Japan Scraps Most Curbs on Exporting Weapons in Historic Shift Japan removed most of its restrictions on weapons exports, allowing the nation to sell arms overseas for the first time since World War II in a move aimed at strengthening its defense industrial base.

www.bloomberg.com/news/article...

Silicon Valley Bet on War. The Bets Are Paying Off.

www.nytimes.com/2026/03/18/t...

The Hidden System Turning Chinese Tech Companies into Military Suppliers In October 2022, Unitree Robotics joined Boston Dynamics, Agility Robotics, and three other firms in signing an open letter pledging not to weaponize

Most analysis of China’s military-civil fusion looks for firms that pivot to defense. The story of this Chinese robotics firm’s path from civilian to military use suggests a different dynamic entirely.

Even if I were not a Zone Books completist, I’d be pretty stoked about this one.

📢 Fragmented Efforts: Defense AI in Brazil🇧🇷 📚
Although Brazil gradually moves towards defense AI, initatives are limited in scope, driven by individual services and fragmented, write Joao Paulo Moralez and Santiago Rivas in our latest study. See defenseai.eu/daio_study26...

Japan and France eye sharing satellite data in space defense collaboration Partnership grows in response to Chinese, Russian threats to communications

seeing more and more collaborations like this

asia.nikkei.com/politics/def...

Japan Considering Possibility of Purchasing Ukrainian Drones The Japanese government is considering the possibility of purchasing Ukrainian-made attack drones to strengthen its defense capabilities.Kyodo News reported on this, citing its own sources.One option ...

militarnyi.com/en/news/japa...

Book cover for "Platform Extractivism: Data Work and the People Powering Artificial Intelligence" by Julián Posada. Set against a bright yellow background, three vertical photographic panels at the top depict a crowd with digital bounding boxes over faces, a person coding at a computer, and a dense rack of glowing server cables. The title is in large, bold black text, followed by the red subtitle and the author’s name in blue at the bottom.

With the cover now finalized, I am pleased to announce my forthcoming book: 𝐏𝐥𝐚𝐭𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐦 𝐄𝐱𝐭𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐭𝐢𝐯𝐢𝐬𝐦: 𝐃𝐚𝐭𝐚 𝐖𝐨𝐫𝐤 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐏𝐞𝐨𝐩𝐥𝐞 𝐏𝐨𝐰𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐀𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐟𝐢𝐜𝐢𝐚𝐥 𝐈𝐧𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐥𝐢𝐠𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐞. Available this October from @ucpress.bsky.social s. 🧵 1/4

**Postdoc positions**

Kyoto University has opened up applications for the Hakubi Project, due May 17, 2026.

This is a cream of the crop postdoc ("all fields, from basic to applied"), 5 (FIVE!) years, great research budget.

Please apply or let others know!

www.hakubi.kyoto-u.ac.jp/en/recruitme...

Fun fact: The exact location of the first launch is now the 9th hole on a golf course, commemorated by a memorial.

Image source: commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Mo...

poor guy has never considered he could just be a butterfly dreaming he's marc andreesen

the astrofinancial imaginary

AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership (CDP) studentship – ‘Urgent rescue curation of space heritage in a time of world crisis’ with The Science Museum Group and University College London at Universi... PhD Project - AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership (CDP) studentship – ‘Urgent rescue curation of space heritage in a time of world crisis’ with The Science Museum Group and University College Lond...

We have a 4-year AHRC-funded PhD studentship on 'Rescue curation of space heritage' advertised!

Supervision by me, space scientist Lucie Green (@luciegreen.bsky.social), and curators of space and engineering at the Science Museum, Doug Millard and Ben Russell

www.findaphd.com/phds/project...

To the surprise of some officials in Kyiv, no one from the U.S. bothered to ask Ukraine to share its expertise in how to defend against drones before starting the offensive in Iran, Simon Shuster and Nancy A. Youssef report. theatln.tc/AFPCstm6

Where things stand with the Department of War A statement from Dario Amodei

I think one of the most staggering industry shifts in my 16 years as a tech reporter is that it’s not become a question of “should our product help the government kill and/or surveil people?” but “to what extent?”

www.anthropic.com/news/where-s...

This is a really key thing that people are just not getting: "VC" is simply *not venture capital* anymore. There is ZERO risk for A16Z and peers. They do not resemble the thing that regulators described when creating the category of venture capital. A cartel of ~4 firms runs the whole industry.

This App Warns You if Someone Is Wearing Smart Glasses Nearby The creator of Nearby Glasses made the app after reading 404 Media's coverage of how people are using Meta's Ray-Bans smartglasses to film people without their knowledge or consent. “I consider it to ...

This is cool as hell: An app designed to ping people about nearby smartglasses.

Also cool: The creator was inspired by @404media.co coverage, a great illustration of why their journalism is so essential. This kind of work is funded by paid subscribers so become one of those if you can.

The Technobabble Defense: The Tech “Industry” What’s in a name??

What's in a name? Our @dylangyauchl.bsky.social writes about why the term "tech industry" is incoherent and lends itself to serving Silicon Valley's techno-optimist PR campaign.

revolvingdoorproject.substack.com/p/the-techno...

The Workplace Arms Race • Protean Magazine Shane Boyle reviews Craig Gent's Cyberboss: The Rise of Algorithmic Management. "Rather than representing a step towards scientific perfection, algorithmic management is simply the latest episode in c...

