Meet the Sad Wives of AI. “Princess Diana famously said there were three people in her marriage. For the sad wives of AI, the third is a chatbot.”
ZIRNDORF (ANP) - De fabrikant van speelgoedmerk Playmobil, de Horst Brandstätter Group, blijft fors minder verkopen. Dat blijkt uit de jaarcijfers van het bedrijf. Het bedrijf kampt al enkele jaren met dalende cijfers en schrapte eerder al banen.
De omzet over het gebroken boekjaar 2024/2025 was 409 miljoen euro. Dat was een jaar eerder nog 449 miljoen euro. Ter vergelijking: in 2020/2021 was de omzet nog ongeveer 760 miljoen euro. De speelgoedfabrikant is nog bezig met herstructureren. Zolang dat duurt heeft het bedrijf zich er naar eigen zeggen bij neergelegd dat de resultaten negatief blijven. Onder die maatregelen viel ook het schrappen van zevenhonderd banen.
Om de ommekeer te bewerkstelligen, wil de fabrikant met Playmobil nieuwe doelgroepen aanboren. Daarom is het bedrijf bijvoorbeeld een samenwerking aangegaan met Duitse voetbalteams. "We zien dat onze nieuwe producten en samenwerkingen veel interesse in de markt genereren en onze merkbekendheid versterken", aldus directeur Bahri Kurter.
De Horst Brandstätter Group stopt in juni met de productie van Playmobil-figuren in Duitsland. Daardoor verliezen 350 mensen daar hun baan. De productie wordt verplaatst naar Tsjechië en Malta. Volgens de onderneming is de ingreep nodig om de huidige economische situatie. Het bedrijf heeft onder meer last van hoge energie- en infrastructuurkosten in Duitsland.
PARIJS (ANP) - De Franse start-up voor kunstmatige intelligentie (AI) Mistral is met Europese banken in gesprek over de inzet van zijn alternatief voor Mythos, meldt persbureau Bloomberg op basis van ingewijden. Dat AI-model van het Amerikaanse Anthropic kan razendsnel zwakke punten in de cyberbeveiliging opsporen, wat tot zorgen leidt over de inzet van Mythos door cybercriminelen.
Mistral werkte al met banken aan de inzet van AI om beveiligingslekken te ontdekken. Een betrokkene zegt tegen Bloomberg dat het bedrijf nu een standaardversie van die technologie op de markt wil zetten om breed te kunnen verkopen.
Anthropic stelt Mythos nu nog alleen beschikbaar aan een selecte groep partners, waaronder techbedrijven, cyberbeveiligers en banken. Zij testen de capaciteiten van het AI-model en versterken op basis van de resultaten hun eigen beveiliging. Maar veel Europese organisaties hebben nog geen toegang tot het model. De Europese Centrale Bank riep banken in de eurozone op om zich snel voor te bereiden op mogelijke cyberaanvallen met behulp van Mythos.
Technologische autonomie
Mistral wilde tegenover Bloomberg niet inhoudelijk reageren op vragen. Eerder deze week zei Mistral-topman Arthur Mensch tegen Franse parlementariërs hoe belangrijk hij technologische autonomie in Europa vindt.
"Je kunt de broncode van het Franse leger onmogelijk laten controleren door Mythos. Dat creëert zo'n onherroepelijke afhankelijkheid dat we absoluut oplossingen moeten vinden", zei hij. Hij zei dat Mistral en andere Amerikaanse en Chinese techbedrijven nu ook al in staat zijn beveiligingslekken op te sporen en sprak van "angstzaaierij" rond Mythos.
Mistral heeft onder andere de Britse bank HSBC en het Franse BNP Paribas als klant. De Nederlandse chipmachinemaker ASML is een grote investeerder in Mistral.
Project organisers say high costs and energy crisis have scuppered green route from Camden to King’s Cross
The Camden Highline, a multimillion-pound effort to transform a disused rail line into a greenery-filled walking and cycling paradise, has been all but scrapped.
Nearly a decade since it was conceived as London’s answer to New York’s fabled High Line, the project has fallen victim to high costs and the energy crisis.
Continue reading...Boro to return to training on Friday after semi-final loss
Southampton analyst accused of spying on training
Middlesbrough are scheduled to return to training on Friday in order to be ready to contest a potential playoff final against Hull at Wembley on Saturday week.
