Links
3 stars
Boarding China’s Last Bus | Asterisk
12-minute read
The link above isn’t working at the moment; hopefully it comes back by the time you see this. (If not, use the archive.is link.)
But even if you burn the records, you cannot erase the wound. And no matter how much whitewash one applies to that period, the core mentality — seize the last bus or die — has become deeply ingrained. This persistent anxiety continues to intensify and spread whenever new, potentially transformative shifts occur in Chinese society. While not everyone successfully boards every “last bus,” the alternative of not trying to board at all is a social stigma. As Xiang Biao observed, there seems to be no way to live outside of competing and striving, even when it is unclear what exactly one is striving toward; quitting the race means facing utter failure.
[...]
China’s culture of techno-optimism, analysts argue, may allow AI to be diffused and deployed at scale. Some analysts contrast China’s Star Trek techno-optimism, which some believe will allow AI to be more quickly deployed at scale, with the West’s Black Mirror mindset, wherein public anxiety about various AI risks stifles deployment. It is too easy, however, to draw a binary between the American and Chinese responses to AI, or to think that the Chinese public would be purely enthusiastic about a technology that will automate more jobs. It is true that Chinese respondents in some surveys likely have some genuine enthusiasm — particularly many who lived through and benefited from the market transformation of the 1990s, for whom technology has been a story of concrete improvement. However, enthusiasm and fear are not mutually exclusive.
Original link | Archive.is link
Secrets of the bees: Revealing the sneaky genius of nature’s brightest thinkers | National Geographic
8-minute read
After tinkering with a range of designs, his team placed an artificial flower—a blue dot filled with a sucrose solution—under a low transparent plastic barrier so the bees could see but not reach the reward. Instead, they were shown step-by-step how to pull the flower closer using the attached string. Shortly after the experiment’s design was finalized, one of Chittka’s students called him in to the lab. “I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” he remembered. The bumblebees had quickly figured out how to pull it to them.
Then Chittka and his team decided to expand the classic framework by bringing untrained bees to watch demonstrator bees pull the string. The observers learned the task as well, and soon those bees were showing other foragers in the colony how to do it too. “The fact that a completely nonnatural behavior spread rapidly through an entire population was pretty spectacular,” he said. The experiment suggested that bees can recognize cause and effect—how pulling a string can produce a reward—and engage in social learning.
Original link | Archive.is link
The Chinese whiz kids of Silicon Valley | Rest of World
11-minute read
I was on a mission to better understand the community of young, talented, and intensely in-demand Chinese AI researchers who had installed themselves across Silicon Valley. Top research scientists were being courted like NBA stars. Stories circulated of a Chinese researcher being poached by Meta from Apple with a $200 million compensation package — only to be poached again by OpenAI. In my day-to-day work covering the tech industry, I saw more and more Chinese names cropping up in lists of AI startup founders, as authors of influential machine learning studies, or as the architects behind Silicon Valley’s buzziest AI models.
As a recent Chinese immigrant myself, I had a sense for who these people were, and their trajectories. They were the ones who beat out millions of others to be at the top of their classes. They won math olympiads and got into the best programs at the best universities. Later, they decided to move to Silicon Valley, leveraging their math prowess and relentless work ethic toward advancing AI and landing seven-figure compensation packages.
Geopolitically, U.S.-China relations are at their lowest point in decades. But America’s AI boom has created an incredibly lucrative opportunity for these techies. I grew up alongside them, and wanted to know what their lives were like: Are they destined to become the next generation of Silicon Valley leaders?
Whither the Nerd-Bully? | The New York Review of Books
12-minute read
This public relations crisis culminated with the Justice Department’s antitrust suit against Microsoft, which began in 1998 and continued for years. Gates’s videotaped deposition from the trial remains a masterclass in how not to behave in a deposition: slouched and pouty, he debated the definition of words like “we” and pretended not to understand simple questions. He was so obnoxious that when the Justice Department lawyers played excerpts in court, the judge laughed.
