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White House sources said the US Government was 'very concerned' about the risk the embassy posed to America's interests in the City as a result of Beijing's spies potentially tapping into sensitive cables.

Deputy Prime Minister Angela Rayner was last night facing questions over whether she is paying her own council tax surcharge on her second home.

Spread the news - butter might actually reduce your risk of heart disease, according to scientists.

Is copyrighted material a requirement for training AI? asks the Washington Post. That's what top AI companies are arguing, and "Few AI developers have tried the more ethical route — until now. "A group of more than two dozen AI researchers have found that they could build a massive eight-terabyte dataset using only text that was openly licensed or in public domain. They tested the dataset quality by using it to train a 7 billion parameter language model, which performed about as well as comparable industry efforts, such as Llama 2-7B, which Meta released in 2023." A paper published Thursday detailing their effort also reveals that the process was painstaking, arduous and impossible to fully automate. The group built an AI model that is significantly smaller than the latest offered by OpenAI's ChatGPT or Google's Gemini, but their findings appear to represent the biggest, most transparent and rigorous effort yet to demonstrate a different way of building popular AI tools.... As it turns out, the task involves a lot of humans. That's because of the technical challenges of data not being formatted in a way that's machine readable, as well as the legal challenges of figuring out what license applies to which website, a daunting prospect when the industry is rife with improperly licensed data. "This isn't a thing where you can just scale up the resources that you have available" like access to more computer chips and a fancy web scraper, said Stella Biderman [executive director of the nonprofit research institute Eleuther AI]. "We use automated tools, but all of our stuff was manually annotated at the end of the day and checked by people. And that's just really hard." Still, the group managed to unearth new datasets that can be used ethically. Those include a set of 130,000 English language books in the Library of Congress, which is nearly double the size of the popular-books dataset Project Gutenberg. The group's initiative also builds on recent efforts to develop more ethical, but still useful, datasets, such as FineWeb from Hugging Face, the open-source repository for machine learning... Still, Biderman remained skeptical that this approach could find enough content online to match the size of today's state-of-the-art models... Biderman said she didn't expect companies such as OpenAI and Anthropic to start adopting the same laborious process, but she hoped it would encourage them to at least rewind back to 2021 or 2022, when AI companies still shared a few sentences of information about what their models were trained on. "Even partial transparency has a huge amount of social value and a moderate amount of scientific value," she said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The former Pussycat Doll is currently starring in Andrew Lloyd Webber 's Sunset Boulevard musical on Broadway.

The Spice Girl, who celebrated turning 50 last weekend, is understood to be fully supporting of her child's decision, which has been made public on social media

Around 7,000 Three Lions supporters made the trip to Barcelona to watch the dire World Cup qualifying victory, and some took it upon themselves to make their feelings on Starmer known.

How can it be that the parent of a child in a London suburb was told by her GP that the boy is not eligible for important therapy - because he does not attend a state school?

The NFL star and his 14-time Grammy Award winning girlfriend visited Buccan, a James Beard-nominated restaurant, in Palm Beach, and one Swiftie had a front row seat.

Lorraine Hutton branded the draconian saga 'an enormous waste of time and public money', after being accused of deliberately damaging the 18-inch ceramic ornament.

A 30-year-old woman has been shot dead by police after attacking a 25-year-old woman and a 56-year-old man near Theresienwiese, Munich, where the famed Oktoberfest is held yearly.

The actor, 22, joined the soap in 2022 as Freddy Slater and even won the National Television Award for Rising Star for his work on the show.

