AegirPhotography has added a photo to the pool:

Sunset over Newcastle baths. Shot on Awabakal country.

Saudis yet to provide details about damage from drone attack to key east-west pipeline to Red Sea that could affect 4% of global oil supply

Saudi Arabia will run out of oil ⁠stocks for export if it ⁠doesn’t restart a drone-damaged major ​pipeline to the Red Sea within days, leading to the loss of up to 4% of global supply, Saudi oil buyers and traders said.

Satellite photos released on Sunday night appeared to show a pumping station on the key 1,200km (745-mile) Saudi east-west pipeline charred and badly damaged, after drone attacks on Friday.

Continue reading...

Toronto film festival: the actor gives one of her best performances to date in a smoothly made globe-trotting drama of a woman’s life after the loss of her husband

There’s a jump scare about 30 minutes into the glossy romantic drama Love of Your Life that’s about as effective as anything you’ll see in a horror movie this year.

The film is focused on the life and loves of Maya (Margaret Qualley), a twentysomething Boston nurse who meet-cutes with the nerdy and idiosyncratic Felix (Gabriel Basso) during the purchase of a nightstand. We follow the initial giddy rush of their courting as they progress all the way to an impromptu wedding over the course of a few years, marked by Maya’s change in age announced in text. But just as we’re about to process the unsettling introduction of Felix using Chekhov’s inhaler, a news report interrupts the sunny tone. Spoiler: it’s March 2020.

Continue reading...

Toronto film festival: Shakespeare in Love director John Madden’s feelgood – and bad – comedy-drama is powered by excellent performances and authenticity

So far at this year’s Toronto film festival, I have seen three films involving someone with dementia and two featuring someone who has Aids. It’s not just a sign that the lineup could perhaps benefit from some more light relief but also that certain conditions and illnesses still tend to be covered more often than others on screen.

Last year’s festival saw Scottish hit I Swear bring an unprecedented level of awareness to people who live with Tourette’s and while there’s perhaps less of an obvious edge to John Madden’s more politely framed comedy-drama Onwards and Sideways, it too acts as both narrative movie and potential educational tool. Our knowledge of Parkinson’s is usually restricted to the celebrities who have it, from Muhammad Ali to Michael J Fox to, most recently, Carly Simon, but for many of us, it’s still seen in an abstract way, a handful of symptoms we know about, but so many more that we don’t.

Continue reading...

ajpscs posted a photo:

STREET STILL LIFE
LOST NIGHT
OFF
© ajpscs

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

NEW YORK (ANP/RTR) - Alexander Zverev heeft na zijn winst op de US Open zijn moeder Irina uitvoerig bedankt voor de steun die ze hem gaf nadat op jonge leeftijd diabetes type 1 bij hem was vastgesteld. De Duitse tennisser veroverde zondag tegen de Amerikaan Ben Shelton zijn tweede grandslamtitel.

"Als je 4-jarige zoon diabetes krijgt en artsen zeggen dat zijn leven en sportmogelijkheden zeer beperkt zullen zijn, heb je een heel sterke moeder nodig die zegt: mijn zoon wordt wat hij wil worden", zei de 29-jarige Zverev. "Deze ziekte zal ons niet bepalen."

Zverev noemde zijn moeder "de belangrijkste en sterkste persoon" die hij kent. Ook bedankte hij zijn team, met daarin zijn vader en broer Mischa. "We hebben bijna dertig jaar geen grandslamtitel gewonnen en nu twee in drie maanden."

Zverev won eerder dit jaar Roland Garros. In de finale in New York versloeg hij Shelton met 6-3 7-6 (2) 5-7 6-2.

