive)
  • Florida governor Ron DeSantis signed a bill into law that was intended to make it easier for banks and hedge funds to sell certain unregistered securities in Florida
  • However, the law, as drafted, would have made it illegal for any bank that had been the subject of an SEC enforcement action to sell securities in Florida
  • Virtually all major banks have been in trouble with the SEC at some point, so, in effect, this law would have prohibited large banks from selling securities in Florida
  • On Sunday, Florida's Office of Financial Regulation invoked emergency powers to suspend the law until it can be formally amended by the Florida legislature

2024-10-29 Tuesday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Yasna Polyana has been captured
    • It looks like Hirnyk has been captured as well
    • Russian forces capture Oleksandropil
    • Kurakhivka is now looking very isolated
  • Ukraine strikes a Russian base inside Luhansk City
  • Ukraine and Russia are negotiating on whether to halt strikes on energy infrastructure (archive)
    • Ukraine is proposing halting attacks on Russian oil infrastructure in exchange for Russia halting attacks on its electricity infrastructure
    • Russia has hit a significant number of Ukrainian conventional power plants, weakening Ukraine's electricity grid ahead of winter
    • Ukraine has hit several of Russia's refineries, damaging at least 9 of 32 major refineries since the start of 2024
    • Negotiations on halting strikes on energy infrastructure had been going on earlier this year, but were derailed by Ukraine's invasion of Kursk
    • The two countries have reduced attacks on each others' energy infrastructure as part of a tacit agreement brokered by their respective intelligence agencies
    • A deal on halting attacks on energy infrastructure could be a prelude to broader negotiations to stop hostilities entirely
  • The US Department of Defense estimates that there are 10,000 North Korean troops training at bases in Russia's Far East (archive), in preparation of a deployment to Ukraine
    • The total number of soldiers is less than 1% of Russia's total force
    • Not expected to fight at the front line — instead will serve in support and logistics roles
    • In exchange, Russia is expected to continue providing space technology to North Korea
• OpenAI partners with Broadcom and TSMC to design custom AI accelerators (archive)
  • OpenAI had been looking at a number of options to reduce its dependence on nVidia, up to and including building its own foundries to manufacture custom hardware
  • Instead, the company is partnering with Broadcom and TSMC to design and manufacture custom AI accelerators
  • In the near term, OpenAI will use GPUs from AMD as well as nVidia to train new models
  • OpenAI's chip design team is 20 people, led by engineers who designed Google's TPUs
  • That's pretty small, for a chip design team
• LLM-powered transcription tools, such as Whisper, can insert hallucinated statements into medical transcriptions
  • Several developers working with Whisper, the LLM-based transcription tool from OpenAI, have discovered statements in the transcript that are not present in the source recording
  • These hallucinated statements are especially problematic in medical applications, where they may lead to misdiagnosis
  • Medical centers are rushing to adopt automated transcription tools in order to more efficiently transcribe conversations between patients and doctors
• Boeing announces plans to raise another $19 billion via selling shares (archive)
  • Boeing's balance sheet has been strained by the machinists' strike (archive)
• The leading Chinese coffee chain, Luckin Coffee, plans a US launch (archive)
  • Luckin is the main rival to Starbucks in China
  • Has over 20,000 locations, compared to Starbucks' 7,300
  • However, Luckin's lower prices lead to much lower revenue per store, and Luckin's total revenue only exceeded that of Starbucks in 2023
  • Luckin will target locations with large numbers of expatriate Chinese, such as New York for its initial locations in the US
  • Luckin will face a challenge in the US as the US coffee market is already saturated
  • Expansion into the US comes nearly 5 years after an accounting scandal (archive) that led to a $180 million fine and Luckin's delisting from the NASDAQ stock exchange
• China has lost {$\frac{1}{3}$} of its billionaires (archive)
  • According to a list compiled by the research group Hurun, the number of Chinese individuals whose net worth is over a billion dollars has fallen by a third
  • The number of Chinese billionaires hit a peak of 1,185 in 2021
  • Today that number is 753
  • Decline has been driven by government crackdowns, especially on ecommerce, and a weak Chinese stock market
• German workers launch a series of strikes (archive)
  • Strikes are conducted by the electrical engineering and metalworking unions
  • Take place ahead of wage negotiations across a variety of industries
  • The German union IG Metall is requesting wage increases of 7%, higher than the 3.6% being offered by business associations
• NASA declines to share details about the Orion spacecraft's heat shield issues
  • On the uncrewed Artemis 1 test flight, the Orion spacecraft's heat shield displayed unexpected cracking and wear during reentry
  • Heat shield was supposed to burn away evenly, but upon examination, there were unexpected divots
  • NASA completed its internal investigation into the heat shield issue two months ago, but wants to perform additional testing before disclosing further details about the root cause of the problem
  • The second Orion spacecraft is already assembled for the Artemis 2 mission, and any changes to the heat shield would require the spacecraft to be disassembled again, jeopardizing the currently scheduled September 2025 launch date

2024-10-28 Monday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces attack Novodmytrivka once again
    • Russian forces capture Katerynivka
    • Russian forces have advanced through Shakhtarske and are now on the outskirts of Yasna Polyana
    • Russian forces are also launching attacks north of Bakhmut, near Vasyukivka
  • No word from Kursk over the past few days
• The war in Ukraine and Israeli strikes on Iran have ruined the reputation of Russian anti-aircraft systems (archive)
  • In both Ukraine and Iran, Russian-made anti-aircraft equipment has done a poor job of intercepting incoming missiles and drones
  • Both Ukraine and Israel have demonstrated success in hitting Russia's most advanced air defense systems, the S300 and S400
  • The poor performance of Russian equipment in Ukraine and Iran is causing some of Russia's traditional customers, such as India, to look to other suppliers
  • Compounding this is frustration with the Russian military diverting weapons marked for export to the conflict in Ukraine
  • India has been moving away from exclusive reliance on the S400 towards using the S400 as a long-range interceptor in conjunction with indigenous short and medium range interceptors developed in collaboration with Israel
  • Is working to replace the S400 with an indigenous system as well
• Indonesia bans imports of the iPhone 16 (archive)
  • Indonesia has passed a rule that stipulates imported electronics must have at least 40% local content
  • The Indonesian government has stated that Apple has not made the necessary investments in Indonesia to meet that threshold
  • iPhones can be brought into Indonesia from abroad for personal use, but cannot be (officially) traded in the country
• Volkswagen moves ahead with plans to close 3 German factories even in the face of union opposition (archive)
  • Previous coverage from September 6
  • A set of meetings will take place between Volkswagen's representatives and its union workers on October 30
  • Volkswagen is proposing an across-the-board 10% pay cut, with reductions in bonus payments that would total an up to 18% pay cut for some
  • Will also close 3 factories in Germany, which will result in layoffs
  • Daniela Cavallo, the head of the worker's representative council, says that these measure court an escalatory response from the union, up to and including a strike
• No party receives a majority of seats in the Japanese Diet after parliamentary elections (archive)
  • Until recently, Japanese politics had been dominated by the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP)
  • Ruled Japan nearly continuously after World War 2
  • However recently, the LDP has been rocked by a series of scandals which resulted in the resignation of Prime Minster Kishida Fumio (archive)
  • Voters have punished the LDP at the polls and the primary beneficiary has been the Constitutional Democratic Party of Japan (CDPJ)
  • LDP, and its close ally Komeito, received 215 seats
  • CDPJ received 148 seats
  • 233 votes are required to command a majority
  • The LDP and Komeito will likely look to form informal alliances with smaller parties, such as the Democratic Party for the People (DPP) or the Japan Innovation Party (JIP) which have 28 and 38 seats respectively
• 7-11 customers worry that an acquisition of 7-and-i by Alimentation Couche-Tard will affect the quality of 7-11's food offerings (archive)
  • Background
    • On August 19, 7-and-i, the owner of 7-11, was approached by Alimentation Couche-Tard (archive), owner of Circle K, with a takeover offer
    • On September 6, 7-and-i rejected the offer (archive), stating that it didn't value 7-and-i's business appropriately
    • On October 9, Alimentation Couche-Tard returned with a 20% higher offer (archive)
  • Japanese customers of 7-11 praise the high quality rice balls and sandwiches offered in 7-11's Japanese stores
  • Much of 7-11's food offerings are manufactured exclusively for it
  • 7-11 worked with chefs and developed special equipment to make e.g. rice balls and potato salad
  • Works with suppliers to develop new recipes, exclusively for 7-11
  • However, in recent years, this practice was leading to higher costs and reduced profitability, which is one of the reasons 7-and-i is seen as an attractive acquisition target
  • Foreign companies often struggle to understand Japanese customer preferences
    • Walmart backed out of an acquisition of Japanese retailer Seiyu after over a decade of struggling to turn a profit
    • Carrefour pulled out of Japan in 2005 after only 4 years
  • Alimentation Couche-Tard has said that it has "tremendous respect" for 7-11's standards of excellence, and will maintain those standards if the merger goes through
  • And if you believe that, I have a deed to Tokyo Tower I'd like to sell you

2024-10-27 Sunday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces capture Selydove
    • Russian forces reached the outskirts of Selydove on September 2, meaning that the town held for 56 days
    • Russian forces have advanced into Vyshneve, though the extent of the advance is unclear
    • North of Vuhledar, Russian forces capture Bohoyavlenka
    • If the Ukrainians are smart they'll pull out of Hirnyk and Kurakhivka, as the loss of Selydove makes it very likely that Ukrainian forces in those to towns get pinned against the reservoir behind them and become unable to retreat
    • Arguably they should have retreated when the Russians occupied Tsukurnye on October 13
• Memory chips could be the next bottleneck for AI (archive)
  • There is a large difference in demand between demand for AI-related chips and chips for other applications
  • This explains how ASML, which makes chips for the general market, could have disappointing results (archive) while TSMC reported strong profits (archive)
  • Similarly SK Hynix reported record profits (archive) while Samsung, a rival in the memory chip business had to apologize (archive) for disappointing sales
  • The common thread is that TSMC and SK Hynix are focused on the market for AI chips, which is red hot, while Samsung and ASML are more broadly exposed to the semiconductor market as a whole which is suffering from oversupply as a result of pandemic-era capacity build-up
  • SK Hynix is an industry leader in the manufacture of High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) chips, controlling 90% of the production of the most advanced version, HBM3
  • Fast, high capacity memory is key to the efficient functioning of the GPUs on which AI models are trained and run
  • HBM chips are emerging as a bottleneck for future AI capacity, with both SK Hynix and Micron having sold through almost their entire production capacity for next year
  • The US is pressuring South Korea to restrict sales of HBM chips to China
  • I called it on May 26, but unfortunately I backed the wrong horse — Micron hasn't done as well, because SK Hynix has taken a lead in HBM manufacturing
• The US Navy seeks to arm its warships with Patriot missiles in order to defeat hypersonic threats (archive)
  • The Patriot's PAC-3 interceptor is more agile than the Navy's SM-6 missile
  • However, the PAC-3 has a shorter range and can't hit targets in space
  • The PAC-3 has not been deployed on any naval vessels but has undergone integration testing with naval systems on land
  • More validation is needed, including testing whether the PAC-3 missile can receive signals from the SPY-1 radar used by US Navy ships
  • I like this
  • Knowing that this capability exists, even if it's not used outside of wartime, gives the US Navy more flexibility in the event of a conflict
  • The precedent for this is the JDAM — it was still undergoing testing when the Kosovo War broke out
  • However, when the Kosovo War strained supplies of precision guided munitions, JDAM was put into production, and helped solve the supply crunch
  • Similarly, having the capability to deploy PAC-3 missiles on Navy ships is a useful insurance policy while the US Navy works to increase its supplies of SM-3 and SM-6 missiles
• Delta sues Crowdstrike (archive)
  • On July 19 a misconfigured update to the CrowdStrike Falcon Protect cybersecurity suite caused Windows machines to crash worldwide (archive)
  • One of the organizations that was most affected by this outage was Delta, which had to cancel 20% of its flights
  • The mass cancellation resulted in an ongoing Department of Transportation investigation into the robustness of Delta's IT infrastructure
  • Delta claims that Crowdstrike's inadequate testing cost Delta hundreds of millions of dollars
  • Is asking for $500 million in reimbursement for out of pocket expenses, plus unspecified amounts for lost profits and additional expenses
  • Crowdstrike, in turn, has questioned (archive) why Delta's competitors, who were affected to a similar degree by the outage, were able to restore service more rapidly
  • I'm only partially sympathetic to Delta's argument
  • Yes, Crowdstrike should have tested its software more thoroughly
  • However, it is still ultimately Delta's responsibility to ensure that its own network is functional and able to serve business needs
  • Delta claims that if Crowdstrike had tested its update on "a single Windows machine", it would have found the problem
  • That's true, but the criticism can be turned against Delta as well — why did Delta apply a patch whose failure could cause potentially catastrophic consequences across its entire network all at once?
• A jury awards Apple $250 in its patent infringement lawsuit against Masimo (archive)
  • Apple had sued Masimo for violating two of its design patents
  • The jury agreed that previous versions of Masimo's smartwatches violated those patents
  • However, the jury found that current versions of Masimo's smartwatches did not infringe upon Apple's patents
  • The jury awarded Apple just $250 in damages, the minimum amount allowed by law

2024-10-25 Friday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Ukrainian sources are reporting that Russian troops have advanced from Zolota Nyva to Shakhtarske
      • If confirmed, this advance would put significantly more pressure on Velyka Novosilka
    • John Helin has a good thread analyzing the overall situation at Selydove
      • Currently Selydove is the point at which the Russians appear to be applying maximum pressure
      • Have attempted to cut off logistics from the north and south, with relatively little success in the north and rather more in the south
      • Made advances into the southern and eastern parts of the city
      • City is currently split, with a Ukrainian brigade holding the northern and western portions and the Russians holding the south and east
      • Russian forces are also attempting to advance on Novodmytrivka to the southwest, in order to put additional pressure on the Ukrainian forces in Kurakhivka and Hirnyk
      • The loss of Selydove and Novodmytrivka could allow a Russian breakthrough, as Ukraine does not have the same density of fortifications to the west of those cities as it had to their east
  • North Korean troops aiding Russia
    • Vladimir Putin appears to confirm that North Korean troops are aiding Russia (archive)
      • In a press conference, Putin referred to Article 4 of the mutual defense treaty (archive) signed on June 19
      • That clause commits Russia and North Korea to assisting each other with "all means at their disposal" if either should be attacked
      • Putin's specific invocation of Article 4 in response to a question about the presence of North Korean troops is seen as tacit confirmation that North Korean troops are aiding Russia
    • The Financial Times reports on how North Korean troops might be used (archive) by Russia
      • Western analysts think the most likely use of North Korean troops would be to retake territory in Kursk
      • North Korean troops are reportedly from the "Storm Corps", a North Korean light infantry formation that is reputed to have better equipment and cohesion
      • Kim Jong-Un has long wanted to send troops to Ukraine, in order to gather real-world combat data
      • Sending troops to Ukraine is also seen as a way to secure a long-term security guarantee from Russia, giving North Korea an alternative to China (archive) for its security needs
• Russia provided targeting data to the Houthis to enable them to strike Western shipping (archive)
  • Russian satellite data was passed to the Houthis via Iran
  • Allows Houthis to track ships even after they've turned off their satellite transponders in an effort to evade detection
  • Shows that Russia has turned decisively in favor of Iran, and away from Israel, a country with which it had previously maintained good relations
• Boeing has lost $1.85 billion on the Starliner program
  • The future of the Starliner program is in question
  • Boeing has committed to providing at least three flights and up to six flights for NASA
  • However, it is unclear that Boeing will be able to meet the six flight committment before NASA decides to deorbit the ISS
• Boeing is looking into selling its space business, including the troubled Starliner program (archive)
  • Sale would include most of the business that supplies NASA, including the Starliner program
  • Comes as new CEO Kelly Ortberg looks to streamline the company in the face of significant financial difficulties (archive)
  • Boeing will keep its military satellite business and its SLS contract
  • Sale rumors come in the wake of the departure of Boeing's head of defense and space (archive) on September 21
  • Blue Origin is a potential buyer for the space assets that Boeing would be selling
  • This looks to me like Boeing ditching its fixed-cost contracts and keeping the cost-plus contracts
• The US Department of Justice is investigating the Tether cryptocurrency for violating money-laundering laws (archive)
  • Tether has the highest trading volume of all cryptocurrencies
  • Maintained by the Tether corporation
  • Unlike other cryptocurrencies, Tether is pegged to the dollar at a 1:1 ratio
  • Backed by a mix of assets, such as government and corporate bonds
  • Is used as a dollar substitute by people who find it difficult to get actual dollars for legal reasons (e.g. because they're drug dealers or arms smugglers)
  • Tether argues that the fact that all Tether transactions are inherently public due to the nature of the blockchain means that Tether is poorly suited for criminal users
• Chinese students are increasingly unable to write Chinese characters by hand
  • The Chinese dictionary contains over 13,000 characters
  • However, the standard for literacy is being able to read and write the 4,000 most commonly used characters
  • Chinese people can still recognize characters when they read, but increasingly they're forgetting how to write the characters
  • Phenomenon is known as "character amnesia" or "lift the pen, forget the character"
  • Exacerbated by digital technologies that automatically translate phonetic representations to characters
  • The Chinese Ministry of Education is responding by mandating the teaching of calligraphy in schools
  • Sponsoring televised calligraphy contests
  • The problem for Chinese (and Japanese) is that the non-phonetic nature of characters means that the actions of speaking, listening, reading, and writing are not mutually reinforcing as they are in phonetic languages (or even partially phonetic languages, like English)
  • Although the Chinese government is treating "character amnesia" as a crisis, to me it seems more like the similar phenomenon of children in the US being increasingly unable to write in cursive

2024-10-24 Thursday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Fighting continues in Selydove, with the town under attack from multiple directions
    • Ukrainian forces launch a counterattack around Novohrodivka
    • Novohrodivka fell on August 26, but the front line has stabilized somewhat in that area
  • Other than that, there isn't a lot of news from the front — not many new geolocations from the Kupyansk or Kursk regions
  • Emil Kastehelmi has a thread analyzing the impact North Korean troops will have on Russian operations
    • North Korea has already played a significant role in aiding Russia against Ukraine by enabling Russia to sustain its artillery advantage
    • The arrival of North Korean troops should be seen as a continuation of this preexisting cooperation
    • The use of North Korean troops in Ukraine benefits both the Russian and North Korean governments
      • Is another short-term band-aid solution (like ever increasing sign-on bonuses) that allows the Russian military to plug gaps without having to resort to a second round of mobilization
      • North Korean military gains combat experience against Western equipment
    • The fact that Russia is using North Korean troops now, however, should not be seen as indicative of Russian weakness
    • Although the Russian military is facing many challenges in the medium to long term, in the short term it is still advancing in multiple areas
• Boeing's machinists vote to reject the deal and continue striking (archive)
  • New contract was agreed to by union and Boeing negotiators on Sunday
  • Was presented to the membership for a vote yesterday
  • Increased pay by 35% and had increased contributions to retirement accounts
• ARM has given Qualcomm 60 days' notice that it is canceling its IP license
  • ARM designs the instruction set that all smartphone chips implement
  • Also makes and licenses reference designs that implement those instructions
  • ARM and Qualcomm are in a legal dispute over Qualcomm's acquisition of Nuvia
  • Qualcomm acquired Nuvia to bring more design resources in-house, reducing its dependence on ARM's reference designs and making Qualcomm's relationship with ARM more like Apple, which licenses the instruction set, but does all design work in-house
  • ARM claims that Qualcomm's acquisition of Nuvia caused Nuvia to breach its own license agreements with ARM
• The EU's antitrust case against Intel has been overturned on appeal (archive)
  • The European Commission had found Intel guilty of anticompetitive behavior
  • Issued a €1.06 billion fine for offering discounts to computer manufacturers only if they bought the majority of their processors from Intel
  • The fine was overturned by a lower court in 2022, stating that the EC had not properly conducted an economic analysis before fining Intel
  • The EC appealed to the highest court in the EU, the European Court of Justice
  • The ECJ found in favor of Intel, stating that lower court's ruling was correct
• Google makes its SynthID AI content watermarking tool open source
  • SynthID watermarks AI generated content in a manner that is imperceptible to humans
  • Works by increasing the correlation between certain tokens that would be otherwise uncorrelated
  • These increased correlations act as a watermark
  • However the altered token distribution is close enough to the original LLM distribution that it would be imperceptible to a human
  • Can then perform statistical analysis on a particular piece of content to see if the watermark
• The co-founder of Cerebras, Jean-Philippe Fricker, discusses what might have caused the delays with nVidia's Blackwell
  • Traditional GPUs consist of a logic chip, along with several high-bandwidth memory chips
  • Each of these chips is placed on a substrate, which connects them to the underlying printed circuit board
  • If there are multiple chips on a single substrate, that substrate is known as an interposer
  • Putting multiple chips on a single interposer allows for higher bandwidth connections between them
  • Blackwell is the first nVidia design that has multiple logic chips
  • This requires nVidia to make connections between logic chips, in addition to having connections between logic chips and memory
  • More connections are required to link two logic chips together than are required to link a logic chip to a memory chip
  • Furthermore, having two logic chips and a larger amount of memory means that the interposer must be much bigger
  • In order to manufacture this interposer more cheaply nVidia decided that only the parts of the interposer which are responsible for chip-to-chip connections should be manufactured from silicon
  • The remainder of the interposer could be manufactured out of an organic material (i.e. plastic)
  • The silicon components of the interposer are known as bridges
  • Bridges have to be aligned very precisely, typically to tolerances between 10 and 50 microns, in order to ensure that the various components on the interposer are connected properly
  • It is difficult to ensure that everything remains aligned through the whole manufacturing process
  • The fact that Blackwell is a larger design, with two logic chips, means that alignment must be maintained across longer distances
  • Another problem is that silicon and the organic material have different thermal properties
  • This means that temperatures have to be controlled more precisely in order to ensure that thermal expansion doesn't cause correctly placed components to become misaligned later on
  • Cerebras attempts to avoid this problem by using an entire 300mm² wafer
  • Designs its chips to have redundancy built in so that manufacturing defects can be compensated for and worked around
  • Because Cerebras uses a large silicon wafer to hold both logic and RAM, it can use the same process all throughout
  • Doesn't need an interposer to connect disparate components, because all components are manufactured as a unit
  • Parts don't have to be physically placed, which solves alignment problems
  • Whole thing is silicon, which solves the thermal expansion problem
  • The downside of using an entire wafer is that it has to use the same machinery and the same processes for everything
  • nVidia can rely on, e.g. SK Hynix, to specialize in memory while it specializes in logic — Cerebras gives up on the benefits of that specialization and argues that the benefits of integration make up for not having components that are individually superior
• Cable companies, newspapers and advertising firms sue to block the FTC's "click-to-cancel" rule
  • On October 16, the FTC passed a rule designed to make it easier to cancel subscriptions (archive)
  • Rule was designed to make cancellation procedures easier to find and less onerous to go through
  • Notably the rule mandated that it should be possible to cancel service without having to interact with a chatbot or customer service representative
  • Trade groups representing newspapers, cable companies and advertising firms have sued to block the rule, claiming that the FTC was being "arbitrary and capricious" with its rulemaking
  • Argue that they have a First Amendment right to try to persuade a customer to keep their service
  • I don't know how the court will rule, because it's the 5th Circuit, which has a history of somewhat wacky rulings, but it's there are a lot of carve-outs around advertising when it comes to First Amendment protection
  • In general, commercial speech doesn't enjoy the same level of protection as private, or especially private political speech

2024-10-23 Wednesday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Russian forces retake Olgovka
    • This isn't as significant as the attack towards Zelenyi Shlyakh, but it's still not good news
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces occupy Izmailivka, increasing the pressure on Hirnyk
  • Kupyansk region
    • The latest Deep State map shows that Russian forces have made gains in Kruhlyakivka
  • North Korean troops aiding Russia
    • South Korean lawmakers state that 3000 North Korean troops have been sent to Russia to support its war effort (archive)
      • New estimate is double that of the previous report from Friday, which stated that 1500 troops had been ferried to Russia by the Russian Navy
    • The US Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin, confirms that North Korean soldiers have gone to Russia
      • Did not confirm numbers or intentions
  • The US will contribute $20 billion into a G7 loan for Ukraine (archive)
    • Loan will be repaid with interest on frozen Russian assets
    • The US has decided to participate even if Hungary does not drop its objection to a longer-term freeze of Russian assets
    • This means that the full $50 billion loan can go forward, rather than the reduced €35 billion loan (archive) the EU was preparing to proceed on without US participation
• Turkish defense facility hit in terrorist attack (archive)
  • Attack was at the Turkish Aerospace Industries' headquarters, northwest of Ankara
  • At least 4 people have been killed, with 14 injured
  • The attackers were all killed as well
  • In retaliation, Turkey carried out strikes (archive) against PKK targets in Iraq and Syria
• Maersk boosts its profit guidance again as Red Sea disruptions continue (archive)
  • Persistent disruptions caused by Houthi attacks in the Red Sea have led to container ships taking longer routes around the Cape of Good Hope
  • This has increased the demand for container ship capacity
  • Although this has led to increased fuel costs, the lack of surplus container ship capacity has allowed Maersk to pass on those costs to its customers, resulting in increased profits
• Anthropic demonstrates a tool that lets its AI take control of your computer to carry out tasks that require user input
  • Tool is called "Computer Use"
  • Allows Anthropic's Claude model to control the user's mouse and keyboard
  • Operates by taking successive screenshots to determine where input fields are
  • Oh yes, let the AI remote desktop into your machine, what could possibly go wrong?
• nVidia has resolved the production issues it was having with its new Blackwell AI accelerators (archive)
  • Earlier this year, nVidia announced that its Blackwell CPUs, previously scheduled to ship in Q2 would be delayed until Q4
  • Delay was due to design issues that caused yields to be unacceptably low
  • Jensen Huang, nVidia's CEO, has stated that the chip has been redesigned and will ship in Q4 as expected
• SK Hynix posts record profit (archive)
  • SK Hynix is a leading manufacturers of computer memory
  • Has seen demand for memory increase as ever larger AI models require ever more RAM
  • SK Hynix has a lead in producing the High Bandwidth Memory (HBM) chips most desirable for advanced GPUs and AI accelerators, allowing it to outperform Samsung Electronics and Micron Technologies
• Frontier and Spirit renew merger talks (archive)
  • Frontier and Spirit had held merger talks in 2022, which resulted in a preliminary agreement (archive)
  • JetBlue came in with a higher offer, causing Spirit to seek a merger with that airline instead
  • The JetBlue merger was blocked on antitrust grounds
  • This led Spirit to explore a Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing (archive) in order to restructure its debts in the face of declining revenue caused by increased competition and a Pratt & Whitney engine recall
  • The new merger talks with Frontier are at an early stage and may not yield a deal
• Boeing posts a $6 billion loss for the quarter (archive)
  • Losses were primarily due to the machinists strike (archive) that halted production (archive) of the 737 Max, 767 and 777
  • Company has made a loss of approximately $8 billion for the year thus far

2024-10-22 Tuesday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Ukrainian forces reenter Zelenyi Shlyakh, after successfully repelling the Russian counterattack
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces enter Selydove
    • Although Selydove hasn't fallen yet, once Russian troops get a foothold in a town it's almost impossible for Ukrainians to force them out again
    • Fighting continues between Kostyantynivka and Katerynivka
  • According to the UN, Ukraine's population has declined by 10 million since the start of the war (archive)
    • Decline is almost 25% of the population
    • Due to a combination of crashing fertility and emigration
    • Russia has also seen its demographic situation deteriorate, with Russia recording its lowest official birth rate in 25 years
  • NATO officials cannot corroborate large numbers of North Koreans being sent to Russia
    • Confirm that North Korean observers are present to learn from the Russians and assess the performance of North Korean weapons
    • No large infantry formations, however
• The United Kingdom has granted political asylum to the son of Lee Kuan Yew, founder of Singapore (archive)
  • Lee Hsien Yang and his wife, Lee Suet Fern, have been in self-imposed exile in London since 2022
  • Under criminal investigation in Singapore
  • Lee Hsien Yang wished to have Lee Kuan Yew's family home demolished, per Kuan Yew's wishes
  • However Kuan Yew's other children disagreed, leading to a dynastic dispute
  • Singaporean authorities claim that Lee Suet Fern tampered with Lee Kuan Yew's will
  • Lee Hsien Yang and Lee Suet Fern argued successfully that these claims are politically motivated in order to ensure that their son, Li Shengwu, will never have a political career in Singapore
• The merger between DirecTV and Dish Network is on the brink of collapse because of bondholder objections (archive)
  • DirecTV proposed to exchange approximately $10 billion of Dish Network's bonds for $8 billion of its own debt
  • That is too much of a discount for creditors, who want a $300 million discount instead of DirecTV's proposed $1.6 billion discount
  • Approximately 80% of Dish Network bondholders have formed a cooperation group, agreeing to negotiate with DirecTV as a collective

2024-10-21 Monday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Despite Russian attacks on Zelenyi Shlyakh, Ukrainian forces have managed to hold positions in the area, most notably in Novoivanovka
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces capture Zoryane, south of Hirnyk
    • Continuing their advance out of Kostyantynivka (captured August 27), Russian forces have entered Katerynivka
    • Contrary to the Reuters report (archive) from yesterday, it appears that Selydove is still under Ukrainian control
  • Lloyd Austin visits Ukraine and announces a new aid package (archive)
    • Announced a new $400 million aid package
    • Includes additional weapons, antitank munitions and armored vehicles
    • Is this in addition to the $8 billion aid package (archive) that the US announced on September 25
    • Or is it a specific disbursement of aid from that overall package?
    • Austin has often been criticized for advocating restraint and pursuing an incrementalist approach that critics say has given Ukraine just enough weapons to survive, but not enough to drive Russian troops from the country
• India and China reach a deal on military patrols on their disputed border (archive)
  • India and China fought a major war in 1962 over the border between Kashmir and Tibet
  • War was inconclusive, with both sides laying claim to the disputed territory
  • The frontier between the two nations in this area is referred to as the "Line of Actual Control"
  • Recently, in 2020, clashes between Indian and Chinese troops along the Line of Actual Control in the Galwan Valley led to both sides rushing reinforcements to the area
  • In the wake of those clashes, the Modi government banned several Chinese apps and implemented restrictions on Chinese investment into India
  • The Modi government has made de-escalation in the Galwan valley a condition of resuming "normal" relations with China
• Dow Jones, parent company of the Wall Street Journal, and the New York Post file suit against Perplexity (archive)
  • Accuse Perplexity of illegally scraping copyrighted content and using AI generated summaries to substitute for the original source
  • Comes in the wake of the New York Times sending Perplexity a cease-and-desist (archive) last Tuesday demanding that Perplexity stop scraping the Times
• Prandtl Defense, a new startup, demonstrates an anti-drone weapon that uses ultrasonic sound (archive)
  • Uses sound waves that align with resonant frequencies of drone components to destabilize drones and cause them to crash
  • Won a Canadian competition, beating out Boeing, Leonardo, and other established defense contractors
  • Shows how the emergence of low-cost UAVs has created opportunities smaller startups

2024-10-20 Sunday

• Ukraine War
  • Kupyansk region
    • Russia launched another major attack towards Kruhlyakivka, which was once again repelled with heavy losses
    • However, Russian forces have already closed in on the Oskil river — it seems like it's only a matter of time before they manage to exhaust and push back the Ukrainians here
  • Donetsk region
    • Russia has launched a major assault (archive) on Selydove, and according to some sources, has taken the town
    • If true, it would mean that Selydove held for 49 days, as Russian troops began attacking (archive) Selydove on September 2
    • Right now, the cities that are most at risk appear to be Hirnyk and Kurakhivka
  • Ukrainian drones hit an ammunition factory in Dzerzhinsk, just west of Nizhny Novogorod
    • Dzerzhinsk is roughly 200 miles (321 km) east of Moscow
    • This might be one of the deepest strikes into Russian territory carried out by Ukrainian drones
  • Ramzan Kadyrov's forces are looting the steel mills of Mariupol (archive)
    • Although Azovstal was too damaged by fighting to have much salvageable equipment, the other steel mill in Mariupol, Ilyich Iron and Steel Works, had much less damage
    • The Russian government gave the Kadyrov clan responsibility for governing Mariupol and they're looting the steel works
      • Removing and selling modern equipment to Russian mills
      • Selling inert gases to the Russian space program
    • This mirrors Russian practices in Africa, where the Wagner group was awarded control of mines after securing them from insurgents
  • Ukrainians are building auto-targeting systems into their drones so that even Russian jamming causes the drone to lose signal, it can complete its attack
• Perplexity is in talks to raise funds at an $8 billion valuation (archive)
  • Looking for a roughly $500 million funding round
  • Annualized revenue is roughly $50 million, up from $10 million in March
  • Perplexity currently earns money by selling subscriptions, but is exploring ways of adding advertising to its free tier to broaden its revenue stream
  • Perplexity has attracted controversy (archive) for scraping content without authorization and using it to make AI-generated summaries and articles
• The International Association of Machinists and Boeing have reached a tentative agreement to end the strike (archive)
  • Machinists will vote on Wednesday to accept or reject Boeing's latest offer
  • Boeing will increase wages by 35% over four years
  • Increase contributions to retirement accounts

2024-10-18 Friday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Russian forces attacked Kruglenkoe northeast of Zelenyi Shlyakh, however, it doesn't appear that they had much success
  • Kupyansk region
    • Russian forces make an effort to reach the Oskil River at Kruhlyakivka, but are driven back by a Ukrainian counterattack
    • It looks like the prediction I made on September 23 was correct — it does look like the Russians are attempting to make a crossing at Kruhlyakivka
  • Donetsk region
    • Leonidivka remains contested, with Russian forces not able to establish a foothold, despite advancing to the city on September 21
  • North Korean troops aiding Russia
    • A large group of what appear to be North Korean soldiers are spotted on a Russian base in Usuriyssk near Vladivostok, and also near Anastasevka, near Khabarovsk, in Russia's far east
    • According to the South Korean government, Russian navy ships transported 1500 North Korean troops to Russia, where they'll allegedly be given Russian weapons, uniforms and identification papers
    • This is reportedly an initial contingent out of a total deployment of 12,000 troops, but that is impossible to confirm as of yet
• Microsoft and OpenAI begin negotiations on Microsoft's equity stake (archive)
  • Microsoft has invested approximately $14 billion in OpenAI
  • However that investment was made when OpenAI still had a complex ownership structure with a nonprofit entity owning a for-profit company whose profits were capped
  • Now that OpenAI is converting itself (archive) to a more conventional for-profit public benefit corporation, OpenAI has to decide how much equity Microsoft is entitled to
  • In addition, OpenAI has to decide whether Microsoft gets a say in its governance
  • Microsoft and OpenAI have a close relationship, with Microsoft providing the bulk of OpenAI's computing power through its Azure cloud service
  • However, Microsoft has been lately making its own investments in developing AI that's independent of OpenAI and OpenAI has been seeking other investors and computing providers
• OpenAI and Bain Consulting reach a deal to sell customized versions of ChatGPT to businesses (archive)
  • Bain is working with businesses to build custom GPT models
  • Automate document creation
  • Help with planning and forecasting
  • OpenAI has a similar arrangement with Pricewaterhouse Coopers, another accounting and consulting firm
• Former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati is raising funds for a new AI startup (archive)
  • Murati resigned from OpenAI (archive) on September 25
  • Murati has reportedly been recruiting OpenAI employees to join her
  • She is able to do this because California doesn't enforce noncompete agreements, so Murati was free to turn around and build a competitor to OpenAI as soon as she left
• Spirit Aerosystems will furlough workers as a result of the prolonged strike at Boeing (archive)
  • Spirit Aerosystems makes fuselages for Boeing (including, most notably, the fuselage whose door plug fell off)
  • Boeing has halted production (archive) of its 737 Max, 767 and 777 aircraft, because of a strike by the International Association of Machinists
  • As a result, inventory is building up at Spirit
  • As Spirit is running out of storage, it is halting production of 767 and 777 fuselages and furloughing the workers on those production lines
  • 737 Max production is unaffected
  • That's interesting because Boeing has halted production of 737 Maxes, 767s and 777s, but Spirit has only halted production of 767 and 777 fuselages
  • Boeing is in the process of buying back Spirit, a company that it spun out more than 20 years ago
• The International Association of Machinists is indirectly negotiating with Boeing in talks that are being mediated by the federal government (archive)
  • These are the first talks since Boeing withdrew a new contract offer (archive) after the IAM rejected it (archive) for bypassing the normal collective bargaining process
  • Talks are being attended to personally by acting Labor Secretary Julie Su
• The EU may consider Musk's other business in calculating fines against Twitter (archive)
  • Further coverage
  • The EU has warned Twitter that it may use revenue from SpaceX, Neuralink and other businesses when calculating fines against Twitter
  • The potential fines are over Twitter's allegedly deceptive use of blue checks (from July 12)
  • The EU's Digital Services Act provides for fines of up to 6% of revenue
  • The reasoning behind including Elon's other businesses is that the fine might be targeted at Elon himself, therefore allowing the EU to consider other businesses under Elon's "exclusive control" as contributing to his revenue
  • This is because the DSA is targeted at the "provider" of online platforms, where provider is defined as the legal entity exercising "decisive influence" over the platform or search engine, regardless of whether it is a corporate or actual person
  • Because Elon himself is alleged to be the person exercising "decisive influence", the EU Commission feels justified in considering all of Musk's privately held companies as a single entity, which it has termed the "Musk Group"
  • This would include Twitter, SpaceX, Neuralink and The Boring Company
  • Tesla would be excluded because it is a publicly held company, and therefore not under Elon's exclusive control
  • On the one hand, this is behavior that you'd expect from the villain in an Ayn Rand novel
  • On the other hand, the forcible seizure of cash from Starlink seemed to get Twitter to bend the knee (archive) in Brazil, so who knows, this might be persuasive to Musk

2024-10-17 Thursday

• Ukraine War
  • Luhansk region
    • Ukrainian forces retook territory near Nevske
      • Nevske itself was liberated on October 28, 2022, but since then the front line in that area had barely moved
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces attack Lysivka once again
    • Russian units were also spotted southwest of Selydove, between Tsukurnye, Novodymitrivka, and Selydove
    • Seems like Russian forces are continuing to attempt to bypass Selydove, as they have been trying to do since October 4
    • Russian forces capture Maksymilyanivka
    • This seems like Russians consolidating gains, as they captured Hostre sometime around October 1, and Maksymilyanivka is just south of Hostre
    • No word from the Zolota Nyva area where Russian forces had advanced to on October 7
    • Russian forces make small advances south of Chasiv Yar
  • Tatarigami has a list of reforms that he'd like to see Ukraine carry out in order to maximize its chances of victory
    • Accepts that it is unlikely for NATO to accept Ukraine in the near future
    • Therefore Ukraine needs to become as strong as possible on its own in order to deter further Russian aggression
    • Ukraine should pursue defense production agreements and other joint ventures with Western defense contractors to produce more materiel locally
    • Should pursue a comprehensive strategy of building fortifications informed by battlefield experience
    • Instead of attempting to form new brigades, the Ukrainian military should focus on rearming and restaffing units that have show success on the battlefield
    • Needs to plan for troop rotation, and mobilize sufficiently that troop rotations are possible
    • Remove old Soviet-era attitudes from the military, and enable lower-ranking troops to show more operational initiative
    • The Ukrainian military should create formal structures for taking care of wounded veterans, rather than leaving it to ad hoc volunteer groups
    • This seems a lot like Finland and Sweden's strategies during the Cold War, where they weren't part of NATO, but they did work closely with NATO while maintaining sufficient military capacity to establish conventional deterrence on their own
    • The proposal for pre-planned fortifications seems very Finnish
• The Russian legislature moves forward with a ban on "childfree propaganda"
  • Previous coverage (translation) from October 4
  • The law has cleared its first hurdle in the Russian Duma
  • Authors of content that has been deemed "childfree propaganda" will face fines
  • According to Deputy Duma speaker Anna Kuznetzova, the law is part of Russia's "national security strategy"
  • According to her the goal isn't to "criminalize" women who don't have children, but rather to ensure that they're not subject to "propaganda" that encourages them to remain childless
  • Data released last month showed that Russia's birthrate had dropped to the lowest in 25 years
  • At least 72,000 Russians have been killed in Ukraine
  • See also my open question from yesterday, asking what the demographics of Russian volunteers were
• The Open Source Initiative criticizes Meta for calling its models "open source" (archive)
  • The OSI states that Meta's license for its Llama models, whose weights are publicly available do not meet the standards for open source
  • Furthermore, Meta only publishes the weights, and does not specify the code or training data
  • Other companies, like Mistral, call these models "open weight" rather than "open source"
  • Next week, the OSI will publish a list of criteria that models need to meet in order to be considered "open source"
• TSMC reports a strong profit, based on high demand for its chipmaking services (archive)
  • Profits were up by 54%
  • Full year revenue is up by 36%
  • TSMC has recently increased its forecasts for full-year revenue and has announced additional capital expenditure plans to meet increasing demands for AI chips
• Alimentation Couche-Tard dismisses 7-and-i's breakup plan and urges the board to consider its revised takeover offer (archive)
  • A week ago 7-and-i announced plans to break itself up (archive) in order to improve its balance sheet and ward off a second takeover offer (archive) from Alimentation Couche-Tard
  • Alimentation Couche-Tard executives, in Japan, stated that their buyout offers more certainty for 7-and-i shareholders
  • Comments were made in a joint interview with Alain Bouchard, Alimentation Couche-Tard's founder, and Alex Miller, its CEO
  • Miller stated that US antitrust concerns were a manageable problem
  • Believes that the Japanese government will engage in talks about the merger once the current election campaign is over
  • The Japanese government had designated 7-and-i as a company that was "core" to national security (archive) on September 13
  • The designation means that any takeover will require affirmative permission from the Japanese government, rather than being subject to a veto after it has been approved by both companies
• Airbus announces 2,500 jobs cut after taking steep losses on its satellite business (archive)
  • Job cuts will be complete by mid-2026 after talks with unions
  • Analysts expect the reduction to occur mostly through retirements and voluntary departures
  • Most of the cuts will occur in the struggling Space Systems division, but there will be some layoffs at Airbus' defense headquarters in Germany
  • Airbus has not benefited as much from the increase in defense spending that has occurred as a result of Russia's invasion of Ukraine
  • Most of the additional spending has gone towards munitions and missiles, not aircraft or other large platforms which are Airbus' specialty
• Amazon debuts a color e-paper Kindle: the Kindle Colorsoft
  • The Kindle Colorsoft will cost $280
  • Replaces the Kindle Oasis, which is now discontinued
  • Allows the user to highlight with multiple colors, just as in the Kindle web and mobile apps
  • The actual saturation levels and responsiveness of the screen remain to be seen
• Twitter's steep declines in ad revenue save it from being considered a "gatekeeper" by EU regulation
  • EU regulations state that social networks and other online services can be considered "gatekeepers" if they provide an important gateway between businesses and consumers
  • Currently there are six companies classified as gatekeepers: Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, ByteDance, Meta, and Microsoft
  • The EU had been investigating Twitter, for possible inclusion as another gatekeeper
  • However, the EU decided against the designation, as Twitter's revenue in the EU is low and declining
• SpaceX plans to catch Starship with its launch tower arms early in 2025
  • SpaceX demonstrated the ability to catch the Super Heavy booster on Sunday
  • Next year, they're going to attempt catching the upper-stage Starship too
  • Will they come down and be caught by separate towers?

