Touted as China's first 3-on-3 football game between humanoid robots, the event served as a preview for the upcoming World Humanoid Robot Games, set to take place in the Chinese capital this August.

According to the organizers, a key highlight of the competition was that all participating robots operated fully autonomously using AI-driven strategies – without any human intervention or supervision.

Equipped with advanced visual sensors, the robots were able to identify the ball and navigate the field. They were also designed to stand up on their own after falling.

During the game, however, several still had to be carried off the field on stretchers by staff.

We are proud to release GIMP 3.1.2. It's the first development version of what will become GIMP 3.2!

Note that a development release is not ready for production use. It might crash. If it didn’t have any problems it would be 3.2 already. So please understand this is a release for early adopters and for the more adventurous!

What is GIMP ?

GIMP is a powerful, free and opensource photo editor. It is available on Linux, Windows, and MacOS. The last stable version is Gimp 3.0.4

How can I use GIMP?

These are good short tutorials:

👉 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pXsP6vNtjck

👉 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kGAol0lDCko

What are the new features?

• Theme colors for Brush, Font, and Palette improvements

• We know have an additional “System Colors” color scheme so that GIMP matches your current OS theme preferences on Windows and Linux

• New contributor Woynert implemented a new paint blend mode called Overwrite. It allows you to directly replace the pixels over the area you paint, without blending the transparency values of the brush and the existing pixels in that area. This new mode is particularly useful for pixel art.

• There’s a new setting in the text tool to control the direction of the text outline. You can have the text outline grow inward, outward, or in both directions!

• GIMP now supports adding non-destructive filters to channels! The Channels dockable now shows the same FX column as the Layers dockable, so you can edit, rearrange, delete, and merge filters on channels just like you can with layers.

• The CMYK Color Selector now calculates and displays the Total Ink Coverage of the selected color. This is useful when printing, as depending on the printing system and the media used, there may be a limit on how much ink can be applied.

• We’re adding support for using ART (AnotherRawTherapee) as a Camera Raw loader in GIMP, in addition to our existing support for darktable and RawTherapee. If you have ART already installed, GIMP should automatically recognize it and use it to load Camera Raw format images for further editing.

• We’ve added a new option to export to Krita‘s .kpl palette format from GIMP. You can do this by choosing Export as from the menu in the Palette dockable.

• Jacob Boerema has added support for importing Photoshop patterns! You can put Adobe .pat files in the GIMP pattern folder and automatically load them in the same way as GIMP’s own .pat files

• You can now use presets from Photoshop’s Curves and Levels filters in GIMP’s Curves and Levels filters! When you use these filters, choose Import Current Settings from File... from the Preset menu and select your .acv or .alv preset respectively

• Alx Sa has implemented initial support for exporting PSBs, Photoshop Large format. It is very similar to PSDs - the main difference is that you can export images up to 300,000 pixels

• GIMP can now import APNG animations

• We’ve now added support for loading multi-layer OpenEXR images. For instance, if you export a multi-view image from other software such as Blender, all views should show up in GIMP as individual layers.

• All previously non-portable build scripts of GIMP repository have been made POSIX-compliant. This means that it’s now easier to use these on platforms like BSD

• Some image formats do not allow images to have transparent sections. This can be confusing if you’re not familiar with all the details of the image you imported, especially when rotating or applying a filter with transparency such as Color to Alpha. We now detect if a filter or transformation would require transparency, and automatically add an alpha channel to the layer to prevent unexpected distortions.

What about UX/UI Improvements?

Denis Rangelov, Reju, Michal Vašut, and other designers have been working on a number of UX/UI updates for GIMP 3.2. While the larger changes are still being designed and reviewed, we have been implementing several UX/UI fixes:

• We found instances where the Foreground Selection algorithm would run when switching to another tool, even if no selection had been made yet. This caused an unnecessary lag, so we adjusted the algorithm to avoid running in those cases.

• The state of the “Merge Filter” checkbox for non-destructive filters should no longer be affected if you apply a filter that currently has to be destructive, like Lens Blur.

• The Palette dockable now automatically selects the next swatch when you delete a previous one, allowing you to quickly delete several swatches by just clicking the Delete button repeatedly.

• “Lock pixels” now generates an undo step in undo history, just like “Lock Position” and other locks.

What’s next?

Our main focus for GIMP 3.2 on the roadmap is developing 2 new types of non-destructive layers - linked layers and vector layers. Our Google Summer of Code students are making great progress with their summer projects!

