NunoSempere
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User ID: 1101
NunoSempere
1mo ago
Geopolitics
Americas
US launched its second ICBM test this year
Africa
Christians in Africa are being prosecuted somewhat systematically, particularly in northern Nigeria by Boko Haram. "In 2024 alone, over 4,500 Christians in 12 countries across the Sahel region were killed for their faith, 114,000 Christians forcibly displaced, 16,000 homes destroyed, and over 1,700 churches impacted"
Sudan's army chief names former UN official as new prime minister
U.S. will impose sanctions on Sudan for using chemical weapons
Middle East
Russia's Hmeimim airbase in Syria is under attack. I remember thinking that Lisa thought this was important
Iran
Israel 'preparing strike on Iran's nuclear facilities'
Oil prices rise on signs of faltering U.S.-Iran nuclear talks
U.S. media reports: Should U.S.-Iran nuclear talks fail, Israel is prepared to quickly strike Iranian nuclear facilities.
Gaza
14,000 babies could die in Gaza within 48 hours without aid: UN
Israel allowed some aid into Gaza
Britain, Canada, France condemn Israel's blocking of aid in Gaza, threaten sanctions
Gaza reports 326 malnutrition deaths, more than 300 miscarriages due to lack of essentials
New Gaza offensive
Yemen
Yemen's Houthis target Israel's Ben Gurion Airport, 3rd missile strike in 24 hours
Houthis declare naval blockade of Haifa port
Asia
China is integrating civil and military networks. "By connecting high-tech enterprises and facilitating data-driven collaborations, the platform accelerates the matching of military needs with available resources, resulting in timely and effective responses to various challenges. The platform features a comprehensive database that includes over ten thousand high-tech companies, hundreds of thousands of skilled personnel"
United States Develops "Orbital Aircraft Carriers" Endangering Space Safety, says China
Accelerate the building of China's independent military knowledge system. Another article in a similar vein as above.
China says ready to boost military-to-military ties with Russia
MEMRI warning about "China's Imminent Invasion Of Taiwan"
House Select Committee Warns: "The Window to Deter War with China is Closing Fast"
Oropuche virus rapidly spreading in Latin America; over 20K infected individuals ince late 2023
Riding the Waves! Full Throttle Live Fire Drill with Missile Speedboats
A squadron of missile boats from the Navy of the Eastern Theater Command has recently engaged in a comprehensive live-fire training exercise. This high-intensity session included a variety of drills such as maritime search and rescue operations, fleet patrols, and missile attack simulations, all aimed at enhancing the operational combat skills of the soldiers involved.
The training took place around the clock and involved multi-subject scenarios, systematically validating and improving the readiness of the naval forces for potential maritime combat situations.
India/Pakistan
3/4th of India's population at 'high' to 'very high' heat risk: CEEW study
Airlines Prepare for Nuclear War
Europe
Poland intervenes after Russian 'shadow fleet' ship detected near Baltic Sea cable
Russia stops Greek tanker leaving Estonia in tit-for-tat Baltic move
Bio
A paper in Nature looks at an outbreak of multidrug-resistant dysentery from 2021 to 2023 in Mexico
US Secretary of State Marco Rubio has called for increased American involvement and support for the Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS)-led administration in Syria to prevent its potential collapse
Study shows that the 2022 mpox outbreak started in 2014
Tech and AI
xAI’s Grok 3 comes to Microsoft Azure
VEO 3 generates some pretty nifty videos
veo3 is a new model by Google that is able to create convincing (and addictive) video
Misc
Chances of a mega-tsunami hitting California about 15% over the next 50 years?
Also covered here
Briefing to the UN on the state of the protection of civilians in armed conflict
Netanyahu press conference
NunoSempere
6mo ago
Some stuff I'm looking at this week. The Facebook censorship policy change seems important. The Russia/EU Suwałki gap items are also pretty interesting.
Some digital brain simulations is able to predict fMRI data.
