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EDU Unlimited turns online learning into a one-time 20 purchase instead of ongoing tuition costs

PCWorld

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. TL;DR: Score lifetime access to EDU Unlimited for just $19.97 through May 31 (MSRP $600) and unlock 1,000+ online courses across tech, business, creative skills, and more with a single payment. Online learning can get expensive fast, especially when a single course or boot camp can run into the hundreds or even thousands of dollars. EDU Unlimited by StackSkills flips that model by giving you one-time lifetime access to a massive library of 1,000+ courses across a wide range of subjects for just $19.97 during this limited-time offer (MSRP $600). From coding and marketing to creative hobbies like photography or design, StackSkills lets you build your dream skill-set at your own pace, without the pressure.


Russia presses college students to fill ranks of drone pilots

The Japan Times

Students at one of Russia's leading engineering universities are getting a lucrative offer: ditch their studies for a year, fly drones for the military and earn more than 5 million rubles ($68,275) in pay as well as free tuition on their return. Pamphlets distributed at Bauman Moscow State Technical University promise students who sign up for the unmanned systems forces will fly drones from far behind the front lines, but still qualify for combat veteran status. It's part of a broader push across Russia to recruit university and college students, using lavish signing bonuses, academic leave and even outright coercion to convince young men to join the fight. At least 270 institutions are actively promoting military contracts, according to the independent magazine Groza, which specializes in higher education and student issues. In a time of both misinformation and too much information, quality journalism is more crucial than ever. By subscribing, you can help us get the story right.


xAI introduces its coding agent called Grok Build

Engadget

It's called Grok Build, and it's still in its early beta version that's initially only available to SuperGrok Heavy subscribers paying $300 per month for the service. It says it will take user feedback from the early beta release to improve the product. SuperGrok Heavy users can install the beta from xAI's website and then log into their account to be able to access it. As Bloomberg notes, xAI has been trying to catch up to its rival companies like Anthropic and OpenAI. Elon Musk, the company's founder and CEO, previously admitted that it has fallen behind its competitors when it comes to coding.


Claim, counter-claim and tech's seedy side exposed: Five things we learned in the Musk-Altman trial

BBC News

Claim, counter-claim and tech's seedy side exposed: Five things we learned in the Musk-Altman trial It is the legal showdown that has pitted two of the biggest names in tech, Elon Musk and Sam Altman, against each other. At stake is the future of one of the world's most valuable start-ups, ChatGPT-maker OpenAI, along with the reputations of Altman - the company's boss - and Musk, the man he founded it with. The central claim the jury has now retired to consider is Musk's argument his former friend stole a charity, cheating him out of a fortune (albeit a tiny one, by Musk's standards) along the way - something Altman strongly rejects. But there's been much more to the trial than that. Over the past three weeks, myself and other reporters have been glued to our seats at the federal court in California as the evidence ranged from explosive text messages to revelations of free Teslas allegedly offered in exchange for power.


After Trump's pledge to 'open up' China, low expectations for summit deal

Al Jazeera

Before arriving for his high-stakes summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping, United States President Donald Trump aimed to set expectations high. He said he would urge Xi to "open up" China's economy and announced a delegation of top business executives, including Tesla's Elon Musk, Apple's Tim Cook and Nvidia's Jensen Huang, to accompany him. While Trump and Xi are anticipated to extend the one-year pause in their trade war agreed to in South Korea in October, the expectations are for a stabilisation - not revitalisation - in ties between the world's two largest economies, which are locked in a rivalry that spans everything from trade and artificial intelligence to the status of Taiwan. "It is important to be clear-eyed about the state of relations here," Claire E Reade, a senior counsel at Arnold & Porter who previously worked on China at the Office of the US Trade Representative (USTR), told Al Jazeera. "China does not trust the US, and China wants to beat the US in what it sees as long-term global competition," Reade said.


I'm a pastor who attended a secret UFO disclosure meeting. We saw images of 'translucent beings' that chilled me to the bone... the files could fulfil a dark biblical prophecy

Daily Mail - Science & tech

Rare glimpse inside secretive compound at heart of Chinese power... as Trump reveals his delight at'beautiful' gift from'friend' Xi Underwater bomb discovered at base of dam holding entire city's drinking water supply... sparking massive federal response Life as a newlywed was bliss... then a mystery illness left me paralyzed and blind overnight. Now I'm convinced I've got proof God answered this prayer I'm a pastor who attended a secret UFO disclosure meeting. We saw images of'translucent beings' that chilled me to the bone... the files could fulfil a dark biblical prophecy Emmy-nominated TV reporter who was brutally'blindsided' after being fired on her birthday reveals her new job Shocking video of THAT Britney Spears night out after rehab: Watch her humiliating liquor store antics before'BARKING and carrying knife' at restaurant... forcing family to admit the unsayable about'train wreck' star Rogue AI'helper' deletes company's database after deciding to think for itself - sparking Terminator-style warning for businesses Beer demand plunges... and America's wokest state drinking less is to blame Shock NBA team LeBron James could leave Lakers for amid tense showdown talks with wife Savannah: 'Unbelievable' Jerry Seinfeld reveals only mistake in Seinfeld finale... 28 years after show ended Fury as Kash Patel SNORKELS at sacred Pearl Harbor tomb where 900 sailors still lie... then jets off to Las Vegas Horrifying final days of killer dad Chris Watts' pregnant wife before she was slaughtered alongside their daughters. Read all the chilling texts and receipts in full for first time: 'My eyes burn from crying' Glamorous Texas Democrat's secret KINK exposed: Congressional candidate's past life returns to haunt her Cancer-linked toxins found in America's favorite strawberry brand, consumer group claims Mystery blonde Trump aide with unfettered access to President's phone sparks White House friction: Real reason his posts contain random capital letters... and shadowy team behind them unmasked I'm a pastor who attended a secret UFO disclosure meeting. We saw images of'translucent beings' that chilled me to the bone... the files could fulfil a dark biblical prophecy Several pastors who claim they were part of secret meetings to prepare for the disclosure of UFO information have come forward to warn that the long-anticipated files may fulfill a dark biblical prophecy.


The Real Losers of the Musk v. Altman Trial

WIRED

A federal jury is now deciding whether Elon Musk will win his lawsuit against OpenAI and Sam Altman--but the trial has made everyone look bad. Attorneys delivered closing arguments in the trial on Thursday in a final attempt to convince a judge and jury that their respective clients, Elon Musk and Sam Altman, are the most well-intentioned, truth-telling stewards of OpenAI's founding nonprofit mission. A judgement could be delivered as soon as next week, ending a decade-long battle between two of the technology industry's most influential entrepreneurs. But regardless of the outcome, there is a wide set of losers in this case. Based on ample amounts of evidence, it appears that the people worst off are the employees, policymakers, and members of the public who believed in the mission of a nonprofit research lab--and supported OpenAI because of it.


Brutal raid on woman's birthday party highlights rise of Russian vigilante group

BBC News

Brutal raid on woman's birthday party highlights rise of Russian vigilante group Katya was about to blow out the candles on her 30th birthday cake when masked men burst into the nightclub hired for her party, and began physically and verbally attacking her friends. They called us faggots and lesbians. I could hear violence from every corner, she told a BBC World Service investigation. Her mother was told to get down on all fours, she says. The swoop was instigated by a vigilante group, called Russkaya Obshina, that wants to accelerate President Vladimir Putin's agenda to stamp out what he describes as Western liberalism, and promote traditional family-oriented values.


Functional-prior-based approaches to Bayesian PDE-constrained inversion using physics-informed neural networks

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Physics-informed neural networks (PINNs) provide a mesh-free framework for solving PDE-constrained inverse problems, but their extension to Bayesian inversion still faces a fundamental difficulty: prior distributions are typically defined in the weight space of neural networks, whereas physically meaningful prior assumptions are more naturally expressed in function space. In this study, we introduce a unified framework, termed functional-prior-based approaches to Bayesian PDE-constrained inversion using physics-informed neural networks (fpBPINN), to incorporate functional priors into Bayesian PINN-based inversion. We consider two complementary approaches. The first is a functional-prior-informed Bayesian PINN (FPI-BPINN), in which a neural network weight prior is learned to be consistent with a prescribed functional prior, and Bayesian inference is subsequently performed in weight space. The second is function-space particle-based variational inference for PINNs (fParVI-PINN), which performs Bayesian estimation using ParVI directly in function space. We also show that random Fourier features (RFF) play an important role in representing Gaussian functional priors with neural networks and in improving posterior approximation. We applied the proposed approaches to one-dimensional seismic traveltime tomography and two-dimensional Darcy-flow permeability inversion. These numerical experiments showed that both approaches accurately estimated posterior distributions, highlighting the significance of introducing physically interpretable functional priors into Bayesian PINN-based inverse problems. We also identified the contrasting advantages of FPI-BPINN and fParVI-PINN, namely flexibility and accuracy, respectively.


Sample-Mean Anchored Thompson Sampling for Offline-to-Online Learning with Distribution Shift

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Offline-to-online learning aims to improve online decision-making by leveraging offline logged data. A central challenge in this setting is the distribution shift between offline and online environments. While some existing works attempt to leverage shifted offline data, they largely rely on UCB-type algorithms. Thompson sampling (TS) represents another canonical class of bandit algorithms, well known for its strong empirical performance and naturally suited to offline-to-online learning through its Bayesian formulation. However, unlike UCB indices, posterior samples in TS are not guaranteed to be optimistic with respect to the true arm means. This makes indices constructed from purely online and hybrid data difficult to compare and complicates their use. To address this issue, we propose sample-mean anchored TS (Anchor-TS), which introduces a novel median-based anchoring rule that defines the arm index as the median of an online posterior sample, a hybrid posterior sample, and the online sample mean. The median anchoring systematically corrects bias induced by distribution shift by mitigating over-estimation for suboptimal arms and under-estimation for optimal arms, while exploiting offline information to obtain more accurate estimates when the shift is small. We establish theoretical guarantees showing that the proposed algorithm safely leverages offline data to accelerate online learning, and quantifying how the degree of distribution shift and the size of offline data affect the resulting regret reduction. Extensive experiments demonstrate consistent improvements of our algorithm over baselines.