“The more others painted him a villain, the more he thought himself a victim,” Das writes. The same could be said for any number of founders who followed in his footsteps, despite their efforts to distinguish themselves from him. As Silicon Valley took its modern shape in the 1990s, it did so under the shadow of Gates, that mad boomer to the north—since 1979 Microsoft has been headquartered in his home state of Washington—whom the young prospectors of the Internet economy feared and hated. They wanted to build companies that were the opposite of Microsoft, and in doing so they laid the basis of Big Tech. Defying the monopolist Gates, they constructed monopolies of surpassing ambition and ruthlessness. He was the father they rebelled against and, in so rebelling, became.
Original link | Archive.is link
2 stars
The Desert Safety Net | RE:PUBLIC
11-minute read
Community and infrastructure move in tandem here, creating a seasonal metropolis layered on to the existing town. But what allows it to function year after year is something more fundamental: affordability.
For $180, a permit allows camping from 15 September through 15 April. At La Posa, that price includes trash collection, vault toilets and a dump station. It’s worth pausing on the math. For less than the cost of a single night in many American hotels, a person can legally live on public lands in the desert for seven months.
Many LTVA visitors are traditional snowbirds: retirees who maintain homes elsewhere and migrate seasonally for warmth. But for a growing number of others, the permit functions differently: as a legal foothold in a housing system that has increasingly shut them out.
There are Many Configurations of Business That Work | Commoncog
18-minute read
The obvious criticism to this essay is to say ‘oh, this is just survivorship bias’ or ‘all of these examples are idiosyncratic and unique.’ But that reaction is a little silly. Of course these stories are idiosyncratic. I’m not saying that you can copy Yvon Chouinard with Patagonia, or that you can be Buffett. They are each unique individuals. I’m saying “these folks found a configuration that worked for them, and you can find one that works for you.” I am saying “those configurations are counter examples to the typical narrative of business success.” I am also saying “Don’t blindly follow the most dominant template of business. There are more workable configurations than you might think, and you may hunt for these patterns, and you may find a unique setup that fits who you are and what you want.”
Trump destroyed USAID. Now people are dying. | Reveal
18-minute read
When Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, went looking for government agencies to axe last year, one of its first targets was the US Agency for International Development. Established during the Cold War to counter Soviet influence, USAID spent billions of dollars on food aid, public health, and emergency relief for some of the world’s most vulnerable populations. In return, the US hoped to gain allies and goodwill. Call it a decades-long exercise in soft power.
But since President Donald Trump returned to office, soft power is out. And so is USAID, which has been slashed and reorganized. The Trump administration is trying to close the agency altogether by September. This has led to some horrific consequences for the people who relied on USAID to get by.
Roadside Attraction | The Offing
12-minute read
It’s hard to commemorate something ephemeral, something that never really had a name to begin with. When love is fleeting and out in the middle of nowhere—small and enormous all at once, then gone, out of my life entirely, one half with me and one half with the person who left, I don’t know how to make it feel entirely real. The Marfa Lights Viewing Center has become a monument to life in the desert as much one to the lights—a place that can hold hope and promise, and also, sometimes, disappoint.
One night, I drove out to the Marfa Lights Viewing Center alone. I sat on the ledge and watched people cycle through it all—the delight, the disappointment, the reality, the impatience, the desperation, the hope, the wonder.
The Marfa Lights, like Marfa and the desert itself, is a big Rorschach test. What you see is what you get. But that “sight” reflects the beliefs of the seer. The desert has a changeling effect, transforming lights into magic, desert into space, visitors into lovers, me into something apart from what I actually am.
Messi is the best player at the World Cup, and the best male athlete of all time | ESPN
6-minute read
A pretty compelling case, actually:
In 2022, I was inclined to give the edge to Bolt over Messi: Everyone can run, and he was so much better at running than any person who has ever lived. But, four years later, I’m no longer sure that comparison is right.
Messi won his first Ballon d’Or in 2009, for his age-21 season. He’s currently 39, and based on what we’ve just watched this summer, he’s still the best player in the world. Bolt won his first gold in an Olympics or world championship at 21, too. But his last came at 29. That gives Messi an extra 10 years -- a full decade -- at the top.
