Quick notes: Myanmar corridor | Stealth fighter...

• After Pak, It's Bangladesh, Myanmar: China plans new corridor that runs roughly 1,700 km from Kunming to Myanmar's coast. This is China building Indian Ocean access on India's eastern flank, mirroring what CPEC and Gwadar do on the western flank via Pakistan. Beijing intends to extend the China-Myanmar Economic Corridor to Bangladesh as part of its larger Maritime Belt and Road Initiative to boost its Indian Ocean presence.



• China's Teesta Move: Why India should be very, very alarmed about China's Teesta move in Bangladesh. The firm involved in the project is PowerChina is also part of the strategic works with the People's Liberation Army. Pakistan, in the meanwhile, reportedly proposed a 'Joint Military Command' that comes alongside offers of 16-48 JF-17 Block III fighters - together with a simulator already delivered two months ago. That's the first piece of Pakistani military equipment to enter the country since 1971



• Hundreds vs Zero: If war were to break out between India and China tomorrow, one side could send hundreds of stealth fighter jets into battle, while the other may not be able to send even one. China may already have around 500 operational J-20 Mighty Dragon stealth fighters, its most advanced jet. Delhi's operational stealth fighter inventory today stands at exactly zero.



• Kaveri To J-20: How China Overtook India In A 40-Year-Old Race To Build Fighter Jets. China's early efforts were disastrous. Many countries would have cancelled the programme. But China doubled down.
  
  Between 2010 and 2020, Beijing invested approximately USD 42 billion under its "Two Engines" initiative, pouring unprecedented resources into superalloy metallurgy, manufacturing technologies, testing infrastructure, and specialised research institutes. Failures were treated not as embarrassments but as engineering data.



• The tables are turning: As Chinese Tech Pulls Ahead, U.S. Fears It Will Become Dependent. China could surpass the US in biopharmaceutical innovation within this decade. “For decades now, we’ve been used to a world where the technology and innovation comes out of the West”



• China takes supercomputer crown from US for first time since 2017: LineShine' beat the USA's El Capitan system and exceeded 2 exaflops for the first time.



• E20 Petrol Debate: 'No Politician Has The Guts'




• Security nightmare: Anthropic’s powerful Mythos AI reportedly breached ‘almost all’ NSA classified systems within a few hours during red-team test — report sheds more light on the U.S. government's sudden ban on the flagship models



• China Has Matched Anthropic in Cybersecurity, Resetting AI Race: Chinese cybersecurity company 360 Security Technology released a new bug-finding tool called Tulongfeng. The company said it was comparable to Mythos in finding bugs. Those capabilities have alarmed many national-security officials and CEOs.



• Top American AI execs sound alarm on Chinese models: Silicon Valley and Washington are debating a multibillion-dollar question: Should American companies be able to use Chinese artificial-intelligence models?
  
  Nvidia CEO: Jensen Huang argues American companies should be allowed to use Chinese AI models
  
  China narrows AI gap, challenges US influence . . .



• Open-weight GLM-5.2 AI model powered by Huawei silicon: Chinese Z.ai's latest model tops AI ranking charts amid Anthropic Fable 5 ban.

https://t.co/3DqSGxUDGR

— Vikram M (@Vvikramai) July 20, 2026




• CATL unveils Tener Sodium-Ion storage system: 15,000-cycle lifespan and 30-year durability. . . Battery breakthrough that smashes coal.



• Chinese juggernaut: Inside China’s race to overtake European supercars. Nissan CEO: China is setting the auto industry's 'future standards'

How did Chinese automakers expand their market share in Europe despite tariffs?https://t.co/HjpJ0D5835

— Nikkei Asia (@NikkeiAsia) July 5, 2026




• India's Ghost Projects: Empty Stations, Airports & Schools




• Strategic autonomy requires defence tech to leave foreign crutch: India remains heavily dependent on foreign suppliers for some of the most critical technologies. Part of the problem lies in a persistent misunderstanding of technology transfer.



• Every attempt was made to hide the loot: Ayodhya shows why keeping temples outside state control is not enough.

Ayodhya Shows Why Keeping Temples Outside State Control Is Not Enough https://t.co/4zjsyPhpYT

— Prasanna Viswanathan (@prasannavishy) June 23, 2026




• Drama over substance: Making an ass of Indian tech.

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei stated in a Bloomberg interview that the India AI Summit was "extremely disorganised".

About the chaos on stage: "There was Narendra Modi up there suddenly telling everyone to hold hands..." (collapses with laughter). pic.twitter.com/24lnmtCw17

— Amitabh Dubey (@dubeyamitabh) June 18, 2026




• Putin in trouble? Over 40% of refining capacity hit: Expert warns Russia could ‘disintegrate’ over fuel shortage. . . China's Great Betrayal? Has Russia's biggest energy gamble just collapsed?