2024-10-16 Wednesday

• Ukraine War
  • Kupyansk region
    • The Ukrainian government has called for a civilian evacuation of Kupyansk, as Russian forces approach the town
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces attack Verkhnokamyanske, but are repelled with heavy casualties
    • Russian forces consolidate their gains in Ostrivske
    • Russian forces also consolidate their gains in Niu York, and begin to advance on Nelipivka to the north
  • Kursk region
    • Fighting continues near Zelenyi Shlyakh
    • For a general overview of what's going on in Kursk, look at Emil Kastehelmi's thread from Monday
  • The Biden administration announces a $425 million package of air defense missiles, artillery ammunition and Humvees
  • The Russian air force targets a Ukrainian drone operator with a FAB glide bomb in Dyliivka
    • This further highlights the limitations of FPV drones
    • Current FPV drones are cheap, and because they're cheap, they're short range
    • The Russians are learning that it's easier to kill drone pilots than it is to kill individual drones
  • American military officials are skeptical of claims of North Korean mercenaries fighting for Russia in Ukraine (archive)
    • These officials do not dispute that North Korea has sent engineers and observers to aid Russian troops in operating North Korean weaponry
    • However, there is little evidence of North Korean infantry participating in the fighting
    • North Koreans have been killed in Ukraine, however, the evidence thus far is that they are volunteers who signed up with the Russian military individually
  • Open question: what are the demographics of Russian volunteers?
    • Russian forces are taking very heavy losses as they advance in Donetsk
    • Daily Russian casualty rates are often greater than 1000 per day (archive)
    • Even if not all of these are fatalities a significant number of them are going to involve life altering injuries that will permanently reduce the employability and productivity of the victim
    • Is Russia destroying its future productivity with a "free market" approach to making war, which pays anyone who volunteers a hefty signing bonus
    • Is Ukraine's more statist approach to recruitment, where only those above a certain age are eligible for military service, better for its long term demographics?
• China affirms its right to use force to reunify with Taiwan (archive)
  • The Chinese military recently concluded a series of exercises (archive) in the air and water around Taiwan
  • In response to the international condemnation of those exercises, China's Taiwan Affairs Office issued a statement affirming that China reserved the right to use force to reunify Taiwan with the mainland
• North Korea has started work on a nuclear-powered submarine, according to South Korean sources (archive)
  • The size and role of the submarine remains unclear
  • The article argues that a North Korean nuclear powered attack submarine would be more dangerous than a nuclear powered ballistic missile submarine carrying nuclear warheads
  • I don't agree
  • Attack submarines have to place themselves at considerably more risk in order to carry out their missions
  • A single nuclear powered attack submarine, especially one that's likely to be slow and noisy, presents a limited threat
  • While it does pose a limited role to enemy ships, it needs to get close to those enemy ships in order to attack them, placing it at risk of counterattack every time it strikes
  • On the other hand, a ballistic missile submarine poses a grave threat even if it isn't particularly fast
  • A ballistic missile submarine doesn't have to hunt, it only has to hide
  • If North Korea's first nuclear powered submarine is an attack submarine, it would be because North Korea is following the same strategy as China, building an attack submarine in order to gain experience with building submarines first
• Amazon joins the latest financing round for X-Energy, another manufacturer of small modular reactors (archive)
  • Similar to Google's deal with Kairos Energy, announced on Monday
  • Amazon and X-Energy will fund the construction of a four-reactor project that will supply 320 MW in Washington State
  • Amazon has also signed a deal with Dominion Energy in Virginia to explore whether it's feasible to build small modular reactors to power its datacenters there
• The FTC passes a rule making it easier for consumers to cancel subscriptions (archive)
  • Businesses must make cancellation procedures easy to find
  • Customers can't be forced to interact with a chatbot or customer service representative unless they agreed to allow that when they signed up for the subscription
  • If a customer is required to cancel over the phone, they must be able to call within "normal business hours"
  • Businesses that sell products or services using subscriptions must make that clear in their advertising
  • The Republican minority on the commission warns that this could lead to legal challenges
  • In my opinion, this rule doesn't go far enough
  • If a business can process subscription sign-ups online, it should be mandated to process cancellations online too
  • Cancellations by phone should only be allowed if the business doesn't allow online sign-ups

2024-10-15 Tuesday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces may have captured Spirne
      • Spirne had been occupied by Russia for a short period of time in August 2022 before being liberated again in September
    • Russian forces have also reportedly made advances towards Velyka Novosilka, but the extent of those advances isn't clear
  • The Economist has another overview (archive) of the war
    • Russia is continuing to advance, slowly
    • However, there has not been any kind of breakthrough or Ukrainian collapse
    • Russia's artillery advantage may be declining
    • Russia has lost a lot of vehicles, and, as a result, Russian troops are easier now for Ukrainian FPV drones to hit
    • Russia is still a long way away from achieving full control over Donetsk and Luhansk
    • Even if they take Pokrovsk this year, which is increasingly in doubt, there's no way they'll take the two much larger cities of Slovyansk and Kramatorsk
    • The continued Russian advances, however slow, do make it difficult to make the case for eventual Ukrainian victory
    • Therefore, even if the continued assaults don't make military sense, they may be politically useful for Putin, especially if Trump wins the election
• The New York Times sends Perplexity a cease-and-desist demanding that Perplexity stop accessing New York Times content for its AI search engine (archive)
  • The Times alleges that Perplexity's AI generated summaries violate its copyright
  • Says that although they've taken technical measures to block Perplexity's crawler, Perplexity has found workarounds to allow it to keep accessing the Times' content
  • Perplexity has faced similar accusations from Forbes
• ASML cuts its sales forecast for 2025 (archive)
  • ASML is a Dutch manufacturer of lithography equipment
  • Upstream of chip makers like TSMC and Intel
  • Reduction in sales forecasts may signal a plateauing of semiconductor output
  • However it might also mean that ASML's customers have become better at using its lithography tools for longer (archive)
  • ASML's sales have also been affected by the ongoing turmoil at Intel (archive), which has severely cut back on its capital expansion plans in an effort to conserve cash
  • Another factor is that ASML can no longer sell its most advanced (and most expensive) equipment to China, because of export restrictions imposed by the Biden administration
• Boeing raises $35 billion in additional funding in order to weather the financial pressure caused by the machinists strike (archive)
  • $25 billion will be raised by selling stock and debt
  • $10 billion will come through a credit agreement with major lenders
  • According to Standard & Poors, the strike is costing Boeing roughly $1 billion a month in lost production
• SpaceX applies for changes to enable gigabit speeds from its forthcoming Gen2 satellites
  • Lower altitude of satellites from 525 km, 530 km and 535 km to 480 km, 485 km and 475 km to allow for more satellites per orbital plane
  • Change elevation angles of satellites from 25° to 20°
  • These alterations will be necessary to extract maximum performance from the 2nd Generation Starlink satellites which can only be launched by Starship
  • The significance of this story is that SpaceX expects Starship to be operational soon
• Using invisible Unicode to exfiltrate data from LLM users
  • Exploit demonstration
  • Riley Goodside demonstrates a prompt injection attack that instructs Microsoft Copilot to append invisible characters to a URL which it then displays to the user
  • When an unsuspecting user clicks on the link, the invisible characters can be used to exfiltrate data
  • Invisible characters come from the deprecated Unicode Tags block
  • Tags were originally intended to indicate blocks of text in different languages, but were deprecated early on as Unicode moved to other approaches to handle multilingual text
  • As a result, most UIs don't display tags if they're appended to text, which allows an attacker to use them as a steganographic side channel

2024-10-14 Monday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Fighting continues in Toretsk, Makiivka and Selydove, but no substantial advances or retreats
    • Makiivka was liberated almost exactly two years ago
  • Kursk region
    • Emil Kastehelmi has an assessment of the current situation in Kursk
      • Russian forces have launched a successful set of counterattacks against the flanks of the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk
      • Opened the land route between Glushkovo and Korenevo on the western flank
      • Recaptured Borki in the east
      • Russian forces have attacked as far as Zelenyi Shlyakh, but it's unclear whether they were able to actually hold on to those gains
      • Ukraine has lost roughly 300 km², or 1/3 of the territory that it captured in August
      • The terrain in the area is unfavorable — mostly open fields that make it difficult for Ukrainians to defend against Russian artillery and drones
      • Although Ukraine has launched further offensive operations towards Glushkovo from its side of the border, it's unclear how much success can be expected, given that Glushkovo can be reinforced from the Russian side from Korenevo
      • Overall, it doesn't look like the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk has accomplished anything
  • Kharkiv region
    • Intense fighting continues in Vovchansk
  • Germany warns of increased Russian sabotage efforts in Europe (archive)
    • In a recent sabotage attempt, an package caught fire in a DHL logistics center
    • According to German intelligence, the package was intended to catch fire while it was being carried by an aircraft, causing a crash
    • This sabotage attempt follows a series of suspicious fires carried out on warehouses and logistics centers linked to weapons deliveries to Ukraine
• The US sends a THAAD battery to Israel (archive)
  • The Terminal High Altitude Area Defense system is designed to intercept ballistic missiles
  • One is currently deployed to South Korea
  • This annoys me because it sets a bad incentive
  • The reason that Israel is getting a THAAD and not Ukraine is because Ukraine is under attack by a nuclear power, and Israel isn't
  • In effect, the US has signaled that Iran should get a nuclear weapon ASAP, so that it can leverage the same sorts of threats as Russia
• NASA launches the Europa Clipper mission (archive)
  • Mission will travel to Jupiter's moon, Europa, arriving in 2030
  • Europa has a large subsurface ocean (holding potentially twice as much liquid water as the oceans on earth)
  • Europa Clipper will conduct close flybys of Europa in order to determine whether this ocean is capable of supporting life
  • However, NASA has taken pains to point out that the mission is not designed to look for signs of life directly, only its preconditions
• Google orders small modular reactors to power its datacenters (archive)
  • Order went to Kairos Energy for 6-7 small reactors
  • Reactors will have 500 MW output in total
  • Reactors will be a molten-salt design using TRISO pellets to encapsulate its fuel
  • The combination of molten-salt and TRISO creates an efficient reactor with reduced chances of failure by foregoing the use of high-pressure water
  • Kairos Energy has received a permit from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission to build a 50 MW prototype reactor in Tennessee
  • Prototype reactor should be ready by 2027
  • Kairos aims to have its first operational reactor ready for Google by 2030
• The Chinese government seeks to extend China's advantage in electric cars into delivery drones
  • China's aviation regulator released new rules that designated airspace under 300 meters as unrestricted, allowing small drones to operate without a permit
  • This is helping drive a boom in drones, many of which are used in agriculture to survey crops and spray pesticides and fertilizer
  • Flights of larger drones, used for deliveries passenger transport still require permits, but the Chinese government has simplified the process
  • China is seeking to leapfrog Western companies by developing eVTOLs, which take advantage of Chinese expertise in both drones and batteries
  • eVTOLs are significantly cheaper to build and operate than traditional helicopters
  • To address safety concerns, the Chinese government has issued the following guidelines for eVTOL development
    • Suburbs before cities
    • Cargo before passengers
    • Isolation before integration
  • And of course, these cargo drones have military applications, which is probably why the Chinese government is so keen on them

2024-10-13 Sunday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Ukrainian forces north of Ozarianivka are shelled by the Russian 177th Marine Regiment
      • I'm including this because I'm surprised that Ukrainian forces are still in that area
      • The town of Ozarianivka had been captured in November 2022
      • It seems like Ukrainian forces didn't retreat very far outside of Ozarianivka, and this area of the front line had been quiet until Russian advances in Toretsk made it more exposed
    • Ukrainian forces have pushed back Russian gains near Sukhi Yar and Mykolaivka
    • Russian forces occupy positions west of Tsukurnye, indicating that the town is under Russian control
  • Kupyansk region
    • Russian forces make gains near Kolisnykivka, putting them less than 2km from the Oskil River
    • This adds pressure on Kupyansk to the north and Borova to the south
  • Kursk region
    • Fighting continues south of Obukhovka
    • Russian forces have recaptured Borki
      • Russian forces began attacking Borki on September 17
    • Ukrainian forces continue to occupy positions near Russkoe Porechnoe
      • Russkoe Porechnoe is near Cherkasskoe Porechnoe, which I mentioned on October 3
• Poland argues that its defense spending should be exempt from EU fiscal rules (archive)
  • Poland has raised defense spending to 4.1% of GDP
  • Is planning to raise it further to 4.7% in 2025
  • However, with Poland running a fiscal deficit of 5.7% of GDP, above the EU's 3% limit, the EU has opened a "excessive deficit" procedure against Poland
  • The Polish government is arguing that its defense spending is a necessary contribution to pan-European security, and therefore should be excluded from deficit considerations
  • France and Italy are also subject to excessive deficit procedures
• SpaceX demonstrates Super Heavy reusability on the fifth Starship test flight
  • The Super Heavy booster launched Starship onto a suborbital flight
  • Then it returned to the launchpad where it was caught by mechanical arms extending from the launch tower
  • Demonstrates significant progress in reliability and maturity of Super Heavy
  • Shows how Super Heavy can be reused, like Falcon 9
  • Starship demonstrated a controlled re-entry into the atmosphere
  • SpaceX has developed Starship and Super Heavy using an iterative development process, demonstrating greater success with every flight
• The Apple Vision Pro mixed reality headset struggles to attract software support (archive)
  • It has been a year since Apple released the Vision Pro mixed reality headset
  • There has been a significant slowdown in the pace of apps being released
  • Most of the apps released for the Vision Pro are versions of existing apps for iOS or MacOS devices
  • Unlike Meta, Apple has not funded app developers or offered any incentives for them to port their apps to Vision Pro
  • The Vision Pro app market has experienced slower growth than the Apple Watch
  • Apple has only sold between 400,000 and 450,000 Vision Pro headsets
  • Game developers have cited the lack of controllers as a significant obstacle to porting their software to the Vision Pro
• Chiquita has developed a new disease-resistant banana, Yelloway 1 (archive)
  • The previous dominant strain of bananas, the Gros Michel, was wiped out by a fungal disease known as Tropical Race 1 (TR1)
  • The current strain, Cavendish, replaced the Gros Michel
  • This is why banana flavored candy doesn't taste like bananas — the flavoring more closely resembles the flavor profile of Gros Michels
  • However, a new fungal disease, Tropical Race 4 (TR4) threatens the Cavendish
  • TR4 has spread to all continents and could be a major threat to banana plantations by the end of the decade
  • In response, Chiquita has bred a new strain of banana, Yelloway 1, with improved disease resistance
  • Yelloway 1 is not expected to taste like Cavendish, but that might be fixable with further selective breeding
  • Australian researchers have also developed a disease resistant banana by genetically altering Cavendish plants but that plant counts as a GMO and therefore cannot be sold in Europe

2024-10-11 Friday

• Ukraine War
  • No confirmed changes in the front lines but there is intense fighting in Toretsk and Kursk
  • Olaf Scholz announces a new military aid package for Ukraine (archive)
    • Includes more air defense, tanks, and artillery
    • Is a joint package that includes assistance from Germany, Belgium, Denmark and Norway
    • However, the package does not include long-range Taurus missiles and Scholz made no mention of Taurus missiles in his remarks on the aid package
  • The Russian news website ura.ru shares an update on Sergey Surovikin (translation)
    • Surovikin had been a supporter of Yevgeny Prigozhin and wagner
    • Sidelined from the war in Ukraine after the Wagner Mutiny
    • Was spotted recently leading a Russian delegation to Algeria
  • The EU announces further sanctions on Iran for its transfer of ballistic missiles to Russia (archive)
    • Sanctions target 14 unnamed individuals and firms
    • The EU is also working to limit the operations of Iran's state owned airline, Iran Air, in response to Iran's aid to Russia for its war in Ukraine
    • I'm going to assume these sanctions are toothless symbolism until proven otherwise
• AMD unveils a new AI accelerator chip to compete with nVidia (archive)
  • More coverage from Ars Technica
  • AMD revealed its MI325X chip
  • Designed to compete with nVidia's current H200 AI accelerator
  • Built using TSMC's 5nm process
  • Performance
    • 1.3 PFLOPs at FP16
    • 2.6 PFLOPs at FP8
    • This compares somewhat poorly with the H200 which reaches 1.9 PFLOPs at FP16 and 3.9 PFLOPs at FP8
  • Will ship to customers in Q4 of this year
  • AMD CEO Lisa Su also previewed the forthcoming MI350, designed to compete with nVidia's new "Blackwell" series
  • The MI350 will ship in the second half of 2025
  • While AMD's market share in AI accelerators is a small fraction of nVidia's, Su believes the market is far from saturated and there are still significant opportunities for growth from new customers
• TikTok owner ByteDance lays off hundreds of workers in offshore content moderation teams as it shifts to greater use of AI (archive)
  • Most layoffs in Malaysia
  • Numbers unclear — initial report stated 700 layoffs, but ByteDance has stated that fewer than 500 employees will be affected
• Tesla shares are down sharply in reaction to its "Cybercab" announcement (archive)
  • Tesla announced a new robotaxi vehicle, the Cybercab, designed without a steering wheel, which it seeks to roll out in 2026
  • Also announced the Robovan, a shuttle bus designed to carry 20 people
  • Cybercab will be sold for less than $30,000 according to Tesla
  • These schedules are in Elon-years and these prices are in Elon-dollars, respectively, so in reality, I think the cybercab will debut closer to 2030, and it'll cost more like $50,000
  • Investors were disappointed by the lack of details on how Tesla plans to catch up to Waymo's driverless technology in such a short time
• Boeing will cut 10% of its workforce and delay introducing a new plane as it seeks to conserve cash during its machinists strike (archive)
  • 17,000 jobs will be cut
  • The 777X, which is already behind schedule, will be delayed further
  • Boeing will also discontinue production of the 767 cargo variant

2024-10-10 Thursday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Russian vehicles spotted driving on the road near Zelenyi Shlyakh, indicating a possible Russian counterattack near Korenevo
    • Does this mean that Ukrainian forces have retreated from near Liubimovka, where they were last spotted on September 23
    • DeepState UA has more details, stating that Russian forces are mounting a major offensive near Liubimovka and Zelenyi Shlyakh, and the situation is becoming increasingly precarious for Ukrainian units to the north, near Kremyanoe
  • Donetsk region
    • A Ukrainian soldier writes about the defense of Novomykhailivka
      • Ukrainian soldiers managed to destroy 320 armored vehicles over the course of six months of defending Novomykhailivka
      • However, Russian forces did manage to capture Novomykhailivka sometime around August this year
  • North Korea has deployed combat engineers to Ukraine (archive) to help Russians operate North Korean ballistic missiles
    • Kim Jong-Un is using the war in Ukraine as a means to give his troops combat experience and assess the performance of his weapons in realistic wartime circumstances
    • North Korea has provided Russia with a large supply of ammunition, estimated to be nearly 2 million shells
    • Has also provided Russia with supplies of the short-range KN-23 ballistic missile
  • The United Kingdom considers sending troops into Ukraine (archive) to conduct training
    • Small groups of military trainers would go to Ukraine to set up training programs for Ukrainian forces
    • Would solve the logistics issues of bringing Ukrainian soldiers to the UK for training
    • British soldiers would also learn battlefield skills from Ukrainians
    • If the North Koreans can gain experience from Ukraine, why can't NATO?
  • The European Union proceeds with a plan to provide Ukraine with a €35 billion loan, collateralized by frozen Russian assets (archive)
    • Previous coverage (archive) from September 20
    • Loan gets around Hungarian objections (archive) which prevented the EU from committing to a US precondition that Russian assets be frozen for a minimum of three years, rather than having the freeze be reviewed every six months
    • This answers my question from yesterday, where I asked what prevented the EU from proceeding with its own €35 billion loan plan even though Hungarian objections were blocking US participation
    • It turns out that nothing was preventing the EU with proceeding with the plan, and indeed the loan is in progress
• The Nobel Prize in Chemistry is awarded to David Baker, Demis Hassabis, and John Jumper (archive)
  • Notably Hassabis and Jumper are founders of DeepMind, an AI lab that was bought by Google
  • Prize recognizes AlphaFold, a DeepMind AI model that predicts how proteins will fold
  • Are all the Nobels going to be for AI this year?
  • At this rate, they may as well give the Nobel Prize in Literature to Ilya Sutskever for ChatGPT and the Nobel Peace Prize jointly to Sam Altman and Elon Musk for founding OpenAI
• The US Air Force's secretive X-37B will demonstrate novel deceleration maneuvers in Earth orbit
  • Currently the X-37B is in a highly elliptical orbit whose current apogee is 38,600 miles
  • Will carry out a series of controlled aerobraking maneuvers to lower the apogee of its orbit, and make it more circular, without using propellant
  • The purpose of these maneuvers is to enable the X-37B to safely dispose of its service module without contributing to space debris
  • After the maneuvers are complete, the X-37B will conduct some more secret activities in low earth orbit before eventually landing
  • While aerobraking to change orbit had been conducted by some civilian space probes around Mars, according to the Air Force, this is the first time any Earth orbiting satellite has used aerobraking to change orbit
• Boeing withdraws its updated offer to the IAM to end the strike (archive)
  • The IAM had already rejected the offer (archive), saying that the timing and method of Boeing's offer bypassed the normal collective bargaining process and didn't give the union enough time to schedule a vote
  • S&P put Boeing's credit rating on notice
  • Any downgrade would cut Boeing's credit rating below investment grade
• 7-and-i announces its final plans to split itself up in order to fend off a takeover attempt from Alimentation Couche-Tard (archive)
  • Previous coverage (archive) from October 7
  • 31 subsidiary businesses, including supermarkets, specialty stores, and the Denny's restaurant chain will be spun out into a new holding company: York Holdings
  • The companies banking and financial services arm, 7 Bank, will also be spun out separately
  • Confirms that it received a higher bid (initially reported (archive) yesterday) from Alimentation Couche-Tard, which it could not summarily dismiss as undervaluing the company
  • Lowered its annual income projections, to ¥403 billion from ¥545 billion
  • Also stated that its quarterly income was down by 20% from the same quarter last year

2024-10-09 Wednesday

• Ukraine War
  • Ukraine hits another Russian arsenal, this time in Karachev, Bryansk Oblast
  • Ukraine destroys a Shahed drone storage facility near Oktyabrskii, in Krasnodar Kraii
  • Krasnodar Kraii is the province that was home to another Russian depot, near Tikhoretsk that was hit on September 21
  • Russian Iskander ballistic missiles appear to score a successful hit on a Ukrainian Patriot missile radar, near Novomykolaivka, just south of Dnipro
  • The Hungarian government holds up approval of a $50 billion loan to Ukraine until after the US Presidential election (archive)
    • The EU has been pressing forward with a plan to give Ukraine $50 billion in loans collaterized by frozen Russian assets
    • However, US participation in this plan has been predicated on the EU agreeing to review its freeze of Russian assets every three years, instead of having to renew the freeze every six months as is done today
    • The Hungarian government has blocked this change, stating that it wishes to see the direction pursued by a future American administration
    • I'm interpreting this to mean that Hungary wants to see if Donald Trump will be elected, at which point they think that the loan will be a dead letter
    • However, I don't understand why this is a blocker — in theory, on September 20, Ursula von der Leyen announced a €35 billion loan (archive) to Ukraine that would not require US participation, and would only require a majority vote of EU members, bypassing Hungary's veto
    • Why can't the EU proceed with that?
  • Russia blocks Discord
    • The Russian government blocked access to the popular Discord messenger service after saying it was in violation of Russian laws
    • This has reportedly caused problems with Russian military units who were using Discord to communicate
• The US awards contracts to six firms to refine HALEU fuel for next-generation nuclear reactors (archive)
  • HALEU is "high-assay low-enriched uranium"
  • Traditional nuclear fuel is enriched to approximately 5% Uranium 235
  • HALEU fuel is nuclear fuel that is enriched to between 5% and 20% U235
  • Proponents say that HALEU fuel makes new nuclear reactors more efficient
  • Critics say that the increased enrichment level of HALEU means it poses more of a weapons risk if it falls into the wrong hands
  • The firms that won the contracts to make HALEU are
    • Centrus
    • GE Vernova
    • BWXT
    • Framatome
    • Westinghouse
  • Mix of American and French firms
  • Currently the only country that manufactures HALEU is Russia
• Stocks in high-growth economies underperform (archive)
  • Researchers gathered monthly returns of country-specific MSCI exchange-traded funds
  • Normalized returns to US dollars to make comparison easier
  • Compared returns to quarterly inflation-adjusted GDP growth
  • Out of the top 7 fastest growing economies in the last decade, only one, India, had a positive stock market return
  • The others, China, Philippines, Vietnam, Turkey, Indonesia and Malaysia all averaged negative returns
  • One possible explanation is that high growth is driven by weakening the currency, which increases GDP but hurts dollar-denominated returns
• Alimentation Couche-Tard returns with a 20% higher bid for 7-and-i (archive)
  • Original $39 billion dollar bid increased to $47 billion
  • The takeover offer, if accepted, will face significant scrutiny from US anti-trust regulators
  • The takeover will also face scrutiny from Japanese regulators, who have classified 7-and-i as "core" to national security (archive) on September 13
• SpaceX pressured other providers of satellite internet to cede spectrum rights in exchange for agreeing to launch their satellites (archive)
  • SpaceX has pressured competing satellite internet providers, such as OneWeb and Kepler Communications to cede spectrum rights before agreeing to launch their equipment into space
  • These spectrum rights would privilege Starlink, SpaceX's own satellite internet service
  • This is the danger of any monopoly, no matter how benevolent it appears at first
  • Monopolies inevitably use their monopoly power in one market to try to advantage their offerings in another
• Analysts are downbeat on Project Kuiper, Amazon's satellite internet initiative (archive)
  • Satellite networks require a large capital expenditure before they generate revenue
  • This poses a particular challenge for Amazon, whose core retail business has slim margins
  • In addition to satellites, Amazon has also been investing heavily in AI, both through its own investments in AWS and through its investments in Anthropic
  • These capital investments could have a long-term negative impact on earnings
• 1.7 million Hondas are recalled over "sticky" gears inside the steering system
  • Improperly manufactured worm gears can cause the steering wheels inside the affected cars to become sticky
  • Affected vehicles include Honda Civics, Honda CR-Vs, Honda HR-Vs and Acura Integras
  • Recall will see the affected vehicles brought back to the dealer, where the faulty gears will be replaced

2024-10-08 Tuesday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces have occupied Zelhanne Pershe, just east of Hirnyk
      • I'm somewhat surprised that it took this long for Russian forces to advance into Zelhanne Pershe, given that they advanced into Memryk, to the northwest, on August 28
      • Furthermore, Ukrainsk, almost directly behind Zelhanne Pershe, has been under attack since at least September 13
  • The Belgorod regional government is offering additional payments of 3 million rubles for volunteers to go fight in Ukraine
    • Exceeds the previous record, the 2.75 million ruble payment offered by the Khanty-Mansi autonomous district
    • Payout will be given to anyone who enlists in Belgorod, regardless of the province of their birth
    • This seems like a way for Belgorod regional authorities to make themselves look better than their counterparts elsewhere
    • However, over the long run, it seems like it'll just result in an inflationary spiral as regions offer ever larger sign on bonuses in order to draw recruits in from other regions
  • The Russian defense-industrial base is experiencing labor shortages as Russian men are going off to fight in the war
    • The defense industry in Russia has over 90,000 job openings, according to data compiled from job search sites by the BBC
    • Shortages appear most acute among certain skilled professions, such as CNC machinists
    • This shortage is exacerbated by Soviet-era regulations that prohibit women from working in certain fields
  • According to South Korea's minister of defense, North Korea will likely send members of its military to support Russia in Ukraine
    • The minister also said that reports of North Korean casualties as a result of a Ukrainian strike near Donetsk city are likely true
    • And yet we still hesitate to give Ukraine permission to use Western weapons to strike into Russia
• AI pioneers Geoffrey Hinton and John Hopfield are awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics
  • Were recognized for foundational work behind neural networks
  • Hinton had previously won the Turing Award in 2018 and is known as one of the "godfathers of AI"
  • Its really weird that the Nobel Committee gave the prize in physics for this
  • AI is great, but it doesn't have much to do with physics — it's closer to pure math
• AI startup Cerebras files for an IPO (archive)
  • Cerebras is a competitor to nVidia, known for their large "wafer-scale" chips
  • Hardware is designed to scale more efficiently than nVidia GPUs
• Twitter gets approval to resume operations in Brazil (archive)
  • On September 22, Twitter reappointed a legal representative in Brazil (archive), after it had been banned (archive) on September 2
  • Twitter paid fines and complied with court orders to ban accounts that were accused of spreading misinformation
  • Brazilian judge Alexandre de Moraes said that Twitter had met all requirements to resume operations, and directed Brazilian ISPs to remove their blocks on Twitter

2024-10-07 Monday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces have advanced westward to Zolota Nyva
      • It looks like Russian forces are capitalizing on their capture of Prechystivka and capture (archive) of Vuhledar to advance westwards towards Velyka Novosilka
      • Velyka Novosilka is another town that had been a bastion of resistance since the start of the war
      • Velyka Novosilka and Vuhledar are both towns whose capture would make logistics much easier for Russians
  • Ukrainian forces hit an oil depot in Feodosia, in occupied Crimea
  • Russian missiles hit two grain export vessels in Odesa (archive)
    • The ship that was struck was the Optima, a Palau-flagged bulk carrier
    • Yesterday, Russia hit another ship, the Paresa, another bulk carrier carrying a load of corn for export in the nearby port of Pivdennyi
    • It has been some time since Russia hit ships in Odesa
    • Russia has repeatedly attacked the port, but it usually hasn't hit ships
• The FCC grants SpaceX temporary authority to offer direct-to-cell phone service in storm hit areas
  • SpaceX has been granted a temporary waiver of FCC rules to allow it to offer text messaging service to cell phones in areas affected by hurricane Helene
  • Service comes via a collaboration with T-Mobile
  • SpaceX's constellation hasn't been fully deployed, so service is offered on a "best effort" basis
  • Full approval of the service has been blocked by claims from AT&T and Verizon who argue that SpaceX's satellite service will cause interference with terrestrial cell phone networks
• 7-and-i, owner of 7-11, is exploring plans to sell off side-businesses in an effort to improve its balance sheet (archive)
  • On September 6, 7-and-i rejected (archive) a takeover offer from Alimentation Couche-Tard, the owner of Circle-K, saying the offer grossly undervalued the company
  • Alimentation Couche-Tard is expected to return with an improved offer later, potentially after 7-and-i announces Q2 earnings
  • The fact that an offer was made has marked 7-and-i as a potential takeover target for other firms
  • As a result, 7-and-i is looking at selling non-core assets, such as its financial services business or its supermarket arm
  • This will improve 7-and-i's balance sheet and satisfy shareholder pressure for 7-and-i to focus more on its central convenience store business
• The Chinese government is demanding that its employees hand in their passports (archive)
  • Passport restrictions stem from a 2003 regulation which established a system to restrict travel for key government personnel
  • However, lately, that regulation has been increasingly applied to lower level government officials, such as schoolteachers
  • To travel abroad, people subject to the restrictions must file applications with the government department they work for (e.g. schools for schoolteachers) and would be restricted to 1 trip per year of 20 days or fewer
  • Focus on schoolteachers appears to be the result of the Chinese government's increasing concern about ideological purity
  • Government is concerned that schoolteachers may encounter subversive ideas abroad and then pass those ideas on to their students
  • Employees and even retired former employees of state-owned enterprises in sensitive sectors, such as aircraft, have also been subject to passport restrictions
• Jensen Huang's personal net worth is now higher than the market capitalization of Intel
  • Jensen Huang is worth $109.2 billion
  • Intel's market capitalization is $96 billion
  • Huang could, theoretically, buy all of Intel (at current prices) and have $13 billion left over

2024-10-06 Sunday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces have entered Tsukurnye
      • Selydove is looking increasingly dicey
      • On Friday, Russian troops entered Lysivka, which flanks Selydove to the north
      • Today they're attacking Tsukurnye, which flanks Selydove to the south
    • Another area that looks to be at risk is Kurakhivka
      • With the advance to Ostrivske, on Thursday, and Russians moving into Hirnyk, it looks like Kurakhivka could go soon too
    • Over the past year, in the Pokrovsk area alone, Russia has lost 531 tanks, of which 381 have been confirmed as destroyed
      • This is why I remain optimistic for Ukraine
      • Russian loss rates are unsustainable
  • A Russian S-70 stealth drone was shot down by friendly fire over occupied Donetsk
    • The S-70 is a large (almost as large as the manned Su-57 which it is meant to complement) UAV with advanced stealth characteristics
    • Designed to carry large payloads of bombs or air-to-air missiles
    • The S-70 is a rare aircraft, with fewer than ten supposedly built
    • According to Russian sources, the drone had to be shot down because a failure in its command circuitry led operators to lose control over it, and it had to be shot down before it could stray further into Ukrainian territory
    • It seems not to have mattered, because the Ukrainians managed to salvage quite a bit of the drone anyway, even though it landed close to the front lines
  • Ukraine has taken delivery of its first Dutch F-16s
    • The Netherlands has promised a total of 24 aircraft, and says that the remainder will be delivered in the coming months
• Investors question Microsoft's ever increasing investments in AI (archive)
  • Although Microsoft has increased revenue substantially and has posted healthy operating margins, its stock lags the rest of the S&P 500
  • This is because Microsoft has massively increased capital expenditures to build its lead in AI
  • Results in lower free cash flow
  • AI chips become obsolete rapidly, which leads to higher depreciation charges
  • Unclear whether all this expenditure on AI will lead to significant revenue in the future
  • Microsoft's close collaboration with OpenAI, which had been seen as an asset, could become a liability as researchers depart OpenAI because of internal turmoil there
• Reddit moves closer to profitability (archive)
  • Reddit is already profitable on an adjusted basis, excluding certain nonrecurring charges
  • Close to being profitable on a GAAP basis
  • Revenue is up by 54%, allowing Reddit to narrow its net loss to about $10 million for the year, down from $41 million
  • Improvements in revenue attributed to better ad targeting and licensing deals with AI companies to consume Reddit's trove of user-generated content
  • Costs have been controlled by keeping Reddit's head-count steady
• Chinese hacking efforts cannot be deterred through punishment
  • Cyberattacks require far less commitment than attacks on space infrastructure or nuclear deterrence
  • There is no punishment that the US can impose on China that will make cyberattacks more expensive than the alternatives
  • Therefore the US has to pursue defensive cybersecurity measures, so that we can effect deterrence by denial

