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Brazil launches AI supercomputer push while balancing US and Chinese tech

Al Jazeera

Brazil will invest about 2.3bn reais ($444.2m) to bolster its artificial intelligence ecosystem, splitting projects between United States and Chinese tech firms in a strategic move that underscores its efforts to balance ties with both superpowers. Just more than half the total, 1.3bn reais ($251m), will fund a supercomputing infrastructure project in Rio de Janeiro developed in partnership with China's Huawei Technologies and iFlytek, President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva's government said on Thursday. The machine will be installed in the northeastern state of Rio Grande do Norte, chosen for its energy potential. Lula attended an announcement ceremony in the state on Thursday. The Reuters news agency quoted unnamed government officials as saying they expect US chipmaker Nvidia to win the tender.


Meta's app for creating generative AI minigames is now available in the US

Engadget

Meta's little vibe-coding app Pocket has now arrived in the US after a brief testing phase in Brazil. The app lets people generate minigames, called gizmos, via prompts. The games get published to a scrollable feed, bringing in a social media component. Users can save gizmos to a favorites list and repost gizmos to their feed. These games make full use of the capabilities available in modern smartphones.


Tupac Shakur murder trial begins thirty years after his death

Al Jazeera

Former gang boss Duane'Keffe D' Davis is standing trial over the 1996 murder of US rapper Tupac Shakur, becoming the first person prosecuted in the case. Prosecutors point to his alleged confession in his memoir and interviews, while his defence say his claims were lies. Brazil's president says Amazon oil is'passport to the future' Chinese company unveils new'Superman' humanoid robot


Brazil's president says Amazon oil is 'passport to the future'

Al Jazeera

Brazil's president says Amazon oil is'passport to the future' Brazil's president says Amazon oil is'passport to the future' Brazil's President Lula da Silva has praised the discovery of oil off the Amazon coast, despite opposition from environmentalists to drilling in the area. He called the find a "passport to the country's future", saying it would strengthen Brazil's national sovereignty. Chinese company unveils new'Superman' humanoid robot Can Trump limit birthright citizenship?


Syrian man dies in custody after alleged abuse by security officers

Al Jazeera

How many Syrians have returned? A Syrian man died in police custody after his family alleged he was severely beaten despite his wife warning officers about his haemophilia. His death has raised fresh concerns over abuse in detention, while Syria's Interior Ministry says seven officers have been detained. Brazil's president says Amazon oil is'passport to the future' Chinese company unveils new'Superman' humanoid robot Can Trump limit birthright citizenship?


UK diplomats no longer get hardship bonus for being posted to Buenos Aires

BBC News

British diplomats in six locations around the world, including Buenos Aires and Santiago in South America, will no longer get hardship payments for working in dangerous cities. Bonuses and respite breaks are granted to those working in cities considered risky, like Beirut in Lebanon, or with high crime, such as Pretoria in South Africa, or high air pollution in cities including New Delhi and Beijing. The UK government has removed Santiago, in Chile, Panama City in Panama, Pyongyang in North Korea, Bamako in Mali, and Sarajevo in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in addition to the two south American cities, according to the latest list published last week, external . The 144 locations still on the list include many trouble spots but also popular holiday destinations such as Bali and Rio De Janeiro, prompting criticism from the Conservatives. Tory chairman Kevin Hollin rake said civil servants receiving extra pay for working in such areas is unfair on the taxpayer. The Foreign Office has given civil servants extra payments for working in areas where there is a high level of danger, or high risks to health, for the past 30 years.


Netflix says it's already used AI in 'roughly 300' titles this year

Engadget

Netflix says it's already used AI in'roughly 300' titles this year Netflix says it's already used AI in'roughly 300' titles this year Don't expect that number to shrink any time soon. Netflix hasn't made any secret of its interest in artificial intelligence, and now we have a sense of how those tools are being used in its content. In 2026, GenAI workflows have been used in roughly 300 of our titles, with the largest concentration of work in post-production, according to the shareholder letter detailing its second-quarter financials. The company named three projects -- (India), (Brazil) and (US) -- that used generative AI to create highly complex sequences, but the tech is becoming more widespread at this point. We already knew that Netflix had applied generative AI in at least one original show as of last July, but between making acquisitions and launching new specialized studios, its ambitions clearly extended further.


Brazil Condemns U.S. Decision to Impose 25% Tariffs, Vows to Retaliate

TIME - Tech

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31 alien-like marine species discovered off the coast of Brazil

Popular Science

More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results. A siphonophore--a colonial marine invertebrate related to the venomous stinging Portuguese Man-o-war--is scanned using Deep Particle Image Velocimetry (DeepPIV) at a depth of 350 meters. This species was undescribed prior to this encounter and is likely new to science. DeepPIV is a laser-and optics-based imaging system that quantifies both the motion of liquids and the 3D shape of transparent animals. The imaging system was developed by the Bioinspiration Lab at MBARI (Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute) to create 3D models of gelatinous animals.


Anchor-based Maximum Discrepancy for Relative Similarity Testing

Neural Information Processing Systems

The relative similarity testing aims to determine which of the distributions, P or Q, is closer to an anchor distribution U. Existing kernel-based approaches often test the relative similarity with a fixed kernel in a manually specified alternative hypothesis, e.g., Qis closer to Uthan P. Although kernel selection is known to be important to kernel-based testing methods, the manually specified hypothesis poses a significant challenge for kernel selection in relative similarity testing: Once the hypothesis is specified first, we can always find a kernel such that the hypothesis is rejected. This challenge makes relative similarity testing ill-defined when we want to select a good kernel after the hypothesis is specified. In this paper, we cope with this challenge via learning a proper hypothesis and a kernel simultaneously, instead of learning a kernel after manually specifying the hypothesis. We propose an anchor-based maximum discrepancy (AMD), which defines the relative similarity as the maximum discrepancy between the distances of (U,P)and (U,Q)in a space of deep kernels. Based on AMD, our testing incorporates two phases. In Phase I, we estimate the AMD over the deep kernel space and infer the potential hypothesis. In Phase II, we assess the statistical significance of the potential hypothesis, where we propose a unified testing framework to derive thresholds for tests over different possible hypotheses from Phase I. Lastly, we validate our method theoretically and demonstrate its effectiveness via extensive experiments on benchmark datasets. Codes are publicly available at: https://github.com/tmlr-group/AMD.