Duologue, Arnaud Montagard

Mulholland Dr, Benjamin Juhel

British wildcard has no quit in him and fought back to deny Grigor Dimitrov and reach the Wimbledon quarter-finals

Who the hell taught Arthur Fery when to know when he’s beaten? It’s easier to kick nicotine than it is to make this kid quit. He made it through to the fourth round by twice fighting his way back after trailing by a set and a break to defeat Zizou Bergs in a fifth‑set tie‑break, and now he’s gone on to the quarter‑finals by doing it all over again after being a set and a break down against Grigor Dimitrov.

There are brick walls with more ive in them. Against Dimitrov the 23‑year‑old Fery, who has never made it past the second round of a grand slam tournament, almost lost, almost lost, and almost lost again. And then in the end, he won.

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• Celeste Amarilla called striker a ‘colonised Cameroonian’

• French Football Federation to file criminal charges

France’s Kylian Mbappé has hit back at a Paraguayan senator, describing her ⁠as a “despicable woman” after she launched a racist attack on him. Mbappé’s ⁠penalty proved ​the difference in an ill-tempered match as France beat Paraguay 1-0 in Philadelphia on Saturday to advance ⁠to the quarter-finals.

Celeste Amarilla wrote a long tirade on X, describing Mbappé as a “colonised Cameroonian, desperately trying to ⁠pass himself off as French” and as a “brute who had not learned to ​write”. Paraguay’s players should have ‌slapped him after the ‌match, she added.

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Democratic candidate for Senate, who has faced series of scandals, denies allegation reported by Politico

A woman has accused Graham Platner, the Democratic candidate for US Senate in Maine, of sexual assault, according to an exclusive report by Politico.

Jenny Racicot, 41, dated the oyster farmer former marine veteran and alleges he forced her to have sex despite repeated objections.

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Despite ‘a setback that will hurt for eternity’, the co-hosts exit with heads held high after bringing pride, passion and soul

On Monday music pulsated from some of the bars on Calle Genova, a narrow thoroughfare in Mexico City’s heart that rarely lives in silence. The clock was yet to strike 11am, but, spilling out on to the street, a healthy crowd of patrons were picking up where they had left off. Perhaps they had never stopped at all. National team shirts were on full display and, had anyone lived under a news blackout for 15 hours, they may have drawn a wildly different conclusion about the previous night’s events.

The truth was more evident to anyone who, upon returning from Estadio Azteca, made a beeline for Paseo de la Reforma. Long after Mexico’s last-16 victory over Ecuador this vast boulevard had been teeming, an affirmative national moment bringing 1.4 million people on to the streets. But it was virtually empty three and a half hours after England had shattered the dreams of El Tri, the clean-up operation from the evening’s mass screening already in full swing and remaining revellers confined to the sidestreets.

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We try to teach our children to follow the rules. Now an American president has chosen the opposite tack

I’m rooting for the US as we take on Belgium today in Seattle for a place in the World Cup quarterfinals.

But the game isn’t what it was – before Trump asked the Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, to review the suspension of the US’s top scorer, striker Folarin Balogun, who got a red card in a match against Bosnia and Herzegovina and would otherwise have been suspended from Monday’s match.

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Microsoft is laying off about 4,800 employees, including 1,600 from Xbox, as it restructures around AI investments and tries to reset its struggling gaming business. "Our business is changing because the world around it is changing. The way technology is built, deployed, and used is transforming faster than at any point in my time here," said Amy Coleman, EVP and chief people officer at Microsoft. "Our customers' needs are shifting, the business models that serve them are shifting, and that means the work itself -- what we do, where we focus, and how we're organized -- has to transform too." She continued: "Companies don't get to choose whether their industry changes; they only get to choose whether they change with it. That means we will need to adjust resources and roles and shift how we operate so we can have the greatest impact for our customers." TechCrunch reports: Coleman stressed that the roles being eliminated today "are not being replaced by AI," but noted, "what is true is that AI is changing how work gets done." "Some of the tasks we do every day can now be automated, and that means we all need to keep learning, keep building new skills, and keep adapting as the work evolves," Coleman wrote. [...] Speaking about the Xbox layoffs, Coleman said little: "We are restructuring to position the business for long-term success. Engineering teams across the company will also evolve their structure and priorities to meet customer needs and innovate for the future."