2024-10-04 Friday

• Ukraine War
  • Kupyansk region
    • I think one of the underreported aspects of the Russian 2024 offensive has been their rollback of the Ukrainian gains of autumn-winter 2022
    • Kyslivka, for example, which had been liberated on December 8 2022, was recaptured by Russia sometime in July
    • Likewise Pischane, which had been liberated around October 28, 2022, was recpatured by Russia on August 30
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces have advanced to the outskirts of Lysivka
    • It looks like they're trying to flank Selydove
  • One possible reason that the Russian government has not resorted to a second round of mobilization is because the current system of volunteer recruitment is better at leaving skilled workers in the economy
• The Russian legislature considers a ban on "childfree propaganda" (translation)
  • Ban would be modeled on similar Russian ban on "LGBT propaganda"
  • Would restrict information on "voluntary refusal to have children"
  • So what? Is Russia banning birth control now?
• Meta debuts an AI filmmaking tool to challenge OpenAI's Sora (archive)
  • Tool is called Meta Movie Gen
  • Generates videos from text descriptions
  • Can be used to generate videos up to 16 seconds long
  • Can also be used to edit videos to e.g. match sound to video or personalize existing videos with new content
  • Model was demonstrated today, but won't be available for users until next year
  • The focus on movie generation tools comes as part of an effort by AI companies to find more profitable uses for AI
  • Movie Gen will watermark its videos to avoid potential issues with copyright or deepfakes
• AIs lie to us because we ask them to
  • Research paper (open access)
  • LLM-based AIs, such as ChatGPT, are trained with human feedback
  • This human feedback often penalizes "I don't know" answers, where the AI expresses uncertainty about its response
  • This trains AIs to give convincing-sounding but wrong answers which are sufficiently sophisticated to fool human reviewers
  • Researchers asked AIs increasingly difficult questions on a variety of topics, from geography to addition problems
  • AIs rarely responded with uncertainty, even on question categories where they gave correct answers less than 10% of the time
  • These incorrect answers were convincing
  • When presented to humans in a survey, they fooled human raters between 19 and 40% of the time
  • The fact that AI interfaces don't expose the likelihood scores that AI models include with their output makes it more difficult for humans to judge whether an AI is certain of its answer
  • Always verify AI answers
  • AI will be broadly useless as a research tool until we get AIs that can actually cite sources
• Spirit Airlines explores a possible bankruptcy filing (archive)
  • Spirit has been struggling with declining revenue and financial losses
  • Chapter 11 bankruptcy filing would allow Spirit to restructure its debts
  • Spirit has been cutting routes in an effort to save cash
  • Budget airlines have not recovered as well from the pandemic as legacy carriers
  • Spirit hasn't turned an annual profit since before the COVID pandemic
  • In addition, Spirit has been affected by a Pratt & Whitney engine recall which grounded a portion of its fleet
  • Spirit had sought a merger with JetBlue, but that had been blocked on antitrust grounds
• Samsung update bricks older phones
  • Affected phones are the Galaxy S10, Galaxy Note 10, Galaxy M51, and Galaxy A90
  • Update sends phones into a boot loop, rendering it impossible for users to power on their phones
  • It appears that the only way to recover the devices is to perform a data-erasing factory reset
  • Yet another reminder to check your backups
• Waymo announces a collaboration with Hyundai to use Ioniq 5 electric vehicles as robotaxis
  • Currently Waymo operates with Jaguar I-Pace SUVs and some Chrysler Pacifica minivans
  • The Ioniq 5 offers more passenger room than the Jaguars
  • Waymo had previously worked with the Chinese EV maker Zeekr
  • However impending tariffs on Chinese EVs as well as a ban on Chinese EVs with self-driving features (archive) made it impractical for Waymo to continue that collaboration
  • The Ioniq 5s used by Waymo will be manufactured at Hyundai's factory in Georgia
  • Will be converted into self-driving vehicles at Waymo's facility in Mesa, Arizona
• The Indian government will investigate whether offerings made at one of the most visited Hindu temples have been contaminated with beef fat (archive)
  • The Andhra Pradesh state government alleges that the laddu (sweet offering) at the Venkateswara temple in Tirupati has been contaminated with beef tallow
  • Laddu is made with ghee (clarified butter)
  • According to the government, lab reports indicate that the ghee used to make the laddu at the temple was contaminated with beef tallow, fish oil, and lard
  • The temple strongly denies the allegations
  • The previous chief minister, Y.S. Jagan Mohan Reddy, also denies the allegations
  • The Indian Supreme Court has created a team to investigate further

2024-10-03 Thursday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Ukrainian forces still hold Cherkasskoe Porechnoe, depsite Russian attempts to drive them out
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces advance to Ostrivske, south of Kurakhivka
      • This is part of the Russian plan to advance on Kurakhove that Emil Kastehelmi wrote about in his analysis from September 2
    • A report from the front lines about the fall of Vuhledar
      • Report interviews a soldier from the 72nd Brigade, the unit responsible for holding Vuhledar
      • Unit had been deployed to Vuhledar since August 2022
      • New recruits were old (often 50+ years old) and poorly trained
      • Russia has reached drone parity with Ukraine and maintains artillery superiority
      • Big difference from 2023 where, at Vuhledar, Ukrainian forces had decisive advantages in both
      • The soldier says that Vuhledar could have been held if Ukraine had additional manpower and was able to rotate units
  • Trade and historical grievances threaten the Polish-Ukrainian relationship (archive)
    • Although Poland has been one of Ukraine's most steadfast supporters in the EU, there are underlying tensions between the two countries
    • In 2023, Poland banned Ukrainian grain exports because of farmers protesting that Ukrainian grain was collapsing commodity prices
    • Poland is now asking Ukraine to allow the exhumation of Polish victims of the 1943 Volyn Massacre, in which tens of thousands of Poles were killed by the Ukrainian Insurgent Army, an insurgent force fighting both Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union
    • This has become a sticking point in Ukraine's EU accession negotiations
    • These tensions come amid declining public support for Ukraine in Poland
    • Polish citizens are increasingly resentful of Ukrainian refugees and Ukrainian exports to Poland
    • However, in the near term, this issue does not threaten Polish military aid to Ukraine
• US port workers agree to end strike (archive)
  • Port employers agreed to a 62% raise, up from their initial proposal of 50%
  • Agreement is tentative, and port workers will return to their jobs under an extension of the old contract while the final terms of the new contract are negotiated
  • Extension runs through January 15, 2025
  • Looks like there won't be much of a disruption after all — the contract extension will cover the holiday season
• Germany will vote against EU tariffs on imported Chinese electric vehicles (archive)
  • The EU commission states that a tariff is necessary to oppose low-cost financing and subsidies on land and raw materials provided by the Chinese government to its automakers
  • German automakers are more worried about retaliatory tariffs imposed by China than they are about Chinese competition
  • German manufacturers made approximately 1/3 of their sales in China
  • However, the measure is still likely to go through, as a qualified majority representing 65% of the EU's population is necessary to veto the tariffs
  • I think the German automakers are naive
  • Chinese trade policy, time and again, across a range of industries, from textiles to electronics, has been to trade with the West until Chinese manufacturers have absorbed enough knowledge to bootstrap local manufacturing
  • Then the Chinese impose tariffs and subsidize local production to drive foreign manufacturers from China and give Chinese manufacturers a boost in the global market
  • In game theory terms, the Chinese are consistent defectors
  • There's no sense in cooperating with them
  • This is exactly the sort of thing that the German Council of Foreign Relations was speaking out against in their assessment of Zeitenwende

2024-10-02 Wednesday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • It looks like the Russians have captured (archive) Vuhledar
    • Russians have also advanced south of Tsukurnye
  • Luhansk region
    • Ukrainians fend off Russian attacks near Karmazynivka and Novovodyane
  • The Washington post has an article on the updated tactics that Russian forces have been using to gain territory (archive)
    • Russians advance in small groups, backed by vast amounts of artillery
    • Small groups take extremely heavy losses, but Russian commanders don't care — they know that eventually they'll find a weakness
    • Once Russian troops are in place, they call in artillery and drones, which force Ukrainian defenders to retreat
    • It looks like the Russians are increasingly using the German "stormtrooper" tactics from the end of World War 1
• The longshoremen's strike impacts supplies of frozen beef (archive)
  • Fast food chains had come to rely on cheaper meat from overseas after drought caused US-origin beef prices to spike
  • Importers had stockpiled some beef, but supplies will run out after about a week
  • Conversely, chicken suppliers face a glut, as their ability to export is cut by the same strike
  • Coffee supplies are also affected (archive)

2024-10-01 Tuesday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces continue to advance into Vuhledar
    • Russian forces attack Selydove, taking vehicle losses
    • Hostre is shelled and attacked, but it doesn't appear as if Russian forces made much progress
      • I'm surprised that Ukrainian troops are still in Hostre, given that Ukrainsk, to the northwest, is under Russian control and Russian forces are attacking Hirnyk, which is practically behind them
  • The Kyiv Independent has published an article summarizing the situation at Vuhledar
    • Vuhledar was one of the bright spots in Ukrainian defenses in 2023, with Russians losing over 130 tanks and other armored vehicles (archive), and an entire brigade of 5000 troops in an effort to capture the town in February and March of 2023
    • The loss of Vuhledar poses a threat to the southern flank of Pokrovsk
    • Vuhledar is under attack from two sides, as the Russians have captured Vodyane to the northeast (on September 10) and Prechystivka to the west (on September 4)
    • Not a whole lot that hasn't been covered here in various daily updates, but it does provide a useful summary and describes why Vuhledar is important
• China's housing glut collides with its shrinking population (archive)
  • A shrinking population means that, in many smaller cities excess housing may never be filled
  • Smaller cities by Chinese standards — these are still cities that have hundreds of thousands to millions of people
  • Many of these smaller cities encouraged home building even though they knew their populations were declining
  • As a result, many Chinese bought second or even third homes as investment properties, as construction was subsidized and prices were expected to keep going up
  • Now these homes sit empty
  • According to some estimates, China has as many as 90 million vacant housing units — assuming 3 residents per unit, that's enough housing for the entire population of Brazil
  • Assuming one resident per unit, that's enough for the entire population of Germany
  • Strict bankruptcy laws make it difficult for the owners of these houses and condos to walk away and let them be torn down
  • In Japan, which had a similar property boom right as its population peaked in the late '80s, the excess housing was never absorbed, and empty houses litter the landscape
  • The Chinese government has provided fiscal stimulus to further subsidize houses, but it's unclear whether that stimulus will ever get used in the absence of buyers
• Dockworkers launch strike at East Coast ports (archive)
  • Previous coverage (archive) from yesterday
  • Members of the International Longshoremen's Association walked off the job at ports from Maine to Texas
  • First strike across all east coast ports since 1977
  • Strike had been anticipated by importers who had moved up deliveries in advance
  • Supply chains should be able to weather a brief walkout, but will have trouble handling an extended shutdown, especially with the holiday season approaching
  • Retailers were able to use experience garnered during the supply chain disruptions during the COVID pandemic to plan for this shutdown
  • One commodity that will be especially affected by this strike is bananas
  • Most bananas come in through east coast ports
  • Bananas are a perishable, but relatively low-value good, so it doesn't make sense to use air freight to bring them in
• High vehicle prices and high interest rates crimp new car sales (archive)
  • Although auto prices have stopped rising, they still remain substantially higher than their pre-pandemic levels
  • Average prices of a new vehicle is now $44,467, up from $34,600 at the end of 2019
  • Consumers are gravitating towards smaller, more affordable cars as a result
  • More customers are choosing to lease, rather than buy
  • Although the Federal Reserve has recently cut interest rates, those cuts haven't yet translated into easier financing for car buyers
  • The brightest sector of the market is hybrids — sales of hybrids are growing faster than the auto market as a whole, indicating that hybrid vehicles are gaining market share over their internal combustion counterparts
  • Fully electric vehicle sales were up by 8% in the previous quarter
  • I wonder how much of the decline in growth rate of fully electric vehicles comes down to the fact that they're just expensive
  • Unfortunately the only short-term way to make EVs cheaper is to allow imports from China

2024-09-30 Monday

• I wrote an essay summarizing the German Council of Foreign Relations two year assessment of Zeitenwende
• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • No major territorial changes, however, Russian forces continue to attack near Selydove, Pokrovsk and Toretsk
    • Russian forces are also continuing to attack Vuhledar
  • Kharkiv region
    • In Vovchansk, Russian forces launched a major assault which was repelled with heavy casualties
  • Drone vs. drone combat in Ukraine as Russian unmanned ground vehicles are struck by Ukrainian FPV drones
  • After meeting with Zelensky, Biden does not grant permission for Ukraine to use American long-range weapons to strike Russia (archive)
    • American refusal to grant permission for Ukrainian strikes on Russian territory is beginning to garner frustration with other NATO allies as well
    • Notably, the president of Finland, the Lithuanian foreign minister and the Danish prime minister have urged the US to allow Ukraine unrestricted use of its weapons
• AI
  • Softbank will invest $500 million in OpenAI (archive)
    • Investment will be part of the previously announced $5 billion fundraising round (archive) that values OpenAI at $150 billion
    • Investment will be part of Vision Fund 2, largely made up of founder Masayoshi Son's personal wealth
    • After a period of retrenchment after the pandemic, Softbank has been moving aggressively into AI
  • Apple backs out of funding OpenAI (archive)
    • Reporting from August 29 indicated that Apple was considering joining (archive) OpenAI's latest funding round
    • However, it appears that Apple has dropped out of those talks
  • OpenAI charts a complex path towards becoming a for-profit entity (archive)
    • Previous coverage (archive) from last Wednesday
    • The fact that OpenAI is a for-profit owned by a non-profit makes reorganizing it into a pure for-profit entity difficult
    • Legally, nonprofits aren't allowed to give assets to for-profits
    • Therefore, the non-profit arm of OpenAI will have to be compensated for its ownership stake in the for-profit entity
    • One possible solution is for the nonprofit to continue operations as a charity, using its ownership stake in OpenAI as a source of income
  • Gavin Newsom, governor of California, vetoes an AI safety bill
    • SB-1047 was a bill that would have mandated that all owners large AI models (where "large" is defined as costing more than $100 million to train) to have testing procedures and response plans for safety incidents
    • Would also have required kill-switches for these large models
    • Newsom vetoed because he thought the bill was too broadly focused on large models
    • Wants legislation that is more targeted towards specific harms, rather than a blanket regulation covering all models above a certain size, regardless of their use
    • Argued that legislation didn't account for the context of particular AI deployments
    • Worried about a chilling effect, especially on "open-source" models which are released by companies for anyone to use
  • Google unveils AlphaChip, a reinforcement learning AI for chip design
    • Work builds upon a 2020 research paper outlining a reinforcement learning method for automatically placing chip components
    • AlphaChip is an implementation of that method
    • Google has used it internally to build the layouts for newer versions of its Tensor Processing Units
    • Google has open-sourced the model weights behind AlphaChip, enabling anyone to use it
    • Has reportedly been adopted by other chip design firms, such as MediaTek
• Strike at US east coast ports set to start on Tuesday (archive)
  • No negotiations are currently taking place and none are scheduled before the midnight strike deadline
  • Would be the first coast-wide walkout since 1977
  • President Joe Biden has indicated that he does not plan to intervene (archive) with the Taft-Hartley Act in order to force International Longshoremen's Association workers to return to work
  • Previous coverage (archive) from Wednesday
• DirecTV agrees to buy Dish Network's TV business for the nominal price of $1
  • DirecTV will be purchasing Dish Network's TV business from its current owner, EchoStar
  • DirecTV will take on $9.75 billion of Dish Network's debt
  • EchoStar will continue to own Dish Network's other business lines, such as its 5G cellular network
  • EchoStar was looking to get out of the TV business so that it could focus on the more lucrative cellular network portion of the business
  • Cellular network was boosted by a forced sale of some of T-Mobile's assets to Dish, as part of the T-Mobile/Sprint merger
  • Deal still needs regulatory approval
  • Is scheduled to close in Q4 of 2025
• The UK phases out its last coal fired power plant
  • Coal is being replaced by natural gas and renewables
  • Coal use has also been restricted by EU regulations aimed at controlling acid rain

2024-09-27 Friday

• Ukraine War
  • Kupyansk region
    • Russian forces launched a major assault near Pishchane, which took heavy casualties and was repelled
  • New Ukrainian recruits often freeze in combat (archive)
    • Ukrainian commanders complain that new recruits often freeze or abandon their positions when they come under fire
    • Results in new recruits taking casualties at a much higher rate than veterans
    • Coordination between units remains a particular problem, with troop rotations proving to be a particular point of vulnerability that Russian forces have exploited repeatedly to advance
    • Field commanders note that Ukrainian trainers still have a Soviet-era mindset, and give passing grades to everyone regardless of their actual competence
    • Combat training is not realistic
    • This places more strain on veteran units leading to burnout there as well
    • Tatarigami wrote more about this on Monday
• The UK competition authority clears Amazon in an antitrust probe related to its investment in Anthropic (archive)
  • Amazon has invested $4 billion into Anthropic, and has taken a partial ownership position
  • This led the British Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) to investigate whether this would hamper competition
  • British officials closed the case today after concluding that they lacked jurisdiction, as Anthropic's revenue in the UK didn't meet the minimum threshold of £70 million per year
  • Also stated that Amazon's investment in Anthropic was unlikely to result in a relevant merger scenario
• AIs can now reliably beat reCAPTCHA v2
  • Paper preprint
  • Researchers at ETH Zurich created a system that combined VPNs, human-like mouse movements and a finetuned version of the You Only Look Once (YOLO) vision model to defeat Google's reCAPTCHA v2
  • reCAPTCHA v2 is the CAPTCHA that asks users to identify images containing motorcycles, fire hydrants, bridges, etc.
  • The fine-tuned vision model could identify images correctly between 69% of the time (motorcycles) and 100% of the time (fire hydrants)
  • Although reCAPTCHA v2 is obsolete, having been phased out in favor of reCAPTCHA v3, it is still used as a fallback when v3 gives a low confidence score

2024-09-26 Thursday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian troops have begun to move into Hirnyk
      • Sad but predictable — as I stated on Monday, Hirnyk and Vuhledar were the most vulnerable towns
      • Ever since Russian forces moved into Ukrainsk on September 17, Hirnyk has been at risk
    • It appears that Russian forces have advanced past Mykolaivka towards Myrnohrad
      • This implies that, in addition to Hirnyk, Selydove is at risk in the short term as well
    • Russian troops have also deployed thermite-drones near Vuhledar
• China's newest nuclear submarine sank next to the pier (archive)
  • Incident occurred in June or July
  • Was covered up by the Chinese government
  • The submarine that sank is reported as a Zhou-class
  • Was being built at Wuchang Shipyard, near Wuhan, on the Yangtze River
  • Most Chinese submarines have been built at Bohai Shipyards, in Huludao, however recently China has sought to diversify the shipyards that it uses to construct its submarines
  • Incident was reported by Thomas Shugart, an analyst working for the Center for New American Security who noticed the floating cranes working to raise the submarine in commercial satellite imagery
  • That's odd, because, as far as I know, there's no such thing as a Zhou-class
  • China's latest submarines are the Type 093B, also known as the Shang III class
  • China attempting to diversify submarine construction makes sense, because Bohai Shipyards have limited capacity and aren't capable of building very many submarines at a time
  • In the past, China has had to shut down construction of attack submarines to allow the shipyards to focus on building ballistic missile submarines
  • I've written more about the history of Chinese submarines
• Japan sends a ship through the Taiwan Strait for the first time (archive)
  • The United States and other nations routinely conduct freedom of navigation exercises by sending their ships through the Taiwan Strait separating Taiwan from mainland China
  • On September 25, the JS Sazanami, a Takanami-class destroyer, passed through the Taiwan Strait
  • Marks the first time since World War 2 that a Japanese military vessel has transited the Taiwan Strait
  • Ships from Australia and New Zealand ships also passed through the strait on the same day
  • This move comes in the aftermath of a Chinese aircraft carrier coming within 24 miles of the Japanese coastline and a Russian aircraft violating Japanese airspace

2024-09-25 Wednesday

• Ukraine War
  • No major territorial changes today
  • Reuters reports that the US will announce an $8 billion military aid package for Ukraine (archive)
    • Aid will come in two tranches
    • First tranche is $5.6 billion of the Presidential Drawdown Authority, which authorizes the President to send weapons to Ukraine from the US military's stocks
    • Second tranche is $2.4 billion under the Ukraine Security Assistance Program, which allows the administration to buy weapons from private companies on Ukraine's behalf
    • Ukraine will also receive Joint Standoff Weapons (JSOWs), a glide-bomb capable of striking targets from 130 km away
    • Will receive more ammunition for its artillery and HIMARS systems
  • Russia has reportedly established a secret drone factory in China (archive)
    • A subsidiary of the Russian arms company Almaz-Antey has established a factory in China to build a new long-range drone called the Garpiya-3 (G3)
    • The G3 can travel 2000 km with a 50 kg payload
    • Is an upgraded version of the Garpiya-A1
    • Two prototype models have reportedly already been delivered to the Russian Ministry of Defense for testing
    • There is reportedly a follow-up effort to make a drone comparable in capability to the US Reaper, with a payload of 400 kg
    • Delivery of the UAVs from China would represent a significant escalation
    • Would be the first time a whole weapons system was transferred from China to Russia
    • And yet we still hesitate to allow Ukraine to use long-range weapons to strike into Russia
• OpenAI is reportedly working on a plan to reorganize into a for-profit entity (archive)
  • Previous coverage (archive) from September 14
  • Currently OpenAI is structured as profit-capped corporation owned by a nonprofit
  • Reorganization would remove the non-profit portion and reorganize the company into a public benefit corporation
  • Would also give Sam Altman equity
  • New organization would make OpenAI more closely resemble a "normal" startup
  • However, it raises questions as to whether OpenAI can hold itself accountable to develop a safe AI
  • Now we see the true purpose behind the boardroom drama from last year
• OpenAI Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati resigns (archive)
  • During the boardroom coup, Murati was appointed interim CEO while Altman went into (temporary) exile
  • Since then, sources close to the company have stated that Murati was likely to leave
  • I guess Altman is cleaning house
• Google pays $2.7 billion to rehire Noam Shazeer (archive)
  • Noam Shazeer is one of the co-authors of "Attention Is All You Need", the seminal paper that introduced the Transformer architecture
  • After Google delayed releasing an LLM powered chatbot, Shazeer quit Google to found his own company, Character.AI
  • When Character.AI ran into financial trouble, Google paid $2.7 billion to rehire Shazeer and his co-founder Daniel De Freitas, and license Character.AI's technology
• Volkswagen isn't the only European carmaker in trouble (archive)
  • Volkswagen is not unique in having a high cost structure
  • Factory utilization rates for other European automakers, such as Stellantis and Renault, are similar to Volkswagen's
  • The difference for Volkswagen is that it committed to building electric vehicles at its highest cost plants, in Germany, putting it at a cost disadvantage to its competitors
  • Furthermore new car sales are down in Europe across the board
  • Union leaders are urging Volkswagen to commit to making affordable vehicles, even if that means they're internal combustion
  • Volkswagen management would like to close factories in Germany and move production to eastern Europe, but that will be difficult to do, as the union and the German state of Lower Saxony both hold seats on Volkswagen's board
  • Other automakers have shed jobs and closed factories, but Volkswagen's unique ownership structure makes it difficult for Volkswagen to do the same
• Shippers scramble as a strike at US east coast ports becomes more likely (archive)
  • Previous coverage (archive) from September 9
  • Shippers are bringing goods in early and making alternative arrangement to bring goods in via the West Coast or even via air freight
  • Scale of walkout, combined with the ongoing strike at Boeing, could affect US unemployment numbers
  • Would affect supply chains and would potentially stoke inflation
  • Might result in a shortage of bananas as East Coast ports handle the majority of US banana imports and it doesn't make sense to use air freight to ship bananas
• Google files antitrust complaint against Microsoft in Europe (archive)
  • Alleges that Microsoft is using Windows to lock customers into Azure
  • According to Google, Microsoft is allowing customers to set up Windows VMs on Azure for free, but is saying that if they wish to set up Windows VMs on competing cloud services, they'll have to purchase new Windows Server licenses

2024-09-24 Tuesday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Ukrainian forces have advanced near Veseloe
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian troops have entered Vuhledar
    • This is significant, because this is the first time that Russian forces have actually managed to reach Vuhledar
    • In 2023, they assaulted Vuhledar, but the Ukrainians were able to fend them off in the fields outside the city
  • Kharkiv region
    • Ukrainian forces continue to advance in Vovchansk, and have retaken a major factory complex
  • Ukrainians are increasingly frustrated with the Biden administration's refusal to grant permission for Ukraine to conduct long-range strikes into Russia (archive)
    • One of the asks that Zelensky will make of Biden is to allow Ukraine to use ATACMS to strike into Russia
    • Ukrainian officials are frustrated, as they had expected this permission to have been granted months or even years ago
    • Ukrainians point out that the US has a pattern of insistent denial followed by acquiescence
      • HIMARS
      • Tanks
      • Fighter jets
    • Defense Department officials retort that they have yet to see a plan from the Ukrainians that shows how granting permission to strike inside Russia with ATACMS would help Ukraine on the battlefield
    • However, European officials disagree, and argue that giving weapons but restraining how they're used is incoherent policy
  • Russian defense spending will reach 6.2% of GDP next year
    • The Russian economy is adapting to elevated military spending
    • Over one third of the government's budget is now allocated to the military
    • Russia will get the money for this from hydrocarbon exports revenues and import duties
    • Will cut spending on social programs
    • The Russian government is prioritizing military strength over social stability — will deal with social and economic problems when they arrive
    • Sadly, 6.2% GDP on military spending is perfectly sustainable — the US was spending 6.5% of GDP on military spending during the Reagan administration
  • The Economist writes about the benefits that Iran, North Korea and China are receiving from the war in Ukraine (archive)
    • Iran gets feedback about how its drones (and soon, ballistic missiles) fare against Western countermeasures
    • North Korea gets feedback about its missiles as well
    • China gets information about Western weapons systems, many of which are also possessed by Taiwan
    • Russia is also giving technical expertise regarding missile defense, aircraft design and submarines to China in exchange for Chinese microelectronics, machine tools and heavy equipment
    • Iran, likewise is receiving Russian assistance on space technology, which is also applicable to ICBMs
    • However, the cooperation between Russia, Iran, China and North Korea comes with limits
    • No sign that Russia is sharing nuclear technology with its three partners
    • Russia has also declined to send missiles to the Houthis
    • China has not sent any weapons to Russia, despite having ample capacity to do so, because it risks secondary sanctions from the US
    • Sending weapons would also undermine the neutral mediator image that China is trying to portray for itself
    • Iran and China have a history of conflicts with the Soviet Union
    • Furthermore, China is concerned by Russia's increasing closeness with North Korea — gives North Korea a second patron and dilutes Chinese influence
• China raises its retirement age (archive)
  • Blue collar women — from 50 to 55
  • White collar women — from 55 to 58
  • For men — from 60 to 63
  • Like increases to retirement ages in other countries, this drew a public backlash
  • However, censors have quickly removed critical replies to the retirement age reform on social media
  • Pension reforms do not adjust hukou system, which gives people with a rural hukou a much smaller pension than people with an urban registration
  • Perhaps Xi Jinping thinks that the broader reforms to hukou (archive) proposed last month will fix that problem by allowing more people to gain urban hukou
• A Huawei laptop reveals China's progress towards technological self-sufficiency
  • In response to American export restrictions, China is mandating that local suppliers of electronics, cars, and other durable goods use made-in-China integrated circuits
  • The Huawei Qingyun L540 is an example of that localization
  • Uses a locally-designed HiSilicon CPU
  • Runs a locally designed variant of Linux, with locally built applications
  • However, there are still many components, such as memory, SSD storage and various controller chips that come either from the US or US allies, like South Korea
• Telegram turns over more data about users in response to police requests (archive)
  • Law enforcement officers had long complained that Telegram would ignore their requests for information about users engaging in illegal activity on the platform
  • Now, after the arrest of Telegram founder Pavel Durov in France, Telegram is doing more to comply with these requests
• AMD CEO Lisa Su expects that, in the future, AIs will be trained on custom chips rather than GPUs (archive)
  • Right now the pace of change in models ensures that GPUs are the most favored option
  • GPUs are quasi-generalist chips with "just enough" programmability to allow them to be used for different models
  • However, as the AI market matures and AI companies figure out what specific functions they need, the market will gravitate towards more specialized hardware
  • I think a useful analogy is with Bitcoin mining
  • When Bitcoin mining started out, GPUs were the favored tool
  • Now, however, all the major mining pools are using specialized application specific integrated circuits (ASICs)
  • Lisa Su is stating that AI hardware will undergo a similar evolution
  • To me, this is the greatest threat to nVidia — it's not that nVidia GPUs will suddenly stop being the best, it's that GPUs in general will become increasingly irrelevant to AI
• Booting Linux on the Intel 4004
  • Original blogpost with further project details
  • Video demonstration
  • The Intel 4004 is the world's first commercial microprocessor
  • 2,300 transistors running at 740 kHz
  • Dmitry Grinberg managed to boot Debian Linux on it by writing an emulator for a MIPS R3000
  • Boots Linux in 4.76 days
  • Notably the 4004 was designed for calculators, so it doesn't have any logical operators built in hardware
  • Logical operators must be implemented in software using arithmetic and shift operators
• Sandia National Labs performs an experiment that demonstrates that nuclear weapons can deflect asteroids as large as 4km across
  • Used the Z-machine to generate high-energy X-rays, which simulated the radiation of a nuclear explosion
  • X-rays were directed at rock samples similar in composition to asteroids
  • X-rays vaporized the surface of the rock sample and imparted significant momentum to the rock
  • By extrapolating from rock sample tests, Sandia researchers were able to determine that a nuclear weapon would be able to deflect an asteroid up to 4km across

2024-09-23 Monday

• Ukraine War
  • Donestsk region
    • Russian forces mounted a major attack near Pobjeda, which was repelled
    • Russian forces also attacked towards Tsukuryne
    • Russian forces advance on Mykolaivka
    • Emil Kastehelmi has another analysis thread, this time focusing on Vuhledar
    • Looking at the control map, it seems like the towns that are most in danger are Hirnyk and Vuhledar
  • Kupyansk region
    • Russian forces expand southwards near Pischane
    • It's possible that they're trying to capture the bridge over the Oskil river at Kruhlyakivka
  • Kursk region
    • Fighting continues near Liubimovka
    • No further word of the Ukrainian attack near Veseloe
  • Financial Times report from Donetsk (archive)
    • Russian forces in the Pokrovsk area have a significant firepower and manpower advantage over the defenders
      • 10:1 advantage in shells fired
      • 8:1 advantage in troops
    • Russian forces have also learned lessons from Wagner, and have adopted the tactics that Wagner used in Bakhmut
    • The troops guarding Vuhledar are exhausted, and lack air defenses
  • To counter Ukrainian "interceptor" UAVs, Russian forces have started equipping their reconnaissance UAVs with built in jamming systems that turn on when they detect the radio frequencies used to control interceptors
  • Tatarigami writes about the systemic leadership problems in the Ukrainian military that are hampering its ability to defend against the Russian onslaught
    • While enlisted men and junior officers are performing well at the tactical level, they're being let down by their senior leadership
    • Inexperienced units are being assigned to guard high-risk areas of the battlefield
    • Brigades are having to develop their own internal training programs because new recruits are not being sufficiently prepared for combat by training centers
    • The Ukrainian military still does not have a formal after-action-review process to identify and disseminate lessons learned in combat
• Russia suffered a major failure in testing its newest nuclear missile (archive)
  • Test was of the RS-28 Sarmat
  • Appears that missile either exploded in or very close to the silo
  • At one point Russian officials had stated that the RS-28 would be ready by 2018
  • However the missile has been repeatedly delayed since then, and this test failure is likely to result in further delays
  • This is the fourth failed test of the RS-28, and raises doubts about the viability of the missile
• The Biden administration proposes banning Chinese vehicles with self-driving features (archive)
  • The administration is concerned that self-driving features which report back to China could be a privacy threat
  • Vehicles might be shut down or caused to crash in the event of a conflict with China in order to cause chaos on American roads
  • The ban is a proactive step that seeks to prevent internet-connected Chinese vehicles and components from entering US supply chains
  • This would functionally be a total ban on Chinese electric vehicles, since all of them come with some kind of driver assistance
• Boeing returns to the bargaining table with the International Association of Machinists in hopes of ending the strike (archive)
  • Offers a 30% pay increase instead of the previous 25% increase offered
  • Restores annual bonuses
  • Increases company contributions to 401(k) plans

2024-09-22 Sunday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces advance further into Toretsk
    • Russian forces have captured Nevske
  • Kursk region
    • Russian forces are attacking Liubimovka
    • It doesn't seem like the Ukrainian flanking offensive near Veseloe has had much of an effect thus far
  • A dispatch from Snake Island (archive)
    • The Wall Street Journal spoke with members of the Timur Unit, an elite unit that's part of Ukraine's intelligence agency, about the recapture of Snake Island
    • Recapturing Snake Island was both a practical and symbolic victory
    • Symbolic, because, on the first day of the war, the Ukrainian outpost on Snake Island told the cruiser Moskva, "Russian warship, go fuck yourself" when asked to surrender
    • Practical, because taking Snake Island opened up a sea route out of Odesa for grain ships
    • Russia is still striking the island with missiles, even though they have not made an effort to recapture it
    • Ukraine used innovative tactics, including firing howitzers and MLRS from barges at the island in order to pummel the Russian garrison there
    • The initial mission to reestablish Ukrainian control over Snake Island after Russian forces evacuated it almost foundered as bad weather forced them to abandon their initial speedboat and use an inflatable with no motor
    • After demining the island, Ukraine has established a small garrison on Snake Island and uses Snake Island as a base from which to launch raids on Russian-held oil platforms in the Black Sea
• The EU's defense commissioner, Andrius Kubilius, advocates for the EU to mandate that member states must stockpile ammunition (archive)
  • Would function similarly to the EU's current natural gas stockpile, where countries maintain reserves and share with neighbors as necessary
  • The stockpile would create a stable long-term demand signal for production, a key factor in convincing defense manufacturers to invest in additional capacity
  • In March, the EU allocated €500 million under the Act in Support of Ammunition Production (ASAP) act to boost EU-wide 155mm shell production to 2 million per year
  • Kubilius wants a debt-funded EU-wide fund in order to bolster the EU's defenses
  • However member states, notably Germany and the Netherlands, oppose EU-wide bonds for defense spending
• TSMC and Samsung discuss building chip fabs in the Middle East (archive)
  • Discussions are still in the early phases and may not result in any actual investment
  • Fabs would be funded by Mubadala, the UAE's sovereign wealth fund
  • Efforts are a result of the growing AI boom and a desire to diversify chip production away from Taiwan
  • Sure, let's move chip fabs out of missile range of China and into missile range of Iran​/the Houthis, I'm sure that'll go well
  • Chip-making requires large amounts of ultra-pure water, which would be problematic for the UAE to supply
  • The Biden administration is concerned that factories in the Middle East could be a source for chips to China, a country with which the UAE has extensive trade relations
  • Mubadala has experience investing in chip manufacturing, as it was the owner of AMD spinoff GlobalFoundries before taking it public in 2021
• Twitter has hired lawers to represent it in Brazil, a first step towards complying with the Brazilian government's demands (archive)
  • Brazil had banned Twitter on September 2, after Twitter refused to ban accounts that had been accused of spreading misinformation
  • Brazil's Supreme Court has stipulated that Twitter must do three things before it overturns the ban
    1. Appoint a legal representative in the country
    2. Block accounts found to be spreading misinformation
    3. Pay a fine
  • Twitter's hiring of a law firm in Brazil represents the first of those steps
• Perplexity, an AI-powered search engine, is in talks with advertisers as it seeks to challenge Google (archive)
  • Perplexity is reportedly in talks with major advertisers, such as Nike and Mariott, to allow them to place sponsored follow-up questions after Perplexity's AI search engine provides an answer to a user's query
  • Perplexity currently makes money via a subscription model, like all the other AIs
  • The timing of this is interesting, because it comes right as Google's deep integration between ads and search is coming under anti-trust scrutiny
  • That will likely prevent Google from acting as ruthlessly as it otherwise would have to undercut Perplexity's experiment
• Linux kernel 6.12 brings some interesting new features
  • Finally enables the realtime preemption modifications, completing a 20-year long process to allow Linux to be used for "realtime" applications like industrial control machinery, which require deterministic response times
    • Background article from 2009 explaining why realtime preemption is important
  • Replaces the current scheduler with the new EEVDF scheduler which will help more latency sensitive programs
  • Also adds a way for users to implement custom schedulers using eBPF

2024-09-21 Saturday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces have advanced to Leonidivka, potentially opening a flank on Niu York
    • Russian forces have advanced past Chervonopopivka to Nevske
    • Russian forces attack towards Novoukrainka, in an effort to cut Vuhledar off from the west
      • I think this is pretty serious — Vuhledar is another notable strong point in Ukrainian defenses, which had defeated significant Russian attacks in the past, notably at the beginning of 2023, when Bakhmut was also under attack
  • Ukrainian long range drones hit two Russian ammunition depots
    • First depot to be hit is near Tikhoretsk, in Krasnodar Krai, on the other side of the Sea of Azov from Crimea
    • Second depot is in Oktyabrskii, south of Toropets, where a depot had been hit previously (archive)
  • According to US officials, Iran has not sent launchers for the ballistic missiles that it shipped to Russia (archive)
    • Previous reporting (archive)
    • One possibility is that Russia might be planning to build its own launchers, as Iranian launchers might not be suitable for the cold winters and rough terrain of Ukraine
    • Another possibility is that Iran is holding back launchers as a bargaining chip in arms control talks with the West
• The chief of Boeing's defense and space unit is leaving the company (archive)
  • Ted Colbert had only taken over the division in March, under previous CEO Dave Calhoun
  • Had reorganized defense division into four large groups, down from eight
  • Defense unit was responsible for the troubled Starliner program
  • In addition to Starliner, it had taken write-downs on contracts to create a successor to the VC-25s that are often used as Air Force One
  • Was also affected by a fatal Osprey crash off the coast of Japan, which led to a temporary grounding of the entire Osprey fleet
• Scientists at the University of California, Berkeley have developed a method to break down polyethylene and polypropylene plastic into propylene and isobutylene
  • Polyethylene and polypropylene are extremely commonly used plastics
  • Used for bags and food packaging
  • Researchers used a catalyst to break down mixed polyethylene and polypropylene stocks into a mixutre propylene and isobutylene gas
  • Both propylene and isobutylene can be used as feedstock for plastics and other chemicals
  • Approach still needs to demonstrate that it can be scaled up