• Low cost killing machines: “The average life expectancy of a Russian recruit right now arriving on the battlefield in Ukraine is estimated to be between 20 and 30 minutes”



• Raag Gaud Malhar: Sri. Aniruddh Aithal - gift to humanity

Quick notes: Ditching windows | Dr Kurt Tank...

• Digital sovereignty push: France is ditching Windows for Linux... when will India do this? Claude is there to make the process smooth.



• Dr Kurt Tank and the Marut program:




• “If we can’t build it, host a summit”: India's technological progress occurs primarily in keynote presentations

Watching India pitch itself as a “rule-setter” in AI is a reminder that geopolitics now includes a new category:
Countries whose technological progress occurs primarily in keynote presentations.

India doesn’t have an AI industry, but they have an AI narrative:
“If we can’t build… pic.twitter.com/XnhLmwu2yk

— 𝘊𝘰𝘳𝘳𝘪𝘯𝘦 (@OopsGuess) February 23, 2026




• R&D poor nation: The Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) proposed Rs 28,169 crore but received Rs 21,632 crore at the budget estimates stage — a reduction of nearly Rs 6,500 crore. The ministry proposed Rs 13,000 crore for the semiconductor programme but received Rs 8,000 crore at the budget estimates stage.



• A giant leap for our energy sector: India is now only the second country after Russia to operate a commercial-scale FBR. Parallel development of the third stage to leverage India’s vast thorium resources, a vision conceived by Dr Homi Bhabha.

16/

China has been trying to build a Fast Breeder Reactor for 20 years.

They've spent billions.
Bought Russian technology.
Hired foreign experts.

Their CFR-600 is still being commissioned.

India built theirs:
✅ Indigenously - no foreign reactor design
✅ With domestic…

— CA Vivek Khatri (@CaVivekkhatri) April 7, 2026




• Meta must face youth addiction lawsuit: "...designing a social media platform that capitalizes on the developmental vulnerabilities of children or by affirmatively misleading consumers about the safety of the Instagram platform" . . . . Yoga can reduce gaming addiction.



• Sweden goes back to basics, swapping screens for books in the classroom: Studies have linked heavy digital use to reduced comprehension and memory retention as well as eye strain. . . Sweden’s Education Recalibration



• Non whites are non Americans:

Trump’s lawyers can’t even say for sure if Native Americans are citizens by birth.

This administration is disgusting! pic.twitter.com/GT4iG8tvU2

— Ed Krassenstein (@EdKrassen) April 1, 2026




• Pakistan’s solar boom shielding it from worst of Iran war crisis: A quarter of Pakistani households are now using solar panels. This insulates millions of families from the energy supply crunch prompted by the US-Israel war on Iran.



• India no Vishwaguru: Acharya S.N. Goenka's interview

Quick notes: GaN technology | Xiaomi SU7...

• DRDO's GaN technology breakthrough: Denied access to compound chip technology by foreign powers, Indian scientists, operating in tandem from Delhi and Hyderabad, crack the code to make Gallium Nitride (GaN) monolithic microwave integrated circuits (MMICs).
  + How GaN is revolutionising key industries.
  
  
  India is no longer dependent on foreign powers for these high-value, cutting-edge chips. Instead, it broke into a select group of six nations—the US, France, Russia, Germany, South Korea and China. . . . . Defense as well as commercial applications!



• UK FTA was terrible. EU FTA is worse: India gives away market access for nothing. Once CBAM takes effect India will be immensely disadvantaged.

Major concession on Machinery/Electrical equipment. India already runs a $16 billion deficit with EU in it. 0% tariff means domestic mfg in this sector will likely never take off. One hopes that exports from labour intensive sectors go up enough to make up for it. https://t.co/Xl1ZozajOH

— Diva Jain (@DivaJain2) January 27, 2026




• WSJ: I test drove a Chinese EV. Now I don’t want to buy American cars anymore.
Marques Brownlee's negative reviews had bankrupted some automakers in the past.



• Ford CEO Jim Farley: Praises his Xiaomi SU7. 'I don't want to give it up'
  
  Honda CEO Toshihiro Mibe: "Chinese are ahead, even more than expected"



• Foolish NRIs: The overconfidence of the Indian settler in the pre-MAGA days led to excesses. Such as the 90-foot-tall statue of Lord Hanuman, dubbed by some over-clever NRIs who installed it, as the “Statue of Union” in Sugar Land, Texas.
  
