Mr Mikage (ミスター御影） posted a photo:
Coach aims to strengthen with Ekitiké and Bradley out
Mac Allister has been linked with move to Real Madrid
Andoni Iraola has said he is determined to keep Alexis Mac Allister and Alisson for his first season as Liverpool head coach and must strengthen a squad that will be without Hugo Ekitiké and Conor Bradley for several more months.
The dust had barely settled on Argentina’s World Cup final defeat by Spain when Mac Allister was linked with a move to Real Madrid. Iraola, in Chicago for the start of Liverpool’s pre-season tour of the US, accepted the midfielder is unlikely to be 100% ready for the Premier League opener at Newcastle due to a post-World Cup holiday. But he allayed doubts over Mac Allister’s long-term future at Liverpool, where he is under contract until 2028, by insisting the 27-year-old is part of next season’s plans.
Continue reading...After nationwide protests Oleksandr Syrskyi is to be replaced in reshuffle and popular defence minister returns to government
Volodymyr Zelenskyy has fired Ukraine’s commander-in-chief Oleksandr Syrskyi and offered a “prominent position” to the defence minister he sacked last week in a move that sparked nationwide protests.
In a late-night TV address, Zelenskyy said he was appointing Mykhailo Drapatyi, a popular and innovative general, as the new head of Ukraine’s armed forces. Drapatyi would oversee a reorganisation of the army’s command structure, Ukraine’s president said.
Continue reading...England international signs seven-year contract
Xabi Alonso was key factor in Chelsea’s record signing
Morgan Rogers has joined Chelsea from Aston Villa for a fee of £117m, signing a seven-year deal to become the Blues’ record signing.
A deal was agreed on Saturday for the 23-year-old to move to Stamford Bridge as the club stole in ahead of Arsenal, who had been in talks to sign the England international and had appeared to be favourites to secure his signature.
Continue reading...The rebooted GCHQ digital warfare series has more zip than its predecessor – but people bashing away on computers in a bunker near Cheltenham is inherently unsexy
If the espionage battles of the future are going to be fought online, TV thrillers will have to reflect that fact, much as they might not want to. Cyber-attacks, cross-border malware and digital misinformation just aren’t especially televisual: whatever you do, you always end up with a speed-typing nerd muttering “Shit!” as gobbledegook scrolls across a monitor and red lights flash in the distance.
In 2022, Channel 4’s missable drama The Undeclared War tried to crack the problem by throwing heavyweight film-making pedigree at it. Peter Kosminsky, the esteemed director behind Wolf Hall and The Government Inspector, had evidently researched the back end out of the subject, presenting the details of an imagined campaign of Russian interference in Britain’s daily digital functionality – and, from there, the democratic process of an election – in a way that real-life sleepless nerds said was credible enough.
Continue reading...Elephants May Hear Ground Vibrations Through Their Bones, Helping Them to Communicate Over 6 Miles. “Studying elephant hearing isn’t as simple as asking an elephant to wear headphones…”
Who needs expensive frontier models to find software vulns? Cisco has just released two open-weight models that specialize in finding known bugs in existing codebases. The models, Antares-350M and Antares-1B, are part of Cisco’s new Antares family of security small language models (SLMs), and are now available on Hugging Face - but only to vetted users. “We’re making sure we’re gating that and appropriately granting access,” DJ Sampath, Cisco's senior vice president and general manager of AI software and platform, told The Register. The company is working with academic and nonprofit organizations, as well as smaller and public organizations’ security teams, to ensure they have access to the vulnerability-hunting models. Plus, because both are small models designed to run locally, “you also need the keys to the source code” to scan for and find vulnerabilities, Sampath said. “This means an attacker is going to be able to exploit an endpoint or a service that you have.” It also means that proprietary code never leaves the organization’s machines, compared to cloud-based LLMs that send code to the AI providers’ external servers for processing and analysis. This enables security analysis in environments with strict privacy or compliance requirements, according to the networking and security giant. And yes, it's named after the massive red super-giant star. “It's almost 1,000 times bigger than the sun, even though the sun dominates the sky, and that is the analogy that we're using here for vulnerability detection and localization,” Cisco VP and chief AI scientist Amin Karbasi told The Register. “The impact of vulnerabilities in your codebase is huge, but it might be only a single file or a few lines of code in a million lines of code.” A future, 3-billion-parameter model in the Antares family won’t be released to the public, Karbasi added. “We are completely gating the 3B model to make sure that we responsibly release it to communities that need it,” he said. Small yet mighty Cisco claims that its models perform as well as or better than dozens of larger models in its new benchmark test that measures how efficiently AI models identify security flaws in codebases. Antares-1B outperforms Google’s Gemini 3 Pro and is comparable to Z.ai's GLM-5.2, we’re told, while the yet-to-be-released Antares-3B does a better job at finding vulnerabilities than GLM-5.2 and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5. Plus, we’re told that the small models scan code much faster and at a fraction of the cost of larger, token-gobbling AI systems. “If you look at the performance, in terms of the time it takes to finish 500 repositories, Antares finishes the entire cohort of repositories in 15 minutes, whereas frontier models take five hours,” Karbasi said, adding that this translates to significantly less cost. “It takes like less than $1 whereas frontier models are above $100 into $150 of cost,” he added. The difference, Karbasi explained, is that Cisco took a “fundamentally different approach” to building Antares. “These models have been trained in a very different way,” he said. “Antares is inherently not a chatbot. It is an investigator. It is a search engine. It has to find a very specific thing that might be a needle in a haystack, and it goes and finds that.” This required training the model on several different ways to search for vulnerabilities “because one way of search may not actually be fruitful, then it has to change its strategy, do it another way, and then do it another way,” Karbasi said. “Because it is very nimble and it’s very small, it can actually do a lot of search at the same time, which is very different from bigger models.” Karbasi likened it to a bicycle on a busy London street: “You can go much faster than the biggest truck.” Or, to use Sampath’s favorite analogy for the benefits of using a small, security-focused model to find bugs in code: “Sometimes you don't need a private jet to go to a corner store, right?”®
I came across this fun little comic titled We Didn’t Lose the Plot. It has a straightforward conclusion: more things should come to an end. The “things” referred to here is media like books and movies and television but I’d extend it to many other things as well.
Like web projects.
So often, things are built in the attempt to have infinite growth. And like cancer, they seemingly grow to the point where the entire thing eventually dies or becomes useless at the problem it originally set out to solve.
I like projects that have a definitive end. One of the things I liked about doing the Fifty project was that it had to finish. I don’t need to do a Fifty: The Refiftying, or Fifty 2: Fifty Boogaloo, or 2 Fifty 2 Furious. The project is done.
It’s likely why I enjoy building concepts or mini-apps. They’re quick and solve a specific problem or answer a particular question without needing to be grown, sold, serviced, or maintained.
I’ve been considering potential projects that would have a specific end in mind with which I could build a mini-site around. I don’t have anything planned yet but I’m looking forward to the possibilities.
Have something to say? Tell me about it.