OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said AI adoption is "non-negotiable" for countries, comparing rejecting it to refusing electricity a century ago and predicting it will unleash an unprecedented boom in entrepreneurship. "The economic growth and benefit to people that can come from this, the value to a country, is too high to ignore," he said. His comments were made during a fireside chat with U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick at the G20 Innovation Ministerial in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. CNBC reports: Altman thinks the public won't be talking as much about AI a decade from now -- it'll be expected everywhere. "A kid growing up today will never be smarter than AI, but he or she will also never have understood a world where every product and service that they interact with is not really smart and really capable and really helpful," he said.

Altman referenced the adoption of electricity multiple times in his comments and drew a line between that and AI. "I think it would be approximately as bad of an idea to say we're not going to have AI in our country as it was to say we're not going to have electricity in our country, you know, back 100 plus years ago," he said.

Altman called cybersecurity one of the biggest challenges to navigate in the age of AI and one that leaders shouldn't sidestep. "I think some things are going to go very wrong with cybersecurity unless people act quite urgently," he said. Altman said that falling short in cyber defense and other areas "could set this technology back a great deal." You can watch a recording of the chat on YouTube.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New York City Public Schools is banning generative AI for students from pre-K through eighth grade for the 2026-27 school year, affecting more than half a million students in the nation's largest school district. ABC News reports: In a statement to ABC News, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said that the city is implementing a moratorium on generative AI for students in pre-school or 2-K through eighth grade and will spend the next year "studying the impacts of this technology." Mamdani wrote in part, "the tech industry wants us to believe that A.I.-powered early education is not only inevitable, but necessary." "We do not see it that way," he added.

[...] The district said it is implementing the most expansive AI moratorium in the nation, eliminating software that uses student-facing AI and banning companion chatbots. The city's AI moratorium does not apply to high school students. The district said it will offer twice-yearly AI literacy classes designed to help high school students "think critically" about the technology before they start to "rely" on it.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Alphabet's Google escaped a breakup of its advertising technology business on Wednesday, when a judge in Virginia rejected U.S. antitrust enforcers' bid to force a sale of Google's online advertising exchange. While the ad exchange is a small part of Google's business, the ruling is the second powerful symbolic victory against the U.S. Department of Justice in its efforts to force Google to sell assets to address illegal monopolies. U.S. Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia, declined to make Google sell AdX, where publishers pay Google a 20% fee to sell ads in auctions that happen instantly when users load websites. She accepted most of the parties' proposed behavioral remedies.

The DOJ and a broad coalition of states sued Google in 2023 over its dominance in markets for advertising technology used by online publishers and websites. In April 2025, Brinkema ruled that Google holds illegal monopolies on servers that host publisher ads and ad exchanges which sit between buyers and sellers. Google unlawfully locked publishers on its ad server into using its AdX, the judge found. The tech giant's anticompetitive conduct "substantially harmed Google's publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web," Brinkema said at the time.

At a trial last year on remedies in the case, the DOJ argued that Google cannot be trusted to run AdX, given its past behavior. Google argued that a forced sale would be technically difficult and result in a long and painful transition that would hurt customers. During the remedies trial, Google's lawyers warned that forcing it to sell parts of its ad-tech business would cause disruption and damage. [...] The ruling is the third time in a row that a judge has rejected a bid by U.S. antitrust enforcers to break up Big Tech in a crackdown that started during President Donald Trump's first term. In another major Google antitrust case, a judge similarly rejected the DOJ's push to force Google to sell Chrome. It is likely to fuel questions about whether courts are up to the task of checking the industry's unprecedented power over the U.S. economy.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Uber is laying off about 3,300 employees, or roughly 10% of its workforce, as part of a restructuring aimed at cutting management layers and redirecting investment toward ridesharing, delivery, and robotaxis. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi announced the changes in an internal email that was also published online.TechCrunch reports: According to the email, the layoffs are part of a restructuring exercise that would shrink the number of managers by 20%, and some personnel in these roles would work as individual contributors going forward.

