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This is a sign that it’s time to replace your running shoes, according to doctors
Debt collections and forgiveness: What borrowers need to consider now
Brain disease in dead NFL players 'higher than previously shown'
Canada hits back at the U.S. with tariffs as the countries' trade fight escalates
The measures come after President Trump imposed 50% tariffs on many Canadian goods and threatened more after trade talks broke down on Friday.
(Image credit: Cole Burston)
German Election Is Important
Pennsylvania records first 2 measles deaths in 35 years
Russian ex-official says "unknown sources" could attack U.K. drone plants
The Supreme Court’s Mail-In Ballot Ruling Is a Step Toward Chaos in the Midterms
Canada announces tariffs on $20bn worth of US goods
Badenoch plotted to remove Sunak as PM months before election, book claims
Anthony Seldon’s book alleges Badenoch asked fellow Tory ministers ‘if anyone was interested in changing the captain’
Kemi Badenoch plotted with fellow Conservative cabinet ministers to remove Rishi Sunak as prime minister months before the general election, it has been claimed.
Anthony Seldon, who has written political biographies of every prime minister since John Major, has alleged in a new book that Badenoch, who was business secretary at the time, phoned several other cabinet ministers to ask “if anyone was interested in changing the captain”.
Continue reading...One Nation’s Malcolm Roberts ‘in two minds’ about whether gay people should be equal
Footage shows senator on stage at the Church and State conference responding to question about party’s director James Ashby
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One Nation’s Malcolm Roberts told a conference earlier this year that he was in “two minds” about whether gay people should have equal rights.
In footage from June’s Church and State conference, released on Sunday, the senator can be seen responding to a question about James Ashby, the party’s director, who is gay.
Continue reading...Australia may face a rush of datacentre construction as AI firms look to avoid upcoming rules, experts say
Regulations will require new sites to avoid pushing up power prices by building renewable energy plants and minimising water use
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Planned datacentres around Australia may avoid strict new rules being proposed by Anthony Albanese if they can secure approvals in the coming months, amid growing calls for a moratorium.
The prime minister is aiming to come to an agreement with national cabinet on federal regulations for datacentres at a meeting on Wednesday.
Continue reading...Trump’s Canada Tariffs Rely on Untested Law
WATCH: Canada announces retaliatory tariffs against the U.S.
The Airport Chaplain review – thoroughly bingeable TV about ‘Batman in a hi-vis vest’
This moreish show about a do-gooder keen to save the day stars Hugo Weaving and The Pitt’s Shabana Azeez … and it’s pressure-packed from the get-go
Hugo Weaving plays the eponymous airport chaplain in this pacy and moreish eight-part series, which was co-created by Elise McCredie and Jude Troy, and directed with jittery flair by Bonnie Moir and Tig Terera. In case you were wondering, yes, that profession really does exist.
I doubt the lives of real airport chaplains are anywhere near as frenetic as those of this show’s protagonist, Tobias Wallace (Weaving), whose existence is a testament to that old saying: “Not all heroes wear capes.” Sometimes, they wear hi-vis.
Continue reading...Canada Fires Back in Trade War Against Trump With Up to 50% Tariffs
Federal judge rejects Ghislaine Maxwell's 'miscarriage of justice' claim and bid for prison release
'Forget about going back': 9 years on, Rohingya crisis enters dangerous phase
The world largely moved on from the Rohingya crisis. But the exodus has not stopped, aid is shrinking and a generation of refugees is growing up with little prospect of going home.
(Image credit: Valeria Mongelli)
Селф-хост Ornith-1.5 и Qwen3.8: тестирую 18 квантов на одной карте и похоже не покупаю RTX5090
Встала задача - срочно за вечер решить практический вопрос: какой квант ставить на карту и нужна ли мне RTX5090 домой (спойлер: нет, 9B и Q5/Q6 и я буду счастлив). Прогнал 18 конфигураций по схеме - три модели, пять-шесть квантов на каждую, один и тот же набор из 22 реальных задач.