Although Boro lost the semi-final to Southampton, they are pushing for the south-coast side to be expelled from the playoffs after William Salt, one of Tonda Eckert’s analysts, was allegedly caught spying on Kim Hellberg’s team at their Rockliffe Park base near Darlington last Thursday.
Continue reading...Passengers will now continue their 45 days of isolation at home, with health officials confirming they remain asymptomatic
Six people who were on the cruise ship linked to an outbreak of hantavirus have left Arrowe Park hospital in Wirral to isolate at home, health officials have said.
Passengers from the MV Hondius were taken to the Merseyside facility for checks by specialists.
Continue reading...The Guardian view on the king’s speech: an agenda for a government that lacks conviction | Editorial
Keir Starmer’s programme is fatally limited by the timidity of an election manifesto that shied away from hard arguments
Ending 14 years of Conservative rule was supposed to bring an end to dysfunctional government. In the speech that launched his 2024 general election campaign, Sir Keir Starmer said that “a vote for Labour is a vote for stability … a vote to stop the chaos”. Less than two years later, Sir Keir’s government looks no sturdier than its predecessors. The prime minister’s chances of serving a full term in office look slim.
There are as many reasons for this precipitous decline as there are Labour MPs calling for a change of direction. The common analysis is that a project branded by the single word “change” has neither transformed people’s lives for the better nor given them confidence that a transformation is coming. For many voters, the prime minister is the embodiment of a miserable status quo.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Continue reading...The critically ill Nobel peace laureate should be released. Iranians’ human rights are under attack from both the regime and the US-Israel war
“Authoritarian regimes do not always need an executioner’s rope,” the Iranian Nobel peace laureate Narges Mohammadi observes in a forthcoming memoir smuggled from her cell. “Sometimes, they simply wait for the human body to fail – and then make sure no help arrives, or they create conditions in which death can come easily, helping it along by standing in the way of life-saving care.”
Long denied adequate treatment, Ms Mohammadi is now in a critical condition. She was found unconscious in her cell after a suspected heart attack in March and had been experiencing chest pain, loss of consciousness and extreme weight loss. She was finally moved to hospital this month, with authorities approving her transfer to specialist care in Tehran only this week. Supporters fear that she will be sent back to prison if her condition improves.
Do you have an opinion on the issues raised in this article? If you would like to submit a response of up to 300 words by email to be considered for publication in our letters section, please click here.
Continue reading...Cannes film festival: The Irish actor plays a disillusioned Circassian chef with a knack with animals in Kantemir Balagov’s clunky third film
All talented directors are allowed an off moment in their careers – and this is the stage arrived at by Kantemir Balagov, whose earlier film Beanpole was such a triumph. This follow-up – his third feature in fact – is his first English language movie, set among the expat Circassian community in New Jersey; it features star names and one colossally self-conscious icon cameo unsubtly signalling cinephile importance. Butterfly Jam is contrived, tonally uncertain, implausible and frankly plain silly in its underpowered kind of magic-unrealism, with some clunky secondhand Mean Streets mob-fraternal dialogue and pedantic ethnic-foodie cred, and elliptically positioning key scenes off camera for no obviously satisfying reason.
Barry Keoghan plays Azik, a widower who with his longsuffering pregnant sister Zalda (Riley Keough) runs a Circassian food diner in Newark; as chef he cooks a sublime delens a delicious cheese and potato dish to his own (secret) recipe, accessorised with delicious jams, one of which, he whimsically announces, is made of butterflies. (He is presumably kidding but he has an amazing touch with the natural world, as we will see.) His teen son Temir (Talga Akdogan) is a talented wrestler who dreams of Olympic glory and he has a sweet crush on fellow wrestler Alika (Jaliyah Richards).
Continue reading...
Toen Rotterdamse kroegen één voor één begonnen te verdwijnen, besloot Rick Arnold zijn camera erbij te pakken. Wat begon met een laatste fotosessie in een sluitende kroeg, groeide uit tot een fotoboek over de bruine kroegcultuur van Rotterdam. "In een bruine kroeg praat iedereen met elkaar."
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Meta employees distributed flyers at multiple U.S. offices on Tuesday to protest the company's recent installation of mouse-tracking software on their computers, according to photos of the pamphlets seen by Reuters. The flyers, which appeared in meeting rooms, on vending machines and atop toilet paper dispensers at the Facebook owner's offices, encouraged staffers to sign an online petition against the move. "Don't want to work at the Employee Data Extraction Factory?" they asked, according to the photos seen by Reuters. [...]
