OpenAI is reportedly developing a screen-free, portable smart speaker meant to act as a personalized home computer and humanlike AI companion. "It will help control smart-home appliances, play media, answer questions, respond to messages and tap into the range of capabilities offered by OpenAI's ChatGPT," reports Bloomberg, citing people familiar with the matter. The device, expected to be unveiled this year and released in 2027, would mark OpenAI's first major hardware push after acquiring Jony Ive's io Products. Bloomberg reports: Apple sued OpenAI last week, accusing the company of stealing trade secrets. But OpenAI believes that the device veers significantly from anything Apple has on the market today and that it's unlikely that it violates trade secrets belonging to the iPhone maker, the people said. OpenAI's success in hardware will hinge on bringing a novel approach to the market -- something it aims to do with the smart speaker. For instance, the device's technology is meant to become increasingly personalized and proactive as it gains a deeper understanding of its owner over time, according to the people.

OpenAI envisions the device anticipating needs, surfacing information proactively and serving as an expert on its user, they said. Though the speaker is designed to stay in the home, it will be easy to move around the house. OpenAI believes the product's defining feature will be its personality and ability to connect on a humanlike level with users. The speaker incorporates mechanical elements that can move on their own, creating a sense that it is alive and not just an object responding to commands. The machine also will draw on personal information such as emails to better understand its owner. The goal is for the device to feel like a companion and become a physical manifestation of OpenAI's ChatGPT. Still, the exact plans could change as the company works through the development and legal process.

The device's communication abilities will rely on a more advanced version of the ChatGPT Voice Mode -- GPT-Live -- that OpenAI rolled out this month. The new voice mode is designed to act more like a human. It can listen and talk at the same time, adapt more naturally during conversations, and quickly process information. Though the new product resembles a speaker, OpenAI internally describes it as the first of its kind: a computer built for AI to help make busy people more productive. It includes a camera and other sensors that help it understand a user's surroundings and context, as well as advanced AI models beyond those available on conventional smart speakers. Another central difference is that the device includes a rechargeable battery, allowing it to be carried from room to room throughout the day. A user could bring it into the laundry room while doing chores, move it into the kitchen for cooking assistance, and later place it in a living room or bedroom to have it play music. It can also remain plugged into a single room if the customer chooses.

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Google Images is getting a Pinterest-like redesign that turns image search into a personalized discovery feed, with "For You" galleries, real-time updates, and collections for saving visual ideas. "Google is also adding a way for users to create AI images right in Search, as it celebrates 25 years since the debut of Google Images," reports TechCrunch. From the report: After navigating to the redesigned Google Images, users will see a "For You" gallery of images tailored to their interests and browsing history. Like Pinterest, the gallery is designed for continuous browsing, with Google saying it updates in real time with new images. As users browse, they can save ideas to their "collections," which will appear as tabs above the main gallery of photos. For example, users can create collections for things like vacation outfit ideas, travel inspiration, and ways to design a reading nook, which they can come back to later.

[...] As for generating images directly in Search, Google says the feature is meant for moments when you have a highly specific idea for an image that doesn't already exist online. Google is bringing image generation directly into AI Overviews on Search and will use its latest Nano Banana model to transform a text prompt into a custom visual. The feature can also help users reimagine spaces and visualize ideas, such as seeing what a room might look like painted red or what a dorm room with a coastal theme could look like.

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A lawsuit from 26 Meta employees alleges the company used AI-driven scoring and monitoring systems to select workers for layoffs, disproportionately targeting employees with disabilities or those who had taken protected medical, family, pregnancy, or parental leave. "Meta did not assemble the termination list through the considered judgment of managers who knew the work. Instead, Meta used a constellation of internal artificial-intelligence systems -- including a system referred to internally as 'Metamate,' employee-trained 'second-brain' agents, keystroke- and activity-monitoring data, AI-token-usage dashboards, and algorithmically assisted performance ranking and calibration -- to score, rank, and select employees for inclusion on the list," the lawsuit (PDF) said. Ars Technica reports: Employees were allegedly graded, among other things, on how much they used Meta's AI tools. "Meta's internal dashboards classified employees by their stage of adoption of its artificial-intelligence tools, using categories such as 'AI Native,' 'AI First,' and 'AI Enabled,'" the lawsuit said. The lawsuit is apparently "the first against a major U.S. company to challenge the alleged use of AI in conducting layoffs," according to Reuters. The complaint alleges that Meta's tools for monitoring employees did not account for differences caused by disabilities and protected leaves. "Those tools draw on inputs -- performance ratings, calibration scores, productivity and output metrics, 'AI-native' ratings, and AI-token consumption -- that, by design, cannot be accumulated by an employee who is on protected medical or family leave, or whose output is reduced by a disability," the lawsuit said.

