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Shashank Joshi

@shashj.bsky.social
67K followers 144 following 124 posts

Incoming Washington bureau chief at The Economist. Previously defence editor for eight years. Visiting Fellow at Department of War Studies, KCL. For speaking engagements: chartwellspeakers.com/speaker/shash…

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Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 13/08/2026
It is utterly tedious pedantry made in bad faith. The linked story presents a wide range of data, describing the nuances. The quote in my post picks out the issue of robberies, which tends to be less scrutinised than homicides, and presents a completely accurate piece of data on this.
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Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
Why does every interaction on this website involve this sort of tedious pedantry?
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Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
Do you have the raw data?
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Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
Eh?
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Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
A new phase in US coercion of Canada. 'if the new tariffs come into force on August 19th, Canada will be the first country ever to be subjected to tariffs under Section 338 of the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act, a law passed in 1930" www.economist.com/the-americas...
economist.com
Donald Trump’s bullying of Canada is endless
Canadians are starting to turn against Mark Carney’s pragmatic response
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Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 10/08/2026
A big debate a couple of weeks ago, sparked by Musk, on whether US or European cities are safer. My colleagues look carefully at the data. "Personal robberies with a use of force happen about as often in both regions, even if London and Paris do especially badly." www.economist.com/graphic-deta...
economist.com
Is Europe safer than America?
A novel dataset provides some surprising answers
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Oliver Morton, Eater of Sun @eaterofsun.bsky.social · 27/07/2026
File under "Really quite disturbing" If the preliminary data for the past few weeks are confirmed, we are now very close to a new world record, and seeing an alarming rate of change climatereanalyzer.org/clim/sst_dai...
Plot of daily sea surface temperature between 60ºN and 60ºS. Day for day the temperature has been at a record height siince June 3rd. The as yet provisinal data for the past couple of weeks reaches 21.16ºC-- just a smidge below the all time record of 21.17ºC set in early 2024, when an El Nino event was at its peak.
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Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
I do not think they spend much of their day thinking about James Woolsey.
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Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 22/07/2026
Why would Woolsey be a target?
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Ian Kearns @ianpkearns.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
If you want to get close to what the war in #Ukraine is really like, worth listening to this fascinating conversation between @shashj.bsky.social and Jack Watling of @rusi.bsky.social War in Ukraine: has the tide really turned? www.economist.com/insider/insi...
economist.com
War in Ukraine: has the tide really turned? | The Economist Insider
The war in Ukraine is in flux. The country's deep strikes inside Russia have drawn a lot of attention. But Ukraine is also improving recruitment while pioneering new tactics that could eventually brea...
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Nathan Goldwag @goldwagnathan.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
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Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
It is, it’s not cheap doing serious journalism.
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Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 21/07/2026
For @economist.com subscribers: I spoke to Jack Watling on the latest episode of Inside Defence. We talked about Ukraine, what people misunderstand about drone warfare and the vital role played on the modern battlefield by the ancient art of digging. www.economist.com/insider/insi...
economist.com
War in Ukraine: has the tide really turned? | The Economist Insider
The war in Ukraine is in flux. The country's deep strikes inside Russia have drawn a lot of attention. But Ukraine is also improving recruitment while pioneering new tactics that could eventually brea...
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Peter Sloman @pjsloman.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
Fair play to John Healey, who managed to time his 5.5-week break from government to coincide exactly with the World Cup
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Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
These are general-purpose models. The same model is disproving conjectures, finding vulnerabilities in software at superhuman scale and writing poems about my cat in rhyming couplets. It's the same thing, trained with the same compute.
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Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
What do you mean “the issue”? Is there solely one issue in defence policy?
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Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
I don’t think knee-jerk scepticism of new technology is the job description of a journalist. I’ve reported extensively on strengths and limitations of generative AI - my job - and I believe the strengths are extraordinary. That’s an evidence based view.
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Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
What’s in paragraph one of the story?
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Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
Just read the response. Seems sensible me. It does not come out against the proposed policy, as far as I can see. Just suggests a number of caveats.
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Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
I challenge you to tell me anything in it that is inaccurate.
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Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 20/07/2026
For the 'just a stochastic parrot' brigade. 'A mathematician has cracked an 87-year-old conundrum with the help of AI and announced the solution unceremoniously in a tweet. The finding is the most difficult mathematical problem yet solved by AI, say experts.' www.newscientist.com/article/2580...
newscientist.com
AI's solution to 87-year-old riddle takes mathematicians by surprise | New Scientist
Mathematicians have been trying to prove the Jacobian conjecture for nearly a century, but now the Claude Fable 5 AI has apparently found a counterexample that disproves it
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Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 19/07/2026
Not true on both counts. Testosterone potentially linked to wide range of symptoms. And warfare not just about technical ability, very far from it.
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Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
I wouldn’t normally respond to such boorish & ignorant messages, but I will state here that I spoke to three endocrinologists for this story, as well as a clinical psychologist who has published peer-reviewed work in The Lancet & other journals on symptoms associated with special-forces personnel.
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Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
static.klipy.com
Peter Griffin's First Time Skydiving?
ALT: Peter Griffin's First Time Skydiving?
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Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
You can and must separate it, because a policy does not become bad because the motivations for it may be misguided or bad.
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Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
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/
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Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 17/07/2026
I wrote on Hegseth's plan to screen all troops over 30 for low testosterone. It is unusual—I don't think any other military does it—but it is not crazy. Universal screening is not recommended in the general population, but military personnel are distinctive. www.economist.com/united-state...
economist.com
Pete Hegseth’s testosterone-screening plan is unusual, not crazy
Soldiers seem to be at particular risk of hypogonadism
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James Cameron @jjjcameron.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
Maybe NATO should just not have summits for 2027 and 2028. Low-key constructive work to transfer more responsibility to Europe can continue without giving Trump a platform to beat up on allies and undermine deterrence further.
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Alexander Martin @alexmartin.bsky.social · 08/07/2026
Britain’s cyber agency laid out plans on Tuesday for what it called “a national scale, sovereign defense capability” that would use agentic AI systems to discover and fix cybersecurity weaknesses across government networks and critical national infrastructure.
therecord.media
Britain plans to build autonomous AI 'Cyber Shield' to defend nation
The capability, called Cyber Shield, is designed to counter a threat the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) said could see attackers “move at machine speed and greater scale, reducing opportunities...
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Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
Closely tracks the original
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Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
I think the code should be available on my GitHub but I’ll share. Prompt in Claude code was about as simple as it gets, with only one follow-up to add the War and Peace passages.
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Carnegie Russia Eurasia @carnegierussia.bsky.social · 06/07/2026
On July 9, join us online for an important conversation with Senior Fellow @michaelkofman.bsky.social on Russia's military power after Ukraine, moderated by The Economist's @shashj.bsky.social. RSVP here: carnegieendowment.org/events/2026/...
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Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 07/07/2026
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/
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Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 03/07/2026
"entirely unstable, often incorrect" - anyone who has used the most modern and capable versions of the technology knows this is false, and based on a total lack of familiarity with the newest models. The evidence is right there in the first post.
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Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 03/07/2026
I think that is the point: this technology is very good at helping take people through complex topics in different ways, rather than simply compiling long things to read. The website above is one example of that. Of course, I don't think anyone would argue that it supplants good teachers entirely.
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Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 03/07/2026
A crying shame that a history teacher can't see the enormous pedagogical potential of the technology. A loss for your students.
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Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
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
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Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
true, but if I remember correctly it covers and explains overfitting later, right?
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Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 02/07/2026
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
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Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
Curious if you could point me to where they said that about Mythos, as opposed to the mostly factual claims here. www.anthropic.com/research/myt...
anthropic.com
Assessing Claude Mythos Preview’s cybersecurity capabilities
Claude Mythos Preview is a new general-purpose language model that is strikingly capable at computer security tasks. This post provides technical details for researchers and practitioners who want to ...
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Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 01/07/2026
I wrote this week on the whiplash of American AI policy: the unpredictable zig-zag of restrictions, where AI governance might be headed in this administration, and the broader implications of locking down and restricting cutting-edge models. www.economist.com/business/202...
economist.com
Donald Trump’s AI regime is opaque, unpredictable—and unsustainable
The administration now controls who gets access to the best models
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Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 30/06/2026
Congratulations on the incredible work you and your colleagues have done.
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Oliver Morton, Eater of Sun @eaterofsun.bsky.social · 27/06/2026
Lede:
L.P. Hartley’s novel “The Go-Between”, written in the 1950s but set in 1900, made that summer’s heatwave perhaps the most famous in English literature. As Leo, the 12-year-old protagonist, becomes more deeply enmeshed in the events that will lead to his breakdown, the heat weighs on him ever more heavily. It is made all the worse by the fact that at first he delights in it, even urging it on: “The thermometer stood at eighty-four: that was satisfactory but I was confident it could do better.”