  Besides being considered an eyesore by the enraged local Texans, it is a goad for the Christian Nationalists of the American south and southwest that make up the MAGA flock. So far they have restricted themselves to mocking the Monkey God, reviling Hindus as savages, Hinduism as satanic, and Hindu religious symbols as an affront to Christianity. Soon they may take a hammer to the statue, and run the Indians out of town.
  
  Two Indian jewelry stores raided in Texas



• Trump betrayed the Kurds?: Tell me something new.

Meet America’s 🇺🇸 newest allies in Syria, brought to you by @USAMBTurkiye.

The Kurds were betrayed for these Islamist barbarians.

Congrats. pic.twitter.com/uPUr4TCIB4

— Diliman Abdulkader (@D_abdulkader) January 25, 2026




• No headscarves in Kosovo's public school classrooms: Over 95% of the population of Kosovo is Muslim.



• Why are strokes rising among young adults?: Stroke deaths are climbing among people ages 25 to 34, even as overall cardiovascular deaths return to pre-COVID levels.



• The scientific case for ping-pong: Why athletes — and you — should play more table tennis



• How Ancient Is Indian Music? Dr. Raj Vedam on the history of Indian music

Quick notes: State capitalism | EnCharge AI...

• USA copying China? A generation ago conventional wisdom held that as China liberalized, its economy would come to resemble America’s. Instead, capitalism in America is starting to look like China - 'State capitalism with American characteristics' - a sea change from the free market ethos the U.S. once embodied. . . . Trump reviving crony capitalism.



• Reverse privatization: Trump says U.S. govt has gained 10% stake in Intel. . . Inside Intel’s tricky dance with Trump



• Consumers bearing the burden of tariffs: Walmart says tariff costs are rising 'each week' and will continue



• India pauses plans to buy U.S. arms after Trump's tariffs: Discussions on India's purchases of Stryker combat vehicles made by General Dynamics Land Systems and Javelin anti-tank missiles developed by Raytheon and Lockheed Martin have been paused due to the tariffs.



• Fistful Of Dollars: Rice for Vietnam farmers displaced for Trump Golf Club.



• Confine solar to rooftops and canals: India's largest solar energy project threatening Ladakh nomads and Pashmina wool.



• The Shipping Container That Might Replace Solar Farms: 0.59 acres per MW. As opposed to Solar PV's 0.97 acres per MW. . . . How a Stirling Engine works




• EnCharge AI: Princeton researcher Naveen Verma’s startup claims their chip tackles AI workloads with performance per watt up to 20 times better than competing chips.



• Power hungry toy: AI's soaring energy consumption is causing skyrocketing power bills for households across the US — States reporting spikes in energy costs of up to 36%



• Raja Koduri is back in the GPU business: Unveils new startup, Oxmiq Labs, bringing 500 Years of combined experience via world-class GPU & AI architects



• AI pervert: Meta AI chatbots gave false medical advice and flirted with minors — now the company is restructuring its AI division again - fourth restructuring in six months.



• Open-source in AI: Huawei is making its Ascend AI GPU software toolkit open-source to better compete against CUDA. . . Chinese censorship bias in LLMs



• Think beyond cars:

"Urbanism works when it creates a journey as desirable as the destination." pic.twitter.com/mnepPaP5cX

— 𝚃𝚊𝚛𝚊𝚜 𝙶𝚛𝚎𝚜𝚌𝚘𝚎 🚇 (@grescoe) August 30, 2022




• India's ethanol drive imperils its push for edible oil self-sufficiency: Depressing oilseed prices and prompting farmers to plant more corn and rice in place of soybeans and groundnuts



• Milk may not help the elderly: People who live in countries with the lowest rates of hip fractures also tend to drink the least milk. Drinking more milk was not associated with lower fracture risk  

Quick notes: Tariff pressure | Dr Chetan Nayak...

• US push for grand trade agreement with India The US is pushing India to negotiate a "large" and "grand" bilateral trade agreement while seeking opening the agriculture sector for American businesses, saying "it just can not stay closed".



• Hurting everyone else but sparing China: Donald Trump makes Chinese stocks (somewhat) great again.



• ‘Closest target’: Why is Trump targeting allies while sparing China?



• Dr Chetan Nayak: The man behind Microsoft’s decadeslong quest to build a quantum computer



• Sweatshop advocates: Mr. Amitabh Kant, Advocating an 80-90 Hour Week is Abetting Multiple Offences



• WIN-WIN!: Solar panels above waterways and farms... Gujarat innovation spreads world over!




• Nvidia, AMD, Broadcom and now Intel: Major US tech firms now have Chinese-descent individuals as their CEOs, shows how valuable China’s talent is for the tech industry.
  
