Category Archives: Transhuman News

Area co-founder Piotrek Panszczyk has dressed Beyonc before, but creating a custom look for her for British Vogues July 2022 cover shoot, lensed by Rafael Pavarotti, was undeniably a special moment.

British Vogues editor-in-chief Edward Enninful styled the multi-hyphenate in a series of killer looks for her return to the pages of Vogue. In the months leading up to the shoot, Beyonc and Edward exchanged texts about mirror balls, light boxes, headdresses and yes, even a horse on the dance floor. The fantastical set they concocted demanded fashion to match. B wanted to play with fashion like never before, says Enninful in his July editors letter. Area fit perfectly into the glittering retro-futurism theme of the shoot.

I feel like [Beyonc and I] grew up together, because her music was always very present in my life, says Piotrek. Its surreal to think that many years later, we [the designer and his co-founder, Beckett Fogg] are creating these special moments for her.

Area previously provided the superstar with crystal-choked jewellery a brand signature and a similarly spangled rainbow look for her 2020 film, Black is King, a career high for both Bey and team Area. For the July 2022 issue, they scaled back the embellishments but still delivered high drama with the exaggerated silhouette of the singers sculptural strapless gown an altered version of look 22 from Areas most recent spring couture collection.

This dress was a big triumph for us we are known for lavish embroideries, but this dress truly was an ode to dress-making, asserts Piotrek, who wanted to showcase team Areas atelier skills. Its truly grand in construction with a sense of elegance. Piotr couldnt help but add a touch of gilded glamour, via a winged feather and crystal hairpiece and gold butterfly belt.

The classic couture grandeur [is] translated through a sculptural and graphic lens, Piotrek said ahead of the big reveal. The curves were created using a lightweight internal bustle structure, which was padded out and smoothened before the outer duchesse-silk shell was added. This globular silhouette a conception between [fashion designer] Charles James and [sculptor] Jean Arps abstract body sculptures is seen throughout the couture collection, but Beyonc truly brings it to life.

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The Dramatic Area Gown Beyonc Wears In Vogue Is An Ode To Dress-Making - British Vogue

Surely nothing will go wrong with this plan. Why Not?

Amid an industry collapse and a class-action lawsuit, the crypto exchange Binance is looking to bring on 2,000 new employees.

In a braggadocious Wednesday tweet announcing the new hires, Binance CEO Changpeng Zhao made tongue-in-cheek references to his company's poorly-faring competitors,many of which are currently laying off workers en masse.

"It was not easy saying no to Super bowl ads, stadium naming rights, [and] large sponsor deals a few months ago, but we did,"Zhao tweeted, in a clear dig at competitor's Crypto.com and Coinbase.

"Today," he added, "we are hiring for 2000 open positions."

This could be good news for former and soon-to-be-former employees of Crypto.com and Coinbase, the two companies Zhao not-so-subtly subtweeted in his announcement. Over the past week, they've laid off roughly 1,360 people total as crypto plummets for the second time in a month.

But given that these Binance hires are dropping not only during the beginning of what experts say is a likely global recession and, perhaps more saliently, an investor fraud lawsuit in California, it seems like a particularly bad time to hire a bunch of people.

That's not the end of Binance's problems, either. Just this week, the company embarrassingly had to halt transactions for multiple hours amid a huge Bitcoin selloff when the coin's value started shrinking.

At the end of the day, it really looks like crypto hubris and solid strategical investment seem to be flip sides of the same (bit)coin.

More on the latest crypto crash: Financial Planner Desperately Explains to Clients Why the Bitcoin Crash Is Good, Actually

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Many Crypto Startups Are Firing People Right Now, But This One Is Hiring 2,000 New Employees - Futurism

Cryptocurrencies were supposed to teach traditional financiers a thing or two about how to avoid collapses and crises. Yet, it feels like were simply repeating history. Specifically, the messy hedge-fund humiliation captured in Roger Lowensteins 2000-published book, When Genius Failed: The Rise and Fall of Long-Term Capital Management.

After Terra and Lunas $60 billion stablecoin collapse and the freeze of withdrawals at crypto-lending platform Celsius, trading firm Three Arrows Capital now appears to be in trouble. The fund is liquidating its holdings amid fast plummeting prices, and an ominous tweet from co-founder Zhu Su about communicating with relevant parties" is stirring fears of something potentially more fatal.

A glance at Three Arrowss past crypto betson the likes of Luna and Axie Infinity, as well as Bitcoin and Etherleaves very little doubt that the communicating" is probably not of the fun kind. The fund, estimated to be managing $10 billion in assets in March, combined Zhus derivatives expertise with a kind of beatific conviction in a broad crypto supercycle", which he recently admitted was wrong.

That waves of forced selling still seem to be rippling through crypto markets shows how complex and lending-driven this market has become. Traditional finances margin calls take on a more brutal form in the cryptosphere when smart contracts automatically liquidate positions in quick succession. The current focus is on Three Arrowss exposure to staked Ether, a token designed to earn interest while Ethereum upgrades its network, which has been buckling under heavy selling pressure.

