Jusqu’à ce matin, je pensais que l’esport était une activité consacrée à 100% aux jeux vidéos et en fait non !! Je viens de découvrir qu’il y a des mecs qui font des compétitions de tableurs Excel à Las Vegas, devant des centaines de spectateurs en IRL et des 60 000 personnes sur YouTube, avec diffusion sur ESPN et une même une ceinture de champion façon catch à remporter !

Bienvenue dans le monde merveilleux du Microsoft Excel World Championship.

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Ce truc existe depuis une douzaine d’années, mais ça a vraiment décollé en 2021 quand le Financial Modeling World Cup s’est associé avec Microsoft pour créer un format plus spectaculaire. Parce que regarder des gens faire de la modélisation financière pendant des heures… Disons que c’est pas le contenu Twitch le plus palpitant. Du coup ils ont totalement gamifié le truc !

Et c’est en décembre 2024 que s’est tenue la finale au HyperX Arena de Las Vegas avec un prize pool de 60 000 dollars avec comme grand gagnant Michael Jarman, un Canadien de Toronto qui bosse comme directeur de modélisation financière chez Operis. Le mec a détrôné Andrew Ngai, surnommé “The Annihilator”, qui avait remporté les trois éditions précédentes.

Competition and Markets Authority’s classification grants it expanded authority to tackle potential competition issues across the nation’s app and mobile markets.

The post UK Regulator Confirms Apple and Google Hold ‘Strategic Market Status’ appeared first on TechRepublic.

When Li Hao’s Pop Star View Platform first appeared in the landscape, it probably broke a few people’s brains. This isn’t your typical public art installation that politely sits in a corner being contemplative. Instead, it’s a massive crystalline beast that looks like it crash-landed from Krypton, all faceted surfaces and impossible geometry that shifts from alien fortress to disco ball depending on the light. The structure is based on an icosahedron, but Li Hao has exploded and reconstructed it into something that feels both mathematically precise and completely otherworldly. You’re looking at what happens when someone takes sacred geometry and runs it through a kaleidoscope filter.

The visual impact is absolutely bonkers in the best possible way. Those iridescent panels catch and fracture sunlight into a spectrum that would make a prism jealous, creating this constantly shifting light show that transforms throughout the day. At sunset, the thing becomes a beacon of pure color that radiates across the landscape like some kind of interdimensional lighthouse. The dichroic glass or film coating on each facet creates that oil-slick rainbow effect, where purples bleed into teals, oranges melt into magentas, and the whole structure seems to pulse with its own internal energy.

Designer: Li Hao

What’s brilliant about Pop Star is how it plays with scale and perception. From a distance, it reads as this monolithic alien artifact, but as you get closer, the complexity of the internal structure reveals itself. Those black steel frames create a secondary geometric pattern within each colored panel, adding depth and visual texture that keeps your eye engaged. The mesh or perforated elements in some sections let you see through the structure, creating layers of transparency that make the whole thing feel less solid and more like a hologram materializing in space.

Creating a structure this large with so many angled surfaces while maintaining structural integrity requires serious computational design work. Each joint has to handle complex load distributions, and the panel mounting system needs to accommodate thermal expansion while keeping those pristine edges aligned. The fact that it doubles as a viewing platform means the internal framework has to support human traffic, adding another layer of complexity to what could have been just a sculptural statement.

Pop Star View Platform earned its Golden A’ Design Award by doing something most public art fails at: it creates genuine wonder without being pretentious about it. Whether you’re a design nerd who appreciates the mathematical elegance or just someone walking by who stops dead because holy shit, what is that thing, the installation delivers. It’s Instagram-ready spectacle with serious conceptual depth, proving that sometimes the most effective way to make people think about space, light, and perception is to build something so visually arresting they can’t look away.

The post Step Inside this Giant Kaleidoscope That Feels Like it Descended From Krypton first appeared on Yanko Design.

Amis hackers, cyber-ninja et autres geeks de tous poils, sortez vos claviers et annulez tous vos rendez-vous car le France Cybersecurity Challenge (FCSC) 2025 commence aujourd’hui même à 14h ! C’est l’occasion ou jamais de prouver que vous êtes le Neo de la cybersécurité française et attention, ce n’est pas juste un CTF de plus, c’est carrement le championnat national qui peut propulser votre carrière ou simplement vous offrir le frisson de défier les meilleurs.

If Google or Apple is deemed to have Strategic Market Status in the U.K., the government might force it to make the user data it collects available to competitors, or give publishers more control over how their data is used.

If Google is deemed to have “Strategic Market Status” in the U.K., the government might force it to make the user data it collects available to competitors, or give publishers more control over how their data is used.

The U.K. Competition and Markets Authority has concluded that Amazon’s partnership with Anthropic does not create a relevant merger situation and has closed its investigation.

Google owns four prominent ad tech tools, and the Competition and Markets Authority said it is using its industry dominance to prevent competition from rivals.

Vestager’s tenure drew both praise and criticism — particularly from U.S. tech giants.