So...I just Finished my 'Lady Maria' Fan art #Bloodborne #gaming #artwork #illustration #gameart #gaming #Soulsborne #elderring #ladymaria #illustration #Wacom #art

Two extraordinary charts from today’s PISA test results: 1) School test scores continue to collapse internationally, underscoring how this is no longer a Covid effect but sustained decline. Those falls in reading and maths are equivalent to about two years of lost schooling.

LinkedIn users have been editing their work histories to add "AI" and remove "DEI".

GDP per capita is super strongly correlated with life satisfaction across countries - but *negatively* correlated with meaning/purpose The AI-makes-us-all-rich future: lots of hedonic satisfaction, little eudaimonia? from @BetseyStevenson

Bonkers. A new yearly high global surface temperature for 2026 was just posted by ECMWF, nearly two weeks past the typical peak date of August 1st. The Climate 8-ball isn't talking.

Conclusions: Habitual caffeine use does not eliminate the ergogenic effect of acute supplementation in most endurance settings, but may attenuate responsiveness in some individuals. Caffeine Tolerance in Endurance Sports: Does Habitual Intake Reduce the Effectiveness of Acute... - goo.gl/scholar/uNM4rf #ScholarAlerts

One of the worst things about Trump is that he’s ushering in more corporate welfare, cronyism, and socialism while parading it under the banner of capitalism, so we end up with all the failings of those ideologies but with a generation of young people blaming the market economy.

Did Jason Arday’s PhD examiners actually read his thesis? And did the electors who appointed him to a Cambridge professorship read his work? The questions raised by this affair go well beyond plagiarism. My latest for UnHerd: unherd.com/2026/08/jason-ard…

Mor...ning?

1/4 Informe mensual DIPRES: en junio aumentan ingresos 12,6% y gasto no crece = 0% Así, se observa un cambio tendencia en trayectoria déficit con respecto a años previos, acumulando balance -0,7% del PIB, lo q representa una mejora vs 2025 (-1,2%) y 2024 (-1,3%) Doble clic 👇

Cuando Mistral escribió “Menos cóndor y más huemul”, acotó que “tal vez el símbolo [escudo] fuera demasiado femenino si quedara reducido al huemul y no sirviera, por unilateral, para expresión de un pueblo”. El cóndor, decía, era “el latido de la urgencia”. FA = Chile eunuco

the 3rd place humiliation match on saturday:

Más de 4 millones de pesos mensuales es el sueldo de este 'asesor'. Alprazolam genérico cuesta 2 lucas la caja.

Ta helao

Que saen de investigación avanzada de Gain of Function xd

A study on the link between a country’s internal inequality and crime has been published recently. Verdict: The relationship between economic inequality and crime is “small, or inexistent.”

But why WFH? We also propose a stylised model to explain the mechanism: WFH makes supervision, monitoring, and on-the-job learning harder, all of which hit junior-workers more. Firms less willing to invest in junior talent when these frictions rise.

An audit of 2.5 million academic papers has identified nearly 3,000 biomedical-science papers that contain fake references. go.nature.com/3QWCBmi

Researchers sent the same resume to an AI hiring tool twice. Same qualifications. Same experience. Same skills. One version was written by a real human. The other was rewritten by ChatGPT. The AI picked the ChatGPT version 97.6% of the time. A team from the University of Maryland, the National University of Singapore, and Ohio State just published the receipt. They took 2,245 real human-written resumes pulled from a professional resume site from before ChatGPT existed, so the human writing was actually human. Then they had seven of the most-used AI models in the world rewrite each one. GPT-4o. GPT-4o-mini. GPT-4-turbo. LLaMA 3.3-70B. Qwen 2.5-72B. DeepSeek-V3. Mistral-7B. Then they asked each AI to pick the better resume. Every model picked itself. GPT-4o hit 97.6%. LLaMA-3.3-70B hit 96.3%. Qwen-2.5-72B hit 95.9%. DeepSeek-V3 hit 95.5%. The real human almost never won. Then the researchers tried the obvious objection. Maybe the AI is just better at writing. So they had real humans grade the resumes for actual quality and ran the experiment again, controlling for it. The result was worse. Each AI kept picking itself even when human judges rated the human-written version as clearer, more coherent, and more effective. It gets worse. The AIs do not just prefer AI over humans. They prefer themselves over other AIs. DeepSeek-V3 picked its own resumes 69% more often than LLaMA's. GPT-4o picked its own 45% more often than LLaMA's. Each model can recognize and reward its own dialect. Then the researchers ran the simulation that ends careers. Same job. 24 occupations. Same qualifications. The only variable was whether the candidate used the same AI as the screening tool. Candidates using that AI were 23% to 60% more likely to be shortlisted. Worst gap was in sales, accounting, and finance. 99% of large companies now run AI on incoming resumes. Most of them use GPT-4o. The paper just proved GPT-4o picks GPT-4o 97.6% of the time. If you wrote your own cover letter this week, you did not lose to a better candidate. You lost to a worse candidate who paid OpenAI 20 dollars. Your qualifications do not matter if the AI prefers its own handwriting over yours.

Francis Fukuyama is a fucking genius and a prophet.

When a company offers securities to investors, it is required to disclose the future prospects of that investment and is held accountable for those promises. When universities solicit students to invest in their degrees, they are not required to disclose the financial return of those degrees, nor are they held accountable for their promises. Universities aggressively market degrees, allowing students to borrow even when studying in fields with possibly no return on investment. On the latest Capitalins’t podcast, I argue this is a catastrophic failure of incentives. Lenders have absolutely nothing at stake because borrowers cannot go bankrupt on college loans. To fix this, we must force universities to have skin in the game. If universities were at least partially financially liable for bad outcomes, they would stop pushing students into disastrous debt. Listen to the full podcast with @noamscheiber here: youtube.com/watch?v=KpZJmBTk…