All posts tagged: Adapt

Rise Of “War Unicorns” As Big Defense Primes Face An “Adapt Or Die” Moment

Rise Of “War Unicorns” As Big Defense Primes Face An “Adapt Or Die” Moment

Published by Jenni Sidey

“Rebuilding our military and reestablishing credible deterrence demands the Department of War (DoW) put our Acquisition System and Enterprise on a wartime footing and dramatically accelerate the fielding of new technology and advanced capabilities to maintain the military superiority of our Armed Forces,” Secretary of War Pete Hegseth announced in his November acquisition reform package. Translation: The DoW under Pete Hegseth and the rest of the procurement process is moving away from bloated legacy defense primes toward defense tech startups, creating the next boom that is already underway, giving rise to “war unicorns” like Palmer Luckey’s Anduril Industries. Adding further color to the DoW’s procurement process reset is a conversation Army Secretary Dan Driscoll had with Bloomberg earlier this week. Driscoll said that major US defense contractors must adapt to a revamped DoW procurement process or risk being displaced by firms that have historically stayed outside defense contracting. “They have got to adapt and change or die, and we will hold them publicly accountable if they don’t,” Driscoll said, adding, “It does not mean we …

Lord of the Flies is a seismic, chilling masterpiece – of course Adolescence creator Jack Thorne chose to adapt it

Lord of the Flies is a seismic, chilling masterpiece – of course Adolescence creator Jack Thorne chose to adapt it

Published by Daniella Wilson

Get the latest entertainment news, reviews and star-studded interviews with our Independent Culture email Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter Get the latest entertainment news with our free Culture newsletter We can all be thankful that a young editor from Northern Ireland saved William Golding’s masterpiece, Lord of the Flies, from potential obscurity when he rescued the unknown author’s debut novel from a publisher’s “slush pile”. Charles Monteith took the time to read through Golding’s yellowing, stained manuscript – which bore the original title “Strangers from Within” – even though it had already been turned down by 21 publishers and dismissed by a previous Faber editor with the words, “absurd and uninteresting fantasy. Rubbish and dull. Pointless. Reject.” Monteith asked Golding, then a 42-year-old English and philosophy teacher, to drop the first chapter, about an evacuation from nuclear war, and open with the moment where two schoolboys (Piggy and Ralph) meet on a desert island, after a plane crash has stranded a group of boys aged six to 13. Incidentally, Faber …

European intelligence services adapt to the upheavals of the Trump era

European intelligence services adapt to the upheavals of the Trump era

Published by Sam Flores

French President Emmanuel Macron (L) and German Chancellor Friedrich Merz at the coalition of the willing summit at the Elysée Palace in Paris, January 6, 2026. KAMIL ZIHNIOGLU FOR LE MONDE Until the 12-day war between the Israeli-American alliance and Iran in June 2025, Donald Trump’s return to the White House on January 20, 2025, had not had a major impact on intelligence cooperation between Washington and Paris. The first sign that the world of intelligence would also have to adapt to the new transatlantic reality emerged that summer. France’s foreign intelligence service, the DGSE, realized dialogue with American agencies on Iranian issues would now be limited. “Their contacts told them,” recounted a French diplomat connected with the DGSE, “that they could no longer exchange information about Iranian nuclear facilities, because President Trump had declared that they had all been destroyed.” Even the Israelis disputed such a claim. The erratic leadership of the American president, purges within the US intelligence community and politically motivated appointments of inexperienced figures at the helm and in subordinate roles …

Instagram Chief Warns: AI Images Are Advancing Faster Than Humans Can Adapt

Instagram Chief Warns: AI Images Are Advancing Faster Than Humans Can Adapt

Published by skeptic

In a 2025 year-end post, Instagram chief Adam Mosseri addressed the massive shifts AI is causing in photography, stressing that authenticity will become increasingly harder to come by — and offered thoughts on how creators, camera makers, and Instagram itself will need to adapt. “The key risk Instagram faces is that, as the world changes more quickly, the platform fails to keep up. Looking forward to 2026, one major shift: authenticity is becoming infinitely reproducible,” Mosseri wrote in the post, which took the form of 20 text slides — no images at all. (He also posted a somewhat expanded version on Threads.)   Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source. Mosseri said that AI is making it impossible to distinguish real photos from AI-generated images and that as more “savvy creators are leaning into unproduced, unflattering images,” AI itself will follow with images that lean into that “raw aesthetic” as well. That will force us, he said, to change how we approach images from the jump. …

