An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: For its famous intractability, the Bloomberg Terminal has long inspired devotion, bordering on obsession. Among traders, the ability to chart a path through the software's dizzying scrolls of numbers and text to isolate far-flung information is the mark of a seasoned professional. But as a greater mass of data is fed into the Terminal -- not only earnings and asset prices, but weather forecasts, shipping logs, factory locations, consumer spending patterns, private loans, and so on -- valuable information is being lost. "It has become more and more untenable," says Shawn Edwards, chief technology officer at Bloomberg. "You miss things, or it takes too long."

To try to remedy the problem, Bloomberg is testing a chatbot-style interface for the Terminal, ASKB (pronounced ask-bee), built atop a basket of different language models. The broad idea is to help finance professionals to condense labor-intensive tasks, and make it possible to test abstract investment theses against the data through natural language prompts. As of publication, the ASKB beta is open to roughly a third of the software's 375,000 users; Bloomberg has not specified a date for a full release. Wired spoke with Edwards at Bloomberg's palatial London headquarters in early April, where he shared several examples of what ASKB can do. "With ASKB, I can create workflow templates. I can write a long query, and say, 'Hey, here's all the data I'm going to need. Give me a synopsis of the bull and bear cases, what the Street is saying, what the guidance is.' Now, I want to schedule [the workflows] or trigger them when I see this or that condition in the world."

As for what separates mediocre traders from the best, assuming both have access to the same data, Edwards said: "These tools are not magical. They don't make an average [employee] all of a sudden great. The difference will be your ideas. In the hands of experts, it allows them to do better analysis, deeper research -- to sift through 10 great ideas when they might have only had time for one. If you're a mediocre analyst, they'll be 10 mediocre ideas."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has reportedly signed a classified agreement allowing the Pentagon to use its AI models for "any lawful government purpose." While the deal is said to discourage domestic mass surveillance and autonomous weapons without human oversight, it apparently does not give Google the power to block how the government actually uses its models. The Verge reports: The agreement was reported less than a day after Google employees demanded CEO Sundar Pichai block the Pentagon from using its AI amid concerns that it would be used in "inhumane or extremely harmful ways." If the agreement is confirmed, it would place Google alongside OpenAI and xAI, which have also made classified AI deals with the US government. Anthropic was also among that list until it was blacklisted by the Pentagon for refusing the Department of Defense's demands to remove weapon and surveillance-related guardrails from its AI models.

Citing a single anonymous source "with knowledge of the situation," The Information reports that the deal states that both parties have agreed that the search giant's AI systems shouldn't be used for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weapons "without appropriate human oversight and control." But the contract also says it doesn't give Google "any right to control or veto lawful government operational decision-making," which would suggest the agreed restrictions are more of a pinky promise than legally binding obligations.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

fjo3 writes: The United Arab Emirates announced Tuesday that it would exit the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (source paywalled; alternative source), or OPEC, along with the wider group of partners known as OPEC+, effective May 1, in what could be a blow to control over prices by the group, long led in practice by Saudi Arabia. The move "reflects the UAE's long-term strategic and economic vision and evolving energy profile" read an official statement carried by a UAE state news agency, as disruptions "in the Strait of Hormuz continues to affect supply dynamics."

[...] The UAE is the second Persian Gulf country to leave the group after Qatar terminated its membership in 2019. The UAE has been a member of OPEC since 1971. The latest departure leaves in place 11 core members: Algeria, Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Gabon, Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Libya, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia and Venezuela.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Bay Area homeowner and investment banker Storm Duncan is trying to swap a 13-acre Mill Valley property for Anthropic equity instead of cash. He created a LinkedIn page for the home, describing the move as a "diversification play" because he is "under-concentrated in AI investments relative to the importance of AI in the future, and over-concentrated in real estate." A young Anthropic employee, Duncan says, might be "in the exact opposite scenario." TechCrunch reports: Duncan is asking potential buyers to email him to discuss deal specifics, but he said it would be a private transaction that doesn't require the buyer to sell their stock outright. On LinkedIn, he also said the homebuyer would "continue to retain 20% of the upside value of the shares exchanged for the duration of the lockup period."

