Aggregator

In celebration of his life, the courtyard of the Pinacoteca di Brera Museum was lined with candles as the fashion house described their 'infinite sorrow' at his loss.

Reform bashing was everywhere. It cheered up the delegates. Charlatans, snake-oil salesmen, peddlers of division and hatred: these were but some of the insults hurled at Mr Farage's brigade.

The bizarre story of how an unsubstantiated internet conspiracy theory about 72-year-old Brigitte Macron secretly being a transgender woman has snowballed into a high-profile U.S. court case.

The Mail on Sunday exclusively revealed today that the Duke of Sussex was understood to be infuriated with royal courtiers who he has accused of giving hostile briefings to newspapers.

Tim Berners-Lee writes in a new article in the Guardian that "Somewhere between my original vision for web 1.0 and the rise of social media as part of web 2.0, we took the wrong path Today, I look at my invention and I am forced to ask: is the web still free today? No, not all of it. We see a handful of large platforms harvesting users' private data to share with commercial brokers or even repressive governments. We see ubiquitous algorithms that are addictive by design and damaging to our teenagers' mental health. Trading personal data for use certainly does not fit with my vision for a free web. On many platforms, we are no longer the customers, but instead have become the product. Our data, even if anonymised, is sold on to actors we never intended it to reach, who can then target us with content and advertising... We have the technical capability to give that power back to the individual. Solid is an open-source interoperable standard that I and my team developed at MIT more than a decade ago. Apps running on Solid don't implicitly own your data — they have to request it from you and you choose whether to agree, or not. Rather than being in countless separate places on the internet in the hands of whomever it had been resold to, your data is in one place, controlled by you. Sharing your information in a smart way can also liberate it. Why is your smartwatch writing your biological data to one silo in one format? Why is your credit card writing your financial data to a second silo in a different format? Why are your YouTube comments, Reddit posts, Facebook updates and tweets all stored in different places? Why is the default expectation that you aren't supposed to be able to look at any of this stuff? You generate all this data — your actions, your choices, your body, your preferences, your decisions. You should own it. You should be empowered by it... We're now at a new crossroads, one where we must decide if AI will be used for the betterment or to the detriment of society. How can we learn from the mistakes of the past? First of all, we must ensure policymakers do not end up playing the same decade-long game of catchup they have done over social media. The time to decide the governance model for AI was yesterday, so we must act with urgency. In 2017, I wrote a thought experiment about an AI that works for you. I called it Charlie. Charlie works for you like your doctor or your lawyer, bound by law, regulation and codes of conduct. Why can't the same frameworks be adopted for AI? We have learned from social media that power rests with the monopolies who control and harvest personal data. We can't let the same thing happen with AI. Berners-Lee also says "we need a Cern-like not-for-profit body driving forward international AI research," arguing that if we muster the political willpower, "we have the chance to restore the web as a tool for collaboration, creativity and compassion across cultural borders. "We can re-empower individuals, and take the web back. It's not too late." Berners-Lee has also written a new book titled This is For Everyone.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The ICE agent seen body slamming a woman onto the floor was hit with karma after the horrific video of him throwing the mother at the NYC customs and immigration offices went viral.

Tetyana Sakyian, 23, suffered 90 per cent burns but miraculously surgeons managed to deliver little Nazar at 35 weeks. She died from her injuries while the baby is still fighting for his life.

Kicking off Labour 's conference in Liverpool, Keir Starmer risked inflaming public anger by using the term 'racist' to dismiss the policy of abolishing 'settled status'.

"Facebook and Instagram owner Meta is launching paid subscriptions for users who do not want to see adverts in the UK," reports the BBC: The company said it would start notifying users in the coming weeks to let them choose whether to subscribe to its platforms if they wish to use them without seeing ads. EU users of its platforms can already pay a fee starting from €5.99 (£5) a month to see no ads — but subscriptions will start from £2.99 a month for UK users. "It will give people in the UK a clear choice about whether their data is used for personalised advertising, while preserving the free access and value that the ads-supported internet creates for people, businesses and platforms," Meta said. But UK users will not have an option to not pay and see "less personalised" adverts — a feature Meta added for EU users after regulators raised concerns... Meta said its own model would see its subscription for no ads cost £2.99 a month on the web or £3.99 a month on iOS and Android apps — with the higher fee to offset cuts taken from transactions by Apple and Google... [Meta] reiterated its critical stance on the EU on Friday, saying its regulations were creating a worse experience for users and businesses unlike the UK's "more pro-growth and pro-innovation regulatory environment". "Meta said its own model would see its subscription for no ads cost £2.99 a month on the web or £3.99 a month on iOS and Android apps," according to the BBC, "with the higher fee to offset cuts taken from transactions by Apple and Google." Even users not paying for an ad-free experience have "tools and settings that empower people to control their ads experience," according to Meta's announcement. The include Ad Preferences which influences data used to inform ads including Activity Information from Ad Partners. "We also have tools in our products that explain 'Why am I seeing this ad?' and how people can manage their ad experience. We do not sell personal data to advertisers."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Pretty Woman actor, 75, cut a dapper figure in a sharp black tuxedo as he sat front row with Alejandra, 42.