2024-09-20 Friday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Ukrainian forces renew their attacks near Veseloe
    • This seems like another effort to hit the flanks of the Russian counterattacks near Nikolaevo-Darino
    • Looking back, it seems like the report from August 19 which stated that Ukraine had captured Tolpino and Kolychevka was probably misleading
    • I don't think the Ukrainians ever got past Korenevo with enough forces to hold territory
    • Ukrainian troops might have advanced to Tolpino, but it doesn't seem like they were able to capture the town
  • Kherson region
    • Russian forces are increasingly targeting random civilians with drone attacks near Antonivka
  • The Wall Street Journal reports that Russia may be preparing for another round of mobilization (archive)
    • Although Russia has had success near Pokrovsk, it has come at a heavy price
    • The UK Defense Minister, John Healey, estimated that Russia was losing 1,100 soldiers per day
    • The Russian government has stepped up recruitment, increasing the signing bonus that it gives to new volunteers, but that hasn't been enough to make up for the losses
    • The Ukrainian incursion into Kursk has forced Russia to pull troops from sectors of Ukraine, such as Zaporizhzhia and Kherson, where fighting has been less intense
    • As a result, officials are reportedly pressuring Putin to conduct another round of mobilization
    • However, a further round of mobilization would be politically more difficult to conduct
    • My prediction is that mobilization won't happen until something goes catastrophically wrong for Russia
    • Putin's entire approach to managing the war has been procrastination
    • The first round of mobilization was a reaction to Ukraine's recapturing territory in Kharkiv Oblast in the autumn of 2022
    • As long as Russian forces are creeping forward around Pokrovsk, as long as the Ukrainians are contained in Kursk, as long as Putin can keep claiming wins today, he'll put off further conscription until tomorrow
    • The thing that's saving the Russians right now is that the Ukrainians are also starved of troops, as they wait for new recruits to be trained after their own second round of mobilization
    • See also this article from yesterday, where Ukrainian commanders lament not having enough troops to exploit Russian weaknesses
    • I would also caution about reading too much into the fact that Ukraine has a smaller overall population than Russia — both Russia and Ukraine have enough men to continue this war for a very long time
    • Countries with smaller populations win against countries with larger populations all the time — after all, the US lost the Vietnam War
  • Russia is struggling to build trade links for commodities other than oil (archive)
    • The US imposed new rules that prohibit foreign banks from dealing with Russia (archive)
    • These secondary sanctions appear to have been effective in reducing trade between Russia and countries like Turkey and China
      • Sanctions aren't very effective at stopping a country from doing things, but they are effective at slowing things down and making them more complicated
      • The theory behind sanctions is that this drag, over time, will be persuasive
      • However, in practice, countries such as Russia, Iran, North Korea, Venezuela, etc. always seem to prioritize their geopolitical objectives over having access to global markets
    • Russia was immediately successful in rerouting oil supplies to India and China because oil can be transported in tankers
    • However, it has not been as successful in rerouting natural gas supplies, as natural gas is much more efficiently transported via pipeline
    • Russian ability to liquefy natural gas for tanker transport is limited
    • Notably Xi Jinping has refused to authorize a new gas pipeline (archive) between Russia and China
      • Xi Jinping understands that Russia is more desperate to export gas than China is to import gas
      • Therefore he's holding out for price guarantees that will ensure that China will receive the gas at a favorable rate
    • Russia's underdeveloped rail infrastructure in Siberia has hurt its ability to export to Central Asia
    • Furthermore, those rail links are now overstretched in bringing imports from China
    • Russia is attempting to implement a trade route to India through Azerbaijan and Iran via the Caspian Sea and Persian Gulf, but that effort is hampered by lack of funding and poor Iranian infrastructure
  • Ursula von der Leyen announces a new €35 billion loan to Ukraine (archive)
    • Loan will be collaterized by interest on frozen Russian assets in Western banks
    • The amount of the loan is a compromise
    • The original amount was to be greater, and the US was meant to participate
    • However, the US conditioned its participation (archive) on the EU agreeing to indefinitely freeze Russian assets in order to ensure that the loan would pose little risk to lenders
    • The EU was unable to provide this assurance, because of Hungarian insistence that freezes on Russian assets be time-limited
    • Therefore the EU proceeded on its own with a smaller loan
  • Ramzan Kadyrov accuses Elon Musk of remotely disabling his Cybertruck (archive)
    • For context, on August 19, Kadyrov posted a video (archive) of himself driving a Cybertruck with a machine gun mounted to the bed
    • Kadyrov alleges that he received the Cybertruck as a gift from Elon himself
    • Claims that the vehicle was sent to Ukraine where it "performed admirably"
    • If by "performed admirably" he means "got a lot of views on TikTok or Telegram", I believe him
  • Ukraine bans Telegram from state-owned devices (archive)
    • Ban comes after Kyrylo Budanov, head of Ukrainian intelligence, submitted evidence of Russia's ability to spy on Telegram users
    • Ban only applies to official devices, not personal ones
• China sentences a Taiwanese person for the first time on charges of separatism (archive)
  • Yang Chih-yuan was a Taiwanese living in China
  • Was arrested in 2022, in Wenzhou province
  • Had previously founded a minor political party in Taiwan
  • His sentencing prompted the Taiwanese government to issue an advisory telling citizens traveling to China to take caution
  • Separatism charges, in the past, have been directed more at Uighur activists than Taiwanese
  • Officials from the Communist Party have stated that the sentence is intended to intimidate the people of Taiwan
  • More self-defeating actions from the Chinese Communist Party when it comes to Taiwan
  • I don't see how indicating that Taiwanese people will risk jail by traveling to the mainland will make the Taiwanese people more sympathetic to unification with China
• Microsoft reaches a deal with Constellation Energy to restart the Three Mile Island nuclear plant (archive)
  • Unit that would restart is Unit 1, which is adjacent to the reactor that suffered the infamous meltdown in 1979
  • Unit 1 had been retired in 2019 because it was no longer economically viable to operate
  • Three Mile Island plant will be renamed the Crane Clean Energy Center
  • Will generate 835 MW for Microsoft's data centers
  • Driven by increasing power demands for AI applications
  • Restart will be challenging but Microsoft and Constellation are betting that there will be enough sustained demand from data centers to make Unit 1 economically sustainable once again
• Intel places its foundries under a wholly-owned subsidiary (archive)
  • Intel had already started reporting its foundry division's financial results separately, in an effort to increase the separation between the design side and the manufacturing side of the company
  • This restructuring allows the foundry division to seek outside financing independently of the parent organization
  • Intel has also reached an agreement with Amazon to manufacture custom chips for AWS
  • Won a $3 billion Department of Defense contract to build semiconductor manufacturing capacity for national security applications
  • It also makes the foundry division easier to spin off, should Intel want to do what AMD did in 2009 when it spun off GlobalFoundries
• Semiconductor process node names do not reflect transistor sizes (archive)
  • Semiconductor process node names ("22 nm", "14 nm", etc.) at one point reflected the "gate-pitch" or the distance between two gates on a single transistor
  • However, these names diverged from that statistic in the '90s
  • At this point, semiconductor manufacturers assign node names somewhat arbitrarily
  • This is all well known to people within the industry, but it bears repeating

2024-09-19 Thursday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Supposedly Ukrainain forces are on the offensive once again near Glushkovo, but there are few confirmed details from the area
  • Donetsk region
    • In the north of Donetsk, Russian forces advance west of Chervonopopivka
    • Around Pokrovsk it doesn't seem like much has changed over the past day
  • US officials note that Ukraine has been able to rapidly train maintenance crews for F-16s (archive)
    • US officials have been impressed at how quickly Ukrainian forces have learned training material for the F-16
    • One consistent theme in this war is that the US has underestimated Ukraine's ability to provide logistics for the Western weapons that have been given
    • In many ways, the Ukrainian military is less bureaucratic than our own
      • Much younger military — bureaucracy hasn't had a chance to set in
      • Fighting a war — great incentive to avoid unnecessary bureaucracy
  • A dispatch from a drone unit on the front lines
    • Drones drop anti-tank mines and small "mini-bombs" on individual soldiers
    • Jamming is pervasive and "friendly" jamming is often as much of a problem as enemy EW
    • It seems like there's a disconnect between Ukrainian drone units and Ukrainian infantry units
    • There's a need for "limited" jammers that can discriminate between the frequencies used by enemy drones and those used by friendly drones
  • Ukrainska Pravda has a long article discussing the issues that led to the retreat towards Pokrovsk
    • New soldiers are less well-trained than the experienced veterans they've replaced
    • Artillery ammunition shortages continue to be a problem
    • There is a disconnect between Ukrainian front-line units and Ukrainian logistics units which dig trenches — often the pre-prepared trenches are dug in totally unsuitable locations, which forces retreating Ukrainian front-line units to re-dig new fortifications
    • Example: Pre-dug trenches are dug in open fields that are easily targeted by artillery or drones
    • Once the Russians started advancing past Avdiivka, not enough was done to spoil their paths of advance
    • Minefields that had supposedly been laid proved to be nonexistent
    • The Ukrainian military is drawing a distinction between offensive and defensive units — the units that were deployed to Kursk were primarily offensive units, which might have been wasted committed to a fight that they didn't train for near Pokrovsk
    • However opening the Kursk front has not led to a meaningful decrease in pressure on Pokrovsk — Russian attacks in Pokrovsk have actually intensified since Ukraine invaded Kursk
    • The main problem appears to be personnel — Ukrainian commanders stated that there are known weaknesses in the Russian flanks, but they don't have the personnel to assault them
• How a continuing resolution could hurt the Air Force in 2025 (archive)
  • Delays in modernizing space launch and testing equipment
  • Would prevent the Air Force from buying the amount of long-range missiles that it needs
  • Delays the production of new jet trainers
  • Delays procurement of new F-35s
  • Delays procurment of advanced Collaborative Combat Aircraft UAVs
  • I genuinely think that the Congressional budgeting process, which results in these continuing resolutions, is a greater threat to national security than China
  • When people ask, "Why are defense programs so expensive?" one of the factors they often overlook is the huge risk premiums that defense contractors have to charge in order to guard against contingencies like these
  • Low missile inventories are a well known problem, but without stable funding, no contractor is going to be willing to invest in new plant, equipment and personnel to improve production rates
• Three Wasp-class amphibious landing ships have had mechanical problems in the last few months (archive)
  • The USS Iwo Jima suffered a mechanical problem on September 5 while conducting exercises off the coast of Virginia
  • Earlier this year the USS Wasp and USS Boxer suffered mechanical issues causing them to return to port
  • The maintenance issues reflect the increased strain caused by the loss of the USS Bonhomme Richard (archive), which was declared a total loss after it suffered a fire while down for maintenance
  • Wasp-class amphibious assault ships are deploying undermanned by 20%, which makes it difficult for ships to complete routine maintenance while at sea, further increasing the likelihood of mechanical breakdown
  • These mechanical problems hinder training and could potentially impact the ability of the US Navy and the US Marine Corps to respond to unexpected crises

2024-09-18 Wednesday

• Ukraine War
  • No major changes to the front-lines today
  • A Ukrainian drone attack causes a large explosion at an ammunition depot in Tver (archive)
    • Explosion occurred at an arsenal near Toropets
    • Heat from fire and explosions was intense enough to be picked up by NASA fire monitoring satellites
    • Force from explosions was powerful enough to register as a small earthquake
    • Toropets is approximately 300 miles from the Ukrainian border
    • Shows that Ukrainian drones can launch strikes deep into Russia itself
• Walkie-talkies explode across Lebanon, in an apparent continuation of the pager attack from yesterday (archive)
  • Walkie-talkies all had new batteries
  • Increasingly indicative of supply-chain compromises
  • This attack was narrower, because the new batteries had been distributed to fewer people
  • These attacks are significant not for their physical impact, but for their psychological impact
  • Hezbollah will now have to spend a lot of time working out how these devices were compromised, and will be forced to revert to e.g. paper messages sent by courier
  • During this time, decision-making will be slowed and coordinated actions will be more difficult to carry out
• The EU's €1.49 billion ($1.66 billion) fine against Google for anticompetitive business practices has been overturned on appeal (archive)
  • Fine had been imposed in 2019 (archive) as a penalty for Google limiting how websites could display ads sold by rivals
  • Google had ended the practice in 2016, so no changes in Google's business practices were sought
  • The General Court of the EU upheld most of the regulators' findings, but overturned the fine after stating that the European Commission's assessments of the duration of contract provisions were incorrect
  • The European Commission can still appeal this decision further to the European Court of Justice
  • This ruling comes a week after the ECJ upheld (archive) a €2.42 billion ($2.7 billion) fine against Google for favoring its own shopping service in search results (archive)
• Meta is being investigated by the EU for anticompetitive business practices relating to Facebook Marketplace (archive)
  • Meta is accused of unfairly favoring Facebook Marketplace links in Facebook
  • This follows up on preliminary findings issued by the EC in December 2022 which stated that by making Facebook Marketplace the default option for classifieds on Facebook, Meta had given Facebook Marketplace an unfair advantage
  • Furthermore, Meta is accused of imposing restrictions on competing classified ad services which seek to advertise on Facebook or Instagram
  • Normally I get a bit annoyed by EU antitrust actions, but this one makes sense
  • The Facebook​/Facebook Marketplace scenario is analogous to Windows​/Internet Explorer
  • It makes sense that Meta shouldn't be able to use its dominant position in one market (social networking) to unfairly privilege its business in another (online classifieds)
• Boeing furloughs thousands of employees in order to save cash during the machinists' strike
  • Boeing machinists voted to go on strike on Friday
  • The strike halted production of the 737 Max, 777, and 767
  • This has led to cash-flow issues for Boeing, which is why it's having to furlough workers
• The SEC is preparing rules to allow stocks to be priced in increments of $0.005 (archive)
  • Is an effort to reduce bid-ask spreads
  • Will apply to heavily traded stocks whose bid-ask spread frequently hits the current minimum of $0.01 (i.e. stocks with a lot of trading volume)
  • Approximately 1700 securities are expected to qualify for the half-cent increments
• 23-and-me board resigns amid cash-flow problems for the DNA testing company (archive)
  • 23-and-me had, at one point, a $6 billion valuation
  • That valuation has collapsed by over 99.9% to $169 million
  • Has never turned a profit
  • No recurring revenue — people only need to take a DNA test once
  • The effort to use 23-and-me's DNA database as a tool for drug development hasn't worked out
  • CEO Anne Wojcicki announced a plan to take the company private, which prompted the board resignation
  • Wojcicki controls 49% of the company, which prevents the board from entertaining other competing offers
  • The directors who resigned said that Wojcicki's offer lacked committed financing and was not priced at a premium above the existing share price

2024-09-17 Tuesday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces advance into the center of Ukrainsk
    • Russian forces make advances in Hrodivka, taking control of almost the entire town
  • Kursk region
    • Russian forces advance on Borki
    • Russian forces spotted west of Nikolaevo-Darino
    • This seems to indicate that Ukrainian forces have withdrawn from Gordeevka area, where fighting was taking place yesterday
• Nine killed and thousands injured as pagers explode across Lebanon (archive)
  • Pagers belong to Hezbollah
  • Israeli sabotage suspected
  • Israeli government hasn't commented
  • Explosions followed what Shin Bet, the Israeli internal security service, reported as a foiled assassination attempt on an Israeli official
  • According to the New York Times (archive), the pagers had been sabotaged by inserting small amounts of the explosive PETN into their batteries
  • Hezbollah had reverted to using pagers as a way of thwarting Israeli monitoring of more modern means of communication
• Instagram is using AI to detect whether users are underage and is proactively restricting accounts (archive)
  • Teen accounts will be restricted by default from the kinds of content they're able to access
  • Will display notifications to close the app after an hour
  • Notifications will be muted overnight by default
  • Removing the restrictions will be an opt-in process for parents, who will have to use a parental supervision tool to lift the content restrictions
  • If underage users attempt to create unrestricted accounts by lying about their age, they will be prompted to send proof of age, such as a photo ID
  • Can also send a photo of their face, which will be checked by an AI to determine if they look old enough
  • Meta will also roll out an AI model which will police existing accounts to determine if they likely belong to teenagers
  • This all sounds like an incredible dystopia
  • The war on general purpose computing continues
  • I look forward to seeing the creative workarounds that teens will come up with to try to get past these restrictions
• Brazil seizes cash from Starlink and Twitter to cover fines imposed on Twitter
  • Banks carried out orders to transfer fines from Starlink and Twitter's accounts to the government
  • Bank accounts were unfrozen afterwards
  • Brazil's Supreme Court found that Starlink and Twitter were part of the same de facto economic group, so therefore it was justified to take money from Starlink to pay off fines owed by Twitter
• Google announces a privately-funded nonprofit project to create a constellation of fire-monitoring satellites
  • FireSat will be a constellation of 50 small satellites in low-earth orbit
  • Managed by the Earth Fire Alliance (EFA) nonprofit
  • Will use multispectral infrared to image the earth from orbit, looking for hotspots indicative of wildfires
  • Infrared imagery will feed into a Google AI system that will determine if a particular hotspot is likely to be a wildfire
  • AI system was trained with satellite data from controlled burns
  • At full capability, the constellation will be able to report new wildfires in as little as 20 minutes
  • Satellites will be built by Muon Space and will likely be launched by SpaceX
  • While NASA and Planet labs also have fire-detection capabilities, they don't have the resolution or refresh rate envisioned by FireSat
• Apple stops the rollout of iPadOS 18 after some users report that their devices had been bricked by the update
  • Apple is offering hardware replacements to users whose devices are affected
  • Affected devices appear to be the new M4 iPad Pros
  • Uncharacteristic for Apple to botch an upgrade like this

2024-09-16 Monday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces advance near Stupochky
      • This is a significant advance across the canal that separates Chasiv Yar from Bakhmut
      • Opens up a new flank against Chasiv Yar
      • Puts Kostyantynivka under greater pressure
  • Kursk region
    • Russian forces attack Gordeevka, Vnezapnoe and Byakhovo
    • Does this mean that Ukrainian forces have been pushed out of Sadovoye Tovarishchestvo Glushkovo?
  • Kharkiv region
    • Ukrainian forces advance in Vovchansk, pushing Russians out of the city center
  • Kupyansk region
    • Russian forces advance near Kolisnykivka, and are within 4 km of the Oskil River
  • According to Anthony Blinken, Russia has agreed to share nuclear technology with Iran (archive)
    • It would make sense as a quid-pro-quo for the short-range ballistic missiles that Iran is reportedly supplying to Russia (archive)
    • Raises questions about Israel's reluctance to aid Ukraine — Iran getting a nuclear weapon is considered a red line for Israel, and here Russia is, helping Iran towards, if not over, that line
  • General Syrsky announces an overhaul of basic training for Ukrainian soldiers
    • I think this is underrated
    • One of the problems that Ukraine has faced this year is that after two years of war, the quality of the Ukrainian military has also become very uneven
    • A key factor in the success of Russian forces after the fall of Avdiivka has been the fact that a Ukrainian unit broke at Ocheretyne
    • Improving the quality of basic training is key to allowing Ukraine to get some relief for its most competent and experienced units
    • It should have been done sooner, but that could be said of so many things in this war
• Thierry Breton has resigned his post and pulled his candidacy for the European Commission (archive)
  • Breton was EU commissioner for the internal market
  • Notable for being the EU's chief enforcer of the Digital Services Act (DSA) and Digital Markets Act (DMA)
  • Was also the EU's coordinator for increasing ammunition production to aid Ukraine
  • Resigned after posting an acrimonious note on social media pointed at EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen
  • Accused President Leyen of promising France more influence on the EU Commission if someone other than Breton were nominated to be the French representative
  • I bet Musk is very happy about this — he and Breton butted head several times over Twitter's policies for handling disinformation
• Boeing takes immediate action to cut costs and preserve cash during the machinists' strike (archive)
  • Hiring freeze
  • Parts orders for the 737, 767 and 777 programs canceled
  • Temporary furloughs are under discussion
  • The immediate priority for Boeing CFO Brian West is to hoard cash and preserve Boeing's credit rating
• Amazon tells its employees to return to the office five days a week (archive)
  • Official Amazon announcement
  • In addition to returning to the office five days a week, Amazon will be reducing the ratio of managers to individual contributors
  • This is more evidence that the pandemic was just a blip

2024-09-15 Sunday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces have made many small advances, but no new towns have come under threat
  • Kursk region
    • Ukrainian forces are fighting west of Sadovoye Tovarishchestvo Glushkovo
  • Russian state-owned banks open branches in occupied Ukraine (archive)
    • Banks such as Sbersbank and VTB are already subject to stringent Western sanctions, so there is little additional pressure that can be brought to bear to prevent them from aiding the Russian government's occupation
    • However, privately owned Russian businesses are still wary of operating in the occupied regions
    • Residents of the occupied regions rely on an informal courier service, ordering items to addresses in Southern Russia, which are then couriered into the occupied territory
    • These courier services operate informally via Telegram groups
  • Ukrainian Defense Intelligence chief Kyrilo Budanov says that Russia has increased its production of ballistic missiles and glide bombs
• The Philippines has withdrawn its coast guard ship in a stand-off over a disputed reef (archive)
  • Stand-off was over Sabina Shoal
  • Sabina Shoal is near Second Thomas Shoal, the scene of other confrontations between Chinese and Philippine forces
  • Philippine ship was forced to withdraw after being blocked and rammed by a Chinese coast guard vessel
  • The Philippine government has said that another ship will be dispatched to the area
  • China claims sovereignty over almost the entire South China Sea, which includes many small islands and reefs that are within the exclusive economic zone of other countries
  • These claims have no basis in international maritime law, according to the Permanent Court of Arbitration which judged competing claims from China and the Philippines under the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS)

2024-09-14 Saturday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces continue to press forward around Ukrainsk
    • Russians have also made marginal gains around Hryhorivka, near Chasiv Yar
  • Kursk region
    • Ukrainian forces have reached Obukhovka, on the outskirts of Veseloe
    • Fighting continues around Korenevo, and is especially heavy near Liubimovka
    • Although this attack was repelled, it was dangerous that the Russians managed to get so close to the Sudzha-Korenevo road
    • A report from soldiers who fought in Kursk
      • Kursk was by no means an easy operation
      • Involved casualty rates comparable with other areas of the frontline
      • Ukrainian forces have found Wagner flags and insignia — Russia is deploying Wagner fighters to counter the Ukrainian incursion
      • Ukrainian troops say that Wagner forces are distinguished by their greater discipline and better equipment
      • Praise Russian fortifications — combine different types of defensive measures, such as dragons teeth and anti-tank mines
      • Describe challenges with navigating unfamiliar territory
      • Different from other parts of the front line which have been defended for months, if not years, and Ukrainian forces know intimately
      • Russian electronic warfare has been effective
        • No GPS
        • Radios jammed
        • No Starlink
      • This is one thing that concerns me about the US military — are we training to operate in a GPS-denied environment?
      • For the past 30+ years, the US military has had unrestricted access to GPS in its combat theaters
      • However, Russia and China have developed increasingly sophisticated GPS jamming and spoofing capability
      • Ukrainian forces are now assuming a defensive posture to ready themselves for further Russian counterattacks
• OpenAI's $150 billion valuation depends on it removing its profit cap (archive)
  • OpenAI's latest $150 billion funding round (archive) will reportedly come in the form of convertible debt
  • $150 billion valuation will be contingent on the startup removing the profit cap for investors
  • If the board does not approve removing the profit cap, then the funding round will have to be renegotiated, likely at a lower valuation
  • When OpenAI was founded, it was originally a nonprofit
  • Started a for-profit subsidiary (archive) to commercialize AI to generate funding for the large amounts of computing capacity needed to train new AIs
  • This for-profit subsidiary is what most people know of as OpenAI — it's the entity behind commercializing ChatGPT
  • Returns to the first investors in OpenAI are capped at 100x their original investment
  • It's this cap which is supposedly at the heart of OpenAI's latest funding negotiations
  • Is this the real reason why Sam Altman undertook the boardroom coup (archive) last year?
• Boeing faces losing its investment grade debt rating as the machinists' strike impacts 737 Max production (archive)
  • The machinists' strike could seriously impact Boeing's ability to deliver planes to customers
  • This could have significant deleterious impact on free cash flow
  • Ratings agencies had been counting on Boeing to raise 737 Max production to 38 planes per month, the limit set by the FAA, by the end of the year
  • The strike puts that goal in jeopardy
  • It just keeps getting worse and worse for Boeing
• United plans to roll out free Starlink-based wifi across all its planes
  • Rollout won't start until 2025
  • Will take several years before equipment is installed across the entire fleet

2024-09-13 Friday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Ukrainsk is under attack by Russian troops, indicating a further advance towards Selydove
    • Russian forces are attempting to advance out of Vodyane, attacking a coal mine that sits in between Vodyane and Vuhledar
    • Russian forces are also attacking Dibrova, north of Siversk
      • Siversk has been one of the post-Bakhmut success stories, holding off multiple waves of Russian attacks
      • However, that area has been quiet more recently, as both sides have focused on the fighting near Pokrovsk
    • Russian forces are attempting to advance through Bilohorivka
      • Like Siversk, Bilohorivka had also been a post-Bakhmut success
    • In general, it seems like Russia is piling on the pressure across Donetsk
    • Maybe they're hoping to reveal another exploitable weakness, like the one they found around Ocheretyne in April
    • In some good news for Ukraine, it doesn't appear that Russia has made many further advances into Niu York or Toretsk
  • Kursk region
    • Situation is still unclear
    • It doesn't appear that the Russians have advanced beyond Snagost
    • However, it also doesn't appear that the Ukrainian counter-counteroffensive at Veseloe has been all that successful either
  • Russia is producing UAVs with Chinese engines (archive)
    • Russia can use Iranian drones, North Korean ballistic missiles, and weapons with Chinese components to strike into Ukraine
    • But somehow it'll be escalatory if we allow Ukraine the same freedom to strike into Russia with Western weapons
    • The US reaction to this is toothless — yet more sanctions that Chinese companies can work around via shell companies or third parties in places like Kazakhstan
  • Ukraine is experimenting with rocket launcher drones
• Boeing's US factory workers go on strike, halting 737 Max production (archive)
  • 94.6% of International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers voted to reject the new contract
  • Workers demanded a 40% pay increase
  • Boeing was only offering a 25% raise
  • The last strike, in 2008, closed Boeing factories for 52 days
• 7-and-i, owner of 7-11 is classified as "core" to Japanese national security (archive)
  • On August 27, the owners of 7-11, 7-and-i, sought to have the chain of convenience stores classified as a "core" company on national security grounds (archive)
  • This claim has been granted by the Japanese government
  • This means that any acquisition of more than 1% must pass a review by the national government
  • Doesn't affect the initial takeover bid from Alimentation Couche-Tard, because that was for the entire company, a process that automatically triggers a national security review, regardless of the company's classification
  • However, according to the previous FT article, that review would only have been triggered after a deal had been agreed to
  • Being classified as a "core" business enables the government to investigate proactively
  • 7-and-i claims that its reclassification does not have anything to do with the takeover offer from Alimentation Couche-Tard, and is due to a routine annual Ministry of Finance reclassification based on survey data
  • The reclassification is not based on 7-and-i's convenience store holdings, rather, it is based on its provision of financial services and security services for commercial facilities
  • Between this and the FTC's notification that it will investigate any deal between 7-and-i and Alimentation Couche-Tard, I wonder if Alimentation Couche-Tard will bother with an updated offer
• Uber and Waymo partner to expand self-driving taxis to Austin, Texas and Atlanta, Georgia (archive)
  • Uber had previously partnered with Waymo to expand Waymo to Phoenix
  • Uber also has a collaboration with Cruise
• The Biden administration targets Shein and Temu with revisions to the "de minimis" exemption (archive)
  • The de minimis exemption allowed shipments valued at less than $800 to come into the US largely tariff and paperwork free
  • This exemption is heavily used by Shein and Temu to ship directly from Chinese factories to US customers
  • The exemption was intended to allow US residents to receive small parcels from abroad or bring back souvenirs
  • The Biden administration is revising the exemption to make it so that parcels containing merchandise subject to tariffs under other sections of trade law will be ineligible for the de minimis exemption
  • Critics say that the heavy use of the de minimis exemption makes it difficult for regulators to block shipments based on consumer safety problems or use of forced labor
  • Lawmakers in both parties have written to the Biden administration expressing concerns about the de minimis exemption

2024-09-12 Thursday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • A Russian airstrike destroyed a bridge on the freeway connecting Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad
    • A water treatment station has been hit near Pokrovsk, severing the water supply to the city (archive)
    • Russian forces launch a major assault on Hostre, but are repelled
  • Kursk region
    • Russian forces appear to have recaptured Krasnooktyabrskoe, southwest of Korenevo
    • Ukrainian forces are attacking near Veseloe
  • Ukrainian forces struck a Russian ammunition dump outside of Mariupol
  • Ukrainian special forces managed to shoot down a Su-30SM fighter while raiding a Black Sea oil platform
• OpenAI launches new "o1" model
  • FT coverage (archive)
  • Comes in two variants, o1 Mini and o1 Preview
  • Specialized for reasoning and logic tasks
  • Designed to help with science, math and programming
  • Uses chain of thought prompting to elicit more advanced capabilities from the baseline model
  • OpenAI notes that o1 is complementary to, not a substitute for ChatGPT-4o
  • 4o still has more advanced multimodal capabilities, and is able to access outside resources
  • This is why o1 didn't seem all that impressive in my early tests, I think, because I was already informally doing chain-of-thought prompting by telling e.g. GPT-4o to break down a problem into steps and then solve each step individually
  • This is convenient, but I don't think it represents "true" reasoning capabilities like OpenAI claims it does
  • Still, UI and UX matter!
• OpenAI's latest funding round is now valuing the company at $150 billion (archive)
  • Previous reporting (archive)
  • OpenAI is seeking to raise at least $5 billion
  • Funding round could exceed $6.5 billion depending on investor demand
  • Funding round will value the company at $150 billion
  • Comes in the wake of former OpenAI chief scientist Ilya Sutskever raising $1 billion at a $5 billion valuation (archive) for his startup, Safe Superintelligence Inc. (SSI)
  • The $150 billion valuation would put OpenAI's valuation close to that of SpaceX, whose latest tender offer valued the company at roughly $210 billion (archive)
• Jared Isaacman and Sarah Gillis conduct the first commercial spacewalk (archive)
  • Spacewalk took place as part of the Polaris Dawn private spaceflight mission
  • Entire capsule was depressurized
  • Isaacman and Gillis ventured out of the capsule in turn
  • Conducted suit mobility tests for SpaceX
• The Federal Trade Commission tells 7-and-i and Alimentation Couche-Tard to preserve documents related to the proposed merger between them (archive)
  • Although 7-and-i rejected Alimentation Couche-Tard's bid on September 6, Alimentation Couche-Tard has said that it remains focused on the potential merger (archive)
  • The FTC has proactively approached both companies with anti-trust concerns and instructed them to preserve documents, as there has been an increasing number of cases where companies have destroyed documents to avoid scrutiny during a potential anti-trust trial
  • Underscores that any merger would face scrutiny in the US, where both own large numbers of convenience stores across multiple brands
• Australia will strip service medals from soldiers accused of participating in war crimes (archive)
  • These are service medals, which are essentially participation trophies that show that a particular soldier served in a particular conflict

2024-09-11 Wednesday

• Ukraine War
  • Russian forces are also experimenting with incendiary drones
  • It doesn't seem like there have been too many territorial changes between yesterday and today
  • The situation on the eastern flank of Ukraine's incursion into Kursk remains confused, and so I'm waiting for more geolocated events before posting more on it
  • There are rumors about the US relaxing restrictions on Ukraine's ability to strike into Russia with American-made weapons, but similarly, without a public statement or evidence of Ukraine striking Russia with ATACMS or Storm Shadow, it's impossible to say what the current status of those restrictions is
  • Similarly, there have also been rumors about Russia receiving and preparing to actually use Iranian ballistic missiles, but until there is evidence of those missiles in Ukraine (as there is of North Korean missiles) it's useless to speculate about their, use, impact or effectiveness
• New genetic data from Easter Island casts doubt on the Easter Island ecological collapse hypothesis
  • Original paper (open access)
  • A popular theory about the lack of trees on Easter Island is that they were chopped down by the natives
  • This then led to ecological collapse and a severe decline in population
  • However, a historical analysis of genome data from Easter Island doesn't show any sign of a population bottleneck
  • Instead, a comparison between older Easter Island genomes and those of the present population indicates that the only bottleneck was caused by the initial arrival of humans on Easter Island
  • The genetic data indicates that Easter Island's pre-European population fluctuated between 1,000 and 3,000 individuals, far below the 15,000 that was thought to be the cause of overexploitation and population collapse
  • The major population collapse in Easter Island's history occurred after contact with Europeans, where a combination of slave raids and disease reduced the population to hundreds

2024-09-10 Tuesday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russia has captured Vodyane
    • Russian forces have been spotted west of Marynivka, indicating that it has been captured as well
    • The Economist has a good overview (archive) of the current situation in Donetsk
      • Ukrainian forces are getting pushed back slowly
      • Trading territory for opportunities to inflict casualties on Russian forces
      • Russia has paused pushing westwards towards Pokrovsk directly and is instead attacking northwards and southwards in an effort to create new avenues for attack
      • Ukrainian forces are having local successes in pushing back Russian forces, for example, around Selydove, but overall the Russians have the advantage
      • Russian advantages in drones and electronic warfare continue to make it difficult for Ukrainian armored vehicles and logistics
      • The article points out the danger of encirclement, but I think that's overblown
      • One general characteristic of this war is that, just as in World War 1, neither side has been able to get a breakthrough
      • Ukrainian and Russian armies bend, but they don't break, and any local weakness cannot be exploited quickly enough to force more than small retreat
      • The only large-scale encirclement in this war was Mariupol, and that was because it's right next to the Russian border, and on the east side of the Crimean peninsula, which meant that Russian forces could rapidly cut off supply lines to the city
      • But other than that, I'm not sure there have been any World War 2-style "cauldrons"
  • Kursk region
    • Russian forces have reportedly counterattacked near Korenevo and have reached Snagost
    • Video of a Ukrainian HIMARS strike on a Russian pontoon bridge
  • Ukraine launches 144 drones at Russia, with some targeting Moscow (archive)
    • Some drones hit apartment buildings in Moscow, causing civilian deaths
    • 50 flights had to be diverted from Moscow airports
    • Russia denies that there has been any impact to its energy infrastructure or oil refineries
  • Tatarigami has a good analysis of the current limitations of Ukraine's military
    • New weapons, such as ATACMS and F-16s are useful, but "boring" things such as more IFVs and artillery systems are arguably more important
    • This has been a war of quantity over quality, and nothing we've seen thus far has done much to change that assessment
    • Ukraine's domestic production of military equipment, especially long-range drones, has improved dramatically over the course of the war
    • The most cost-effective way for Western allies to aid Ukraine might be to set up joint ventures with Ukrainian defense companies to further increase Ukrainian domestic production
    • Unfortunately, France and Germany see the Ukraine war as a way to bolster their domestic arms industries and increase the number of manufacturing jobs — enabling Ukraine to produce its own weapons would be counterproductive to that goal
    • However, problems remain, especially with leadership — Ukraine's military leadership has made a number of questionable decisions, especially in their defense of Donetsk
• SpaceX launches the Polaris Dawn private spaceflight mission
  • Led by Jared Isaacman, a billionaire entrepreneur and pilot
  • Will attempt the first private spacewalk, using new suits developed by SpaceX
  • Will also study radiation levels and test the use of Starlink in space
• Roblox announces a generative AI tool that can create 3D landscapes from a text description
  • The tool has not been released to the public yet
  • Is a LLM, only instead of predicting text-token output, Roblox's model tokenizes a library of 3D building blocks
  • Outputs those blocks as a completed 3D environment
  • The likely limitation to this approach would be a lack of 3D training data, which could lead the model to produce glitchy output
  • I think this can be fixed with an adversarial model that can be trained to look for glitchy models
  • Roblox plans to open-source the model
  • Previously Roblox debuted a tool that would create Lua functions from text descriptions for its scripting engine
  • This is a great example of commoditizing your complement
  • Roblox's revenue source is player engagement, which results in on-platform transactions
  • In order to maximize engagement, Roblox needs to make it very easy for people to add new minigames and activities to its platform

2024-09-09 Monday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Niu York remains contested
    • Russians advance near Hrodivka
    • Russians continue to make small advances in Toretsk, and around Selydove
    • Russians make advances near Vuhledar
  • Kursk region
    • Overall, it seems like the front line has stabilized in this sector
    • Ukrainian forces have captured Sudzha, are near Korenevo to the northwest, and are around Spalnoe to the southeast
    • Ukrainian forces have reached Pogrebki
    • Ukrainian forces destroy another pontoon bridge, near Zvannoe
    • Ukrainian forces destroyed a pontoon bridge in this area a week ago, however, this is (or rather, was) a new bridge
  • Kupyansk region
    • Russian forces keep advancing near Pishchane, now within 5km of the river
  • The Ukrainian military destroys an ammunition depot in Soldatskoe, inside Russia
  • The Ukrainian military has developed fixed-wing "interceptor" UAVs that can target Russian reconnaissance UAVs
  • Incendiary UAVs
    • Footage of the aftermath of an incendiary UAV attack
    • Russian soldiers post on Telegram about their efforts to defend themselves from drone-dropped thermite
      • Dig deeper
      • Cover trenches with sand
      • Think the ideal solution would be to use concrete
      • However, digging shelters and lining them with concrete is time-consuming and isn't something that is practical for front-line trenches
  • CIA Director Bill Burns says that China has not shipped weapons to Russia but has shipped lots of items that are just short of weapons which is allowing Russia to maintain and build up its defense-industrial base
  • Insurance brokers push insurers to resume coverage in Ukraine (archive)
    • Aon and Marsh McLellan, two of the largest insurance brokers in the world, are saying that insurers must drop "arbitrary" exclusions that disallow policies from covering Ukraine
    • Lack of insurance is impeding Ukraine's economic recovery
    • While the exclusions may have made sense during the early part of the war, in 2022, today they fail to recognize that there is a broad diversity of risk in the country
  • Data on signing-bonuses indicates that Russia recruited 166,000 new soldiers in the first half of 2024
• Apple launches the iPhone 16 and the iPhone 16 Pro
  • Both launch with Apple's new A18 chip
  • Improved efficiency along with a larger battery should result in increased battery life
  • Phones are designed around a suite of generative AI features called Apple Intelligence, which is currently in beta
  • Vertically aligned camera lenses
  • Includes a dedicated button to launch the camera and take a picture
  • Once the generative AI features launch, holding the button will take a picture and ask the AI to give information about the picture
  • The Pro model now supports taking video at 4k resolution at 120 frames per second, thanks to new video encoding hardware
• Google's second anti-trust case begins (archive)
  • This antitrust case is about Google's dominance of ad-sales
  • The government alleges that Google used unlawful tactics to keep advertisers using its marketplace exclusively
  • The proposed remedy is for Google to divest itself of its Ad Manager product
  • A win by the government could have a massive effect on Google, as advertising integration is deeply woven into so many of Google's business processes
  • Google has been criticized by the judge for deleting e-mails, chat logs and other data that might have had a bearing on the case
  • The previous anti-trust case, which Google lost on August 5, was about Google paying third parties, notably Apple to be the default search engine on their devices
  • Although Google has lost that case, no sentence has yet been given, nor have any appeals been filed
  • This case has a far larger potential impact on Google than the previous one, as it would potentially require Google to divest itself of one of its core products
• Brazilians protest the Twitter ban (archive)
  • Street protests in Sao Paulo on Brazil's independence day
  • Protesters want the order banning Twitter (archive) to be lifted
  • Accuse the government of banning right-wing political speech
  • Want the judge who imposed the ban to be impeached
• Platinum producers see their fortunes improve as EV sales fall short of expectations
  • The primary use of platinum is in catalytic converters which clean car exhausts
  • Platinum producers had been preparing for a steep dropoff in demand, as EVs don't have exhausts
  • However, the recent slowdown in sales of EVs has increased the demand forecast for platinum
• A strike at American ports becomes more likely by the day (archive)
  • The International Longshoremen's Association, a union of dockworkers, is requesting a 77% pay increase
  • Argues that this is fair, because ocean carriers are significantly more profitable today than they were before the pandemic
  • The ILA's leader, Harold Daggett, has been threatening a strike since 2023
  • A strike would lead to significant impacts at US ports, and would affect supply chains worldwide
  • The US government can invoke the Taft-Hartley Act to force dockworkers back to work
• James Earl Jones, voice of Darth Vader, has passed away (archive)