The ridesharing giant is reducing the number of teams with one or two members by 50%, and letting go staff who are "more than seven layers down from the CEO," per Bloomberg. Khosrowshahi's email said the company is combining its engineering, science, and delivery divisions. The company is also bringing together its delivery operations across restaurants, retail, and direct divisions.

Remote jobs at the company are going away, too, with Uber only allowing less than 1% of its staff to work remotely.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

2025 F1 World Champion Lando Norris has co-founded a new junior single-seater team, LN4 Fusion, that will compete in the Italian F4 Championship, FRECA and Formula 3.

Formula 1 signs off its European season with back-to-back rounds at Monza and a return to Madrid. From the flat-out blast through the trees on the outskirts of Milan to the unknown quantity that is the Madring in the Spanish capital, which drivers and teams deserve a place in your F1 Fantasy line-up?

The weather forecast is in ahead of the Italian Grand Prix weekend at Monza.

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Kijk, Milo is ondanks/dankzij z'n persoonlijke pathologie en heteroseksualiteit na conversietherapie extreem intelligent. En wat we in het bovenstaande interview menen te zien is het volgende: zijn deportatie was een conversietherapie naar de Democraten en nu hij weet hoe 'America's institutional brutality' voelt, wordt hij voorvechter van de rechten van minderheden op deportatielijsten. Maar goed, het blijft een buitencategorie retorische artiest, dus zelfs in dat kamp zien we uit naar z'n fratsen, want kijk hoe heerlijk hij nu al over z'n deportatieleed praat, en de kop van zijn nieuwe stuk in The Spectator had ook moeilijk beter gekund: "I am a persecuted human rights icon". Maatje, we zien er naar uit door je ontregeld te worden.

Instant Update: Milo zegt in het onderstaande fragment dat hij ondanks z'n conversietherapie nog steeds getrouwd is en samenwoont met zijn mannelijke echtgenoot, maar dat ze sinds zijn conversietherapie 'alleen geen seks meer hebben'. Hele show na de breek.

LOL "I am a persecuted human rights icon"

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conversie met korreltje zout

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Hele interview

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Hurry up: both to make your mark and to cherish your loved ones.

Om het fusieproces van PvdA en GroenLinks af te ronden moet Pro kiezen voor aansluiting bij de rode óf de groene ‘familie’ in het Europees Parlement. „De Europarlementariërs willen het liefst bij de twee families blijven en verbinden.”

Feyenoord Vrouwen blijft actief in Europa. De ploeg van trainer Marc Pieters rekende woensdagavond op een sfeervol Varkenoord met 3-1 af met Anderlecht en maakte daarmee de 2-1 achterstand uit de heenwedstrijd goed. De Rotterdammers plaatsen zich daarmee voor de volgende Europese ronde.

Een half jaar heeft de nieuwe provinciegedeputeerde Robert Tieman (BBB, Financiën & Stikstof) om zijn stempel te drukken op de Gedeputeerde Staten in Zuid-Holland. Maar zelf wil hij niet “op de tent passen”. Woensdagmiddag is hij definitief aangesteld als gedeputeerde en vervanger van Mariëtte van Leeuwen, nadat hij eerder dit jaar afzwaaide als minister.

CARACAS (ANP/RTR) - Het Amerikaanse Chevron, het Italiaanse Eni en andere buitenlandse energiebedrijven hebben woensdag in Caracas handtekeningen gezet onder grote projectuitbreidingen om de olieproductie in Venezuela op te krikken. Ze willen er komende jaren veel geld investeren. Chevron heeft zelfs meer dan 7 miljard dollar toegezegd.

De akkoorden staan los van een recent aangekondigde deal tussen Caracas en Washington, die de Verenigde Staten toegang geeft tot zeventien olievelden. Toch kan dit niet losgezien worden van de Amerikaanse inspanningen die begonnen met de aanval op Venezuela in januari, waarbij president Nicolás Maduro gevangen werd genomen.

Bij de ondertekeningsceremonie was naast interim-president Delcy Rodriguez ook de Amerikaanse energieminister Chris Wright aanwezig. "We proberen te werken op wat ik 'Trump-tempo' noem", zei hij. "President Trump wilde geen klein duwtje of een trage, positieve koerswijziging. Hij wilde een zo snel mogelijke transformatie van Venezuela zien."