  
• Astonishing, if true: China’s in-House EUV machines reportedly entering trial production in Q3 2025, utilizing an approach that offers a simpler, efficient design; SMIC & Huawei to benefit greatly
  
  
• Han juggernaut: Why a Chinese Gadget Company Can Make an Electric Car and Apple Can’t
  
  
• China Piles the Pressure on India in Its Own Backyard: China has also poured billions into 46 commercial ports across the region, 36 of which are capable of hosting naval assets



• 'India Has Missed Every Bus': "India has missed every bus; not just one. We don't know which bus is coming next. I know for sure it will miss that too. To imagine that by 2047, we will be better than the US or China is just living in a dream world".



• Shiv Kailash: Rishab Rikhiram Sharma

Quick notes: Lutyens properties | BYD in India...

• Inspired by Waqf board, KKKaangress to reclaim 'its' properties: “There are a large number of properties, including in Delhi, that belong to the pre-1969 Indian National Congress that were subject to legislation. There is now a Supreme Court judgment, which says that all the pre-1969 properties in which the Congress had operated from belong to the INC”.



• Chinese EVs in India?: BYD keen on India manufacturing despite Visa issues.... Xi wants EV dominance, NaMo wants shanti, sadbhavana. Match made in heaven! /s



• India's battery hope: Hindustan Zinc to revolutionize batteries, challenge Lithium dominance. "We are working with IITs on how to innovate with zinc for EVs".



• 15-Minute Meal Revolution: Quick Commerce Killing Restaurants?




• Tibet Dam Project: China could use it as "Water Bomb".



• War prep: Chinese university applies for undersea cable cutter patent — device developed by coastal university located across the sea from Taiwan



• Oh Dear, Did Someone Steal Something From OpenAI? OpenAI is investigating whether DeepSeek used its work to build its model—an ironic twist for a company that’s built plenty on, well, other people’s work
  
  
• Extreme optimization: How DeepSeek trained its AI model on a lot less. . . . DeepSeek's AI breakthrough bypasses industry-standard CUDA for some functions.
  
  
• Here come the AI lawsuits: LinkedIn accused of using private messages to train AI



• Semiconductors: First 'Made-in-India' chip to now roll out in 2025.



• Did Pannu threaten Trump yet? US Homeland Security agents visit gurdwaras to check for illegals. The Sikh American Legal Defence and Education Fund (SALDF) expressed grave concern over the directive rescinding the guidelines that designated “sensitive areas”, such as houses of worship.



• Chinese illegal immigrants in US: “Sixty thousand Chinese males, mostly military age, do not leave China without the coordination and approval of the Chinese government. This is a coordinated national security vulnerability that the Chinese government is involved in.”



• Solar Sheep: China's Unexpected Solar Power Success Story！




• Freebie Raj: "All over the world, subsidy and welfare is given to those who can't afford. Here, we have women from two rich cities like Bengaluru and Mysuru, traveling free just because it is available".

  I took an early morning bus to Mysuru, from Bengaluru. ₹210 fare. Comfortable KSRTC bus and a world class highway for fast travel.
  
  But I got a few thoughts.
  
  1) Nearly 30 of the 50 passengers were women. Just show Aadhar and travel free. Is this fair? Is it equality?
  2) 20… pic.twitter.com/2TfkzF88IA

  — Kiran Kumar S (@KiranKS) January 8, 2025

DeepSeek - new AI model from China

• Silicon Valley Is Raving About a Made-in-China AI Model: As of Saturday, DeepSeek models R1 and V3 were ranked in the top 10 on Chatbot Arena, a platform hosted by University of California, Berkeley, researchers that rates chatbot performance. A Google Gemini model was in the top spot, while DeepSeek bested Anthropic’s Claude and Grok from Elon Musk’s xAI.
  
  DeepSeek said training one of its latest models cost $5.6 million, compared with the $100 million to $1 billion range cited last year by Anthropic.



• How China’s new AI model DeepSeek is threatening U.S. dominance: “To see the DeepSeek new model, it’s super impressive in terms of both how they have really effectively done an open-source model that does this inference-time compute, and is super-compute efficient,” Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said at the World Economic Forum in Davos. “We should take the developments out of China very, very seriously.”
  
  DeepSeek also had to navigate the strict semiconductor restrictions that the U.S. govt has imposed on China, cutting the country off from access to the most powerful chips, like Nvidia’s H100s. The latest advancements suggest DeepSeek either found a way to work around the rules, or that the export controls were not the chokehold Washington intended.
  