Soccer is the most competitive team sport on the planet, and at worst, it’s the second-most competitive of all sports outside of running. Messi has been better than everyone else at soccer for almost 20 years at this point. His run at this World Cup, in my opinion, has stretched the lead he has held over the rest of the soccer world to the lead he now has on the rest of the sports world.
He’s the best male athlete of all time -- and no, it’s not even close.
Inside the Enhanced Games, Where Athletes Compete on Steroids. And Growth Hormones. And Adderall. | Vanity Fair
13-minute read
But in the run-up to the competition, it’s become clear that something far more complex than extreme athletics is taking shape. The Enhanced Games is not just a rogue competition—it’s a node in a rapidly expanding biohacking economy, where the same networks funding life-extension start-ups and experimental clinics are now underwriting a sporting spectacle and preparing to sell it back to viewers, who the game makers are betting are would-be consumers. The venture capitalists with the most money and the highest tolerance for risk are already rewriting the rules for the public too.
Original link | Archive.is link
How 34 generations of ancient warrior training helped build a once-in-a-generation NBA superstar | ESPN
8-minute read
Master Yan’an is a 34th-generation warrior monk, an inheritor of the Shaolin Temple.
He has taught thousands of students in China and the United States. He was chosen to work with Wembanyama for a number of reasons, among them his fluency in English from having lived for seven years in Los Angeles and Washington, D.C.
Wembanyama’s agent, Bouna Ndiaye, first contacted him in April 2025, soon after Wembanyama had been cleared to resume physical activities following surgery to address a blood clot in his shoulder that prematurely ended his second NBA season.
After researching martial arts masters and forms from all over China, India and Japan, Ndiaye decided that the retreat offered by the Shaolin Temple was the best option for Wembanyama.
Deepfakes are everywhere. The godfather of digital forensics is fighting back | Science
12-minute read
AI-generated images have left us questioning what is real. But the godfather of digital forensics, Hany Farid, is not giving up
I Work in Hollywood. Everyone Who Used to Make TV Is Now Secretly Training AI | WIRED
13-minute read
This abrupt hiring, firing, stopping, starting, abandonment, and rapid depletion of projects, was, I would learn, commonplace. A friend we shall call Jonathan, a mid-level TV writer who’d worked on several big streaming shows, was employed as an Expert Creative Writer. He was paid $150 an hour to evaluate scripts for OpenAI. He said it was all “a bit Hunger Games,” meaning he slept when they slept, and curried favor among his sponsors, also known as “TLs”—the team leaders who seemingly had the ability to hire and fire us at will. “It feels like we are all in a fishbowl waiting for our human masters to drop some food in a big aquarium,” someone wrote plaintively in a Slack for another project I joined that yielded barely any work. “And then, only the ones who are fast enough to swim to the top can eat.”
Original link | Archive.is link
What Will It Take to Get A.I. Out of Schools? | New Yorker
11-minute read
Even some pro-A.I. education advocates concede that A.I. poses significant cognitive and social-emotional risks to young people. Amanda Bickerstaff is the co-founder and C.E.O. of the organization AI for Education, which provides training for educators and students on generative A.I. literacy. “Children should not be using chatbots under age ten,” Bickerstaff told me. “These tools require expertise and evaluation skills that even many adults don’t have.” Google’s decision to make Gemini available to all ages, she said, marked one of the few times in her career that she has lost sleep over a work-related matter; she recalled thinking, “They so clearly know that this is going to be bad for kids, and yet they’re still going to do it.” Bickerstaff went on, “I don’t think they’re asking really basic questions like, ‘If a kid can immediately make a picture instead of draw one, what will happen to that kid’s ability to think on their own and draw?’ ”
Original link | Archive.is link
How Everest Has Changed Since “Into Thin Air” | The Atlantic
5-minute read
When the first edition of Into Thin Air was published not long after the 1996 Mount Everest calamity, during which eight climbers died in a violent storm, I assumed that the disturbing events I described in my book would convince amateur climbers that paying a lot of money to be guided up the highest mountain on Earth was a bad idea. I was wrong. The deadly hazards I wrote about attracted novice climbers to Everest like gamblers to a slot machine. The owner of one of the prominent guiding companies told me that Into Thin Air was better advertising for his business than anything he could have imagined.