Читать далееCanada Hits Back at U.S. With Tariffs Targeting Midterm Hot Spots
Football Daily | Two goals, some polish and a rebrand: City flip Sávio for quite the profit
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We see Manchester City have managed to flip Savinho for quite the profit. Football Daily had previously assumed this sort of wheeler-dealing was restricted to the Dion-Dublin-adjacent property market, or the Harry-Redknapp-infused used car scene, but it seems we were mistaken. We have no idea how City ended up trousering a £44.2m markup on a player who cost £30.8m two seasons ago, and has achieved the square root of eff all since, but they’ve done it. Consider standing stock still and allowing a ball to clank off you and into the net in an FA Cup tie at Newcastle analogous to installing a new bathroom suite and giving the front room a lick of paint, or taking a microfibre cloth and some polish to the crevices of that grimy dashboard. Result! Goal! Ker-ching! That’s 75 million-nil!
Re: the ‘hand of God’ ball’s sale (yesterday’s News, Bits and Bobs, full email edition). I understand Peter Shilton did, in fact, intend to bid but couldn’t get his hand up high enough” – John Myles.
As much as people dislike Chelsea (the football club that is, not the posh area of London, which is quite nice if a bit dull), Xabi Alonso’s wild experiment to attempt to score so many goals that it even offsets Robert Sánchez’s constant Keystone Cops-style performances in goal is going to be wonderfully exciting” – Noble Francis.
This is an extract from our daily football email … Football Daily. To get the full version, just visit this page and follow the instructions.
Continue reading...New York business group sues Mamdani over city-owned grocery stores plan
Multicultural Business Coalition sues New York City mayor, alleging plan for city-run stores will harm smaller grocers
A New York City business group sued mayor Zohran Mamdani on Monday over his plan to create five municipally owned grocery stores.
The Multicultural Business Coalition, which says it represents hundreds of small supermarkets, filed two lawsuits in New York county supreme court on Monday, arguing that the plan violates the civil rights of smaller, immigrant- and minority-owned businesses. The group argues that smaller stores would be unable to match the discounts offered by the city grocery stores and “therefore, will be put out of business,” according to the lawsuits.
Continue reading...Lawmakers Push Hochul to Block ICE From Taking Over Upstate Warehouse
Gamma acquires Accel-backed design startup Lica
Kit Harington replaces Nicholas Hoult in HBO's Harry Potter series
Two unvaccinated people die of measles in Pennsylvania
VPN'ы в упряжке: собираем VPN box с несколькими VPN‑провайдерами на Mikrotik
Как повысить надежность VPN доступа для домашней сети, если в случае блокировки VPN нет возможности в разумный срок обновить конфиг и восстановить доступ?
Решение ― multi‑VPN резервированием VPN‑провайдеров, использующих разные VPN‑протоколы. Собственный опыт, собранный в виде гайда.
В этом гайде мы настроим сразу два клиента VPN, AmneziaWG и VLESS+Reality, работающих одновременно как основной и резерв на одном Mikrotik роутере с общим раздельным туннелированием (split‑routing). Хотя таких каналов может быть столько, сколько позволят ресурсы роутера. Этакий VPN‑box, но с резервированием.
Читать далееWhy Google Bid $10 Million for a Failed Airline’s Data
What would a company like Google want with data from a failed airline?
Google won a bankruptcy auction this month with a bid to spend $10 million on the corporate data of Spirit Airlines, which stopped flying in May. Google’s offer beat a $7.5 million bid for the data from an AI data company, Mercor.
The cache includes 100 million emails and 500 million Microsoft Teams messages, and around 30 million lines of code.
AI companies have been battling it out this year to make the best AI coding agent—and they have benefited from an abundance of publicly available code to train these models. But teaching agents to do other kinds of white-collar work may require data that is largely private, buried in corporate emails and chats. If that effort succeeds, it could send ripples across the labor market.
