🎧 If you’ve missed it, there is a podcast version of this newsletter available at the top of the email/post. It’s available on Substack/Spotify/Apple to premium subscribers right away and to free subscribers a week after.
📚 Halfway through Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall for my book club. So far, I’d highly recommend. There’s a miniseries adaptation too.
🇮🇹 Also, if you’re in the market for an Italian summer home, check out this steal I found.
Highlights in this issue:
Venezuela gearing up to invade Guyana for its oil?
conflict escalating on the Lebanon-Israel border
philosophical attitudes around having kids
Good reading,
—TK
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Here’s a link to my 2024 News Journal where I'm collecting the headlines that catch my interest each day so that when we look back at that at the end of the year, we'll see when things happened, what kind of patterns emerged, without the problem of hindsight bias.
🍼 Anastasia Berg and Rachel Wiseman have an op-ed in the NYT introducing their book What Are Children For?, which examines the attitudes and philosophical thoughts around having children in liberal middle/upper class circles.
There is nothing inherently unprogressive about embracing the prospect of children. Even Simone de Beauvoir, the philosopher who was among the first to critique reproduction and family as instruments for the oppression of women, acknowledged that shaping the character and intellect of another human being was “the most delicate and the most serious undertaking of all”… our fellow progressives need to stop thinking of having children as a conservative hobbyhorse and reclaim it for what it is: a fundamental human concern…
One can’t help noting the irony: In permitting the conservative movement to alienate them from the question of whether they want to have and raise children, these liberals and progressives are allowing the right to shape their reproductive agendas in yet another way.
Jay Caspian Kang also has a thoughtful review of the book in The New Yorker.
🤖📍 We all know ChatGPT can do some powerful things. My friend and AI researcher Keyon Vafa, recently published a paper (Twitter thread) that examines whether this means that transformers (the architecture behind LLMs like ChatGPT or Google’s Gemini) actually have accurate understandings and representations of the real world. For example, if it can tell you how to accurately navigate a city, it must have internally something like a map of that city, right?
I asked Keyon for his thoughts:
Some people think that LLMs are successful because transformers implicitly learn "world models". This paper tried to test that by training a transformer on turn-by-turn directions of taxi rides in NYC and seeing if we could recover a map of the city.
The model does really well. It can generate the shortest route between unseen locations and it makes legal turns almost all the time. But the model's implied map of NYC is incoherent, which implies fragility. When we add detours to the map, the model's capabilities break down.
The paper shows that LLMs can still do amazing things with incoherent world models. But it makes them fragile for other tasks.1
🕊🦠 The third human case of H5N1 bird flu was reported this month after a Michigan farmworker contracted it from contact with dairy cattle, where the virus has been found in herds across nine states.
The first two cases were relatively mild, involving symptoms like eye irritation, or conjunctivitis. However, the most recent case has shown more concerning signs, including coughing. The emergence of respiratory symptoms is disconcerting because it indicates a potential shift in how the virus affects humans. Coughing can spread viruses more easily than eye irritation can.
🌍🌡 GLOBAL HOTSPOTS
🇻🇪🇬🇾 I wrote about the Venezuela-Guyana border conflict in December and followed up in February about Venezuela’s troop movements to the border. The WSJ has a good 6-minute explainer video if you want a quick refresher.
Since then Venezuela has continued to build up its military presence on the border (the CSIS report linked is really thorough and worth reading).
There’s a domestic angle to all of this with Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro trying to manufacture and capitalize on a regional crisis as he approaches elections on July 28th.
At the same time, Russian warships and a nuclear-powered submarine arrived in the Caribbean this month for drills and are expected to remain in the area through the summer. Both Iran and Russia have a history of close military cooperation with Venezuela and both countries stand to benefit from another crisis diverting US attention closer to home.
Here’s a Putin quote from a few weeks ago in response to the US allowing Ukraine to use American weapons to attack some targets in Russian territory:
“If someone considers it possible to supply such weapons to a combat zone to strike our territory and create problems for us, then why do we not have the right to supply our weapons of the same class to those regions of the world from which the strikes will be carried out on sensitive objects of those countries that do this in relation to Russia?”
🇱🇧🇮🇱 Hezbollah warned Israel of war “without limits” and threatened to attack Cyprus, a day after news came out that the Israeli military approved “operational plans for an offensive in Lebanon”, the south of which Hezbollah controls. Israel and Hezbollah having been exchanging rocket fire on Israel’s northern border almost daily since the Hamas attack on Israel last fall.
🇵🇭🇨🇳 China and the Philippines are increasingly clashing in the South China Sea. The latest skirmish occurred after a Chinese Coast Guard boat rammed a Philippines vessel causing “severe injury” to a Filipino sailor. Here’s a video of the confrontation.
Philippines President Ferdinand Marcos Jr warning last month that any death of a Philippines citizen caused by a “wilful act” would be considered close to an “act of war”.
China claims most of the South China Sea for itself, an assertion that its neighbors reject. Vietnam, for example, is also shoring up its presence although China hasn’t responded as aggressively as it has with the Philippines.
🇮🇷 Iran is ramping up its nuclear program and “could soon triple… production of enriched uranium” at one of its underground facilities. Iran already possesses a stockpile of uranium it could quickly enrich to weapons grade and install in a bomb. While Iran has long had the capability to develop nukes, only recently has public opinion in Iranian society shifted towards approval of a weapons program:
Historically, public opinion polls since the mid-2000s have consistently demonstrated that while Iranians favored a peaceful nuclear program, a majority of them opposed developing nuclear weapons. A recent survey, however, suggests that Iranian citizens are growing more receptive to nuclear weapons…
Over 69 percent of them responded they support Iran pursuing nuclear weapons. This marks a departure from earlier opinion polls in which most Iranians consistently rejected the weaponization of the country’s nuclear program…
This shift in the opinion of Iranians vis-à-vis nuclear weapons cannot be entirely divorced from recent events in the Iran-Israel conflict, which included an Israeli air strike of an Iranian consulate in Syria on April 1 and direct Iranian drone and missile strikes against Israel in response on April 13.
You’ve made it all the way to the end! Thanks for reading fD. You can support my work by upgrading to premium or share the newsletter with a friend. —TK
If you’re interested in what LLMs can and cannot do, check out Keyon’s other paper on generalizing their capabilities
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