  “They can take a really good, big model and use a process called distillation,” said Benchmark General Partner Chetan Puttagunta. “Basically you use a very large model to help your small model get smart at the thing you want it to get smart at. That’s actually very cost-efficient.”



• DeepSeek R1 Explained to your grandma:




• How small Chinese AI start-up DeepSeek shocked Silicon Valley: DeepSeek’s R1 release sparked a frenzied debate in Silicon Valley about whether better resourced US AI companies, including Meta and Anthropic, can defend their technical edge.
  
  Industry insiders say DeepSeek’s singular focus on research makes it a dangerous competitor because it is willing to share its breakthroughs rather than protect them for commercial gains. DeepSeek has not raised money from outside funds or made significant moves to monetise its models.
  
  DeepSeek claimed it used just 2,048 Nvidia H800s and $5.6mn to train a model with 671bn parameters, a fraction of what OpenAI and Google spent to train comparably sized models.
  
  Ritwik Gupta, AI policy researcher at the University of California, Berkeley, said DeepSeek’s recent model releases demonstrate that “there is no moat when it comes to AI capabilities”. “The first person to train models has to expend lots of resources to get there,” he said. “But the second mover can get there cheaper and more quickly.”
  
  Gupta added that China had a much larger talent pool of systems engineers than the US who understand how to get the best use of computing resources to train and run models more cheaply.



• Twist in the tale: Nvidia Stock May Fall As DeepSeek’s ‘Amazing’ AI Model Disrupts OpenAI.. America’s policy of restricting Chinese access to Nvidia’s most advanced AI chips has unintentionally helped a Chinese AI developer leapfrog U.S. rivals who have full access to the company’s latest chips. This proves a basic reason why startups are often more successful than large companies: Scarcity spawns innovation.



• The Empire Strikes Back: China Prepares One Trillion Yuan AI Plan to Rival $500 Billion US Stargate Project.

Quick notes: Slowing AI development | Falling fertility...

• Google CEO: AI development is finally slowing down—'the low-hanging fruit is gone’



• India's crisis in Engineering and management studies: Manufacturing sector has struggled to grow due to increased dependence on imports from China. On the other hand, the service-sector firms are either solving last-mile delivery problems or offering basic services -- sectors that don’t really need higher-order engineering and management capability.



• BikAss ain't working: Why 7 crore new farmers in the last 7 years is bad news: The increase of people taking up farming in the last seven years is the highest in some of India’s poorest states, with usual suspect Uttar Pradesh leading from the front, along with compatriots Madhya Pradesh and Bihar.



• Mohan Bhagwat on falling fertility rate: 'Population below replacement rate risks extinction,' says RSS chief.
  
  
• Naidu & Stalin's push for more babies in AP & TN: A new population crisis with global implications



• Why most Indians choking on smog aren’t in Delhi: According to Swiss firm IQAir, eight of the 10 most polluted cities in the world last year were located in the Indo-Gangetic plains. Delhi receives significant attention due to its position as the capital of India



• Green Great Wall: China completes 3,000-km green belt around its biggest desert - 46-year campaign to encircle its largest desert with trees, part of national efforts to end desertification and curb the sandstorms that plague parts of the country during the spring



• Salmon back in Klamath river: After 100 years, salmon have returned to the Klamath River – following a historic dam removal project in California. "Seeing the videos of the salmon returning home brought me to tears of happiness and relief".



• Hans eating EU alive: German manufacturers warn of the sector's 'formidable crash'
  
  
• Chinese Carmakers Are Trouncing Once-Unbeatable Japanese Rivals: Foreign carmakers used to make combined net profit of $21b on average every year in China, but this fell by one-third in 2023 and then halved again in the first six months
  
  
• Significant edge in air combat: China’s 99% efficient afterburner tech could make it ‘unrivaled in air combat’



• Banning kids from social media: What countries do to regulate children's social media access




• Non-Christians be damned: Texas education board approves optional Bible-infused curriculum for elementary schools

Quick notes: FTA | Pedestrian hell...

• Free-Trade-Agreements never benefited us: India-UK FTA negotiations to restart in early 2025
  
  
• India should not be pushed into joining trade blocs: It must assess existing FTAs, and should build a larger team of expert negotiators



• Trump unpredictable, Modi dependable? On trade, it’s just the opposite.




• Stranglehold on market, breach of Antitrust Laws: Zomato and Swiggy coerced restaurants into entering exclusive agreements that would deny them space to shift elsewhere if they wanted to join competing platforms.



• China is bombarding tech talent with job offers: And the West is freaking out. Chinese companies are trying to poach engineers in high-tech Western industries by offering to triple their salaries as Beijing seeks to catch up with Silicon Valley in the battle for tech supremacy.
  
