Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging. At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story. The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political…

Four open source projects dominate LLM fine-tuning today. Unsloth, Axolotl, TRL, and LLaMA-Factory all wrap the same underlying PyTorch and Hugging Face stack. They diverge on where they spend engineering effort. Unsloth rewrites kernels. Axolotl composes parallelism strategies. TRL defines the trainer APIs the others build on. LLaMA-Factory optimizes for breadth of model coverage and zero-code operation. This comparison covers three axes engineers actually hit: training throughput, peak VRAM, and multi-GPU scaling. Understand each framework TRL is the reference implementation layer. It ships SFTTrainer, DPOTrainer, GRPOTrainer, KTOTrainer,…

A few minutes in traffic were apparently too valuable to waste. A man was filmed pulling out his laptop and getting back to work while sitting on a motorcycle, leaving social media users stunned. The video circulating on X has left users questioning just how far the demands of modern work have begun to spill into everyday life. The clip shows a man seated on the back of a motorcycle stuck in slow-moving traffic. At first, it appears to be an ordinary traffic jam. Seconds later, however, the passenger unzips his backpack, pulls out a laptop and begins working while waiting for vehicles to move. Although it is unclear what he was working on, viewers…

Your support helps us to tell the story From reproductive rights to climate change to Big Tech, The Independent is on the ground when the story is developing. Whether it's investigating the financials of Elon Musk's pro-Trump PAC or producing our latest documentary, 'The A Word', which shines a light on the American women fighting for reproductive rights, we know how important it is to parse out the facts from the messaging. At such a critical moment in US history, we need reporters on the ground. Your donation allows us to keep sending journalists to speak to both sides of the story. The Independent is trusted by Americans across the entire political…

A man waiting at an airport boarding gate questioned why so many passengers rush to stand in long queues even before boarding begins, saying the habit reflects a deeper sense of anxiety rather than necessity. The video was shared by Instagram user Shresth Ojha, who recorded his observations while waiting to board his flight. In the clip, Ojha panned the camera towards a long queue of passengers already lined up at the boarding gate before turning it towards himself. Looking at the crowd, he wondered why so many people felt the need to stand in line when boarding had not even been announced. "Just have a look at this queue. What are Indians so afraid…

Ujjivan Small Finance Bank (Ujjivan SFB), one of India’s leading small finance banks, today announced that it has secured the 8th position among Top 100 India’s Best Companies to Work For 2026, marking a significant leap from its previous ranking and reinforcing its position as one of the country’s most admired workplaces. In addition to this achievement, Ujjivan SFB has also been recognized among the Top 25 in India’s Best Workplaces in BFSI 2026 and the Top 10 in India’s Best Workplaces in Health \& Wellness 2026, reflecting the Bank’s commitment to building an environment where people can grow, thrive, and perform at their best. For Ujjivan SFB,…

Gen Z are among those least likely to understand corporate jargon, report claims Younger workers are struggling to fit in, in a remote work world Leaders should prioritize inclusion, not fancy jargon New research has claimed younger workers are feeling increasingly disconnected from their workplaces, with the average Gen Z worker understanding just 5.3 out of 24 common workplace phrases. More broadly, the average worker of any age identified seven out of 24, with around half (48.8%) understanding five or fewer, revealing a shift in how workplaces communicate, the report from CareerMinds found. This comes amid ongoing transformations, with AI…

I lint-scanned 36 popular MCP servers. A third of them are failing your agent. 2026-07-21AgentsMCPEngineering Your MCP server can be 100% spec-compliant and still be unusable by an agent. The Model Context Protocol spec tells you how to transport tools: JSON-RPC framing, capability negotiation, schema shapes. It says nothing about whether a model can actually use what you serve — whether it picks the right tool out of your catalog, fills the arguments correctly, or burns 8k tokens parsing your schemas on every single request. I integrate first- and third-party MCP connectors into a production AI agent for a living, and I kept seeing the same failure:…

“First make the change easy, then make the easy change.” - paraphrased from Kent Beck You're working on a new feature, but the existing code wasn't written with future changes in mind. Trying to force the feature in directly gets complicated fast. One change leads to another, and before you know it you're already a few files deep fixing things you never planned to touch. Prefactoring (short for "preparatory refactoring") is the practice of reworking existing code to make it more suitable for an upcoming change before you actually implement the new functionality. Instead of cleaning up code as an afterthought or trying to force a new feature into an…

Design systems operate under one of the following governance models: centralised, federated, or hybrid. All approaches have different benefits and drawbacks, swaying the decision-making scales depending on organisational priorities, maturity, size, and resourcing. Not all decisions are made the same, as one of these models stands to upend what design system teams care about most: cohesion, consistency, and a high bar for excellence. Yes, I’m talking about federated design systems. A federated system (also known as decentralised) operates with no centralised ownership. Instead, it relies on feature teams maintaining it, most often as a side-track to…

Wirtschaftsministerin Katherina Reiche (CDU) präsentiert ihre neue Start-up-Strategie, um mehr privates Wagniskapital für junge Unternehmen zu mobilisieren. Larissa Kögl von POLITICO „Technologie \& KI am Morgen“ analysiert die Pläne, die unter anderem erleichterte Kündigungen für Top-Verdiener und direkte Staatsinvestitionen in Rüstungs-Start-ups vorsehen. Im 200-Sekunden-Interview bewertet der Digitalpolitiker Daniel Bettermann (SPD) die Start-up-Pläne seiner Koalitionskollegin. Er lobt den neuen Fokus auf kapitalintensive Scale-ups und technologische Souveränität im Verteidigungsbereich. Die im Koalitionsvertrag geplante 24-Stunden-Gründung sei…

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If you like playing daily word games like Wordle, then Hurdle is a great game to add to your routine. There are five rounds to the game. The first round sees you trying to guess the word, with correct, misplaced, and incorrect letters shown in each guess. If you guess the correct answer, it'll take you to the next hurdle, providing the answer to the last hurdle as your first guess. This can give you several clues or none, depending on the words. For the final hurdle, every correct answer from previous hurdles is shown, with correct and misplaced letters clearly shown. An important note is that the number of times a letter is highlighted from previous…