Duncan, who described himself as a longtime Bay Area resident who moved to Miami during the pandemic, bought the property in 2019 for $4.75 million. It's currently occupied by "a high-profile VC," he said, but he declined to identify the VC.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

BertvB posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Inside the cavernous former train station that now houses Hamburger Bahnhof, 400,000 wooden cubes stack and topple into piles. Conceived by Lithuanian artist Lina Lapelytė and commissioned by Chanel, “We Make Years Out of Hours” is a large-scale installation that invites the public to remake structures from these 10-centimeter blocks made of pine and spruce.

Lapelytė often combines sound and performance and collaborates with both professionals and novices. This participatory work continues the artist’s interest in collective making and caretaking, particularly as it relates to shared authorship and how we might amend and reshape what currently exists.

A trio of weekly performances on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays will feature a libretto with the words of 15 writers, including Vietnamese-American poet Ocean Vuong, Lebanese-American painter Etel Adnan, Iranian filmmaker
Forugh Farrokhzad, and Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish. Centered around community, love, and loss, these songs create another dimension in the space to consider agency and hope.

“We Make Years Out of Hours” opens on May 1 and is on view through January 10, 2027, in Berlin. Explore more of Lapelytė’s multi-disciplinary works on her website and 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 Lina Lapelytė Fills Hamburger Bahnhof with 400,000 Wood Blocks for Communal Building appeared first on Colossal.

AP report King Charles III addressed a joint session of the U.S. Congress today, only the second British monarch to do so after Queen Elizabeth II in 1991. Speaking during the 250th year of American independence, he invoked Magna Carta, Oscar Wilde's line about being "divided by a common language," and framed the relationship as "A Tale of Two Georges" — Washington and George III. An interesting blend of speechwriting, symbolism, diplomacy, and royal theatre. Curious what others made of the speech.

Read article | Sheer luck means Anguilla's domain is .ai - so many tech businesses are rushing to use it. The island is happy to shut up and take their money!

"In its draft 2025 budget document, the Anguillian government says that in 2024 it earned 105.5m East Caribbean dollars ($39m; £29m) from selling domain names. That was almost a quarter (23%) of its total revenues last year. Tourism accounts for some 37%, according to the IMF. The Anguillian government expects its .ai revenues to increase further to 132m Eastern Caribbean dollars this year, and to 138m in 2026. It comes as more than 850,000 .ai domains are now in existence, up from fewer than 50,000 in 2020. As a British Overseas Territory, Anguilla is under the sovereignty of the UK, but with a high level of internal self-governance."

A call for targeted microlooting. Nadja Spiegelman hosts the New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino and Twitch streamer/commentator Hasan Piker on a New York Times podcast to discuss the political possibilities of stealing from large corporations.

Nadja Spiegelman previously. Jia Tolentino previously.

PERM filings require employers to show American workers had a fair shot at the role

The US Department of Justice has accused data and AI platform provider Cloudera of abusing a program designed to give permanent residency to foreign workers who take tough-to-fill positions by creating a parallel hiring process that dumped the applications of Americans to a non-functional email address. …

Altman's gaggle of GPTs now available in limited preview in an AWS region near you

OpenAI's top models are officially available on Amazon Web Services' Bedrock managed inference and agent platform.…

'Full recovery is impossible for anyone, including the attacker'

Organizations hit by the wave of Trivy and LiteLLM supply-chain compromises that paid Vect in hopes of recovering their data likely did not get much back, according to Check Point Research. That's because the ransomware Vect uses isn't actually ransomware at all, but a wiper that destroys any file larger than 128KB.…

DoI offers up to $885M if they abandon offshore wind projects

As the Iran war pushes up energy prices, the Trump administration is paying offshore wind developers to walk away from projects and invest instead in fossil fuel infrastructure.…

