Garfield AI, the UK's first regulator-approved AI law firm, has won its first court case after helping a freelancer recover 7,000 pounds in unpaid fees. "I was owed money for work I had done, but it felt like the process of recovering it could be too stressful, expensive and time-consuming," said Tamires Camal Taquidir, a freelancer who had provided HR-related services to a hospitality business. "Garfield made it possible for me to pursue the claim and keep going. When the counterclaim was brought, it was intended to intimidate me, but I knew I had accessible, cost-effective and competent support. I'm delighted by the result." Computer Weekly reports: After attempting to resolve a dispute over paid fees without court action, Camal Taquidir [...] used Garfield AI to help her pursue the case in court. She was able to generate pre-action correspondence, and then prepare and issue court proceedings. The AI legal assistant conducted all of the legal work preceding the court trial. The defendant instructed solicitors and brought a counterclaim, which the claimant disputed with the support of Garfield AI.

The claimant continued to trial, including dealing with document production, the preparation witness statements and trial bundles. Garfield then instructed a junior, shortly before the trial began. She won the claim over unpaid fees following a three-hour trial at Wandsworth County Court. The claimant paid around 400 pounds in Garfield AI fees to recover the 7,000 pounds owed, while the defendant instructed both a solicitor and a barrister. [...] Following a three-hour trial at Wandsworth County Court on 14 May 2026, in which both sides were represented by barristers, the court found in favor of the claimant, awarding 7,000 pounds and dismissing the counterclaim.

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UC San Diego researchers are working with Google to build a private cloud from 2,000 retired Pixel Fold motherboards, demonstrating how discarded smartphones could provide useful, low-cost computing capacity. "The full smartphone cluster is expected to launch this fall," reports The Register. "Depending on how well the initial phase goes, we're told the cluster could grow even larger." From the report Once the phone's motherboards have been extracted from their shells, the researchers say that the chips hiding within remain more than potent enough to be useful for a variety of tasks. In many cases, the single-threaded performance of these chips is as good as, if not better than, what you'd find from a many-cored datacenter chip. The Pixel Fold smartphones, which will form the basis of the cluster, are powered by a Google Tensor G2 processor with two 2.85 GHz Cortex-X1, two 2.35 GHz Cortex-A78 and four 1.80 GHz Cortex-A55 Arm cores, a Mali-G710 MP7 GPU, and 12 GB of system memory. Early benchmarking using the SPEC suite suggests that 25-50 phones should deliver performance similar to that of a conventional server.

The major challenge, instead, is distributing workloads across multiple devices, each of which has a handful of cores of one or more varieties, and most have 8-12 GB of memory. UCSD researchers are approaching this challenge from a couple of different angles. The first is by targeting applications that can easily fit within a single device. The second is using Kubernetes to orchestrate container deployments across clusters of 25-50 phones. For this to work, the devices first need to be flashed with a Linux operating system suitable for the job. While Android makes for a great handheld experience, it is not intended for server duty. In the blog post, researchers note that Android includes functionality intended to stop rogue applications from chewing up excessive amounts of memory and draining your battery. In server context, these safety mechanisms are no longer necessary.

[Ryan Kastner, an associate professor of computer science at UCSD] told us this was by no means an easy task, but the team has made steady progress toward getting Linux running smoothly on these devices, including support for the phone's onboard GPUs. Access to some functionality, like the chip's integrated tensor processing unit, remains elusive. Clustering these devices will require networking the phones together. Normally these devices would connect over cellular or Wi-Fi, but at this scale, this not only isn't practical, but also has implications for security, he explained. Instead, the team will employ PCBs that both supply power and break out wired Ethernet networking.

The researchers suggest that many EdTech, grading, and research workloads commonly run by universities in the cloud are small enough to run on the cluster without issue. "The vast majority of these applications are within the capabilities of a single smartphone to host, with the standard grading backend running on small cloud instances," a blog post detailing the planned deployment reads. "Early experiments show that even a moderately-sized cluster of 20 phones is capable of supporting peak submission rates for a 75+ student class."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Claude Guillemot, co-founder of French video game company Ubisoft, died Friday at the age of 69. According to French media (via Bloomberg), Guillemot died in a plane crash in the French resort town of La Baule. He was one of two people aboard the plane, both of whom died.

Guillemot founded Ubisoft with his four brothers in 1986. Since then, the company has published the Assassin's Creed, Far Cry, Prince of Persia, and Tom Clancy video game franchises, as well as many other titles. The family retains control of Ubisoft, and Guillemot's brother Yves is still CEO. Guillemot was also chairman of Guillemot Corp., which makes gaming and audio accessories. "Ubisoft was deeply saddened to learn of the death of Claude Guillemot, co-founder of the group and chairman of Guillemot Corp., in an accident," Ubisoft said in a statement. "Our thoughts are with his family and loved ones during this difficult time. No further statements will be made at this time."

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The F1 Nation crew are on hand to run through the main talking points ahead of the Austrian Grand Prix.

Chris Medland picks out the biggest talking points as F1 heads to Austria for the eighth round of the 2026 season.

Kimi Antonelli’s retirement from the Barcelona-Catalunya Grand Prix was the latest in a string of reliability issues that are impacting the F1 title race.

„Gezond verstand voorop”, herhaalt Marjo Dethmers, interim-directeur van openbare basisschool Ixieje in Moordrecht maandag als een mantra aan de telefoon tegenover NRC.