  Executives at Zeiss SMT, which makes indispensable components to build the world’s most powerful semiconductors, got some troubling news last fall. Staff with access to sensitive Zeiss know-how received LinkedIn messages, emails and calls from Huawei representatives, offering them up to three times their salaries to join the Chinese company.
  
  
• Huawei trying to poach TSMC employees with 3X salary: Desperate times call for desperate measures
  
  
• China's CATL open to building US battery plant if Trump allows: In an August interview Trump was open to Chinese firms building cars in the US
  
  
• CATL electric bus batteries set for 1M miles, megawatt charging: New-gen LFP bus batteries last 15 years, CATL claims—20% longer. CATL claims a 22% boost in energy density by volume, and 175 Wh/kg by weight



• Anywhere but India: Chip makers expand in Vietnam — companies move to Southeast Asia as US-China tensions simmer



• Why it is so difficult to walk in Indian cities: The main problem is that too much focus is given to solving the problem of car congestion on roads. "To improve the flow of traffic, authorities often narrow down footpaths or eliminate them entirely. It might seem counter-intuitive, but allowing the congestion to persist and focussing on improving infrastructure for pedestrians will help solve the traffic problem in the long run". Cities can also implement their own Non-Motorised Transport Policy (NMTP) to create better infrastructure for cyclists and pedestrians.



• The families fleeing Delhi to escape deadly smog... Also fighting "walking pneumonia" cases this season.... Why and what will fix it.... Why Indian capital lags behind Beijing in the battle to breathe..




• ED raids e-commerce sellers linked to Amazon, Flipkart: The livelihoods of small shopkeepers are at stake due to anti-competitive practices, particularly from quick-commerce companies.



• Australia approves social media ban on under-16s.. lessons for India.

Big Tech is now seen as predatory in Silicon Valley

the Dem - Big Tech nexus is not delivering for the people. several I know have moved out. from the San Jose Mercury News. 

Quick notes: Predatory MNCs | Thorium solved...

• E-commerce MNCs a threat to India: Amazon not doing India a favour by investing billions of dollars: Piyush Goyal.... “If you made ₹6,000 crore loss in one year, does that not smell of predatory pricing to any of you? Where did that loss come from?” The role of e-commerce in the Indian economy needs to be carefully evaluated and made citizen-centric to ensure there is no social disruption that may affect about 100 million small retailers across the country, the Minister said.




• Waqf through the ages: How Rs 1-lakh crore property owner board acquires land... Entire village's land snatched away overnight, shocking reality of Thiruchendurai



• Time To Shut Down Coaching Classes? Nobody wants to learn from the Chinese, but see how Xi Jinping addressed it in 2021. He demolished his entire tuition and coaching industry overnight. Reasons given: It was straining the finances of families, causing inequality, wasting families' time and taking young people away from more fun things. Everything, including coaching centres for China's famed UPSC equivalent, Gaokao, was banned. There was to be no tutoring for profit, no IPO listings, no share sales, limits on online learning, no mergers, acquisitions, foreign collaborations. End of story.



• Thorium solved?: China to launch world’s first thorium molten salt power station<. Moving away from the water cooling model, this design significantly reduces the chances of meltdowns. Further, thorium reactors generatw less toxic and short-lived radioactive waste than uranium-fueled ones, thereby easing long-term disposal. They offer several potential advantages over traditional uranium reactors, including increased safety, reduced waste and improved fuel efficiency.... Thorium MSRs are a type of advanced nuclear technology that use liquid fuels, typically molten salts, as both a fuel and a coolant.




• AI's insatiable energy demand: Amazon's purchase of a data center campus adjacent to a nuclear power facility speaks to a broader issue that Amazon and other tech giants are grappling with: the insatiable demand for energy from AI... not just power, AI is guzzling water too.



• Beijing increases its influence in Nepal: Tibetans in Nepal not free to celebrate Dalai Lama's birthday.



• Foxconn: Southern states look to outfox each other in hunt for a Foxconn ‘city’... 1. Land is all our politicans can think of. 2. And why no Hindi state or BJP ruled state in this race?



• Environmental concerns persist as Amaravati 'world city' rises: “Amaravati is likely to be an environmental disaster in making. There are a series of environmental issues involved, revolving around forests, water bodies, wetlands, floodplains and the riverbed. It is a flood-prone area. Flood mitigation measures are going to be expensive”.... Rains turn Vijayawada into a lake.

Quick Notes: Tech jobs | Hockey legend...