“Buying Spirit Airlines—that's not centrally a coding agent purchase,” says Nick Heiner, the head of reinforcement learning environments at Surge, a data company that supplies the frontier AI labs. “That's a purchase if you believe that your agent is going to generalize into the rest of the economy.”
Reinforcement learning
One of the biggest trends in AI over the last 18 months or so has been the rise of reinforcement learning from verifiable rewards—a method of AI training that has led to rapid improvements in models that can work independently for long periods of time.
Anthropic alone has discussed spending more than $1 billion in a year on so-called reinforcement learning (RL) environments, which are essentially simulations of commonly used software, where AI agents can take strings of actions independently. If these actions lead to a desired outcome, the AI is rewarded and will be more likely to take similar actions in the future.
Until now, the biggest jumps from this type of training have come from coding models, mostly because code has a useful property: it either works or it doesn’t, meaning that the reward signal is immediate, so improvement can happen in a fast loop. (It’s also helpful that there was plenty of coding data already out there on the internet, meaning models were good coders to begin with.)
But AI companies’ long-term goal is to automate large swathes of the economy. That’s where Spirit’s data likely comes in.
What makes the data useful
RL environments are only as good as the data that populates them, says Heiner of Surge AI. Companies like Surge and Mercor often hire human workers who are tasked with populating these environments with realistic data, either from scratch or in partnership with AI tools. “But even that is a little bit removed from literally having actual data that was used in the real world,” Heiner says. “That's where deals like Spirit come in.”
Even though Spirit was a failed company, its data probably still encodes many useful things about how humans carry out their jobs, like how workers collaborate toward shared goals, or the norms of how the aviation industry operates. Even data depicting bad decisions can be helpful, Heiner says. “Maybe you see something where they're actually doing something poorly, and you build a task out of that, and you change what they were doing to be something better.”
But unlike coding, which can be quickly and easily determined to either work or not, office tasks are fuzzier. Human experts can still provide that feedback—a service that companies like Mercor and Surge offer to AI companies—but that work is relatively expensive, time-consuming, and subjective. It’s therefore unclear that even populating RL environments with real-world data like Spirit’s will allow AI companies to move into white-collar fields as quickly as they have ripped through the software industry.
Privacy drama
A Google spokesperson declined to comment on the specifics of how Spirit’s data would be used, but said the data “can be helpful in improving our products and AI models.” The spokesperson added that personal information would be “rigorously scrubbed” by a third party before the dataset’s delivery to Google, and would include no customer data.
After Google submitted its bid, a union of flight attendants filed an objection, saying that although the deal’s terms would result in personal data being removed, the dataset would maintain “referential integrity,” meaning that links between one type of data and another would be kept. That integrity is what makes the data useful for training AI, but the union said it may also allow for even anonymized information about its members to be reconstructed. The group is seeking additional privacy protections; a judge is set to rule on the matter on Sept. 9.
Another AI data company, Micro1, submitted a higher bid of $12.5 million after the auction closed.
Whichever way the deal goes, it looks like the AI industry is setting its sights on white-collar work. “Google is willing to pay $10 million for a failed budget airline, because if you believe this is really generalizable, you see a path to all these different industries—not just the ones that Spirit was involved in—being something you can replace pretty quickly,” Heiner says.
Nothing changes yet with the Supreme Court's order on mail voting. But it could open door to 'chaos'
CIA Director John Ratcliffe in Moscow for meetings, sources say
Trump gets his way on mail-in voting for now
От подписки к корпоративному AI: как мы собирали команду ИИ-разработчиков и преодолевали скепсис сотрудников
Для тех, кто в блоге впервые: здесь я рассказывал про AI ready инфраструктуру, здесь — про её «железную» инженерную основу. После статьи про информационную безопасность логично перехожу от темы сборки техрешения к теме «сборки команды», которая это решение может реализовать.
Короче, говорим про локальную инфраструктуру для ИИ в стеке с реальностью: что это, зачем и как вообще её реализовывать в нынешних условиях AI-рынка в России.