Of today's 4,800 layoffs at Microsoft, 1,600 will hit Xbox, with about 3,200 cuts in total expected through fiscal year 2027, according to Asha Sharma, CEO of Xbox. In an email she sent to employees on Monday, Sharma called this "the most significant restructure in Xbox history." "Our business today is not healthy," Sharma wrote. "We are operating at margins that are 3-10x lower than comparable platform and publishing businesses." She added that Xbox made bets like its monthly subscription service Game Pass, alongside moves to grow its portfolio of content and invest in multi-platform, among other attempts to breathe life into the business. None of those strategies grew at the expected pace, leading to the core business weakening even as Xbox added more teams and investment. "And now the industry is facing the most severe hardware crisis in its history," Sharma said. "We must reset Xbox."

As part of the shift, Microsoft will transition four of its gaming studios to operate under new management, ensuring preservation of intellectual property and ongoing projects. Specifically Compulsion Games and Double Fine Productions will return to independent studios, according to Sharma. Ninja Theory and Undead Labs are coming under new ownership with funding to complete and grow some of their more popular games. According to Sharma's memo, Xbox is also flattening management hard, cutting the current 14 management layers to no more than five, but ideally three. As part of this major organization redesign, Xbox is making longtime executive Helen Chiang chief operating officer with end-to-end profit and loss authority across content, hardware, platform, and services. Xbox's restructuring plan centers around narrowing focus by dropping sprawling creative bets that don't produce platform-scale returns, and instead homing in on core strategic pillars like Mojang and King, the businesses behind Minecraft and Candy Crush.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MeFi's own Maciej Cegłowski (Pinboard, Idle Words) has a new Substack newsletter, Mars For The Rest of Us, where he investigates "the prospects and practicalities of exploring Mars in our lifetime." He's a Mars skeptic in a field full of (rocket) boosters, digging into the human physiology and life support problems that need to be solved before humans can make the years-long journey to Mars. This includes serious investigation about space toilets, Italy's quest to make a decent espresso in space, and how antiperspirant fumes nearly triggered an ISS evacuation.

(Many of the posts are partially behind a newsletter paywall, but there's lots of great free space nerd content.)

m01229 has added a photo to the pool:

Tokyo, Japan - April 14, 2026: Store advertising second-hand kimonos for sale in Kannon-dori shopping street in Tokyo Asakusa district

m01229 has added a photo to the pool:

Tokyo, Japan - April 14, 2026: Tourist women dressed in kimonos play gachapon machines in Asakusa district

Just dropped a couple of days ago: Lane 8’s Summer 2026 Mixtape (4 hours long). Also available on Soundcloud.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Fusion energy has presented a tantalizing alternative to fossil fuels for the better part of a century, but creating the equivalent of a human-made sun is easier said than done. However, new research from the boffins at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the Cleveland Clinic, and IBM in support of the Department of Energy’s (DoE) Genesis Mission suggests quantum computers and perhaps a sprinkle of AI could be what the world needs to get fusion power running at scale. Specifically, researchers are looking to quantum processing units (QPUs), like those built by IBM, to find optimal materials to extract the tritium fuel required by some of the most promising reactor designs. On Earth, tritium, a radioactive hydrogen isotope with one proton and two neutrons, is fleetingly rare. Before we can harness fusion to produce energy at scale, we need to figure out a way to mass produce the stuff. According to researchers, molten salts containing a mixture of fluorine, lithium, and beryllium (FLiBe), are one of the more promising candidates for extracting tritium for use in fusion reactors. The idea is that these molten salts, which have historically been used in experimental fission reactors as a coolant, function as a breeder environment for tritium. The trick, as you might expect, is predicting the electronic ground-state energies of FLiBe molecular clusters to better understand how they bind tritium. This is no easy task. These calculations are extremely computationally expensive and prone to error. But as it happens, one of the applications quantum computers have shown the most promise with is optimization and computational chemistry problems. Developing the quantum algorithms necessary to do this isn't easy, but researchers won't stop trying to solve it. As it turns out, the same techniques used by the Cleveland Clinic to simulate 12,635-atom proteins can be applied to FLiBe sims. The process involves using QPUs as an accelerator, similar to how GPUs are used in supercomputers and AI clusters today to perform calculations not easily performed on conventional hardware. In a blog post, IBM explains that parts of the problem are broken down into quantum circuits which can be solved by the QPU. “This allowed the team to more precisely determine the electronic structure of the material and how its atoms behave, particularly how strongly they bind tritium at the fundamental molecular level.” By combining CPUs, GPUs, and QPUs, the researchers say they were able to identify nine potential cluster configurations for producing the tritium fuel needed by fusion reactor designs. “These results add to mounting evidence that quantum-centric supercomputing is now a practical scientific tool for problems that have long challenged chemists, engineers, and materials scientists,” Jerry Chow, CTO of quantum-centric supercomputing at IBM, said in a statement. While quantum computing may show promise, this isn’t a silver bullet to realizing the potential of fusion power. Despite the progress made in recent years toward the development of a self-sustaining fusion reactor, it seems we’ve still got a ways to go. ®

