Coinbase is laying off about 700 workers, or 14% of its workforce, as CEO Brian Armstrong says the company is restructuring to become "lean, fast, and AI-native." Engadget reports: Armstrong claimed he'd seen engineers "use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks" and that non-technical teams in the company are "shipping production code," while Coinbase is automating many of its workflows. "All of this has led us to an inflection point, not just for Coinbase, but for every company," Armstrong wrote. "The biggest risk now is not taking action. We are adjusting early and deliberately to rebuild Coinbase to be lean, fast and AI-native. We need to return to the speed and focus of our startup founding, with AI at our core."

An AI-driven restructuring is only one half of the equation for Coinbase, though. Armstrong wrote that while the company "is well-capitalized, has diversified revenue streams and is well-positioned to weather any storm," the crypto market is down. As such, Coinbase is attempting to become leaner and faster ahead of the next crypto cycle. The company is eliminating some management layers and organizing the business around "AI-native talent who can manage fleets of agents to drive outsized impact," Armstrong wrote. "We'll also be experimenting with reduced pod sizes, including 'one person teams' with engineers, designers and product managers all in one role." That sure sounds like an attempt to get workers to take on more responsibilities.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Employees at Google DeepMind in London have voted to unionize as part of a bid to block the AI lab from providing its technology to the US and Israeli militaries. In a letter addressed to Google's managing director for the UK and Ireland, Debbie Weinstein, the workers asked the company to recognize the Communication Workers Union and Unite the Union as joint representatives for DeepMind employees. "Fundamentally, the push for unionization is about holding Google to its own ethical standards on AI, how they monetize it, what the products do, and who they work with," John Chadfield, national officer for technology at the CWU, tells WIRED. "Through the process of unionization, workers are collectively in a much stronger place to put [demands] to an increasingly deaf management."

[...] The DeepMind employee tells WIRED that if the staff succeeds in unionizing in the UK, they will likely demand that Google pulls out of its long-standing contract with the Israeli military, and seek greater transparency over how its AI products will be used, and some sort of assurance relating to layoffs made possible by automation. If Google does not engage, the letter states, the employees will ask an arbitration committee to compel the company to recognize the unions. Since the turn of the year, both Anthropic and OpenAI have announced large-scale expansions of their operations in London. CWU hopes the unionization effort at DeepMind will spur workers at those labs into similar action. "These conversations are happening," claims Chadfield. "The workers at other frontier labs have seen what Google DeepMind workers have done. They've come to us asking for help as well." The unionization push began in February 2025 after Alphabet removed a pledge from its AI ethics guidelines that had barred uses such as weapons development and surveillance. "A lot of people here bought into the Google DeepMind tagline 'to build AI responsibly to benefit humanity,'" the DeepMind employee told WIRED. "The direction of travel is to further militarization of the AI models we're building here."

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Gartner says some VMware customers may find it cheaper to move certain Linux VM workloads to IBM mainframes than to adopt Broadcom's new VMware licensing, especially for fleets of hundreds of Linux VMs and mission-critical apps needing long-term stability. The Register reports: Speaking to The Register to discuss the analyst firm's mid-April publication, "The State of the IBM Mainframe in 2026," [Gartner Vice President Analyst Alessandro Galimberti] said some buyers in many fields are comparing mainframes to modern environments and deciding Big Blue's big iron comes out ahead. "I can build a multi-region cloud application, but things like data synchronization and high availability are things I need to build into application logic," he said. "The mainframe has that in the platform, which shields developers from complexity." He also thinks mainframes are ideally suited to workloads that need many years of transactional consistency and backward-compatibility.

That said, Galimberti doesn't recommend the mainframe for all applications. He said mission-critical applications that are unlikely to change much for a decade are best-suited to the machines, as are Linux applications because the open source OS runs on IBM's hardware. IBM also offers the z/VM hypervisor, which he says can make Linux "even better and more enterprise-ready." Which is why Galimberti thinks IBM's ecosystem is attractive to VMware users, especially those who operate a fleet of 500 to 700 Linux VMs. [...]

Committing to mainframes therefore means planning "to spend time negotiating price and renewal protections, rather than prioritizing the business value these solutions can deliver." Another downside is that mainframes pose clear lock-in risk, so users may hold back on useful customizations out of fear they make it harder to extricate themselves from the platform. Access to skills remains an issue, too, as kids these days mostly don't contemplate a career working with big iron. Galimberti sees more service providers investing in their mainframe programs, which might help. So does the availability of Linux.

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A new Internet Matters survey suggests the UK's Online Safety Act age checks are easy for many children to bypass. Reported workarounds include fake birthdays, borrowed IDs, video game characters, and even drawing on a fake mustache. The Register reports: The group surveyed over 1,000 UK children and their parents, and while it did report some positive effects from changes made under the OSA, many children saw age verification as an easy-to-bypass hurdle rather than something that kept them genuinely safe. A full 46 percent of children even said that age checks were easy to bypass, while just 17 percent said that they were difficult to fool. The methods kids use to fool age gates vary, but most are pretty simple: There's the classic use of a video game character to fool video selfie systems, while in other instances, children reported just entering a fake birthday or using someone else's ID card when that was required.

