Compressing over 100TB of images into a 4.2GB: “This release is the culmination of many hours of collective effort to create a single file that compresses the visual information of humanity into a few gigabytes.” https://stability.ai/blog/stable-diffusion-public-release
Bioerror is a serious risk: “…they conducted a formal clean-up before they moved, and during that process they found 327 vials of unclaimed samples of viruses “inside cardboard boxes stored in the back left corner of an FDA laboratory’s cold storage room.” Six of them contained smallpox, one contained Russian spring-summer viral encephalitis (the subject of previous lab accidents), and nine had labels that couldn’t be read.” https://www.slowboring.com/p/we-should-expect-more-and-worse-pandemics
“PlayCable was an online service introduced in 1980 that allowed local cable television system operators to send games for the Intellivision over cable wires alongside normal television signals. Through the service, subscribers would use a device, called the PlayCable adapter, to download the games for play on their Intellivision. It was the first service that allowed users to download games for play on a video game console.” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/PlayCable
Grid-style social management in China: “The grid-style social management process consists in subdividing a country's counties into smaller zones, and assign each zone to a person that reports all activity to the local government on a regular basis. This model is applied in rural areas and cities.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grid-style_social_management_in_China
Chemists have identified how to destroy "forever chemicals" in a low-cost way for the first time, new research says. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-62561756
The Unexpected Future: On the global population bust, its causes, and consequences. https://quillette.com/2022/08/20/the-unexpected-future/
Monkeys anoint themselves with onions. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0003347222001257
After six months of the war, what has Russia achieved?
1. The alleged threat emanating from Ukraine has not been neutralized. On the contrary, Ukraine is now capable of frequently carrying out attacks inside Russian territory.
2. NATO has been massively strengthened: (a) it gained two new members (b) defence spending is rising (c) more favorable opinion of the alliance among the general public (d) a significant strengthening of its eastern flank is underway (e) several member states are now determined to actively harm Russia.
3. The Russian military is now widely seen as weak and incompetent. Before the war people feared that Russia could take Berlin within a few weeks. But it turned out that they couldn't even capture Ukraine's second-largest city which is located just 40 km from the Russian border. Indeed, Russia is so weak that Western weapons systems need to be limited to a quarter of their range to avoid a panicked nuclear escalation.
4. Without Western technology and with China posed to be its main export market, Russia's future will be that of a Chinese vassal state. A decidedly worse perspective for its national identity than before.
People who blame environmental factors for racial disparities implicitly agree that there are differences in average intelligence between those populations. Because general intelligence means being able to adapt to and thrive in a wide range of environments.
Jews did not need advantageous environmental conditions. Despite centuries of persecution and genocide, Jews consistently outperformed their oppressors. There are more Jewish holocaust survivors who went to win a Nobel Prize or revolutionized fields such as mathematics than in all of Africa.
The European renaissance did not happen because outside forces created favorable conditions. It happened despite debilitating poverty and centuries of wars.
North Korea manages to build intercontinental ballistic missiles despite having some of the worst environmental conditions imaginable.
If you claim that a certain group of people needs various affirmative policies in order to achieve the same as other groups then you essentially claim that they are less intelligent.
Whenever someone attempts to explain differing population outcomes by some alleged environmental factor, ask yourself why nobody tried to replicate this environmental factor in order to achieve the same.
If Jews outcompeted everyone in various intellectual tasks because of their cultural milieu, shouldn't we expect to see a trillion-dollar industry trying to figure out how to teach gentile parents to raise their kids in a similar way? Why don't people convert to Judaism and send their children to Talmud Torah schools?
If East Africans are out-competing everyone at long-distance running because, among other reasons, they live in mountainous regions, shouldn't we expect countries like China to have replicated the East African training and nutrition plan by now?
Nobody does this because everyone secretly knows that the differences are not due to the environment. But few people are ready to admit this openly.
In addition to the above-mentioned facts, there are many disjunctive lines of evidence supporting the theory that genetic components are partly to blame for cognitive population differences. One example here is the fact that bigger brain size (the number of neurons) is robustly related to higher intelligence both in humans and artificial neural networks. Just as one would expect from the fact that the cranial capacities of different races correlate with their average IQs.
Consider further how ivory hunting caused the rapid evolution of tusklessness in elephants. Or how lactose tolerance evolved several times over a short period of time. Or how selective breeding has demonstrated that it is possible to quickly select for genes that lead to changes in behavior and neuroanatomy. These facts suggest that it is entirely possible that 150,000 years of culture, discrimination, slavery, war, genocide, 40,000 years of decreasing brain volume, the interbreeding between archaic and modern humans, and genetic isolation could have caused differences in behavior and intelligence between human populations.
For your editorial (of sorts) regarding IQ and race, I agree but it misses a very important point: it is our duty to help people who have, by the misfortune of their birth, acquired less efficient genes for intelligence. IVF-based embryo selection and other technologies (that already work!) should be scaled up massively and offered to as many people as possible in these populations. It’s rare to have a case that is both so obviously moral and in the common interest of everyone involved. If we can overcome the taboo surrounding both intelligence and heredity as well as positive eugenics the amount of good we could achieve is staggering.