If you listen to the AI industry, coders' days are numbered. Despite these concerns, software developers, at least those with experience, appear to be doing just fine at growing companies. Hiring biz Levels.fyi recently looked at how US compensation for software engineers (SWEs) is related to changes in headcount and found that salary level tends to be correlated with growth. "Generally, the companies paying the most are also the ones still hiring the most," observed Hakeem Shibly, content marketing manager for Levels.fyi, in a LinkedIn post. As an example, he pointed to companies like Anthropic and OpenAI where senior SWE offers are said to be around $810,000 and $605,000 annually. Several large companies with major investments in AI infrastructure occupy a different statistical space – they're still paying well and generating healthy profits, but they're also cutting staff. "Meta, Amazon, Google, and Coinbase all pay near the top of the market, and all four have cut staff in the last two years," said Shibly. In the least desirable quadrant, where eroding headcount meets lower relative compensation, we find companies like Microsoft, Oracle, and Salesforce, where AI expenditures and AI liabilities appear to be taking a toll on hiring and compensation. "At certain companies like Block, for example, they did announce in their layoffs that it was specifically because they're increasing their investment in AI and they're cutting people from their organization," Shibly told The Register. "But, at other companies, it's a little bit more ambiguous. They're not necessarily saying that in their layoff announcements. But there has been some correlation – companies that have been spending more money on their AI compute, their AI investment, have been cutting heads as well, even though they're increasing in revenue." As this applies to SWEs, Shibly said, "There's been a bifurcation in the market where the people who are getting paid the most are getting paid much more than they used to be. And the people who are below some certain threshold … they're getting cut and it's harder for them than ever to find jobs." That hasn't been the case in Australia, where technology services firm Adaca last month said that demand for software developers has been growing. The biz reported that there are now 216,000 software and application programmers working in Australia, up from 189,000 in 2025. "We are seeing devs displaced, not replaced," said Adaca founder Lambros Photios in a statement. "They are leaving big tech and finding work anywhere and everywhere else." Looking beyond just SWEs, recent data from Ramp and Revelio suggests AI leads companies to hire more people over time. "If I were a software engineer in this market," said Shibly, "I would prioritize looking for a job at a company that is growing, even if it might not be paying as much, because at least for me personally, I want to be guaranteed that job [will still exist] a couple years down the line. And that's kind of what the data shows." ®

dumpsterdiversanonymous has added a photo to the pool:

Very nice haul of three for $5. Super sized Art of the Print book by Fritz Eichenberg. He's famous for relief prints in book illustrations, and editing Artist's Proof magazine for Pratt art school in the 1960's. Johannes Lebek is German block print artist from after WWII.

NEW YORK (ANP) - De beursgraadmeters in New York gingen maandag verder omhoog, vooral door flinke koerswinsten van chipbedrijven en andere techconcerns. Beleggers stapten na het lange weekend in de Verenigde Staten weer in deze aandelen, na de recente koersverliezen in de techsector. Dat had te maken met zorgen bij beleggers over de winstgevendheid van de enorme AI-investeringen op de langere termijn door veel technologiebedrijven. Die zorgen verdwenen maandag verder naar de achtergrond.

Techbeurs Nasdaq sloot met een winst van 1,1 procent op 26.121,16 punten. De S&P 500-index ging 0,7 procent omhoog tot 7537,43 punten. De Dow-Jonesindex won 0,3 procent op 53.055,91 punten, een nieuw slotrecord. De Amerikaanse beurzen waren vrijdag dicht vanwege de viering van Onafhankelijkheidsdag op 4 juli.

De Dow steeg donderdag al ruim 1 procent tot een nieuw record en wist maandag de historische grens van 53.000 punten te passeren.

769 photographers and astronomers around the world, representing 66 countries, submitted more than 4,000 images to this year’s ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition. The shortlisted photos represent a range of phenomena from aurorae and stars to planets and the moon, captured around the globe. Some photographers focus on the juxtaposition of space and the human environment while others take telescopically captured snapshots of distant galaxies and nebulae, creating striking composite images.

Winners will be announced on September 17, the day after which the public exhibition will open at London’s National Maritime Museum. The show is also accompanied by the book Astronomy Photographer of the Year, Collection 15.

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 Nebulae, Comets, and Aurorae, Oh My! See the ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the Year Shortlist appeared first on Colossal.

Tighter ties with the mainland have not always helped.