Shashank Joshi
@shashj
Incoming Washington bureau chief at The Economist. Previously defence editor for eight years. Visiting Fellow at Department of War Studies, KCL. For speaking engagements:
A farewell to Fable. I got it to make a Guess-Who inspired game which gives you a series of clues to guess the purged PLA or American general. Admittedly niche. shashj1.github.io/guess-hu/
Another Fable experiment. An interactive visualisation of Charles Joseph Minard's famous 'Carte figurative' showing Napoleon's retreat from Moscow in 1812, with some Tolstoy mixed in. shashj1.github.io/minard-1812/
I updated this so it now has three chapters: how neural networks work, how tokens work, and how transformers work. Fable even trained a small transformer language model. superb-stardust-8ced44.netlify.app
I asked Fable to produce an interactive tool that explains simply how neural networks work, taking users through the history of the technology at the same time. Pretty magical, in my view. jazzy-duckanoo-9271fa.netlify.app
"... even AI models marketed as having conservative views, including Elon Musk’s Grok, offered by his company SpaceX, cited left-leaning arguments more often, on average." www.washingtonpost.com/technology/i...
Al Carns on a bit of a political kamikaze mission today. What's much more damning is that his critique isn't just about money, but also the inadequate - in his view - level of "transformation" on tech.
Big claim from a Ukrainian drone maker about a test two years ago: "We just launch it and we know...everything that will be found there in this particular area will be dead. There is no connection to the drone at all, you cannot see the video, nothing." www.newscientist.com/article/2529...
Is it because defence has systematically been hollowed out at a time when the risk of war has risen considerably? Few people are arguing for more borrowing.
Wow. UK defence sec'y John Healey resigns. His resignation letter says DIP settlement he was given "falls well short of what is required for defence and the country" and that UK would be spending just 2.68% of GDP in 2030.
While you're waiting for the DIP, please enjoy this DIP Mad Libs generator. stirring-pika-6d5081.netlify.app
Bovino appears to have bought up Rommel, unprompted. www.breizh-info.com/2026/05/28/2...
Bored of waiting for the DIP? Try the Choose-Your-Own-DIP-Adventure simulator for UK defence spending trade-offs. An entertaining (and hopefully not too libellous) way to put Opus 4.8 through its paces. singular-faloodeh-dea45f.netlify.app
I wrote our cover story this week, a valedictory essay on the changes in war & warfare over my eight years as defence editor. It’s a reflection on the growth & limits of battlefield transparency, the lessons from different wars & the utility of force today www.economist.com/interactive/...
Passing an Amtrak ride by catching up with @kschake.bsky.social's latest. Cheery reading.
I thought people moved to Bluesky to escape all the loons on the "For You" tab, rather than curate a new set of them.
An interesting lesson here about the advance & limits of battlefield transparency. In 1991 the US failed to hit a single Iraqi Scud missile, despite huge air/ground efforts. This time it hit a lot—but still only a fraction of the total. Sensing *over large areas* remains hard. From NYT report: