Een kruiswoordpuzzel, maar dan heel klein (en snel).

Je krijgt een paar cijfers cadeau, maar het grid van 9x9 moet foutloos ingevuld worden.

Wie of wat staat er midden in het nieuws? Een actuele puzzel, die makkelijker is als je het nieuws een beetje volgt.

In het duel tussen twee voetbalgrootheden is Spanje superieur en valt het sterrenensemble van Frankrijk zwaar tegen. Voor de tweede keer in de geschiedenis bereikt Spanje de WK-finale.

A lawsuit from 26 Meta employees alleges the company used AI-driven scoring and monitoring systems to select workers for layoffs, disproportionately targeting employees with disabilities or those who had taken protected medical, family, pregnancy, or parental leave. "Meta did not assemble the termination list through the considered judgment of managers who knew the work. Instead, Meta used a constellation of internal artificial-intelligence systems -- including a system referred to internally as 'Metamate,' employee-trained 'second-brain' agents, keystroke- and activity-monitoring data, AI-token-usage dashboards, and algorithmically assisted performance ranking and calibration -- to score, rank, and select employees for inclusion on the list," the lawsuit (PDF) said. Ars Technica reports: Employees were allegedly graded, among other things, on how much they used Meta's AI tools. "Meta's internal dashboards classified employees by their stage of adoption of its artificial-intelligence tools, using categories such as 'AI Native,' 'AI First,' and 'AI Enabled,'" the lawsuit said. The lawsuit is apparently "the first against a major U.S. company to challenge the alleged use of AI in conducting layoffs," according to Reuters. The complaint alleges that Meta's tools for monitoring employees did not account for differences caused by disabilities and protected leaves. "Those tools draw on inputs -- performance ratings, calibration scores, productivity and output metrics, 'AI-native' ratings, and AI-token consumption -- that, by design, cannot be accumulated by an employee who is on protected medical or family leave, or whose output is reduced by a disability," the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit alleged that Meta management did not take steps to adjust scores for employees who took leave or who requested reasonable accommodations for disabilities. "Meta did not neutralize those inputs for protected leave; did not exclude protected-leave-takers or accommodation-seekers from the selection cohort; and did not pause the system for the individualized, leave- and accommodation-neutral review that the law requires," the complaint alleged. "The result was that employees who took protected leaves were disproportionately selected for layoff, based on scoring that not only failed to account for their protected leaves, but in effect penalized the employees for exercising their legal rights to these leaves." The 26 plaintiffs requested leaves or disability accommodations in the 24 months before being selected for layoffs, the lawsuit said. The layoffs are not yet finalized, but employees are scheduled to start losing their jobs on July 22, the lawsuit said. "These claims lack merit and are not based on facts," said Meta in a statement. "Workforce management and organizational decisions were and are made by people, not AI."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google DeepMind chief Demis Hassabis is calling for a U.S.-led AI standards body to review frontier models for national security risks such as cybersecurity and biological threats. His proposal would create a federally overseen public-private organization, initially voluntary and eventually mandatory for U.S. deployment. CNBC reports: Google DeepMind boss Demis Hassabis, a Nobel laureate, said in an article posted on X on Tuesday that "urgent action" was needed to address risks associated with artificial general intelligence (AGI) -- the point at which AI matches or surpasses human intelligence. "We've already seen the challenges frontier models pose for cybersecurity, and other threats including nuclear and bio risks may soon emerge as capabilities continue to advance," he said.

[...] Hassabis said the U.S. was well positioned to lead in developing an AI framework "given its economic and technical standing." "It could establish a new Standards Body modelled on a federally overseen public-private partnership or self-regulatory organisation, much like the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), with a board that includes independent leading technical experts and open-source representatives," he added. FINRA regulates brokerage firms and exchange markets in the U.S.

The proposed body would need "substantial" funding "in order to attract world-class technical talent and provide the necessary compute resources for large-scale testing," Hassabis said. Funding would "likely" come from industry, he added. Frontier labs would initially voluntarily share models with the body for review up to 30 days before release, before becoming mandatory for deployment in the U.S. market after being shown to be "effective." "Specific agentic AI tests could look for attempts to bypass safety guardrails or signs of deception, and ensure best practices, such as digitally watermarking AI-generated images and generating human-readable output tokens to understand model reasoning," Hassabis said. Further reading: Over 200 Economists Say 'We Must Act Now' On AI's Economic Impact

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

OpenAI has never been as open as its name suggests and is becoming even less so. The free-spending AI giant recently revised the multi-agent orchestration in its Codex command line interface to encrypt messages passed to subagents. OpenAI's Codex supports multi-agent orchestration, a way to have a parent agent spawn child agents or delegate tasks to other agents that may call out to different models. Codex/GPT-5.6 introduced a protocol called multi-agent v2 that appears to be geared toward letting the runtime allocate work instead of leaving those decisions to user-declared configuration settings. Multi-agent v2 is still under development and OpenAI hasn't formally documented it yet. Developers, however, have observed changes made to Codex to accommodate the new agent plumbing – and some are concerned by the new arrangements. Last month, OpenAI devs merged a pull request (a suggested code change) to encrypt multi-agent v2 message payloads – the text instruction passed between agents. The pull request prefaces its explanatory text with the word "Why" but doesn't actually offer a reason for the change. It states: "Multi-agent v2 currently routes agent instructions through normal tool arguments and inter-agent context. That means the parent model can emit plaintext task text, Codex can persist it in history/rollouts, and the recipient can receive it as ordinary assistant-message JSON. "This changes the v2 path so agent instructions stay encrypted between model calls: Responses [An OpenAI API - Ed] encrypts the message argument returned by the model, Codex forwards only that ciphertext, and Responses decrypts it internally for the recipient model." A desire to enhance privacy and security, or conceal data that would be useful for model distillation, are sound reasons for these changes. Yet OpenAI has not said why it made the change. In the absence of clear communication from OpenAI, developers have urged the company to ensure that its implementation doesn't sacrifice auditability to accommodate other concerns. An issue opened by Ignat Remizov, CTO at payment service Zolvat, says, "The encrypted delivery path is understandable as privacy hardening, but it also removes the human-readable task/message text from local rollout history, trace reduction, and parent-side audit/debug surfaces." Remizov's concern is that developers and code maintainers will have less information to assess the instructions an agent received and the actions it took. "Guys, we don’t want to build Skynet and then be unable to audit what it’s doing," he quips. Other developers, echoing Remizov's concern about the loss of observability, speculate that OpenAI has locked its agent messaging down to keep competitors from seeing how its multi-agent implementation works. OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment. ®

Here's the full 2011 filmed performance starring an ensemble cast led by Neil Patrick Harris. It also stars Martha Plimpton, Stephen Colbert, Jon Cryer, Patti LuPone, Christina Hendricks, and Chryssie Whitehead.

From the 1970 original D. A. Pennebaker. 'Barcelona' from the 1996 London performance (with Adrian Lester & Hannah Waddingham...) Adam Driver singing 'Being Alive in 'A marriage story'. "Company" on the blue before.