"Algorithmic management is 'a way of organising work in which workers are directed, tracked and assessed—all at once, in real time—by a computer system[.]' Tendrils of this managerial regime are now creeping into offices, universities, even hospitals."

–Shane Boyle

proteanmag.com/2025/12/23/t...

China's overlapping tech-industrial ecosystems EVs, batteries, lidar, drones, robotics, smartphones, AI. China's progress across a range of overlapping industries creates a mutually reinforcing feedback loop.

Kyle Chan: "China’s strength across multiple overlapping industries creates a compounding effect for its industrial policy efforts."
open.substack.com/pub/highcapa...

Space Force Wants Payloads, Not More Rockets - Technology Org Pentagon space chief says launch is solved but payload manufacturing lags years behind. SBIR funding freeze and new defense spending rules add urgency.

www.technology.org/2026/02/24/p...

The political effects of X's feed algorithm https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-026-10098-2 Received: 16 December 2024 Accepted: 4 January 2026 Published online: 18 February 2026 Open access • Check for updates Germain Gauthier,5, Roland Hodler?5, Philine Widmer35 & Ekaterina Zhuravskaya3,4,5 m Feed algorithms are widely suspected to influence political attitudes. However, previous evidence from switching off the algorithm on Meta platforms found no political effects'. Here we present results from a 2023 field experiment on Elon Musk's platform X shedding light on this puzzle. We assigned active US-based users randomly to either an algorithmic or a chronological feed for 7 weeks, measuring political attitudes and online behaviour. Switching from a chronological to an algorithmic feed increased engagement and shifted political opinion towards more conservative positions, particularly regarding policy priorities, perceptions of criminal investigations into Donald Trump and views on the war in Ukraine. In contrast, switching from the algorithmic to the chronological feed had no comparable effects. Neither switching the algorithm on nor switching it off significantly affected affective polarization or self-reported partisanship. To investigate the mechanism, we analysed users' feed content and behaviour. We found that the algorithm promotes conservative content and demotes posts by traditional media. Exposure to algorithmic content leads users to follow conservative political activist accounts, which they continue to follow even after switching off the algorithm, helping explain the asymmetry in effects. These results suggest that initial exposure to X's algorithm has persistent effects on users' current political attitudes and account-following behaviour, even in the absence of a detectable effect on partisanship.

A new paper shows that less than 2 months of exposure to Twitter’s algorithmic feed significantly shifts people’s political views to the right.

Moving from chronological feed to the algorithmic feed also increases engagement.

This is one of the most concerning papers I’ve read in awhile.

Elon Musk’s pivot from Mars to the moon SpaceX shifts focus with IPO approaching

SpaceX is now focused on “building a self-growing city on the moon,” Musk said on X. That goal could be achieved in “less than 10 years,” whereas colonizing Mars would “take 20-plus years.”

This SpaceX Situation: Not Good! Elon Musk's political projects are combining into a highly concerning megacompany.

The SpaceX/xAI merger situation is actually pretty important and, I think, very bad. "Data centers in space" is a bit of a pipe dream, but SpaceX now dominates low-Earth orbit in a highly concerning way. Starlink is real and could monopolize a lot of things.Not Good!

www.404media.co/this-spacex-...

The silicon gaze: A typology of biases and inequality in LLMs through the lens of place - Francisco W. Kerche, Matthew Zook, Mark Graham, 2026 This paper introduces the concept of the silicon gaze to explain how large language models (LLMs) reproduce and amplify long-standing spatial inequalities. Draw...

"Drawing on a 20.3-million-query audit of ChatGPT, we map systematic biases in the model's representations of countries, states, cities, and neighbourhoods. From these empirics, we argue that bias is not a correctable anomaly but an intrinsic feature of generative AI”.

ht: Dagmar Monett

I tasked the UMBRA-10 satellite over LC-39B to capture SLS on the pad.

The capture lasted 33 seconds (2026-01-20 04:20:43 - 4:21:16 UTC) so here it is turned into a short video.

‘ELITE’: The Palantir App ICE Uses to Find Neighborhoods to Raid Internal ICE material and testimony from an official obtained by 404 Media provides the clearest link yet between the technological infrastructure Palantir is building for ICE and the agency’s activit...

New: meet ELITE, the Palantir app ICE is using to find neighborhoods to raid. Map interface; officers search for immigrants; click person to bring up individual dossier. This is clearest link between what Palantir is building and ICE's activities on the ground yet www.404media.co/elite-the-pa...

the exact same arguments were used to boost new space a decade ago

Tech elites are starting their own for-profit cities They want to escape from regulation and ‘failing’ democracy — but are they more opportunistic than libertarian?

"Srinivasan himself has started a 'Network School' on an artificial island near Singapore, where techno-optimists can work their day jobs remotely while living in a hotel together and learning how to 'bootstrap'... a new society [ — ] 'society-as-a-service'"

Radar locked | Japan Daily Briefing Japan protests risky encounter between Japanese and Chinese aircraft, while deepening defense ties with Australia

This edition of Japan Daily Briefing looks at some things to watch this week, as well as the "radar lock" incident, a defense ministerial with Australia, and efforts by opposition parties to coordinate their candidates for the next general election.

open.substack.com/pub/observin...