US sanctions Chinese company for cyberattacks
110K Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps forces to stage military exercise
Time to get rid of TTP once and for all, says Pakistani PM
There was aurge in armed activities by Baloch 'pro-independence' groups in 2024
Climate extremes significantly disrupted global water cycle in 2024, says the Global Water Monitor Report
"In the arena of Western politics where they’d cut their teeth, the worst imaginable outcome was that a poorly phrased missive might rile an EU country’s prime minister or upset an industry lobby group. Now, they’d inserted themselves into a bitter ethnic dispute where the worst thing that could happen was somebody burning down your house and cutting your head off."; Politico on Europe and Nagorno-Karabach
NATO to deploy nearly a dozen ships to the Baltic Sea to protect underwater infrastructure
Tibet earthquake kills more than 120 people
Jerusalem Post calling for a pre-emptive strike on Iran's nuclear program
Hamas approves Israeli list of captives to be freed as part of Gaza ceasefire deal
Israeli soldier flees Brazil amid Gaza war crimes investigation
Japanese crime leader pleads guilty to conspiring to sell nuclear materials to Iran
Deepsea internet cable connecting Taiwan to the rest of the world cut off by China.
Human Metapneumovirus (HMPV) outbreak in China; reporting somewhat sensationalistic
Russia intends to share advanced space tech with North Korea, says Blinken
Blinken reveals that the US began supplying weapons to Ukraine before the Russian invasion
Russian TV personalities, including a Duma member, talk about why Russia is cutting energy cables on national TV. "[The point] is to create problems for them, and it is creating problems", "We need the Suwałki Gap from Kaliningrad to Leningrad", "So let's go ahead and invade Estonia, right? Why just Estonia? Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania". It's pretty good TV.
Lithuania to protect said Suwalki Gap more intensely, ahead of planned disconnection of Baltic countries from Soviet-era grid shared with Russia and Belarus.
Russia says Ukraine Fired US-made missiles at Belgorod region
Techcrunch covers Chinese cyberattack capabilities. "The U.S. says Chinese government-backed hackers have — in some cases for years — been burrowing deep into the networks of U.S. critical infrastructure, including water, energy, and transportation providers. The goal, officials say, is to lay the groundwork for potentially destructive cyberattacks in the event of a future conflict between China and the United States, such as over a possible Chinese invasion of Taiwan"
344K Michigan turkeys killed after detecting bird flu outbreaks
First H5 bird flu death reported in US
Parting Biden administration to remove regulations to facilitate civil nuclear cooperation with India
State Department accuses Sudan's Rapid Support Forces of committing genocide
Maoist rebels in India kill nine
North Korea does further intermediate-range missile tests
Indonesia joins BRICS
Paraguay and Venezuela suspend relations after Paraguay recognizes Edmundo González as the president
Masked men kidnap son-in-law of Edmundo González
US to maybe purchase Greenland??
International flights resume from Damascus
India confirms first case of HMPV
Zuckerberg announces end to censorship in Facebook and Instagram, asks US to pressure Europeans and others for more free speech.
NunoSempere
7mo ago
Meanwhile I'm still running my little intelligence agency, and we keep putting out weekly minutes (of which stuff like the above is my draft for Thursday). Today I was very frustrated because someone wants to give us a grant but their ops is fucked up and so we might have to pay $5k in overhead basically just because. On the plus side, my cofounder has been doing very fast wargames for the items in this list and these have generally been very enlightening, because they make it much easier to think through what the "obvious steps" are in catastrophes like that in a way that more abstract thinking doesn't do it for me.
Yesterday I posted a blogpost on the "grain of truth problem", where you can't really update well if you observe something which you previously thought had probability ~0—many of the big picture frameworks people use to make sense of AI have fail and imho will continue to fail because they are too rigid. I put it on twitter, but it failed to reach anybody with real power.
/end of rant.
NunoSempere
10mo ago
Yes, the overwhelmingly most likely case is as a test.
Monkeypox is currently mostly an STD, especially between men, right?
Nope, this was the previous strain. This one seems to be spread by close contact as well, e.g., in families, corpses, etc.
Exporting technological and social innovation is another factor I care about. E.g., the Germans experimented with tanks in the Spanish civil war, and this affected the next war; similarly, I'm thinking about how much to care about Ukranian advances, or about conflicts in Africa developing strategies that are then exported to other conflicts.
NunoSempere
1yr ago
Surrogacy would solve problems related to giving birth, but would add additional complications, and it's also expensive. Still, maybe worth thinking about.
NunoSempere
1yr ago
Thanks for the comment. Some points:
actual large stakes betting
To quantify this, there are some markets in which you can bet >100k, particularly around US elections. Kalshi is also trying to change this in the US. But yeah.
actual financial, governmental and business markets
Different niche, though. One important difference is that in normal markets "the market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent". Not so in prediction markets/forecasting questions: there is a definite date.
how would one extract any value from it
Not all goods are rival, not all games are zero sum. E.g., people can and do get value from weather forecasting.
alter the very things it is trying to predict
Sure. You do have fixed point problems. You can also make predictions conditional on a level of investment. It's still a consideration, though.
