The Guardian

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Why the supreme court’s tariffs ruling is a win for world trade – but also tricky

The decision adds to economic uncertainty, as deals Donald Trump struck with other countries are upended

It is refreshing to witness the US supreme court recover its spine and stand up to Donald Trump’s most extreme caprices. The 6-3 decision on Friday to strike down his barrage of tariffs on imports from virtually everywhere based on the preposterous argument that they addressed national emergencies will reassure the world that the US’s system of government – based on the separation of powers, checks and balances, and the rule of law – has not collapsed entirely.

But let’s hold the (imported) champagne. The court’s ruling will not restore the United States to its former place as a reasonable, trustworthy player in the world economy. The rules-based economic architecture that underpinned the integration of the world economy over the decades that followed the second world war remains fractured. Trump is still intent on its disintegration. And he retains power to do so.

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California bill would ban ICE agents from being near polling sites

Legislation responds to concerns that immigration officers could interfere with voting during November midterms

A bill introduced this week by California lawmakers would ban federal immigration agents from being stationed outside polling places, responding to concerns that Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officers could interfere with voting during the November midterm elections.

The legislation was introduced on Thursday by state senator Tom Umberg and co-authored by state senator Sabrina Cervantes. Umberg said the measure aimed to safeguard voters from “ruthless intimidation” near polling locations.

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UK clinical trial into puberty blockers paused after medicines regulator raises concerns

Study set to delay recruitment after warning participants should be a minimum of 14 years old

A clinical trial into puberty blockers for children has been paused after the medicines regulator warned it should have a minimum age limit of 14 because of the “unquantified risk” of “long-term biological harms”.

Discussions between the Medicines and Healthcare products Regulatory Agency (MHRA) and the trial sponsor, King’s College London, will begin next week to discuss the wellbeing concerns, the Department of Health and Social Care (DHSC) said on Friday evening.

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Wel.nl

Minder lezen, Meer weten.

Politie prijst kritische blik Big Brother Award

AMSTERDAM (ANP) - De Nationale Politie heeft de kritische blik van Bits of Freedom gebruikt om de werkwijze aan te passen. Dat zei plaatsvervangend korpschef Wilbert Paulissen in een videoboodschap bij de uitreiking van de Big Brother Awards, de 'prijs' voor de grootste privacyschenders van 2025.

"Je bent nooit blij dat je een prijs als deze wint, maar het is altijd goed dat er kritisch meegekeken wordt naar het handelen van de politie. En ik vind het ook mooi om hier te melden dat we op basis van die kritische blik onze werkwijze aangepast hebben en hier nu anders mee omgaan", aldus Paulissen. "Het gaat over het evenwicht tussen de bescherming van de privacy van mensen en onze taak als het gaat over het waarborgen van de veiligheid. Daar zit een soort spanningsveld tussen."

De Nationale Politie won met 30 procent van de stemmen de publieksprijs. Aanleiding was het monitoren van activisten via sociale media en ze vervolgens thuis opzoeken zonder wettelijke grondslag. Intimiderend, vindt Bits of Freedom.


Nederland met acht keer goud op vierde plek in medaillespiegel

MILAAN (ANP) - Nederland staat met nog twee dagen te gaan stevig op de vierde plaats in het medailleklassement van de Olympische Spelen in Milaan en Cortina d'Ampezzo. Vrijdag bezorgden langebaanschaatsster Antoinette Rijpma-de Jong (1500 meter) en de shorttrackmannen (aflossing) TeamNL de zevende en achtste gouden medaille.

Daarmee werd het recordaantal gouden medailles van Sotsji (2014), Pyeongchang (2018) en Beijing (2022) geëvenaard. Die drie Winterspelen eindigde Nederland met acht keer goud.

Noorwegen leidt het klassement in Italië met een recordaantal van zeventien gouden medailles, gevolgd door de Verenigde Staten (tien) en Italië (negen).

Spelen van 1972

Nederland eindigde bij de Spelen van 1972 in Sapporo op de vierde plaats van de medaillespiegel. In Sotsji en Beijing was de zesde plaats de eindklassering voor TeamNL en in Pyeongchang de vijfde plaats.

Bij de Winterspelen zijn nu 102 van de 116 onderdelen afgewerkt.