2024-09-06 Friday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces advance north of Krasnohorivka
    • This means that Ukrainian troops have likely withdrawn from Nevelske, a position that had held since 2022
    • Russian forces advance on Klishchiivka
    • Niu York and Toretsk remain contested
  • Kupyansk region
    • Russian forces continue to advance towards the Oskil River near Pishchane
  • Kursk region
    • Fighting continues in Korenevo
  • Kherson region
    • Russian forces raid across the Dnipro river near Yantarne
  • Photos of Vovchansk, a city near the Russian border that has been the scene of heavy fighting
  • President Zelensky urges allies to increase the rate at which they send air-defense equipment to Ukraine (archive)
    • Zelensky is attending a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group at Rammstein Air Base in Germany
    • Urged allies to send more air defense weapons so that the Ukrainian military can defend more cities
    • Discussed a "victory plan" with US security officials
    • The Biden administration would prefer that Ukraine work to increase production of its own homegrown weapons systems, including long range drones, to attack Russian air bases and economic targets
    • Points out that the majority of planes launching glide bombs do so from air bases beyond the range of ATACMS
      • Only because the US has given Russia so much warning, Russia has had time to move the planes back
      • If the US had given Ukraine ATACMS at the same time as it gave Ukraine HIMARS, Ukraine could have inflicted significantly greater damage on the Russian air force by striking its aircraft while they were operating from air bases near Kursk and in Belarus
    • Zelensky also briefed American officials about the Kursk offensive
  • Iran has reportedly sent short range ballistic missiles to Russia (archive)
    • So if Russia uses Iranian ballistic missiles to strike Ukraine, that's fine, but if Ukraine uses American cruise missiles to strike Russia, that's escalation?
    • The US government's policy of banning Ukraine from using weapons with American components against Russian territory looks ever less justifiable, by the day
    • Russia has already been using large numbers of Iranian drones to attack targets deep inside Ukraine
    • The short-range ballistic missiles can be reliably targeted by Patriot air defense batteries, but Ukraine has too few of these to protect all major cities
    • While the EU will likely ban Iran Air from flying to European airports as a result of this transfer, few additional sanctions are expected
    • At what point does the EU realize that Iran does not care about "targeted" sanctions
    • The only sanctions that have a chance of stopping the Iranian government are broad-based economy-wide sanctions
    • The Iranians continue to arm the Houthis, and arming Russia is a logical next step for them
  • Emil Kastehelmi has an analysis of Ukrainian incendiary drones
    • Incendiary drones aren't a replacement for FPV or bomber drones
    • Are a useful addition for special circumstances, such as entrenched infantry formations
    • Will likely have a large psychological effect on enemy infantry
    • Too early to tell how effective they are
    • If they are effective, it won't be long until we see the Russians making their own incendiary drones
  • Russian ultranationalists remain the largest open challenge to Putin's government (archive)
    • Criticism from right-wing ultranationalists against Putin has increased in the wake of Ukraine's incursion into Russia
    • "Z-bloggers" on Telegram have openly contradicted the government's claims that Ukrainian incursion is under control
    • These social media influencers strongly believe in the righteousness of Russia's war against Ukraine and wants the Russian military to succeed
    • Call out corruption and military blunders when they occur, in order to make the military more effective
    • However, there is a thin line between critiques of the military and criticism of the government as a whole
    • Z-bloggers who cross that line, such as Igor Girkin, were arrested for going beyond critiquing specific military failures and criticizing Putin himself
    • After Girkin's arrest and sentencing to four years in prison, many of these bloggers quietened down
    • However, after Ukraine's incursion into Kursk, many of these bloggers resumed their harsh critiques of the Russian military and security agencies
    • Called out the lack of fortifications on the border
    • Called out desertion by Chechen Akhmat Brigade fighters, leading to increased ethnic tensions between Akhmat Brigade fighters and regular Russian army soldiers
    • Z-bloggers remain an exception to the majority of Russian society, because they are engaged and informed rather than apathetic
    • This makes them a potential nucleus of opposition to Putin, and currently, the most organized challengers to the government
    • The Z-bloggers are a perfect illustration of the dictum that "The enemy of my enemy is my enemy's enemy. No more. No less."
    • As bad as Putin is, having any of these people in charge would be worse
• Volkswagen is attempting to close factories in order to cut costs (archive)
  • Volkswagen is facing dwindling sales and a high cost structure
  • Is looking at closing factories in Germany in order to reduce costs
  • This plan faces stiff resistance from unions and the German state of Lower Saxony, both of whom have seats on Volkswagen's board
  • However reducing capacity and cutting costs won't necessarily help sales
  • Volkswagen has arguably invested too much, too soon in electrification
  • Its ID-series of electric vehicles are not selling well
  • Another problem has been software — Volkswagen's attempt to create an in-house software division, Cariad, has been a disaster
  • As a result, Volkswagen is moving away from in-house software and is licensing software from Rivian, an American electric automaker and XPeng, a Chinese electric automaker
  • The story is trying to make this about electrification, but it seems to me that the real problem is that Volkswagen couldn't do software right
  • Cariad lost over $2 billion in 2022 (archive) alone
  • That loss led to Volkswagen's $5 billion investment in Rivian
  • Cariad has 6000 employees and is tasked with creating a unified software platform for all of Volkswagen's sub-brands
  • This is way too much, way too soon — Volkswagen's brands traverse every market segment, from Skoda to Bugatti
  • Any attempt at creating a single software platform that can handle such a wide range of vehicles and customer expectations, right from the get-go is doomed to failure, as Volkswagen is currently finding out
  • Instead of 6000 employees attempting to create some kind of unifying monolith that will handle the software needs of the entire Volkswagen group, they should have started with like 60 employees and a single task: make software for the ID3 and ID4
• Intel's 18 Angstrom manufacturing process fails quality control checks (archive)
  • Manufacturing contract was with Broadcom
  • Initial batch of chips failed quality control
  • This is a further setback for Intel Foundry Services, which is already facing scrutiny for the amount of money it is spending to set up new foundries
  • Intel still aims to have volume production of 18 Angstrom chips in 2025
• Qualcomm is reportedly an interested customer for some of Intel's chip design groups (archive)
  • See previous coverage
  • Qualcomm is reportedly interested in Intel's PC design business
  • I'm guessing this means the NUC business, but I thought Intel had already sold off that line to ASUS
  • Intel's board will meet next week to consider Intel CEO Pat Gelsinger's plan to trim Intel's lines of business in order to reduce costs
• 7-11 owners 7-and-i reject Alimentation Couche-Tard's takeover offer (archive)
  • See previous coverage from Tuesday 8/27 and Tuesday 8/20
  • 7-and-i rejected the offer from Circle-K owners Alimentation Couche-Tard as being too low
  • Also highlighted antitrust concerns
  • One of the really good things about the increased anti-trust enforcement lately is that companies are abandoning merger plans on their own, without the government having to get involved, because they can see that the market concentration of the combined firm will lead to anti-trust concerns

2024-09-05 Thursday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russia fails to make any notable advances for two days in a row near Selydove and Pokrovsk
    • Russian forces appear to have been pushed back slightly near Mykhailivka
    • Russian forces continue to mount attacks in the fields east of Vodyane
  • Kupyansk region
    • Russian forces make slight advances near Pishchane
  • Vladimir Putin reiterates his peace proposal (archive)
    • Talks are based off a Russian proposal from 2022
    • Would allow Ukraine to join the EU
    • Would prohibit Ukraine from joining NATO
    • Would significantly pare down the Ukrainian military
    • Would prevent Ukraine from having any "foreign" weapons
    • Says that territorial negotiations will start from existing lines of control
    • I don't see why this deal is any more acceptable to Ukraine today than it would have been in 2022
    • Why should Ukraine trust Putin enough to disarm?
    • Especially given that this phase of the war started when Putin left the Minsk II negotiations and launched a full scale invasion to take by force what it was taking too long for him to gain with negotiations
    • The provisions having to do with cutting down the Ukrainian military are telling — in Putin's eyes, the real Ukrainian crime is having the gall to fight back when Russia invaded
    • Putin could probably end the war today, if he allowed Ukraine to retain its expanded military and join NATO, in exchange for territorial concessions
    • But he won't because he doesn't just want Donetsk and Luhansk, he wants all of Ukraine to be a Russian vassal-state
  • More footage of Ukrainian incendiary drones
    • The first one seems to be operating at a much higher altitude than the the one from Wednesday
    • As a result, it doesn't seem to be as effective — the burning thermite is being scattered over a much wider area
    • The second one is at a much lower altitude and more focused — is clearly leaving behind a burning trail of forest
    • I still wonder about how effective they are against vehicles, but I increasingly think that they're effective against trenches — at the very least this is the sort of thing that would get troops to leave trenches
    • Of course, it's an attack that can only work once — once that section of the woods is burnt, you can't easily burn it again
• Microwaves don't self-disinfect (archive)
  • Researchers took swabs from 30 microwaves and cultured the results
  • Found numerous disease-causing bacteria (such as staphylococcus) in swabs from household microwaves
  • Microwaves aren't usually on for long enough to kill disease-causing bacteria
  • Microwaves should be cleaned as often as other surfaces in a kitchen, like tables or countertops
  • The real lesson here is that office microwaves are gross
• nVidia invests in Japanese AI startup Sakana AI (archive)
  • $100 million funding round is in collaboration with other investors
  • Sakana was founded by former Google engineers
  • Is focused on developing new foundation models
  • I'm skeptical
  • Unless they really have an edge, they're going to be building the same thing as OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google, etc, just with a two or three year delay
  • We're seeing, for example, Amazon abandoning its own models (archive) in favor of Claude for its Alexa service
  • This is because the vast amount of training and computational resources required to build a new state-of-the-art foundation model means that by the time a startup creates a ChatGPT-3 equivalent model, cutting edge companies like OpenAI and Anthropic will have released new, even more capable versions of ChatGPT and Claude
  • Furthermore, we have Meta releasing Llama model weights for free, so there's no profit in selling lower capability models — why would anyone pay to use Sakana AI when they can get Llama for free?
  • So unless they have some kind of shortcut that enables them to build a higher capability model either faster or cheaper they'll never catch up
• Billy McFarland is planning a second Fyre Festival (archive)
  • The original Fyre Festival was notorious for being a disaster (archive)
  • Led to Billy McFarland being convicted for fraud and sent to jail
  • Also led to the best documentary on NetFlix
  • Now McFarland is back and has scheduled a second Fyre Festival
  • Is working with an anonymous production company that a 51% share of the defunct Fyre Media, the festival's parent company
  • Venue and performers haven't yet been named
  • McFarland acknowledges that people have their doubts, given his history, but says that the doubters give him additional motivation to pull off a successful festival this time
  • If anything, it'll be even more difficult for him to pull off a successful festival this time around
  • 2019 was something of a peak for festivals and outdoor events
  • These days, even major festivals such as Coachella and Burning Man are not selling 100% of their tickets
  • Artists are canceling concert tours (archive) because of sluggish ticket sales
  • Maybe his notoriety will drive some interest, but it's just as likely to drive people away
• North Korean spies are seeking IT remote work in the United States (archive)
  • North Korean spies are using false identities to apply for remote IT jobs
  • Recruit accomplices in the US to provide valid addresses and host "laptop farms" which allows the Korean engineers to access laptops remotely
  • Spies sometimes actually did work for companies
  • In addition to claiming paychecks legitimately the North Korean remote workers sought to plant malware on corporate networks
• Verizon strikes a $9.6 billion deal to buy Frontier Communications (archive)
  • Verizon is facing increasing competition from AT&T and T-Mobile
  • Customers who get wired Internet and cell service together from Verizon are less likely to switch away
  • Frontier had bought a large chunk of legacy landline infrastructure from Verizon in 2016 for $10.5 billion
  • The debt from this deal led Frontier to go into Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2020 (archive)
  • Frontier emerged from Chapter 11 with a reduced debt load and a focus on building out fiber-to-the-premises infrastructure
  • And now Verizon gets to buy back the assets it sold for $10.5 billion for $9.6 billion
  • I wonder if this deal will survive antitrust scrutiny
  • Verizon is already the largest cell-phone provider in the US and one of the largest landline broadband providers — any deal that allows it to achieve more lock-in is the sort of thing that regulators would be looking at
• Brazilians have mixed opinions over the Twitter ban (archive)
  • A plurality think that Twitter is in the wrong by failing to ban accounts accused of spreading misinformation
  • However, a majority also think that banning Twitter entirely for this is unjustified
  • A large majority oppose the financial penalties (archive) that users face for using VPNs to work around the ban
  • A majority also opposes the decision to link Starlink and Twitter, saying that imposing penalties on Starlink for Twitter's actions just because they're both owned by Elon Musk is unjustified

2024-09-04 Wednesday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russia has captured Prechystivka
      • This goes back to what Emil Kastehelmi was saying on Monday
      • Russians are capturing towns faster now than at any point since the opening few weeks of the war
      • The Ukrainian defense in southern Donetsk, especially, looks to be crumbling
  • Ukraine has developed a drone with an incendiary attack
    • Video of the UAV from a Russian soldier's perspective
    • It looks impressive, but it's unclear how effective this would be
    • It doesn't seem like it'd be very effective against vehicles
  • President Zelensky reshuffles his cabinet (archive)
    • Coverage from the Wall Street Journal (archive)
    • A total of six ministers have submitted their resignation, including Dmytro Kuleba, the foreign minister
    • Zelensky says the government needs "new energy"
    • Some of the outgoing ministers might be reappointed to new roles
    • Zelensky claims this was a planned reshuffle, in order to bring in new voices and new ideas
  • How do long-range strikes fit into Ukraine's theory of victory?
    • If long-range strikes are authorized, they will not immediately win the war
    • However, they will allow Ukraine to put more pressure on the Russian economy
    • No single thing is decisive in war
    • Victory in war is due to cumulative effects
    • Scaling small tactical successes can result in strategic impact over time
• Ilya Sutskever's Safe Superintelligence Inc raises $1 billion (archive)
  • Deal values the company at $5 billion
  • Ilya is a co-founder of OpenAI who left after a boardroom dispute (archive) with Sam Altman, co-founder and CEO of OpenAI
  • Safe Superintelligence Inc does not have a product — instead it's a "skunk works" effort aimed at building a safe general artificial intelligence
  • I wish SSI the best, but I don't see how they can build a product without customer feedback
  • As Steve Jobs put it: "Real artists ship"
• The Dutch data protection authority issues a $33 million fine against ClearView AI
  • ClearView maintains a facial recognition database
  • Markets it to US law enforcement as a means of tracking suspects and missing persons
  • Scrapes images from social media and other online sources
  • The Dutch data protection authority asserts jurisdiction because it claims that data about citizens of The Netherlands is in ClearView's database
  • However ClearView asserts that because it does not do business in the EU and does not maintain any commercial presence in the EU, it is not subject to the EU's jurisdiction
• nVidia suffers a record drop as investors become more skeptical about AI spending (archive)
  • nVidia shares suffer the largest ever single-day decline for an American company
  • Decline comes in the wake of nVidia's quarterly earnings, which were good, but below expectations
  • However nVidia is still up by 118% for the year to date
  • nVidia has delayed shipping its new "Blackwell" chips until Q4
• Intel is discussing plans to cut lines of business in an effort to trim costs and focus investment on CPUs (archive)
  • Might include plans to delay or halt entirely Intel's $32 billion factory in Germany
  • Might also include plans to spin out Altera, a manufacturer of FPGAs, which Intel had acquired for $16.7 bn in 2015
  • A potential buyer for Altera is Marvell, a manufacturer of chips for embedded devices
• What's going on at Relativity Space?
  • Relativity Space is a space startup working on 3D printed rocket engines
  • Launched the Terran 1 rocket, with a payload capacity of 1,250 kg to low-earth orbit
  • Terran 1 launch had a successful first stage burn, but a malfunction on the second stage caused loss of mission
  • After the Terran 1 launch failure, Relativity pivoted to working on the much bigger Terran R, a rocket with a 33,500 kg payload capacity
  • Claimed that the market for larger rockets was much larger
  • However, according to this article, Relativity Space is having trouble with the manufacturing of the Terran R
  • Has been forced to rely on outside suppliers for components that were planned to be manufactured internally using 3D printing
  • Further increasing costs is the size of the Terran R
    • Too large to be transported by highway or rail
    • Needs to be shipped by barge through the Panama Canal, which adds time and cost
  • Relativity appears to be making a large and risky bet that it will be able to figure out reusability quickly, as that is the only way it can amortize the development costs of the Terran R
  • However, reuse is much more difficult than it looks — took SpaceX seven years to make its systems reliable enough to land and reuse rockets consistently
  • There is real demand for more heavy-lift launch capacity, particularly as Amazon looks to build out Project Kuiper, but it will be a hard road for Relativity Space, given that their supposed 3D printing advantage has turned out to be illusory
• SpaceX advises its employees not to travel to Brazil as it becomes embroiled in the government's dispute with Twitter (archive)
  • SpaceX has had its accounts in Brazil frozen, as Brazil determines whether SpaceX can be held liable for Twitter's noncompliance with Brazilian court orders to suspend accounts deemed to be spreading misinformation
  • Gwynne Shotwell, COO of SpaceX, has advised employees to not travel to Brazil
  • Starlink has become relatively important as an internet provider to rural Brazilians since it entered the country several years ago
• US Steel warns of plant closings if it is not allowed to complete its merger with Nippon Steel (archive)
  • Would also likely move its headquarters out of Pittsburgh
  • Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Donald Trump are all on record opposing the merger
  • Deal is also opposed by the United Steelworkers union
  • Since 2020, US Steel has idled portions of its mills near Detroit and St. Louis, because of low steel prices
  • The CEO of US Steel, David Burritt, says that the merger is necessary for US Steel to secure additional investment to improve efficiency at older mills
  • Nippon Steel executives say that the deal with US Steel is necessary to allow Nippon Steel to expand into the US
  • Nippon Steel outbid an American company, Cleveland Cliffs for US Steel

2024-09-03 Tuesday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russia continues its attacks on Vuhledar
      • Fighting has reportedly reached Prechystivka
      • Russians are attacking from both flanks
    • Another report from Pokrovsk (archive)
      • A Ukrainian commander notes that Russian EW is so thick that the Ukrainians have to fly 10-15 drone missions, in some cases, to achieve one kill
        • More proof that drones aren't unstoppable wonder weapons that will revolutionize warfare
        • Also emphasizes that, while social media feeds are full of drones killing tanks, that represents a vanishingly small proportion of all drone missions
        • The real battlefield utility of drones is in providing reconnaissance and surveillance, which doesn't get published to Telegram or Twitter
      • If Pokrovsk falls, it will complicate the supply lines for Slovyansk and Kramatorsk, the two remaining major cities in Donetsk that are still under Ukrainian control
      • According to the report, fighting has reached Krasnyi Yar
      • The threat to Pokrovsk has been amplified by the decision to send troops into Kursk, which depleted reserves that might have been used to contain and slow down Russian advances in this sector
      • The Russians are still suffering extremely high casualty rates, however, as they advance
  • The head of Ukrenergo, Volodymyr Kudrytski, has been fired (archive)
    • Ukrenergo is the Ukrainian state-owned electricity grid operator
    • Foreign directors on the board describe the firing as "politically motivated"
    • Analysts have interpreted the firing of Kudrytski as a further centralization of power in the Presidency
    • This is worrying because Kudrytski was widely regarded as an honest operator who worked hard to ensure the resilience of Ukraine's electricity grid in the face of constant Russian attacks
  • A Russian ballistic missile strike on Poltava kills at least 50 and wounds 271 (archive)
    • One of the deadliest missile attacks in recent months
    • Ukraine has insufficient air defense to protect all of its cities
    • Patriot batteries are concentrated around major cities like Kyiv and Kharkiv, leaving smaller cities like Poltava exposed
• Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket will roll out to the launch pad on Monday
  • New Glenn is a heavy-lift rocket, with capability similar to Falcon Heavy
  • New Glenn will launch two small spacecraft on a trajectory to Mars
  • The launch window to Mars is narrow and opens in six weeks, giving Blue Origin a tight timeline to conduct final tests and integrate the payload
  • New Glenn will attempt a landing on a drone ship, but success isn't likely, given that it took SpaceX 23 attempts before it had a successful landing
  • New Glenn is an important next step for Blue Origin, as it is the company's first rocket capable of reaching orbit
  • Their current rocket, New Shepard, is only capable of suborbital flights, limiting its utility to space tourism and training missions
• Brazilians flock to BlueSky after Twitter ban (archive)
  • BlueSky reported almost 2 million new registrations in four days
  • Became the most download app on both iOS and Android app stores
• The European Court of Justice limits the EU Competition Authority's merger overview procedures (archive)
  • Merger was between two genetic testing companies, Illumina and Grail
  • The EU's scrutiny of the merger was contentious because one of the companies, Grail, had no revenue in the EU
• The EU's proposed tariffs on imported Chinese electric vehicles could have unintended consequences on EU automakers (archive)
  • Focuses on Volkswagen's CUPRA brand
  • CUPRA had designed the Tavascan, an all electric SUV to be built in China
  • Because this vehicle is built in China, it would be hit with an import tariff of 21.3%
  • Raising the price of the vehicle isn't an option, given current levels of demand for electric vehicles
  • However, without Tavascan sales, CUPRA would miss its emissions reduction targets, triggering heavy fines that would threaten the continued existence of the brand and its operations in Spain
  • The 21.3% tariff is lower than the general 48% tariff on Chinese built vehicles from Chinese companies
  • However it is much higher than the 9% tariff that Tesla negotiated on imported vehicles from its Shanghai gigafactory
    • How did Tesla manage that?
  • This story highlights the ongoing tension between reducing emissions and decoupling from China
  • While many politicians, especially on the left, insist that there is no tension, that "both" can be done at the same time, in practice China's dominance of the lithium ion​/lithium ferrophosphate battery supply chain means that decoupling will result price increases
  • Combined with the fact that electric vehicles have saturated the early adopter market, but have yet to find substantial demand among mainstream consumers, this means that EU automakers are caught between a rock and a hard place
  • On the one hand, they need to sell more electric vehicles in order to meet the EU's climate change targets
  • On the other hand, in order to actually sell those vehicles, they need to be cheap, and in order to be cheap, they need to be built in China
  • The usual EU method for squaring circles like these is government subsidies — I wonder why they're not being considered here
• The White House directs federal agencies to improve BGP security (archive)
  • White House press release
  • The White House has directed to deploy improved security around BGP routing messages
  • Published roadmap directs government agencies to Resource Public Key Infrastructure to ensure proper authentication and authorization of BGP update messages
  • This is a good proactive step
  • BGP is an important, but often overlooked part of internet infrastructure
  • Unverified BGP update messages have long been recognized as a vulnerability in Internet routing infrastructure
  • This hopefully addresses a vulnerability before it results in a major outage or hack
• Former Volkswagen CEO Martin Winterkorn appears in court over charges related to "dieselgate" (archive)
  • Winterkorn is accused of fraud in directing Volkswagen engineers to make engine software that would run the engine at a lower power setting when it detected that it was being subject to an emissions test
• Sony shuts down Concord and issues refunds after just two weeks
  • Concord was a new multiplayer shooter, like Overwatch, or Valorant
  • Debuted to an extremely underwhelming reception
  • Had only 25,000 sales after two weeks
  • Fewer than 1,000 concurrent players on Steam
  • Market for new shooters is saturated, and Concord didn't really distinguish itself

2024-09-02 Monday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Ukraine destroys another Russian pontoon bridge near Zvannoe
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces have advanced to Selydove and Ukrainsk
    • Russian forces captured Halytsynivka
    • Russian forces have advanced to the mine complex just northeast of Vuhledar
    • The Wall Street Journal has an article (archive) on the evacuation from Pokrovsk
    • Emil Kastehelmi has a good update on the current overall situation in Donetsk
      • Russia is pushing in two directions in Donetsk
        • Pokrovsk
        • Toretsk
      • The two towns of Pokrovsk and Myrnohrad are a significant logistical hub and had over 100,000 pre-war residents
      • Russian forces are less than 10km away from Pokrovsk
      • More concerning is the rate of Russian advances
      • Towns such as Novohrodivka (pre-war population: 14,000) are falling in less than a week
      • Previously it would have taken Russian months, or even the better part of a year to conquer such a town
      • Ukrainian defenses appear to be uncoordinated, with persistent manpower and ammunition shortages
      • The Ukrainian incursion into Kursk did not cause Russia to overreact and draw troops away from Donetsk
      • Instead, it appears that the Russians have reinforced their Donetsk offensive and have done the minimum necessary to contain Ukrainian advances into Kursk, knowing that the Ukrainian incursion is limited by the Ukrainian's own logistics
      • Ukrainian forces are digging new fortifications around Pokrovsk, but the fortifications need adequate manpower to hold against Russian assaults
      • South of Donetsk, Russian forces are advancing towards Kurakhove
      • This, combined with Russian advances near Karlivka, have left Ukrainian forces west of Krasnohorivka in an exposed position
  • A Ukrainian drone hits a refinery near Moscow
  • American officials state that the crash of the Ukrainian F-16 was probably not caused by friendly fire (archive)
• Brazil's Supreme Court upholds the country's ban on Twitter (archive)
  • Twitter ban includes an $8000 fine (archive) for people who use VPNs to bypass the block

2024-08-30 Friday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Gen. Syrski says that Ukrainian forces have advanced up to 2km in Kursk (archive)
    • Ukrainian forces continue their attacks on Kremyanoe, east of Korenevo
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces have entered Hrodivka
    • Ukrainian forces have withdrawn from the Karlovske Reservoir near Karlivka
      • This makes sense, given the Russian advance into Memryk reported on Wednesday
      • The tweet also reports that Ukrainian forces have also withdrawn from their defensive positions near Pervomaiske and Nevelske, but doesn't offer any photo or video evidence backing that up
      • Still, it's likely, given the advances of Russian forces in that area would have left Pervomaiske and Nevelske in a very exposed position
      • I guess this also means that Ukrainian forces have pulled back from Krasnohorivka
    • The Financial Times reports on the increasingly dire situation near Pokrovsk (archive)
      • Critics say that the attack on Kursk has fatally weakened the defenses around Pokrovsk
      • Ukrainian analysts suggest that Pokrovsk will fall much faster than Bakhmut
      • Withdrawals of Ukrainian troops from areas like Novohrodivka and Niu York indicate a shortage of manpower and ammunition
      • If Pokrovsk falls, then it exposes Dnipro, Ukraine's fourth largest city to Russian attack
      • Overall, I think the point I made on August 15, that trading Pokrovsk for some random villages in Kursk is a bad trade, still holds
      • If the strategic goal of the Kursk incursion was to force Russia to withdraw forces from Donetsk to reinforce Kursk, it seems like the Kursk incursion has been a failure
  • Kupyansk region
    • Russian troops advance to Pishchane
  • President Zelensky has dismissed the commander of the Ukrainian Air Force (archive)
    • Dismissal comes in the wake of the loss of one of Ukraine's F-16s
    • No specific reason was given, but the statement issued by the President's office says that all personnel must be protected
• More details on the arrest of Pavel Durov, CEO of Telegram (archive)
  • Charges are based on a novel legal theory that holds the CEO of a corporation as an accomplice if the corporation does not comply sufficiently with law enforcement requests to take down illegal content
  • French prosecutors are also reportedly investigating Discord
  • This legal theory has implications for other encrypted messaging applications, most notably Signal
• AnandTech shuts down
  • This is really sad news for me
  • AnandTech was a great source for reviews, not just of CPUs and GPUs, but for more mundane computer hardware, like heatsinks and fans
• Boeing will attempt an unmanned return of Starliner next week
  • Starliner will depart the station on September 6
  • Is scheduled to make touchdown the next day, on September 7
  • Flight controllers successfully performed a software update to allow the capsule to perform an autonomous reentry

2024-08-29 Thursday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Russian forces are building fortifications near Dolgii
      • That's one thing the Russians have always been good at during this war: digging
  • Russian forces advance into Synkivka, near Kupyansk
    • This is signficant because it's well away from the main Russian advance, in Donetsk
    • Erases some of the gains that Ukraine made in autumn of 2022
  • A Ukrainian F-16 was lost in a crash while helping to repel Russia's barrage of missiles and drones (archive)
    • The circumstances of the crash are unclear
    • However Ukrainians say the jet was not shot down by enemy fire
    • Also deny that pilot error was the cause
    • Loss might have been due to fratricide by a Patriot missile battery
    • Ukraine doesn't have many F-16s or pilots trained to fly them, so the loss of any at this early stage, hurts disproportionately
  • Russia places former deputy defense minister Pavel Popov under arrest (archive)
    • Fraud charges are linked to the construction of a military theme park
    • The Russian government alleges that Popov diverted construction materials for the park to his own country house
    • Comes as part of a broader crackdown against corruption undertaken by the new Minister of Defense, Andrei Belousov
    • Two other senior defense officials, Major General Vladimir Shesterov and the director of the park, Col. Vyacheslav Akhmedov had already been arrested (archive) in connection with this investigation
    • These officials had been accused of embezzling 40 million roubles ($470,000) from funding for the park
• SpaceX misses a booster landing for the first time in three years
  • Booster successfully landed on the drone ship, but then tipped over
  • Possible engine burn timing issue
  • The booster in question had launched 23 times, making it the most reused booster in SpaceX's fleet
  • Although successful booster recovery is a secondary objective on every mission, and failing to recover the booster doesn't indicate that the mission failed, SpaceX is reliant on reliable booster recovery in order to sustain its aggressive launch schedule
• Tesla has developed a low-latency network protocol for its datacenters to help with machine learning
  • Instead of using a proprietary datacenter networking solution like Infiniband, Tesla has chosen to use Ethernet, with a custom transport protocol, TTP (Tesla Transport Protocol)
  • TTP can be viewed as a highly simplified TCP, designed to operate over low-latency, high-reliability links
  • Replaces TCP's three-way handshakes for opening and closing connections for simpler two-way handshakes
  • Removes wait-states — assumes that over low latency datacenter links there won't be any out-of-order packets still propagating when a connection close signal is sent
  • Congestion control is implemented by defining a fixed number of packets that are allowed to be in flight, unlike TCP's congestion control mechanism which scales up and down depending on the bandwidth and reliability of the underlying link
  • TCP needs to use this mechanism because it's going to be running on a wide variety of links, from high-speed fiber-optic ethernet to noisy wi-fi
  • Tesla doesn't have this problem so they can predefine their congestion control parameters
  • Defining a fixed width congestion control window allows TTP to be more easily implemented in hardware — can use a fixed size SRAM buffer to store packets
  • The fact that TTP is a custom protocol running at the transport layer allows Tesla to use commodity Ethernet switches, unlike Infiniband, which requires proprietary networking gear
• Apple is in talks to participate in OpenAI's latest funding round (archive)
  • Comes on the heels of reports from yesterday that OpenAI is raising a new round of funding at a $100 bn valuation
  • Investing in OpenAI could complicate Apple's ability to partner with other AI model developers, such as Google, in the future
• nVidia reports strong quarterly earnings, but highlights ongoing challenges with its new chips (archive)
  • Sales and profit have more than doubled compared with a year ago
  • However, production issues with "interposer" that ties together the various components of nVidia's new chip have caused manufacturing delays
  • nVidia faces scrutiny from antitrust regulators, and restrictions on selling to China
  • nVidia's growth rate has slowed, however, as the AI market becomes increasingly saturated
  • The WSJ article also mentions potential competition from AMD, but I think that competition from large cloud vendors making custom AI chips is a bigger threat to nVidia

2024-08-28 Wednesday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces advance into Memryk
    • Russian forces have also been geolocated north of Novohrodivka
    • Russian forces make gains near Toretsk
    • Overall, Russian forces are roughly 8km from Pokrovsk
    • A visualization of Russian gains in Pokrovsk
    • The steady Russian advance to Pokrovsk continues
  • Kursk region
    • Russian POWs report that they were abandoned by their superior officers when the Ukrainian attack started
    • Traffic cameras are still operating in Kursk, and residents are complaining about receiving speeding tickets while fleeing from Ukrainian forces
    • Thread detailing how Ukrainians were able to surprise and overwhelm Russians during the opening stages of the Kursk offensive
      • Ukraine used its own reconnaissance drones to map Russian fortifications
      • Used this data to predetermine artillery and drone strikes
  • Russian soldiers take cover after detecting drones nearby with a handheld spectrum analyzer
    • This is an interesting video because it shows what it's like to be on the other side of all those drone videos
    • The soldiers detect drones nearby and drop into a trench, and shelter there until the drone threat is gone
    • The most distinctive thing is the sound — drones have a very distinct noise
  • An attack by Ukrainian drones has caused a major fire at an oil depot in Rostov-on-Don (archive)
    • Russia has claimed to have defeated several other Ukrainian drone attacks
  • Ukraine secures a debt relief deal worth $11 bn (archive)
    • Reduces the economic value of the affected debt by 60%
    • Bondholders will directly write off 37% of their claims
    • Debt relief program was organized by the IMF
    • Ukraine still needs to restructure payments on "GDP Warrants" that it had issued in 2015
    • This is important for Ukraine, as it enables the government to continue to seek international financing to run its operations, which would have been difficult if it had gone into default
• French prosecutors bring formal charges against Pavel Durov, CEO of Telegram (archive)
  • Durov is accused of being complicit in distributing child pornography, illegal drugs and hacking software
  • Durov is alleged to have refused to cooperate with investigations into illegal activity on the app
  • As a result, prosecutors claim that Durov is in violation of laws that require app developers to cooperate with authorities to limit harmful content
  • Wow they hit him with three of the four horsemen
• The EU investigates Telegram over misreporting user numbers (archive)
  • The EU is investigating whether Telegram deliberately understated its user numbers
  • Online platforms with more than 45 million EU users are subject to additional rules under the Digital Services Act
  • The EU's Joint Research Center is conducting an investigation to determine how many EU users are using Telegram
  • Investigation comes in the wake of Telegram CEO Pavel Durov's arrest
• OpenAI is in talks to raise funding at a greater than $100 bn valuation (archive)
  • Was previously valued at between $86 bn and $90 bn (archive) in a share sale that allowed employees to cash out their stock grants
  • Funding round will be led by Thrive Capital
  • Microsoft is also expected to increase its investment
• The AI boom has sparked a literal land-rush as speculators seek to buy up land and prepare it for datacenter expansions (archive)
  • Currently the major datacenter markets are Northern Virginia, Atlanta, Phoenix and Silicon Valley
  • As those markets become saturated, developers are expanding to locations like Indiana, Idaho and Kansas
  • One major constraint on datacenter growth is power availability, especially power from renewable sources
• India is in talks with Russia to fully indigenize production of the Su-30 (archive)
  • The Su-30 is a derivation of the Su-27, with some backported features from a canceled follow-up to the Su-27, such as the Su-27M and Su-37
    • Thrust-vectoring nozzles
    • Forward canards for increased maneuverability
    • Improved radar
    • The article claims that the Su-30 was the first operational fighter with thrust-vectoring nozzles, a claim I found surprising, but it turns out that the Su-30 was declared operational in 2002, while the F-22 didn't reach initial operational capability until 2005
  • India has over 260 Su-30 fighters
  • However, unlike China, which has fully indigenized production of its Su-27 variants such as the J-11, India's contribution to the Su-30 is less than 50%
  • Full indigenous production of the Su-30 by India would potentially allow India to re-export the Su-30 to other states which have significant pre-existing stocks of Soviet aircraft
  • Potential customers include Egypt and Malaysia, both of whom were pressured by the US to cancel orders for Su-35s from Russia
  • This arrangement would be similar to the BrahMos partnership which isn't subject to US sanctions either
  • India will have to improve the Su-30, however, if it is to be competitive on the export market
    • Indian-made Su-30s cost roughly twice as much to build as their Russian counterparts
    • The Su-30s radar, while considered state of the art in 2002, is widely considered to be obsolete today
    • Engines also need improving for improved performance and reductions in maintenance requirements
  • With the war in Ukraine turning Russia into a pariah, India is finding itself in a profitable position as a reseller of Russian commodities and technology to countries who suddenly find themselves unable to work with Russia directly

2024-08-27 Tuesday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian troops continue to advance near Vodyane
    • Russian troops advance into Kalynove
    • Russian forces have captured Kostyantynivka
    • That's bad news for the Ukrainian position in Vuhledar — unlike last year, where the Russians made a frontal assault from the south, through Pavlivka, this time, they can attack from two directions
    • See previous coverage for why Vuhledar is important
  • Kursk region
    • The Russian military has built a fourth pontoon bridge across the Seym River near Zvnannoe
    • Probably just another target for HIMARS, just like the last three
  • Article on why Pokrovsk is so important
    • Until the start of this year, Avdiivka was an important stronghold for Ukrainian forces in Donetsk
      • Put Russian logistics under threat
      • Provided a Ukrainian foothold for potential counterattacks against Russian forces
    • Pokrovsk is just west of Avdiivka and holds a key railroad junction
    • Supplies come into Pokrovsk for distribution to Ukrainian forces along a broad front, from Vuhledar into north Donetsk
    • Pokrovsk also holds a number of significant highway junctions as well
    • Capturing Pokrovsk also gives Russian troops a clear march to the border of Donetsk Oblast and Dnipro Oblast
    • The pace of Russian advances in this sector has quickened since about July
    • The problem for Ukraine appears to be insufficient manpower rather than insufficient weaponry
    • Ukraine's redeployment of its reserves to Kharkiv has reduced the number of troops available to be rotated into trouble spots to stabilize the Pokrovsk front
  • Belarus conducts military exercises on Ukraine's border
    • The exercises are probably not a prelude to invasion
    • However their location, Gomel, was one of the staging areas for Russia's initial thrust towards Kyiv
    • As a result, the possibility of invasion, although unlikely, cannot be discounted
• GM delays building a battery factory in Indiana (archive)
  • Factory is a collaboration between GM and Samsung
  • Plant's opening will be delayed to 2027
  • A separate plant, built in collaboration with LG Chemical will open later this year
  • Comes in the wake of GM delaying new electric models and Ford taking a $1.9 billion write-down on EVs
  • Volkswagen is also cutting back on its electrification plans
• Chinese automaker XPeng unveils an affordable EV with self-driving features (archive)
  • Called the Mona M03
  • Based on a design purchased from the ride-hailing company Didi
  • Starting price of RMB 119,800 ($16,800), but adding self-driving features raises the price to approximately $22,000
  • XPeng is partially backed by Volkswagen
  • The price point of the car raises questions about its profitability
  • No word on range (which probably means that the range is bad, which is fine for China but less for foreign markets)
  • The other reason to question the range is the price point — $16,800 means there just isn't a lot of room in the budget to have a big battery, even assuming that XPeng is taking zero to negative profit on every car
  • In Q2 2024 XPeng delivered 30,200 cars, compared with 982,700 (wow) for its mass market rival, BYD
  • It's a good looking car, at least
• 7-11 explores seeking protected status as it tries to defend itself from a takeover offer from Circle-K owners Alimentation Couche-Tard (archive)
  • Seeks to have the company categorized as a "core" company under Japan's Foreign Exchange and Foreign Trade Act (FEFTA), which would require the Japanese government to vet any acquisition on national security grounds
  • Would put 7-11 in the same category as companies in the nuclear power, defense, and semiconductor industries
  • 7-11's argument is that its convenience stores form a critical part in providing food and supplies during natural disasters
  • Although Alimentation Couche-Tard's takeover offer is friendly and 7-11's board has set up a committee to consider the offer, the fact that they're also investigating changing the company's designation under FEFTA means that there is at least a faction within the company that is strongly opposed to the merger
  • An application for core status would not be straightforward and would have no guarantee of success
  • Personally, I think this is dumb
  • The straightforward way to block a takeover of 7-11 by Alimentation Couche-Tard is during the review of the merger agreement by anti-trust authorities
  • Trying to block it on national security grounds stretches the definition of national security to the breaking point
  • If 7-11 convenience stores are a national security asset, what isn't?
• The NFL allows team owners to sell a portion of their teams to private equity consortiums (archive)
  • The NFL was one of the last few leagues that banned private equity ownership
  • New agreement allows team owners to sell up to 10% of their firms to one of a list of preapproved private equity groups
  • Each private equity group can own stakes in at most six different teams
  • Does not allow investments by sovereign wealth funds
  • Is likely to further increase the franchise values of NFL teams
• The FreeBSD foundation announces that the German Sovereign Tech Fund has issued a grant for €686,400 for infrastructure modernization
  • Money is for addressing technical debt and improving build infrastructure
  • Work will continue through 2024 and into 2025
  • Nice to see money going towards non-Linux Unixes for a change

2024-08-26 Monday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Fighting is ongoing in Toretsk, as Russian forces attack the town from two directions
    • Russian troops have reportedly entered Novohrodivka
    • This is after they took Orlivka on August 23
    • Ukrainian forces counterattack and capture Russian prisoners in Niu York
  • Russia launches a large salvo of drones and missiles against Ukrainian power infrastructure (archive)
    • A detailed breakdown of the missiles launched
    • Over 200 missiles and drones
    • Energy infrastructure struck
    • This seems to be the standard Russian pattern as Ukraine has built up its air defenses — keep things relatively quiet for weeks or months, build up an inventory and then launch a big attack that can saturate defenses
    • I worry for Ukraine this winter — Russia has been much more systematic about targeting Ukraine's energy infrastructure this year than it had been last year
    • One thing that's remarkable is how dependent Russia has become on Iranian Shahed drones for these sorts of attacks — 46% of the systems used in this attack were Shaheds
    • The implication is that Ukraine would benefit significantly from more "low-end" anti-aircraft systems to knock down the Shaheds and free up sophisticated systems to engage Kh-101s and Kalibrs
    • Also, Russia appears to be using its Su-57s in a more active role — they've been launching missiles into Ukraine on more than one occasion this year
  • Ukraine has implemented a new mobilization program drafting roughly 30,000 soldiers a month, according to US officials
  • The Russians have reinvented flak towers to give their short-range air-defenses a better chance of shooting down incoming drones
    • Ukraine is reinventing door gunners and Russia is reinventing flak towers; everything old is new again