The Sex Education star, 57, was the epitome of class in the sleeveless number, which perfectly enhanced her lithe figure.

The former Love Island star, 34, confessed that he and Chloe, 24, had split for the eighth time in June, but it appears the pair have worked through their breakup.

Our thoughts are with those who have lost a loved one

Jonny Mitchell , 53, became an unlikely heartthrob when he starred on the show as the headteacher at Thornhill Community Academy, in Dewsbury, West Yorkshire, more than a decade ago.

Dr Victor Kattan claimed that the current bloody conflict in Gaza was 'made in Britain' as he campaigned for the UK to apologise and make 'reparations' to Palestinian Arabs.

The local pub is at the heart of the village community

IEEE Spectrum ranks the popularity of programming languages — but is there a problem? Programmers "are turning away from many of these public expressions of interest. Rather than page through a book or search a website like Stack Exchange for answers to their questions, they'll chat with an LLM like Claude or ChatGPT in a private conversation." And with an AI assistant like Cursor helping to write code, the need to pose questions in the first place is significantly decreased. For example, across the total set of languages evaluated in the Top Programming Languages, the number of questions we saw posted per week on Stack Exchange in 2025 was just 22% of what it was in 2024... However, an even more fundamental problem is looming in the wings... In the same way most developers today don't pay much attention to the instruction sets and other hardware idiosyncrasies of the CPUs that their code runs on, which language a program is vibe coded in ultimately becomes a minor detail... [T]he popularity of different computer languages could become as obscure a topic as the relative popularity of railway track gauges... But if an AI is soothing our irritations with today's languages, will any new ones ever reach the kind of critical mass needed to make an impact? Will the popularity of today's languages remain frozen in time? That's ultimately the larger question. "how much abstraction and anti-foot-shooting structure will a sufficiently-advanced coding AI really need...?" [C]ould we get our AIs to go straight from prompt to an intermediate language that could be fed into the interpreter or compiler of our choice? Do we need high-level languages at all in that future? True, this would turn programs into inscrutable black boxes, but they could still be divided into modular testable units for sanity and quality checks. And instead of trying to read or maintain source code, programmers would just tweak their prompts and generate software afresh. What's the role of the programmer in a future without source code? Architecture design and algorithm selection would remain vital skills... How should a piece of software be interfaced with a larger system? How should new hardware be exploited? In this scenario, computer science degrees, with their emphasis on fundamentals over the details of programming languages, rise in value over coding boot camps. Will there be a Top Programming Language in 2026? Right now, programming is going through the biggest transformation since compilers broke onto the scene in the early 1950s. Even if the predictions that much of AI is a bubble about to burst come true, the thing about tech bubbles is that there's always some residual technology that survives. It's likely that using LLMs to write and assist with code is something that's going to stick. So we're going to be spending the next 12 months figuring out what popularity means in this new age, and what metrics might be useful to measure. Having said that, IEEE Spectrum still ranks programming language popularity three ways — based on use among working programmers, demand from employers, and "trending" in the zeitgeist — using seven different metrics. Their results? Among programmers, "we see that once again Python has the top spot, with the biggest change in the top five being JavaScript's drop from third place last year to sixth place this year. As JavaScript is often used to create web pages, and vibe coding is often used to create websites, this drop in the apparent popularity may be due to the effects of AI... In the 'Jobs' ranking, which looks exclusively at what skills employers are looking for, we see that Python has also taken 1st place, up from second place last year, though SQL expertise remains an incredibly valuable skill to have on your resume."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Benny Blanco gave fans a glimpse inside newlywed life with Selena Gomez as he shared a series of intimate snaps from their wedding weekend - including one showing the singer asleep on his chest.

Harrison Mizen, eight, learned about the unique communication method at school and put a message in an old glass rum bottle which 'reminded him of pirates'.

A video circulating on social media of the incident shows the three-time darts world champion, 36, at the centre of a five-man scuffle near the shop's counter.