The Excel games have gone extreme, tossing four top competitors into urban wilds around the world in a one-off battle, which reigning champion Diarmuid Early won at the last minute. Irish phenom Early captured the win in the Microsoft Excel World Championship’s (MEWC) inaugural Landmark Battle over the weekend after a last-minute comeback that saw him take down Andrew Ngai by a mere 40 points (1060 to 1020) in the 30-minute contest. Jaq Kennedy and Nicolas Micot made up the back half of the chart. The conceit of the whole one-off contest, which was co-sponsored by hardware manufacturer Asus, was to stick the four contestants in the wild around four landmarks, forcing them to deal with weather, potentially flaky internet, and - shudder - the public who might wander over and question what exactly they were doing. Early, who now resides in New York, competed overlooking the Statue of Liberty; Kennedy near Big Ben; Micot at the Eiffel Tower; and Ngai overlooking Sydney Harbour. Hardware for the contest was provided by Asus, which doled out ExpertBook Ultras and wireless portable second screens to each contestant. MEWC said the contest was inspired by the remote work undertaken by many modern professionals, who increasingly work “across client sites, airports, cafés, co-working spaces, and remote locations, instead of behind a desk in an office.” The competition goes back to 2021. It was a 2022 broadcast on ESPN, however, that made competitive Excel a … um … popular thing to watch. MEWC competitions pit Excel experts against each other to solve complex problems designed ahead of time by other Excel experts. In the 2025 World Championship in Las Vegas, where Early beat Ngai to win the trophy, puzzles included doing things like solving a jigsaw puzzle using Excel. The 2022 competition broadcast on ESPN included the spreadsheet platformer Modelario, as well as tasks involving a yacht regatta and slot machine-style games. The one-off Landmark Battle took its inspiration from Jules Verne’s novel Around the World in Eighty Days, and saw the quartet of competitors racing through a seven-part puzzle to decipher the fastest travel route for a group of spreadsheet-bound characters intent on duplicating Phileas Fogg’s feat. According to MEWC, Early came from behind to win the contest using his signature strategy of “core-first, bonus-later,” which involves solving all the core challenges of a puzzle before returning after completion to see how many bonus questions he can pull off. Having been deployed to the field with nothing but a cameraman and the laptop they were working on, none of the competitors were aware of their opponents' live scores, meaning that Early won without knowing how close the contest had become. Qualifiers for the 2026 world championship are ongoing, and Early is an early favorite so far. Six of nine Road to Las Vegas qualifier matches have taken place so far, and Early has won three of them. ®

When it comes to AI services, you don't necessarily get what you pay for. It turns out that AI models with expensive tokens may cost less than models with cheap tokens for particular tasks. And the tooling attached to those models can have a significant effect on cost and output quality. Databricks, which sells data analytics software and services, recently devised an internal coding benchmark to assess the tradeoff between price and performance using various AI models. Matei Zaharia, CTO of Databricks and associate professor of computer science at UC Berkeley, said the company undertook the evaluation because models are often tuned to existing benchmark tests like SWE-Bench – which is "broken," according to OpenAI. Databricks devised its benchmark using real engineering tasks performed by its staff to assess how AI agents perform. Zaharia said while the results reflect the company's internal codebase, other companies should be able to conduct similar evaluations using their own code. One of the things Databricks found was that open weight models like Z.ai's GLM 5.2 are competitive with frontier models, like Anthropic's Opus 4.8. "It landed in the top capability tier, statistically tied with Opus 4.8 on quality, but costing $1.28/task against Opus’s $1.94," the company said in its report. But the price-per-token doesn't tell the whole story. Databricks contends that price-per-task needs to be considered. "Cheaper per-token does not imply cheaper per-task," said Zaharia in a social media post. "For example, Sonnet 5 costs less per token than Opus 4.8 but used more tokens, resulting in higher cost and lower quality." So while Anthropic's Sonnet 5 was around 1.7x cheaper than Opus 4.8 on a per-token basis, it was more costly on a per-task basis – $2.09 for Sonnet 5 compared to $1.94 for Opus 4.8. That's because it completed tasks less often (81 percent compared to 87 percent), and consumed more tokens to achieve the desired result. Academics already reached this conclusion, noting back in March that in about a third of the model comparisons they conducted, the model with the lower listed price ended up costing more. "For example, Gemini 3 Flash's listed price is 80 percent cheaper than GPT-5.4's, yet its actual cost across all tasks is 38 percent higher," they observed. The other thing that had a significant impact on test results was the harness – software like Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and the Pi coding agent – which passes user input to the model, invokes various tools, and returns results. "Harnesses make a huge difference in cost-performance," said Zaharia. "The very simple Pi harness got the same success rate as harnesses from the LLM vendors with Opus and GPT 5.5, but at 2x less cost!" Zaharia attributed the difference to the size of the input – the context – passed to the model with every turn. When Claude Code served as the harness for Opus 4.8, Databricks measured a context of 742,000 tokens per task, compared to 236,999 for Pi. That's about 3.2x fewer tokens overall. With Codex, the total context per task was 1,235,000 tokens, compared to 665,000 tokens for Pi, which is known for its minimal system prompt. Zaharia said the results explain why Databricks built a tool called Omnigent to harness the harnesses – it's a wrapper for combining and swapping multiple coding agents. It's the front-end equivalent of the kind of back-end model swapping that OpenRouter enables. ®