But it also suggests lessons from history have been ignored. This is hardly the first boom-and-bust cycle in Bitcoin or the broader crypto market; this years 65% drop in the Bloomberg Galaxy Crypto Index is similar to the crash seen back in early 2018. Yet, hedge funds set up to deliver market-beating returns from crypto assets look blindsided. Average estimated returns for those providing daily data were -24% in April, -32% in May and -28% in June, according to industry database NilssonHedge. A large number of managers have simply stopped trading", it says, with the total tracked falling to 325 from 510 in January.

The risk of a generalized crypto slump, the kind that humbled token-picking strategies in 2018, doesnt seem to have been high on their radar. The kind of strategies designed to exploit inefficiencies between exchanges that might bring in 6%-10% returns have been juiced by funds using DeFi lending platforms offering lucrative rateswhich are proving unsustainable. As one hedge funder tells me, its like picking up BMWs rather than pennies in front of a steam-roller. The end result still involves getting squished.

With more than 40% of crypto funds using borrowing and lending strategies, according to PwC, the current turmoil feels like a rug-pull rather than vindication of trading smarts. The winners are probably those that simply got their money out in good time. Two-thirds of crypto funds are likely to fail, reckons Mike Novogratz. Short-sellers seem to be in short supply.

Three Arrowss Zhu perhaps spoke for many investors earlier this year when he said the lesson of 2018s slide was to stay bullish and not give in to despair." Hence his praise for all sorts of clearly speculative shenanigans like Axie Infinity, a crypto game that pays people who spend their days breeding virtual pets thats been battered by deflating hype and a $620 million hack. His justifications seemed wrapped in futurism rather than risk management: His bible" James Dale Davidsons 1997 book The Sovereign Individual, foresaw some of the social upheaval of the internet age.

Maybe Zhu should have been reading When Genius Failed. As Novogratz has observed, whats happening in crypto echoes the 1998 blowup of Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund stuffed with very smart people, including a pair of Nobel laureates,dealing in sophisticated arbitrage strategies juiced by derivatives. When the unthinkable happened and losses piled up, banks called in their loans and eventually took over the firm.

The silver lining is that there seems to have been little bank involvement in the crypto slump. This is probably just as well, given the risks of contagion spreading to a real US economy already battered by rising inflation and weak economic growth.

But that doesnt change the fact that real losses are being racked up by funds and punters who are least able to afford it. Whatever happens to Three Arrows, the lesson of 2022that crypto prices can go down and can keep going down for months on endshouldnt be forgotten the way 2018 was. bloomberg

Lionel Laurent is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering digital currencies, the European Union and France.

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American hedge fund geniuses of the cryptosphere have failed | Mint - Mint

New Blood Interactive CEO Dave Oshry threatened to kill a puppy (opens in new tab) if he got bumped from the PC Gaming Show (opens in new tab) this past weekend, so we made sure he got his time and then he used it to say that the studio isn't actually ready to talk about any of the new stuff that it's working on (except Gloomwood (opens in new tab), which we already know about). He did offer the briefest of glimpses at three games, though, including a top-down shooter, a car combat game, and a "Fallout-style RPG" that Oshry described as his "dream game."

What a difference three days makes, apparently, because yesterday New Blood revealed a little more about its "retro futurist isometric CRPG," and while there's no detail yet, even at this early stage it sounds very promising.

The studio described the game on Twitter as a "passion project" among Oshry, game developer Adam Lacko, and artist Alexander Berezin. The latter two are major figures on the retro Fallout scene: Lacko is the mastermind of Project Van Buren (opens in new tab), an effort to resurrect Black Isle Studios' original Fallout 3, which was cancelled in 2003, while Berezin, known as Red888guns (opens in new tab) on DeviantArt, is an artist who has previously worked on the Fallout Sonora and Olympus 2207 mods.

Mark Morgan (opens in new tab), another name that will be familiar to post-apocalyptic RPG fans (and one of my favorite game composers), is also involved in the project. Morgan's previous work includes the soundtracks for the first two Fallout games, Planescape: Torment, and inXile's Wasteland sequels.

There's no indication as to when this RPG will be formally announced, much less released, and Oshry warned that despite the tease, it's still a long way off.

"Everyone knows this is my dream game," he told PC Gamer. "And now I've got my dream artist and dream composer working on it as well as all the talented devs at New Blood. Should we be showing it this early? Probably not. But it's encouraging to see how many people want this game as much as I've always wanted to create it."

"Bwahahahaha," he added.

New Blood also revealed a bit more about the other games it teased at the PC Gaming Show: The top-down shooter has already been in development "for a VERY long time" and will include a level editor, co-op support, and appearances from most New Blood Universe characters, while the car combat game is coming along "slowly but surely."

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The Fallout-style RPG teased by New Blood last week features big names in the classic Fallout scene - PC Gamer

Enlarge / The taillight of the Celestiq show car is one of the few images Cadillac has released of its next flagship.