• Gabriele Barbero is making some much-requested improvements to our on-canvas text editor.

• Ondřej Míchal has created a GEGL Filter Browser prototype in their own test branch. This involved a lot of research, as there any a number of edge cases and formats to account for.

• Shivam is working on a website to list and display third-party GIMP extensions

About Gimp 3.1.2

We remind people that this Gimp 3.1.2 a development version, not a stable version.

We really welcome feedback and bug reports:

👉 https://www.gimp.org/bugs/report.html

GIMP is a community, first and foremost. We are relying on your help so that the upcoming GIMP 3.2 can be as stable and great as possible

👉 https://www.gimp.org/news/2025/06/23/gimp-3-1-2-released/

We are very grateful to the many developers, designers, translators, moderators and supporters.

Thank you so much 🙏🙏🙏

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/32183144

Generated Summary below:

Video Description:

Iran has just shut off GPS across its territory — and switched to China’s Beidou satellite system. Why now? What does it mean for U.S. dominance in space-based navigation and warfare? In this episode of GVS Deep Dive, Najma Minhas unpacks Iran’s bold strategic pivot — and why it may mark the beginning of the end for America’s global GPS monopoly. From WhatsApp tracking scandals and drone warfare to China’s high-precision Beidou system and Belt & Road integration, this decision carries major military and geopolitical consequences.

Watch till the end to understand: Why GPS was always a tool of U.S. soft power

How the 1996 Taiwan Strait crisis pushed China to develop Beidou

What makes Beidou uniquely powerful in battlefield environments

How Iran and the Global South are quietly building independence from Western tech

Will more countries ditch GPS and align with China’s Beidou system?

#GVSDeepDive #Beidou #IranGPS #ChinaTech #Geopolitics #SatelliteWars

Do give your comments below. Subscribe and Share our video.

Najma tweets @MinhasNajma

Najma Minhas is Managing Editor, Global Village Space. She has worked with National Economic Research Associates (NERA) in New York, Lehman Brothers in London and Standard Chartered Bank in Pakistan. Before launching GVS, she worked as a consultant with World Bank, and USAID. Najma studied Economics at London School of Economics and International Relations at Columbia University, NewYork. She tweets at @MinhasNajma.

Generated Summary:

Main Topic: Iran's decision to disable GPS across its territory and adopt China's Beidou (Bato) satellite navigation system, and the implications of this shift for U.S. dominance in space and global geopolitics.

Key Points:

• Iran's Shift: Iran has disabled GPS and adopted China's Beidou, a geopolitical statement driven by concerns over cyber warfare, electronic jamming, and dependence on Western-dominated systems.
• Reasons for the Shift:
  • Rising cyber warfare threats and tensions with the US and Israel.
  • Geostrategic alignment with China, which offers technical superiority in some areas.
  • A scandal involving alleged leaks of Iranian officials' locations via WhatsApp and Instagram.
• GPS Origins and Dominance: GPS, built and controlled by the US military, became the backbone of global navigation. The US unlocked high precision for civilian access in 2000, fueling the growth of smartphones, Uber, and precision agriculture.
• China's Beidou as a Competitor: China developed Beidou after realizing its military vulnerability during the 1996 Taiwan Strait crisis. Beidou now rivals GPS, with more satellites and ground stations, offering better positioning accuracy in some regions and unique features like short message communication.
• Beidou's Capabilities: Beidou offers high accuracy, anti-jamming protections, and short message communication. It powers over 1.5 billion users daily and is integrated into China's Belt and Road Initiative.
• Implications for Iran: Beidou provides Iran with a secure, independent navigation network, enhancing the precision of its military operations and strengthening its economic resilience under sanctions.
• Future Trends: China aims to make Beidou the world's go-to system by 2035. The US is upgrading its GPS system, but these upgrades offer only moderate improvements.

Highlights:

• Iran's move is not just a tech upgrade but a geopolitical realignment, signaling a shift away from Western digital hegemony.
• Beidou is becoming a first-choice alternative for countries seeking political independence.
• The US Space Force acknowledges that GPS is lagging in updates.
• Beidou's short message communication feature is a unique strategic capability not offered by GPS.
• The video poses the question of whether more countries will follow Iran's lead and adopt Beidou.

About Channel:

Deep diving into major regional and international issues to drill down an understand the how, why, what and where!

• Arxiv.
• PDF.
• HTML.

Source.

The Trump administration has, for the first time ever, built a searchable national citizenship data system.

