https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/03/03/world/europe/ukraine-russia-war-drones-deaths.html Here's a link to an NYT article about that. 

Here are some quotes:

Drones, not the big, heavy artillery that the war was once known for, inflict about 70 percent of all Russian and Ukrainian casualties, said Roman Kostenko, the chairman of the defense and intelligence committee in Ukraine’s Parliament. In some battles, they cause even more — up to 80 percent of deaths and injuries, commanders say.

The conflict now bears little resemblance to the war’s early battles, when Russian columns lumbered into towns and small bands of Ukrainian infantry moved quickly, using hit-and-run tactics to slow the larger enemy.

today most soldiers die or lose limbs to remote-controlled aircraft rigged with explosives, many of them lightly modified hobby models. Drone pilots, in the safety of bunkers or hidden positions in tree lines, attack with joysticks and video screens, often miles from the fighting.

Ukrainian officials said they had made more than one million first-person-view, or FPV, drones in 2024. Russia claims it can churn out 4,000 every day. Both countries say they are still scaling up production, with each aiming to make three to four million drones in 2025.

They’re being deployed far more often, too. With each year of the war, Ukraine’s military has reported huge increases in drone attacks by Russian forces. 
2022: 2,600+ reported attacks
2023: 4,700+ reported attacks
2024: 13,800+ reported attacks

People are better defined by smaller categories.

If someone is part of both a large category and a small category that usually don’t overlap, it’s likely that they are an outlier in the large category, not a representative member.

For example, if someone is both a rationalist and a Muslim, you shouldn’t expect them to be very similar to a normal Muslim but much more similar to a rationalist, and that it’s possible that they may not be very good at representing Muslims in general to a rationalist audience. 

The category of “social construction” is a social construct.

Good job for guessing that it was Google correctly! Here’s the arXiv print.

UBI would probably work better in Kenya compared to the US because when people are in extreme poverty, funds get used to meet pressing needs, but when these basic needs are met, extra funds are probably more likely to go into having more leisure time. People in Kenya generally have more low-hanging fruit to buy a motorcycle or to get a home renovation, but in the US, major life-changing things probably cost too much for UBI to cover and the income might be used on something like alcohol.

Why are comments on older posts sorted by date, but comments on newer posts are sorted by top scoring?

What about a goal that isn't competitive, such as "get grade 8 on the ABRSM music exam for <instrument>"? Plenty of Asian parents have that particular goal and yet they usually ask/force their children to practice daily. Is this irrational, or is it good at achieving this goal? Would we be able to improve efficiency by using spaced repetition in this scenario as opposed to daily practice?

If spaced repetition is the most efficient way of remembering information, why do people who learn a music instrument practice every day instead of adhering to a spaced repetition schedule?

hare/tortoise takeoff

This seems like the sort of R&D that China is good at: research that doesn't need superstar researchers and that is mostly made of incremental improvements. But yet they don't seem to be producing top LLMs. Why is that?