Aggregator

We took a wallop from the USS Donald Trump; but as MPs emerged from shelters and the Speaker's secretary dispensed tin mugs of sugared tea, there was a consolation: the EU copped it worse.

Tracey Connelly, 42, who was hauled back to jail in September for breaching her jail conditions, has been promised an oral parole hearing, according to reports.

The Channel 5 News presenter, 47, was close friends with Gary, who tragically took his own life in November 2011 at the age of 42.

My mother said something cruel and demeaning one sunny afternoon 12 years ago. I can't recall her exact words, but I do remember the last words I ever spoke to her: 'We're done. Goodbye.'

US president Donald Trump has given Taliban-controlled Afghanistan the same tariff as the UK, despite the Central Asian country applying a levy on imported US goods five times larger than Britain's. 

All Britons know that when our fellow countrymen start a sentence 'With great respect...', they mean that they think the person they're speaking to is a prize idiot who is talking pure rubbish...

Nicole Kidman has stunned fans with a dramatic transformation for the highly anticipated second season of Nine Perfect Strangers.

The Louvre Museum will discontinue its use of Nintendo 3DS XL consoles as audio guides by September 2025, replacing them with a new system. NintendoSoup reports: For several years the Louvre has been using specially dedicated New Nintendo 3DS XL consoles to give visitors an audio guided tour of the famous museum. According to the museum's official website however, it seems that the program will be discontinued in September 2025, to be replaced by a new system. Presumably, this is due to Nintendo slowly phasing out the Nintendo 3DS line in general, having stopped supporting repairs for the console in a few countries. The consoles used by the Louvre would have broken down sooner or later, necessitating a change if they could no longer be sent in for repairs. At the time of this writing, it is not known what will become of the unique special edition consoles that were being used for this purpose.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

And now the 56-year-old Friends star has added fuel to the flame as she shared a flirty public message in tribute to The Last Of Us star on his 50th birthday.

When a music legend hints at bringing the curtain down on an illustrious career, it's best to treat their words with caution.

From red telephone boxes to Tudor cobbled streets and traditional country pubs to Gothic churches, it looks like any other quaint English village - but there's one quirk that makes Thames Town unique.

From anger over expletive-laden Best Man speeches to guests urinating in residents' gardens, locals living in the shadow of popular wedding venues say they have reached breaking point.

The Emmy winner - turning 71 later this month - bundled up to walk her little raincoat-clad pooch in her native New York City on Thursday

It was announced this week that the actor will be starring in the movie alongside Harris Dickinson as John Lennon, Barry Keoghan as Ringo Starr and Joseph Quinn as George Harrison.

John Donnelly's muddled new play, ostensibly the tale of a young mother suffering from severe post-natal depression , turns into a one-woman, blood-sucking revenge mission against toxic masculinity

Its alternate history has you commandeering some mechs of your own and leading the Allied fightback, all the way from the Highlands to Berlin.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica, written by Ryan Whitwam: Researchers at DeepMind have ... released a new technical paper (PDF) that explains how to develop AGI safely, which you can download at your convenience. It contains a huge amount of detail, clocking in at 108 pages before references. While some in the AI field believe AGI is a pipe dream, the authors of the DeepMind paper project that it could happen by 2030. With that in mind, they aimed to understand the risks of a human-like synthetic intelligence, which they acknowledge could lead to "severe harm." This work has identified four possible types of AGI risk, along with suggestions on how we might ameliorate said risks. The DeepMind team, led by company co-founder Shane Legg, categorized the negative AGI outcomes as misuse, misalignment, mistakes, and structural risks. The first possible issue, misuse, is fundamentally similar to current AI risks. However, because AGI will be more powerful by definition, the damage it could do is much greater. A ne'er-do-well with access to AGI could misuse the system to do harm, for example, by asking the system to identify and exploit zero-day vulnerabilities or create a designer virus that could be used as a bioweapon. DeepMind says companies developing AGI will have to conduct extensive testing and create robust post-training safety protocols. Essentially, AI guardrails on steroids. They also suggest devising a method to suppress dangerous capabilities entirely, sometimes called "unlearning," but it's unclear if this is possible without substantially limiting models. Misalignment is largely not something we have to worry about with generative AI as it currently exists. This type of AGI harm is envisioned as a rogue machine that has shaken off the limits imposed by its designers. Terminators, anyone? More specifically, the AI takes actions it knows the developer did not intend. DeepMind says its standard for misalignment here is more advanced than simple deception or scheming as seen in the current literature. To avoid that, DeepMind suggests developers use techniques like amplified oversight, in which two copies of an AI check each other's output, to create robust systems that aren't likely to go rogue. If that fails, DeepMind suggests intensive stress testing and monitoring to watch for any hint that an AI might be turning against us. Keeping AGIs in virtual sandboxes with strict security and direct human oversight could help mitigate issues arising from misalignment. Basically, make sure there's an "off" switch. If, on the other hand, an AI didn't know that its output would be harmful and the human operator didn't intend for it to be, that's a mistake. We get plenty of those with current AI systems -- remember when Google said to put glue on pizza? The "glue" for AGI could be much stickier, though. DeepMind notes that militaries may deploy AGI due to "competitive pressure," but such systems could make serious mistakes as they will be tasked with much more elaborate functions than today's AI. The paper doesn't have a great solution for mitigating mistakes. It boils down to not letting AGI get too powerful in the first place. DeepMind calls for deploying slowly and limiting AGI authority. The study also suggests passing AGI commands through a "shield" system that ensures they are safe before implementation. Lastly, there are structural risks, which DeepMind defines as the unintended but real consequences of multi-agent systems contributing to our already complex human existence. For example, AGI could create false information that is so believable that we no longer know who or what to trust. The paper also raises the possibility that AGI could accumulate more and more control over economic and political systems, perhaps by devising heavy-handed tariff schemes. Then one day, we look up and realize the machines are in charge instead of us. This category of risk is also the hardest to guard against because it would depend on how people, infrastructure, and institutions operate in the future.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Jeweller Richard Johnson, 77, said he had been dealt 'indescribable stress' by the endless slew of penalties while running his city centre shop for more than 40 years.

Mother Emmie-Rose Wright said her three children - aged five, eight and nine - relayed the crash only caused slight damage to the rear break light of the Toyota Highlander.

Vietnam war veteran Joe Haldeman is a human time machine. Now 81 and probably the world's greatest living sci-fi author, he has an unequalled record of predicting the future.