The tool, which is being rolled out in phases, is designed to be used by state and local election officials to give them an easier way to ensure only citizens are voting. But it was developed rapidly without a public process, and some of those officials are already worrying about what else it could be used for.

NPR is the first news organization to report the details of the new system.

For decades, voting officials have noted that there was no national citizenship list to compare their state lists to, so to verify citizenship for their voters, they either needed to ask people to provide a birth certificate or a passport — something that could disenfranchise millions — or use a complex patchwork of disparate data sources.

“We want our publishers to stand with us. To make a pledge that they will never release books that were created by machines.”

On May 19, China’s top law enforcement agency released measures for the roll-out of “cyber IDs” (网络身份认证), a new form of user identification to monitor internet users. Although the measures were released as a draft over the summer last year, they have only just been finalized, and will come into effect in mid-July.

According to the measures, introduced by the Ministry of Public Security (MPS), each internet user in China will be issued with a unique “web number,” or wanghao (网号), that is linked to their personal information. While these IDs are, according to the MPS notice, to be issued on a strictly voluntary basis through public service platforms, the government appears to have been working on this system for quite some time — and state media are strongly promoting it as a means of guaranteeing personal “information security” (信息安全). With big plans afoot for how these IDs will be deployed, one obvious question is whether these measures will remain voluntary.

cross-posted from: https://gregtech.eu/post/14912399

We are constantly fed a version of AI that looks, sounds and acts suspiciously like us. It speaks in polished sentences, mimics emotions, expresses curiosity, claims to feel compassion, even dabbles in what it calls creativity.

But what we call AI today is nothing more than a statistical machine: a digital parrot regurgitating patterns mined from oceans of human data (the situation hasn’t changed much since it was discussed here five years ago). When it writes an answer to a question, it literally just guesses which letter and word will come next in a sequence – based on the data it’s been trained on.

This means AI has no understanding. No consciousness. No knowledge in any real, human sense. Just pure probability-driven, engineered brilliance — nothing more, and nothing less.

So why is a real “thinking” AI likely impossible? Because it’s bodiless. It has no senses, no flesh, no nerves, no pain, no pleasure. It doesn’t hunger, desire or fear. And because there is no cognition — not a shred — there’s a fundamental gap between the data it consumes (data born out of human feelings and experience) and what it can do with them.

Philosopher David Chalmers calls the mysterious mechanism underlying the relationship between our physical body and consciousness the “hard problem of consciousness”. Eminent scientists have recently hypothesised that consciousness actually emerges from the integration of internal, mental states with sensory representations (such as changes in heart rate, sweating and much more).

Given the paramount importance of the human senses and emotion for consciousness to “happen”, there is a profound and probably irreconcilable disconnect between general AI, the machine, and consciousness, a human phenomenon.

https://archive.ph/Fapar

Meet Louis Anthony “Tony” Cox. He lives in Denver, Colorado.

He works for chemical corporations such as DuPont, Dow, Bayer and Chevron. He is paid to criticize scientists and cast doubts about pollutants.

Previous to working for DuPont, Dow, and Bayer, Tony Cox worked for Philip Morris

Of course, Tony denies that. Tony claims it's just a coincidence that he only happens to defend the corporations paying him 🙃🙃🙃

Recently, Tony Cox sent an email to his corporate clients. He came up with a new idea. Using Artificial Intelligence.

Microsoft learned error handling after Idk 30 years or so lol.

edit: sorry for the piped link, just watched it over it and this is my first post lolol

Source.

Relevant:

Facebook is now inputting your photos into Meta AI automatically by default

What if there was a simple test to make sure every new internet regulation preserved the spaces and parts of the internet that you love the most?

We get it; we really do. Lawmakers across the world are rightly focused on regulating powerful, for-profit platforms to mitigate the harms ascribed to social media and other threats online. When developing such legislation, however, some draft laws can inadvertently place public interest projects like Wikipedia at risk. At the Wikimedia Foundation, the nonprofit organization that hosts Wikipedia and other Wikimedia platforms, we have found that when a proposed law harms Wikipedia, in many cases it likely harms other community-led websites, open resources, or digital infrastructure.

That is why we have created the Wikipedia Test: a public policy tool and a call to action to help ensure regulators consider how new laws can negatively affect online communities and platforms that provide services and information in the public interest.

cross-posted from: https://rss.ponder.cat/post/217784

Signposts on the Vancouver street bear the English name below the official Musqueam name, which is written in the North American Phonetic Alphabet.

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