By 25 July, all sites and apps that allow pornography – whether they are dedicated adult sites or social media, search or gaming services – must use highly effective age checks to ensure children are not normally able to encounter it. Online firms who publish their own pornography are already required to protect children from it, and thousands of sites have already introduced robust age checks in response. 

Major porn providers operating in the UK have confirmed to Ofcom that they will introduce effective checks by next month’s deadline in order to comply with the new rules. They include PornHub, the most-visited pornographic service in the UK. Other services who are happy to be named at this stage include BoyfriendTV, Cam4, FrolicMe, inxxx, Jerkmate, LiveHDCams, MyDirtyHobby, RedTube, Streamate, Stripchat, Tube8, and YouPorn. This represents a broad range of pornography services accessed in the UK.

Monitoring compliance with these new duties is a priority for Ofcom. If any company fails to comply with its new duties, Ofcom can impose fines and – in very serious cases – apply for a court order to prevent the site or app from being available in the UK. As part of our work enforcing the Online Safety Act, we have already launched investigations into four porn providers and won’t hesitate to take further action from July.

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/protecting-children/uks-major-porn-providers-agree-to-age-checks-from-next-month

By 25 July, all sites and apps that allow pornography – whether they are dedicated adult sites or social media, search or gaming services – must use highly effective age checks to ensure children are not normally able to encounter it. Online firms who publish their own pornography are already required to protect children from it, and thousands of sites have already introduced robust age checks in response. 

Major porn providers operating in the UK have confirmed to Ofcom that they will introduce effective checks by next month’s deadline in order to comply with the new rules. They include PornHub, the most-visited pornographic service in the UK. Other services who are happy to be named at this stage include BoyfriendTV, Cam4, FrolicMe, inxxx, Jerkmate, LiveHDCams, MyDirtyHobby, RedTube, Streamate, Stripchat, Tube8, and YouPorn. This represents a broad range of pornography services accessed in the UK.

Monitoring compliance with these new duties is a priority for Ofcom. If any company fails to comply with its new duties, Ofcom can impose fines and – in very serious cases – apply for a court order to prevent the site or app from being available in the UK. As part of our work enforcing the Online Safety Act, we have already launched investigations into four porn providers and won’t hesitate to take further action from July.

https://www.ofcom.org.uk/online-safety/protecting-children/uks-major-porn-providers-agree-to-age-checks-from-next-month

Roblox, an online gaming platform that supposedly fosters creativity and connection among children and teens, harbors a darker underbelly that has harmed countless young users for years. Families nationwide are coming forward with stories of how predators, explicit content, and exploitation pervade this digital playground. The attorneys at Anapol Weiss have filed four lawsuits against Roblox on behalf of children from various parts of the U.S. (Florida, Indiana, New Jersey, Texas) who were sexually exploited on the Roblox platform. Anapol Weiss is investigating hundreds of similar cases and will be filing many more lawsuits in the upcoming months.

Shareholder Alexandra Walsh and nationally renowned abuse attorney Kristen Gibbons Feden are spearheading our efforts to hold Roblox and related companies accountable, bringing extensive experience to this high-stakes litigation. We are demanding justice for our clients and seeking to hold Roblox and other companies accountable.

Roblox Lawsuit Attorneys : Anapol Weiss Mass Torts / Class Action Lawyers

Roblox, a platform celebrated for fostering creativity and connection among children and teens, harbors a darker underbelly that has harmed countless young users. Learn more now.

^{www.anapolweiss.com}

Roblox, an online gaming platform that supposedly fosters creativity and connection among children and teens, harbors a darker underbelly that has harmed countless young users for years. Families nationwide are coming forward with stories of how predators, explicit content, and exploitation pervade this digital playground. The attorneys at Anapol Weiss have filed four lawsuits against Roblox on behalf of children from various parts of the U.S. (Florida, Indiana, New Jersey, Texas) who were sexually exploited on the Roblox platform. Anapol Weiss is investigating hundreds of similar cases and will be filing many more lawsuits in the upcoming months.

Shareholder Alexandra Walsh and nationally renowned abuse attorney Kristen Gibbons Feden are spearheading our efforts to hold Roblox and related companies accountable, bringing extensive experience to this high-stakes litigation. We are demanding justice for our clients and seeking to hold Roblox and other companies accountable.

