Leon Hu

Chinese in Michigan, Software Engineering in Healthcare Tech, Wolverine

[New York Basketball @NBA_NewYork]

Jalen Brunson "To all the students taking the Gaokao, don't be nervous…Good luck"

Josh Hart "This is your guys playoff moment, the Finals…relax…stay confident…and kill it"

Today 13 million Chinese high schoolers take the grueling all-important Gaokao college entrance exam🇨🇳

[Hunter Biden @HunterBiden]

Things most Americans agree on:

Groceries cost too much.

Tariffs suck and make no sense.

Congress and Presidents shouldn’t trade stocks.

The debt is a mess.

The border should be secure, but legal immigration is good.

Endless wars are stupid, especially ones that nobody wants and have never been explained.

Americans are exhausted.

AI is like my new best friend that also might be trying to take my job, my ability to think for myself, and my humanity in the process. Yo like I love you, but WTF, but I still love you.

Diversity is actually awesome! The opposite is boring AF.

Canadians are super fucking cool.

Mexicans are chill.

Putin isn’t a good guy looking out for America’s best interest. Rocky IV and Miracle are great movies.

Good neighbors are a blessing.

Freedom of religion and coexistence without having to blow each other up is probably a good idea.

We all question, are we alone in the universe?

We all fuck up along the way.

Epstein didn’t hang himself.

The Trumps and Epstein were best friends for decades. It’s like Bert trying to tell us Ernie was just an acquaintance in the same social scene on Sesame Street back in the day.

The Cowboys suck. Go Birds!

Things we’re told to fight about:

Me.
Laptop.
Vaccines.
Transgenders in sports.
Pronouns.

That’s the joke.

[Kevin S. Xu @kevinsxu]

Unitree Got Talent 😂

[Bojan Tunguz @tunguz]

Lake Michigan near Gary, Indiana.

[🇺🇦8964fella川粉迷惑行为bot @minowagin2952]

#川粉TV

[Leon Hu @leonhu07]

@Rei102rei 仔羊のもも肉のロースト

[Kevin S. Xu @kevinsxu]

Watching this video of Lex and Mike hitchhiking in the middle of nowhere China, getting picked up by a truck driver, then talking about life and manhood (watch til the end) makes me so happy

No matter how famous or ordinary, it's heartwarming to see humans being human

[sourcery @sourceryy]

.@mlevchin spent "zero minutes" introspecting on his failed companies:

"I kept going because I realized I liked the journey as much, if not more than the destination."

"The day my co-founders and I declared our first company dead, I found myself thinking, 'What will be the next one?'"

"I took exactly zero hours or minutes contemplating, 'Is this the right thing for me to do?'"

[Taisu Zhang @ZhangTaisu]

In the future, we might look back at the rise of cheap, weaponized drones as a watershed moment in human geopolitics: in both Ukraine and Iran, it may have given smaller countries a measure of real military deterrence that previously was only available to large nuclear powers…

[Rishabh Mukherjee @rishabhm]

I can share an interesting experience from last week. We have a person who is incharge of buying hardware, software and data sets. This might sound stupid but when you are buying 100s of servers, workstations and laptops a month, it's complicated. This dude used Claude to create an entire tracking and maintanence portal that inventoried everything. He even managed to integrate the portal with our monitoring software to display the status of every server vm. He then modified it to store invoices and so on. He's been at it for a couple of weeks and we've been able to identify wastage and needs.

Without Claude, this would have been a maze of spreadsheets and a lot of manual labor. But we wouldn't have hired a developer for this. To me, this kind of software is the killer use case for AI. Enough to simplify your life, but not enough to justify hiring someone or buying a product.

Is the code great? Is it scalable? Is it good software engineering? No, no and no. But that's besides the point.

[陈东成 @fncischen]

Didn’t know Shaobing can be popular in Los Angeles Skid Row lol

[Carl Worker @carlworker]

Wang Yi is very down to earth. During a visit to NZ a number of years back, it was my job to greet him at the airport and escort him to meet our foreign minister in central Auckland. He said he had not liked the look of the airline food, was hungry, and would like to stop for a hamburger (he was quite specific) on the way to town if there was somewhere handy. So we stopped at the Carl’s Jr. that used to be near the airport and Wang Yi and members of his delegation and I all enjoyed a burger before proceeding into town to meet the minister.

[张小珺 Xiaojun Zhang @zhang_benita]

This episode features an interview with Yao Shunyu @ShunyuYao14 , Research Scientist at Google DeepMind. Yao has held research scientist roles at both Anthropic and Google DeepMind, contributing to the development of key models including Claude 3.7, 4.5, and Gemini 3.