Schulting ziet abrupt einde aan rentree op shorttrackijs Milaan

MILAAN (ANP) - Voor Suzanne Schulting zat het olympisch shorttracktoernooi er ineens op in de halve finale van de 1500 meter. De 28-jarige Friezin ging halverwege haar halve finale in een duel met de Italiaanse Elisa Confortola plots onderuit. "Ik viel uit het niets, ik brak gewoon weg op mijn linkerschaats en that's it", zei de drievoudig olympisch kampioene. Landgenote Xandra Velzeboer kwam in dezelfde halve finale ook ten val.

"In de kwartfinale merkte ik dat mijn benen er echt even in moesten komen", zei Schulting over haar eerste internationale shorttrackwedstrijd sinds de WK van 2024. "Maar ik voelde me heel goed en sterk. Ook in de actie die ik opzette voelde ik me sterk en dan is het heel frustrerend dat je op deze manier het ijs moet verlaten. Maar het was ook heel mooi om weer terug te zijn op het ijs."


Slashdot

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Several Meta Employees Have Started Calling Themselves 'AI Builders'

An anonymous reader shares a report: Meta product managers are rebranding. Some are now calling themselves "AI builders," a signal that AI coding tools are changing who gets to build software inside the company. One of them, Jeremie Guedj, announced the change in a LinkedIn post last week. "I still can't believe I'm writing this: as of today, my full-time job at Meta is AI Builder," he wrote.

Guedj has spent more than a decade as a traditional product manager, a role that sets the road map and strategy for products then built by engineering teams. He said that while his title in Meta's internal systems still lists him as a product manager, his actual work is now full-time building with AI on what he calls an "AI-native team." Another Meta product manager also lists "AI Builder" on her LinkedIn profile, while at least two other Meta engineers write the term in their bios, Business Insider found.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI Has No Moat, No Tech Edge, No Lock-in and No Real Plan, Analyst Warns

OpenAI faces four fundamental strategic problems that no amount of fundraising or capex announcements can paper over, according to analyst Benedict Evans: it has no unique technology, its enormous user base is shallow and fragile, incumbents like Google and Meta are leveraging superior distribution to close the gap, and its product roadmap is dictated by whatever the research labs happen to discover rather than by deliberate product strategy.

The company claims 800-900 million weekly active users, but 80% of them sent fewer than 1,000 messages across all of 2025, averaging fewer than three prompts a day, and only 5% pay. OpenAI has acknowledged what it calls a "capability gap" between what models can do and what people use them for -- a framing Evans reads as a polite way to avoid admitting the absence of product-market fit. Gemini and Meta AI are meanwhile gaining share rapidly because the products look nearly indistinguishable to typical users, and Google and Meta already have the distribution to push them. Evans compares ChatGPT to Netscape -- an early leader in a category where the products were hard to tell apart, overtaken by a competitor that used distribution as a crowbar.

On capex, Evans argues that Altman's ambitions -- claiming $1.4 trillion and 30 gigawatts of future compute -- amount to an attempt to will OpenAI into a seat at a table where annual infrastructure spending may need to reach hundreds of billions. But a seat at the table is not leverage over it; he compares this to TSMC, which holds a de facto chip monopoly yet captures little value further up the stack.

OpenAI's own strategy diagrams from late last year laid out a full-stack platform vision -- chips, models, developer tools, consumer products -- each layer reinforcing the others. Evans argues this borrows the language of Windows and iOS without possessing any of the underlying dynamics: no network effect, no lock-in preventing developers from calling a different model's API, and no reason customers would know or care which foundation model powers the product they are using.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MetaFilter

The past 24 hours of MetaFilter

:emoji::emoji::emoji: Female Fronted Metal & Rock # 22 :emoji::emoji::emoji:

Arch Enemy , the Swedish melodic death metal band, has a new vocalist and a new song, To the Last Breath.

They recently split ways with Alissa White-Gluz (she put out a really cool, long-form, more melodic song, The Room Where She Died), who had previously replaced Angela Gossow. The new vocalist, Australian Lauren Hart, has stated that she was inspired to learn to sing harsh vocals by Gossow's work with the band, so this is in a way a closing of the circle. Hart was previously with Once Human (eg: Eye Of Chaos). Here's a cool clip of Hart with some other female metal masters covering Sepultura - Territory. Poppy put out a new album, Empty Hands. Lead single, Time Will Tell, pretty similar to her previous album, IMO. Finally, more hardcore than metal but still pretty great, unpolished* - collateral damage.

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Hand-drawn monograms and lettering collection 2022-2023


Hand-drawn monograms and lettering collection 2022-2023