WASHINGTON (ANP) - De Amerikaanse president Donald Trump heeft gezegd dat de nieuwe aanvalscampagne tegen Iran "niet te lang" zal duren. Tegelijkertijd dreigde hij met nieuwe aanvallen op het land.

Zijn uitspraken volgen op de zwaarste aanvallen over en weer tussen Washington en Teheran sinds juli en de eerste aanvallen in weken. Trump zei dat de Amerikaanse krijgsmacht verschillende doelen heeft vernietigd. Het zou gaan om een raket waarmee Iran mijnen wilde afwerpen en om radar- en raketsystemen die het land probeerde te herstellen.

"We hebben alle nieuwe apparatuur vernietigd die ze probeerden te bouwen langs de Straat van Hormuz. Sommige defensief, andere offensief", aldus Trump. "Het was gisteravond een zeer zware aanval en we zijn bereid om op elk moment opnieuw toe te slaan."

De Iranoorlog begon in februari met Amerikaanse en Israëlische aanvallen op Iran. Een staakt-het-vuren hield geen stand. De onderhandelingen tussen de landen bevinden zich in een impasse.

Vice-president says on evangelical podcast he would feel ‘not shocked if the antichrist was walking among us’

JD Vance has said he is “doing as much of God’s work as possible” and that he is OK “if that leads to the end times”, which he says “are coming”.

The US vice-president made the comments during a Monday podcast interview with Bryce Crawford, a 22-year old evangelical host with over a million YouTube followers and videos featuring sensationalist headlines including “Preaching the gospel in Chicago’s deadliest neighborhood” and “Debating a ‘gay’ pastor”.

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• Real Sociedad 0-1 Chelsea (agg 2-6)

• Keira Walsh scores at corner to settle tie

Chelsea ensured there will be three Women’s Super League teams in the league phase of the Champions League as Keira Walsh’s second-half strike against Real Sociedad extended their three-goal margin from the first leg of the third-round qualifier.

The 5-2 win against the Spanish side in Chelsea’s first game at Wimbledon’s Cherry Red Records stadium gave Sonia Bompastor’s side a commanding lead in the tie, after a rusty start had forced them to come from a goal down. It wasn’t a particularly pretty performance, though, and that continued into the second leg against La Real, who will now drop into the Europa League.

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braart has added a photo to the pool:

Russell Street & Collin’s Street

From the stillness of a lily-specked pond to a nostalgic carousel perched on top of a spindly stand, Hans Op de Beeck’s latest works delve further into a realm of meditation and solitude. His forthcoming solo exhibition, Vanishing Point at Almine Rech, highlights his characteristically monochromatic sculptures, which he often coats in matte gray. Many are life-size, inviting viewers to stand quietly near a calm figure seated on a chaise lounge beside a fawn or peer into a framed seascape in which definition is only wrought by contrasts in light and shadow.

Scale, lifelike detail, and an array of objects, figures, and animals in different settings lend Op de Beeck’s sculptures a kind of wünderkammer quality when displayed together. Individually, the pieces read like muted curiosities or components of an unusual puzzle. There’s a sense that at any moment, especially in works like “Orrery (Loss),” the scene may whir into motion and transform into the full vibrancy of reality (one might recall the effect in The Wizard of Oz).

Without color, we’re drawn to the dimensionality and textures of reliefs and in-the-round objects, although the tableaux themselves remain enigmatic. We recognize familiar elements, but they seem out of place or in uncanny relationships. Op de Beeck prompts us to imagine how the scenes may have come to be and how they relate to the surroundings, including us. “His art does not explain—it suggests,” the gallery says.

The title of the show is derived from the artistic term “vanishing point,” which describes the effect where all lines converge in a perspective drawing and elements disappear into the distance. A statement says, “Op de Beeck uses it as a metaphor for those moments when the concrete and rational give way to something less tangible—memory, imagination, introspection, or the feeling of briefly slipping outside time.”

Vanishing Point opens on September 10 and continues through November 7 in Brussels. 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 Hans Op de Beeck Taps into Memory, Time, and Enigma in ‘Vanishing Point’ appeared first on Colossal.

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