NunoSempere
1yr ago
Just Look At the Germans. The way these minds are shackled by man-made categories was really obvious to me, as a foreigner from Spain:
- In a charity I was volunteering, they made emphasis in having processes, structures, sub-groups responsible for categories of work. Sadly, despite this, not much got done.
- Their morality is base on some concept of what is MORALLY CORRECT that doesn't leave much place for uncertainty. Sure, let's shut down nuclear plants and crippling the economy and industrial base, because it is MORALLY CORRECT. Let's vote for the Greens, because they are the MORALLY CORRECT party.
- You wouldn't cross an empty street when the traffic light is red, even if you can see that there aren't any cars coming, because it wouldn't be MORALLY CORRECT
- Look at the way Switzerland's nuclear weapons programme went: they established a subcomittee to study the possibility, and when that didn't work, they established a second subcomittee, which produced a report, which... you get the idea.
- The way you learn math is by understanding a finite list of concepts and methods, going subject by subject
- Rather than by having a problem and looking for an algorithm/tooling/approach which solves it.
- To understand language and communication, you differentiate between sense and meaning; you seek to understand language by presenting categories for it.
- Consider Javert from Les Miserables. He is hunting the sympathetic protagonist because he is A CRIMINAL, and criminals are DANGEROUS TO SOCIETY and must be BROUGHT TO JUSTICE.
In a stylized way, there is a common way of being amongst Germans which is something like, implicit Aristotelianism? There are categories, which are so robust that they need not be questioned, and which can be a source of comfort and security in this uncertain world. This is why we should choose a subcomittee to address the subcategory of Strategic Dialogue, which is different from Cooperative Dialogue (of which a different committe is responsible).
To be clear, though, I admire some parts of it, like the work ethic, the strong economy (particularly compared to my more chill Spain), the part of their moral structure that ends up helping other people. Also, do note that this is just one subculture in the geographical Germany.
So, throughout, what alternatives could my stylized German be missing?
- Deep understanding (vs shallow understanding based on classification)
- Employing categories as shortcuts (vs as pillars, as fundaments)
- Rules as constraints that can sometimes be bent (vs as MORALLY CORRECT commandments)
- Finding approximate solutions through brute force and simulations (vs analytic solutions through applying a finite list of manipulations)
- Moral relativism (as opposed to moral realism)
- The Israeli nuclear weapons programme (as opposed to the Swiss)
- Not having a stick up your own ass (as opposed to having a stick up your own ass)
Now, there is a question, which part of this is language, and which part of this is culture? Yeah, I mean, you can definitely have a chill German, but the tradition, the language games, the way language is used in practice by the richer social strata, the utterances that people make in practice and that they grow up with, do contain and transmit these blindspots.
NunoSempere
1yr ago
I mean, we don't have a small number of clearly achievable goals, but if you pick N major human drives, the question then becomes why aren't we better at attaining all the major human drives, and formidability would just be a shorthand for becoming better across all these dimensions. But I'd in fact think that excellency in various domains does correlate.
On top of this, being formidable for long enough, in an impressive enough position for people to take note, requires huge amounts of luck over a long period
Sure, but we don't see that many people taking their shot at greatness come what may rather than wasting away in their cubicle jobs.
NunoSempere
6d ago
NunoSempere
2mo ago
ranked quite highly on PopePredictor
Do you have a link?
NunoSempere
2mo ago
Yes but it needs taste. Go is nicer than C, python is nicer than perl and bash and php. Command line apps are blazingly fast.
Slack is built upon a tower of abstractions and it does have more functionality than IRC. It could have been better but the tower of abstractions means it was created faster.
NunoSempere
4mo ago
India imposes direct presidential rule (rather than local elected government) in rebellious state
Drone strike on Chernobyl
IRGC holds large-scale military exercises in southwest Iran
Last week I was worried about Congo affecting more african nations. Since then:
- Uganda deploys troops in Congo to help the local government against local militias
- 4K deaths, 4K wounded in Congo civil war since Jan 21st 2025
- DR Congo seeks Chad’s support to combat M23 rebels: Report
- Bukavu, the second largest city in DR Congo falls to M23
- US imposed sanctions to M23 members
And in Sudan:
- Rapid Support Forces in Sudan kill 200 civilians in three days, are considering establishing their own government.
