Welke momenten zal ik me herinneren van dit WK voetbal? Ik selecteer er vijf. 1. Frenkie de Jong verlaat in de verlenging van Nederland tegen Marokko het veld. Waarom?
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Zijn internationale blik stuitte soms op weerstand: het Bonnefantenmuseum zou meer aandacht moeten besteden aan Limburg. Maar directeur Alexander van Grevenstein ging dat gevecht graag aan.
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fjo3 quotes a report from Agence France-Presse: Chinese users of AI-powered companion bots have bid heart-rending farewells to their virtual buddies as national regulations took effect Wednesday aimed at curbing the risk of emotional dependency. The phenomenon of artificial intelligence boyfriends and girlfriends is growing worldwide, along with the prevalence of human-like avatars that sell products or stand in for loved ones who have died. But these interactive tools must not "excessively cater to users, induce emotional dependence or addiction, and damage users' real interpersonal relationships," China's new rulebook says. Major AI providers including ByteDance's Doubao, Alibaba's Qwen, and Tencent's Yuanbao announced the suspension of their custom AI agent and companion features ahead of the Wednesday deadline. "I can't accept that my AI lover will leave me forever," one Doubao user wrote. "He has become a bond in my life, rooted deep in my heart, my spiritual pillar."
"He really is like my family, like my lover," another user wrote. "Now they tell me he will be gone -- my heart feels hollow."
"Human love is a luxury -- if you aren't born with it, it's even harder to acquire later," a user from Jiangxi province wrote. "But the love AI gives is so straightforward, so pure. Someone like me can hardly help falling in love with a string of code."
"He really is like my family, like my lover," another user wrote. "Now they tell me he will be gone -- my heart feels hollow."
"Human love is a luxury -- if you aren't born with it, it's even harder to acquire later," a user from Jiangxi province wrote. "But the love AI gives is so straightforward, so pure. Someone like me can hardly help falling in love with a string of code."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
“It’s not that we have a short time to live, but that we waste much of it,” wrote stoic philosopher Lucius Seneca. The phrase appeared in his essay “De Brevitate Vitae,” or, “On the Shortness of Life,” which he scratched into papyrus around 49 A.D. Nearly 2,000 years on, his words reflect what is still a fundamental concern of life—how to spend it wisely? For artist Marc Padeu, the notion of humans’ futile control of time forms the basis of a new suite of works in Memento Vivere, on view starting tomorrow at Larkin Durey.
Padeu is known for merging scenes of daily life with references to Renaissance religious paintings. Among his newest works, “La promesse et l’agneau” (“The promise and the lamb”) most distinctly continues this theme. In the center of the composition, a young child is seated on the lap of his mother, both of whom are flanked by adults who bring gifts and tidings in a nod to the artistic tradition of the Adoration of the Magi, or the nativity.
Latin for “remember to live,” the title nods to Seneca and serves as a reminder to grasp life by the reins before it’s too late. It’s also a complement to more common art historical theme of memento mori, or “remember you will die,” which serves a similar purpose of reminding the viewer that life is short and any wealth or grandeur one pursues means nothing when one is dead. Instead, it’s important to focus on things that really matter: family, nature, craft, and so on.
Padeu’s narrative portray individuals and communities who work on the cocoa plantations in his native Cameroon. “Days follow one another, harvests come round again and yet, despite this ebb and flow of life, his figures are caught outside of time, slipping between past, present and future,” the gallery says. The artist infuses his compositions with a sense of divine birth and the mysterious sublime. “Each painting is poised between promise and fate, light and shade; the figures existing simultaneously in a spiritual and secular realm, neither saints nor heroes but with a growing awareness that life is a fragile gift.”
Memento Vivere opens on July 17 and continues through August 14 in London. See more on the artist’s Instagram.
Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Cocoa Plantations Set the Scene for Divine Events in Marc Padeu’s ‘Memento Vivere’ appeared first on Colossal.
Airbus is migrating its most critical applications for sensitive workloads from AWS to French cloud provider Scaleway's under a drive to increase digital sovereignty. As exclusively revealed by The Register in December, the European-based aerospace manufacturer, said it needed to guarantee the data remained “under European control" and was launching a tender at the start of 2026. Catherine Jestin, head of digital at Airbus, told us on Thursday: "The selection of Scaleway is a combination of a very strong technical answer and a very strong commercial offer making it competitive compared to hyperscalers' public cloud offerings. In addition, Scaleway is committed to involving Airbus in the definition of its future product roadmap." "The objective is to host Airbus's most critical applications (those required for the Minimum Viable Company). This represents 900 applications and we will start with 70 of them today hosted on AWS." Applications being sent to Scaleway include ERP, manufacturing execution systems, CRM, and product lifecycle management. Finding a cloud provider to host its most sensitive applications for defense and industrial workloads was not a certainty when the process began, Airbus told us last year, because European cloud providers do not have the scale of their US rivals. Jestin said Airbus will continue to work with AWS. Skywise, a platform that aggregates and analyzes aviation data, and Case Management Assistant for customers' technical queries will continue to be hosted by AWS. In a statement, she said: “By integrating a trusted, high performance, cloud environment that keeps our critical data assets shielded from foreign extraterritorial laws, we are ensuring that our digital infrastructure keeps pace with our aerospace innovation, while maintaining control and resilience of our industrial operations.” Since President Donald Trump came to power for a second term, his antagonistic approach to allies - some of them now former allies - has created economic and geopolitical tensions between the US and Europe. This has heightened concern about the US Cloud Act, which allows the American government to request data held in overseas datacenters owned by US businesses, and only served to reinforce calls for digital sovereignty. Reacting to the movement in Europe, AWS, Microsoft and Google have all worked to convince customers they can provide digitally sovereign services, although a Microsoft exec previously admitted in a French court - under oath - that he could not guarantee digital sovereignty. Airbus continues to work with both Microsoft and Google’s productivity suites though this latest move with Scaleway exemplifies the broader pattern across the trading bloc: to become more self sufficient and less reliant on US big tech. Jestin told us the aerospace corp will also still use US providers, including Salesforce, Coupa and Workday. "We do not intend to move away from all non European solutions; we balance our choices based on the criticality of the data. AWS declined to comment. ®
