Give it a Polish! Classic film posters with a twist – The Guardian
This exhibition unveils how Polish artists interpreted US and UK films such as The Shining and Return of the Jedi while navigating the harsh realities of communist and post-Soviet Poland, at a time when censorship, propaganda and surveillance were omnipresent. … Blending raw intensity with haunting beauty, these posters reflect the psychological landscape of a society shaped by repression.
Microsoft is finally shutting down Skype in May – XDA
Skype was first launched back in 2003, and Microsoft acquired it in 2011. A couple of years after that, it discontinued some of its in-house communication products like Windows Live Messenger, and then in 2015, the Redmond firm tried to integrate Skype into Windows 10. … In 2017, Microsoft launched Teams, a collaboration platform built on the backbone of Skype, designed to compete with the likes of Slack. It’s been pushing Teams pretty hard ever since, so you’d be forgiven if you were expecting Skype to be killed off, say, six years years ago when Skype for Business was retired. But just as you’d expect it to happen, some update would ship, and you’d say to yourself, “People are still working on this thing?”
America the evil mastermind? Not so fast, Russians are told – The New York Times
As President Trump turns decades of U.S. foreign policy upside down, another dizzying swing is taking place in Russia, both in the Kremlin and on state-controlled television: The United States, the new message goes, is not that bad after all. Almost overnight, it’s Europe — not the United States — that has become the source of instability in the Russian narrative. On his marquee weekly show on the Rossiya-1 channel Sunday night, the anchor Dmitri Kiselyov described the “party of war” in Europe as outmatched by the “great troika” of the United States, Russia and China that will form “the new structure of the world.” […]
The whiplash in ties with Washington was so stark that Russian state television on Sunday showed a reporter asking the Kremlin’s spokesman how it was possible that “a couple of months ago we were publicly saying that we were almost enemies.” “This, indeed, couldn’t have been imagined,” the spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, replied, marveling at the shift. American foreign policy, he added, now “coincides with our vision in many ways.” […]
But for Mr. Putin himself, there may be a wisp of internal consistency in the swing toward Washington. He has generally avoided labeling the United States as a whole as Russia’s enemy. Rather, Mr. Putin has said it is the Western “neoliberal elite” that tries to impose its “strange” values on the world and seeks Russia’s destruction, while depicting American conservatives as Russia’s friends. It’s a mirror image of the propaganda tropes of the Soviet Union, when American progressives were cast as Moscow’s allies.
Scientists aiming to bring back woolly mammoth create woolly mice – The Guardian
In the research, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, the team used a number of genome editing techniques to either genetically modify fertilised mouse eggs or modify embryonic mouse stem cells and inject them into mouse embryos, before implanting them into surrogates. The team focused on disrupting nine genes associated with hair colour, texture, length or pattern or hair follicles. Most of these genes were selected because they were already known to influence the coats of mice, with the induced disruptions expected to produce physical traits similar to those seen in mammoths, such as golden hair. However, two of the genes targeted in the mice were also found in mammoths, where they are thought to have contributed to a woolly coat, with the changes introduced by the researchers designed to make the mouse genes more mammoth-like.
Serbian parliament erupts into chaos as opposition hurl smoke bombs and flares – Politico
“We believe that an exiting government cannot propose laws,” Radomir Lazović from the Green-Left Front said in an address before lawmakers released the gas bombs, leading to thick plumes of red smoke and smoke grenade clouds filling the national assembly. Fights broke out between MPs and two were injured after the speaker of parliament, Ana Brnabić, refused to interrupt the session and called the opposition “thugs and terrorist bandits who want to block the work of the institutions.”
Citigroup erroneously credited client account with $81tn in ‘near miss’ – Financial Times
Citigroup credited a client’s account with $81tn when it meant to send only $280, an error that could hinder the bank’s attempt to persuade regulators that it has fixed long-standing operational issues. … A total of 10 near misses — incidents when a bank processes the wrong amount but ultimately is able to recover the funds — of $1bn or greater occurred at Citi last year, according to an internal report seen by the FT. The figure was down slightly from 13 the previous year. Citi declined to comment on this broader set of events.
New York Times goes all-in on internal AI tools – Semafor
In messages to newsroom staff, the company announced that it’s opening up AI training to the newsroom, and debuting a new internal AI tool called Echo to staff, Semafor has learned. The Times also shared documents and videos laying out editorial do’s and don’t for using AI, and shared a suite of AI products that staff could now use to develop web products and editorial ideas.