Yao Shunyu is not your typical nerd. Every now and then, he’ll catch you off guard with a flash of irreverence.

“None of the old guard are your relatives — so if you think someone’s being dumb, they’re just being dumb. Say it. No big deal.” (laughs)

“Everyone’s a surfer now, but what really matters is the wave — not the person riding it.”

“AI doesn’t actually require that much brainpower — I mean it genuinely doesn’t — most of this is work any undergrad could do. The most important quality in this industry is reliability: being meticulous, and taking responsibility for what you put out.”

“You don’t need to worry too much about ruffling feathers with your opinions. As long as your views are internally consistent — not just taking random shots at people, but grounded in your own genuine understanding — there are objective standards for how you’re doing in this field. People will respect you for it.”

Let us have a little fun with this one! 😄​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

https://t.co/q8AbJKA4Mx

[Taisu Zhang @ZhangTaisu]

Having spent the past few weeks in Beijing giving talks and attending meetings, here are some quick observations as I wait for my flight to NYC to board:

1. The talk of the town has, of course, been the Xi-Trump meeting, but no one (not even usually well informed elite circle insiders) seems to know what it actually accomplished, other than a continuation of the detente that’s been in place for the past several months. That’s about as good an outcome as one could realistically expect, I suppose, but clearly a real “grand bargain” is not in the cards anytime soon.

2. The Chinese economy seems to be in a steady state, neither improving much nor visibly deteriorating like it was in 24-25. In that sense the government’s stimulus policies have had a positive effect, but the vast majority of industry people I talked to remain very pessimistic about domestic profits and consumption. The dominant sentiment is that the only way for major firms to generate profit growth is through direct overseas expansion.

3. That said, technological advancement is of course very real and quite impressive (although it’s not quite as visible in Beijing as it is in, say, Shenzhen). One interesting and very pleasant side effect of the EV revolution (paired with infrastructure investment) has been that Beijing is now a bike-able city again, given the sharp reduction in exhaust fumes on city streets and the expansion of bike lanes. Armed with a new bike, I could almost explore the city like I used to back in 2000. Hugely nostalgic feeling.

4. Academia is, in general, in a pretty dour mood. STEM subjects and the social sciences/humanities alike have seen very significant funding reductions over the past 2 years, but the latter have of course gotten the worst end of the deal. Political censorship also seems to be visibly ramping up again, with the sheer scale of perceived “red lines” snowballing to levels unprecedented since the early 1990s. As the recent Yang Nianqun incident suggests, administrative regulation of faculty members’ personal affairs has also expanded (i.e., consensual extramarital relationships between adults who were not in a direct teacher-student relationship would almost certainly have gone unpunished as recently as 5 years ago).

5. In general, it’s hard not to notice the steady increase in government presence in everyday life—in both positive and negative ways. The city feels safer and cleaner than it ever has been, and yet the layers of administrative review needed for just about any kind of professional activity have clearly proliferated on a vast scale (made less painful by the digitization of most government services and more uniform law abidance, but still more onerous than it used to be despite all that).

6. The most alarming thing, I suppose, is that general optimism (personal or socioeconomic) seems to be in particularly short supply among the younger generations. This is obvious even among the most intellectually gifted kids at Tsinghua and PKU, where the level of career anxiety seems to be at a level that I have never encountered before. Unsurprisingly, willingness to form families or plan ahead in general at the personal level is very low.

All in all, it was, as always, a very informative couple of weeks. The stay was also made much more pleasant by the fact that I managed to do it before Beijing becomes brutally hot. I look forward to being back more often in the near future.

[Angelica 🌐⚛️🇹🇼🇨🇳🇺🇸 @AngelicaOung]

Trump practicing his speech before he speaks at the Beijing State Banquet. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Trump prepare for anything before. So serious! He wanted to do a good job!

[范凯说 AI | Kai on AI @fankaishuoai]

我的 AI 使用心法：三个凡是。

1、凡是需要重复的、可形成SOP的工作，都果断交给AI去做。
2、凡是自己不会的，都优先让AI来教。
3、凡是重大的、拿不准的事情，都找AI探讨。

[ian bremmer @ianbremmer]

the chinese played ymca for trump

[Yuchen Jin @Yuchenj_UW]

I’m so glad AI killed LeetCode interviews.

For 10 years, tech companies made every engineer grind the same puzzles and prove they could invert a binary tree from memory.

Today, the dumbest AI model can walk in and one-shot the entire interview.

Thank you, AI.

[Steve Hou @stevehou]

Jensen changed into a suit for China.