Peter Archer obituary
My friend Peter Archer, who has died aged 80, bettered the lives of many people by improving housing conditions and regenerating neighbourhoods from inner city Bristol to New Delhi.He combined a strategic vision with a belief that communities should have a voice in decisions that affect their lives.One of Peter’s greatest achievements was his establishment in 1986 of Care and Repair England, a project designed to help older and disabled people to continue to live independently by improving their existing housing conditions.He chaired the charity for 20 years and would later (in 2010) rewrite UK government guidance on home adaptations for disabled people.Born and raised in Bromley, Kent, Peter came from a family with a strong Methodist background.
Public service was in his blood: his father, Harold, was a public health inspector and his mother, Evelyn (nee Smart), was a teacher,Educated at Kent college, Canterbury, Archer qualified as an environmental health officer at the London borough of Croydon in 1968 before working in West Bromwich and Birmingham,Moving to Bristol in 1985 as divisional director for housing with the city council, he transformed its approach to inner city decay,Group repair projects were introduced to rescue older homes, with whole terraces were improved as one project in “enveloping” schemes,He set up an empty homes register and a licensing and regulation system of the city’s bed and breakfast accommodation.
Leaving local government in 1996, Peter established the Regeneration and Housing Services consultancy, whose clients included the New Delhi metropolitan council.A director of Homelessness International since 1989, he represented the UK Chartered Institute of Environmental Health on the International Federation of Environmental Health from 2001, serving as president from 2016 to 2018.In 2015, with Chris Watson, he formed the Healthier Housing Partnership, a body of housing and environmental experts that promotes the building of healthier housing.It celebrated its 10th anniversary in April with an international conference on the impact of climate change on health and housing.At home in Stourport, Worcestershire, Peter set up and ran the local Methodist cub and scout group for many years.
He chaired several local organisations, ran community events and edited the parish magazine.Living in a rectory, he put care and repair to use on the Grade I Norman church next door.His special pleasure lay in winding the church clock twice weekly.In 1968 he married Hilary Price, a social worker.She survives him, along with their daughters Sally and Chloe, son Toby and eight grandchildren.
Matthew McConaughey and Michael Caine sign voice deal with AI company
Oscar-winning actors Matthew McConaughey and Michael Caine have both signed a deal with the AI audio company ElevenLabs.The New York-based company can now create AI-generated versions of their voices as part of a bid to solve a “key ethical challenge” in the artificial intelligence industry’s alliance with Hollywood.McConaughey, who has also invested in the company and collaborated with it since 2022, will now allow ElevenLabs to translate his newsletter, Lyrics of Livin’, into a Spanish-language audio version using his voice.In a statement, the Dallas Buyers Club actor said he was “impressed” by ElevenLabs and wanted the partnership to help him “reach and connect with even more people”.ElevenLabs is also launching the Iconic Voices Marketplace, which will allow brands to partner with the company and use officially licensed celebrity voices for AI-generated usage
John Tymukas obituary
My brother-in-law John Tymukas, who has died aged 73, was a structural engineer on many of London’s infrastructure projects from the 1990s onwards, including Canning Town station, Heathrow Terminal 5, Glaxo Smithkline HQ and Crossrail Bond Street.Born in Adelaide, South Australia, John was the son of Kostas, a Lithuanian refugee and engineer, and Kathleen (nee Donohoe), the daughter of Irish emigrants and a former clerk. He was the eldest of six siblings. John completed his education in Brisbane at Downlands school and the Queensland Institute of Technology, where he took a four-year engineering degree course and worked in Australia before heading in 1990 to London to work on contracts with engineering companies such as SKB and WSP.An avid traveller, he covered Europe extensively, making contact with Lithuanian and Irish family members and discovering family history unknown in Australia until he made the links
ChatGPT violated copyright law by ‘learning’ from song lyrics, German court rules
A court in Munich has ruled that OpenAI’s chatbot ChatGPT violated German copyright laws by using hits from top-selling musicians to train its language models in what creative industry advocates described as a landmark European ruling.The Munich regional court sided in favour of Germany’s music rights society GEMA, which said ChatGPT had harvested protected lyrics by popular artists to “learn” from them.The collecting society GEMA, which manages the rights of composers, lyricists and music publishers and has approximately 100,000 members, filed the case against OpenAI in November 2024.The lawsuit was seen as a key European test case in a campaign to stop AI scraping of creative output. OpenAI can appeal against the decision
The race begins to make the world’s best self-driving cars
Hello, and welcome to TechScape. I’m your host, Blake Montgomery, writing to you from Barcelona, where my diet has transformed at least half my body into ham.We are on the verge of the global arrival of self-driving cars. Next year, major firms from both the US and China will deploy their robotaxis to metropolises around the world, in major expansions of their existing operations. These companies are posturing in the press like male birds fighting for the same mate; the dance sets the stage for the global competition to come
Datacenters meet resistance over environmental concerns as AI boom spreads in Latin America
This Q&A originally appeared as part of The Guardian’s TechScape newsletter. Sign up for this weekly newsletter here.The datacenters that power the artificial intelligence boom are beyond enormous. Their financials, their physical scale, and the amount of information contained within are so massive that the idea of stopping their construction can seem like opposing an avalanche in progress.Despite the scale and momentum of the explosion of datacenters, resistance is mounting in the United States, in the United Kingdom, and in Latin America, where datacenters have been built in some of the world’s driest areas
Can OpenAI keep pace with industry’s soaring costs?
It is the $1.4tn (£1.1tn) question. How can a loss-making startup such as OpenAI afford such a staggering spending commitment?Answer that positively and it will go a long way to easing investor concerns over bubble warnings in the artificial intelligence boom, from lofty tech company valuations to a mooted $3tn global spend on datacentres.The company behind ChatGPT needs a vast amount of computing power – or compute, in tech jargon – to train its models, produce their responses and build even more powerful systems in the future
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