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Rae said he was an early fan of VAR.

Californians should be able to agree that convicted sex offenders should not be allowed to hold public office.

Whether James views Golden State as the right way to finish — or merely another flattering option —remains entirely up to him.

The California Highway Patrol (CHP) busted Kevin Michael Silva last Monday after he allegedly tried to fake being a sheriff's deputy while drunk driving.

University Of California Suspends Move To Restore Standardized Testing

Authored by Jonathan Turley,

A University of California advisory board suspended the much-celebrated planned review of the system’s admissions policies to bring back standardized testing requirements for undergraduate applicants. The decision of the academic senate’s Board of Admissions and Relations with Schools is not surprising to many of us who have been critical of the system in abandoning objective standards for admissions.

Ahmet Palazoglu, chair of the system’s academic senate, confirmed that the faculty group was ”revising its timeline” for ”a comprehensive review of standardized testing in admissions.”

As various schools reversed the disastrous abandonment of standardized testing, the California system continues to slow-walk the process. Many of the advocates of abandoning standardized testing to advance diversity in admissions are relatively silent in the face of falling academic standards. However, there was still a successful effort behind the scenes to delay any restoration.

As I have previously written, the University of California system was an early supporter of this disastrous move. It was heralded as a way to preserve diversity after voters in California repeatedly rejected race-based admissions and the Supreme Court appeared ready to bar such practices (commonly proven with reference to standardized test differentials among applicants).

Now, many professors in the California system have come to the same conclusion as some of us who denounced the move years ago. They have witnessed the drop in academic skills and abilities among incoming students.

The value of standardized testing was well established years ago. The claim that additional time is needed to contemplate the change is consistent with the university’s prior record. It previously studied the question and then ignored the findings to end the use of standardized testing.

These tests not only have the greatest predictive power for performance but also play an important role in advancing minority students. Former University of California President Janet Napolitano, however, overrode those conclusions.

Napolitano responded to such criticism with a Standardized Testing Task Force in 2019. Many people expected the task force to recommend the cessation of standardized testing. The task force did find that 59 percent of high school graduates were Latino, African-American, or Native American, but only 37 percent were admitted as UC freshman students. The Task Force did not find standardized testing to be unreliable or call for its abandonment, however.

Instead, its final report concluded that “At UC, test scores are currently better predictors of first-year GPA than high school grade point average (HSGPA), and about as good at predicting first-year retention, [University] GPA, and graduation.”

Not only that, it found: “Further, the amount of variance in student outcomes explained by test scores has increased since 2007 … Test scores are predictive for all demographic groups and disciplines … In fact, test scores are better predictors of success for students who are Underrepresented Minority Students (URMs), who are first generation, or whose families are low-income.”

In other words, test scores remain the best indicator for continued performance in college.

That clearly was not the result Napolitano or some others wanted. So, she simply announced a cessation of the use of such scores in admissions.

The system would go to a “test-blind” system until it developed its own test.

Ending standardized testing had an obvious secondary purpose: to frustrate new legal challenges to the use of race in college admissions.

We have also seen the dismal decline in standards at elite universities like Harvard, where faculty have been compelled to teach high school-level math classes to students.

Various schools have now reversed this ridiculous move pushed by faculty and administrators in the cause of racial diversity. The proponents of the change, such as Napolitano, have said little after they decimated the academic integrity and standing of their schools.

The UC faculty cited the UC San Diego Senate–Administration Workgroup on Admissions report, which found that 70 percent of these students are performing below a middle-school level.

Like Harvard, faculty are now teaching high-school-level math.

The trust of the new push to restore standardized testing has focused on STEM subjects. In a June 5 open letter, STEM faculty raised the alarm that UC has regularly admitted students who cannot complete college-level coursework.

UC Board Chair Maria Anguiano insisted that they just needed more time before reintroducing testing that it required by the vast majority of schools:  “The goal of this review is not to rehash old questions or data but an opportunity to take a fresh look at how we define and evaluate college readiness in a rapidly changing world.”

For many critics, this comes off as a state academic system contemplating its collective navel as academic standards plummet. Neither the public nor many of the faculty want to continue on the terrible course taken under Napolitano. However, even on this easy and straightforward question, the faculty is dragging its feet to study the matter further — after previously disregarding the results of a study supporting standardized testing.