Идея AI ready сложилась из личного опыта использования ChatGPT и пилотного внедрения модели в бизнес-процессы моей компании. Ещё год назад AI-команды у нас не было — один ИИ-энтузиазм. Мы, как и многие, наивно полагали, что запустим AI-ассистента силами имеющейся ИТ-команды. Ведь с ChatGPT даже ребёнок разберётся, корпоративный сервис немногим сложнее, не так ли?
Не так. Посвящаю эту статью всем руководителям, которые без разбора стремятся сегодня внедрить ИИ во все процессы, и тем, кто думает, что ИИ легко сможет заменить сотню сотрудников. Поверьте, чтобы создать собственный рабочий AI-инструмент, вам нужно будет работать в три раза больше, и найти тех, кто выстроит эту работу правильно, будет непросто. Равно как непросто переубедить нейроскептиков и научить команду бороться с рутиной с помощью ИИ.
Читать далееЗначение поменялось, а экран нет: где Vue теряет реактивность и почему это не баг
Состояние во Vue обновилось, а интерфейс остался прежним — и начинается охота на watch, nextTick и принудительный ререндер. Разберём, где именно рвётся реактивная связь, почему это происходит и как находить такие проблемы до того, как вокруг них вырастут костыли.
Циник цифровизации — Кен Олсен был прав
Время от времени мимо меня пролетают разные общепризнанные нелепости, которые должны подчёркивать дремучесть разных дедов из прошлого. Это тешит наше самолюбие и позволяет нам думать что мы умные, а деды — нет. Такая вот романтическая иллюзия. И именно в таких иллюзиях я со временем разочаровался и реализовал формулу «циник — это разочаровавшийся романтик».
Читать далее'We keep making stupid mistakes' - England cricket captain Joe Root
United Airlines to add 10 new international routes. See where.
Apple rescues Hide My Email feature from the privacy scrap heap
Two unvaccinated people die of measles in Pennsylvania
Deaths from disease are first in state in 35 years and just one day after Maryland declared outbreak in three counties
Two unvaccinated individuals have died of measles in Pennsylvania, state health officials announced on Tuesday. The deaths are the first in the state in 35 years and have been announced just one day after Maryland declared a measles outbreak in three counties.
Measles is one of the most contagious diseases known to medicine, and is preventable with a highly effective vaccine.
Continue reading...Louisiana supreme court justice wins rare $300,000 defamation trial against newspaper
Then Advocate editor-in-chief and writer testified editorial was not part of agenda against Jefferson Davis Hughes III
A jury on Monday awarded $300,000 to a Louisiana supreme court justice over a 2019 editorial by the state’s largest newspaper in a rare defamation trial involving an elected public official.
Jurors in Iberville parish, Louisiana, found that the editorial whose headline included “Jeff Hughes … made a mockery of justice” and was published by the Advocate had defamed state supreme court justice Jefferson Davis Hughes III. The $300,000 in damages that the jury awarded Hughes were nonetheless significantly less than the $10m he sought for what he described as injury to his reputation and emotional distress.
Continue reading...Billie Piper stalker jailed for 12 months after breaching prevention order
Philip Jerome, 49, repeatedly tried to contact actor in hope they would begin a relationship, court hears
A fan obsessed with Billie Piper has been jailed for 12 months after breaching a stalking prevention order.
Philip Jerome, 49, from Winchester, had a sexual interest in the singer and actor, and repeatedly tried to get in touch with her in the hope they would end up in a relationship, a court in Hampshire was told.
Continue reading...Several states will decide voter ID ballot measures this year
Voters in at least six states will soon decide ballot measures related to voter ID — the largest number of voter ID measures in a single year. The tally includes three prominent swing states.
(Image credit: Chris Carlson)
Two unvaccinated people die of measles in Pennsylvania
Deaths from disease are first in state in 35 years and just one day after Maryland declared outbreak in three counties
Two unvaccinated individuals have died of measles in Pennsylvania, state health officials announced on Tuesday. The deaths are the first in the state in 35 years and have been announced just one day after Maryland declared a measles outbreak in three counties.
