Things That Would Be Nice If They Are True
A News Link Round-Up
Here is the latest weekly round-up of links, with updates on the wars in Ukraine, in the Persian Gulf, and against algae, the upsurge of “democratic socialism”—and its limits, the conservative threat to free speech, the resurgence of racism here and in the UK, and the grifter’s paradise of MAGA. You will also notice a pattern of putting some good news—often a form of scientific and technological progress—at the end, because we should never lose sight of the fact that this is the real story of human life.
A reminder about this News Link Round-Up format: The main headlines are there to provide context and perhaps a little commentary, the headlines with the links are the original headlines from the articles, and the quotations beneath are extracts from the articles.
So How Are the Wars Going?
Turning Crimea from an Asset into a Russian Liability
The best piece of concrete evidence for the isolation of Crimea is that the peninsula is running out of fuel. Yesterday, the Russian governor was forced to take the dramatic step of forbidding fuel sales to civilians. According to a BBC story: “Governor Sergey Aksyonov said individuals and businesses would be turned away from petrol stations, and fuel would only be sold to government agencies ensuring Crimea’s ‘functioning and security.’”
It is hard to overstate how serious the fuel situation must be on Crimea for such a draconian restriction to be imposed on civilians. Putin has always maintained the fiction that Crimea is some happy and functioning part of the Russian state. No more.
Back in July 2024, I wrote that Ukraine isolating Crimea would be a three step process, and at that point only the first step has been accomplished (which was the cutting off of Crimea from the sea). The next two steps would be far more difficult, but if they could be accomplished, the whole process might culminate in an attempt to take down the Kerch Bridge….
I was thinking about this piece a few hours ago, when I saw this Ukrainian boast that they had just disabled the remaining Russian air defense systems protecting the Kerch Bridge.
We Are on a Twin-Track Road to an AI Battlefield
I was very much struck by two very recent claims about how AI systems are on the cusp of changing warfare, both of which came from senior people in the Ukrainian Ministry of Defense. One claim was made by the Ukrainian Minister of Defense, Mykhailo Fedorov. He stated that Ukraine now has an anti-air system that is fully automated after launch and can make all of the decisions from that point until it (hopefully) destroys its target (in this case, a Russian Shahed/Geran attack UAV). He even released a video in this tweet which purported to show the system in action.
The other claim was made by Danylo Tsvok, the head of the Ukrainian MOD’s AI center. He predicted AI systems would soon be unified into a single network overseeing the battlefield, leading to a “war of operating systems” with Russia in the next three to five years—something referred to as a “new paradigm” of war.
“The system that possesses more data and better understands that data, proposes solutions—that system will gain the advantage over the other.”…
If the micro and macro can be merged, think of combining what Fedorov and Tsvok are saying, the result would be a fully automated battlefield. This would dramatically alter the whole idea of warfare.
Ship Attacked in Strait of Hormuz as Iran Threatens UN-Backed Route