Seemingly unaware of the concept of irony, Satya Nadella is warning AI-using enterprises to take care not to give away their business secrets alongside the massive piles of cash they’re forking over to frontier labs every month. Writing in a long-form post on X over the weekend, the Microsoft CEO and chairman warned of what he called the “reverse information paradox,” a situation in which purchasers of AI essentially pay for the intelligence product they’re getting twice: once with cash, and again “with something even more valuable,” namely the proprietary business knowledge one has to feed an AI model in order to make it worth using in the rare instance an AI investment actually pays off. “Over time, the information asymmetry becomes increasingly skewed,” Nadella noted. “The seller learns more and more about you as you use what you purchased, while you learn very little about what the seller is learning in return.” The irony is thick, given that Microsoft itself pushes AI that slurps up business data, and Redmond helped get this entire messy AI ball rolling by investing billions into early generative AI leader OpenAI. Azure was the former exclusive cloud home for ChatGPT, and Microsoft leadership arguably helped Altman get his job back when OpenAI ousted him in 2023. The pair’s relationship grew strained in the intervening years, and they loosened several exclusivity provisions in early 2026. It also comes after a number of large organizations paused or restricted Microsoft Copilot deployments in 2024 over a related concern: weak data governance and sprawling internal access rights. Enterprise data security outfit Securiti told The Register in 2024 that about half of the more than 20 chief data officers it polled had grounded Copilot deployments, either switching the assistant off or severely restricting what it could access. The problem was particularly acute in organizations with years of accumulated SharePoint and Microsoft 365 permissions, where overly broad access rights risked exposing sensitive information through Copilot. Fast forward a couple of years, and now Nadella is warning that data protection measures aren’t even enough for a business to stay safe in the AI age. “Models learn from ‘exhaust,’ the prompts people write, the tools agents use, and especially the corrections people make,” Nadella warned. “It's the kind of knowledge a competitor could never buy, and the kind that leaks almost imperceptibly: trace by trace, correction by correction, eval by eval.” Consuming intelligence through AI, Nadella added, creates more organizational intelligence. The Microsoft chief argued that the knowledge generated through those interactions ought to belong to the companies that create it. “Enterprises need a real trust boundary for their human capital and token capital to compound,” Nadella wrote, describing his ideal solution as having “a hard boundary across which nothing crosses, not even the intelligence exhaust, without consent.” In other words, welcome to the post-cloud era when all your AI infrastructure will come home to roost inside your own network. If you think we’re exaggerating, Nadella even mentions that one of the things enterprises need to do to solve the reverse information paradox is to build their own proprietary AI learning environments “within the tenant boundary.” We asked Nadella and Microsoft whether solving the problem goes beyond good data governance, as Nadella suggested in his article, and a spokesperson told us yes, describing the matter as a structural problem with the current generally accepted model of AI business in which companies rely on hosted services. Anyone and everyone using AI for business is at risk, they explained. In addition to isolating learning environments, Nadella’s X note also suggested AI-using businesses should create their own private evaluation systems and retain ownership of organizational AI memory and decouple their orchestration layer from any particular AI model, essentially creating “your own continuous learning loop.” “A company should be able to use a model without giving up the knowledge that makes it unique,” Nadella wrote. The Microsoft spokesperson argued that agent harnesses and memory should be independent of models, and called for enterprises to have the rights to their own usage data and model outputs, echoing Nadella’s comments about the irony of leading AI firms crying foul about model distillation while reserving “the right to learn from customer usage and interaction data.” As for whether this is a generic warning that something in the AI industry’s got to give or a sales pitch with Microsoft positioned as the hero, the spokesperson made that clear, telling us that Copilot and Azure AI Foundry (a hosted solution, it’s worth pointing out) are Redmond’s solution to the problems Nadella outlined in his weekend post. Both separate context, memory, and agent harnesses from AI models themselves, giving businesses an additional layer of assurance that their data is safe, the company told us. It's debatable whether or not Microsoft is actually the AI data protection hero enterprises are looking for. But the bigger point is true: Frontier labs are rolling in valuable proprietary data, and that could come back to bite the businesses that forked it over for free. ®

International investors still aren’t interested

Al sinds zijn verkiezingswinst in april wilde premier Péter Magyar dat president Tamás Sulyok aftrad. Sulyok, die door Magyar werd bestempeld als een „marionet” van de radicaal-rechtse oud-premier Viktor Orbán, weigerde dat.