- Sudan’s army-backed government recalled its ambassador from Kenya in protest over Kenya reportedly supporting Sudan's Rapid Support Forces.
Transmissible brain disease is spreading through Canadian deer.
US seizes weapons shipment to Yemen's Houthis from Iran; Iran denies provenance.
NK building capability for missiles to reach US
South Korea stages military drills near inter-Korean maritime border, and air drills with the United States
Zelensky warns of Russian invasion of NATO countries.
US/Russia holding talks without EU or Ukraine
Stray Russian drones hit Moldova and Romania
Former Bangladeshi PM Hasina accusses Yunus of deploying terrorists, pledges to return and avenge police officers. This seems unlikely, as she doesn't control the state apparatus. However, if she does return, it would lead to wider turmoil in the region.
Southern California has a 36% chance of a M7.5 or greater earthquake in the next 30 years," Elizabeth Cochran with the USGS Earthquake Science Center says. This would wreak havoc upon the state's most populated cities, causing roughly 1,800 deaths, 50,000 injuries, and $200 billion in damage.
How does this:
The President and the Attorney General, subject to the President’s supervision and control, shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch. The President and the Attorney General’s opinions on questions of law are controlling on all employees in the conduct of their official duties. No employee of the executive branch acting in their official capacity may advance an interpretation of the law as the position of the United States that contravenes the President or the Attorney General’s opinion on a matter of law, including but not limited to the issuance of regulations, guidance, and positions advanced in litigation, unless authorized to do so by the President or in writing by the Attorney General.
affect injunctions and rulings? In a plain reading,
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if the Trump administration does something,
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and a judge disagrees and issues an injuction and then a ruling,
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the Trump administration can still disagree with that
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Until it goes up to an appelate court, and then to the Supreme Court.
At which step does the president/AG's interpretation cease to be binding?.
Washington post article on the topic: https://archive.is/XIMum
Geologists warn of an "overdue" very large earthquake for Istambul, and warn that Turkey doesn't have the infrastructure to mitigate it, and millions could die.. Die Erdbebenwarte Kandilli gibt die Wahrscheinlichkeit für ein Beben mit einer Stärke über 7 bis zum Jahr 2030 mit 60 Prozent an.
H5N1 also in India. They were doing less testing so they've caught it later. Or it could be that it only reached them now (unlikely). Authorities in the southern Indian state of Andhra Pradesh have issued an alert and a series of containment measures following the outbreak of bird flu (Avian Influenza H5N1), officials said Thursday.. The outbreak has been reported in Eluru, West Godavari, East Godavari, Krishna and NTR districts of the state, where over half a million poultry birds had died over the last three days
CDC conducted a small survey of 150 bovine veterinary practitioners; 3 had H5N1 antibodies. Also wow is this very little testing still.
Nevada and Ohio report first human cases of bird flu; nominal egg prices hit record high – The Moderate Voice
41 Former Bangladesh Police Officials Arrested Over Crackdown On Hasina Ouster Protests
NunoSempere
6mo ago
Feliz navidad all! I've appreciated your comments over these past months.
French military is withdrawing/being ousted from more African country
Chinese AI lab Deepseek releases a model on par with the previous generation, trained for "just" $5M
Nigerian media is up in arms after a survey-based report estimated 2.2M kidnappings in the past year. The report estimates this through a survey-based method: 3.2% of households reported a kidnapping in the last year. I'm not convinced by the methodology—consider lizardman's constant—though they do interview 12K households. Though a friend with Nigerian family says these numbers are plausible?
Protests in Mozambique after election results, now over 100 deaths.
Conspiracy theory that Israel exploded a small nuclear bomb in Syria.
Trump Reportedly Offers To Hold High-level Nuclear Talks With Iran
Putin says Russia is ready to compromise with Trump on Ukraine war
Putin meets Slovak PM over gas imports
UK anti-corruption minister accused of taking £4bn bribe for Russia-funded nuclear plant in Bangladesh
FEWS.net removed a famine warning for Gaza after pressure from Israel and the US (which funds FEWS).
Famine continues in Sudan
Outage between undersea cable that connects Finish and Estonian power grids
Syrian opposition factions announce that they will dissolve and merge under the authority of the Ministry of Defense.
Guatemalan police rescue at least 160 children and 40 women held by a Jewish sect
NunoSempere
6mo ago
Feliz navidad!
