Utah students can no longer bring banned books to school

The books are still available in book stores and online, etc., and ownership is not prohibited, but there's a troubling line in the state code that "...explicitly states, “Sensitive materials are prohibited in the school setting.”"

Suggestions in the Library Reddit include fake book covers, and of course reading ebooks would make it a bit difficult to be tapped out by a school official, or simply setting up an after-school club to read and discuss the books off of the school grounds.

They briefly got the Bible banned, I don't know if they tried to get the Book of Mormon banned. I've never read it, I have no idea if it's nearly as juicy with questionable content as the Bible is. The State Board's Library Media Specialist is saying that they're not conducting backpack and locker searches, but if a student is caught reading a banned book the teacher should 'gently' tell them the book is not permitted on school property and that they should take it home and not bring it back.

https://www.kuer.org/education/2025-01-21/utah-students-can-no-longer-bring-personal-copies-of-banned-books-to-school

The Chinese release an open source chatbot AI, slams American stocks

This is pretty amusing, funny, and ironic, for certain values of amusing, funny, and ironic.

The Chinese have released an open source LLM chatbot, it's called DeepSeek R1. It's available on GitHub, you can download it and play with it, tear apart the code, tweak it, etc. Completely free. It was built in TWO MONTHS for $6,000,000. And on lower grade GPUs because of export restrictions placed on the Chinese - can't have them getting top of the line GPUs now, can we? And they didn't scrape the internet, stealing trademarked and copyrighted information without permission to train it.

And it's the top downloaded app on the Apple app store.

The belief was that with denying the Chinese the top-end GPUs needed to do the crunching to construct large language models, that they had no hope of catching up with Team USA when it came to building AIs. Well, it seems that Team USA forgot the phrase 'Work smarter, not harder'. The Chinese applied a lot of smarts to work around the restrictions that were placed upon them and produced a much better product.

And stocks tanked because it's good software. From the article: "GPU maker NVIDIA fell 11%, Oracle dropped 8%, and Palantir was down 5% ... Stocks are adjusting to the revelation that China can build AI faster, cheaper, and just as good as America."

The comments in the article are amusing.

Nice slice of humble pie served up there.

https://gizmodo.com/chinese-ai-deepseek-deep-sixes-openai-on-the-app-store-stocks-tank-2000555171