28 July 2026

Are Chinese students taking the easy way out?

"China’s brightest students are increasingly choosing police academies, government-funded teaching programs, and other paths to permanent state employment," according to hedge fund manager Ken Cao this weekend, "even when their scores qualify them for elite universities."
"The stepping stones to a solid, middle-class life seem to be sinking away, and the promise of long-term financial stability is crumbling as the housing market does the same."
What a waste of brainpower.

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Is an AI company buying up all the used books?  The thesis is that someone is buying old discard books to train the next AI models. And that this should be stopped. I don't see that problem with this. It's not really another Library of Alexandria, here.

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Do we have an HIV vaccine at last?  Let's hope so. But people have thought as much before.

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How a 99-year-old mathematician unraveled a century-old braid mystery. 99 years old! Wow!

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Ars Technica writes on the Google web-scraper case, which also involves Reddit. It's interesting that Reddit is trying to get money off their content, which was freely contributed by Redditors. These are two companies trying to profit off of content provided by someone else. The Internet is better off that they lost. 

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Wow, it's incredible how much Oregon state government grew since 2019 under Kate Brown.
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Claude is now refusing to perform a task asked of it. Claude has already refused to perform some tasks that were vaguely medical, claiming that it was a guardrail, but this one is a value judgment. It's serious that it refuses to perform tasks on the basis that it might be offensive, rather than risking medical error. This is getting into woke territory, where there will be no end to potentially offending someone. Not good.

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Signs of depression in men that don't look like depression. Perhaps "depression" isn't the right word for this feeling. I've had days like this for sure. Fortunately they were short-lived. Maybe it's related to the tiredness you can't explain to anyone.

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