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'It's survival of the fittest': the UK kebab chain seeking an edge with robot slicers

The Guardian

'People are being more discerning about spending money,' he says. 'People are being more discerning about spending money,' he says. T hey are already packing our groceries and delivering shopping. Now robots are coming to the kebab shop, alongside self-service screens and loyalty apps, as takeaways look for ways to tackle rising costs. German Doner Kebab (GDK), a perhaps surprisingly British-owned chain that has been springing up across the country, has turned to technology to keep its fast food business buzzing in the face of rising costs and tough times on the high street.


SpaceX rocket fireball linked to plume of polluting lithium

BBC News

When a SpaceX rocket failure set the skies aflame over western Europe last February, no-one was sure if the debris was also polluting our atmosphere. Now scientists are directly linking the uncontrolled rocket re-entry to a plume of lithium measured less than 100km above Earth. It is the first time researchers have drawn a direct link between a known piece of space debris crashing to Earth and pollution levels. They warn that as SpaceX chief Elon Musk pledges to launch one million satellites in the coming years, this contamination could be the tip of the iceberg. The scientists were already investigating the problem of pollution from space debris when they realised a SpaceX Falcon 9 had failed in flight.




Core-sets for Fair and Diverse Data Summarization

Neural Information Processing Systems

Second, we show the first core-set w.r.t. the sum-of-nearest-neighbor distances. Finally, we run several experiments showing the effectiveness of our core-set approach. In particular, we apply constrained diversity maximization to summarize a set of timed messages that takes into account the messages' recency.


Text Alignment Is An Efficient Unified Model for Massive NLP Tasks

Neural Information Processing Systems

Large language models (LLMs), typically designed as a function of next-word prediction, have excelled across extensive NLP tasks. Despite the generality, next-word prediction is often not an efficient formulation for many of the tasks, demanding an extreme scale of model parameters (10s or 100s of billions) and sometimes yielding suboptimal performance. In practice, it is often desirable to build more efficient models--despite being less versatile, they still apply to a substantial subset of problems, delivering on par or even superior performance with much smaller model sizes.




Spain Orders Criminal Investigation Into X, Meta, and TikTok Over Alleged AI-Generated Child Sexual Abuse Material

TIME - Tech

Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez gives a speech during the World Governments Summit in Dubai on February 3, 2026. Spain's Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez gives a speech during the World Governments Summit in Dubai on February 3, 2026. The Spanish government has called for an investigation into social media giants X, Meta, and TikTok over their alleged role in producing and spreading AI-generated child sexual abuse material. The Council of Ministers will invoke Article 8 of the Organic Statute of the Public Prosecution Service to request that it investigate the crimes that X, Meta and TikTok may be committing through the creation and dissemination of child pornography by means of their AI, Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez wrote on X on Tuesday. Sánchez accused the platforms of "attacking the mental health, dignity and rights of our sons and daughters," saying that "the impunity of the giants must end."