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International

Aldi cuts hundreds of UK head office roles as part of global cost trimming

Supermarket’s move labelled ‘shortsighted’ by worker who calls upper management ‘woefully out of touch with reality’ Aldi’s UK business is cutting hundreds of head office roles as part of a global effort to trim costs at the budget grocer. The retailer is consulting with its technology team on the loss of up to 150 roles after 103 redundancies in its finance and administration team earlier this year and almost 20 more redundancies among buying directors. Continue reading...

The Guardian
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Politics

Tories would have to raise state pension age above 70 to keep triple lock, says minister

Kemi Badenoch attacked reforms but is not being clear about how party would meet costs, Torsten Bell claims Kemi Badenoch’s Conservatives would have to raise the state pension age above 70 to meet the cost of keeping the triple lock, Treasury minister Torsten Bell has claimed. Labour has announced reforms to the triple-lock promise to come into force in the next parliament – with the initial proceeds earmarked for Andy Burnham’s national care service. Continue reading...

The Guardian
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Technology

Alibaba Cloud ranks first in China's gaming cloud market overall and in six segments

Recently, the latest "China Game Cloud Market Tracking Research, 2026H1" report released by International Data Corporation (IDC) shows that in the first half of 2026, Alibaba Cloud ranked first in the overall market with a market share of 37%, and ranked first in the six major market segments of infrastructure IaaS+CDN, infrastructure IaaS+ solution, infrastructure IaaS, solution, general cloud platform, and cloud gaming platform. Among them, in the game cloud infrastructure market, Alibaba Cloud accounts for 40%; in the game cloud solutions market, Alibaba Cloud accounts for 44%. Focusing on game R&D, operations, and overseas expansion, Alibaba Cloud provides full-stack AI technology from chips, cloud infrastructure, basic models to MaaS and agents. At the agent level, the application of AI is moving from code assistance to specific positions and team workflow. The level planning team of Buming Technology, the developer of "War Intent", uses Qoder to generate the Lua scripts required for troop lines, task triggering and performance control based on natural language requirements. After manual review and in-game execution verification, the level planning team implements the level logic, allowing planners who are familiar with scene design but not good at programming to directly participate in the production of runnable scripts. At the MaaS level, model capabilities have begun to enter the office, customer service and marketing processes of game companies. "Crazy Water World" owned by Yishijie has accessed the multi-model ecosystem through the Qianwen AI platform, built office agents and customer service efficiency solutions, and combined with Wanjingshi's AIGC video capabilities, expanded game advertising materials into short comics and creative ads, shortened the creative iteration cycle and reduced material production costs; for small and medium-sized teams and independent developers, Alibaba Cloud's cooperation with TapTap further connects model capabilities and game creation platforms. By accessing Alibaba models such as Qwen-Image-3.0, Wan3.0 and Qwen3.8-Max, T

雷峰网
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