Microsoft geeft als eerste grote Amerikaanse partij inzicht in het stroomverbruik van zijn datacenters in Nederland. Dat is groot, en groeit de komende jaren bovendien hard. Terwijl andere datacenteruitbaters zwijgen, verhardt de strijd om toekomstige aansluitingen op het stroomnet.

Ongeveer een kwart van de geslaagden op havo en vwo kiest voor een tussenjaar. Ze willen reizen, sporten, een taal leren, vrijwilligerswerk doen. En ze zijn op zoek naar persoonlijke groei. „Ik weet nog niet zo goed wat mijn kwaliteiten zijn.”

Het waterschap Brabantse Delta ziet zich door droogte gedwongen om het watergebruik in de regio aan banden te leggen.

De economisch kleine, maar politiek omstreden handel tussen Europa en de illegale Israëlische nederzettingen op de bezette Westelijke Jordaanoever gaat door. Een grote groep EU-landen wil een verbod, maar Ursula von der Leyen en Berlijn liggen dwars.

A new Incogni survey suggests Americans are pulling back from social media, with more than half saying "maintaining an online presence feels like work" and 55% reporting they post less than they did five years ago. "The full study concludes that there's been a significant shift in public attitudes toward social media," reports PCMag. "Where it was once fun and relaxing, it's now growing dark and angsty..." From the report: As the chart shows, there's also a clear correlation with age. A full 60% of Gen Z respondents feel the pain of maintaining a social presence. Perhaps they have a niggling hope that they might still be discovered as an influencer? Those of us in the Boomer category are clearly more relaxed about it, with just 38% saying that maintaining a social presence feels like work. The survey quizzed respondents about how they feel when they don't keep up with checking their socials and, by extension, how they'd feel if they just plain quit. They were given choices, both positive (peace, relaxation, and relief) and negative (anxiety, fear of missing out, and discomfort).

Overall, positive reactions held slightly greater sway, with an average of about 21% compared with 19% for negative reactions. The Gen Y contingent accentuated that split, with 25% positive and 21% negative, while Gen X went even further, with 20% positive and just 13% negative. But the Gen Z group flipped the results, identifying 27% negative and 26% positive reactions to going without social media.

There's another force pushing folks away from the socials: increasing politicization. Of the survey's respondents, 44% agreed that political content is driving people away from social media, and only 20% disagreed. Among Gen Z respondents, the impetus was stronger: 48% agreed, and just 13% disagreed. These negative feelings associated with politics only serve to highlight the positive reactions to deleting your social media.

Are you posting less on social media than you did five years ago, and are you being more selective about who can see what you post? Then you're with the majority. More than half of the respondents answered yes to each of those questions. But would you ever parlay fewer posts into no posts (aka quit posting entirely)? When asked what it would take to finally get them to terminate a social media account, a die-hard group of one in six respondents said there's nothing that could make them quit. But more than half could picture quitting due to security concerns, and almost half accepted the possibility that harassment or hate speech could send them packing. Others cited the amount of time wasted on scrolling through social media and the mental health threats of doomscrolling.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The European Union is considering major new restrictions on children's access to social media, including age limits, phased access, and an outright ban. "This is not about whether children can access social media," said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. "It is about when social media can access our children." The Verge reports: Social media platforms could also be forced to prove their services are not harmful before young people are allowed to use them. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said the bloc's executive arm could propose new legislation within months, after reviewing recommendations from a panel of experts released today.

