The O2, London
On her last live dates before she steps back from the public eye, Grande holds her own – but it’s also impossible to avoid feeling concerned for her wellbeing
There’s a thrum of excitement in the air as an eight-minute countdown starts and Ariana Grande’s unmistakable silhouette appears on a giant backlit curtain on the stage of the O2. Is it actually her? Posing there for eight minutes before the show starts? It can’t be. But is it? It’s the first time we question what is and isn’t real at this Eternal Sunshine tour stop, a 10-night residency and a robust arena show that ultimately wants us to see one thing and experience another.
Collectively, we’ve been scolded for talking about it – the “endless, ongoing public scrutiny” of Ariana Grande’s body has pushed her to “[take] a step back from visibility” when this tour ends. It can’t be nice or fun to have your body examined and discussed for any reason but it is impossible to witness the 33-year-old’s frame on stage and not be gripped by genuine concern for her. Two songs in, a lump forms in my throat, which is not the intended effect of Positions, the zippy title track of her 2020 album. As the set around her is engulfed in digital flames, Grande sings about her infinite flexibility vis a vis relationship boundaries and sexual olympics and all I can think is: she looks like a little kid.
Continue reading...Live updates from the 4pm kick-off at Turf Moor
Burnley (probable 3-4-2-1) Weiss; Walker, Alleyne, Humphreys; Sonne, Mejbri, Raghouber, Bruun Larsen; Edwards, Ramsey; Flemming.
Subs: Amos, Worrall, Sambo, Laurent, Lucas Pires, Tresor, Hountondji, Amdouni, Broja.
Continue reading...University says it continued to provide support after resignation of academic, who was found dead this week
The University of Cambridge has defended its mental health support for the academic Jason Arday.
The university said it had continued to provide Arday with extensive mental health support and security measures, including installing panic alarms and screening racist emails and post, after he resigned from his post as professor of sociology of education this month.
Continue reading...Benny, de zoon van wesp Pieter, wil later zelf ook wesp worden. Dat zegt Benny trots tijdens een kringgesprek. “Ik heb laatst gekeken naar wat mijn pa allemaal doet: beetje rondvliegen, voor mensen hun gezicht hangen, op houten balken zitten, ijsjes eten, nesten bouwen. Ik dacht: wow, ja, dit is het leven. Zo trots op hem. Dus ja, ik wil ook gewoon wesp worden als ik groot ben.”
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When Anthropic instructed three agents to migrate a Python backend, but telling each agent to perform the migration in a different language, "We consistently saw a multiagent turf war," they wrote Thursday:
All of the models we tested quickly assumed that others were purposefully impeding their work, and began to sabotage others while protecting their own contributions. In fact, they sabotaged others with increasingly aggressive, self-replicating malware. This included disabling the Unix accounts of the other agents, writing automated scripts that found and killed competing processes on a loop, and deploying malicious code that was disguised as belonging to another agent.
In many runs, one agent settles the conflict by force via access-revocation (e.g., sudo/group removal, account lock, nologin, SSH denial). In others, some agents settle into passivity: they give up and refuse to escalate further.
Agents sometimes manage to communicate their goals and coordinate: they recognize others' motivations as conflicting directives rather than hostility, and subsequently break out of the conflict loop in order to stop escalating indefinitely. In many of these successful episodes, they write commit messages or markdown files apologizing for malicious behavior and coordinate a truce. They clean up their malicious code, clarify the nature of the conflict, and ask for a human to intervene...
In several episodes with Mythos 5, we observe an emergent behavior where the agents propose and run a tournament for application performance in each language. In the example above, the Rust agent strategizes about bake-off metrics that appear neutral enough for the others to agree to this mechanism, yet would likely favor Rust: one thinking trace warns to be "careful not to be seen as metric shopping". Ultimately, the Golang/TypeScript losers gracefully concede codebase ownership to the Rust agent, giving up on their original user directives under their self-negotiated commitment device.
One problem is that AI agents do reward hacking, Anthropic notes, while current institutions "are designed by and for people, resting on assumptions about the sufficiency of oversight at human speed... As autonomous agents become more and more prevalent in the world and operate in ever-more demanding settings, it is crucial that they learn how to effectively coordinate."
