Show Notes
There's a lot of drone warfare footage on the internet from Ukraine and Russia. But over the last year, a surprising change has emerged, via photos from the battlefront posted online. It has become clear that a huge part of the drone war, from dropping grenades on soldiers in bunkers, to dropping explosives on infrastructure or airfields, is wired. Those wires are fiber optic cable, stretching from drone operators to the drones, which spool out cable across the ground and over trees along the battlefront. These drones are often single-use rarely returning from the mission they set out on. And the spools of fiber optic cable, stretching over 30-50 kilometers, don't get cleaned up. We explore this evolution of drone use in the conflict - where it came from, and why.
More from Endless Thread
Up to a billion people use ChatGPT every week, for everything from the mundane to the weird to the deeply personal. It is commonly assumed that these messages are private – between the user and the LLM. It is commonly assumed that these messages are private – between the user and the LLM. But in some cases, human reviewers are reading these conversations and offering editorial feedback to help ChatGPT sound more human.
The internet is the great connector. Talk with nearly anyone at any time about anything. But that kind of freedom can lead to misunderstandings. Maybe your neighbors discover your cruder, less friendly persona online. Maybe a debate over holiday lore becomes a battle front.
Get out your graphing calculators, because today's episode of Endless Thread is about a math problem.
Mo lives in Aden, an ancient city in southern Yemen. Built on a volcanic crater, it has castles and beaches set against mountains. It's beautiful. Like the rest of the country, it is also in the midst of an ongoing civil war. This summer, protests broke out over living conditions and basic services in the city -- like electricity, which can be shut off for 18 hours at a time.