Laurent Mekies offered an insight into Red Bull’s recruitment policy in the wake of the news that Max Verstappen’s long time Race Engineer Gianpiero Lambiase is to leave the team for McLaren.
"Meta's embrace of AI is making its employees miserable," reports the New York Times.
And "After Meta said late last month that it would start tracking employees' computer use, hundreds of workers spoke up." (One employee even told Meta's CTO in an internal post, "Your callousness to the concerns of your own employees is concerning."
In an internal post last month, Meta told its U.S. employees that it was making a change that would affect tens of thousands of them. What employees typed into their computer, how they moved their mouse, where they clicked and what they saw on their screen would be tracked, Meta said. The goal, the company said, was to capture employee data so Meta's artificial intelligence models could learn "how people actually complete everyday tasks using computers." Many workers immediately revolted. In online comments, they blasted the tracking as a privacy violation, calling it antisocial and callous... [One engineering manager even asked "How do we opt out?"] "There is no option to opt-out on your corporate laptop," replied Andrew Bosworth, Meta's chief technology officer. Employees reacted by posting more than 100 angry and surprised emoji, according to the messages....
Meta is pushing its 78,000 employees to adopt AI tools and factoring their use of the technology in performance reviews. The company is also tracking employees' computer work to feed and train its AI models. And it is cutting jobs to offset its AI spending, saying last month that it would slash 10% of its workforce. That has led to anger and anxiety as employees await news of whether they are affected by the layoffs, which are slated to be carried out May 20, according to 11 current and former Meta employees. Some said they no longer saw Meta as a place for a long career. Others were looking for new jobs or trying to signal that they wanted to be laid off so they could receive severance pay, the current and former employees said. "It's incredibly demoralizing," an employee who does user research wrote in an internal post, which was reviewed by the Times...
Meta also introduced internal dashboards to track employees' consumption of "tokens," a unit of AI use that is roughly equivalent to four characters of text, four people said. Some said the dashboards were a pressure tactic to encourage competition with colleagues. That led some employees to make so many AI agents that others had to introduce agents to find agents, and agents to rate agents, two people said.
And "After Meta said late last month that it would start tracking employees' computer use, hundreds of workers spoke up." (One employee even told Meta's CTO in an internal post, "Your callousness to the concerns of your own employees is concerning."
In an internal post last month, Meta told its U.S. employees that it was making a change that would affect tens of thousands of them. What employees typed into their computer, how they moved their mouse, where they clicked and what they saw on their screen would be tracked, Meta said. The goal, the company said, was to capture employee data so Meta's artificial intelligence models could learn "how people actually complete everyday tasks using computers." Many workers immediately revolted. In online comments, they blasted the tracking as a privacy violation, calling it antisocial and callous... [One engineering manager even asked "How do we opt out?"] "There is no option to opt-out on your corporate laptop," replied Andrew Bosworth, Meta's chief technology officer. Employees reacted by posting more than 100 angry and surprised emoji, according to the messages....
Meta is pushing its 78,000 employees to adopt AI tools and factoring their use of the technology in performance reviews. The company is also tracking employees' computer work to feed and train its AI models. And it is cutting jobs to offset its AI spending, saying last month that it would slash 10% of its workforce. That has led to anger and anxiety as employees await news of whether they are affected by the layoffs, which are slated to be carried out May 20, according to 11 current and former Meta employees. Some said they no longer saw Meta as a place for a long career. Others were looking for new jobs or trying to signal that they wanted to be laid off so they could receive severance pay, the current and former employees said. "It's incredibly demoralizing," an employee who does user research wrote in an internal post, which was reviewed by the Times...
Meta also introduced internal dashboards to track employees' consumption of "tokens," a unit of AI use that is roughly equivalent to four characters of text, four people said. Some said the dashboards were a pressure tactic to encourage competition with colleagues. That led some employees to make so many AI agents that others had to introduce agents to find agents, and agents to rate agents, two people said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Een voormalig agent van de Algemene Inlichtingen- en Veiligheidsdienst ( AIVD) zegt dat de dienst gemaakte afspraken over zijn inzet en bescherming stelselmatig heeft geschonden. De man, in De Telegraaf aangeduid als Gabriël, infiltreerde jarenlang in jihadistische kringen en zegt dat hij niet mocht stoppen toen hij door de spanning psychische klachten kreeg.
Volgens Gabriël beloofde de AIVD dat hij slechts enkele maanden zou worden ingezet en een vast salaris plus bonussen zou krijgen, maar duurde de operatie jaren en bleef de financiële afwikkeling uit. Ook zou hem zijn gevraagd zich als medeverdachte in een terrorismenetwerk te laten veroordelen, in ruil voor een hoge maandelijkse vergoeding, een voorstel dat hij weigerde. Hij stelt verder dat de dienst hem afluisterde, een gps-baken onder zijn auto plaatste en hem na een reeks intimiderende gesprekken zonder adequate nazorg en inkomen liet zitten.
De ex-agent zegt dakloos te zijn geworden en zich misbruikt en in de steek gelaten te voelen, terwijl jihadisten uit zijn oude netwerk hem begonnen te verdenken. Een klacht bij de toezichthouder CTIVD werd niet inhoudelijk behandeld; de rechter oordeelde dat de zorgplicht van de dienst beperkt was omdat hij zich vrijwillig zou hebben gemeld, iets wat hij bestrijdt. Gabriël heeft zich nu in een brief tot de minister van Binnenlandse Zaken gewend en dreigt alle “misstanden rond deze doofpot” naar buiten te brengen als er geen oplossing komt.