NunoSempere
7mo ago
Use git?
NunoSempere
7mo ago
You could just have nasal polyps, i.e., growths in your nose. A doctor can burn them.
NunoSempere
8mo ago
I see, I'm more worried about incidents with many casualties, but it seems interesting that it's more lethal given infectoin.
NunoSempere
11mo ago
Congrats! I'm intrigued. Where are you from originally? Whats' your startup about? Do you have funding?
I have no horse in this race, but: as a small case study, the Effective Altruism forum has been impoverished over the last few years by not being lenient with valuable contributors when they had a bad day.
In a few cases, I later learnt that some longstanding user had a mental health breakdown/psychotic break/bipolar something or other. To some extent this is an arbitrary category, and you can interpret going outside normality through the lens of mental health, or through the lens of "this person chose to behave inappropriately". Still, my sense is that leniency would have been a better move when people go off the rails.
In particular, the best move seems to me a combination of:
- In the short term, when a valued member is behaving uncharacteristically badly, stop them from posting
- Followup a week or a few weeks later to see how the person is doing
Two factors here are:
- There is going to be some overlap in that people with propensity for some mental health disorders might be more creative, better able to see things from weird angles, better able to make conceptual connections.
- In a longstanding online community, people grow to care about others. If a friend goes of the rails, there is the question of how to stop them from causing harm to others, but there is also the question of how to help them be ok, and the second one can just dominate sometimes.
NunoSempere
1yr ago
Thanks a lot for this. Do you have a pointer to your code, or could you put it up on Github/Codeberg?
NunoSempere
1yr ago
I think military greatness is a red-herring here: I don't think that it's a realistic shot at greatness for readers here. Starting a religion, or a billion-dollar startup, or a social/political movement seems much easier.
Maybe I'm just rehashing 'good times breed weak men, weak men make harsh times'.
Maybe so, but it's a useful handle nonetheless.
Elon Musk and Dominic Cummings are the closest we have to the great men 'type' today, aiming for performance above all else. Elon Musk is widely hated and disliked by the usual suspects in government and acceptable society
I'm not sure about them two. I prefer Peter Thiel as an example. He was:
- able to shut down Gawker
- able to create several scalable companies: Paypal, Palantir, Founders Fund
- able to spread his worldview around, through books, the Thiel Fellowship, etc.
- able to make multi-year political plans (endorse Trump, give very high salaries to people who could later run for office, to get around spending limits), even if these didn't work out (Trump doesn't seem to have consulted him for much, his candidates didn't win the elections)
and like, these aren't world-changing, but he's still got time, and he isn't constrained by fickle political winds.
NunoSempere
1yr ago
A. There is a heap of inertia B. Enthusiastic people with a grand plan are working in fields which already have inertia C. Therefore enthusiastic people which have a grand plan will be bogged down in that previously existing inertia.
I mean, sure. But then the answer would seem to not work inside fields which already have huge amounts of negative inertia: to try to explore new fields, or to in fact try to create a greenfield site. To give a small example, the Motte does happen to be its own effort, and thus seems less bogged down. Or, many open source projects were started pretty much from scratch.
Any thoughts on why people don't avoid fields with huge amounts of inertia? Otherwise the inertia hypothesis doesn't sound that explanatory to me.
NunoSempere
2yr ago
How would one go about using this?
NunoSempere
5d ago
My impression is that the numbers you are mention... aren't that high; Israel is probably willing to spend many more of its own lives in this conflict.
For reference, if we adjust the 150K to 500K deaths[^1] from Russia's war in Ukraine from Russia's population of 143M to Israel's population of 9.757M, we get 10K to 34K, and remember that we are talking about deaths here. So there is room for a 10x here easily.
This doesn't really speak to your point of whether Hamas' fighting capabilities have been degraded. But Israel has been fighting a war with many fronts, in which Iran has been taken out of the picture, Hezbollah has been disabled in Lebanon. Recently the Israeli army claimed that they had operational control of 65% of Gaza, which is congruent with your perspective.
[^1]: Recent reports say 1M dead or injured, but use the confusing term "casualties" for this, to make it look bigger.
A straightforward answer could be to write a parser for each source of information that you are interested in, and then a frontend to consume that information. I am partially doing this (and it provides some of the magic sauce for my startup), though I also use email and rss. And Twitter; the serendipity factor for the algorithm is still too high to leave it be.
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