Roblox Lawsuit Attorneys : Anapol Weiss Mass Torts / Class Action Lawyers

Roblox, a platform celebrated for fostering creativity and connection among children and teens, harbors a darker underbelly that has harmed countless young users. Learn more now.

^{www.anapolweiss.com}

Roblox, an online gaming platform that supposedly fosters creativity and connection among children and teens, harbors a darker underbelly that has harmed countless young users for years. Families nationwide are coming forward with stories of how predators, explicit content, and exploitation pervade this digital playground. The attorneys at Anapol Weiss have filed four lawsuits against Roblox on behalf of children from various parts of the U.S. (Florida, Indiana, New Jersey, Texas) who were sexually exploited on the Roblox platform. Anapol Weiss is investigating hundreds of similar cases and will be filing many more lawsuits in the upcoming months.

Shareholder Alexandra Walsh and nationally renowned abuse attorney Kristen Gibbons Feden are spearheading our efforts to hold Roblox and related companies accountable, bringing extensive experience to this high-stakes litigation. We are demanding justice for our clients and seeking to hold Roblox and other companies accountable.

Roblox Lawsuit Attorneys : Anapol Weiss Mass Torts / Class Action Lawyers

Roblox, a platform celebrated for fostering creativity and connection among children and teens, harbors a darker underbelly that has harmed countless young users. Learn more now.

^{www.anapolweiss.com}

The operation reportedly began with the detonation of a concealed minefield, forcing Israeli forces to seek shelter in nearby civilian homes.

Israeli Soldiers Killed, Wounded in Complex Resistance Attacks in Gaza - Palestine Chronicle

^{admin (Palestine Chronicle)}

A powerful new report submitted to the UN Human Rights Council by Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, is drawing sharp condemnation — not only from Israel but also from the United States.

Titled ‘From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide’, the report delivers a searing indictment of corporate involvement in Israel’s settler-colonial enterprise and its ongoing genocidal war on Gaza, accusing private and state-linked companies of enabling apartheid, war crimes, and genocide.

Economy of Genocide: UN Report Links Western Firms to Israeli War Crimes - Palestine Chronicle

The report delivers a searing indictment of corporate involvement in Israel’s settler-colonial enterprise and its genocide in Gaza.

^{admin (Palestine Chronicle)}

Homes raided, people approached on the street, called from unknown numbers, arrested without warning: how British police are cracking down on activists

'Like a kidnapping': How UK police are hunting pro-Palestine activists

At 7am on 6 March, three men turned up at Lujane's door.  They said they were from the British Transport Police (BTP) and asked her to come for an interview regarding a video in which, several months before, she had been seen chanting pro-Palestine …

^{Katherine Hearst (Middle East Eye)}

A powerful new report submitted to the UN Human Rights Council by Francesca Albanese, the Special Rapporteur on the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967, is drawing sharp condemnation — not only from Israel but also from the United States.

Titled ‘From Economy of Occupation to Economy of Genocide’, the report delivers a searing indictment of corporate involvement in Israel’s settler-colonial enterprise and its ongoing genocidal war on Gaza, accusing private and state-linked companies of enabling apartheid, war crimes, and genocide.

Economy of Genocide: UN Report Links Western Firms to Israeli War Crimes - Palestine Chronicle

The report delivers a searing indictment of corporate involvement in Israel’s settler-colonial enterprise and its genocide in Gaza.

^{admin (Palestine Chronicle)}

Mirror

https://t.me/operativnoZSU/185304

Iran’s president has ordered the country to suspend its cooperation with the International Atomic Energy Agency after American airstrikes hit its most-important nuclear facilities.

Archived version: archive.is/newest/apnews.com/a…

Disclaimer: The article linked is from a single source with a single perspective. Make sure to cross-check information against multiple sources to get a comprehensive view on the situation.

This paper introduces DiffuCoder, a 7B-scale open-source masked diffusion large language model (dLLM) specifically designed for code generation.