GRANADILLA DE ABONA (ANP) - De evacuatie van de opvarenden van het Nederlandse cruiseschip Hondius is begonnen, ziet een ANP-verslaggever ter plaatse. Het door hantavirus getroffen schip kwam zondag vroeg in de ochtend aan in de haven van Granadilla op Tenerife, waar het voor anker ging.
Op de Hondius zitten circa 150 opvarenden, van wie niemand klachten heeft die kunnen duiden op een besmetting met het hantavirus. Ook nog aan boord is het lichaam van een opvarende die overleed aan het virus. Dat zal meevaren tot aan Rotterdam, waar het schip wordt schoongemaakt. Die reis zal zo'n vijf dagen in beslag nemen, meldde rederij Oceanwide zaterdagavond.
De Hondius lag eerst voor de kust van Kaapverdië, maar mocht daar van de Kaapverdische autoriteiten om veiligheidsredenen niet aanmeren. Op verzoek van de Wereldgezondheidsorganisatie (WHO) was Spanje daar wel toe bereid. Het eilandbestuur van de Spaanse Canarische Eilanden was daar geenszins blij mee, onder meer vanwege de vermeende gebrekkige communicatie door het ministerie in Madrid.
Sarah Eberle hopes to inspire people to nurture where town and countryside meet and nature is need of protection
Stinging nettles, buttercups, broken crockery, fly-tipped flowers and a discarded gnome are not the usual hallmarks of an RHS Chelsea flower show garden.
But this year’s On the Edge garden by Sarah Eberle – the most decorated designer at Chelsea – is designed not to look like a garden at all, rather to transport its visitors to the liminal spaces on the outskirts of towns where the countryside begins and nature is in critical need of protection.
Continue reading...As the pioneering BalletBoyz company celebrates its 25th anniversary and Billy Elliott returns to the stage, the male dance landscape appears transformed from where it was at the turn of the century. But a certain macho dismissiveness remains …
“We always thought BalletBoyz was a really stupid name. We wanted not to be BalletBoyz.” says William Trevitt, founder of the company called, guess what, BalletBoyz. It was the BBC that landed them with that tag, when then-Royal Ballet dancers Trevitt and Michael Nunn made a cheeky and revealing backstage documentary at London’s Royal Opera House. Their knockabout, laddish charm won them fans, and when they went on to found their own company, first the two of them, later expanded to 10 men, the name stuck. It does carry a slight hint of the Chippendales about it. “We had a theatre manager coming and saying: ‘Could you ask the dancers to take their shirts off in the second act?’” remembers Trevitt. Which may say something about the expectations of a group of men dancing.
BalletBoyz is heading out on tour this month to celebrate its 25th anniversary. In those two-and-a-half decades, Nunn and Trevitt have done a lot for the image of men dancing (they have had women in their shows over the years, too, it must be said). It was never their intention to make a statement, it was always just about great dance, but still, here were two straight men who danced together – and later a whole company of young men – and commissioned a new repertoire that wasn’t about romantic partnering, but “two matching energies and exploring the balance between them”, as Trevitt puts it.
Around the same time Nunn and Trevitt were making their video diaries, another iconic male dancer spun into view. The film Billy Elliot came out in 2000, the story of the miner’s son who wanted to dance, and by the moving final scene was leaping into choreographer Matthew Bourne’s pioneering Swan Lake with its cast of all-male swans. The film was turned into a multi-award-winning musical that’s still going strong, with a new national tour opening this autumn.
It seemed like a moment where the image and profile of male dancers was changing – the so-called “Billy Elliot effect” – with rumours that one year more boys than girls auditioned for the Royal Ballet School. It feels as though in 2026 we’re living in a culturally different time to the turn of the millennium, especially when it comes to expectations of gender, so have attitudes to boys and men dancing completely changed?
“It’s cool to dance now, isn’t it,” says Layton Williams, who was the ninth Billy Elliot on stage, and more recently a runner-up on Strictly with pro partner Nikita Kuzmin. “My nephew is dancing on TikTok with his mates, and he’s a proper lad.”
Are you feeling hungry? If not, you will be after reading about the world’s most mouth-watering, life-changing sandwiches of all time ...
A crab stick and taramasalata baguette
I was young and carefree, living in Barons Court, west London, in the mid-90s. Chains weren’t a thing, and delis all had sandwich fillings laid out in silver dishes of a uniform, surgical shape, inviting adventure. Russian salad and ham? Sure, why not. The price structure was weird: sometimes everything was the same, and other times you’d accidentally hit a premium ingredient and your sandwich would be £3.50. That’s how I hit on the crab stick and taramasalata baguette, after a financial catastrophe involving actual crab. Crab sticks taste nothing like crab. They are, in fact, more delicious. So much better. And everything so pink. My life was like a fairytale. Zoe Williams
A vegetarian Christmas focaccia
Christmas sandwiches can be wildly underwhelming for veggies – but I’m still craving Glasgow cafe Boca’s offering: salty focaccia, stuffed to the brim with mushroom and chestnut roast, apricot glazed carrots and parsnips, cranberry and walnut agrodolce, sprout slaw and the option to add hefty slices of brie – which, of course, I did. Indulgent, Christmassy, and not a “festive falafel” in sight. Leah Harper
Wie overwaarde wil verzilveren maar niet genoeg inkomen heeft om de hypotheek te verhogen, komt al snel uit bij ‘opeethypotheken’. Ze werken, maar zijn kostbaar – en een goed gesprek met erfgenamen is geen overbodige luxe.
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