2024-08-25 Sunday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Analysis of the logistical challenges that Ukraine faces in Kursk
      • Like Russia, Ukraine is largely rail-dependent for its logistics
      • However, in Kursk, Ukraine has not secured any rail infrastructure
      • Reliant on trucks to move supplies
      • One of the reasons the front lines have stabilized over the last day or so is that it's likely that Ukrainian forces have reached the end of their logistical rope
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian troops make advances near Vodyane
      • This is important because Vodyane is just northeast of Vuhledar
      • Vuhledar was the scene of heavy fighting in early 2023, as Ukrainian forces there held off a significant armored assault
      • Vuhledar holds a key piece of terrain that enables Ukraine to threaten a potential rail link between Russia and occupied southern Ukraine that bypasses the Kerch Strait
    • Russian forces also make small advances in Kostyantynivka
  • Narendra Modi urges peace talks between Ukraine and Russia (archive)
    • Modi is visiting Kyiv
    • Suggests that India is prepared to play an active role as a host of peace talks
    • Zelensky says he's open to that suggestion (archive)
    • However he says that talks to end the war need to take place on Ukraine's terms not just Russia's
  • The Economist has coverage from Pokrovsk (archive)
    • Pokrovsk is emptying out as civilians evacuate
    • Suggests that the reason for continued Ukrainian retreats in the area is because of a lack of manpower, not necessarily a lack of ammunition
    • Says that a flawed troop rotation in Ocheretyne gave Russian forces the vulnerability they needed to make advances
    • Not a whole lot here that's new, but is a good summary of the overall story around Avdiivka this year
  • The US unveils new economic sanctions against Russian entities (archive)
    • Tightens export controls on goods produced by US-based companies that are manufactured outside the US
    • Targets overseas proxies that Russian companies have set up to try to bypass sanctions
    • Aimed at blocking Russian access to microelectronics
    • Maybe this will work, but I'm not confident
    • Russian entities have proved adept at evading Western sanctions in the past
    • Ultimately there will always be people in India, China, Turkey, Thailand, etc, who are willing to do business with Russia
    • The real way to hurt the Russian economy is for Europe to wean itself completely off Russian gas, but that's not going to happen any time soon
  • Ukraine uses helicopters with door gunners to down Shahed drones
• Telegram CEO Pavel Durov is arrested in France (archive)
  • Arrest was supposedly due to Telegram lacking moderation, which enabled criminal activity on the platform
  • According to Durov, Telegram is a "neutral platform" that doesn't participate in geopolitics
  • Telegram has been a platform heavily used by both Russian and Ukrainian sources to disseminate information and propaganda about the war
  • If Telegram gets shut down, a major source of information about the war goes dark
  • A lot of the videos on especially Twitter about the war come directly from Telegram
  • Without Telegram, battlefield geolocations go dark, and that makes it much more difficult to assess various parties' claims about their positions
• ISS Astronauts will be returning on SpaceX's Crew Dragon instead of Starliner (archive)
  • NASA is not confident that helium leaks in the spacecraft wouldn't endanger the ability of the crew to return
  • Instead of returning on Starliner, they will return on the next Crew Dragon flight next year
  • This failure raises questions about the financial viability of Starliner for Boeing
  • Reinforces SpaceX's dominant position
  • This is huge embarrassment for Boeing
• YCombinator backs its first weapons startup (archive)
  • Startup is called "Ares Industries"
  • Aims to build low-cost cruise missiles
  • Goal is to increase US magazine depths for a potential US-China conflict scenario
  • Advertises a plan to build a cruise missile for $300,000
  • "10x cheaper and 10x smaller" than existing missiles
  • 10x cheaper makes sense
  • LRASM costs approximately $3 million per missile, and that's widely seen as being too expensive
  • 10x cheaper than that is $300,000, which is what Ares Industries is targeting
  • However, I hope they're being hyperbolic with the 10x smaller claim
  • A cruise missile is already pretty much as small as it can be
  • The majority of the space and weight on a cruise missile isn't the control electronics, but rather the engine, fuel tank and warhead
  • Making a missile that's 10x smaller than existing cruise missiles would mean either reducing the range considerably, or making the warhead ineffectual against ships
  • That missile is still going to have to fly out to a place, find a ship (hopefully an enemy ship), dodge the ship's countermeasures, and hit the ship with enough of a bang to do meaningful damage — how do you accomplish with 10x less space​/weight
  • Ammunition supplies are a real problem for a US-China conflict, and I hope that this startup helps solve them, but their initial public statements make them seem like yet another group of Silicon Valley software types who are dangerously out of their depth when it comes to building physical hardware

2024-08-23 Friday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Ukrainian troops have reached Krasnooktyabr'skoe
    • This further tightens their encirclement of Korenevo
    • Krasnooktyabr'skoe is important because it enables Ukrainian troops to establish positions on the Seym River, an important natural boundary
  • Donetsk region
    • Russian forces capture Ptyche
    • Russian troops have advanced beyond Orlivka
    • According to UA Control Map, the town to the north of Orlivka, Zhuravka, has fallen as well, but I'm still waiting for more confirmation on that
  • Ukraine strikes and sinks a ferry carrying fuel tanker railcars in Chushka, on the Kerch Strait
  • This is significant, because this ferry is only one of two capable of carrying railcars
  • Mourners gather to celebrate Yevgeny Prigozhin, on the one-year anniversary of his death (archive)
• CN Rail workers to strike on Monday (archive)
  • Comes in the wake of the Trudeau government asking its labor relations board to impose a back to work order and force the Teamsters and the companies into binding arbitration (archive)
  • Teamsters are saying that they're prepared to defy the back-to-work order
• Chinese entities are using AWS and other cloud services to gain access to high-end nVidia chips for training AI (archive)
  • The efforts by Chinese entities to gain access to AWS were revealed by a survey of tender documents for government contracts
  • Providing Chinese entities access to high-end nVidia chips in the US doesn't technically violate sanctions
  • Sanctions only govern the export of property (either physical or intellectual), and in this case, technically no US property has been transferred to China
  • The US House of Representatives is working to close this loophole
  • In addition to hardware, AWS and other cloud services offer Chinese entities access to the latest "foundation models", such as Claude and ChatGPT
  • The condition of this access is that while China-based entities may not access these foundation models directly, they are allowed to access them through overseas-based subsidiaries
  • This highlights the continuing difficulty in trying to make economic sanctions work between two highly integrated economies in a globalized economic system
  • There are a lot of ways to bypass sanctions that prohibit the transfer of hardware
• Volkswagen board member in charge of technology, Thomas Schmall, lays out the evolution of VW's electrification strategy (archive, translation)
  • Defends Volkswagen's hybrid strategy of building its own battery factories while continuing to purchase batteries from third party suppliers
  • Says that build-out plans for battery factories have been designed with built-in flexibility to allow VW to build more or less capacity to meet fluctuating market demands
  • Volkswagen has not overcommitted to EVs — it still remains a leading manufacturer of conventional and hybrid vehicles
  • However, unlike the CEO of BMW, Schmall still believes that in the long term, EVs represent the only viable future for mass-manufactured consumer vehicles
  • Will be building capacity to manufacture lithium ferrophosphate (LFP) batteries, a cheaper variant of lithium-ion batteries that Tesla and Chinese manufacturers have been using for some time
  • Still plans on building a solid-state battery by the end of this decade
  • Volkswagen is trying to downplay it, but this represents a reduction in investment in EVs
  • They've cut back the number of battery factories they're building from six to three
  • It turns out that European consumers aren't significantly more accepting of EVs than American consumers are
  • Volkswagen wants the EU to stick to its EV mandates because it has invested significantly more in electrification than its peers in Europe, due to the fallout from the "Dieselgate" scandal, and it needs market demand to catch up to that investment
  • Comes on the heels of Ford taking a significant writedown (archive) on its EV plans
  • GM has delayed new EV models (archive) as well

2024-08-22 Thursday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk region
    • Ukrainian forces have advanced to Komarovka in the west
    • Ukrainian forces have advanced to Olgovka in the north
    • The status of Korenevo is unclear, but it looks increasingly surrounded by Ukrainian forces
    • Near Sudzha, Ukrainians have advanced to Martynovka and Russkaya Konopelka
    • However, the Ukrainians seem to be taking more losses in the process, as Russian resistance intensifies
    • More footage of the Ukrainian strikes against Russian pontoon bridges near Glushkovo
  • Donetsk
    • Fighting continues on the outskirts of Kostyantynivka
    • According to the latest map updates, Kostyantynivka is still under Ukrainian control, however the Russians have advanced to the outskirts of the town after capturing Novomykhailivka
  • Zaporizhzhia
    • Russian forces have advanced to Luhivske, in Zaporizhzhia Oblast
      • This is notable because, until now, the Zaporizhzhia front has been relatively quiet, compared to Donetsk
  • Ukrainian drones strike a Russian airbase in Volgograd (archive)
    • The Ukrainian drone campaign has been effective by forcing Russia to stage its glide bombs farther away from the front, forcing its aircraft to fly longer before dropping their bombs
  • A summary report on the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk (archive)
    • Ukraine is seeking to broaden its incursion rather than deepen it
    • This is smart because it means that Ukrainian forces aren't going to advance beyond their supply lines
    • Russia is putting up stiffer resistance
      • More counterattacks by Russian soldiers
      • More experienced Russian soldiers
      • Greater artillery and glide-bomb support
      • However, it still seems like the Russian response is fairly disorganized and uncoordinated
  • More video of Russian turtle tanks
    • They built an entire house on top of that tank, it looks like
    • Like other examples, this has zero visibility off to the sides; but apparently that's not as much of a hindrance I thought it would be
• Mike Lynch confirmed dead (archive)
  • Sad but expected
• Canadian National Railway and Canadian Pacific Kansas City lock out workers as negotiations with the Teamsters break down (archive)
  • More coverage from the Financial Times (archive)
  • Canadian railroad disputes comes on top work stoppages in Indian ports
  • Ongoing disruption to Red Sea traffic because of the Houthi threat
  • Potential industrial action at US ports by the International Longshoremen's Association (previous coverage (archive))
  • Although this work stoppage is limited to Canada, it will likely have effects in the United States, given the volume of cross-border trade handled by these railroads
  • Will impact grain prices, as Canada is heavily rail dependent to ship grain to ports

2024-08-21 Wednesday

• Ukraine War
  • Ukraine launches a massive drone attack on Russia
    • Air raid sirens have sounded in Moscow, Rostov on Don, Bryansk, and Belgorod
  • How A General's Blunder Left Russia's Border Vulnerable (archive)
    • Col. Gen. Alexander Lapin disbanded a council focused on border security
    • Said that the responsibility for border security should rest with the military
    • The disbanding of the interagency council has hampered coordination between the military, the interior ministry and the Federal Security Service
    • The initial response to the incursion was reminiscent of the response to Prigozhin's rebellion
    • Although Lapin had sent warnings to Moscow that Ukraine was massing troops on the border, it was dismissed as a Ukrainian bluff
    • Furthermore, Lapin's troops failed to build defensive fortifications like trenches and minefields
    • Ukrainian electronic warfare disabled Russian communications, leaving troops unable to mount a coordinated resistance
    • While some soldiers did form localized pockets of resistance, the majority, often conscripts serving their mandatory military service, just surrendered
    • Conscript units were often lacking armored vehicles — a motor rifle regiment had just a few dozen armored vehicles instead of the hundreds that it's supposed to
    • Prior to this Lapin had been in charge of Russian forces in Kharkiv, prior to Ukraine's successful counteroffensive there in the autumn of 2022
    • To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, once maybe regarded as misfortune, twice looks like carelessness
  • Franz Stefan-Gady has a good analysis of the Kursk offensive and the overall situation in Ukraine (archive, translation)
    • A large scale Russian counterattack against the incursion into Kursk in inevitable
    • It is not clear that the benefits of carving out a buffer zone in Kursk are worth the costs in terms of manpower and materiel
    • However, with this operation, Ukraine has shown that it can still carry out combined-arms maneuvers and achieve operational surprise, something that would be beyond the capability of many European armed forces
    • There are ongoing concerns about Ukraine's ability to hold Donetsk Oblast — has Ukraine committed its strategic reserve?
    • The ability of Ukrainian forces to hold territory inside Russia is strongly dependent on how well they can protect their logistics from Russian artillery, UAVs and glide bombs
    • We need to evaluate this offensive not just today, but weeks or months from now
    • No matter what happens from here on out, Ukraine has increased the perimeter of the territory that it must defend
    • While this offensive goes on, we must remember that Ukraine still has not stabilized the front in the Donbas region
    • We haven't actually seen the true Russian response yet, as Russia is still organizing larger units for a potential counterattack
  • General Syrski delivered a report to the Ukrainian legislature re: missile and drone interception rates (translation)
    • Russian missiles and drones have hit 11,879 targets in Ukraine
      • 6,203 civilian targets
      • 5,676 military targets
    • To hit these targets, the Russians used 9,590 missiles and 13,997 drones
      • 2,429 missiles intercepted
      • 5,972 drones intercepted
    • Large cruise missiles, such as the Kalibr, Kh-555/101, and R-500 were intercepted with 67% success
    • However smaller cruise missiles, such as the Kh-59, Kh-35, and Kh-31 were only intercepted 22% of the time
    • The difference is due to the fact that the smaller cruise missiles are used against frontline or border targets, which have less air defense protection
    • Ballistic missiles are very difficult to shoot down
      • The Iskander OTRK, Tochka-U and the North Korean KN-23 were used 1,388 times in total
      • Of these, only 4.5% were intercepted
    • However the most difficult missiles to intercept were the high-speed air-launched anti-ship missiles — the Kh-22 and Kh-32 — out of 362 launched, only 2 were intercepted, a hit rate of 0.55%
    • Drones, such as Lancets and Shaheds were intercepted 63% of the time
  • President Zelensky says that Ukraine has used US-made weapons to destroy Russian pontoon bridges in Kursk (archive)
    • These strikes disrupt Russian logistics and help Ukraine hold a defensive line along the Seym River
    • Strikes were conducted with HIMARS
• A federal court vacates the FTC's ban on non-compete agreements (archive)
  • Sad, but predictable
  • The legal basis for the FTC's regulation here was always shaky
  • And especially since Loper Bright the Supreme Court has made it clear that agencies are supposed to stick to their statutory limits
• Ford takes a $1.9 bn writedown on canceling a three-row electric SUV (archive)
  • WSJ's coverage (archive)
  • Cancellation was due to uncertainty that the SUV would be profitable within one year of launch
  • Will be manufactured as a hybrid instead of all-electric
  • Ford's electric vehicle division lost $5 bn last year, so the company is cutting models in an effort to improve profitability
  • Will still launch an electric commercial van and midsized electric pickup in the coming years
  • This comes in the wake of GM delaying new EV models (archive)

2024-08-20 Tuesday

• Ukraine War
  • Kursk offensive
    • Ukraine has captured Snagost, and Ukrainian troops are fighting for Korenevo
    • There are reports of Ukrainian troops in Vishnevka, directly west of Snagost as well
    • Ukraine has also captured Cherkasskoe Porechnoe and Martynovka
  • Donetsk
    • A visualization of the movement of the front line in Donetsk over the previous month
      • As expected, it's not good
      • Seems like the Russian advance has intensified in that area
    • According to UA Control Map's interactive map, Russian forces are less than 20km from Pokrovsk
  • Analysis of the political aspects of the Kursk incursion
    • The Ukrainians have succeeded in shutting up many Western commentators who advocated for freezing the war along current lines
    • Has completely discredited Russia's red lines
      • According to Russian doctrine and Putin's statements, the response to an incursion onto Russian territory by a foreign power would have been a nuclear strike
      • The fact that Ukraine has taken roughly 300km² of Russian territory shows that threats of nuclear escalation aren't credible
    • Shows that large scale operations are still possible
    • When Ukraine captures towns, it does so with minimal destruction; when Russia captures towns, it flattens them
    • The incursion into Russia by Ukraine is another nail in the coffin of CSTO
  • Further analysis of the Ukrainian offensive into Kursk (archive)
    • This is a high-risk/high-reward strategy
    • Ukraine has depleted the reserves that it was building up for a 2025 offensive
    • Whether this incursion is successful is less dependent on how much territory Ukraine captures and more on how many losses they're able to inflict on the Russians on the way out
    • Ukraine appears to be preparing for a potential Trump victory by ensuring that it has territory that Russia wants, as a bargaining chip
• Rocket Factory Augsburg loses a first stage during a hot-fire test
  • Failure occurred during the first test of the full complement of 9 engines
  • RFA was taking a higher-risk approach with an emphasis on real testing in lieu of simulations
  • Prior to this failure, the German startup had been planning to launch its first orbital rocket later this year
  • RFA's "Helix-One" rocket resembles a small Falcon 9, with 9 first stage engine and a single second stage engine
  • Designed to deliver 1.3 metric tons to low earth orbit
• Elon's takeover of Twitter has been the worst underwriting deal for major investment banks since the financial crisis (archive)
  • Twitter's weak financial performance has made it difficult for banks to resell the loans the made to underwrite Elon's buyout of Twitter
  • Banks got taken in by financing the world's richest person
  • They could be made whole by keeping the loan on their books until it matures
  • However this is reliant on Twitter actually repaying those loans
  • The inability to sell the loans has reduced compensation for senior bankers at banks like Barclay's and BNP Paribas
  • Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group has assigned the Twitter loan to its special situations and workouts group, which normally handles distressed debts and bankruptcies
• 7-11 shares close lower because of antitrust concerns with the Circle-K merger (archive)
  • 7-and-i Incorporated, owner of 7-11 has been approached with a merger offer from Alimentation Couche-Tard, owner of Circle-K
  • FTC and Japan's competition authority are expected to have major questions about this merger, if it's agreed to
  • Food and fuel are both sensitive concerns for anti-trust authorities
  • This will raise even more concerns than the proposed Kroger-Albertson's merger, which was halted due to anti-trust concerns

2024-08-19 Monday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russia captures (archive) Zalizne
    • Capture probably occurred around August 5, but is only being confirmed today
    • Russian forces have entered Toretsk and made progress in Niu York
    • Russian forces have also entered Zavitne
      • This follows up from the capture of Zelhanne on August 15
  • Kursk region
    • Ukraine destroys a third bridge (archive) over the Seym River
      • The destruction of the three bridges (archive) turns the Seym river into a natural barrier that the Russians will have to cross in order to retake the area of Kursk that Ukraine has captured
      • At least one of the bridges was destroyed with a HIMARS strike, according to Russian officials
    • The Russians have reportedly replaced one of the destroyed permanent bridges with a pontoon bridge
      • However pontoon bridges are even easier to destroy than concrete bridges
    • Ukraine has reportedly captured (archive) the towns of Tolpino and Kolychevka, cutting off a Russian garrison in Korenevo
    • Aleksandrovka has reportedly been captured (archive) as well
  • Russia has started flying drones with hard-wired fiber optic connections
    • This is likely to insulate them from electronic warfare
  • Ramzan Kadyrov posts a video of himself on a Cybertruck equipped with a machine gun (archive)
    • It's completely useless on the battlefield
    • But it'll go viral on social media
    • So of course it's the Chechens who come up with it
  • The German finance ministry is reportedly hesitating on approvals for more aid to Ukraine (archive)
    • The government's draft 2025 spending plans halved aid to Ukraine (archive), from €8 bn to €4 bn
    • Now, Christian Lindner, the finance minister, is arguing that aid to Ukraine should be cut entirely, unless alternative funding mechanisms can be found
    • One possible funding mechanism he suggested was frozen Russian assets in Europe
    • But aren't those assets already being used as collateral for the €50 bn loan for Ukraine organized by the G7?
  • According to President Zelensky, the goal of the incursion into Kursk is to create a buffer zone that would prevent Russian attacks towards Sumy (archive)
    • Other goals include destroying as much Russian offensive potential as possible
• Mike Lynch among the missing in a yacht sinking off the coast of Sicily (archive)
  • Mike Lynch was the CEO of Autonomy, a company acquired by HP in a major transaction
  • After the acquisition went bad, HP brought fraud charges against Mike Lynch
  • However, Mike Lynch was found not guilty on all counts (archive), and retained the fortune he made by selling the company
  • Yacht was named the Bayesian and was reportedly owned by Lynch's family
  • Previous coverage of the trial on June 7, 2024
• The owner of 7-11 convenience stores has been approached with a merger offer from the owner of Circle-K, Alimentation Couche-Tard (archive)
  • 7-11 has just completed its acquisition of the Speedway chain of gas stations and convenience stores
  • Offer is friendly and nonbinding
  • I think this deal will face significant anti-trust scrutiny

2024-08-16 Friday

• Ukraine War
  • Ukraine orders an evacuation of Pokrovsk (archive)
    • More bad news out of the east
• Epic Games and Spotify take advantage of looser iOS App Store regulations imposed by the EU (archive)
  • This is the first practical effect of the EU ruling that Apple was violating the DMA by restricting apps exclusively to its own app store
• The US Navy is beginning to deploy the AIM-174B to the Pacific (archive)
  • The AIM-174B is an air-launched version of the Standard Missile 6 (SM-6)
  • Much longer range than AIM-120 AMRAAM
  • Up to 400 km range as compared with the AMRAAM's 150 km
  • Is a counter to China's PL-15 missile which is thought to have a range of approximately 250 km
  • Because the AIM-174B is a variant of an existing missile, it can be manufactured rapidly from existing production lines
  • Is compatible with Australian aircraft

2024-08-15 Thursday

• Ukraine War
  • Donetsk region
    • Russia captures Zelhanne, near Pokrovsk
      • The news coverage is all on Ukraine's incursion into Russia, but, at the same time, Russia is continuing to advance in Donetsk
    • WSJ coverage of the Pokrovsk offensive (archive)
      • Despite the military aid package, Ukrainian forces in this region are still fighting at a disadvantage in terms of artillery
      • Russia is increasingly able to neutralize Ukrainian drones with electronic warfare
      • The critical problem for Ukraine in this area is a lack of manpower
      • Russia has a manpower advantage of roughly 5:1 in the region
      • Soldiers are spending hundreds of days in front-line trenches, as there are not enough troops available to rotate them out
      • Russia is attacking with motorcycles — these attacks are expensive, often taking 60-80% casualties, but enough soldiers get through to push the Ukrainians back bit by bit
      • Russia pushes widely separated soldiers forward on motorcycles, maybe 4 out of 5 are killed by Ukrainian forces, but last one hunkers down and serves as an artillery spotter
      • Then Russian forces use their artillery advantage to hammer the Ukrainians and force them back
      • Ukraine took heavy casualties during last summer's offensive, and, as a result, the Ukrainian army has manpower shortages
        • If that's true, then last year's offensive was a truly terrible idea
      • The real problem here is lack of artillery — if the Ukrainians had enough artillery, they'd be able to kill the remaining Russian soldiers that escaped direct fire with an artillery barrage
      • But they don't have enough shells at the frontline to conduct artillery barrages
  • Kursk offensive
    • Ukraine captures over 100 prisoners of war after capturing a large bunker in Sverdlikovo
      • I guess Ukraine is going to be exchanging a lot of its own POWs
    • Ukraine strikes the railway station in Lgov
    • This was probably a drone or MLRS strike, as Lgov is fairly distant even from the maximum extent of the Ukrainian advance
    • Emil Kastehelmi has an update on the overall status of the Kursk offensive
      • Sudzha is under Ukrainian control
      • Ukraine is pushing towards Belitsa
      • A large amount of fighting is taking place between Sudzha and Koronevo
  • While Russia is pulling troops from Ukraine in order to reinforce Kursk, it does not appear to be withdrawing troops from the Donetsk offensive
    • This highlights the problem I've had all along with the Ukrainian offensive, which is that it's not actually preventing Russia from achieving strategic objectives
    • Exchanging Pokrovsk for some random dirt across the border in Kursk is not a good trade!
  • I think one of the main questions of military strategy today is, how does one achieve operational surprise in a battlefield where surveillance is ubiquitous
    • The main impact of drones, per interviews with Ukrainian officers, has been less about kinetic impact (i.e. directly striking enemy troops and vehicles) and more about surveillance and reconnaissance
    • The true advantage of Russian drones over Ukrainian drones isn't that Russia has more FPV drones, it's that they have many more medium-altitude surveillance drones, like their Zala and Orlan UAVs
    • This surveillance advantage allows Russian commanders to react to Ukrainian troop movements
    • However, as Ukraine demonstrated in its incursion into Kursk, surprise is still possible
    • It is still possible to find enemy weakpoints, mass troops and engage in maneuver warfare
    • The question is: how does one do this reliably?
  • The Wall Street Journal has a feature article on the Nord Stream pipeline attack (archive)
    • Previous coverage in the WSJ (archive)
    • Sourced from interviews with four unnamed Ukrainian officials who had personal involvement with the plot
    • Was a largely private effort, financed by Ukrainian businessmen and carried out by military officers
    • Initial President Zelensky approved of the attack, but, he rescinded his approval after the CIA warned him against carrying out the attack
    • Effort was personally supervised by Valeriy Zaluzhniy, who, at the time, was the head of the Ukrainian military
    • Attack was conducted by a small team of 6
    • Was a mix of active-duty soldiers and civilians with maritime expertise
    • Included a woman to add credence to their cover story that they were friends on holiday
    • Zelensky tried to get Zaluzhniy to call off the attack, but Zaluzhniy claimed that the team had already been dispatched and were running incommunicado
    • In their rush to leave Germany following the attack the sabotage team failed to hose down the ship they'd rented, the Andromeda allowing German investigators to retrieve evidence, including explosive residue
    • German investigators struggled to secure cooperation from Polish authorities, despite having evidence that Polish front-companies linked to Ukrainian intelligence helped organize the travel arrangements for the attack
• Toyota plans to convert all of its models to hybrid-only (archive)
  • This will give Toyota more time to develop electric vehicles while still complying with ever more stringent emissions regulations
  • Is looking like a sound choice as demand growth for purely electric vehicles slows
  • Toyota already has a dominant position in the market for hybrid vehicles with the Prius, the hybrid RAV-4, the hybrid Camry and other models
  • Toyota chairman Akido Toyoda says that the global share of electric vehicles will top out at around 30%, with the remainder being hybrids, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles, sustainable fuels and other technologies yet to emerge
  • I think that's pure cope
  • The EU is banning all new sales of internal combustion powered vehicles in 2035
  • Toyota is way behind on EV development, and rather than rushing to catch up, like Honda is with its GM partnership, they're burying their heads in the sand and pretending that EVs aren't the future
  • What's especially worrying is that Akio Toyoda keeps repeating the claim that hydrogen is going to be part of the future, when, in reality, hydrogen has repeatedly failed to gain market traction despite massive investments from Toyota
  • There's no evidence that "green fuels" will ever be a mass-market solution
  • It seems like sustainable fuels will be a way to keep vintage sports cars running, and they might have some application in motor racing (which is why e.g. Porsche is looking into them)
• Softbank shifts to TSMC as its manufacturer of AI chips
  • Further coverage from the Financial Times (archive)
  • Under Project Izanagi, Softbank seeks to develop AI processors to rival nVidia
  • Softbank was investigating using Intel Foundry Services to manufacture these processors
  • However, after Intel couldn't meet Softbank's "volume and speed" requirements, Softbank chose TSMC to manufacture the chips
  • Softbank has not ruled out working with Intel in the future
  • This is another setback for Intel
• The US amends ITAR to ease transfers of nuclear technology to Australia (archive)
  • Enables Australia to buy military equipment from the US without requiring an export permit
  • Enables Australian companies to collaborate with US and British companies on new weapons and technologies
  • For the technologies that still require an export license, the US will implement an expedited licensing process
  • However these changes still don't impact data that has been classified at the "NoForn", which prevents dissemination outside the US
  • ITAR changes came after the UK and Australia made changes to their own export licensing rules to assure the US that any shared technology would not be reshared outside AUKUS
  • This is a big deal — ITAR rules can be pretty onerous

2024-08-13 Tuesday

• Russia reportedly withdraws some troops from Ukraine to counterattack against the Ukrainian incursion into Kursk oblast (archive)
  • Unclear how many troops have been shifted
  • Ukrainian troops are facing greater resistance as they seek to expand their foothold
  • The ultimate goal of the Kursk incursion is still unclear
• Data from NASA's InSight lander on Mars indicates the existence of large amounts of subsurface water (archive)
  • The analysis is based on recorded seismic activity
  • Water would be located anywhere between 11.5km and 20km beneath the surface
• The TikTok law and the foreign influence boogeyman
  • The primary justification for the law forcing TikTok to divest itself from its Chinese owner is to ensure that China can't use TikTok as a mechanism to push its propaganda onto American users
  • This article does not dispute that China uses TikTok as a mechanism to push propaganda
  • The Chinese government appears to operate on an "injection" model, where mere exposure to information can trick users into beliefs that don't conform with their pre-existing worldview
  • However, evidence from American social media firms shows that this isn't the case
  • Attempts to make more than marginal changes to beliefs just cause users to leave
  • Facebook's "poke to vote" effort to drive increased voter turnout only raised voter turnout by 0.4%
  • The filter bubble effect is not due to social media algorithms, it is due to people self-selecting into groups whose ideologies conform to their pre-existing beliefs
  • We blame algorithms for causing social media harm, but the harm caused by social media algorithms is due to those algorithms showing us more and more extreme versions of things we already want to see
  • This effect will not go away if TikTok becomes American owned, and in fact, it might become worse, as American ownership would be more attuned to American cultural norms
  • To the extent that motivated reasoning, attachment to beliefs and interest in only viewing cherry-picked information is a problem, it is a problem that is much more likely to be exploited by domestic political parties than foreign actors
  • Information is not a weapons system!
  • Factors that could change this assessment
    • Just-in-time manipulation
      • A well-timed misinformation push at a critical moment could swing a campaign
      • However, this push would have to be massive and easily detected in order to be effective
      • Would only work once — after that point trust in the social network would be destroyed
    • AI-customized manipulation
      • In theory it could be possible to use AI to create hyper-customized messages designed to say the right words to each and every person viewing in order to have the greatest persuasive impact
      • However, there is little to no evidence for any such hyper-customization in use today
  • Congress has no business in "protecting" Americans from speech they choose to engage with voluntarily
  • There is no evidence that TikTok has caused any shifts in political belief
  • Bills like the TikTok ban do more to help Chinese interests by diminishing trust in the impartiality of American politicial institutions than TikTok itself
  • In other words, banning TikTok makes it easier to make the case that Moldbug makes, which is that the US is just as totalitarian as China, but in service of different masters

2024-08-12 Monday

• Ukrainian forces have advanced to near Cherkasskoe Porechnoe, in their Kursk offensive
• The greatest extent of Ukrainian incursion thus far appears to be near Semenovka, approximately 25 miles inside the Russian border
• Russian forces out of Donetsk are attacking Mykolaivka, near Donetsk
• Note that Novozhelhanne and Komyshivka are still in Ukrainian hands, so this might be an attempt to create an encirclement in that area
• The Economist has a summary of the Kursk offensive
• Emil Kastehelmi has a good analysis thread as well
  • After six days, the Ukrainian offensive is slowing down in the face of increasing Russian reinforcements arriving in the area
  • Still not clear what the objective is
  • Ukraine likely cannot commit many more soldiers to this offensive than it already has
  • There is a possibility that Putin allows Ukraine to take and hold this territory, under the expectation that it will be returned to Russia when the war ends, either in a trade for some Ukrainian territory or as part of surrender negotiations
• The Wall Street Journal has a summary and analysis (archive) of the Ukrainian offensive thus far
  • The strategic logic of this attack is questionable
  • However, the attack may have the political goal of showing the US and other Western backers that Ukraine is able to counterattack effectively and take the fight to Russia
  • US was not informed about the attack before it began
  • There are concerns that Putin might order retaliatory missile strikes on Ukrainian cities as a result
  • I don't think that's any more of a concern than it was prior to this incursion, because I don't think Russia has enough missiles and drones to launch after expending significant numbers of them in its previous efforts to target Ukrainian energy infrastructure
  • The pattern of Russian attacks has been to launch waves of drones and missiles when the Russian military has built up enough of an inventory to overwhelm Ukrainian defenses
  • The main concern is whether this is drawing more Ukrainian manpower away from Donetsk than it is drawing Russian manpower

2024-08-09 Friday

• Ukrainian drones hit a military airfield in Lipetsk (archive)
  • Reportedly blew up a large amount of ammunition
  • Unclear whether any aircraft were destroyed
• Ukraine's offensive into Kursk Oblast continues
  • Over 300 km² of Russian territory occupied so far
  • The town of Sudzha has been captured
  • One possible aim of this incursion is to ensure that, if Putin wants to declare a ceasefire "along existing lines", that "existing lines" will include Ukrainian control of Russian territory, increasing Ukraine's bargaining power
• Japan's earthquake early warning system warns of a possible "megaquake" in the Nankai Trough (archive)
  • Warning comes in the aftermath of a magnitude 7.1 earthquake (archive) that struck Kyushu
  • No damage reported as a result of that, however, the Japan Meterological Agency warned that it might be a harbinger of an even more powerful quake in the same region
  • Japanese Prime Minister Fumio Kishida canceled a trip to Central Asia (archive) as a precautionary measure
  • The early warning doesn't mean a quake is guaranteed to occur, rather it means that conditions are unstable and a strong earthquake is possible
• A better explanation for the early rush of holiday shipping (archive)
  • This is a follow-up to the article about increased early holiday orders from Wednesday
  • Retailers are concerned about a possible strike in October by the longshoremen's union
  • A work stoppage would affect imports on both coasts
  • Even a one-week shutdown could take 4-6 weeks to recover from
  • Another factor is new tariffs imposed by the Biden administration (archive), which will take effect later this year
    • New tariffs have been imposed on a wide range of products
    • Notably, electric vehicle tariffs are increasing to 100% (mostly a preventive measure, as there aren't a huge number of Chinese EVs coming in)
    • Another notable tariff is tariffs on imports of critical minerals used to manufacture solar panels
    • Notable because it conflicts with Democratic goals of speeding the energy transition — the government wants to build solar panels, but not with a supply chain that's entirely dependent on China)
    • Tariffs will be imposed for the first time on PPE imported from China

2024-08-08 Thursday

• DeepMind unveils a robotic ping-pong player capable of playing at a human level
  • Has a 100% win rate against beginner opponents
  • 55% win rate against intermediate opponents
  • Still loses to advanced players
  • Uses a system-of-systems approach
    • Low-level "skills"
      • Forehands
      • Backhands
      • Serve returns
    • High-level decision-maker chooses which skill to use for a particular return
  • Was trained using a hybrid of simulated and real-world environments
    • Real world table-tennis data was used to set up a simulated environment
    • Robot was trained in the simulated environment
    • Then, after each round of training, the robot played against a human opponent, and the results of those plays informed the creation of the next iteration of the simulated environment
  • Humans enjoyed playing against the robot
  • Weaknesses of the current system
    • High-spin shots
    • Backhand shots
    • Extremely fast shots
• System76, a manufacturer of Linux workstations, unveils a new desktop environment: Cosmic
  • Official announcement
  • Code is still in alpha
  • Will be built into System76's custom Linux distribution, Pop!_OS
  • Built in Rust
  • Aimed primarily as a replacement for GNOME
  • It's nice to see someone taking on the GNOME/KDE duopoly in Linux desktop enviroments
• More analysis of Ukraine's offensive into Russia
  • Ukrainian objective appears to be to create a buffer zone inside Russia, much like how Russia has created a buffer zone inside Ukraine near Kharkiv
  • Open question as to whether the US will allow its weapons to be used to reinforce this buffer zone
  • This is a risky operation, as Russia has sufficient reserves to reinforce and counterattack this buffer
  • A notable success thus far has been the capture of numerous Russian POWs which can be exchanged for captured Ukrainians
  • It seems like this offensive has had more success than I gave it credit for yesterday
  • However I still think it's a bad idea that Ukraine is committing reserve forces to capturing territory that it has neither the intention nor capacity to hold in the long-term

2024-08-07 Wednesday

• Ukrainian forces have launched a major raid into the Kursk region of Russia
  • This appears to be a reply to Russia's incursion into the Kharkiv region
  • Same justification — force Russia to redeploy troops to defend against Ukrainian raids, blunting its ongoing offensive in the Avdiivka-Pokrovsk region
  • However, at the same time, Russian forces have advanced in Niu York
  • Rob Lee assesses that this cross-border incursion will not have the intended impact, as Russia has substantially reinforced its reserve units with conscript soldiers
  • The analysis I'm seeing is that this seems like desperation — Ukraine is getting slowly but steadily pushed back near Pokrovsk, so it needs something to change, and quickly
  • This operation will also likely harden Russian attitudes towards the war — Ukraine has brought the war to Russia, which will allow Putin to ask more of his citizens
  • It's an open question whether the troops that Ukraine is using for this incursion would have been better used reinforcing Toretsk or Niu York
  • The other open question is just how much of a price Russia is paying for this advance — as per the analysis I linked on July 23, Russia is chewing through its stock of artillery at a ferocious rate
• Maersk has stated that companies are bringing forward orders from China in anticipation of increased tariffs under a possible Trump administration (archive)
  • Says that some companies are bringing forward their Christmas orders
  • This doesn't make any sense because regardless of the outcome of the election, the new administration won't take office until January
  • Christmas orders are safe, no matter what happens in November
• WarnerBros Discovery has written down the value of its traditional cable television channels by $9 billion (archive)
  • Reflects the rise of streaming
  • WarnerBros Discovery anticipated a recovery in traditional TV advertising spending that never materialized

2024-08-06 Tuesday

• OpenAI co-founder John Schulman leaves for Anthropic (archive)
  • Leaving to pursue alignment research at Anthropic
  • Greg Brockman will be taking a year-long sabbatical as well
• Armenia withdraws from Russia-led CSTO
  • Useful backgrounder on the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict
  • Comes in the wake of two successive offensives by Azerbaijian to capture the disputed territory of Nagorno-Karabakh, in 2020 and 2022
  • In neither instance did Russia, the principal military power in the CSTO intervene on behalf of Armenia
• One thing unites America: Hating Google
  • But we all hate Google for different reasons
• Twitter sues advertisers, alleging antitrust violations with regards to an alleged boycott against Twitter
  • Not sure Musk has much of a case here
  • Also, suing your customers is never a good look
  • I think this is Elon just being bipolar again
  • We'll probably never hear about this lawsuit again — either it'll be settled quietly or Elon will drop it

2024-08-05 Monday

• Bangladeshi PM Sheikh Hasina has reportedly resigned and left the country (archive)
  • Comes in the aftermath of renewed protests against her rule
  • Protests began a month ago as students protested a quota system that reserved 30% of jobs for the families of army veterans that had fought for Bangladeshi independence
  • Government was hoping that a Supreme Court decision significantly revising the quota system would quell the protests
    • Reduced veterans' quota to 5%
    • Allocated another 2% to ethnic minorities and disabled people
    • Remaining 93% allocated on merit
  • However, by that point, the objective of the protests had widened to demanding the resignation of Sheikh Hasina herself
• Myanmar's military junta says that communications have been lost with several senior officers as rebels overrun a major base (archive)
  • Military base was in Lashio, in Shan province
  • Was the headquarters of the Burmese military's Northeastern Command
  • One of 14 major regional commands
  • Lashio is by far the largest city the coalition of rebel groups, the Myanmar National Democratic Alliance Army (MNDAA), has conquered so far
  • Governing the city will be a test to determine whether the MNDAA can successfully govern the entire nation
• Japanese stocks are down by over 12% as the Japanese stock market suffers its worst single-day loss since 1987 (archive)
  • Selling was severe enough to trigger automatic circuit breakers
  • Korean stocks also hit similar circuit breakers as the Korean market fell as well
  • Sell-off was largely driven by large declines in manufacturers of chip-making equipment
    • TSMC down by almost 10%
    • Samsung and SK Hynix down by about 10% as well
    • Renesas and Tokyo Electron down by 15% and 18% respectively
  • Seems like investors are pulling back from all AI-related stocks
• China unveils 5-year plan to dismantle its hukou system
  • Further coverage from the South China Morning Post
  • The Chinese hukou is a registration system that ties people to the province of their birth
  • People can only access government benefits in the province that they were born in
  • This means that Chinese migrants to cities are often in the same situation as illegal immigrants in the US — no way to access government benefits where they live
  • Although migrants can theoretically change their hukou, cities often impose stringent quotas on the number of reregistrations in a given year
  • Goal is to achieve 70% formal urbanization
  • Currently 66% of Chinese residents are estimated to live in urban areas, but only 48% have an urban hukou
  • Migrants who wish to re-register their residency in cities whose population is less than 3 million will face zero restrictions
  • Cities with populations of 3 million to 5 million will have their quotas "comprehensively relaxed"
  • Cities larger than 5 million will be allowed to keep a grading system to select who is allowed to reregister as a resident, but will be encouraged to abolish formal upper limits on immigration
  • Plan is primarily aimed at revitalizing the Chinese property market by allowing people with rural hukous to buy property in urban areas, especially second and third-tier cities
  • There will likely be significant local opposition to this plan from existing residents of cities who don't wish to see property prices increase
  • Might also be resistance from rural hukou holders, who wish to hold onto the land rights associated with their rural hukou as a form of insurance
• Google loses antitrust case over search dominance (archive)
  • A US federal court rules that Google abused its dominance in online search by paying web browser developers and phone manufacturers to keep Google as the default search engine
  • Google was criticized for auto-deleting chat messages, however the judge did not impose any specific penalty on Google for doing so, arguing that doing so wouldn't "move the needle" on the court's assessment of Google's liability
  • Possible remedies include caps on how much Google can pay to be the default or a search-engine selection screen
• Russian troops have pushed into Toretsk
  • I think this is a consequence of the Russian push into Vesele last week
  • The Russian advances near Vesele and Chasiv Yar have put Toretsk and Niu York into an exposed position
  • So now the Ukrainians are having to pull back from these positions
  • The real root cause of this is the fall of Avdiivka — Ukraine hasn't been really able to stabilize that area since the fall of Avdiivka
• At least one Su-34 was destroyed by the ammunition explosion in Morozovsk last week
• An interesting comparison between the Summer 2023 Ukrainian offensive and the 2024 Russian offensive
  • The Ukrainian offensive captured a lot of territory early on but petered out quickly
  • Russia has been much more steady in its gains
  • At this point, Russia has captured more territory than Ukraine was able to liberate in the summer of 2023
  • Most of these gains have occurred around Ocheretyne and around Toretsk/Niu York