Cadillac

Cadillac's transformation into an all-electric vehicle brand is about to get underway. The first new Cadillac EV will be the Lyriq, which has just entered production; Ars is driving it next week, and we'll be able to tell you about it on June 28.

With a starting price of $59,990, the Lyriq looks reasonably priced to enter the competitive luxury EV SUV space. But the Cadillac EV that follows will be a much more exclusive machine. It's called the Celestiq, and so far, details are scarce ahead of a formal reveal of the show car in late July. Cadillac has said that "from first approach, the striking silhouette of the Celestiq show car leaves a lasting impression, challenging the ultra-luxury space with the spirit of futurism and the avant-garde."

On Wednesday afternoon, Cadillac revealed that it will hand-build the Celestiq and will spend $81 million to set up production at General Motors' Global Technical Center in Warren, Michigan.

"As Cadillac's future flagship sedan, Celestiq signifies a new, resurgent era for the brand," said General Motors President Mark Reuss. "Each one will be hand-built by an amazing team of craftspeople on our historic Technical Center campus, and today's investment announcement emphasizes our commitment to delivering a world-class Cadillac with nothing but the best in craftsmanship, design, engineering, and technology."

As with the other EVs in GM's pipeline, from next year's sub-$30,000 Chevrolet Equinox to the four-ton Hummer EV, the Celestiq will make use of GM's Ultium battery platform and Ultium drive motors.

But GM says it is embracing innovation across its supplier community with the hand-built EV, which will use a large number of 3D-printed components, both in polymer and metal.

For larger-volume vehicles, additive manufacturing is more useful in the prototyping stage, as the low per-unit cost of mass-producing injection-molded plastics makes that approach hard to beat. But for low-volume cars like the Celestiq, the situation is reversed, and the high cost of tooling means that 3D printing becomes a highly attractive alternative.

These components will be used cosmetically and structurallysomething we saw to a small degree in the Cadillac CT4-V and CT5-V Blackwing sedans, which used 3D-printed badges on their shifters and additively manufactured components in their transmissions and HVAC ducts.

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Cadillacs electric flagship will be hand-built, use extensive 3D printing - Ars Technica

From the June 2022 issue of Car and Driver.

Reducing drag, increasing innovation, and improving quality were primary considerations in conceptualizing the Taurus, as was proving to consumers that Ford was breaking away from the cars of the Malaise Era. To achieve these goals, the project got a dedicated crew of designers, engineers, and marketers all working together. "The car was developed by one team, Team Taurus, from start to finish. This gave the product a cohesive look and feel from inside out," says Jamie Myler, Ford's senior research archivist. That this concept was novel should communicate something about Detroit's failings during that period.

The group journeyed into the windmills of their minds and came up with designs inspired by neo-futurist visionaries like Syd Mead, production-design lead for Blade Runner. "The focus on drag coefficient required a tighter look, with less overhang of the bumpers, less empty space in the wheel wells, and doors that wrapped above the roof," Myler says.

Designers eventually arrived at a wind-cheating hatchback form with a teardrop shape. In fact, all early Taurus concepts were hatches or wagons, evolving from Giugiaro-esque knife-edginess to hatchback blobs. A sedan was introduced to give the car a more traditional appearance, and in 1981, designers mocked up a full-size clay model of a Taurus hatchback (platform code: DN5). Engineering concerns about the hatch's negative impact on structural rigidity derailed the design.

"I think the early design themes that had the hatch would have been interesting," Myler posits. Imagine one of the slippery outr designs equipped with the Taurus SHO's 220-hp V-6 and five-speed. It could have easily been a prescient competitor to today's performance "four-door coupes" such as the Audi RS7 or the Tesla Model S.

Still, the vehicle that Ford settled on pushed domestic design far enough forward that the Taurus stood in as a futuristic car in RoboCop and Back to the Future Part II. It also aged relatively gracefully. "The revolutionary design was a bit jarring to some," Myler says. "But the fact that it wasn't [entirely] redesigned for a decade speaks to the popularity."

This 1981 hatchback proposal for the first Taurus (below) wasn't chosen, but the aerodynamic shape and the doors that wrap into the roof made it to production. The Mercury Sable got the prototype's skirted fenders, and the taillights inspired the 1988-1/2 Escort's.

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The Ford Taurus That Didn't Make It - Car and Driver

Generation Z the first digital natives that are now emerging as financial decision-makers and starting to join the workforce.

Companies are facing a different breed of consumers they didn't see coming a mere three years ago. Now, "humanising" their businesses will be a major factor in determining who will thrive and who might be forgotten in the next decade.

According to futurist strategists who spoke at Glacier by Sanlam's recentLooking into the futurewebinar, no industry is immune to disruption as consumers' psyche and behaviours have been turned upside down after being confined to their homes during the pandemic.

Not only that - the next biggest group of consumers entering the workforce don't think like any other generation. These "wise" digital natives are frustrated as the biggest milestones in their young lives were disrupted by the pandemic. They are changing how companies should work, what investments should look like, and who can influence behaviours.

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'Wise beyond their years' - How Gen Z is forcing businesses to be more 'human' again | Fin24 - News24