Measles is one of the most contagious diseases known to medicine, and is preventable with a highly effective vaccine.
Continue reading...Sex sells and wins votes – and the Democrats know it | Arwa Mahdawi
Wonder why they’re posting flirty photos and wearing tight T-shirts? It’s a thirst trap strategy in motion
Despite being a card-carrying member of the International Order of Confirmed Homosexuals, I have spent quite a lot of time lately thinking about Abdul El-Sayed’s biceps. I mean, have you seen them? The progressive Michigan senate nominee is jacked and he knows it. He almost always wears a tight black T-shirt to show off his muscles and incorporates a lot of fitness content in his campaign.
I’m not the only one who has noticed El-Sayed’s prominent muscles. They have had a lot of coverage, and are seen as part of a wider attempt to rebrand the Democratic party. Which, I don’t need to tell you, has a serious image problem; a poll in March found that the party is looked on even less favourably than the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency. So, to make it look less like a party that is full of out-of-touch technocrats who sound as if they are reading from a 500-page PowerPoint presentation every time they try to explain anything, Democrats seem to be trying to up the sex appeal.
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Continue reading...CheckMateDB в РСХБ: как мы автоматизируем автотесты на Java (и почему это не заменяет автоматизаторов)
Меня зовут Герасимов Михаил, я главный инженер в Россельхозбанке (РСХБ), работаю в команде автоматизации тестирования. Наш основной фокус — регрессионные автотесты на Java.
Эта публикация — первая в серии статей про CheckMateDB. Здесь мы сделаем быстрый, но технически предметный обзор продукта: что уже работает, какие задачи он закрывает и куда мы его развиваем. В следующих статьях разберем отдельные части подробнее: архитектуру модулей, ML‑контур генерации кода, практику внедрения и метрики качества.
Если коротко, то наша ежедневная реальность выглядит так: ручные тестировщики пишут сценарии в TestIT, а автоматизаторы превращают их в код. Звучит просто, но на масштабе регресса очень быстро проявляется bottleneck: между тест‑кейсом и готовым автотестом лежит большой слой однотипной инженерной рутины. Где‑то нужно аккуратно собрать тестовые данные, где‑то написать Criteria, где‑то выстроить PageHelper‑цепочку, где‑то допилить проверки и стабилизировать прогон. И да, иногда кажется, что половина автотеста уже написана… просто в 17 разных местах и в разное время.
В этой статье расскажу, как мы в команде закрываем этот разрыв с помощью CheckMateDB и почему развиваем его как единую точку входа для автоматизированного тестирования: от данных и SQL‑аналитики до AI‑генерации кода и управляемого применения изменений.
Читать далееMusk's data centers push out family that's owned land for generations
1 in 4 former NFL players may have CTE, new study says
U.S. airman faces charges for criticizing Trump over Iran war
Darline Graham, Ralph Norman go head-to-head in South Carolina's GOP Senate runoff
The cat that fought Mussolini: how the Wulz photography sisters weaponised the family pet
Wanda and Marion Wulz defied the unbridled patriarchy of fascist Italy by shooting dancers, fencers and other famous women – as well as their cat Mucincina
‘In those fascist times,” says Federica Muzzarelli of Italy in the 1920s and 30s, “women were not free. They were regarded as mothers and homemakers. But the Wulz sisters were determined to create their own destiny. They chose photography as a way of being independent – and to show through their images that women could live that way.”
Muzzarelli is the curator of Wanda and Marion Wulz: Avant-Garde Photography in 20th Century Italy, a show about to open at the Estorick Collection in London. The Wulz sisters experimented with blended and altered images more than half a century before Photoshop was invented. The most famous image to emerge from their studio was I + Cat, a self-portrait of Wanda superimposed on the face of the family pet. But the show aims to cast Marion in a new light, showing that she was no mere assistant, but rather equal to her sister in terms of photography, as they championed feminism in fascist Italy, keeping the idea of women’s emancipation alive at a time of unbridled patriarchal ideology.
Continue reading...