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Omdat het ook wel een keertje aardig is, bespreken we hedenavond enkel goed nieuws in ons StamCafé. Wat blijkt nou: na het beëindigen van om en nabij 47 oorlogen, het redden van de economie en het bevrijden van de Iraniërs werpt Trump zich nu op tot redder van de bijen. Dat maken wij althans op uit bovenstaande plaat, gemaakt tijdens het staatsbezoek van het Britse koningspaar aan de VS. Weer een banger van een foto van de vredespresident, een ongetwijfelde gamechanger voor de Midterms. Ander goed nieuws uit Amerika: ICE bewijst weer eens hartstikke NICE te zijn door een 19-jarige meid uit het Overijsselse De Krim (ja zo heet het daar. afblijven Poetin) vast te zetten. Hoe durven ze!! Zomaar Nederlandse tienermeisjes in de bak gooien! Die had zeker iets gemeens getweet over Trump!! Euh, nee. De meid in kwestie kwam aan op het vliegveld van Dallas met een koffer vol drugs, maar liefst 67 kilo. Ze zou eerst jarenlang de bak in moeten, maar sloot met justitie om daar slechts 4 maanden van te maken. Die 4 maanden zaten er er al op, maar nu zit ze dus vast in een detentiecentrum van ICE. Altijd weer die jongeren uit De Krim. Hoe dan ook lekker gewerkt ICE! Tenslotte drinken we een rondje extra voor alle patiënten bij zorginstellingen die gebruik maken van patiëntenportalen van ChipSoft. Nadat begin deze maand daar allemaal patiëntgegevens gehackt waren, meldt het bedrijf nu dat die gestolen gegevens allemaal vernietigd zijn. Of ChipSoft de cyberpikkeboeven daarvoor een geldbedrag heeft overgemaakt willen ze niet zeggen, maar we vermoeden: wel. Ja, jammer van je principes maar wel een nieuwe, zoveelste, dataramp afgewend. Kan ook gewoon, Odido. Enfin, tot zover het goede nieuws, na de breek wat miems en uiteraard goedenacht.

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Ook niet onbelangrijk!

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6 mei, zegt die datum u iets? Nou, ons wel, want het is de dag dat de Nederlandse regering gaat tekenen bij het kruisje van het uit handen geven van onze digitale soevereiniteit inzake DigiD. Dan wordt namelijk het contract met de in de etalage staande beheerder van deze best wel cruciale dienst verlengd (ondanks het feit dat vrijwel de hele Kamer TEUGEN is), en de afgelopen dagen is de regering vooral druk geweest met het rechtzetten van deze weeffout in onze digitale rechtsorde verdachtmaken en op non-actief zetten van klokkenluider Pieter van Oordt, die overigens gewoon doorvecht en hierrr nog even wijst op een interessant haakje in het internationaal Europees recht wat betreft de overname. Maar er is hoop! Een coalitie onder leiding van Pieter Omtzigt, met in de gelederen onder meer Brenno (Brenno!) de Winter, Marleen Stikker en Ferd 'de G. blijft toch de G.' Grapperhaus waarschuwt de regering in de Volkskrant VOOR DE LAATSTE KEER. "Tot 6 mei kan Nederland nog zonder veel extra kosten een andere keuze maken en ervoor zorgen dat DigiD en de Berichtenbox niet onder Amerikaanse controle komen. We roepen de regering op dat te doen. De tijdlijn is kort, nu de beslissing om over te stappen consequent is uitgesteld, maar onder druk wordt alles vloeibaar." Zei er niet iemand ooit: het kan wél?

This mural, which is part of the Dear Iran project, was inspired by what Dear Iran’s founder Reza Moazezi, had created with the tulip. The tulip is a flower that has symbolism in Iran, but it is also a flower I find to be really beautiful. I use flowers in a lot of my art because I find that they are very universal and help to bridge gaps culturally. Every different nation, every different culture, and every different religion finds flowers beautiful and symbolically powerful. Flowers are about hope and resilience. So with what’s going on in Iran, doing my version of the tulip growing from the barbed wire was a way of supporting the project. It was a way of using some of the same iconography that people will see in the Dear Iran project and showing a bit of solidarity on human rights no matter where you are.

-Shepard

“Someone very special has stood up for the voiceless people of Iran at a time when no one outside of our community really has. This great human, who is so comfortable in his humanity that he is not worried about how others perceive his activism.

At a time when they are trying hard to separate us, he not only stood up, his heroism has cascaded a whole culture to stand up and bring awareness to the atrocities that are happening to the people of Iran. Thank you Mr Shepard Fairey for being who you are.”

– Reza Moazezi, Founder of Dear Iran

Check out the mural at The Fameyard on 7753 Melrose Ave in Los Angeles, CA.

Photos by Galen Oakes

The post New Dear Iran Mural at The Fame Yard in Los Angeles appeared first on Obey Giant.

Fred Marquer has added a photo to the pool:

Kyoto, Japan

Bij de cyberaanval stalen de hackers medische gegevens van zorginstellingen. Volgens de getroffen softwareontwikkelaar zijn de data niet gepubliceerd.