ANALYSIS The leaders of major AI labs spent the weekend agreeing on a plan to capture regulators, make more money, and avoid responsibility for their dangerous behaviour. They call it “pacing the frontier.” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei set the ball rolling with a post in which he professed alarm at how quickly AI is improving and suggested the attack on Hugging Face caused by rogue agents run by his rival OpenAI as a warning (which he referred to as ‘OAI-HF’) represented a moment that proved something needs to change at so-called “frontier” AI companies – essentially the big US model-makers. “It’s also easy to dismiss OAI-HF as the failure of one company, but I believe that would be a mistake,” he wrote. “I believe it’s incumbent on every frontier AI company to act as if OAI-HF had happened to them,” he added, because he worries that OAI-HF shows that a swarm of agents “could be capable of taking over the entire internet with a persistent botnet.” Amodei therefore suggested “We must slow the pace at which we improve the capabilities of AI models. Progress will still seem fast, and we must make wise use of the time we gain.” The CEO proposed a three-point plan to regulate AI: Requiring AI labs to host “embedded evaluators” whose job is to “verify adherence to safety practices and commitments, report incidents, and help assess the alignment of not just completed AI models but training pipelines and processes.” Frontier AI companies that operate in democratic countries collaborating “to establish common safety standards as well as limits on the rate of unchecked AI progress,” with undefined “forms of coordination” that would be “legally challenging” and “require government support.” A vague call for democratic governments “to coordinate with authoritarian governments, to the extent this is possible, while taking seriously the challenges of verifying compliance.” OpenAI boss Sam Altman endorsed Amodei’s ideas. So did Elon Musk. And just like that, three billionaires all signed up to the same set of rules they think the world’s governments should adopt to regulate their activities. Microsoft's Satya Nadella signed up, too. Amodei even gave democracies a threat/villain to unite against – authoritarians willing to use AI unethically. This new consensus comes after years during which Big AI argued for light oversight and used that time to build tech that generates child sexual abuse material, dispenses terrible health advice, and made the OAI-HF incident possible. Big AI has also argued it will deliver a productivity revolution. Daryl Plummer, chief of research at analyst firm Gartner, used his keynote speech at the company’s annual Symposium in Australia today to cite research that found software vendors are pitching 50 percent productivity gains from AI, but customers report a 16 percent lift. Plummer also doubted that Amodei’s promise to slow development is real. “I will believe that when I see it,” he said in the keynote. Write your own rules Amodei’s ideas therefore read like an attempt at “regulatory capture” – the situation in which vested interests find a way to define the rules their regulators impose. Those supine regulators then make decisions that benefit the entities they oversee more than they benefit the rest of us. In this case, Anthropic, SpaceX, and OpenAI get regulations that amount to a cease fire during which they don’t need to compete so fiercely. OpenAI boss Sam Altman also all-but-admitted that regulation will be good for investors when he used a weekend interview with the billionaires’ bible Fortune to reveal his company won’t seek a public listing this year because it is inopportune to do so while AI safety concerns are unresolved. “We got a lot of stuff to do, like meeting this moment of what is going to be required for safety and alignment, and how the industry and governments can work together,” he said. Or in other words: Our investors will get a better return if we pause our IPO until confidence is higher, and regulatory capture is the way to get that. Amodei, meanwhile, outlined some very specific things he wants from Washington: stop selling Nvidia chips to China so its AI companies can’t build better models, and a crackdown on model distillation. “If we execute these measures well, I believe they would slow China’s progress enough to widen America’s lead significantly over the next 3–5 years — the window when AI becomes geopolitically most important,” he wrote. This plan would, of course, also mean that Chinese companies’ AI services would be inferior to Anthropic’s for a longer period – at a time when Chinese clouds are pushing into the rapidly growing middle eastern and southeast Asian markets. Pacing the frontier landed badly in Washington. Speaker Mike Johnson warned Amodei’s plan could “smother innovation” and see China dominate global AI. President Trump dismissed warnings that AI can have deleterious effects and said the USA must lead the world in AI. Such responses may reflect the fact that vast spending on AI infrastructure is delivering GDP growth in otherwise stagnant economies. Or perhaps they prove, yet again, that lawmakers are nearly always late to understand technology companies’ ambitions and the means they use to achieve them. ®