The report even cites cases of children drawing a mustache on their faces to fool age detection filters. Seriously. While nearly half of UK kids say it's easy to bypass online age checks (and another 17 percent say it's neither hard nor easy), only 32 percent say they've actually bypassed them, according to Internet Matters. Like scoring some booze from "cool" parents, keeping age-gated content out of the hands of kids under the OSA is only as effective as parents let it be, and a quarter of them enable their kids' online delinquency. More specifically, Internet Matters found that a full 17 percent of parents admitted to actively helping their kids evade age checks, while an additional 9 percent simply turned a blind eye to it.

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Al jaren nemen de economische verschillen tussen huishoudens toe. En al jaren roept het Centraal Planbureau op daar iets aan te doen, omdat het slecht is voor de welvaart: „De meeste mensen zijn van mening dat herverdeling via de belastingen gewenst is.”

Brecht Vandenbroucke

If the phone doesn’t ring, it’s me - Alasdair Wallace

Serious side-effects from vaccines were rare, scientists found in studies funded by US taxpayer money

The US Food and Drug Administration has blocked the publication of several studies that found Covid-19 and shingles vaccines to be safe, according to a spokesperson from the Department of Health and Human Services.

Agency scientists conducted the studies by analyzing millions of patient records and found that serious side-effects from the vaccines were rare, the spokesperson confirmed. The studies – funded by taxpayer money and costing several million dollars – included research examining the safety of Covid-19 vaccines in 2023 and 2024.

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Matteo Ruggeri fails in his unenviable job of marking Bukayo Saka, who delivered when it mattered most

David Raya Always on his toes to launch attacks and came to Arsenal’s rescue when he was needed. 7

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Green party leader also accused of incorrectly stating he was a full member of the National Council of Hypnotherapy

Zack Polanski falsely claimed to be a spokesperson for the British Red Cross while campaigning for the Green party leadership, the charity has said.

The claim was also mentioned on his personal website in 2020, where he said he was “really proud of the work we do”.

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• Frenchman had 12 blocks during Spurs’ Monday loss

• Minnesota say referees missed several infractions

The Minnesota Timberwolves have questioned whether Victor Wembanyama’s NBA playoff record 12 blocks were legitimate.

The San Antonio Spurs star set the record during his team’s conference semi-final loss to the Timberwolves on Monday night. But Minnesota coach Chris Finch believes the refereeing during the game was questionable.

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Daft Punk

The Smashing Pumpkins

The Doors

APELDOORN (ANP) - Bij een demonstratie tegen een noodopvang voor asielzoekers in Apeldoorn heeft de politie dinsdagavond ingegrepen. Er werd op een gegeven moment met vuurwerk gegooid naar agenten, waarna de politie een rotonde heeft leeggeveegd waar de betogers zich hadden verzameld. Daarbij is volgens de politie geen geweld gebruikt.

De demonstratie was van tevoren aangekondigd. De politie begeleidde het protest in eerste instantie met een aantal agenten. Toen de demonstranten een rotonde bezetten en verkeer tegenhielden, trokken de agenten zich terug. Een grotere politiemacht kwam daarna terug. In afstemming met de burgemeester is besloten de rotonde leeg te vegen. Agenten hadden ook honden bij zich, maar die zijn niet ingezet.

Tegen de noodopvang is vaker gedemonstreerd. Apeldoorn wil een groep van 240 asielzoekers tijdelijk opvangen in een leegstaand schoolgebouw.

AMSTERDAM (ANP) - Koning Willem-Alexander en koningin Máxima konden tijdens het 5 mei-concert in Amsterdam niet blijven stilstaan toen Rolf Sanchez aan het einde van de avond een mix van Spaanstalige muziek ten gehore bracht. De zanger sloot de jaarlijkse show af met latin-nummers als Vivir Mi Vida, Más Más Más en Danza Kuduro.

Vooral de van oorsprong Argentijnse koningin Máxima toonde haar enthousiasme voor het genre en bewoog ritmisch mee op de maat van de muziek. Het optreden werd afgesloten met vuurwerk, waarna alle artiesten het podium betraden om het traditionele slotnummer We'll Meet Again van Vera Lynn te zingen. Ondertussen stapte het koningspaar op een rondvaartboot, terwijl ze al zwaaiend en zingend de Amstel verlieten.

Eerder op de avond zongen de koning en koningin vrolijk mee met het nummer Somebody to Love van Queen, dat werd uitgevoerd door The Dutch Tenors. Daarnaast waren er optredens van onder anderen Edsilia Rombley, Roxeanne Hazes en Acda en De Munnik. Tineke Schouten en Splinter Chabot presenteerden de avond.

BertvB posted a photo:

This image captures a Yellow-legged Gul just as it is about to take flight from a railing. The bird is a sub-adult, showing a beautiful mix of its mottled brown juvenile feathers and the clean white plumage of an adult.

In the background, the iconic silhouette of Mount Vesuvius rises majestically over the calm waters of the Gulf of Naples in Italy. The cool, blue tones of the dusk and the vast horizon create a serene backdrop for this spirited coastal resident.