TweakTown writes that the Switch 2 "has reportedly beaten the record for the most-sold console within 24 hours and is on track to shatter the two-month record," selling over 3 million units and tripling the PlayStation 4's previous launch day sales. So Nintendo's first console in 8 years becomes "one of the most successful hardware releases of all time," writes Barron's, raising hopes for the future: [2017's original Switch] ultimately sold more than 152 million units... Switch 2's big advantage is its backward compatibility, allowing it to play current-generation Switch games and giving gamers solace that their large investments in software are intact... Many older Switch games also play better on the Switch 2, taking advantage of the extra horsepower. Bloomberg writes that its bigger screen and faster chip "live up to the hype: Despite the hype and a $150 increase over the launch price for the original, the second-generation system manages to impress with faster performance, improved graphics, more comfortable ergonomics and enough tweaks throughout to make this feel like a distinctly new machine... This time, it's capable of outputting 4K resolution and more impactful HDR video to your TV screen... It's a bigger, faster, more polished version of a wildly successful gadget. The "buzzy launch drew long lines" at retailers like Walmart, Target, Best Buy, and Gamestop, according to the article. (See the photos from AOL.com and USA Today.) "The era of spending hours waiting in line for the latest iPhone is long gone, but the debut of a new video game console is still a rare enough event that Nintendo fans didn't think twice about driving to retailers in the middle of the night to secure a Switch 2." The Verge also opines that "the Switch 2's eShop is much better," calling it "way faster... with much less lag browsing through sections and loading up game pages." Or, as Barron's puts it, "Ultimately, Nintendo is winning because it has a different strategy than its competition, the Sony PlayStation and Microsoft Xbox. Instead of trying to appeal to tech snobs like me, who are obsessed with graphics resolution and hardware statistics like teraflops, Nintendo focuses on joy and fun."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

John Miller (pictured), who the MoS last week revealed was the subject of an FBI sting operation, is accused of targeting Hui Bo, 67, a vocal critic of Chinese leader Xi Jinping.

Ben Affleck looked deep in thought after enjoying a meal in Beverly Hills on Friday night. The Accountant 2 star, 52, was spotted exiting the high end eatery Steak 48.

Jared Leto is facing allegations from nine women of inappropriate behavior, including with teenage girls.

It's no secret that Beckham, 50, has bonded with King Charles over a shared love of gardening.

Aimee Lou Wood has been spotted in a passionate embrace with Adam Long in London. 

Mike Judge always seemed to have secret geek sympathies. He co-created the HBO series Silicon Valley, as well as the movie Office Space (reviewed in 1999 by Slashdot contributor Jon Katz). Now comes the word that besides rebooting Buffy the Vampire Slayer — and an animated scifi/action/horror film called Predator: Killer of Killers — Hulu is also relaunching Judge's animated series King of the Hill on August 4th. And Cinemablend notes they took great pains to ensure the inclusion of internet-loving neighbor Dale Gribble despite the death of voice actor Johnny Hardwick: Co-creators Mike Judge and Greg Daniels joined the cast of returning voice actors for a revealing Q&A at ATX Fest while also revealing longtime cast member Toby Huss took over the role of Dale Gribble... Hardwick passed away in August 2023 at 64, with fans and co-stars paying tribute soon after. It was revealed at the time that he'd recorded some audio for the new season, but it was clear that another actor would be needed to fill those intimidating and conspiracy-obsessed shoes. Among other characters, Huss provided the voice of Cotton Hill and Kahn Sr. in the O.G. run, and feels to me like a natural fit to take over as Dale. And he sounds humbled to have been given the task, telling the ATX Fest crowd: "Johnny was one-of-a-kind and a wonderful fellow. I'm not trying to copy Johnny...I guess I'm trying to be Johnny. He laid down a really wonderful goofball character...he had a lot of weird heart to him and that's a credit to Johnny. So all I'm trying to do is hold on to his Dale-ness. We love our guy Johnny and it's so sad that he's not here...." I can already hear Dale himself questioning why he sounds different, and whether or not the government has replaced him with a lizard creature or some other sentient organism... In the immediate aftermath of Johnny Hardwick's death, the word was that the actor had filmed a couple of episodes' worth of material for the Hulu revival, but Mike Judge went on the record at ATX Fest to reveal that initial assessment undershot things entirely. From the voice of Hank Hill himself: "Johnny Hardwick is in six episodes. He's still going to be in the show." Hulu uploaded the new opening credits to YouTube eight days ago — and it's already been viewed 2.1 million times, attracting 55,000 upvotes and 7,952 comments... Long-time Slashdot reader theodp shared the official blurb describing the new show: After years working a propane job in Saudi Arabia to earn their retirement nest egg, Hank and Peggy Hill return to a changed Arlen, Texas to reconnect with old friends Dale, Boomhauer and Bill. Meanwhile, Bobby is living his dream as a chef in Dallas and enjoying his 20s with his former classmates Connie, Joseph and Chane.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Freddy Brazier appeared in high spirits as he attended a VIP launch event for Jurassic World: The Experience on Saturday - just days after revealing he is heading to rehab in Marbella.