2024-08-02 Friday

• AP Moeller-Maersk lifts profit guidance (archive)
  • Lift is because of continuing disruptions in Red Sea shipping
  • Longer trips caused by ships having to route around the Cape of Good Hope have soaked up oversupply

2024-08-01 Thursday

• Russian forces have advanced to Vesele on the way to Pokrovsk
  • Lost Prohres, Vovche and Novoselivka Persha
  • This isn't good for Ukraine
  • Ukraine has not been able to close the door that opened at Avdiivka
• Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich and US businessman Paul Whelan have been freed by Russia as part of the largest East-West prisoner swap since the Cold War (archive)
  • In exchange, Russia gets a number of hackers and Vadim Krasikov, an assassin who murdered a Chechen dissident in Berlin
• Intel suspends its dividend and cuts 15% of its workforce as it seeks to focus on its turnaround (archive)
  • Intel's stock is down by over 40% for the year and fell a further 20% in after-hours trading
  • Intel has struggled against AMD in the market for CPUs and against nVidia in the market for GPUs
  • Qualcomm has emerged as a new challenger with its new ARM chips for desktop PCs

2024-07-28 Sunday

• French railroads are back to being fully operational (archive)
  • Railroads will run 80% of their normal schedule on Sunday and will be back to 100% by Monday
  • French investigators are saying they have a good idea as to who perpetrated the attacks

2024-07-27 Saturday

• The Ohio Supreme Court rules that consumer can't sue if they choke on a bone in their "boneless" wings
  • Berkheimer vs. REKM LLC
  • Majority opinion
    • Chickens have bones, so therefore a bone is "natural" to chicken
    • Therefore, a consumer has a reasonable expectation that there might be a bone in the chicken, even if the chicken is advertised as "boneless"
    • "Boneless wings" merely describes a cooking style; it is not a guarantee of bonelessness
  • Dissent
    • The plaintiff should have received a jury trial
    • "Boneless" means "boneless" — it is a claim made by the restaurant about the condition of its wings
  • I'm with the dissent on this one
  • According to the majority opinion, a restaurant may serve regular wings as boneless wings — if anyone complains, they can say, "Because bones are 'natural' to chickens, you had a reasonable expectation that your boneless wings may contain bones"

2024-07-26 Friday

• French railroads hit by coordinated sabotage attack on the day of the opening ceremony for the Paris Olympics (archive)
  • 3 fires were set at critical railway junctions in Croisilles, Pagny-sur-Moselle, and Courtalain
  • Another attempted attack at Vergigny was stopped when rail workers encountered the saboteurs and chased them away
  • Saboteurs cut and burned signalling cables, requiring repairs which will take days
  • 250,000 travelers affected, with predictions suggesting that 800,000 travelers will be affected before the rail lines are operational again
  • This attack is a counterpoint to "Terrorism Is Not Effective"
  • These terrorists managed to shut down large portions of France's high-speed rail system by attacking weak points away from Paris that were poorly guarded and seem to have gotten away scot-free
  • Furthermore, it is impossible to completely stop this kind of attack — what is France going to do? Deploy police officers to guard every single one of the thousands of signalling nodes that line its TGV lines?
• Large tech corporations are down after investors express increasing concerns about the scale of AI investments (archive)
  • nVidia and Tesla are down by approximately 17% over the past week
  • Alphabet is down by 14%
  • Microsoft and Amazon are down by 9%
  • Apple is down by "only" 7%
  • Sell-off was sparked by Alphabet warning about greater investments in AI hurting its profit forecast
  • It's important to note that I think there's still a bull case for nVidia
  • As tech companies increasingly invest in AI, there will be an increased demand for nVidia's chips
  • The distinction between nVidia and the rest is that nVidia is "selling shovels"
  • nVidia will next announce earnings on August 21
• Myanmar is facing an energy shortage as its primary gas field becomes depleted
  • The primary source of natural gas for Myanmar, the Yadana gas field, is nearing depletion
    • Reduced exports to Thailand by 47%
    • Reduced electricity generation by 35%
  • Energy crisis is the direct result of the country's civil war
  • International sanctions and economic damage from war spending have left the government unable to finance additional investments in gas production
  • The Burmese military is awful at any kind of economic development — repeats the same mistakes over and over again
  • Better at announcing new projects than implementing them
  • The loss of gas production will result in power cuts to Yangon and reduced industrial activity, as a result
  • Could also mean greater vulnerability to the rebels — the other major source of electricity for Myanmar is hydropower, and most of the hydropower dams are located in the upland, rebel-controlled areas

2024-07-25 Thursday

• Students at elite Chinese universities express disillusionment about their prospects
  • Project 985 universities are elite universities designated by the government of China
  • Not quite at the same level as the truly elite universities, like Peking or Tsinghua, but close
  • Students say that they don't feel like the hard work they put in to get into a Project 985 school was worth it, given that "salaries are low and house prices are high"
  • Reinforces that China faces many of the same challenges that the US does
• Samsung unveils 60TB SSD
  • Joins Solidigm in offering a drive of this size class
  • Western Digital is expected to announce a 60TB drive later this year
  • Costs $6905
  • Intended for use in data centers as fast storage for AI
• Graphcore has been acquired by Softbank
  • AI accelerator manufacturer was having trouble competing with nVidia
  • Purchase price was between $400 million and $500 million
  • Comes in the wake of significant layoffs at the firm
  • Might result in a possible tie-in with ARM
  • Softbank money will keep them alive for a while, but the structural problem with their business remains, which is that nVidia's software is the de facto standard for AI
  • It's unclear what advantage any integration with ARM will bring
• Southwest Airlines is introducing assigned seating and extended legroom options (archive)
  • Comes in response to declining margins and pressure from activist investors
  • Southwest had been one of the only airlines to use open seating, where fliers could choose any open seat, instead of having pre-assigned seats
  • However, this meant that Southwest didn't have the ability to upsell fliers by charging more for more favorable seating
  • Also meant that Southwest planes had to be essentially single-class economy, when competitors were getting greater margins by splitting their cabins into multiple classes
• Russia is battling runaway inflation (archive)
  • Russian interest rates at 9%, but it's still not enough to stop inflation
  • Government is printing a huge amount of currency to pay for war production and soldier salaries
  • Labor pool has massively shrunk as people of prime working age have been drafted or sought higher paying jobs in the military-industrial complex
  • The appointment of Belusov as defense minister in a transfer from the finance ministry is an acknowledgement that Russia is on a full war economy, and that having the best possible economic management is key to winning the war
  • However, the economic hardships have not resulted in civil unrest or any significant destabilization of Putin's government
  • As a Russian I know put it, never ever bet against the Russian people's ability to withstand great economic hardship in the service of their rulers' idiocy
• Russian training is formally incorporating clay pigeon shooting practice in order to train soldiers on how to shoot down FPV drones
  • However, to paraphrase Bruce Lee, "Skeet don't shoot back"
• OpenAI tests search tool (archive)
  • Dubbed "SearchGPT"
  • Will use ChatGPT to conduct web searches to supplement answers with references and more up-to-date information
  • Could be a direct threat to Google, if it works
  • However, existing AI-enhanced search engines, such as Perplexity, have not been as transformative as hoped, because of confabulation
  • OpenAI has struck deals with publishers, such as the Wall St. Journal, the Financial Times, and People Magazine to use their content legally, which they say will reduce the chances of confabulation

2024-07-24 Wednesday

• One preprocessor line in the Linux kernel expands to over 47 megabytes of output
  • Recursive preprocessor directives expand each argument 8000 times
  • Results in a large constant expression
• Alphabet posts higher revenue, indicates that search business has not been affected by AI (archive)
  • 14% increase in revenue in Q2
  • Indicates that AI tools have not meaningfully affected search traffic
  • This fits with my usage of AI — AI is fine as a general introduction to a topic, but I still end up using Google to drill down into details
  • It might be that AI tools are complementary to Google Search as they solve the "what words do I search for" problem
• A Ukrainian crew aboard a container ship engages and destroys a Houthi drone boat with small arms fire
  • This reinforces a point that many advocates of drone swarms miss, which is that drones are not immune to physics
  • A drone that is cheap to make and easy to deploy will necessarily be limited in some way, be it range, maneuverability or armor
  • These limitations are vulnerabilities which can be exploited
  • Making the drone less vulnerable makes it more expensive, reducing the cost advantage that makes drone swarms advantageous in the first place

2024-07-23 Tuesday

• An analysis of Russian artillery stocks (Translation)
  • OSINT analysts examined satellite photos of Russian storage depots to estimate stocks of Russian artillery systems
  • Although the numbers of self-propelled artillery units in Russian depots increased from estimates carried out in 2023, this is due to two factors
    • The first reason is that study used a more conservative count than the previous one — counted units with missing barrels as salvageable
    • This was done to ensure that any possible error would result in an overestimate of Russian capability rather than underestimate
    • The second reason is that Russia has been taking severely damaged units off the battlefield and shipping them back to storage depots so that they can be cannibalized for parts
    • Small and medium storage depots are actually depleted, and all suitable equipment has been moved to larger depots for restoration and repair
    • The intermingling of battlefield salvage with pre-existing stocks will make future estimates of Russian reserves more difficult
    • The highest rates of depletion/cannibalization appear to be for 2S7 "Pion" heavy howitzers
    • This makes sense, because the 2S7 is the largest and most powerful howitzer in the world, offering a level of firepower that cannot be substituted for by other systems
    • However, although the quality of restored systems is declining, Russia has enough stocks to last for another 1.5 to 2 years
  • Russian towed artillery quantity is better than self-propelled artillery, but quality is worse
    • Russian towed artillery stocks are down to 36-38% of pre-war levels
    • However, given the vast amounts of towed artillery the Russian military had saved up from the Soviet era, this still represents an ample supply for the foreseeable future
    • A bigger issue is the fact that increasingly, these towed artillery systems are dating from the World War 2 era (late 1930s to 1950s)
    • In addition, Russia can source towed artillery parts from Iran and North Korea, further bolstering its supplies
    • It is unlikely that Iran and North Korea will transfer their most modern systems to Russia, so any transfers will be more of these older World War 2-era cannon
    • As self-propelled artillery stocks become increasingly depleted, we should expect to see the replacement of self-propelled artillery with towed artillery in front-line units
  • Russian stocks of multiple-launch rocket artillery systems (MLRS) have almost totally been depleted from open fields
    • However, this doesn't necessarily mean that the Russian military will run out of MLRS any time soon
    • MLRS tend to have longer range than gun-based artillery, making them more difficult to kill, giving them a longer expected lifespan on the battlefield
    • Russian maintenance depots likely preemptively disassembled stored MLRS systems, removing the actual launcher portion from the chassis
    • These launcher components were likely moved indoors, while the stripped chassis were left outside
  • How much can Russia produce "from scratch"
    • This is difficult to ascertain, because often media reports confuse restoration of stored Soviet-era systems with from-scratch production
    • Expansion of self-propelled artillery production is limited by the fact that Russia's self-propelled artillery systems use non-interchangeable gun barrels
    • Expansion of MLRS systems are limited by the fact that many of these systems are mounted on T-72 and T-90 tank chassis, so production of MLRS has to compete with tank production for the same components
    • Artillery barrel production is limited, according to some sources, to 50-80 barrels per year
    • Other sources report production figures as high as 200 barrels per year
    • However, even the high end estimate is still a small fraction of the barrels that are lost to enemy attack or simple wear and tear in combat
    • The bottleneck for Russian artillery barrel production is the sorry state of Russian metallurgy
      • Artillery barrels require special high-strength alloys
      • Russia has largely lost the ability to produce these alloys
    • One possibility this report does not consider is China stepping in to help Russia with barrel production
    • Chinese metallurgy, while not the absolute best in the world, is still reasonably high quality and capable of high volume
    • Furthermore, sending specialized metal alloys and machine tooling to Russia would not violate the Chinese policy of not providing lethal aid
    • The Chinese government draws a distinction betwen sending raw material and fabrication equipment and sending finished weapons
  • Can Russia source artillery from its allies, Iran and North Korea
    • North Korea
      • Much of North Korea's artillery is outdated, even compared to depleted Russian stocks
      • North Korea is unlikely to supply its most modern equipment, because it has too few examples, and Kim Jong-un would not want to deplete his own military's readiness
      • North Korea's systems have also diverged from Russia
        • Many North Korean guns use 130mm shells, a caliber that Russia doesn't generally use
        • North Korean MLRS are also incompatible with Russian systems for the most part
      • Therefore, North Korea is likely to continue to supply ammunition for Russian forces
      • However, there have been complaints that this ammunition is of poor quality, with North Korean shells reported as having lower accuracy than Russia-produced shells
    • Iran
      • Iran has many fewer Soviet-era systems than North Korea
      • In addition, Iran is involved in many more conflicts than North Korea is — Russia is merely one customer among many for Iran
      • The most likely system that Russia will turn to Iran for spare parts for is the D-30 towed howitzer
  • While Iran and North Korea can supply ammunition, it's unlikely that they will be able to provide enough artillery guns to compensate for battlefield wear and destruction
• Are Macs vulnerable to CrowdStrike-type errors
  • CrowdStrike Falcon Protect does not use a kernel module on modern Apple Silicon Macs, as it does on Intel Macs and Windows machines
  • Instead it uses an Endpoint Security System Extension
  • Endpoint Security System Extensions run with normal user privileges, so if they crash, they won't bring down the entire machine
  • CrowdStrike actually supported this change, stating, "reducing the need for privileged access is always a more secure approach and we are proud to embrace this new architecture."
  • However, although Macs are safe from kernel issues caused by third-party updates, first-party updates from Apple remain a point of vulnerability
  • In 2016, Apple pushed an update that accidentally added one of its own kernel extensions to the list of incompatible kernel extensions, resulting in the loss of wired Ethernet connectivity on all Macs that downloaded the update
  • Although this didn't cause systems to crash, it resulted in the loss of connectivity for any machine not connected to wifi, and also broke software that validated Ethernet MAC addresses for licensing
  • However, Apple's processes have improved since then, and these process improvements, combined with greater vertical integration, in the form of Apple Silicon, has reduced the probability of such an error occurring again
  • If Windows is to have the same resiliency as MacOS in this regard, it too needs to remove drivers from its kernel
  • To its credit, Windows has removed drivers from its kernel, to a large extent
  • Notably GPU drivers — now when a GPU driver crashes, Windows' screen goes blank for a moment as the driver restarts, instead of showing a blue-screen
• Hamas and Fatah agree to form a unity government (archive)
  • Negotiations between Hamas and Fatah were brokered by China
  • Declaration has not been approved by the US, Israel or Britain
  • Demonstrates China's growing influence in the Middle East
  • It also increases the pressure on Israel to negotiate with Hamas regarding a political settlement for the Gaza Strip that leaves Hamas in charge there
• GM puts self-driving vehicle plans on hold (archive)
  • GM has shelved development work on its futuristic "Origin" self-driving taxi concept
  • Origin was intended to be a driverless taxi designed from the ground up for autonomous operations
  • Lacked a steering wheel and had bench seating and subway-style doors
  • Instead GM will refocus on developing a new version of its inexpensive Bolt EV
  • This is smart, given the fallout from the Cruise accident from October 3, 2023 (archive), where a Cruise vehicle struck and dragged a pedestrian who had already been struck by another driver running a red light
  • Cruise had faced increasing regulatory scrutiny and had to scale back operations drastically, so it's probably not worthwhile to continue efforts to design a vehicle that won't have any applications beyond Cruise
  • Plus, I'm not really sure why GM canceled the Bolt in the first place — it was their most popular and profitable EV

2024-07-22 Monday

• Chrome abandons plan to deprecate third-party cookies
  • Reverses a 2020 pledge to end the usage of third-party cookies within two years
  • Plans were abandoned in response to feedback from advertisers and regulators
  • UK regulators opened an investigation into whether Google's replacement for third party cookies, Privacy Sandbox (earlier known as Federated Learning of Cohorts), was anti-competitive
  • Although UK regulators were eventually mollified, continued pushback from advertisers, led Google to abandon its plan to deprecate third-party cookies entirely
  • Instead, Google will display a prompt that will allow users to enable or disable third-party cookies at any time
  • It really is remarkable how scared big tech companies are of any kind of anti-trust
• Korean ISP KT is accused of planting malware on its customers' machines in order to disrupt file-sharing
  • In Korea, ISP peering is billed on a "sender-pays" model, where ISPs pay each other for outgoing traffic
  • This is contrast to the rest of the world, where ISPs largely do not bill one another for cross ISP-traffic ("settlement-free peering")
  • KT, as the largest ISP in Korea, faced the largest bills for outgoing traffic
  • In an effort to reduce outgoing traffic, KT allegedly funded a unit to develop malware that would spread through peer-to-peer file-sharing software and disable it
  • In certain cases, this led to files disappearing and computers crashing
  • KT claims the group was a small group of hackers operating independently

2024-07-21 Sunday

• Ogilvy launches service to help brands deal with rogue influencers (archive)
  • Ogilvy is an advertising agency
  • Advertising is increasingly reliant on personal endorsements by influencers
  • However, these influencers can make controversial statements
  • InfluenceShield is a product that tracks influencer controversies and allows brands to distance themselves from influencers who have found themselves in a backlash
  • Program involves 24-hour monitoring of social media, and a crisis response team
  • Also includes vetting of influencers — service will scan social media history of influencers in order to discover any potentially problematic statements made in the past
  • Reflects the increasing importance of influencers as a marketing channel for major brands
• The Indian military had to mobilize to provide air-traffic control services for the Ambani wedding
  • Indian Air Force provided air traffic controllers and support staff so that Jamnagar Airport wouldn't be overwhelmed by the number of private jets coming in
  • Over 600 takeoffs and landings were handled
  • Had to establish special coordination with Mumbai airport to allow planes to fly to Mumbai after dropping off guests
• Investing In Rust
  • Brookings policy paper advocating for greater adoption of Rust
  • Argues that greater investment in memory-safe programming languages will reduce maintenance costs and reduce security vulnerabilities
  • The content of this paper is less interesting than the fact that it exists — "policy" people are starting to examine the choice of programming language as a component of cybersecurity
• Defining the 5th Generation fighter jet
  • Attempt by an Air Force pilot whose career has spanned multiple generations of aircraft to define what a "5th Gen" fighter jet is
  • First gen
    • Exploited technologies first developed during World War 2, such as jet engines and swept wings
    • Not supersonic
    • Armed with guns
    • Examples: MiG-15, F-86
  • Second gen
    • More powerful afterburning jet engines
    • Able to achieve supersonic speeds in level flight
    • First fighters to be armed with air-to-air guided missiles
    • Examples: F-104, MiG-21
  • Third gen
    • More advanced radar capable of providing tracking data for homing missiles
    • Radar warning receivers
    • Chaff and flares to defeat enemy missiles
    • Examples: F-4, MiG-23
  • Fourth gen
    • Form the bulk of most air forces
    • Can perform maneuvers resulting in high G-forces
    • Digital datalinks allow them to share information with one another
    • Most are designed as multi-role, capable of engaging air targets and ground targets in the same mission
    • Examples: F-15, F-18, MiG-29, JAS 39
  • Fifth gen
    • Stealth — incorporate low-observability features that had been previously only present on specialized platforms (like the F-117)
    • Electronic self-protection — are capable of providing their own jamming and electronic countermeasures without relying on specialized electronic warfare aircraft
    • Sensor-fusion — avionics can integrate data from multiple sensors (radar, infrared, etc) and present a unified "picture" to the pilot
    • Advanced handling characteristics in excess of 4th gen fighters
  • These definitions are pretty close to the ones on my wiki

2024-07-19 Friday

• US intelligence agencies warn that Russia may arm the Houthis with anti-ship missiles in retaliation for the US allowing Ukraine to strike inside Russia with Western weaponry (archive)
  • Russian anti-ship missiles would represent a qualitative upgrade for the Houthis' capabilities
  • Putin had reportedly moved to arm the Houthis in the past but had been talked out of doing so by Mohammed bin Salman
• Crowdstrike outage brings many IT systems to a halt worldwide (archive)
  • Affected systems include many airlines, including American and Delta
  • NHS affected
  • Sky News, a UK television channel, went off-air
  • Outage reportedly caused by a faulty Crowdstrike update, which pushed a misformatted driver file, rendering Windows machines unable to boot
  • I want to see the postmortem on this one
• Reporters' misunderstanding of guns continues to frustrate me
  • That is not an AR-15 pattern rifle
  • That is an AK pattern rifle
  • The AK is not just iconic in the US, it is iconic worldwide
• Corporations turn to smaller language models (archive)
  • Smaller models trained on company specific data often perform as well as fine-tuned large language models
  • Corporations are willing to give up generality because these language models have many fewer parameters, which makes them cheaper to train and operate
  • Smaller models also run faster, providing a more responsive user experience
  • Can be hosted on a company's own infrastructure, lessening reliance on third party providers like OpenAI or Anthropic
  • Many AI companies are moving to provide a greater variety of smaller models that can be customized by customers on their own datasets (archive)
    • Microsoft - Phi
    • Google - Gemini Flash
    • Cohere - Command R
    • Mistral - Mistral Small
    • Anthropic - Claude Haiku

2024-07-18 Thursday

• Ukrainian companies race to create drones capable of autonomous targeting (archive)
  • Swarmer Technology is working to create software that will allow a single operator to control groups of drones
  • Drones will identify targets automatically, and strikes only need to be approved by a human
  • Allows limited numbers of operators to scale to control ever larger numbers of drones
  • Swarm technology is already being reportedly used in Ukrainian long-range drone strikes targeting Russian oil infrastructure
    • Core drones with payloads to strike targets
    • Escort drones to distract and engage air defenses
  • Autonomy and swarming are seen as key countermeasures to regain the advantage as ever advancing electronic warfare systems make it more difficult for traditional FPV drones to find their targets
    • Experienced FPV operators see hit rates between 30% and 50%
    • New FPV operators have hit rates that are as low as 10%
  • Computer vision systems running on Raspberry Pis allow drones to continue the attack once "locked on", even if the signal to the human operator is cut
  • Of course, that also means that once the drone is locked on it's impossible to cancel the attack
  • Like I said on June 21 — it's easy to say in peacetime that fully automated killbots are bad, but it's quite another thing to tell people not to build fully automated killbots when fully automated killbots are the primary line of defense stopping a hostile nation from conquering more territory
• Frontier Airlines initiates a ground stop due to issues with Azure cloud services (archive)
  • Ground stop was temporary and has already been lifted
  • Caused by Azure issues the Central US region
• The EU's production capacity of shells is short of expectations
  • The EU has only sent half as many shells as it has promised to Ukraine, with a significant delay
  • Thierry Breton has stated that the EU's production capacity of 155mm artillery shells is around 1 million shells per year as of January
  • However, according to the Estonian defense ministry, production capacity is only around 600,000 shells per year
  • A Rheinmetall estimate from January put European production capacity at around 550,000 shells per year
  • Ukraine's need, ideally, is approximately 200,000 shells per month, far beyond the production capacity of the US and EU combined
  • Although Rheinmetall has received some long-term contracts to fund capacity expansions, other European ammunition producers, such as Nammo, have not
  • While some components of artillery shells have successfully ramped up production, component delays and materials shortages ensure bottlenecks remain
  • While the Czech Republic has promised 800,000 shells to Ukraine, fewer than 50,000 have been delivered thus far
  • The EU continues to overpromise and underdeliver when it comes to military aid to Ukraine
• Google Docs is officially gaining Markdown import/export support
  • I'm not a fan of Markdown, but it does make things easier when porting from org-mode to Google Docs
  • Previously, I'd have had to export to HTML, open the HTML document in a separate tab, and then copy-paste into Google Docs
  • Now I can export to Markdown, and copy-paste directly from emacs
  • Markdown export means I can copy-paste into emacs, edit, and re-import into Google Docs

2024-07-17 Wednesday

• Ukrainian forces withdraw from Krynky on the "left-bank" of the Dnipro river
  • Actual withdrawal reportedly happened weeks ago — only being reported today
  • Ukrainian forces gained a foothold in Krynky in October 2023
  • It's surprising that it took them this long to withdraw
  • That beachhead was hard to supply and difficult to expand from
• Michael Kofman summarizes findings after a recent field study in Ukraine
  • Situation has stabilized after Russian offensive in Kharkiv
  • Ukraine is slowly rectifying its manpower deficit compared to Russia
  • Ukraine is basically out of ammunition for Soviet-era artillery and air-defense systems
  • This has allowed Russian long-range reconnaissance UAVs to be used across the front, which further suppresses Ukrainian artillery
  • Ukrainian air defense shortages have also allowed Russia to use glide bombs more frequently, which are psychologically worse than artillery — artillery might take hours or days to destroy a building; a glide bomb destroys a building in seconds
  • After Ukraine passed its latest mobilization law, the number of people volunteering for service has also increased
  • We focus on F-16s, but Ukraine needs more "basic" weapons, like M-113s and Bradley AFVs
  • What's saving Ukraine right now is the fact that Russian troops struggle to perform operations at scale
  • The main challenge for Ukraine is dealing with Russian missiles targeting its energy infrastructure
  • F-16s can help with this by intercepting Russian cruise missiles, allowing Ukrainian Patriot and NASAMs systems to focus on ballistic missiles

2024-07-16 Tuesday

• "Strava jockeys" get paid to run for others in order to secure achievements on Strava
  • I don't get the point — won't the people hiring these guys get found out when they have to defend their record?
• "Emacs bankruptcy" is inevitable
  • Emacs is not immune to bitcreep
  • Over time the supported set of emacs packages will change and one's emacs config will become obsolete
  • This cannot be solved by forcing oneself to stick to the modules that come built-in with emacs
  • I'm not sure I agree
  • My emacs config has been pretty stable over time
  • Even if emacs isn't entirely immune to bitcreep, emacs' bitcreep is far slower than those of other ecosystems
  • Furthermore, emacs' approach to backwards compatibility means that packages remain usable long after they've become "obsolete"

2024-07-15 Monday

• Chinese firms develop AI tutors to help students pass the civil service exams
  • Helps students choose which civil service roles to apply for
  • Crafts study plans
  • Explains answers to exam questions
  • Cheaper than hiring a human tutor
  • This is the latest iteration of Chinese "edtech" firms
  • Let's see how long they last before Xi Jinping cracks down on them too
• A profile of the Chinese woman who was killed while defending a Japanese student and his mother from a stabbing attack
  • What this story says is less interesting than the fact that it exists in the first place
  • The existence of this story tells us that the Chinese government is trying to tamp down online nationalism
  • Notably, the woman was a migrant, which makes the existence of this story doubly surprising — Chinese state news doesn't usually highlight actions taken by migrant workers, especially when they're defending Japanese

2024-07-12 Friday

• Redbox files for Chapter 7 liquidation
  • Verge feature story explaining RedBox's demise
  • Employees' health insurance contributions and 401(k) deductions reportedly misplaced
  • I had no idea Redbox was in so much trouble
  • I thought they'd found a relatively stable niche as the replacement for Blockbuster and Netflix's DVD rental business for people who still wanted to watch movies on DVD or Blu Ray
• The EU alleges that Twitter's paid verification system violates the Digital Services Act
  • Argues that the paid verification is a violation of the EU's regulations on dark patterns
  • Also alleges that Twitter fails to comply with advertising transparency requirements, by failing to maintain a public database of ads
  • EU regulations state that researchers should be allowed to scrape data from Twitter, which Twitter currently prohibits
  • I will never call it X
• SpaceX suffers its first malfunction since 2016
  • First stage booster performed nominally
  • Upper-stage engine failure as it was deploying Starlink satellites
  • Will require a mishap investigation from the FAA
  • Places doubts on the scheduling of Polaris Dawn and the next crew transfer to the ISS

2024-07-10 Wednesday

• AMD buys Silo AI, in an effort to compete with nVidia (archive)
  • Silo AI is a Finnish startup that's one of the largest AI model builders in Europe-
  • Makes the "Poro" family open-source models (rather like Mistral, I guess?)
  • All-cash 665 million dollar deal
  • Will be interesting to see if this draws anti-trust attention — EU regulators have not been favorable towards EU tech companies getting bought out by American firms lately
  • I'm skeptical of this deal — "Poro" is not a well-known model
  • I don't see how acquiring a model builder helps AMD's Triton compete with nVidia's CUDA
  • Maybe the strategy is to acquire Silo AI, port its models to Triton and release them as a way to drive further usage of Triton?
• The Mirage, the first Las Vegas resort hotel, is closing (archive)
  • Built in 1989, by Steve Wynn, one of the first outside financiers to enter the Las Vegas market
  • Focused on being a destination — pioneered the themed hotel with an indoor volcano that erupted nightly and a 20,000 gallon fish tank
  • The success of The Mirage paved the way for Ceasar's Palace, Bellagio, Excalibur, Luxor and Treasure Island
  • However, The Mirage has failed to keep up with its more modern rivals, and was sold to Hard Rock International in 2022
  • Hard Rock will be shutting down the hotel, extensively renovating it, and will re-open it in 2027

2024-07-09 Tuesday

• The Ukrainian power grid is already under severe strain
  • Widespread electricity cuts
  • Some areas reporting outages of over 12 hours per day
  • And it's not even winter yet
  • The consequences of the lack of air-defense ammunition for Ukraine are beginning to be felt

2024-07-08 Monday

• Boeing to plead guilty to criminal fraud charges (archive)
  • This was due to prosecutors bringing charges that had been deferred in 2021 over the crashes of the 737 Max in Ethiopia and Indonesia
  • Boeing will pay a fine of $243.6 million
  • Will spend an additional $455 million on increased safety training and compliance programs
  • The court will appoint an independent monitor, who will file annual public progress reports for three years to judge Boeing's compliance
  • Guilty plea will make it more difficult for Boeing to secure government contracts — will have to seek exemption from Department of Defense before it is allowed to bid on contracts
  • Full plea agreement will be filed by July 19
• Iran expands missile production facilities (archive)
  • Facilities being expanded are the Modarres military base and the Khojir production facility
  • Numerous new buildings, surrounded by earthen berms for explosion containment
  • Missile production likely expanding to meet increased Russian demands for the war in Ukraine

2024-07-05 Friday

• A deep dive into the Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite's GPU
  • Appears to be a scaled up version of the Adreno 730 that comes with the Snapdragon 8 series phone chip
  • Competent GPU design, but is slow, even compared to Intel and AMD integrated GPUs
  • DRAM bandwidth is better than comparable integrated GPU designs from Intel and AMD
  • Low cache bandwidth
  • Insufficient register file capacity
  • Much worse at compute workloads than at graphics workloads
  • AMD's integrated GPUs, as usual, are the best of the lot
  • Snapdragon X Elite doesn't lose any performance on battery power (arguably because it doesn't have that much performance to begin with)
  • Older DirectX 11 games have rendering artifacts, possibly due to driver issues
  • Manual driver update process requires extracting and manually installing .cab files, and different platforms have different drivers
  • It seems like Qualcomm carried over their driver process from their phone hardware
• Micro-mechanical resonators as a replacement for quartz crystals
  • Historically, the clock signals for chips have been provided by piezoelectric quartz
  • SiTime claims that MEMS resonators are
    • Cheaper to manufacture (as they can be made using repurposed lithography equipment for computer chips)
    • More accurate than quartz crystals
    • Less susceptible to variability due to thermal or electrical changes in the environment — especially important for embedded or wearable devices
    • Much highter MTBF
  • MEMS resonators are not new technology — first models were made in 1968, by IBM
  • However quartz was cheaper, at the time, and easier to scale
  • The biggest obstacle to wider adoption of MEMS oscillators is that quartz is well understood and thoroughly integrated into chip design workflows
• Russia has debuted UAVs that are specialized for air-to-air UAV combat
  • UAVs continue to mirror the evolution of manned aircraft
• The Ukrainian utility DTEK has reported that 90% of its generation capacity has been damaged or destroyed by Russian strikes
  • Russia has successfully attacked Ukraine's power infrastructure all throughout 2024
  • Ukraine doesn't have enough air-defense infrastructure (and, for a while was running out of ammunition for its existing launchers)
  • This bodes ill for the coming winter for Ukraine
• Video of a Russian tank withstanding multiple FPV drone hits
  • Drones are not a replacement for artillery and ATGMs, they are a complement

2024-07-04 Thursday

• ROSTEC announces that it will be localizing production of ammunition in India (archive)
  • The ammunition in question will be the BM42 "Mango" projectile
  • In addition, Rostec has announced that propellant production will be localized
  • This allows India to become more self-sufficient in sustaining its T-72 and T-90 tanks
  • The interesting question is whether Russia will re-import these projectiles from India

2024-07-03 Wednesday

• Houthis adopt USVs in order to strike ships in the Red Sea (archive)
  • Using swarming tactics
  • Possibly inspired by Ukrainian tactics in the Black Sea
  • USV strikes contributed to the sinking of the MV Tutor, a Liberian-flagged, Greek-owned bulk carrier
• Chinese local governments allowed to buy Teslas as official vehicles (archive)
  • Tesla and Volvo are the only foreign brands allowed for local governments to buy
  • The restrictions on Teslas entering government and military facilities have been lifted
  • Volvo almost doesn't count because it's owned by a Chinese brand, Geely
  • This is especially interesting because previously, the Chinese government was restricting Tesla, because they were worried about data collection

2024-07-02 Tuesday

• The underground network ferrying nVidia chips to China (archive)
  • US export restrictions prohibit nVidia from selling its most advanced chips in China
  • However small quantities of these chips are being smuggled in by informal buyers and couriers who buy the chips in the US or Singapore
  • These buyers take advantage of a loophole wherein re-export of nVidia chips from countries like Singapore isn't illegal
  • The scale of smuggling, however, is tiny in comparison to the overall demand for nVidia's chips — 12,500 chips are known to be smuggled, as compared with 2.6 million sold legitimately
  • This means that 0.4% of nVidia's top end chips go to China
  • I'm not concerned about this — nVidia's chips are important, but having a few thousand won't meaningfully help China catch up to the US in AI
• China is expanding its influence in Central Asia, at Russia's expense (archive)
  • China is investing signficantly in Central Asia to give it a land route to Europe that bypasses Russia
  • Central Asian countries are becoming more economically integrated with China, with trade tripling to $98 billion dollars per year
  • China is providing green energy infrastructure (solar panels, wind turbines) at discounted rates to Central Asian governments to allow them to wean themselves off Russian natural gas, which they fear might be used as a source of leverage against them
• United Airlines uses AI to help craft messages informing why their flight is delayed (archive)
  • Previously, the airline was using a team of human "storytellers" to take in messages from the operations center, collate information, remove industry jargon and craft customized text messages explaining delays
  • In order to expand the number of flights that are eligible for these customized messages, United is turning to AI to do the job of the human storytellers
  • This is the sort of thing that I'd expect AI to do well — take a bunch of reports, and come up with a coherent sounding summary rephrased to avoid jargon

2024-07-01 Monday

• New Delhi Airport's Terminal 1 likely to be closed for weeks (archive)
  • Outdoor canopy collapsed under heavy rain on Friday
  • 1 person was killed in the collapse
  • A full inspection of the wreckage will have to be carried out before debris can be cleared
• EU alleges "Pay or OK" violates the DMA
  • In response to the EU Digital Markets Act, Meta created a system where users of Facebook could pay to opt out from tracking and advertising
  • Today, the European Commission found that "pay or OK" still violates the DMA
  • The EU wants Meta to offer a service that allows users to opt out of personal tracking, but is otherwise equivalent to the "personalized ads" based experience
  • Okay, but if you don't allow Facebook to charge for subscriptions, and you don't allow Facebook to offer advertising, then how exactly is Facebook supposed to make money?
  • At what point does Meta decide that the EU is too much trouble and that Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp are no longer going to be available in the EU?

