(Almost) Daily Interesting Links

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    • This means that Ukrainian troops have likely withdrawn from Nevelske, a position that had held since 2022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, Kostyatynivka 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)
  • 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 (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

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