The panel recommended using a phased approach, including "no screens at all" for children under 3, supervised internet use for those under 13, and some limits for older teens. It also said social media platforms should have to prove their services are safe to younger users, an approach von der Leyen said she supports. Von der Leyen said the Commission will consider the report and return with proposals "after the summer." Any legislation would still need approval from the European Parliament and the EU's 27 member countries before becoming law across the bloc.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: A state-owned newspaper in China recently published a satellite image of a data center in Gainesville, Va., writing in English that the development of artificial intelligence posed a threat to Americans' physical and financial well-being. A comic strip made to look as if it had been published by a Maryland news outlet -- created with OpenAI's ChatGPT by people in China, the tech company said -- circulated on X this year, blaming data centers for soaring electricity bills. It showed a tycoon smoking a cigar and clutching bags of cash. A video shared on X by a known covert Russian influence operation questioned the viability of a data center that an American company, Firebird, is constructing in Armenia, the small Caucasus nation that has been a focus of Kremlin pressure. "The country's electrical grid instability may render it useless," the video's narrator says.

All are examples of a push by foreign adversaries to seize on what polls have shown is deep ambivalence -- verging at times on hostility -- about the spread of the data centers needed to power A.I. in the United States and elsewhere. China, Russia and, to a lesser extent, Iran have sought to use state media outlets to turn the controversy over data centers in the United States into "a domestic fracture point," according to a new analysis by Alethea, a threat intelligence company, which identified scores of articles and posts on social media this year. These campaigns, whose impact on public opinion remains to be seen, have raised alarms in Washington, where A.I. is seen as a top issue heading into this year's midterm elections.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Jongens waar hebben we dit aan verdiend. 's Werelds twee marktleiders in discours-creatie (Clav en Eretz Yisrael) vinden elkaar op het snijvlak van geo-mogging en clip-farming. En het heeft gewoon echt alles. De bovenstaande IDF-soldate Shira Braun die zegt een beheerder te zijn van het IDF TikTok-account is, heeft een probleem. Het Israëlische i24News schrijft: "The IDF Spokesperson's Unit said Braun had acted without authorization. "The soldier acted without coordination with her commanders, and her conduct does not meet the standards expected of IDF soldiers," the IDF said in a statement. "The incident is under investigation, and the soldier will face disciplinary action." En daar maakte AL JAZEERA dan weer een video over jongens wat is de wereld toch mooi soms. Inmiddels is gebleken dat ze uit het IDF social media-team gehaald wordt, en herplaatst is als KOK. 

Vervolgens vertelt Clav onderstaand dat hij gedineerd heeft met Netanyahu-adviseurs en dat er besproken werd hoe Netanyahu meer 'gehumaniseerd' kon worden. Waar het antwoord dan op was dat Clav met hem naar de sportschool zou kunnen gaan en dit ge-livestreamed kon worden.

Weer daarna wordt hij stevig aan de tand gevoeld tijdens een Israëlisch tv-interview over die keer dat hij in een club Kanye West's Heil Hitler zong met o.a. Nick Fuentes, de Tate-broers, Sneako en Amrou Fudl, en meer in het algemeen zijn 'relatie' met Nick Fuentes (die vrij miniem is). 

En wéér daarna scheldt de dochter van rabbijn Schmuley, degene die bekend staat om haar kosjere sekswinkel, Clav de huid vol tijdens een etentje, ook wegens het zingen van dat Heil Hitler-lied.

Al met al: reden genoeg voor Clav om zijn reis door Israël voortijd af te breken: "People are so negative to you here. It almost makes you want to say, well then I'm not going to come back. That's why I'm leaving". Gelukkig hebben we de beelden nog, allemaal onderstaand.

Echt een gemiste kans voor Israël hoor, Clav kwam er met de beste intenties en dat land kan elke positieve PR gebruiken. Is ze niet gelukt, zonde. Hier nog beelden dat hij verbaal belaagd wordt bij zijn hotel. Een generational fumble, noemen de jongeren dat.

Diner met Netanyahu's adviseurs

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Voortijdig beëindigd 'vijandig' interview over Heil Hitler-zangfestijn en band met Nick Fuentues

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Niet alle Israeli's fan van Clavs Heil Hitler-zangfestijn met Nick Fuentes & Co

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Israeli's hebben hier echt de bal laten vallen hey

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JAAAA het Al-Jazeera filmpje over de geschorste IDF-soldate

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Clav heeft genoeg gezien van het beloofde land