Original link | Archive.is link
The identification and work of an eighth-century Maya mathematician | Cambridge
13-minute read
In this article, we present a newly deciphered calendrical formula; designated Text 19, it is located within a chamber of wall paintings at the site of Xultun, Guatemala.
[...]
Aside from the numerological and astronomical importance of the formula, the attribution to its author, Sak Tahn Waax, provides the only known example of a Classic-period Maya mathematician-astronomer identified by name and claiming direct credit for their intellectual work.
Asian mothers, bad feelings: notes on an all-conquering stereotype | The Guardian
12-minute read
Over drinks in London one evening last summer, I mentioned to some old schoolfriends that I was thinking of writing about the persistent trope of the Asian mother. Polite small talk was swiftly done away with, followed by two hours of impassioned discussion. Afterwards, I wanted to find a way into this subject that I was now beginning to see everywhere. The subject was too vast to be treated definitively, so I started closer to home. Taking a highly unscientific and piecemeal approach, I asked my friends if they could speak to me at greater length about their relationship with their mothers.
Can America Escape the Cycle of Vicemaxxing? | Derek Thompson
7-minute read
Again and again, the president has taken the federal government in his hands, turned it upside down like a child’s piggy bank, and smacked it on the side until billions of dollars poured out of the hole in its back. As Republicans excuse his behavior by alleging misdeeds by the other side, I fear that a warped philosophy of amorality is settling over American politics, where fewer people are arguing for universal principles of decency and more people are perfectly comfortable justifying their own side’s uninterrupted immorality by insisting on the enduring presence of a greater evil on the other side.
This is no way to build a world.
Meet the Sad Wives of AI | WIRED
7-minute read
What she said next, I had to write down. Her client base, she allowed, is almost entirely women—women whose husbands, more often than not, are in some way professionally adjacent to AI. And it’s affecting their relationships. The pressure to keep up means zero boundaries at home. The very masculine energy of it all. And the constant fighting, which is about something bigger than them. He’s off in another world, a world of prompts and benchmarks and epiphanies, while she’s firmly in this one.
The resentment builds quietly. Several of these sad wives, my therapist added, have turned down job opportunities in AI themselves. Not because they weren’t qualified, but because it’s hard to raise kids and disrupt civilization at the same time.
Princess Diana famously said there were three people in her marriage. For the sad wives of AI, the third is a chatbot. I spoke to a few other family therapists, and they agreed with mine: The phenomenon is getting worse. “It’s a lot of tech wives,” one said, sighing. “A lot of tech wives.”
Original link | Archive.is link
Roundup #82: Staring in wonder at the world | Noahpinion
10-minute read
First, top professional mathematicians are now saying that the job of “mathematician”, as we know it, may be very rare very soon. As recently as a few years ago, it was conventional wisdom that high-IQ people would be the last people to have their jobs taken by AI. Everyone was concerned about truck drivers, cashiers, and so on. But it turns out that the highest-IQ job on the planet — professional mathematician — may be one of the first to be eliminated by AI. Who would have thought mathematicians would be automated before truckers and cashiers? Perhaps we should revere IQ a little less among the set of human abilities.
Naked mole-rat queens produce an odorous chemical that ensures that only they can reproduce | Phys.org
2-minute read
When a naked mole-rat queen dies or is removed from the colony, fierce fights and new mating behaviors emerge within days. Once the first female becomes pregnant, she assumes the role of queen and stability returns.
“In our experiments, however, we found that the queen’s physical presence is not essential for maintaining harmony in the colony,” says Lewin. “Simply spraying isopropyl myristate into the colony each day was enough.” However, without the queen’s odor, conflicts quickly resumed.