The lawsuit alleged that Meta management did not take steps to adjust scores for employees who took leave or who requested reasonable accommodations for disabilities. "Meta did not neutralize those inputs for protected leave; did not exclude protected-leave-takers or accommodation-seekers from the selection cohort; and did not pause the system for the individualized, leave- and accommodation-neutral review that the law requires," the complaint alleged. "The result was that employees who took protected leaves were disproportionately selected for layoff, based on scoring that not only failed to account for their protected leaves, but in effect penalized the employees for exercising their legal rights to these leaves." The 26 plaintiffs requested leaves or disability accommodations in the 24 months before being selected for layoffs, the lawsuit said. The layoffs are not yet finalized, but employees are scheduled to start losing their jobs on July 22, the lawsuit said. "These claims lack merit and are not based on facts," said Meta in a statement. "Workforce management and organizational decisions were and are made by people, not AI."

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Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

iain.davidson100 has added a photo to the pool:

iain.davidson100 has added a photo to the pool:

iain.davidson100 has added a photo to the pool:

Google Cloud has admitted it made a configuration change that means some customers of its VMware Engine (GCVE) can’t use stretched cluster. A G-Cloud incident report time-stamped 13:24 PDT on July 14 (21:24 UTC) reports some customers “are experiencing zonal outages impacting network connectivity across multiple regions” and that the trouble started at 10:00 PDT. Google first attributed the problem to “an underlying network connectivity issue affecting the infrastructure that links the zones within a stretch cluster,” and warned “This disruption is causing synchronization issues between the affected zones.” Storage and compute services weren’t impacted, and VMs kept running. Users just couldn’t reach their virtual servers. That’s bad because the whole point of stretched clusters is to enhance resilience by creating a virtual pool of resources that spans two physical sites, while keeping the two rigs in synch to enable rapid failover without disruption. Google’s next update offered “underlying inter-zone communication failures and Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) session flapping between cluster zones” as the reason for the mess, adding “Specifically, network connectivity has been lost between the affected zones and the witness appliance. Because the witness appliance is currently unreachable, the cluster zones are unable to safely synchronize state.” At 16:05 PDT Google ‘fessed up. “Our investigation has identified a recent configuration update that is the likely cause of the inter-zone network disruption,” the web giant admitted. “Teams are working on remediation.” Google hasn’t said when it will set things right, so customers in the impacted regions – australia-southeast1, australia-southeast2, europe-west3, and northamerica-northeast2 – must wait to learn when they’ll once again enjoy the resilience they pay for. Other VMware customers may not want to wait because the Broadcom business unit on Tuesday warned of seven flaws in its VMware Avi Load Balancer. One of them, CVE-2026-47865, is an authentication bypass vulnerability that earned a CVSS score of 9.8. The product’s name is a little misleading, as it’s actually a full Application Delivery Controller that includes load balancing and a Web Application Firewall VMware hasn’t said much about the flaw other than warning “A malicious user with network access may be able to access the Avi Control plane by bypassing the authentication mechanism.” The tool works with VMware’s Cloud Foundation bundle, Kubernetes Service, and can connect resources in public clouds. Unauthorized access is therefore distinctly undesirable. The five remaining CVEs are also significant, with CVSS ratings ranging from 8.8 to 7.1. Broadcom has fixed the flaws in recent updates to the product. ®

Ik stop bij het stoplicht op mijn dagelijkse forens en kijk om mij heen. E-bikes, normale fietsen, maar niemand met helm. Er komt een man aan fietsen, met helm.

Als je wel zin hebt om te sudokuen, maar het liever bij een gridje van 5x5 houdt.

Een kruiswoordpuzzel, maar dan heel klein (en snel).

Je krijgt een paar cijfers cadeau, maar het grid van 9x9 moet foutloos ingevuld worden.

Wie of wat staat er midden in het nieuws? Een actuele puzzel, die makkelijker is als je het nieuws een beetje volgt.

In het duel tussen twee voetbalgrootheden is Spanje superieur en valt het sterrenensemble van Frankrijk zwaar tegen. Voor de tweede keer in de geschiedenis bereikt Spanje de WK-finale.