The pamphlets and the petition both cite the U.S. National Labor Relations Act, saying "workers are legally protected when they choose to organize for the improvement of working conditions." In the UK, a group of Meta employees has started organizing a drive for unionization with United Tech and Allied Workers (UTAW), a branch of the Communication Workers Union. The employees set up a website to recruit members using the URL "Leanin.uk," a reference to former Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg's best-selling book encouraging women to seek equal footing in the workplace. "Meta's workers are paying the price for management's reckless and expensive bets. While executives chase speculative AI strategies, staff are facing devastating job cuts, draconian surveillance, and the cruel reality of being forced to train the inefficient systems being positioned to replace them," said Eleanor Payne, an organizer with UTAW. "If we're building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them -- things like mouse movements, clicking buttons, and navigating dropdown menus," said a statement Meta issued earlier.
The pamphlets and the petition both cite the U.S. National Labor Relations Act, saying "workers are legally protected when they choose to organize for the improvement of working conditions." In the UK, a group of Meta employees has started organizing a drive for unionization with United Tech and Allied Workers (UTAW), a branch of the Communication Workers Union. The employees set up a website to recruit members using the URL "Leanin.uk," a reference to former Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg's best-selling book encouraging women to seek equal footing in the workplace. "Meta's workers are paying the price for management's reckless and expensive bets. While executives chase speculative AI strategies, staff are facing devastating job cuts, draconian surveillance, and the cruel reality of being forced to train the inefficient systems being positioned to replace them," said Eleanor Payne, an organizer with UTAW. "If we're building agents to help people complete everyday tasks using computers, our models need real examples of how people actually use them -- things like mouse movements, clicking buttons, and navigating dropdown menus," said a statement Meta issued earlier.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Zowel Saoedi-Arabië als de Verenigde Arabische Emiraten hebben mogelijk bijgedragen aan de bombardementen op Iran, zo werd deze week bekend. De Emiraten geven daarmee niet alleen een waarschuwing af aan Iran, maar ook aan de Verenigde Staten.
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Mark Hughes and Giorgio Piola delve into how and why Ferrari and Red Bull introduced rotating rear wings at the Miami Grand Prix.
Zr.Ms. Evertsen is teruggekeerd in Den Helder. Het luchtverdedigings- en commandofregat verliet de thuishaven begin februari voor een oefening, maar werd aansluitend naar de Middellandse Zee gestuurd. In het oostelijke deel beschermde het schip een Franse Carrier Strike Group, Cyprus en het bondgenootschappelijk grondgebied tegen drones en raketten.
An eon ago, in the year 2012, an editor at my first job at U.S. News and World Report had the idea that we should have a YouTube channel. It wasn’t a pivot to video, exactly, but it would be a bet on an emerging platform where some creators were beginning to go viral with news content. The idea was to put the journalists in front of the camera and have them talk about their articles and the news of the day. It did not go well.
I was nervous, unconfident, had a bad haircut, and, like everyone in Washington, D.C. then and now, was very unfashionable. I had no media training, had never been on TV or video of any sort. I did not have a smartphone. I was socially awkward and spoke in monotone. I blinked endlessly while I talked and fidgeted like crazy with my hands. I constantly said um, tripped over my words, and generally had no idea what I was doing. We made a series of videos with titles like “Head Injury Studies Continue to Cause Alarm in NFL,” “Are the Politics of Climate Change Shifting?,” and “Which Party Will Get the ‘Internet Vote’?” The videos were poorly edited, sounded weird, and got zero traction.
I did not want to make these videos but it was a newsroom-wide initiative and so I did it anyway. Thankfully and mercifully, almost no one watched any of these videos, because they were bad. Then and now, they are the opposite of what anyone watches on the internet. And yet, these videos were roughly about as good as a series of podcast videos being released by the Washington Post’s new and drastically worsened Opinion section, apparently at great expense to the outlet. They were also about as popular, with many of my videos garnering upwards of several dozen views.
On Sunday, the very good media newsletter Status reported that the Washington Post recently invested $80,000 on new audio and video gear for its new Make It Make Sense podcast, which features the Washington Post Editorial Board. It has also remodeled a studio in its office, which seems apparent in a very bad trailer for the show titled “A News Show You Can Trust, Finally,” but not in any of its previously recorded videos (some of which were released this week). All of this has happened at the behest of opinion editor Adam O’Neal and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos as part of the section’s shift rightward to focus on billionaire- and free market-friendly content.