“Generative AI can assist our journalists in uncovering the truth and helping more people understand the world. Machine learning already helps us report stories we couldn’t otherwise, and generative AI has the potential to bolster our journalistic capabilities even more,” the company’s editorial guidelines said.
Exclusive: These universities have the most retracted scientific articles – Nature
This surge can now be seen in a first-of-its-kind analysis of institutional retraction rates around the globe over the past decade, for which Nature’s news team used figures supplied by three private research-integrity and analytics firms. Jining First People’s Hospital tops the charts, with more than 5% of its total output from 2014 to 2024 retracted — more than 100 papers (see ‘Highest retraction rates’). That proportion is an order of magnitude higher than China’s retraction rate, and 50 times the global average. Depending on how one counts, the hospital could be the institution with the world’s highest retraction rate. Many other Chinese hospitals are retraction hotspots. But universities and institutes in China, Saudi Arabia, India, Pakistan and Ethiopia feature in the data as well. Retractions can be for honest mistakes and administrative errors, but evidence suggests the majority of cases in these data are related to misconduct. […]
Data on retractions show that they are rare events. Out of 50 million or more articles published over the past decade, for instance, a mere 40,000 or so (fewer than 0.1%) have been retracted, according to the firms’ data sets. But the rise in retraction notices (by which journals announce that a paper is being retracted) is outstripping the growth of published papers — partly because of the rise of paper mills and the growing number of sleuths who spot problems with published articles.
We are dedicated to the American public. And we aren’t done yet. – 18F Group
For over 11 years, 18F has been proudly serving you to make government technology work better. We are non-partisan civil servants. 18F has worked on hundreds of projects, all designed to make government technology not just efficient but effective, and to save money for American taxpayers. However, all employees at 18F – a group that the Trump Administration GSA Technology Transformation Services Director called “the gold standard” of civic tech – were terminated today at midnight ET. 18F was doing exactly the type of work that DOGE claims to want – yet we were eliminated.
Brooks and Capehart on the implications of Trump’s altercation with Zelenskyy – PBS News
What we saw in the Oval Office was a travesty, horrendous, despicable. I — there aren’t any words to describe what we watched, where we saw a vice president who’s never been to Ukraine lecture a wartime president who was clearly summoned to the White House to humiliate him on the world stage either on behalf of or for the benefit of Vladimir Putin in Russia. […]
What I have seen over the last six weeks is the United States behaving vilely, vilely to our friends in Canada and Mexico, vilely to our friends in Europe. And today was the bottom of the barrel, vilely to a man who is defending Western values, at great personal risk to him and his countrymen. … And I have — I first started thinking, is it — am I feeling grief? Am I feeling shock, like I’m in a hallucination? But I just think shame, moral shame. It’s a moral injury to see the country you love behave in this way.
Desperate for work, translators train the AI that’s putting them out of work – Rest of World
As a teenager, Pelin Türkmen dreamed of becoming an interpreter, translating English into Turkish, and vice versa, in real time. She imagined jet-setting around the world with diplomats and scholars, and participating in history-making events. Her tasks one recent January morning didn’t figure in her dreams. […]
The new roles require much less skill and effort than translation, Türkmen said. For instance, she spent a year on her master’s thesis studying Samuel Beckett’s self-translation of his play Endgame from French to English. More recently, for her Ph.D. in translation studies, she studied for more than two years about the anti-feminist discourse in the Turkish translation of French author Pierre Loti’s 1906 novel, Les Désenchantées. In contrast, working on an AI prompt takes about 20 minutes.
Antiscientific vandalism – Quillette
To understand how biomedical scientists feel as they watch Donald Trump and Elon Musk aim their bazookas at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), recall how you felt when the Taliban aimed their bazookas at the 1,500-year-old Bamiyan Buddhas of Afghanistan. “Senseless” may be one word that springs to mind. “Permanent” might be another.
AI firms follow DeepSeek’s lead, create cheaper models with “distillation” – Ars Technica
Through distillation, companies take a large language model—dubbed a “teacher” model—which generates the next likely word in a sentence. The teacher model generates data which then trains a smaller “student” model, helping to quickly transfer knowledge and predictions of the bigger model to the smaller one. While distillation has been widely used for years, recent advances have led industry experts to believe the process will increasingly be a boon for start-ups seeking cost-effective ways to build applications based on the technology. […]
Thanks to distillation, developers and businesses can access these models’ capabilities at a fraction of the price, allowing app developers to run AI models quickly on devices such as laptops and smartphones.
