Hi, I'm Bhuvan

The human brain isn't built to process numbers about China:

Today China’s share of global export containers is over 36%, though the country represents around a fifth of world GDP. A foreign-business boss in China foresees a reckoning: “There will come a point in time when China and the world simply cannot absorb more Chinese goods, and I think that point is approaching.”

China’s overall trade surplus is on track to exceed $1 trillion this year, with record-setting shipments to Africa, Asia, Europe and Latin America. From Brasília to Berlin and Bangkok, politicians hear calls to protect established industries from Chinese competition.

Damn, I didn't know that the Chinese gig workforce was so huge:

Thanks in part to its early embrace of the “superapps” that organise many facets of people’s lives, China is home to the world’s most advanced gig economy. Today 84m people there rely on platform-based forms of employment, including ride-hailing drivers and food-delivery riders. As consumer apps have spread, this sort of work has become prevalent across emerging Asia, too. In India roughly 10m people work in the gig economy, on platforms and off. In Malaysia, it is 1.2m, roughly 7% of the labour force.

It's an upside-down world in the bond markets:

Analysts at BNP Paribas pointed out in a recent presentation that across global markets, bond yields for supposedly safe governments — the US, Germany and France in particular — are drifting higher, while sovereign borrowers long considered more risky, like Italy and Spain, are fixing their fiscal health and being rewarded by investors. Perceptions of safety are converging.

Welcome to the age of workslop:

In collaboration with Stanford Social Media Lab, our research team at BetterUp Labs has identified one possible reason: Employees are using AI tools to create low-effort, passable looking work that ends up creating more work for their coworkers. On social media, which is increasingly clogged with low-quality AI-generated posts,...

We've all seen images about the decline in the global fertility rate. Some have apocalyptic pronouncements about this, trend and predict the end of humanity, but I've never been convinced about the doom case. Surely this isn't the first time this has happened in human history, and yet here we are.

The reason why I am sharing these charts is because there were a couple of interesting articles in The Economist pouring cold water on the doomsday scenarios that vindicate my skepticism:

Another cause for optimism is that healthy human lifespans keep stretching, allowing people to stay productive for longer. In a 41-country sample, a 70-year-old in 2022 had the same cognitive abilities as a 53-year-old had in 2000. Perhaps such progress will end. But as long as it continues, it will slow the shrinkage of labour forces, giving societies crucial extra decades to adapt. Countries that waste human capital may find ways to waste less of it, by feeding and educating young minds better, and removing barriers to women working. In sum, a declining population need not mean a poorer one. Japan has been shrinking for nearly two decades, yet living standards have risen markedly.

The nationalists are right that the world’s make-up will change. Even the UN’s projection has China’s population collapsing by more than half by 2100. India will hold steady longer. Europe and America may postpone shrinkage via immigration—or they may choose not to. The future will be more African than the present, but there, too, fertility is plunging. Big, gradual geopolitical and cultural shifts are normal. The world has coped with them in the past, and can surely cope again. — Don’t panic about the global fertility crash

Though it's almost a near certainty that the global fertility rate will continue to fall as other populous regions like India and Africa experience faster declines, projections are sensitive to the underlying assumptions:

Alarming as...

Google DeepMind's Gemini and OpenAI achieved gold-medal-level performance at the 2025 International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) World Finals.

OpenAI's Mostafa Rohaninejad:

We officially competed in the onsite AI track of the ICPC, with the same 5-hour time limit to solve all twelve problems, submitting to the ICPC World Finals Local Judge - judged identically and concurrently to the ICPC World Championship submissions. We received the problems in the exact same PDF form, and the reasoning system selected which answers to submit with no bespoke test-time harness whatsoever. For 11 of the 12 problems, the system’s first answer was correct. For the hardest problem, it succeeded on the 9th submission. Notably, the best human team achieved 11/12.

From a post by Google DeepMind:

An advanced version of Gemini 2.5 Deep Think has achieved gold-medal level performance at the 2025 International Collegiate Programming Contest (ICPC) World Finals.

This milestone builds directly on Gemini 2.5 Deep Think's gold-medal win at the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO) just two months ago. Innovations from these efforts will continue to be integrated into future versions of Gemini Deep Think, expanding the frontier of advanced AI capabilities accessible to students and researchers.

Solving complex tasks at these competitions requires deep abstract reasoning, creativity, the ability to synthesize novel solutions to problems never seen before and a genuine spark of ingenuity.

Together, these breakthroughs in competitive programming and mathematical reasoning demonstrate Gemini’s profound leap in abstract problem-solving — marking a significant step on our path toward artificial general intelligence (AGI).

A tweet by Xinyu Zhou:

As a former competitive programmer, this gives me goosebumps and marks my Lee Sedol moment. Those days and nights spent grinding problems—starting in confusion and sweat, ending in excitement and a sense of accomplishment—can now be easily crushed by today’s language models. This is quite bittersweet, as I am now also cooking the very models that can beat humans in...