• AI Is Coming for India’s Famous Tech Hub: AI might accelerate trends that have already made the industry less labor-intensive. About a decade ago, companies needed about 27 employees to earn $1 million in annual revenue. That number has now fallen to 21 employees ..The industry added 60,000 jobs in the year ended in March, the lowest annual increase in more than a decade.



• China Expert: “India must copy this from China to stay ahead!” Manoj Kewalramani -- MUST WATCH!




• China's explosive rise in EVs: How BYD, Nio and other Chinese EVs compare to Tesla



• Loitering munitions: India Unveils Lethal 'Swadeshi' Kamikaze Drones With 1,000 Km Range. . . Ukraine war fuels rise of killer AI robots



• Japan's chipmaking revival? Rapidus to use AI and robots to automate back end chipmaking processes.. claims automation can slash delivery times by 66% versus TSMC and Samsung.



• The Wall of India - PR Sreejesh: The hockey legend who stood tall in cricket-mad India . . . A traditional Kerala meal for Sreejesh



• More white elephants? "India's dream to host Olympics 2036, we are preparing"... Is it to foster sporting culture, or to leverage national pride that borders on jingoism?.... Hosting Olympics is NOT a great investment:




• The world is but a show, glittering and empty. It is, and yet is not. It is there as long as I want to see it and take part in it. When I cease caring, it dissolves, It has no cause and serves no purpose. It just happens when we are absent-minded. It appears exactly as it looks, but there is no depth in it, nor meaning. Only the onlooker is real, call him Self or Atma. To the Self the world is but a colourful show, which he enjoys as long as it lasts and forgets when it is over. Whatever happens on the stage makes him shudder in terror or roll with laughter, yet all the time he is aware that it is but a show. Without desire or fear he enjoys it, as it happens.
  I am a dream that can wake you up.

Quick notes: Death by landslides | Power-hungry AI...

• Man-made catastrophe: Man-made Church-made disaster. 62 per cent of the green cover in Wayanad district disappeared between 1950 and 2018 while plantation cover rose by around 1,800 per cent. Around 85 per cent of the total area of Wayanad was under forest cover until the 1950s.



• Cardinal sin: Church organized agitations against restricting commercial activities in ecologically sensitive areas.

The truth is - The only voice that came out in support of Western Ghats was the RSS
The Kerala govt (be it Left or Congress) + Church vehemently opposed any recommendations to protect Western Ghats https://t.co/oTP0FzDnCs

— Viva Kermani🇮🇳🇮🇱 (@vivakermani) July 31, 2024




• Over-Tourism: Wayanad received more than 1 million domestic and foreign tourists last year, nearly triple the number in 2011 when a federal govt report warned against over-development. Kerala has witnessed nearly 60% of the landslides in India between 2015 and 2022 . . . . Experts panel locates 70,582 buildings in buffer zones; most number of structures in Wayanad



• Scientists May Have Discovered the Cause of Autism: Researchers investigated the link between polyunsaturated fatty acids (PUFA) in umbilical cord blood samples and autism scores in 200 children. The study identified one particular compound in the umbilical cord blood acid, called diHETrE, that may have "strong implications" for ASD severity.



• "Muscular Nationalism": India-China military tensions persist even as their trade surges. India’s exports to China stood at $16 billion last year while imports were more than $100 billion.



• Why the Internet Is Running Out of Electricity: The massive power draw of Generative AI is overtaxing our grid.




• “Where” will the Energy for AI come from?: Google reveals 48% increase in greenhouse gas emissions from 2019, largely driven by data center energy demands.



• Generative AI patents: China beat the U.S. in generative AI patents by 6-to-1 for the past ten years — almost 10,000 Chinese patents filed last year alone



• AI superpower: Chinese AI built off open-source code matches American tech in chatbot benchmark tests.



• Google pulls Gemini AI ad from Olympics after backlash: "Why would anyone want to replace a child’s creativity and authentic expression with words written by a computer?"



• Vidushi Sangeeta Katti Kulkarni: Enna Paliso | Kannada Devotional

Quick notes: Bubble territory | Domestic chips...

• Indian stocks: Squirreling away a portion of one’s income for a rainy day would typically be considered prudent behavior. Yet, in India, it’s helping make stocks overvalued.
  
  Systematic Investment Plans (SIPs) were introduced to help investors periodically put aside money in a disciplined manner. SIPs deduct cash every month from an investor’s bank account and invest the proceeds into selected mutual funds. As more money is directed toward these funds monthly, the portfolio managers are forced to buy stocks even when their valuations might not be as attractive.
  