Finally, an Agatha Christie adaptation that gets it right – The i Paper
Based on Christie’s lesser-known (to me at least) 1944 whodunit, the three-part adaptation boasts an impressive cast that includes Anjelica Huston, Clarke Peters from The Wire and The Americans’ Matthew Rhys. Set in the 1930s, it looks fabulous, from the shimmering Devon seascapes and cocktail dresses to the Art Deco interiors. The propulsive score is more characteristic of a Hitchcock movie.
I went to Homebase’s final day closing down sale and I was not ready for what I saw – Express
As I walked into Homebase for the final time on Saturday afternoon, it was like seeing an old friend’s house being cleared after they’d passed away in hospital. The place is unrecognisable, what was once a store that’s been in the backdrop for several key moments of my life now reduced to a desperate fire sale … Staff were looking on forlornly as displays were ripped down, shelves were dismantled and the aisles themselves were taken apart. It was just a giant empty warehouse, bereft of any branding, with a miserable selection of a few last items on a table near the front, like a sad jumble sale. It was so desperate in there, people were buying the shelves themselves. Nothing was spared a price sticker. I saw one person buying what I can only assume was the microwave from the staff kitchen, since it was used and had no packaging. Others were loading up on wooden boards from the displays, shelving units, and you could buy a set of staff lockers for just £20.
Can we still recover the right to be left alone? – The Nation
“Surely we are correct to think that we have, or ought to have, moral and legal rights to exercise control over such information and to protect us from the harms that can ensue when it falls in the wrong hands,” Pressly writes. But to treat that as the end of the debate is to accept the terms set by the state and capital. Rather, he maintains, “privacy is valuable not because it empowers us to exercise control over our information, but because it protects against the creation of such information.” We now assume that Mayer’s experiment in data-gathering has been perfected, that all of human life has become information hoovered up by our own devices. Pressly argues that this assumption is incorrect—and that to the extent that it is true, such a state of affairs must be resisted in order for our debates about privacy to have any meaning at all.
Reference board final bosses and the irony epidemic – Vik’s Busy Corner
That’s not to say that every piece of art and creative that references something that came before it is automatically unremarkable or unoriginal. Dropped in the right place at the right time, a good reference, both widely known and obscure, can be a powerful storytelling tool that adds depth to the message or winks at a certain demo while flying over everyone else’s heads. The problem is that more often than not, what the public discourse refers to as a reference is actually just a blatant copy of something ripped out of its original context for the sake of visual aesthetics. […]
“I give it two more years of red carpets before the girlies completely run out of looks to reference,” writer, editor, and the host of The New Garde podcast Alyssa Vingan tweeted out in response to a side-by-side of Tate McRae’s and Britney Spears’s identical lacy mini dresses that they wore to the VMAs — decades apart from each other. She can’t take full credit for it, but Alyssa’s best theory for why Hollywood starlets keep replicating iconic 90s looks is a deadly mix of fearing criticism and craving public attention at the same time. “I think because there is so much content and so many red carpets and so many step-and-repeat moments that if you are a celebrity, an influencer, or whatever, and you want to guarantee that press moment for yourself, going the reference route — because you know that ‘your outfit and then the reference outfit’ post will go viral — is an easy way to get talked about,” she explained to me.
AI ‘inspo’ is everywhere. It’s driving your hair stylist crazy. – Archive Today: The Washington Post
When a potential client approached event planner Deanna Evans with an AI-generated vision for her upcoming wedding, Evans couldn’t believe her eyes, she said. The imaginary venue was a lush wonderland, with green satin tablecloths under sprawling floral arrangements, soft professional lighting and trees growing out of the floor. “It looked like the Met Gala,” Evans said. The idea would have run the client around $300,000, she guessed, which was four times her budget. Evans delicately explained the problem — and never heard from the woman again.
I spent 24 hours watching The Clock – MoMA
The meta-study “Severe Sleep Deprivation Causes Hallucinations and a Gradual Progression Toward Psychosis with Increasing Time Awake” (Frontiers of Psychiatry, 2018) found that subjects’ “perceptual distortions, anxiety, irritability, depersonalization, and temporal disorientation started within 24–48 h of sleep loss.” I can offer anecdotal confirmation. It is after 2:00 p.m. and I have been awake for 28 hours. I’m not hallucinating (yet) but I definitely hate everyone and, although I’m literally sitting in a clock, time is meaningless. One hour flies by and the next is like spending an afternoon at the DMV. Paul Hogan pretends to tell the time by looking at the sun (Crocodile Dundee, 1986) and I laugh for the first time in hours.
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