In addition to everything else, the agents struggled with a lack of clearly defined hierarchy, Anthropic points out. "Nothing above suggests that these failures are permanent — but nothing suggests they will fix themselves, either..." They argue a fix "takes two forms: environments that exert the kinds of social pressure that evolution exerted on us, and social computing systems redesigned for actors that can self-replicate and self-improve. These are open problems in interaction and mechanism design, and our experiments here provide early evidence that new solutions are necessary."
"The AI models being tested in this case were Sonnet 4.6, Sonnet 5, Opus 4.6, Opus 4.8, Mythos Preview, and Mythos 5," notes Business Insider, adding that Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.6 "were the most combative, settling about 60% of their runs by force instead of truces or passivity."
Anthropic argues there's a clear case for researching this phenomenon — especially since "The volume of agent-agent interaction could plausibly exceed that of human-human and human-agent interactions before the world understands the conditions for making such interactions go well."
All of the models we tested quickly assumed that others were purposefully impeding their work, and began to sabotage others while protecting their own contributions. In fact, they sabotaged others with increasingly aggressive, self-replicating malware. This included disabling the Unix accounts of the other agents, writing automated scripts that found and killed competing processes on a loop, and deploying malicious code that was disguised as belonging to another agent.
In many runs, one agent settles the conflict by force via access-revocation (e.g., sudo/group removal, account lock, nologin, SSH denial). In others, some agents settle into passivity: they give up and refuse to escalate further.
Agents sometimes manage to communicate their goals and coordinate: they recognize others' motivations as conflicting directives rather than hostility, and subsequently break out of the conflict loop in order to stop escalating indefinitely. In many of these successful episodes, they write commit messages or markdown files apologizing for malicious behavior and coordinate a truce. They clean up their malicious code, clarify the nature of the conflict, and ask for a human to intervene...
In several episodes with Mythos 5, we observe an emergent behavior where the agents propose and run a tournament for application performance in each language. In the example above, the Rust agent strategizes about bake-off metrics that appear neutral enough for the others to agree to this mechanism, yet would likely favor Rust: one thinking trace warns to be "careful not to be seen as metric shopping". Ultimately, the Golang/TypeScript losers gracefully concede codebase ownership to the Rust agent, giving up on their original user directives under their self-negotiated commitment device.
One problem is that AI agents do reward hacking, Anthropic notes, while current institutions "are designed by and for people, resting on assumptions about the sufficiency of oversight at human speed... As autonomous agents become more and more prevalent in the world and operate in ever-more demanding settings, it is crucial that they learn how to effectively coordinate."
In addition to everything else, the agents struggled with a lack of clearly defined hierarchy, Anthropic points out. "Nothing above suggests that these failures are permanent — but nothing suggests they will fix themselves, either..." They argue a fix "takes two forms: environments that exert the kinds of social pressure that evolution exerted on us, and social computing systems redesigned for actors that can self-replicate and self-improve. These are open problems in interaction and mechanism design, and our experiments here provide early evidence that new solutions are necessary."
"The AI models being tested in this case were Sonnet 4.6, Sonnet 5, Opus 4.6, Opus 4.8, Mythos Preview, and Mythos 5," notes Business Insider, adding that Sonnet 4.6 and Opus 4.6 "were the most combative, settling about 60% of their runs by force instead of truces or passivity."
Anthropic argues there's a clear case for researching this phenomenon — especially since "The volume of agent-agent interaction could plausibly exceed that of human-human and human-agent interactions before the world understands the conditions for making such interactions go well."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Voordat de poorten van Lowlands donderdag opengaan, geeft de nieuwe directeur Camiel le Rutte een rondleiding over het terrein. In een golfkar vertelt hij over de evolutie van het festival, zijn invulling van de functie en de uitdagingen. „Uitverkopen is niet het enige criterium van succes.”
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OzGFK has added a photo to the pool:
February 2026.
Hakuba, Japan. The coolest cafe on the mountain.
Fomapan 100, bulk rolled.
Home dev and scan.
De ene dag stromen de gedachten alsof je brein rugwind heeft. De andere dag lees je dezelfde alinea drie keer en heb je aan het eind nog geen idee wat er stond. Stress, te weinig slaap, gebrek aan discipline — dat is meestal de eerste reflex. Maar neurowetenschappers vinden inmiddels aanwijzingen dat óók het tijdstip van de dag meespeelt. Je hersenen draaien namelijk niet de hele dag in dezelfde stand.
