MOSKOU (ANP/BLOOMBERG/DPA) - Rusland heeft de export van diesel verboden om binnenlandse tekorten te voorkomen na OekraĂŻense aanvallen op Russische olieraffinaderijen. Moskou stelde eerder al beperkingen in op de export van benzine en kerosine om dezelfde reden.
Door de aanvallen van het buurland is de Russische olieproductie gedaald. Rusland heeft daardoor moeite om de binnenlandse voorraad olieproducten op peil te houden. Het Russische olieconcern Tatneft kondigde vorige maand aan de verkoop van benzine en diesel bij zijn tankstations te beperken. Bij tankstations die nog brandstof verkopen staan dagelijks lange rijen.
Het exportverbod kan voor verdere druk zorgen op de wereldwijde brandstofmarkt, die al veel last heeft van de oorlog in het Midden-Oosten. Rusland was vorig jaar verantwoordelijk voor ongeveer 11 procent van het wereldwijde dieselaanbod, meldt persbureau Bloomberg op basis van data van Vortexa.
PAU (ANP) - Wielrenner Olav Kooij heeft zijn eerste ritzege geboekt in de Tour de France. De 24-jarige debutant van Decathlon CMA CGM was in het Zuid-Franse Pau in de vijfde etappe de snelste in een rommelige massasprint, de eerste van deze Ronde van Frankrijk. De Duitser Max Kanter reed na goed voorbereidend werk van de Nederlander Mike Teunissen naar de tweede plaats, de Belg Tim Merlier werd derde.
It's bad enough that you used AI to write a research paper instead of composing it yourself. Now, you can take the extra step to hide the evidence of your sloth. A startup has decided academics need a way to hide LLM tells, yet they insist their goal isn’t to support bad habits among boffins. AI humanizers are nothing new - take a cursory look online and you’ll find that companies pushing AI that helps AI writing sound less like AI wrote it are a dime a dozen. None, says the team behind Academic Humanizer, have been specifically tailored to papers and grant proposals. Thankfully for the world’s lazy academics unwilling to actually do their jobs, that’s now changed. “The problem is that AI-assisted drafts come out generic and verbose, with … inflated phrasing, and over-long sentences,” University of Minnesota associate professor and cofounder of MorphMind, the company behind the tool, Jie Ding, wrote in its GitHub readme. “They also drift from the author's own voice and lose the precision scholarship depends on.” A previous version of that statement, written prior to a recent readme update, lays the point of the tool bare. Academic Humanizer, the opening of the readme read until an update five days ago, is designed to “strip the tells of AI writing from papers and grant proposals, without flattening the precise, evidence-bound voice scholarship requires.” The GitHub repo includes several examples of text run through the humanizer for those who want to see what it’s actually capable of. Academic Humanizer is, at its core, just a Claude skill, so it’s using more AI to correct the problems introduced into the academic writing space by AI. To further make its generative utterances more lifelike, Academic Humanizer can be pointed directly at its user’s prior work so that it’ll sound more like the “author” of the new paper instead of a bot. As the GitHub repo and Ding both point out, the Humanizer is designed to rewrite AI-assisted drafts rather than generate new content, so it isn't supposed to pile more AI slop onto an already AI-generated draft. “Academic Humanizer is a writing-clarity tool to help researchers express their own ideas more precisely. It is not designed to generate novel content or circumvent review,” Ding told The Register in an email. The readme further warns users that Academic Humanizer doesn’t remove their obligation to disclose that AI helped them write a paper, or wrote it in its entirety. But if the tool isn't capable of generating findings, inventing data, or changing citations, instead serving only as "an editing aid for clarity and voice," what does that mean for weak or error-prone material in the original AI-generated draft? It probably means that while the tool may tighten prose, it isn't intended to verify the underlying arguments or evidence. Weak content may simply end up sounding more convincingly human - not a great prospect for an industry already drowning in AI-generated slop. Academics at The University of Surrey warned last year that they were being inundated by “formulaic research articles” with “superficial and oversimplified … analysis” that were obviously crafted by large language models. The problem has even reached the AI research space itself, where last month AI output detector GPTZero said it found 100 hallucinated references across 51 papers accepted by the Conference on Neural Information Processing Systems (NeurIPS). It doesn’t bode well for academic integrity, already imperiled by the growing use of AI in higher education and academia, nor does it bode well for the quality of college graduates, either. According to MIT, students who use AI to write essays and papers have less brain activity than those who forego the tools, leading to poorer retention and less actual learning. But sure, let’s create a tool to make AI writing sound more human - that’s definitely the right approach to take in this situation. ®
A lot has been made of how open the women’s draw at Wimbledon is this year, even before the defending champion, Iga Swiatek, and the world’s top two, Aryna Sabalenka and Elena Rybakina, all fell in the first week. But sometimes it pays to be aware of the in-form players, whoever they are, and so it was no surprise to see Marta Kostyuk and Linda Noskova march into the semi-finals.
Kostyuk, the Ukrainian 12th seed who reached the semi-finals at the French Open last month, crushed the 2024 runner-up Jasmine Paolini 6-3, 6-2 on Centre Court while the 21-year-old Noskova, seeded ninth, saw off Elise Mertens of Belgium 6-3, 7-5 to make it 10 wins out of 11 on grass this year.
The US president is in combative mood as Nato leaders meet for a two-day summit in Ankara. There are divisions over Russia’s war in Ukraine, defence spending, and the US-Israel war in Iran with signs of the fragile ceasefire collapsing.
The Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, is holding talks with leaders as he rallies the European cause against Russia’s war that has reached the Ukrainian capital, Kyiv, as Nato allies present an increasingly united front against an unreliable US.