Why I didn’t sign the “We Must Act Now” statement (yet) | Noahpinion
4-minute read
Statistically speaking, we probably don’t live in the best of all possible worlds when it comes to AI’s economic effects. But we might be close enough that any large-scale attempt to interfere in AI development might leave average human workers worse off. There’s certainly plenty of historical precedent for that — collectivization of agriculture, Mao’s “backyard production”, and a bunch of other heavy-handed interventions in the development of an entire sector crashed and burned spectacularly.
It might be, in other words, that the AI we’re building now is already highly complementary to human workers, and that the best approach is not to “Act Now”, but to simply sit there and do nothing. Even the seemingly empty slogan of “We Must Act Now” might actually be wrong. Perhaps we mustn’t.
What Now? | News Items
5-minute read
I would argue that as the United States has already tried three strategies in its war with Iran and come up short each and every time, the question is whether Trump has a Plan D. But who’s counting? The pertinent question is, what now?
1 star
Do you know your default shape? | Useful Fictions
4-minute read
There’s something odd about human behavior. It’s not quite literally true, but it’s close enough to be astonishing: How people respond to anything is how they respond to everything. People have a default perceptual lens that gets applied to everything from world affairs to their marriage. A default shape. Like, “friction is a sign that something bad is happening,” or, “I need to figure out what’s reliable so I don’t get taken advantage of.” The default lens isn’t necessarily wrong in any particular case — it’s just interesting the way it seems to apply to everything. This way of looking creates habitual responses, which, executed over and over again, exert a shockingly large influence on everything in our lives.
How Has Roman Concrete Lasted for Millennia? A 1,900-Year-Old Latrine Offers New Clues About the Material’s Impressive Durability | Smithsonian Magazine
2-minute read
For the new work, researchers traveled to the 1,900-year-old Hadrian’s Villa, a UNESCO World Heritage site that sits about 17 miles east of Rome. The sprawling estate is an architectural marvel, but one of its scientific gems are the communal toilets. They offer an unprecedented opportunity to study Roman concrete in its original state, unaltered by modern hands.
“Nobody restores a latrine,” says Paulo J. M. Monteiro, a study co-author and civil engineer at the University of California, Berkeley, to Sam Macdonald at Scientific American. “So, the material sat undisturbed for 19 centuries, quietly running an experiment no one alive could start.”
Astronomers spot first atmosphere around a potentially habitable alien world | Science
3-minute read
Many teams are zooming in on LHS 1140b, because of its many charms. Besides being nearby, it could be hiding other gases in its lower atmosphere, such as nitrogen and carbon dioxide—much like Earth. And if those gases provide an element of greenhouse warming, it could possess a liquid water ocean warm enough to swim in. “I expect many, many telescopes to take a look at it,” Doyon says.
New spinning drone hides in plain sight | Northwestern
2-minute read
Called the “Phantom Twist,” the drone spins up to 25 times per second, which is too fast for the human eye to see clearly. While it isn’t completely invisible, it morphs into a ghostly smudge that seamlessly blends into the background. The work eventually could lead to drones that monitor wildlife, survey the environment and inspect infrastructure with less visual disruption.
The Best Shots From the 2026 Aerial Photographer of the Year Contest | kottke.org
1-minute read
The best aerial photography reminds us that we don’t have to go all the way to space to experience a small helping of the overview effect.
The Medieval Marriage Ceremony That Sounds Completely Made Up (But Isn’t) | Mental Floss
2-minute read
Proxy marriages often didn’t stop at the altar or with the signing of paperwork, either. When Maximilian of Habsburg (later the Holy Roman Emperor Maximilian I) wed his future queen, Anne of Brittany, by proxy in 1490, the nobleman who represented him at the wedding went on to spend the wedding night in Anne’s bed—albeit wearing a full suit of armor, with a sword placed between them on the mattress.
Students use chatbots to cheat on exam | FlowingData
1-minute read
Roberto Serrano, a Brown University economics professor, gave a take-home midterm and it seems most of the students used AI handle the work. Suspicious of cheating, Serrano required the final exam to be taken in-person. For Inside Higher Ed, Emma Whitford charted the discrepancy between high midterm marks against much lower final marks.