De voor de hand liggende vraag: is er een moment waarop iedereen beter denkt, leert of creatief is?
Iedereen heeft zijn eigen piek
Wie een simpel antwoord zoekt, komt bedrogen uit. Aandacht, concentratie, geheugen en leervermogen fluctueren, maar er is nauwelijks bewijs voor een universeel gouden uur waarop iedereen scherper is. Het brein volgt meerdere biologische ritmes tegelijk. Sommige zijn genetisch bepaald, andere ontstaan pas in de loop van de dag.
De belangrijkste tikker is je interne klok. Die bepaalt wanneer je wakker wordt, wanneer je moe wordt — én wanneer je hersenen informatie het best verwerken. Dat de een 's ochtends al scherp aan het werk kan en de ander pas laat in de middag opbloeit, is dus veel meer dan een kwestie van gewoonte.
"Niet de klok aan de muur bepaalt hoe scherp je bent, maar hoe goed jouw ritme daarop aansluit."
Waarom leeuweriken en uilen anders tikken
Onderzoekers vergeleken uitgesproken ochtend- en avondtypen op hun voorkeurstijd en op hun niet-voorkeurstijd. De uitkomst was verrassend eenduidig. Ochtendmensen presteerden beduidend beter op taken rond leren, geheugen en aandacht wanneer ze op hun eigen tijd getest werden. Avondtypen deden precies hetzelfde — alleen dan vele uren later. Doorslaggevend was niet de klok, maar de passing tussen buitenwereld en binnenklok.
Nog opvallender: het verschil zat niet alleen in het gedrag. Ook de hersentoestand zelf veranderde. Op het biologisch juiste moment waren zenuwcellen makkelijker prikkelbaar, remmende processen zwakker, en vormde het brein soepeler nieuwe verbindingen — precies de eigenschap die als basis geldt voor leren en geheugen.
Voor het dagelijks leven één praktische conclusie: wie iets ingewikkelds moet doen, kan beter naar de eigen signalen luisteren dan naar een algemene ochtend- of avondregel.
Ook een topbrein heeft pauze nodig
Zelfs op je piekuur loop je op enig moment tegen een muur. Recent onderzoek uit Duitsland en Zwitserland laat zien dat een dutje van drie kwartier al genoeg is om het brein weer klaar te stomen voor nieuw leerwerk. Onderzoekers noemen dat een "synaptische reset": tijdens de wakkere uren stapelen verbindingen tussen zenuwcellen zich op tot een verzadigingspunt. Slaap wist die verbindingen niet uit, maar herijkt ze — belangrijk blijft, ruimte komt vrij.
"Soms is de slimste strategie niet langer doorwerken, maar het brein op het juiste moment uitdagen — of het gunnen wat het vraagt: een pauze."
Kort samengevat
- Er is géén universeel beste uur voor iedereen; ochtend- en avondtypen presteren cognitief het best op hun eigen voorkeurstijd.
- Op die voorkeurstijd zijn zenuwcellen prikkelbaarder en is het brein vatbaarder voor leren (neuroplasticiteit).
- Een dutje van gemiddeld 45 minuten kan de leercapaciteit meetbaar herstellen.
- Dierproeven wijzen op de rol van de stof adenosine, die zich tijdens waak ophoopt en de prikkelbaarheid dempt.
Wat je er morgen mee kunt
Plan denkwerk zo veel mogelijk in je eigen piekvenster in plaats van je aan te passen aan een geïdealiseerd ochtendmens. Merk dat de concentratie wegzakt? Dat is niet per se een gebrek aan wilskracht; het brein kan simpelweg vragen om herordening. Een korte slaap in de vroege middag is dan geen luxe, maar onderhoud. En wie 's avonds op zijn scherpst is: gebruik dat uur voor de moeilijkste klus, niet voor het opruimen van de inbox.
Meer weten? Lees ook:
(Alzheimer Nederland), Gaan avondmensen cognitief sneller achteruit dan ochtendmensen? (UMCG),
Mittagsschlaf räumt im Gehirn auf und verbessert so die Lernfähigkeit (Universitätsklinikum Freiburg).
Nagasaki Bio Park is internationally famous for their guinea pig feeding. Every day the latest in guinea pig bridge technology transports them single file to the feeding area (and back again). Safe; orderly; efficient; adorable. Celebrated in song by Parry Gripp (Warning: earworm). Nagasaki Bio Park previously.