Mr Mikage (ミスター御影） posted a photo:
Centre-back forced off in World Cup semi-final
Arsenal say problem does not require surgery
Arsenal, the Premier League champions, have been dealt a significant injury blow after the centre-back William Saliba was ruled out for “an extended period” with a back injury.
Saliba played with a back problem during France’s run to the World Cup semi-final and, although he will not require an operation, the 25-year-old is set for a significant spell on the sidelines. He was forced off with the injury after just 30 minutes of France’s last-four defeat by Spain.
Continue reading...Passage of annual bill complicated by Trump’s decision to join Israel in attacking Iran without congressional approval
The US House of Representatives passed a $1.15tn defense policy bill in a near-party-line vote on Wednesday, after Democrats refused to back the measure amid the war with Iran and Donald Trump’s push to impose new restrictions on voting nationwide.
A key plank of the president’s plan to spend $1.5tn on the military in the 2027 fiscal year, the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), passed the Republican-controlled chamber by a 216-212 vote, with all but six Democrats opposing its passage. Seven House Republicans broke ranks to oppose it. The measure now goes to the Senate.
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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A little over a month after the Department of Defense (DOD) bragged that nearly half of its 3.5 million employees were using AI at work, members of the Army's Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) received an email informing them that they were burning through tokens, and needed to limit use. "Although the Army CIO announced in May 2026 that they were offering unlimited tokens, by mid-June the Army CIO pool was exhausted of tokens and had to re-establish limits," the email reads. The email goes on to say that although the Army has chosen to renew token usage at "its current levels," it's unclear "if the Army CIO pool will be renewed after 1 Oct."
The Army uses Ask Sage, a multimodal generative AI platform where users can run different large language models (LLMs), including Alphabet's Gemini, Meta's Llama, and OpenAI's ChatGPT. "Apparently the whole Army burned through the whole year of tokens for just one service," says an Army employee who spoke to WIRED [...]. The Army employee says that the Army has been pushing its workers to lean into using generative AI. Employees were given an allotment of at least 200,000 tokens per month, according to emails viewed by WIRED, and were automatically allocated more if they burned through their initial allotment. Employees who had signed up for Ask Sage but were not regularly using it would receive emails encouraging them to use more of their allocated tokens.
In order to use Ask Sage, the Army had access to 100,000,000 tokens as part of an annual subscription to an "enterprise pack." Tokens represent a unit of output, either in text or image, from an LLM. For the Ask Sage tool, a single token equates to about 3.7 characters, according to documents viewed by WIRED. The Defense Department burned through some 20 billion tokens per day during the 38-day Operation Epic Fury in Iran, according to Breaking Defense. It's unclear if the tokens used by regular DOD employees are drawn from the same pool as those who might be using AI tools on classified or secret information.
The Army uses Ask Sage, a multimodal generative AI platform where users can run different large language models (LLMs), including Alphabet's Gemini, Meta's Llama, and OpenAI's ChatGPT. "Apparently the whole Army burned through the whole year of tokens for just one service," says an Army employee who spoke to WIRED [...]. The Army employee says that the Army has been pushing its workers to lean into using generative AI. Employees were given an allotment of at least 200,000 tokens per month, according to emails viewed by WIRED, and were automatically allocated more if they burned through their initial allotment. Employees who had signed up for Ask Sage but were not regularly using it would receive emails encouraging them to use more of their allocated tokens.
In order to use Ask Sage, the Army had access to 100,000,000 tokens as part of an annual subscription to an "enterprise pack." Tokens represent a unit of output, either in text or image, from an LLM. For the Ask Sage tool, a single token equates to about 3.7 characters, according to documents viewed by WIRED. The Defense Department burned through some 20 billion tokens per day during the 38-day Operation Epic Fury in Iran, according to Breaking Defense. It's unclear if the tokens used by regular DOD employees are drawn from the same pool as those who might be using AI tools on classified or secret information.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
De 18-jarige Rotterdammer die dinsdagavond is aangehouden voor het dodelijke schietincident in Nijmegen, is door de politie naar huis gestuurd. Hij wordt niet meer aangemerkt als een verdachte. Dat laat de politie woensdagavond weten aan Omroep Gelderland.
Since the beginning of the year, several people have remarked to me off the cuff, apropos of nothing in particular: "Google Cloud is killing it." Parent company Alphabet reported Q2 earnings [PDF] after the bell on Wednesday and the numbers speak for themselves. Let's go to the tape: Google Cloud revenue was up 82 percent from the same quarter last year, increasing from $13.6 billion to $24.8 billion. Google Cloud operating income more than tripled during the same period, going from $2.8 billion to $8.8 billion. Once the distant-third-place laughingstock of the IaaS platforms, Google's cloud business is now the growth engine of Alphabet and a significant contributor to the company's overall business, making up 21 percent of revenues and 22 percent of operating income. How'd this magic happen? The company's claiming it's all AI, citing "demand for AI infrastructure and AI solutions." We have no idea if that's actually the case, given the plethora of more prosaic offerings from the Google Cloud team, but the company's Gemini marketing strategy – pushing it in front of hundreds of millions of searchers every day – can't be faulted. Informal checks against our own sources suggest Anthropic Claude remains the go-to frontier model for most enterprise customers, and we're definitely hearing about companies switching between models to make the most of token costs vs effectiveness. But when the AI bubble finally pops, it could bring down money-losers OpenAI and Anthropic, and maybe even Oracle, which has gotten in a bit too deep. Google, like the janitor at the end of the universe, will be there to pick up the pieces – and talent. ®
MOUNTAIN VIEW (ANP) - Het moederbedrijf van Google heeft het afgelopen kwartaal fors meer verdiend aan zijn cloudactiviteiten. Alphabet profiteerde van een versnelde omzetgroei van Google Cloud dankzij een grote vraag naar AI-infrastructuur en AI-oplossingen. Ook boekte Alphabet een fors hogere nettowinst.
De omzet van de cloudtak groeide met 82 procent naar bijna 24,8 miljard dollar. Topman Sundar Pichai noemt het mede daardoor een "fantastisch" kwartaal. "Onze investeringen in kunstmatige intelligentie herdefiniëren wat mogelijk is binnen elk onderdeel van ons bedrijf", voegt hij daaraan toe.
De totale omzet van Alphabet steeg met bijna een kwart tot zo'n 119,8 miljard dollar. Onderaan de streep boekte het bedrijf een nettowinst van ruim 112,2 miljard dollar. Dat is een flinke stijging vergeleken met de 28,2 miljard dollar in het tweede kwartaal van vorig jaar.
Verder stelt het bedrijf dat zijn AI-functies zorgen voor meer zoekopdrachten en dat meer dan 1,7 miljard unieke gebruikers WK-gerelateerde video's op YouTube hebben gekeken tijdens het voetbalevenement.