The research provides insights into how dLLMs generate content, distinguishing their decoding behavior from that of autoregressive (AR) models. Unlike AR models, dLLMs can intrinsically adjust their generation causality and increasing sampling temperature diversifies not just token choices but also their generation order, creating a rich search space for reinforcement learning (RL).

This flexibility allows dLLMs to be more non-autoregressive and generate tokens in a less sequential, more "human-like" code writing manner.

To leverage this diversity and improve performance, the paper proposes coupled-GRPO RL algorithm. This method utilizes a coupled-sampling scheme that constructs complementary mask noise during training to reduce the variance of token log-likelihood estimates while maintaining training efficiency.

Experimentally, coupled-GRPO significantly boosts DiffuCoder's performance on code generation benchmarks, notably improving EvalPlus scores by 4.4% with training on only 21K samples. The research also shows that coupled-GRPO trained models experience a smaller performance drop when decoding steps are halved (resulting in a 2x speedup), indicating increased parallelism and reduced reliance on AR bias during decoding.

available at huggingface.co/apple/DiffuCode…

apple/DiffuCoder-7B-cpGRPO · Hugging Face

We’re on a journey to advance and democratize artificial intelligence through open source and open science.

^{huggingface.co}

On +972, we Palestinians speak for ourselves (Mahmoud Mushtaha, 2025-07-02)

972mag.com/wp-content/themes/r…
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>> ... speaking out has meant navigating a hostile media environment, shaped by pro-Israel bias and corporate funders. In my own work, I’ve been asked by editors to replace the word “occupation” with “conflict”, or to remove “apartheid” ...

>> Other times, this hostility is the absence of space altogether...

>> This is why +972 Magazine matters. It’s one of the few platforms where Palestinians are not just written about or quoted. We are among its contributors, analysts, editors, and decisionmakers, and we shape the coverage.

>> +972 ... doesn’t have corporate backers. It doesn’t take funding from the U.S. or Israeli governments, ...

>> ... By supporting +972, you help ensure that Palestinians continue to have our voices heard — and without filtering the truth.

#972Magazine
@palestine@a.gup.pe @israel

hcommons.social

hcommons.social is a microblogging network supporting scholars and practitioners across the humanities and around the world.

^{Hometown hosted on hcommons.social}

Cross-posted from "TRUE communism!" by @Muaddib@sopuli.xyz in !politicalmemes@lemmy.world

The past decade has seen tremendous growth in commercial investments in artificial intelligence (AI). The first wave came after the 2012 ImageNet challenge, which was a pivotal moment in the history of artificial intelligence, particularly computer vision and deep learning. Then, advances in computing power—GPU hardware—powered neural network models trained on large amounts of data. Across industries, from construction to pharmaceuticals to finance, companies rushed to implement AI in their operations. This trend has only accelerated with the release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022. Even larger models trained on even larger datasets are showing even greater power, and AI applications are becoming ubiquitous across U.S. businesses (Babina, et al. 2024).

The rapid rise of commercial AI has inevitably brought concerns regarding its potential to displace human workers. There is evidence that AI can automate some cognitive tasks or increase worker productivity in a way that could reduce the number of workers needed. For example, Brynjolfsson, et al. (2025) find that AI tools make customer service workers much more efficient. Fedyk, et al. (2022) find that audit firms that use AI reduce their audit workforce. But the good news is that the labor-displacing effects seem confined to select sectors and occupations. On aggregate, recent academic research finds evidence that companies’ use of AI has been accompanied by an increase in the workforce.

This article synthesizes recent research—including new findings from Babina, et al. (2024) and Babina, et al. (2023)—to assess the real-world impacts of AI on firms and workers. Contrary to common fears, we find that AI has so far not led to widespread job loss. Instead, AI adoption is associated with firm growth, increased employment, and heightened innovation, particularly in product development. However, the effects are not uniformly distributed: AI-investing firms increasingly seek more educated and technically skilled employees, alter their internal hierarchies, and contribute to rising industry concentration. These trends carry important implications for public policy, including workforce development, education and reskilling initiatives, and antitrust enforcement. This article reviews the evidence and highlights key takeaways for policymakers navigating the AI-driven economy.

The effects of AI on firms and workers

Synthesis of new research assessing the real-world impacts of artificial intelligence on firms and workers.

^Brookings