Elke week legt Annemiek Leclaire een lezersvraag voor aan deskundigen. Deze week: hoe bewaar ik mijn kalmte als mijn zoon een grote mond geeft?

Aanstaande vrijdag presenteert het kabinet de langverwachte plannen om stikstofuitstoot te verminderen. Eenvoudig is dat niet: sommige veehouders proberen dat al jaren. Op bezoek bij een boerin in Montfoort die overschakelt op biologische landbouw.

Vanwege te verwachten „extreme hitte” geeft het Koninklijk Meteorologisch Instituut (KNMI) voor woensdag code oranje af voor het midden en zuiden van Nederland.

Bouwhelm op, veiligheidsvestje aan, dop van het flesje water draaien: een medewerker op een bouwwerf in Parijs zoekt verkoeling tegen de hitte. Hij is niet de enige.

Als minister van Onderwijs zette Ingrid van Engelshoven (D66) zich naar eigen zeggen voortdurend in voor het zo veel mogelijk openhouden of heropenen van het onderwijs.

We schakelen over naar Amerika, waar gekte veel meer dan hier wordt gewaardeerd, gecultiveerd en zelfs gevierd. Schitterend spitwerk van de Washington Post, die op basis van 25 duizend documenten concludeert dat voormalig congreslid en ex-directeur van de nationale inlichtingendienst onder Trump Tulsi Gabbard zich jarenlang liet voorschrijven wat te vinden, doen en zeggen door een hindoeïstische sekteleider. Gabbard was ooit een Bernie Sanders-Democraat en is inmiddels een MAGA-Republikein, die onlangs dus afzwaaide als spionnenbons. Daarnaast is ze dus knettergek. Mooi moetleesspul hier.

Dit soort dingen

De (zeer overtuigende!) verdediging

Die hele ""hersteloperatie Groningen"" staat inmiddels dusdanig op instorten dat Nationale Ombudsman Van Zutphen zich genoopt ziet de noodklok te luiden middels een brandbrief aan de Kamer. Daarin geeft hij de Nationaal Coördinator Groningen, het Instituut Mijnbouwschade Groningen en de gehele overheid een tik (8 op de schaal van Richter) op de vingers: "Het kan niet langer zo doorgaan. Mensen zijn te vaak teleurgesteld. Het huidige hersteltraject leidt onvoldoende tot concrete oplossingen voor de mensen die daar al jarenlang op wachten." Er wordt, netter gezegd, geen moer voor de Groningers bereikt en tot overmaat van ramp raakte het Instituut Mijnbouwschade ook nog eens 329 dossiers van inwoners kwijt. En ondertussen verdienen schadebureaus miljoenen aan het Groningse leed en blijven de inwoners zelf rillen, trillen en bibberen dat het een aard(beving) heeft. De gasvelden worden dan misschien volgestort met beton, deze bodemloze put van onbekwaamheid en ellende blijft gewoon gapen en meuren. Echt uitstekend en lekker en top en goed en puik gewerkt allemaal.

Whether it’s a large-scale wallpaper reproduction of Sandro Botticelli’s “The Birth of Venus” or pages of deconstructed Artforum magazines, David Daigle’s detailed punch-cut compositions delve into the material and conceptual possibilities of layers, depth, and what is revealed or concealed.

Daigle’s forthcoming exhibition, The Death of Beauty at Track 16, investigates intersections of identity, consumer culture, and desire through a kind of sedimentary approach to commercial imagery, which he excavates with precise holes each revealing tiny tableaux. This method of décollage, which involves building up the surface and then removing elements, literally peels away the meanings and intentions behind contemporary visual culture.

“The Birth of Venus” serves as the foundational composition for Daigle’s “The Death of Venus,” which has been completely overwhelmed by the artist’s hole-punched interventions. Tiny vignettes of people, things, and colorful dots completely erase and replace the titular figure. The masterpiece of 15th-century art has been reduced to an inexpensive, mass-market object for home decor and is further disarticulated by a sea of anonymous eyes and mouths. What could be more symbolic of our era of ultra consumerism?

Daigle digs into a wide array of photographs and printed media, from bus shelter advertisements to a panoramic photograph of Gaza taken around 2020, in which almost all of the buildings have been subsumed under the cratered surface. It’s symbolic of the real devastation the city has experienced since the war began in late 2023. In a broader sense, the artist’s works reveal something akin to a visualization of the media’s often obscured undercurrent.

“I am interested in sublimating technical images designed to generate desire,” the artist says. “Through the subversive act of perforation, I search for the meanings trapped behind them. I want to see past the imagery, through the photograph itself, and ask whether media can become so untruthful that it ultimately consumes both itself and us.”

The Death of Beauty opens on July 18 and continues through September 5 in East Hollywood. In the meantime, explore 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 David Daigle’s Elaborate Punch-Cut Paper Pieces Excavate Commercial Imagery appeared first on Colossal.

Observations suggest comet spent billions of years on ‘vast unimaginable trajectories’ around our galaxy

An interstellar comet that blazed past the sun last year could be nearly three times older than our solar system and is unlike anything ever before seen in our cosmic back yard, astronomers said on Monday.

The comet 3I/Atlas is just the third visitor from beyond our solar system that humanity has ever observed, its unusual brightness offering scientists an unprecedented opportunity to study something that came from elsewhere in the galaxy.

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Een verroest fraai fors natuurboeket in groen op de wijntafel. Maar dat is leuk: in mijn achtertuin het Essenburgpark een speciale avondopening met een bescheiden keten aan activiteiten in een met het vallen van de [Meer...]