The podcast is not going well. Watching a few minutes of several of the videos immediately gave me flashbacks to the videos I was in at U.S. News, and served as a stark reminder that the executives running these media companies have zero clue what they’re doing. The videos posted by the Washington Post so far feel extremely dated, as though they were made either with zero resources in 2012 or by someone who has never watched a YouTube video or listened to a podcast in their lives. Everyone is wearing the same business casual and looks like they have been suddenly airdropped from a Pret a Manger on K Street into a nondescript glass cube. The podcasts follow zero of the best practices of YouTube or podcasting; the only indication that anyone involved has been on YouTube ever in their life are the podcast’s thumbnails, which are bad and weird in a different way entirely but at least attempt YouTube’s signature clickbait style, albeit with a weird yellow wash and a serif font. Some of the videos start mid-sentence with no introduction or grabby hook whatsoever. One video begins: “The president of the United States is going to head to the Supreme Court to listen to some of the experts, uh, I think this might be the first time a sitting president is going to hear arguments at the Supreme Court…” the host trails off. Another host says “I think so. I think,” and stops speaking. “This is, uhh, we’ll confirm that. We’ll fact check that.” This is the first 19 seconds of the video.
Recent episodes of the podcast feature tired and milquetoast, recycled right-wing takes one could pull out of a hat, such as “What the Media Got Wrong During Covid,” “Weed Isn’t As Harmless As You Think,” and what-to-do-with-racist-statues. Other takes include college is too easy, billionaires actually do pay enough taxes, people who hate AI are unhinged, and—in a moment of actually trying to capture the zeitgeist—Hasan Piker is bad. None of the videos are popular. Some of them have fewer than 30 views, while others have ticked up into the triple digits primarily based on hate watches from people clowning on the podcast in recent days. The new studio has not helped, though it does at least look better. A video posted yesterday has 160 views at the time of this writing.
On audio-only platforms, the podcast is faring no better. Googling “Make It Make Sense podcast” brings up many other podcasts called Make It Make Sense, but not Jeff Bezos’s new flagship show. I was able to find the podcast in the Apple Podcast app, where it has four ratings and 2.3 stars out of 5, and the most glowing review is “This is bad and the people making it should feel bad.” On Spotify, it has a 2.8 out of 5 rating.
I do feel for the people who are in these videos. It is not easy to be on camera and it is not easy to make engaging YouTube content (growing our own YouTube channel has been a slog, and has been far more difficult than growing an audience on any other platform). Over time, with lots of practice and following many mean YouTube comments, I now feel slightly more comfortable being on camera than I did in the U.S. News days. And yet media executives keep trying to make people who are not good at presenting video do it anyway.
The best thing that can be said about this project is that at least we know Jeff Bezos is not buying views on YouTube, which is a common practice for vanity venture capitalist podcasts that no one wants to watch or listen to. So, why write about this at all?
Well, the show is the type of thing that we have seen time and time again from big media companies, and specifically, their airheaded executives who think that they have any idea how to make content that resonates with anyone at all. As Status pointed out, the Washington Post had a large and highly competent video team that made very good and successful video content. It laid the vast majority of them off, and this is what we’re left with. The Washington Post was known for having one of the most innovative, quirky, and successful TikTok channels, built in part by the journalist Dave Jorgenson.
Jorgenson left the Post in July of last year to start his own channel and company. “Dear Jeff Bezos, if you’re reading this, you already know. I’m leaving the Washington Post and starting my own company,” Jorgenson said in a video announcing the channel. “My boss, and my boss’s boss are coming with me, so viewers can continue to expect the same high quality, fact-checked videos.” Jorgenson now has 328,000 subscribers on YouTube and 317,000 TikTok followers. The Washington Post’s TikTok now exclusively posts repurposed stock footage from news wires. We have seen similar at VICE (which just “relaunched” VICE News as Adobe sponcon), Deadspin, etc.
Talented journalists—especially video journalists and podcasters—lose their jobs but the channels and feeds they created and built are zombified and repurposed for an executive’s passion project, staffed by people who have no idea what they’re doing. These projects inevitably also cost lots of money but with the added bonus that no one watches them. The project inevitably fails and is ignored into the oblivion. It’s fine to just ignore these stupid projects but maybe also we should mention sometimes that this is all part of the systematic hollowing out of news institutions that once did very good work that people cared about.
Turns out anyone can make a podcast. That doesn’t mean anyone is going to listen.