Fears of employee displacement as Amazon brings robots into warehouses https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2023/oct/18/amazon-robot-warehouses-digit-workers (see also: https://www.aboutamazon.com/news/operations/amazon-introduces-new-robotics-solutions)
LLMs Better Than Humans at Eliciting Human Task Preferences https://arxiv.org/abs/2310.11589
New study on autonomous vehicle performance vs. human performance: 65% fewer collisions; 94% fewer collisions as primary contributor; 74% fewer collisions w/ meaningful risk of injury. https://getcruise.com/news/blog/2023/human-ridehail-crash-rate-benchmark/
Open-source multimodal model: Fuyu-8B! It doesn't have an image encoder! Images are just patches that are linearly projected into embeddings to the LM. https://www.adept.ai/blog/fuyu-8b
“About 20 per cent of 650 Protestant ministers in Korea recently surveyed by the Ministry Data Institute said they have used ChatGPT to create sermons and about 60 per cent of them found ChatGPT useful in coming up with ideas for sermons.” https://www.ft.com/content/9aeb482d-f781-45c0-896f-38fdcc912139 [https://archive.ph/SAGaZ]
stable diffusion video Rickroll by u/Herolias: https://www.reddit.com/r/StableDiffusion/comments/17b4dfc/my_first_try_with_video/
Meta Quest 3 looks great: https://twitter.com/nearcyan/status/1716675184260968816 (I'm not surprised: https://twitter.com/XiXiDu/status/1490376685539237891)
“early Roman aristocracy was more likely to be killed in wars than the average citizen...wealthy classes were the first to volunteer extra taxes when needed...officers and centurions (but not common soldiers!) served without pay...the greatest burden was placed on the wealthy” https://twitter.com/robkhenderson/status/1330172799663673345
Large meta-analysis reviews the literature on the relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust, and finds "a statistically significant negative relationship between ethnic diversity and social trust across all studies." Diversity reduces trust. https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/10.1146/annurev-polisci-052918-020708
Political links:
Apple won’t let Jon Stewart talk about China. “The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.” https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2023/10/report-apple-cancels-the-problem-with-jon-stewart-over-china-ai-topics/
“Ukraine’s race to build its own arms industry: "Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s deputy prime minister for innovation and digital transformation, said the drone revolution he oversaw was enabled by opening up the traditionally state-run industry. That same shift to the free market was essential if Ukraine was to develop a munitions industry, he added."” https://www.ft.com/content/69cf1288-0156-4b8f-a770-cacb05988596 [https://archive.ph/AAgxc]
“DoD now estimates China has a stockpile of 500 nuclear warheads, up 100 from last year. It also moves up its longer timeline to “over 1,000 warheads” by 2030, vice “about 1,500” warheads by 2036.” https://twitter.com/tshugart3/status/1716465460013662624
Houthi missiles fired from Yemen last week could have successfully reached Israel had they not been intercepted, Pentagon says, assessing their range was "likely in excess of 2,000 kilometers" https://www.defense.gov/News/Transcripts/Transcript/Article/3567652/pentagon-press-secretary-air-force-brig-gen-pat-ryder-holds-an-on-camera-press/
Drone attacks on American bases injured two dozen U.S. military personnel https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/drone-attacks-american-bases-injured-two-dozen-us-military-personnel-rcna121961
“In a very interesting development, US Ambassador to Kazakhstan Daniel Rosemblum inaugurated a NATO liaison office in the country's capital.” https://twitter.com/casusbellii/status/1716941085832847386
Next year could be very difficult for Ukraine. The Russians have been stockpiling missiles and drones for months in order to destroy Ukraine’s critical infrastructure in the winter. As a result, all the water pipes in the major cities could burst, potentially rendering urban areas uninhabitable. Then, after the elections in Russia, there could be a new mobilization. In addition, thanks to the war economy and North Korean support, Russia will have a virtually unlimited supply of artillery ammunition. There will be massive artillery fire around the clock and endless meat assaults reminiscent of Bakhmut and Avdiivka, with no regard for casualties.
Given what the Ukrainian Armed Forces accomplished in one night with the newly provided ATACMS missiles, I want, more than ever, for the US to give the Ukrainians 1,000 Tomahawk cruise missiles without use restrictions. We've already seen that the Russian air defenses, particularly away from the frontline, leave a lot to be desired.
Imagine what daily barrages of 25-50 precision missiles with 450 kilograms of high explosive, or cluster munitions, could have on Russia's infrastructure. With a 1,000 kilometer range, in a month of strikes on munitions factories, railroads, train depots, bridges, and command posts - to say nothing of the Kremlin itself - taskers might be running out of viable targets to hit.
But we won't. Beyond worries about 'escalation', we live in an age where politicians, much as they like to pretend to be leaders, are in fact managers: problems exist to be managed, to demonstrate finesse and savvy and skill in keeping things at a low boil, rather than solving them. So Ukraine keeps bleeding, and the Russian-propaganda nursed voices calling for 'ceasefire' (also known as: Ukraine loses the war) are able to keep asking 'how long will we let the slaughter continue'?
"thanks to the war economy and North Korean support, Russia will have a virtually unlimited supply of..." - words that would have been incomprehensible to my teenage self watching the Soviet Union crash and burn on live television in the early 90s