2024-06-30 Sunday

• The US Justice Department will file criminal charges against Boeing over 737 Max crashes (archive)
  • US Justice Department had reached a deferred prosecution agreement with Boeing in 2021 where the prosecution over the 737 Max crashes would be dropped if Boeing had no further safety violations for three years
  • The Alaska Airlines door panel blowout occurred just before the three year period was up
  • Therefore, prosecutors are alleging that Boeing has failed to live up to the terms of the deferred prosecution agreement, and therefore needs to be subject to a criminal trial for negligence leading to the fatal crashes of the 737 Max
• Spirit Aerosystems to be split between Boeing and Airbus (archive)
  • Boeing will be acquiring the majority of Spirit Aerosystems for $4.7 billion in stock
  • Airbus will acquire the company's European operations, which had been making parts for it, in exchange for 559 million dollars in compensation (archive)
  • Spirit had been originally spun out of Boeing in

2024-06-28 Friday

• The Supreme Court overturns Chevron v. NRDC (archive)
  • Chevron v. NRDC was a 1984 precedent that held that courts should defer to Executive Branch agencies in interpreting administrative law
  • The precedent had already been weakened by the "major questions doctrine" introduced in West Virginia v. EPA, which stated that questions of "economic or political significance" must be decided by Congress

2024-06-27 Thursday

• Amazon is about to launch a new discount service to compete with Shein and Temu (archive)
  • Ship products directly from China to consumers in 9 to 11 days
  • Products will be part of a new channel on Amazon.com
• Amazon is using generative AI in its financial division (archive)
  • Some areas of generative AI use
    • Fraud detection
    • Contract review
      • Looks at reference data, company policies, and previous contract history
      • Recommends changes to company policies needed to accomodate contract terms
    • Financial forecasting
      • Generative AI can help create queries to more efficiently gather certain financial data to generate forecasts
    • Interpretation of regulations
    • Tax-related work
      • Validate inbound invoices for VAT compliance
  • Amazon employees use an in-house AI builder based on AWS Bedrock to create their internal tools
  • Most of these AI uses are pretty predictable
  • I was initially surprised to see AI involved in financial forecasting, but it makes sense when you realize that the AI isn't actually doing the forecasting, it's writing the PowerBI (or whatever equivalent system Amazon uses internally) queries that gather the data that go into the forecasts
  • Instead of creating a centralized tool, Amazon has created an internal build-your-own AI system that allows employees to automate whatever parts of their job they feel would be best handed off to an AI
• Companies are having issues with generative AI tools (archive)
  • AI tools often give answers based on the wrong data (e.g. using last year's data instead of current numbers)
  • Often the databases going into the AI are incorrect or outdated — enterprises have poor internal documentation, which leads to incorrect answers from the AI
  • In order to help enterprises manage how their AIs generate answers, Microsoft has introduced additional tooling which will help enterprises direct their AIs to retrieve information from authoritative systems of record rather than random e-mails
  • Some see AI as beneficial in this sense, because it's forcing enterprises to properly organize their internal documentation, a task that they might have been sluggish about in the past
  • If AI forces companies to get their Sharepoint houses in order, it will have been worth it even if it does nothing else
• The Financial Accounting Standards Board approves new regulations which will force publicly traded companies to break out the cost of employee compensation (archive)
  • Each expense line item on the income statement will have to be broken down
  • Companies will have to disclose how much of their cost-of-goods-sold goes to employee compensation
  • Will be required for 2027 annual reports
  • Companies will have to carry out additional work to gather the data needed for these disclosures
• Trucking company US Logistics Solutions shuts down (archive)
  • One of the largest trucking bankruptcies since the collapse of Yellow
  • US Logistics Solutions was a specialist in shipping apparel to stores
  • Trucking sector is struggling amid a post-pandemic slump in demand
  • When there is a shortage of truckers, it's front-page news
  • When there is a surplus of truckers, it's buried in a specialty section of the Wall Street Journal
  • This is why people believe there's always a shortage of truckers
• The US, Israel and Ukraine are in talks to send up to 8 additional Patriot air defense systems to Ukraine (archive)
  • Israel is replacing the Patriots with more advanced systems
  • Would represent a change in Israeli policy, which has been somewhat conciliatory towards Russia
  • Possibly caused by Israeli concerns about increasing cooperation between Russia and Iran
  • In addition to the launchers, Israel will reportedly send a large batch of missiles

2024-06-26 Wednesday

• Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte has been elected as the next NATO Secretary-General (archive)
  • Replaces Jens Stoltenberg
  • Advocates a policy of continuity re: Ukraine
  • Is stepping down from the Dutch Prime Ministership after the right-wing party of Geert Wilders gained ground in the Dutch parliamentary elections
• EU imposes further sanctions on Russian natural gas (archive)
  • Bans re-export of Russian natural gas to third countries through EU ports
  • Restricts EU nations from providing natural gas processing equipment to Russia
  • However, EU nations are still allowed to buy Russian natural gas for themselves

2024-06-25 Tuesday

• Denmark to charge farmers €100 per cow per year to address climate change (archive)
  • Tax will be introduced in 2030
  • Charges €16 per ton of carbon dioxide emitted — works out to €96.50 per cow per year on average
  • It's important to note that the farmers haven't agreed to this — the Danish farmer's association has already come out against the deal
  • I'm predicting that this tax will be delayed or repealed after protests
• Autonomous target identification in Ukraine
  • This is an example of the autonomous targeting capabilities referred to in The Economist article from 2024-06-21, about the use of AI in warfare
• The Biden Administration is considering allowing US contractors to go into Ukraine
  • Right now, Ukrainians are entirely responsible for in-country repairs, aided by video chat from US bases
  • Equipment that is too severely damaged to be repaired by the Ukrainians must be sent to a NATO country (Poland, Slovakia)
  • This would allow US contractors to go into Ukraine to conduct more extensive repairs and maintenance without having to send the equipment out of the country
  • Especially needed as Ukraine gets F-16s, which have more complex maintenance and repair needs
  • Ukraine will not have the same level of contractor presence that Iraq and Afghanistan did — a few hundred at most compared to the thousands of contractors that were deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan
  • This makes sense, but despite what the Biden administration says, this is somewhat escalatory
  • Regardless of how many contractors there are, they will be a target for Russian attacks
• Trump advisers propose peace plan for Ukraine (archive)
  • Position paper proposed by the America First Policy Institute
  • Ukraine and Russia will be told to negotiate an end to hostilities
  • Negotiations will be based on current battlefield front-lines
  • If Ukraine doesn't agree to negotiate, aid will be cut off
  • If Russia doesn't agree to negotiate, aid to Ukraine will be increased
  • The problem is that this gives Russia most of what it wants — Ukrainian territory
  • Of course Putin will state that he is open to negotiation. Why wouldn't he, when his troops control approximately 20% of Ukraine, and the initial basis for negotiations will be him keeping that 20%
  • The actual policy paper website is very strange — spends more space criticizing Biden for withdrawing from Afghanistan and having a "weak" China policy than it does actually laying out its proposal on Ukraine
  • Says that Trump's strong foreign policy deterred Russia, but that Biden's hostility to Russia provoked the war
  • Gives credit to Trump for "unblocking" deliveries of Javelin missiles to Ukraine… without mentioning that he was the one who blocked them in the first place
  • Blames the Biden administration for "provoking" Russia by giving Ukraine implicit security guarantees, but also blames the Biden administration for giving Ukraine insufficient support — they say that the Biden administration's lukewarm support for Ukraine's eventual NATO membership provoked Russia, but also that the Biden administration is to blame for not immediately giving Ukraine tanks and fighter jets at the outset of hostilities
• Waymo opens its service to everyone in San Francisco (archive)
  • This is the second market that Waymo has opened itself to, after Phoenix, AZ

2024-06-24 Monday

• New supplies of Western ammunition are finally making it to the Ukrainian front-line (archive)
  • The proof will be in the pudding — will Russian advances near Novooleksandrivka, Chasiv Yar, and Robotyne be stopped?
• How Ukrainian naval drones turned the tide of battle in the Black Sea (archive)
  • Ukraine has sunk or damaged 24 Russian ships using naval drones
  • Has caused Russia to disperse its fleet from Sevastopol
  • Allows Ukraine to resume exports from Odessa
  • Recently Ukraine has experimented with mounting MLRS on naval drones and using them to attack targets on land
  • Ukraine has also used naval drones to attack the Kerch Strait bridge, causing more damage than the truck bomb attack and preventing Russia from sending heavy equipment over the bridge

2024-06-23 Sunday

• Thales readies a radio-frequency directed energy anti-drone weapon for Ukraine (archive)
  • Goal is to provide a more cost-effective anti-drone solution
  • Estimated to be ready by the end of the year
  • This will put further pressure on Russia to build full autonomy into its drones
• Not all wars end with negotiations
  • The Falklands War is an example of war where all the conditions were in place for a negotiated settlement
    • The British task force would take weeks to arrive at the Falklands, so there was time for negotiations before fighting started
    • Conflict would be necessarily limited by logistical concerns
    • The Falklands weren't of vital strategic interest to either the British or the Argentines — war was likened to "two bald men arguing over a comb"
    • The US invested significant effort into communicating with both sides — had good relations with both the UK government and the Argentine military junta, and had no desire to see a war take place in its hemisphere
  • Yet despite these "optimal" conditions, negotiations still failed to prevent armed conflict
  • The problem is that once the Argentines initiated the conflict by invading the Falklands, the space for negotiations for both governments narrowed significantly
    • The Argentine military junta found that invading the Falklands was by far the most popular thing they'd done, so couldn't be seen to be backing down in the face of a potential UK military response
    • Margaret Thatcher's reputation as a hard-liner on foreign policy would have been fatally undermined by acquiescing to the forced loss of sovereign territory by a military dictatorship
  • Wars may start for "transactional" reasons, but once the war has started and lives have been lost, the positions of both sides tend to ossify, and even though more-or-less temporary cease-fires may be negotiated, a permanent settlement to the conflict often comes years or decades later, if it comes at all — see: Korea
  • I would disagree, however, with the piece's core assertion that wars "usually" don't end with negotiated solutions
  • Freedman and I disagree over what it means for a war to "end"
  • I see the "temporary" armistice that ended hostilities on the Korean peninsula as an "end" to the war
  • However, Freedman disagrees, because the armistice was not a permanent settlement, and technically either side could resume fighting at a moment's notice
  • Similarly, do I expect Ukraine and Russia to come to an agreement over the final settlement of Donetsk, Luhansk, Crimea, etc? No. Do I expect the fighting to eventually stop with a "temporary" cease-fire that could last decades, if not forever? Yes.
• An analysis of Putin's new deputy defense ministerial appointments (archive)
  • The appointment of both Leonid Gornin and Anna Tsivileva is an effort to balance competing priorities
  • Guarantee the status of his family while also ensuring that competent people are in charge of the war effort
  • Others who gained promotions
    • Dmitry Patrushev, son of Nikolai Patrushev, the (former) head of the Russian Security Council
    • Boris Kovalchuk, son of Yuri Kovalchuk, a banking and media billionaire who is one of Putin's closest allies
  • Elevating these sons is a means of ensuring the continued status of Putin's allies
  • However, these promotions could prove destabilizing in the long run, as people from different families with competing interests race to secure their positions for a post-Putin future
  • Another motivation for promoting Anna Tsivileva into the Defense Ministry could be to give Putin a direct line into the lower levels of the ministry, enabling him to bypass Belusov if needed

2024-06-21 Friday

• Amazon reportedly preparing paid, premium version of Alexa (archive)
  • Alexa has never been profitable for the company
  • Has reportedly failed at its primary purpose of driving additional sales
  • Is reportedly an effort by Amazon to keep up with the offerings from generative AI companies
  • No tie-in with Prime membership
  • That's a huge mistake, IMO
• FDA authorizes a flavored vape product from Altria (archive)
  • Flavor is just menthol, an existing cigarette flavor
  • FDA requires vape manufacturers to show that they are primarily a stop-smoking tool and will not cater to new users
  • Even though the approved flavor is just menthol, I'm still surprised that they did this, given how anti-vaping they've been lately
• Russia is expropriating property in Mariupol
  • Property owners have to be present, with Russian documentation, in order for their property to be marked as occupied
  • Unoccupied property will be marked for demolition or sale
  • Russian real estate agents are showing off apartments in which the previous owners' belongings are clearly visible
• What went wrong for Huy Fong sriracha
  • Huy Fong Foods' sriracha sauce has long been the most popular and recognizable sriracha brand
  • Had financial disagreements with its supplier of vine-reddened jalapeno peppers, Underwood Ranches
  • Switched to alternative growers, whose product was not as consistent
  • This has opened the market for alternative srirachas, such as one from McIlhenny, manufacturer of Tabasco Sauce
  • Underwood Ranches has also launched its own sriracha brand
  • I was wondering why new Huy Fong sriracha was less spicy than the old version
  • Perhaps it's worth giving some other brands a try, like the one from Trader Joe's
• US pauses deliveries of Patriot interceptor missiles to other nations in order to prioritize air defenses for Ukraine (archive)
  • US has also reportedly secured commitments from other countries to supply more air defense systems to Ukraine
  • Italy has agreed to send a SAMP/T air defense system
  • Air defense exports to Taiwan are not expected to be affected by this reprioritization
• The enforcement of sanctions against Russian businessmen involved in the war effort could be improved
  • Russian UAV manufacturer Albatros and its chief designer, Aleksei Florov are under US sanctions for their involvement in creating drones for Russia's war in Ukraine, most notably in their efforts to build local production of Iranian Shahed drones
  • However, they are still able to trade with companies in US-allied nations
  • While many of these transactions go through intermediaries, often located in China, there are still a few direct transactions, which should be totally disallowed by the US sanctions regime
  • This highlights the limitations of economic sanctions in limiting Russian companies' access to the tools and supplies they need to build weapons
• South Korea is reportedly reconsidering its decision against supplying weapons to Ukraine (archive)
  • South Korea has a policy against supplying weapons to countries involved in active hostilities, which has prevented it from supplying weapons to Ukraine
  • However, an exception to that policy is being considered in light of the recent mutual defense pact between North Korea and Russia
• Airbus and Boeing near deal to carve up Spirit AeroSystems (archive)
  • Airbus is reportedly planning on buying up the facilities that Spirit was using to build parts for it
  • This would allow Boeing to buy up the majority of Spirit and reintegrate it into the company
• NASA delays return of Starliner from June 26 to an indefinite date in July
  • Original date was set prior to a review meeting discussing helium leaks and reaction-control system thruster failures
  • NASA is likely not comfortable with the planning for contingencies during the return from the ISS
  • This Starliner is only rated for 45 days in space, starting on June 6
  • Has to return before July 21
• India's state television broadcaster, Doordashan, has introduced a pair of AI news anchors
  • Will host shows on Kishan, a channel aimed at providing news to farmers
  • Designed to provide information on commodity prices, farming trends, and updates on agricultural research
  • Only the anchors are synthetic, the news copy is still written by humans
• Detailed article on how AI is changing warfare
  • Describes "StormCloud", a British experiment in using AI-enhanced command-and-control software, along with mesh networks, to enable troops to coordinate among themselves and designate targets for strikes without involving higher command
  • AI is already being used to determine which parts should be kept in inventory
  • However, the AI model did worse at maintaining inventory of parts that rarely failed
  • As the Naval Logistics In Contested Environments report points out, this is a significant vulnerability
  • Parts that rarely fail in peacetime will often fail at much higher rates during wartime conditions
  • An AI or statistical maintenance model trained on peacetime or low-intensity data may not maintain correct inventories of munitions and spares for wartime, leading to shortages
  • In Ukraine, both the Ukrainian and Russian militaries are equipping drones with image recognition systems to allow them to autonomously identify targets
  • It's easy to say during peacetime that fully automated killbots are bad, but when fully automated killbots are the only thing preventing a hostile adversary from capturing more of their nation's territory, people will make the killbots
  • AI has arguably more potential augmenting intelligence gathering, reconnaissance and data processing than it does in augmenting actual weapons
    • Processing satellite imagery to automatically detect and categorize troop movements and weapons deployments
    • Analyzing sonar data from USVs and UUVs to detect underwater mines
    • Using speech-to-text to automatically transcribe intercepted communications so that they can be searched
  • Advanced AI systems blur the line between C2 (command and control) and ISR (intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance)
  • Skeptics argue that AI systems are too easily fooled and result in too many false positives
  • However, proponents of AI argue that, in the stress of combat, humans make mistakes too, and unlike a human, an AI won't be swayed by stress or hatred
  • Furthermore, the high-intensity war situations that many AI systems are being designed for aren't situations where civilians are likely to be present
  • I'm not sure about that — the war in Ukraine was high intensity in its opening phases, and those opening phases took place in areas around Kyiv and Kharkiv where there was a large civilian presence
  • It's not necessarily realistic to suggest that civilians will be able to evacuate or hunker down in advance of a high intensity conflict
  • Another possible drawback of AI is humans becoming too dependent on AI
  • During the current Gaza war, Israel used a tool called Project Lavender, which was designed to identify potential terrorist targets
  • Reportedly, Israeli troops rubber-stamped the target lists generated by Lavender, without subjecting them to any additional scrutiny
  • Although there are efforts to regulate autonomous weapons via international law, even defining what constitutes an autonomous weapon is tricky
    • UN defines autonomous weapons as anything capable of targeting based on a general profile
    • Proposes regulating autonomous weapons that are capable of targeting individual people
    • However the US and UK define autonomous weapons as anything capable of identifying, selecting, and attacking targets without context-appropriate human intervention, a much more stringent standard
    • I think the US​/UK definition makes a lot more sense — under the UN definition, missile defense systems are "autonomous weapons"
    • I also disagree with the UN's targeting criteria distinction — what is the difference between an autonomous drone that targets a 6-man infantry squad patrolling on foot and an autonomous weapon targeting a vehicle with a 6-man infantry squad riding inside?
    • Military vehicles can be surprisingly difficult to distinguish from civilian vehicles, and, as we've seen in Ukraine, military units will often press civilian vehicles into service as ad hoc transports
    • The laws of war are structured around what you do, not who you are, and we shouldn't change that
  • A fraught topic is using AI to make decisions in a nuclear context
  • Russia reportedly has integrated AI into its "dead hand" system designed to automatically order a retaliatory strike against an adversary that has successfully incapacitated the Russian leadership
  • The good news about AI is that it doesn't seem like China has much of a lead any more
  • The Chinese military-industrial complex is also bureaucratic and sclerotic, and that, combined with the effect of chip export bans has prevented China from sprinting ahead on military AI
  • One thing that the article doesn't adequately address is the "valley of death" separating one-off R&D science projects from widely deployed systems in the military
  • Many of the projects and initiatives listed are funded by grants from DARPA or various other research organizations
  • Even if these projects demonstrate great success, there's no guarantee that they'll receive funding in a timely manner to become products that the average soldier has access to

2024-06-19 Wednesday

• Boeing's Starliner delays its return once again (archive)
  • Original return date was June 14
  • Return delayed until June 26
  • NASA is leaving Starliner attached to the ISS longer than anticipated while it studies the effect of helium leaks
  • Five helium leaks on board
  • Spacecraft has 70 hours of helium remaining, and requires 7 hours of helium to complete a safe return
  • Had five temporary thruster failures as the vehicle docked with the ISS
  • Starliner continues to be a fiasco
• Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong-Un sign a mutual defense agreement (archive)
  • Apparently, Russia is shipping oil to North Korea (archive) as well, in violation of UN sanctions that Russia had agreed to in the past
  • So that's what Kim Jong-Un is getting in exchange for all the artillery shells and missiles he sent to Russia

2024-06-18 Tuesday

• Apple's next generation CarPlay
  • Apple's next generation CarPlay is going to be a UI for the entire car
  • Not just a pass through of your phone's UI
  • Will involve two-way data transfer between the phone and the head unit
  • Will handle "core" dashboard functionality like showing speedometer, HVAC controls, etc.
  • Wireless only
  • I'm not sure I like this
  • Do I really want a smartphone interface for HVAC controls? No! I want physical buttons for HVAC controls
• Technology woes continue to erode new vehicle dependability
  • Historically there has been a high correlation between initial quality reports and the vehicle dependency survey, which polls automobile owners who've had their car for three years
  • However, lately, that relationship has begun to break down
  • The chief culprit is technology
    • Android Auto and Apple CarPlay issues are most prevalent
    • Another widely reported source of issues is with built-in voice recognition systems
    • Owners also report dissatisfaction with automated driver assistance systems (ADAS) alerts
      • Do not get used to overactive ADAS
      • ADAS false alarms might actually get more irritating over time
  • EV owners experience more issues
    • Battery EV owners report having to replace their tires at nearly twice the rate of gas powered vehicles — likely due to BEVs being heavier than their gas or hybrid counterparts
  • Overall, it seems like cars have been wholly captured by the third-user effect
  • Car manufacturers are great at catering to car buyers, but horrible at catering to car owners
  • Furthermore, car buyers seriously overestimate the reliability of the whiz-bang assistance features they're buying, and seriously underestimate how annoyed they'll be when those features start throwing false alarms
  • It's easy to be impressed by a demo that shows a forward collision alarm automatically braking and preventing you from running into an inflatable pole, but difficult to understand just how annoying that same system will be when it goes off every time the car in front of you slows fractionally
• Proton switching to a nonprofit foundation ownership model
  "We believe that if we want to bring about large-scale change, Proton can’t be billionaire-subsidized (like Signal), Google-subsidized (like Mozilla), government-subsidized (like Tor), donation-subsidized (like Wikipedia), or even speculation-subsidized (like the plethora of crypto “foundations”)," Proton CEO Andy Yen wrote in a blog post announcing the transition. "Instead, Proton must have a profitable and healthy business at its core."
  • Foundation incorporated in Switzerland
  • Swiss foundations do not have shareholders — are obligated to act in accordance with their charter
  • Proton's charter obligates it to respect privacy to the greatest extent possible under Swiss law
• A report from the Kharkiv front, from near Vovchansk
  • Lots of UMPK glide bombs being used by the VKS
  • Not many armored vehicles, leading to lots of Russian infantry casualties
  • The armored vehicles that are in evidence appear to be operated by relatively inexperienced crew, relative to those fighting around Bakhmut/Donetsk
  • Reinforces earlier assessments that the Kharkiv offensive is meant more to draw Ukrainian forces away from other, higher priority areas, than it is to actually pose a threat to Kharkiv
  • Russian leadership understands that the Ukrainian military cannot simply retreat to Kharkiv city itself — defending the city from artillery barrages is an important political priority, so the Ukrainian military has to push back against Russian attacks in order to prevent Russian artillery systems and MLRS from targeting Kharkiv
  • Shows the casual disregard that Russian leadership has towards their troops' lives — the Russian soldiers around Kharkiv are being sacrificed like pawns in order to enable the Russian military to have the opportunity to advance near Donetsk
• A captured T-62 turtle tank
  • A video showing what's underneath the superstructure
  • One interesting thing about the latter video is the prominent red "1941"
  • Shows just how obsessed Russians are with World War 2 — ordinary soldiers are decorating their tanks as if they're T-34s marching to Berlin
• Putin fires four deputy defense ministers (archive)
  • Likely a continuation of the purge that saw Minister of Defense Shoigu replaced with Andrey Belusov
  • Fired deputy ministers are
    • Nikolai Pankov
    • Ruslan Tsalikov
    • Tatiana Shevtsova
    • Pavel Popov
  • Replacements are
    • Oleg Savelyev
    • Pavel Fradkov
    • Leonid Gornin
    • Anna Tsivileva
  • Anna Tsivileva is a daughter of one of Putin's cousins
  • Leonid Gornin is the former first deputy finance minister
  • The article focuses on the fact Tsivileva being related to Putin, but I think the bigger factor is that Leonid Gornin, who is being appointed as the first deputy, is from the Ministry of Finance
  • One of the recurring themes of the war has been the relative overperformance of Russia's economic elites and the relative underperformance of its military elites
  • The Russian military has floundered in Ukraine, but the Russian economy has weathered unprecendented sanctions relatively well
  • I think what we're seeing now is Putin recognizing that and putting the competent people more directly in charge of ensuring that the Russian defense industrial complex can sustain a long war
• Russia is scouring China for used CNC machine tools (archive)
  • Russian subsidiaries and distributors are buying secondhand Western machine tools in China, and then re-importing them into Russia, skirting sanctions
  • As pointed out in the Rhodus Intelligence Report, "How Does Russia Make Missiles", the key bottleneck for Russian missiles isn't semiconductors, it's precision metal forming and cutting equipment — namely CNC machine tools
  • Russia produces virtually none of its own machine tools
  • As a result, Russian manufacturers are doing whatever they can to smuggle machine tools in from the West and from China
  • The CNC machines they're importing are decades old, in some cases, but decades old American or Japanese CNC tools are still far beyond what Russia can make natively

2024-06-17 Monday

• Russia is using fast attack craft to counter Ukrainian naval drones
  • High-speed boats armed with lots of machine guns and thermal sights
• More drone vs. drone combat from Ukraine
  • Ukraine is using FPV drones to counter Russian unmanned ground vehicles
• Verstka article on the treatment of people who are deserting or refusing to serve in the Russian army (GPT translation)
  • Soldiers who are suspected of deserting are being sent back to the front at gunpoint
  • Medical exceptions are not being honored by the Russian military — soldiers requesting exemptions due medical conditions, many of which have been acquired during the war, are being rounded up and sent to the front
  • Relatives don't know where their loved ones are being sent
  • Used in support units in order to free up experienced soldiers for front-line duty
  • Some are also being sent to combat units to be used as shock troops
• RFERL article on voluntary enlistment in the Russian military
  • The military and weapons manufacturers pay wages that are well above average
  • These wages, plus death benefits for widows and parents, are leading to genuine economic improvements in Russia's underdeveloped eastern regions
  • The war has offered many poor people in these regions a level of upward social and economic mobility that they wouldn't otherwise have
  • States that the death toll from the war has been estimated by the US at 315,000
  • The signing bonus alone for the Russian military is higher than the average annual salary
  • Salaries in the defense industry have likewise increased — 20-60%
  • These high salaries and benefits are contributing to high inflation
  • Also create a post-war problem — soldiers will come home being accustomed to high salaries
• Apple is shutting down its buy-now-pay-later service (archive)
  • Instead of offering its own service, Apple will be partnering with Affirm to offer buy-now-pay-later loans
  • BNPL never really made sense as an in-house offering, IMO
  • I think the writing was on the wall for this service when Goldman Sachs ended its partnership with Apple and backed out of consumer finance more generally
• This aged like milk
  • We're no closer to direct conflict with Russia today than we were before we sent tanks

2024-06-14 Friday

• EU prevents Meta from rolling out AI features based on user data
  • Irish Data Protection Commission, Meta's direct regulator in the EU walks back prior approval for these features after the European Center for Digital Rights filed a complaint
  • Complaint argued that opt-out was insufficient, given Meta's propensity to use dark patterns to make it difficult for users to opt out
  • Meta's "legitimate interests" do not cover using user-provided content to train AI
• Putin sets out ceasefire conditions (archive)
  • Ukraine must cede Kherson, Zaporizhzhia, Donetsk and Luhansk oblasts
  • Must never join NATO
  • Must pursue "demilitarization" and "denazification" (whatever that means)
  • Must forego nuclear weapons
  • In other words, "give me everything I want, and then I will go away"
• FAA investigating questionable titanium in Boeing and Airbus planes
  • Titanium came from a Turkish supplier who originally sourced it from China
  • Was sold to Spirit Aerosystems, which incorporated it into parts for both Boeing and Airbus
  • Although the documentation stated that the titanium came from Baoji Titanium, a reputable supplier, Baoji Titanium later said that it did not supply the titanium and had no business relationship with the reseller
  • Spirit is working to re-test the titanium and ensure that it does meet quality standards
• The EU has invested €70 million into developing an indigenous RISC-V CPU
  • Website of the European Processor Initiative
  • RISC-V will be used for the "accelerator processor" component of the EPI
  • An accelerator consists of a general purpose 64-bit RISC-V core coupled to 4 "vector tiles"
  • The test chip only contains 4 vector tiles, however the architecture is scalable and up to 512 vector tiles can be connected to a single CPU
  • Processor will be optimized to accelerate Iterative Stencil Loops
  • The architecture is very much like nVidia's all-in-one accelerator chip, with many vector processing units connected to a single CPU
  • However instead of the CPU being ARM, as in nVidia's case, it's RISC-V
  • €70 million is not very much at all to be spending on an initiative this ambitious, if the goal is to make a commercially viable chip
    • The RISC-V software ecosystem is far less mature than the software ecosystems for x86 or ARM, so quite a lot of investment will have to be made into getting competitive software
    • Without competitive software, it doesn't matter how good your hardware is — just look at AMD's attempts to compete with nVidia for machine learning accelerators
  • On the other hand, if the goal is to just make a proof of concept, it might be enough to make a demo system and get some research papers done
• Improving control-flow integrity on RISC-V
  • Contains an interesting discussion of how control-flow integrity mechanisms work in general
  • It's interesting (and somewhat depressing) to realize that the only reason we need CFI is because of the limitations of C

2024-06-13 Thursday

• How the far-right movement gained traction with European youth (archive)
  • Far-right is the new counterculture
  • The simple message on immigration resonates
  • Most youth still back leftist parties — growth among the far-right is a matter of degree rather than a total political reorientation
  • Right-wing parties seem to reach youth primarily through TikTok
  • This is different from the US, where TikTok is very much a bastion of left-wing politics
• Amazon announces plans to launch satellite internet in South America, competing with Starlink (archive)
  • Partnership with Vrio Corp, a US-based firm that resells DirecTV in South America
  • Will use Project Kuiper
  • Scheduled to come online by mid-2025
  • This is interesting, because it gives us a timeline for Project Kuiper launches
  • As far as I know, as of today, Amazon has no functioning Kuiper satellites in orbit, after it deorbited the prototype satellites
  • So this means that Amazon has roughly a year to launch a substantial number of satellites
• SES and Inmarsat get permits to deliver satellite internet to India (archive), in partnership with the Reliance Jio cell network
  • Both Starlink and Project Kuiper have applied for permits to deliver satellite internet in India as well, but those permits have not been granted
• G7 negotiators reach provisional deal on $50bn loan to Ukraine (archive)
  • Loan will be financed by interest on Russia securities that were seized in 2022
  • Not sure what this means: "'It's done. At the sherpa level, it is agreed and I do not expect any leaders… to block it', said one of the officials who declined to be named.
  • What's the "sherpa level"
• Japanese researchers explore the use of free-electron lasers as high-intensity EUV light sources
  • Seems like this is still very far from production-ready
  • Wavelength measured in microns, rather than nanometers
  • Requires a huge particle accelerator
  • No mirrors or photoresists capable of handling light this intense
• The German Sailor Moon opening is a banger
• The US and Ukraine sign a bilateral security arrangement
  • Text of arrangement
  • Reuters coverage (archive)
  • Signed at the G-7 summit in Italy
  • 10-year agreement
  • Annual conference between US and Ukrainian defense officials
  • Civilian nuclear technology sharing
  • US pledges direct aid to Ukraine as well as support for Ukraine's defense-industrial base
  • Ukraine commits to further anti-corruption measures and to further modernization of its defense procurement procedures
  • Not sure what this means in the short-run, since right now Ukraine's defense procurement process is to take whatever equipment NATO countries can donate at short notice and try to cobble together seventeen different systems into a single coherent fighting force
  • Will require further support from Congress (which will entirely be dependent on election results)
  • Goal is to develop Ukraine's forces and build towards eventual NATO membership for Ukraine
  • Agreement will not necessarily be obsoleted by Ukrainian entry into NATO — agreement only states that the parties will "confer" on the future status of the arrangement if Ukraine joins NATO
  • This is probably intended to mean that if Ukraine enters NATO, there will be a conference at which point the US and Ukraine dissolve this agreement by mutual consent
  • However, there is nothing forcing this — technically, Ukraine might end up with a stronger security guarantee than NATO countries, insofar as it might have both a bilateral agreement with the United States and a multilateral security guarantee through NATO

2024-06-12 Wednesday

• The EU will impose 48% tariffs on Chinese electric cars (archive)
  • This is still well short of the 100% tariffs being imposed by the US
  • Some sourcies report this as a 38% tariff — that is because this is a 38% additional tariff on top of a 10% pre-existing tariff, so 48% total
• Four teachers from US college stabbed in China (archive)
• Elon drops lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman (archive)
  • Lawsuit never had much legal or evidentiary force behind it
• An update on Chinese fighter jets
  • Just as the US is working on the NGAD as a successor to the F-22, China is working on the J-XD as a successor to the J-20
  • The J-20A variant, which would be equipped with China's state-of-the-art homegrown WS-15 engines, does not seem to have reached mass production
  • It seems that Chinese production of the J-20 has reached 100 airframes per year
  • But they're all equipped with either WS-10 or Al-31 engines, which means that they don't have supercruise
  • The J-20A may represent a significant overhaul, comparable to the Block 4 upgrade for the F-35
  • The FC-31/J-35 carrier-based fighter has begun trials, on both the ski-jump equipped Liaoning and the catapult equipped Fujian
  • The status of the H-20 stealth bomber project is unclear — may have been shelved or deprioritized
  • Work on Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCAs) is proceeding, but what shape those will take is unclear
• A technical that isn't a Toyota Hilux
  • Ukraine has built technicals out of Ford F-150s
  • Is this even allowed? Technicals are always Hiluxes! That's the rule!
• Ukraine is using US equipment in ways that it wasn't intended
  • Bradleys were supposed to be support vehicles
  • Ukraine is using them on their own in small groups
  • Soldiers praise the Bradley's ability to take punishment and protect its crew
  • Also still worry about ammunition shortages
• GM approves stock buyback because of improving EV profitability
  • The narrative of late is that EV sales, and their corresponding revenue has been below expectations
  • Manufacturers, especially American manufacturers, seem to be focusing more on (plug-in) hybrids over pure EVs
  • This could be the early signs of that narrative turning around, as EVs slowly gain popularity with more mainstream car buyers after quickly saturating the early adopters
  • Also might suggest that Tesla isn't necessarily reflective of the overall EV market — declines in Tesla sales might be the result of consumers souring on Tesla in particular rather than EVs in general

2024-06-11 Tuesday

• The economics department of the University of Genova has a diesel-electric submarine
  • Does this mean that MIT is entitled to a Los Angeles-class?
• Chinese students use AI to defeat AI
  • Chinese universities often use AI detection tools on submitted papers
  • These tools often falsely flag human-written text as AI-generated
  • Ironically, as a result, some students are forced to use AI to rewrite their papers… to make them seem less AI-written
• Worker productivity is down due to an influx of new inexperienced workers (archive)
  • Lots of people switched jobs during the pandemic
  • Lots of people retired and left the labor force
  • This was encouraged by companies
  • Now companies are finding out that inexperienced workers aren't as productive as experienced workers, and that this is cutting into the cost savings of having inexperienced workers
  • This is an especially significant factor in fast-food and fast-casual restaurants
  • Boeing is also struggling with this (archive), making it more difficult to turn around quality problems
  • In manufacturing, the problem is that the manufacturing sector in general has declined, so more workers are coming in with zero manufacturing experience
• The port of Baltimore has fully reopened (archive)
  • Faster than I expected
• A deep dive into the architecture of China's Longsoon processors
• The first joint venture between Rheinmetall and Ukroboronprom has started operating

2024-06-10 Monday

• Ukraine's 3rd assault brigade recruitment station at a comic and anime convention
  • Ukraine is about to deploy its most powerful weapon yet: Hatsune Miku
• A very detailed analysis of PMC Wagner's involvement in the battle for Bakhmut
  • Prigozhin's claim that Wagner suffered 20,000 KIA is likely very close to accurate
  • Of the prisoners recruited, one in three died
  • The KIA rate among prisoners was significantly higher than those among "free" mercenaries
  • Relatives of KIA prisoners were paid 5 million rubles or approximately 55,000 dollars

2024-06-09 Sunday

• Ukraine damages a Su-57 on the ground at Akhtubinsk with a drone strike
• France will be transferring Mirage-2000s to Ukraine
  • Cue the dead-eyed Ukrainian maintenance technician meme
• A thread on Shoigu's medals
  • Shoigu never served in the military
  • Wears a uniform anyway
  • Medals are all basically participation trophies
• While the situation is still challenging for Ukraine, it's becoming clear that the Russian offensive has not made any immediate breakthroughs

2024-06-07 Friday

• No one wants a new car any more (archive)
  • V8 engines
  • CD players
  • Stop-start engines
  • Lack of touch-screens
• Trump has a significant base of support in Silicon Valley (archive)
  • His most prominent supporter is David Sacks (lol)
  • Cryptocurrency venture capitalists who dislike the Biden Administration's hostility to crypto
• Mike Lynch is found not guilty on all counts (archive)
  • Rare case of a defendant helping their case by testifying on the stand
• Giorgia Meloni sparks controversy by issuing a stamp depicting Italo Foschi, founder of AS Roma and prominent supporter of Benito Mussolini (archive)
• The person who inspired the woman in "Baby Reindeer" is suing Netflix for defamation (archive)
• The "turtle tank" at home
  • On the one hand, what the heck, Russia?
  • On the other hand, what the heck, Ukraine, why are you wasting a FPV drone on this?
• Recruitment poster for the 3rd Assault Brigade — spotted in Kyiv
• Putin makes a good point
  • Most wars do end with negotiations, rather than unconditional surrender
  • World War 2 is not a typical war
  • However the bargaining position that each party has in negotiations is dependent on their battlefield positions when negotiations begin
• Russia is gearing up for another push in Ukraine

2024-06-02 Sunday

• Shein prepares for a London IPO (archive)
  • Seems like they're only listing in London because they couldn't list in the US
• Apparently Ahmedinejad has fallen out with the Iranian Revolutionary Council (archive)
  • Advocated for election reforms and limits on the power of Supreme Leader Khamenei

2024-05-31 Friday

• Russia is better at purchasing ammunition on the international market than the West is (archive)
  • The interesting thing is the implication that the Czech ammunition sourcing effort is for Soviet-spec 152 mm shells
  • Else why would Russia be competing with the Czech effort?
• A plausible explanation for why Cthulhu always seems to be swimming "left"
  • Constitutional originalism is the "second best" legal framework for all conservative factions
  • Gives conservatives the "house advantage" at the Supreme Court — they might not win all the time, but the odds are in their favor
  • Ironically wins as a matter of legal realism
  • Allows conservatives to claim that they are not winning at the Supreme Court, because any given faction of conservatives can look at Supreme Court decisions and see that a majority of them are either for liberals or for one of the other conservative factions

2024-05-30 Thursday

• American Airlines' bet on secular shifts in business travel changes did not pay off (archive)
  • American Airlines bet that business travel would be permanently reduced, and that it wouldn't need to offer incentives to travel agencies as a result
  • However, business travel has strongly rebounded, and American's business strategy has seen much of that benefit go to its rivals, like Delta or United
  • Another piece of evidence for the pandemic being just a blip
• The Biden administration has quietly relaxed its restrictions on Ukraine using American weapons to target Russian troops amassing near Kharkiv
• Wagner commanders: Where Are They Now?
  • Most of them have fanned out to various Ministry of Defense or Ministry of Interior units
  • One, controversially, has gone to Ramzan Kadyrov's Akhmat PMC
• Trump guilty of all counts in hush money trial (archive)
• The stereotypical hold music is known as "Opus Number One"
• China launches a rocket immediately offshore a major metropolis
  • Range safety is western decadence
  • This is a different rocket from the OrienSpace Gravity 1
  • However, the launcher appears to be either the same, or the same type of ship

2024-05-29 Wednesday

• A report from the front in Ukraine (archive)
  • Not that much new here
  • Kind of overemphasizes the role of FPV drones (as a lot of reports have done)
  • Still, it's a useful (if grim) picture of what life on and near the front line is like
• Blinken claims that US weapons deliveries have helped Ukraine stabilize the front line (archive)
• It's possible that Ukraine has made advances near Krasnohorivka
• A Russian FPV drone strikes a Ukrainian naval drone
  • This is the latest evolution of drone vs. drone combat
• A close-up of a Russian turtle tank
  • Reinforces the idea that there have been very few tank vs. tank battles in this war
  • Also that Russian tanks are willing to give up a significant amount of maneuverability in order to have protection against FPV drones
• According to this analysis, Starlink is profitable
• An instance of MySQL having better data consistency practices than Postgres

2024-05-28 Tuesday

• Common Soviet air defense systems and their corresponding NATO reporting names
• France allows Ukraine to strike inside Russia with its missiles (archive)
  • Unfortunately the permission is limited to only striking facilities and units that conduct strikes inside Ukraine directly — missile launchers, airbases, etc
  • Even with this permission, Ukraine could not have used French missiles to pre-emptively attack the Russian build-up prior to its second Kharkiv offensive, for example
• The Musk vs. Twitter of trucking company mergers (archive)

2024-05-27 Monday

• The case for a US Cyber Force
  • Arguably, though, this is a case for moving cyber operations out of the military altogether
  • In a sense, we already have a "cyber force", it's called the NSA
  • If we want a cyber-force more aligned with the military, why not have the DIA handle it?
• Vector databases and Retrieval Augmented Generation (archive)
• DeepL announces a 300 million dollar investment round at a 2 billion dollar valuation (archive)
  • The question I have is whether the valuation is justified, given that pretty much all generalist AI models have DeepL-level translation ability for the most common languages
  • It used to be that DeepL's differentiator was that it was far better at translation than Google Translate, but when ChatGPT can translate as well, or better than DeepL and do a bunch of other stuff besides, why would anyone pay for DeepL?
• Researchers have discovered an open-source Chinese data set consisting entirely of oblique and satellite images of Arleigh-Burke class destroyers
  • Just totally normal AI training data, right?
• Russia is still able to import European machinery to manufacture weapons
  • Yet more evidence that sanctions aren't effective as a means of crippling a war economy
• An analysis of the front-line hot-spots in the Ukraine war
  • Although Russia has increased the pressure significantly they have not yet achieved a significant breakthrough beyond the limited gains around Ocheretyne
  • However, Russia still has substantial reserves that they're likely holding back to exploit any cracks that may develop in Ukrainian defenses

2024-05-26 Sunday

• Trump booed and heckled at Libertarian convention (archive)
  • But why was Trump invited to the convention in the first place?
• Another instance of tubulence causing injuries (archive)
  • Thankfully the injuries were much less severe this time
  • Of course the plane is a Boeing — it wouldn't be a headline if it were an Airbus
• Republican areas have experienced higher inflation than Democratic areas (archive)
  • Combination of secular factors and higher inflation expectations
  • Gasoline is a larger component of Republican voters' spending baskets, so the jump in gasoline prices caused by the Ukraine war affected them more
  • Inflation expectations are converging, but it's a slow process
• Meet the startups seeking to dethrone nVidia
  • Cerebras, Groq, MatX
  • This is why I'm invested in Micron as well as nVidia — even if nVidia goes down, all of these other LLM replacements will require memory
  • It's increasingly apparent to me that the real hardware bottleneck is going to be supplies of HBM memory
• Airfish seeks to commercialize ekranoplans
• It takes many more drone hits than artillery hits to destroy a tank
  • 7 drone hits
  • That tank would have been gone after a single direct hit from a 155mm artillery shell
• Ukraine has apparently received air-launched GBU-39s in addition to the GLSDB