As more seniors become homeless, shelters try to adapt : Shots

As more seniors become homeless, shelters try to adapt : Shots

Published by Sam Flores

The Medically Vulnerable People (MVP) shelter in Sandy, Utah, is a remodeled two-story brick hotel. It serves people ages 62 and older, as well as people with health conditions that make it hard to live in a typical homeless shelter. Aaron Bolton/Montana Public Radio hide caption toggle caption Aaron Bolton/Montana Public Radio Just outside Salt Lake City, in Sandy, Utah, there’s an old, two-story brick hotel — now given new life as a homeless shelter for older adults. The Medically Vulnerable People shelter, or MVP shelter for short, is for people ages 62 and older. But it also serves younger adults who have chronic health issues. Instead of sleeping in a large, shared space with multiple beds or bunks, the MVP shelter has semiprivate rooms designed to accommodate wheelchairs or other mobility needs. Each small room has its own bathroom, allowing dignity and privacy for older adults who struggle with incontinence. Unlike the MVP shelter, most homeless shelters aren’t equipped to help older people, especially those 65 and above. They are the fastest-growing homeless population …

Commentary: The global economy must adapt to avoid tumult this year

Commentary: The global economy must adapt to avoid tumult this year

Published by Sam Flores

RESPECTABLE GDP GROWTH Even though the Trump administration boycotted the Group of 20 summit, blanketed the globe in tariffs and dismantled the Washington consensus on liberalisation and free markets that US governments had repeatedly advocated to others, the American economy managed to accelerate real GDP growth to 4.3 per cent in the third quarter and avoid major trade retaliation from most countries. The global economy grew at a respectable 3 per cent; the Chinese economy demonstrated remarkable agility against America’s protectionist measures, making up its roughly 30 per cent drop in exports to the United States by shipping more to Europe and Southeast Asia. China’s trade surplus, for the first time, exceeded US$1 trillion – a staggering feat. Then there were AI leaders and the capital markets that enabled them. Valuations soared, driving a 21 per cent gain in the Nasdaq and 17 per cent in the S&P 500 stock market indexes. Nvidia became the world’s first US$5 trillion company. OpenAI announced a US$1 billion deal with Disney. It often seemed that financing had no …

The real reason some people adapt faster than others

The real reason some people adapt faster than others

Published by Jenni Sidey

Sign up for Big Think on Substack The most surprising and impactful new stories delivered to your inbox every week, for free. We’ve grown comfortable with the idea that trauma leaves people permanently altered. It’s a compelling story, but a misleading one. Drawing on more than a hundred studies, clinical psychologist George Bonanno explains why resilience is not a rare trait or a heroic exception, but the most common human response to adversity. GEORGE BONANNO: There’s a kind of a cultural trend toward thinking we’re all pretty fragile right now. The internet has got us focused on how dangerous, how harmful the world is right now by all the things that we perceive that we’re fed because it gets our attention. But I think that it’s good to remind ourselves of how strong we actually are. It can sometimes seem like a tough sell, but it’s really important to cut yourself a little slack and to allow yourself to take on that belief for a little while, at least to let yourself dig in and try …

J.R.R. Tolkien Expressed a “Heartfelt Loathing” for Walt Disney and Refused to Let Disney Studios Adapt His Work

J.R.R. Tolkien Expressed a “Heartfelt Loathing” for Walt Disney and Refused to Let Disney Studios Adapt His Work

Published by skeptic

Image via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons I’ve just start­ed read­ing J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hob­bit to my daugh­ter. While much of the nuance and the ref­er­ences to Tolkien­ian deep time are lost on her, she eas­i­ly grasps the dis­tinc­tive charms of the char­ac­ters, the nature of their jour­ney, and the per­ils, won­ders, and Elven friends they have met along the way so far. She is famil­iar with fairy tale dwarfs and myth­ic wiz­ards, though not with the typol­o­gy of insu­lar, mid­dle-class, adven­ture-averse coun­try gen­try, thus Hob­bits them­selves took a bit of explain­ing. While read­ing and dis­cussing the book with her, I’ve won­dered to myself about a pos­si­ble his­tor­i­cal rela­tion­ship between Tolkien’s fairy tale fig­ures and those of the Walt Dis­ney com­pa­ny which appeared around the same time. The troupe of dwarves in The Hob­bit might pos­si­bly share a com­mon ances­tor with Snow White’s dwarfs—in the Ger­man fairy tale the Broth­ers Grimm first pub­lished in 1812. But here is where any sim­i­lar­i­ty between Tolkien and Dis­ney begins and ends. In fact, Tolkien most­ly hat­ed Disney’s cre­ations, and he made these feel­ings very …