Lucy Hough speaks to the Guardian’s central and eastern Europe correspondent Shaun Walker
As the family travails worsen, it’s a wretched time to lose face and maybe millions of pounds to his tabloid tormentor. Epic battle, epic fail
It really hasn’t been a very good week for Harry. The fifth in line to the throne will retire to Montecito, his gated California fastness – not, as seemed at least possible a week ago, having visited his mother country to public sympathy and applause, mending a few broken fences and seeing his old dad again. Now instead it will be a retreat in confusion, not having stayed in a palace, or seeing his busy pater, and worst of all, bested at huge cost by the Daily Mail, the bete noire of all bete noires.
The prince might reflect that he has brought many of his troubles on himself. He will leave with the rightwing press chortling that, for a crusader for personal privacy, he has outed himself much more comprehensively than they ever managed with his rancorous TV interviews about how horrible his family has been to him, his glutinous Netflix series and, most of all, his memoir Spare, with its revelation, among much else, about his frostbitten penis.
The co-founder of adult creator subscription platform MintStars announced she’s leaving the platform and donating her ownership shares in the company to its creators and sex workers.
In an email to creators using the platform in late June, Jessica Van Meir wrote that 20 percent of her shares would be used to create a co-ownership pool for creators, while her remaining three percent of the company will be donated to SWOP Behind Bars, a non-profit that supports incarcerated sex workers and sex trafficking survivors in the U.S.
“With this step, which completes my personal mission to launch a company for and by adult content creators, I will also be officially moving on from my position as a Director at MintStars,” Van Meir wrote in the email. Van Meir is a Harvard PhD candidate studying the sex workers’ rights movement in Latin America, and also co-founded the Boston Sex Workers and Allies Collective three years ago. Van Meir and Daniel Sargent co-founded MintStars in 2021; Sargent will remain at the company as CEO.
Setting up a share pool sets a precedent rarely seen on subscription sites, where creators are directly rewarded for the success of the platform, not just their own individual work.
Van Meir said attacks on her academic work outside of MintStars contributed to her decision to step away. “In the past year, my PhD research has faced attacks from anti-sex work organizations that have attempted to use my affiliation with MintStars to undermine the credibility of my research,” Van Meir wrote in the letter to creators. “I would never want my work with the company to prevent my research and activism from benefiting sex worker communities, so it is time for me to pass the baton.”
The pool of shares for creators will be allocated “in proportion to their contributions to the platform,” Van Meir wrote, adding that the platform plans to launch a points system to earn ownership. If the company is ever sold or pays out dividends to shareholders, creators will be paid in proportion to those points via phantom shares. Phantom shares or stock are a cash incentive tied to company performance that doesn’t dilute the company’s ownership stock or give holders voting rights, but do reward holders — typically executives or employees, but in this case, creators — for their contributions to the company’s success.
According to Van Meir, MintStars creators will be able to earn points in accordance to their earned revenue, how many referrals they’ve made, and number of months they’ve actively used the platform. “This means that you will share in the profits of the company’s success, in a fair proportion to how much you’ve contributed,” she wrote.
Many social media and user-generated content platforms have grown massive on the strength and support of sex workers who popularized it. Some of the biggest, like X and Instagram, grew thanks to sexual content; others, like OnlyFans, have been criticized for considering banning adult content due to payment processing problems and banking discrimination in the past.
Demonia, a financial dominatrix who’s used MintStars since 2023, told 404 Media she’s felt frustrated by unstable creator platforms and online censorship in the past, and hopes to put more effort into her MintStars presence following this announcement. “I will be honest, I didn't think I'd live to see such a revolutionary choice in a strictly capitalistic society and environment that promotes individualism to embarrassing levels, and I am elated to have chosen to be part of this project from its early steps,” Demonia told me in an email. “Not only cooperative enterprises are healthier environments to work in on a general level, but there is now a further level of security for the creators who decide to invest in the platform as a source of income, and a great deal of motivation to see it succeed.”
AVN reported that the program for earning points will launch this month and take retroactive activity into account, and that MintStars will also introduce new governance measures including a Creator Advisory Board.
“This co-ownership means to me that MintStars aims to empower sex workers on a practical level, recognizing their importance and their rights, without limiting our creativity and safety in the name of profit, and it will definitely impact my effort into making sure such an example lives to make the adult industry's history, not only because it's a better choice for myself only, but because it also shows to everyone that there is a better way to enjoy our kinky spaces without being afraid of being deplatformed, of our content being rejected or deleted, of our entire existence being put into discussion,” Demonia said.
“This partnership is another important step forward in creating a complete ecosystem of care that is both for and by adult industry workers,” a spokesperson for SWOP Behind Bars told 404 Media. “We're excited to deepen our ties in the MintStars community and anticipate that Ms. Van Meir's shares donation will enable us to better understand and meet those workers' needs.”
MintStars uses the U.S. dollar-pegged stablecoin USDC to process payments. Fans and customers can pay as they would on any other website, with a credit card. Creators can receive payouts in fiat as well. Last month, MintStars announced a new partnership with Payy Network. "Creators face financial discrimination every day, bank accounts shut down, payment processors blocking transactions, and earnings delayed for weeks," Sargent said in an announcement of that partnership. "Crypto solved access, but it didn't solve privacy or safety. Nobody's financial activity should be publicly exposed on a blockchain." Settlements on the blockchain also prevent some of the most risky aspects of accepting payments as an adult site, including chargebacks, censorship, and banking discrimination.
“The fact of the matter in the adult industry is that without the working women who make platforms all of their revenue, the latter would never succeed and we can now choose for what we believe in and choose who believes in us, MintStars has given us the opportunity to have our voices heard,” Demonia said. “I do hope more sex workers will put their safety and rights first and focus their energies where they will be undoubtedly rewarded, as it's been proven over and over again since the beginning of this project.