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Nederland waterland. Dat ligt niet alleen ontzettend lekker in het gehoor, het ís ook nog eens zo. MAAR VOOR HOELANG NOG? Al tijden wordt gewaarschuwd voor grote watertekorten en zelfs De T. zucht, maar nu brengt Nieuwsuur ons een waarschuwing rechtstreeks van de Landelijke Coördinatiecommissie Waterverdeling, die stelt dat we waterwise zo'n beetje teruggaan naar het jaar 1976 (toen Joop den Uyl nog kraanbeheerder was). We zitten pas een paar dagen in fase 1: dreigend watertekort, maar fase 2: feitelijk watertekort ligt al op de loer. Dat raakt in de eerste plaats scheepvaart en boeren, alleen op een gegeven moment komt ook de burger in de zee van ellende terecht, zeker met die eeuwigdurende hittegolf waar we in zitten. En ja, mogen we dan straks nog wel dweilen? Plantjes water geven? De was doen in een teil? Kan er dan nog muntjesloos gedoucht of moeten we de zweetgeur van Jeroen van sales op kantoor gaan gedogen? Dat worden onsmakelijke toestanden in Nederland. Gelukkig kunnen we in plaats van drinkwater nog altijd aan het bier (toch geldt ook hier: hoelang nog?), verder ziet het er allemaal bepaald niet positief uit.

Goed genuanceerd verhaal wel

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De hopeloze toestand in het Slavische theater volgt u wellicht in ons onregelmatigheidsklassement van de Weekupdates maar voor deze banger breken we de week graag weer op. Een FAB-3000, een 3.000 kilo zware zweefbom met een explosieve lading van 1.400 kilo die onder een Su-34 jachtbommenwerper geknoopt wordt en dan een kilometer of 40 van het doelwit op deze manier wordt losgelaten om het zelf uit te zoeken. Heel precies zijn ze niet. En dan krijg je dus deze ellende, in Orikhiv, oblast Zaporizhzhia. Op een woonblok, waar weinig mensen meer wonen, dus we zullen het volgens de Code van de Volkskrant wel geen genocide noemen. En er zijn natuurlijk minder Joden bij betrokken!

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Jeongmin Lee is interested in the ways “memory is carried through craft and repetition.” On traditional Korean mulberry paper, or hanji, Lee draws delicate lines in ink and pigments known as bunchae, rendering rippling textures that whirl across the page. Steeped in local folklore and mythology, the Busan-based artist creates surreal scenes that conjure fantastical tales of life by the sea.

“Most of my recent projects begin with reading regional folktales, visiting places connected to those stories, and collecting fragments of history, mythology, and oral traditions,” she says. “I rarely paint a folktale exactly as it’s written; I’m more interested in its symbols, emotions, and the questions it leaves behind.”

Many of Lee’s compositions focus on women’s knowledge, labor, and resilience and how those qualities emerge through coastal storytelling. Tales of powerful sea gods and the diving traditions of the haenyeo commingle into balanced illustrations that translate the symbols and motifs of the region anew.

While her approach is labor-intensive, Lee enjoys utilizing such a meticulous, meditative technique. “Painting with traditional pigments requires a slow, layered process. The colors are built gradually, allowing the paper and pigments to create subtle textures that wouldn’t be possible with other materials,” she adds. “It gives me space to sit with these stories while I paint them.

Many of the works shown here are part of Daughters of the Sea, an ongoing series recently on view at the SĀBRS Festival in Riga. Lee hopes to expand the project into one that’s participatory and connects similar narratives from across the globe. “I’m exploring ways that folklore can become something people experience and talk about together, rather than something that exists only on a gallery wall,” Lee shares.

She’s also currently working on a graphic novel centering on Busan’s mythology and folklore, which she hopes to complete next year. Keep up with her projects on 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 Korea’s Coastal Folklore Surfaces in Jeongmin Lee’s Ink Illustrations appeared first on Colossal.

I have a Pi 4 B that, after a power failure, seems unable to talk HDMI in any resolution higher than 1024x768. I have tried both ports, multiple cables, multiple monitors, and a known-good CF card.

# xrandr Screen 0: minimum 320 x 200, current 1024 x 768, maximum 7680 x 7680 HDMI-1 connected primary 1024x768+0+0 (normal left inverted right x axis y axis) 0mm x 0mm 1024x768 60.00* 800x600 60.32 56.25 848x480 60.00 640x480 59.94 HDMI-2 disconnected (normal left inverted right x axis y axis)

I have also tried various permutations of hdmi_force_hotplug, hdmi_group, hdmi_mode, hdmi_force_mode, hdmi_force_hotplug and hdmi_drive in config.txt, and video=HDMI-A-1:1920x1080@60D in cmdline.txt with no change.

Before I toss it in the trash, does anyone know what could have caused this and if it is fixable? Is this a known failure mode of the video hardware scorching itself somehow?

Do not speculate. Do not just google it for me.

Previously, previously.

Ik leerde Tiong Ang kennen via Remy Jungerman met wie hij in 2002 een residentie deed in Indonesië. Ik ben zijn werk sindsdien blijven volgen, eerst toen ik meer reisde op afstand en sinds ik [Meer...]