On June 25th thermometers all over Europe were doing considerably better. AFP, a news agency, calculated that 380m Europeans experienced temperatures above 30ºC (86ºF) that day. That included 63m people in France—94% of the population. On June 26th World Weather Attribution, an international scientific collaboration that looks at the degree to which climate change is responsible for various sorts of weather, concluded that this was the most severe heatwave on record in its study area (broadly speaking, western Europe).
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Oliver Morton, Eater of Sun @eaterofsun.bsky.social · 27/06/2026
My round up of @economist.com's heatwave coverage (gift link) www.economist.com/europe/2026/...
economist.com
Europe can’t stand the heat
Oliver Morton, our planetary affairs editor, on why the continent is warming faster than any other—and adapting too slowly
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Jon B. Wolfsthal @jonatomic.bsky.social · 25/06/2026
My latest on where the MOU and talks with Iran leave the US. It is not pretty. The bottom line is Iran has every incentive to drag out the talks and is getting paid without having to do anything on the nuclear issue. open.substack.com/pub/thinking...
open.substack.com
Iran Can Do This All Day
Thoughts about strategic and nuclear challenges over the next few months
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Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 24/06/2026
"... 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...
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Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 23/06/2026
Today I interviewed German army chief Lt-Gen Christian Freuding. We talked about German rearmament, the future of the Lithuania bridge & debates over the timeline of the Russian threat. @economist.com subscribers can tune in to Inside Defence in an hour. www.economist.com/insider/insi...
economist.com
Is Germany war-ready? | The Economist Insider
Germany’s army chief has his work cut out. Lieutenant General Christian Freuding has been charged with overseeing the rearmament of the country’s land forces—part of a once-in-a-generation mission whi...
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Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 22/06/2026
If we step back, is the argument that there are no such things as RMAs or that we just aren’t in one now? I do think - if we accept they are a thing - then it’s very hard to know in the moment whether one is underway.
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Shashank Joshi @shashj.bsky.social · 22/06/2026
I think so. RMAs are rarely evenly distributed!
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