Tyler Durden Wed, 07/15/2026 - 20:05

Athletes and celebs hit the red carpet to celebrate sports excellence.

Athletes and celebs hit the red carpet to celebrate sports excellence.

Drunk wrong-way driver Hernan Marrero, 50, who killed Massachusetts state trooper Kevin Trainor, 30, in a head-on crash, was served 9 alcoholic drinks at Tribu before the fatal crash.

George Santos has worn many hats: Swindler, congressman, prison inmate, podcast host. The obvious next gig? Reality TV show contestant.

Las Vegas Raiders edge rusher Maxx Crosby didn’t mince words when he shared his opinion on the Los Angeles Chargers and their fans. Crosby recently appeared on a Kick livestream with internet personality N3on where the Raiders star gave viewers a tour of his multi-million dollar property and discussed competing against division rivals in the...

Ending those stops, Trump wrote, would be “playing right into the criminal’s hands.”

Loved ones of a Northern California deadly boat accident continue to hold out hope as the search for three missing people in San Francisco's Bay nears the end.

Indian Companies Increasingly Turn To Chinese LLMs Due To "Unsustainable" US Token Bills

Several weeks ago we laid out the increasingly attractive proposition for global enterprises that are Chinese LLM: 95% of the latest US frontier model capabilities and 10% of the cost. Why pay the premium, when one way or another someone will steal your IP, be it Dario Amodei or Beijing? India, it appears, agrees. 

According to the NIkkei, Indian companies are increasingly leaning on Chinese large language models - developed by DeepSeek, Alibaba and Moonshot AI (the same LLMs which we said recently are poised to overtake US models as the best "value proposition", and profiled here) - to contain their artificial intelligence spends, in the process extending India's reliance on China for cutting-edge technologies despite a long history of standoffs between the neighbors.

A schematic of China's AI/Hyperscaler ecosystem is shown below (excerpted from here).

Puneet Kumar, CEO at Mirae Asset Venture Investments India, said that several consumer technology startups that he has met since mid-2025 use such Chinese open-weight LLMs -- those that rely on publicly accessible parameters -- which help drive down costs by an "order of magnitude."

Because these parameters are publicly available, users can download and modify them on their own computers, in contrast to the proprietary offerings by US frontier labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic. The Chinese open-weight LLMs can be accessed in India through service providers such as Microsoft at a fraction of the price of their American counterparts, thanks to their low cost of development. And thanks to reverse engineering distillation, Chinese models have almost caught up with US frontier models in terms of capabilities.

Source: UBS

"The US models are expensive, and for a lot of basic things, you don't need them," Gupta said. "It's overkill, like trying to drive a sports car on a crowded city road."

For the DeepSeek models that Microsoft makes available in southern India through its Foundry platform, charges range between 19 cents and $1.74 per million input tokens, while the price per 1 million output tokens varies from 51 cents to $5.40. Input costs for Moonshot's Kimi go up to 95 cents and output costs up to $4.

In comparison, input costs for OpenAI's GPT 5.5 series range from $5 to $12 per million input tokens, while output costs hover between $30 and $54.

The adoption of Chinese LLMs comes at a time when the likes of OpenAI and Anthropic are opening offices and expanding their offerings in the South Asian nation. Both OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei showed up at the India AI Summit earlier this year, underscoring the importance of India as a market, thanks to its large number of programmers, who have emerged as by far the most active users of AI. Anthropic has bagged Tata Group-owned airline Air India, software maker Cognizant and payment processor Razorpay as customers, while OpenAI counts India's largest software maker, Tata Consultancy Services, as a client. However, unless their token costs crater, the companies can spend billions on marketing and still nobody will use them. 

The cost pressures driving the soaring popularity of Chinese LLMs in India are mirrored globally, with major companies including Tesla, Amazon, Uber and Walmart capping AI usage to arrest soaring technology spends as focus shifts from indiscriminate usage, called tokenmaxxing, to return on investment. Chinese LLMs are emerging as winners with aggressive pricing, with their usage more than doubling to 25 trillion tokens in the final week of June from the end of May, according to Open Router, a marketplace for AI models. That was 78% more than U.S. models, a sharp reversal in fortunes from the start of the year, when usage was less than half that of their American counterparts.

