The top soccer leagues in England have reached a collective, voluntary agreement on gambling sponsorship. 

A code of conduct has been agreed between the Premier League, Football Association (national governing body), English Football League (tiers 2-4) and Women’s Super League. 

The understanding was made public just hours after elite clubs were accused of “desperation” to lure cash, with 11 out of 20 Premier League clubs set to display gambling company logos as their front-of-shirt sponsor in the upcoming 2024/25 season. AFC Bournemouth is the latest club to endorse a betting firm on their jerseys after they revealed a “record-breaking” agreement with Asian betting outlet, bj88.

Aston Villa, Brentford, Crystal Palace, Everton, Fulham, Leicester, Nottingham Forest, Southampton, West Ham, and Wolves are the other top-flight clubs set to display a betting company logo on the front of their shirts in the stadiums and to broadcast audiences of millions around the world.

This remains a contentious issue in the UK, even after Premier League clubs agreed to phase out gambling shirt sponsorship by the end of next season, 2025/26. 

As part of the new code, the leagues have committed to four key principles underpinning the new framework: protection, social responsibility, reinvestment, and integrity. The bodies say they want to reduce the prospects of harm and children’s exposure to gambling activity, with a focus on responsibility.

Charity criticism of soccer’s relationship with gambling sponsorship

Looking ahead to the proposed end of gambling firms as primary shirt sponsors, the code states clubs should only enter into partnerships with companies which the Gambling Commission licenses. It also requests that family sections inside stadiums should not be adorned with gambling advertising or promotions

The Big Step, a charity which campaigns against overall gambling advertising in soccer said the clubs merely “sign these desperate deals for a few extra quid”.

In what is a tangled web, the Football League has SkyBet as the principal sponsor of its three leagues, – Championship, League One, League Two – a longstanding relationship that dates back to the 2013/14 campaign. However, the Football League insists the  partnership is “built around safer gambling, including a memorandum of understanding that sets out how to deliver joint objectives in a socially responsible way”.

 

Image credit: Everton FC/X

Ever since the Amazon Prime Fallout show began to air, gamers new and old have flocked back to the core of the series for more of that gory wasteland action we know and love.

However, if you’re someone who has been still playing the likes of Fallout 4, the modding community has been holding firm, creating some really impressive additions to the base game experience.

Fallout: London is probably at the top of the list when it comes to both depth and hype for release, and today marks the official launch.

If you’re unsure as to what Fallout: London actually is, basically it’s a huge, DLC-sized mod for Fallout 4 that takes you away from the US for the first time.

Not only has London been recreated with all the post-apocalyptic destruction, there’s a whole new storyline featuring brand new NPCs and factions voiced by some impressive talent.

The Team FOLON even managed to recruit former Speaker of the House John Bercrow to voice an AI robot, so you know that this thing is the real deal.

While you can simply go over to GOG.com and get it downloaded, you do have to be aware of some pre–requisites.

You will need to have Fallout 4: Game of the Year Edition installed but the mod does not work with the next-gen update that Bethesda pushed in April, so you’ll in fact have to downgrade your game to the pre-patched version (1.10.163.0).

Because of this, if you’re wanting to play via Epic, you’re going to have a hard time since downgrading simply isn’t possible on the platform.

If you do manage to get it installed though, you’re in for a real treat and something that’ll hopefully tide you over until some form of information comes out on Fallout 5.

Apart from that, you’ll have to make do with the new content added in Fallout 76 which has seen a huge resurgence, thanks again to the aforementioned show.

Reddit has commenced its assault on search engines, reportedly blocking those that don’t have a commercial relationship with the company. 

Back in February this year, Google agreed to a $60 million “expanded partnership” with the mega-site which combines elements of social media, news aggregation, and messageboards. Reddit data can now be used for the advances of the Alphabet company’s AI models, while Reddit content will have a more prominent position on Google Search, making it easier to participate in the site’s conversations and communities.

One of the most notable aspects is that the US multinational tech leader now has access to the Reddit Data API which delivers real-time content.

As reported by 404 Media, Reddit results on other search engine platforms are now being blocked as the company goes on the offensive against web crawlers. That impacts the likes of Bing, DuckDuckGo, and Mojeek, with results either not showing any recent content, or not displaying the search result in full. 

Microsoft spokesperson Caitlin Roulston stated, “Microsoft respects the robots.txt standard and we honor the directions provided by websites that do not want content on their pages to be used with our generative AI models,” adding that its Bing search engine stopped crawling Reddit when it updated its robots.txt file on July 1.

It’s a bold move for Reddit to effectively block some of the biggest search engines on the web, but it could be another pointer of its direction of travel since the IPO earlier this year and desire to find new ways to drive revenue.

Unable or unwilling to make enforceable promises

However, a Reddit spokesperson has provided a different explanation of the situation.  

“This is not at all related to our recent partnership with Google,” stated Tim Rathschmidt in a statement to The Verge. 

“We have been in discussions with multiple search engines. We have been unable to reach agreements with all of them, since some are unable or unwilling to make enforceable promises regarding their use of Reddit content, including their use for AI.”

It has been conveyed that the online results are due to changes to Reddit’s robots.txt file, aimed at “all crawlers” that do not agree to not utilize Reddit data for AI training, with the company listing Internet Archie and reddit4research as two examples of crawlers that still work.

Image credit: Via Ideogram

Google DeepMind has taken a big step toward bringing artificial intelligence (AI) in line with human capability to solve complicated mathematics.

Researchers paired two new systems, known as AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry 2, tasking them with questions from the International Mathematical Olympiad. The global maths contest for advanced high school students has been running since 1959, comprised of six extremely difficult questions each year. Topics include algebra and geometry, with a gold medal putting the winners on a pedestal with the best and brightest young mathematicians in the world.

While the results from the AI systems were impressive, they weren’t quite at the standard of the most intelligent humans at this level, not yet anyway. The Google DeepMind ‘team’ racked up a score of 28 out of 42 points available, one short of the number required for a gold rating and having to settle for silver.

Understandably, and unlike human performance, the answers submitted by DeepMind’s AlphaProof and AlphaGeometry 2 were either perfect or pitiful. The AI solved four questions with precision, taking top marks, but in the other two, there was nothing. The technology could not even begin to work out the answer. 

Building a bridge between spheres

Another key point to note is that the DeepMind experiment effectively had no time limits. Some questions were answered in seconds while others took three days, round the clock. Conversely, human competitors in the Olympiad have a maximum of nine hours to complete the test.

The two AI systems paired by researchers are said to be very different. AlphaProof, which answered three of the questions, works by pairing a large language model (as used in chatbots) with a specialist “reinforcement learning” technique. AlphaGeometry pairs an LLM with a focused, mathematically inclined approach. 

Thomas Hubert, lead researcher on AlphaProof stated, “What we try to do is to build a bridge between these two spheres so that we can take advantage of the guarantees that come with formal mathematics and the data that is available in informal mathematics.”

 

Image credit: Via Ideogram