  For instance, of the nearly 4,900 actively traded India-listed stocks, 300 stocks had a fall in revenue in the last two consecutive financial years. Yet, 216 of these stocks rose over the past 12 months. In fact, small-cap companies such as food packaging carton manufacturer Rollatainers and Tantia Constructions, an infrastructure company, have had three years of falling growth. Yet, their stock has risen more than 300% over the past 12 months.
  
  India records worst FII selloff among emerging markets in May



• Chip news:
  14-nanometer: Tata Electronics prepares ground for high-end chips
  
  Zoho into chips? India's Zoho plans $700 million foray into chipmaking
  
  Rising star: Alibaba's Yitian 710 is the fastest Arm-based CPU for cloud servers, study claims
  
  Moore Threads: Chinese AI GPUs used for three billion parameter LLM training
  
  Tech independence: Chinese govt pushes Huawei's HarmonyOS hard, sets adoption targets to beat Windows, Android, and iOS
  
  Defying sanctions: Blacklisted China chipmaker SMIC becomes the world's second-largest pure-play foundry by revenue.
  
  Decoupling: Huawei brings sanctions-busting Kirin 9000C CPU to desktop PCs to replace banned Intel Alder Lake chips



• Stranglehold on clean energy: China already makes as many batteries as the entire world wants




• No juice for EVs: Amid growing demand, America is running out of power.



• Energy transition: Coal share in India’s electricity mix drops below 50% for the first time since 1966



• Cow dung's key role in India's energy industry: Asia's biggest compressed biogas plant is in Lehragaga, Punjab. It can turn 300 tonnes of paddy straw into 33 tonnes of biogas every day.



• Begum Parveen Sultana: Raag Puriya Dhanashree




• Vegetarians, watch this: The Science of Vitamin B12



• Feeling hot, hot, hot? How India's cities can keep the mercury at bay



• Protein Supplements: Top medical body's advisory urges people to avoid protein supplements



• AI tramples on copyrights: Eight newspaper publishers sue Microsoft and OpenAI over copyright infringement. “The current GPT-4 LLM will output near-verbatim copies of significant portions of the publishers’ works when prompted to do so,”

Quick notes: Billionaire Raj | BYD Seagull...

• Billionaire Raj: India's richest 1% earn 22.6% of total income — the highest share since data going back to the 1920s — and hold more than 40% of the wealth.
  
  The inequality gap widened after the economy’s opening up in the early 1990s, but “between 2014-15 and 2022-23, the rise of top-end inequality has been particularly pronounced in terms of wealth concentration”. “The ‘Billionaire Raj’ headed by India’s modern bourgeoisie is now more unequal than the British Raj headed by the colonialist forces”.



• “Extinction-level event for the U.S. auto sector”: Why a small China-made EV has global auto execs and politicians on edge.
  
  The China-built BYD Seagull, a small all-electric hatchback, starts at less than $10,000, and reportedly banks a profit for the Chinese automaker. That latter point — EV profits where U.S. automakers have mostly failed to turn any — combined with the expansion of Chinese automakers into Europe, Latin America and elsewhere has automotive executives and politicians, from Detroit and Texas to Germany and Japan, on edge.
  
  The rise of BYD and other Chinese automakers led Tesla CEO Elon Musk to warn that Chinese automakers will “demolish” global rivals without trade barriers.





• In One Key A.I. Metric, China Pulls Ahead of the U.S.: Talent: When it comes to the artificial intelligence that powers chatbots like ChatGPT, China lags behind the United States. But when it comes to producing the scientists behind a new generation of humanoid technologies, China is pulling ahead.
  
  New research shows that China has by some metrics eclipsed the United States as the biggest producer of A.I. talent, with the country generating almost half the world’s top A.I. researchers.



• Unlike India's toy design: Alibaba claims it will launch a server-grade RISC-V processor this year



• Domestic chips and operating system: China to pivot from AMD & Intel CPUs to domestic chips in government PCs. The transition to domestic processors will advance more swiftly for server processors than for client PCs, due to the less complex software ecosystem needing replacement. China will need to invest approximately $91 billion from 2023 to 2027 to overhaul the IT infrastructure in government and adjascent industries.



• Solar cooking - From sun to plate: Despite its advantages, solar cooking has some limitations, such as longer cooking time and the need to cook outdoors in the sun.
  
  To overcome these challenges, Saswat Sourav Panda, a resident of Puri, Odisha, integrated three solar-based cooking systems at his house for different cooking processes. A solar box cooking system is used for slow cooking, a parabolic concentrator for heavy cooking and a solar glass tube-based system for cooking even without sunlight.
  
  With a total investment of Rs. 31,000, Panda reduced his annual consumption of gas cylinders from twelve to four. “Once I started to appreciate the enhanced natural taste due to slow cooking in solar, we switched entirely”.