Companies like Coinbase, DoorDash and Airbnb have publicly said that they have begun using Chinese models.

Vidya Madhavan, founder of Elevation Capital-backed dating app Schmooze, said that possibilities of "substantial" savings, coupled with wider uptake of open-weight LLMs globally and their ability to deliver a satisfactory performance in comparison with their American peers, encouraged her to deploy Alibaba's Qwen models after some initial hesitation. 

"Our approach has been to use solutions from Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, ElevenLabs, etc., to start with, so that we have a sense of what great looks like, and then use a combination of open source plus our tuning to achieve the same outcome and save money wherever applicable," she said.

Apple, which today won approval to use Qwen on its devices in China, clearly agrees. 

Nikhil Narendran, a partner at law firm Trilegal, sees startups and developers as early adopters in India, though larger firms are also deliberating over the deployment of Chinese LLMs.

"The token bills are a serious issue -- it is increasingly becoming unsustainable," he said.

Adding to the appeal of open-weight LLMs is that, by virtue of being locally hosted, data stays in India, Narendran said, although "there might be unverified deployment artifacts such as malware or trojans, which is a concern."

"Unless the token-intensive nature of the US frontier AI models changes, the Chinese are likely to take a significant lead over the Americans," he said. "Since it's mainly the trust factor that goes against them, I am sure Chinese developers understand that risk, and hence are likely to be extra careful."

The incursion of Chinese models into India is raising questions about the South Asian nation's ambitions around AI sovereignty, even as companies such as Sarvam and Gnani build LLMs in Indic languages.

In 2024, India earmarked about 104 billion rupees (about $1.1 billion at current exchange rates) for the technology over a five-year period, but this pales in comparison to China's public investments "running into tens of billions of dollars annually," estimates research firm Bernstein. Moreover, disbursals have been patchy, with actual spending in the fiscal year ending March 2025 totaling 190 million rupees, against an allocation of 5.52 billion rupees, while expenditure for the following fiscal year stood at 3.79 billion rupees, versus an allocation of 20 billion rupees. Government officials have said that disbursals will increase in sync with use of graphics processing units, which have taken time to procure but are crucial to developing AI models.

The risk of being cut off from foreign AI models amid a fragile geopolitical situation has increased the pressure on India to develop its own capabilities. Washington has already prevented Anthropic from giving foreign entities access to its latest models, Fable and Mythos, though the restrictions were lifted late last month. In addition, Reuters reported earlier this week that Beijing is now considering restricting overseas access to advanced Chinese AI models.

Analysts warned that India's dependence on China -- which is also evident in other advanced technologies like electric vehicles and lithium-ion cells -- is risky, given the two nations' recent history of tensions, particularly over a territorial dispute in the Himalayas. In 2020, New Delhi tightened restrictions on Chinese investments after an outbreak of fighting there, although these were eased in March this year.

Sameer Patil, director at the Centre for Security, Strategy and Technology at the Observer Research Foundation think tank, said India's ambitions with sovereign LLMs are restricted to domestic usage, unlike the U.S. and China, which are eyeing global dominance.

"Deepening the dependence on the foreign tech, whether American or Chinese, is a concern because access can be shut down overnight and you will be left in the lurch," Patil said. "Therefore, we have to develop that kind of resilience."

Tyler Durden Wed, 07/15/2026 - 19:40

Don’t plan on Willson Contreras leaving Boston anytime soon. 

Deputies and firefighters with the Big Bear Fire Department descended the hillside to reach her, finding her at the bottom of the embankment.

Not all heroes wear capes, some carry tiny oxygen masks for pigeons.

California’s racialist revolutionaries seem incapable of grasping a simple truth: These policies failed in South Africa, and they will fail in California, too. 

The last time the Mets played games that seemed to matter, even a smidge, was in Philadelphia on Father’s Day weekend.

A statue of Charlie Kirk is set to be unveiled in the “center of the universe” in New York City on the one-year anniversary of his shocking death, the artist behind the homage announced.

New York City sees other deadly accidents all the time — without prompting a rush to outright ban cars, construction work or e-bikes.