Still, we do our best.
You can find the fourth quarter of 2025 at:
Thursday, January 1, 2026
Reading the Blog: 4th Quarter 2025
Putting the Old Year Behind Us
The Passing of the Year - Robert W. Service
Or direct to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GuhqvxbJc4o.
Straws in the Wind - Part 209
From the LA Times: A Stanford software engineering degree used to be a golden ticket. Artificial intelligence has devalued it to bronze, recent graduates say. The elite students are shocked by the lack of job offers as they finish studies at what is often ranked as the top university in America. When they were freshmen, ChatGPT hadn’t yet been released upon the world. Today, AI can code better than most humans. Top tech companies just don’t need as many fresh graduates.
...Stanford students describe a suddenly skewed job market, where just a small slice of graduates — those considered “cracked engineers” who already have thick resumes building products and doing research — are getting the few good jobs, leaving everyone else to fight for scraps... The shake-up is being felt across California colleges, including UC Berkeley, USC and others. The job search has been even tougher for those with less prestigious degrees.
...The engineers’ most significant competitor is getting stronger by the day. When ChatGPT launched in 2022, it could only code for 30 seconds at a time. Today’s AI agents can code for hours, and do basic programming faster with fewer mistakes.
Data suggests that even though AI startups like OpenAI and Anthropic are hiring many people, it is not offsetting the decline in hiring elsewhere. Employment for specific groups, such as early-career software developers between the ages of 22 and 25 has declined by nearly 20% from its peak in late 2022, according to a Stanford study. It wasn’t just software engineers, but also customer service and accounting jobs that were highly exposed to competition from AI. The Stanford study estimated that entry-level hiring for AI-exposed jobs declined 13% relative to less-exposed jobs such as nursing...
Full story at https://www.latimes.com/business/story/2025-12-19/they-graduated-from-stanford-due-to-ai-they-cant-find-job.
Will Harvard Continue to Lead the Charge? - Part 105
From the Harvard Crimson: When the Harvard Salient’s board of directors suspended the conservative student magazine in late October, they accused its student members of publishing “reprehensible” material and claimed they had received “deeply disturbing and credible complaints about the broader culture of the organization." Then, for more than a month, the board was silent. But a series of documents obtained by The Crimson reveal what members of the Salient’s governing body were concerned about: variations of a racial slur used casually in a group chat of members; an unpublished issue featuring a call for mass executions; and draft versions of a September article, written by David F.X. Army ’28, that included two images of swastikas and a Nazi slogan in the subtitle.
After its publication, Army’s piece drew fire for a line — “Germany belongs to the Germans, France to the French, Britain to the British, America to the Americans” — that mirrored a phrase used by Adolf Hitler in a 1939 speech. The magazine’s editor-in-chief, Richard Y. Rodgers ’28, eventually issued a statement standing behind the piece and saying any invocation of Nazi language was unintentional. But draft versions of the article suggest that, at the very least, members of the Salient were aware that the article’s contents invoked Nazi ideology...
Full story at https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/12/21/documents-reveal-harvard-salient-complaint/.
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