Terwijl de zon zichzelf de afgelopen weken met het enthousiasme van een Bart Chabot door de hemel slingerde, bezocht ik de ene na de andere uitvaart.

Sinds zondag woedt een omvangrijke natuurbrand in het bos bij Fontainebleau, op veertig minuten met de trein van Parijs. Dit ecologisch belangrijke woud, vernoemd naar een koninklijke jachthond, heeft ook in de Franse cultuur een ereplaats.

Techreus Apple sleept OpenAI voor de rechter. Dit bedrijf zou via oud-medewerkers bedrijfsgeheimen hebben gestolen om AI-gadgets te ontwikkelen.

Landen in oorlog moeten niet alleen zelf het humanitair oorlogsrecht naleven, maar ook zorgen dat andere landen dit doen. De vraag is of Nederland genoeg gedaan heeft om misstanden in Afghanistan op te sporen en uit te zoeken. Twee experts oorlogsrecht vinden van niet. „Iedereen heeft het recht om niet vermist te zijn.”

Trusting an AI agent to summarize user complaints about downtime is one thing; trusting it to fix the problem unattended is something else entirely. A survey of 696 experts The Register ran with NeuBird AI in April 2026 found that 73 percent are not using AIOps at all, another 19 percent are in pilot, and only eight percent have it in production. Asked what's stopping them, 60 percent of respondents cited a lack of trust, by far the biggest issue, with concerns about ROI, security and data quality each registering at around 12 to 13 percent. NeuBird AI's Production Ops Agent is designed to close that trust deficit. Rather than summarizing the alert queue, it continuously correlates metrics, logs, traces, infrastructure telemetry, deployment activity and dependency relationships, then runs investigations across that combined picture to suggest probable root causes and next actions. It also works a step upstream. Rather than bolting a faster responder onto a noisy alert queue, NeuBird AI fixes observability at its source: through agentic instrumentation it generates the right signals, so the alert is high-signal by design. As Martel puts it, the point is to fix observability at the source, not patch the output. Field CTO Francois Martel sat down with The Register to talk through what the survey found, and why the next phase of AIOps will look nothing like the dashboards engineers have stared at for a decade. He also has views on what must change before SRE teams will let agents near their production systems. Lots of interest, very little deployment The data confirmed what Martel was already hearing in the field. "There's a lot of interest, but not a lot of action," he says. The pattern is familiar across agentic workloads: the categories that have taken off are the ones that come with an obvious human in the loop and an obvious verification path, such as coding agents and content generation. Operations is harder, because the work happens inside the running environment, on data the engineer hasn't seen yet, with consequences that show up in customer-facing systems. He saw the same gap inside enterprises long before he joined NeuBird: a backlog of 300 candidate AI fixes and a flurry of early enthusiasm, followed by a year of slog before the first one shipped. Part of that delay comes down to the speed of market development, since waiting six months for the tools to catch up with your expectations is sometimes the right call. Another part of it is the wrong choice of tool category, because general-purpose agents do not fit SRE problems. "There are specialized agents that can do a much better job," Martel says, "and address some of the concerns" of safety, security, guardrails and hallucinations. The tool also has to fit into the team's existing workflows. Trust is built, not declared Martel doesn't try to argue with the trust-heavy concerns the survey surfaced. "Working with AI is a trust-building exercise, and AI has to learn in order to gain trust," he says. "I would say that's kind of the killer feature for AI agents. If you can show that you're learning and getting better, then you can gain trust." That's why explainability sits at the center of NeuBird AI's design rather than being grafted on for the security review. The platform records the reasoning behind every decision so an engineer can interrogate it the way they'd interrogate a colleague's incident report. "Whenever you have an agent, you want to be able to audit the decisions that were made, and understand the reasoning behind the decision," Martel says. Internally, NeuBird AI captures every reasoning step via Langfuse. Explainability is only half of it. The platform is also SOC 2 Type II certified, read-only, and stores nothing, so trust is built into the architecture, not just the reasoning. Externally, the harder problem is presentation: early versions of the system surfaced so much detail that users described it as a wall of text. The fix was to make the reasoning interrogable rather than dumped, so engineers can chat with the system's memory the way they'd query a more senior teammate. Context is what makes the answer credible The same survey found that 59 percent of respondents require near-perfect accuracy before they'll adopt, while another three in every ten will tolerate around 80 percent accuracy. That bar is unforgiving, and Martel argues it can only be cleared with better context engineering, not bigger models. "The key to accuracy is this sweet spot between just enough context so that you're not missing things, and then discoverability of context," he says. "Certainly not too much context." Creating a solution that achieves that balance is beyond the reach of anybody with just a coding agent on their desktop, he argues. NeuBird AI's argument rests on the fact that most outages cannot be reasoned about inside a single dashboard or service. Any enterprise large enough to need an SRE team has silos throughout the tech stack, from storage and networking through to operating platforms and applications, especially after microservices fragmented the estate. An investigation has to traverse boundaries that no single human has full visibility into , and NeuBird handles this by doing the dependency mapping before the incident starts, so that when an investigation kicks off the system already knows where to look and how the pieces relate. Co-pilot now, autonomy later, maybe The clearest signal from the research, and the one Martel finds least surprising, is the preference for co-pilot models, with 62 percent wanting AI to assist rather than replace. He recognizes this stage from his own work with coding agents, though he also acknowledges an evolutionary arc. A year ago he wouldn't walk away from a coding agent for a minute, and now he's tempted to flip it into dangerous mode and let it run. He still checks in and architects everything, though. "I'm not going to completely surrender my responsibilities," he says. The pragmatic path he describes for operations looks similar. NeuBirdAI is starting to wire up automation through Ansible's Model Context Protocol (MCP) server, with certain playbooks marked as safe to automate in production and the rest gated behind human approval. Adding memory to a pod up to a known ceiling is something an agent can handle; anything riskier waits for a person. How much an engineer delegates, Martel says, depends on their appetite for risk and the experience they have built up working alongside the tool. The five-minute clock and the death of the war room Response time dominates the AIOps brief: just over half of survey respondents expect operational answers in under five minutes, and 75 percent want them inside ten, putting immense pressure on workflows that were never built for the cadence. Getting six specialists up to speed and pulling them onto a war-room conference bridge takes time the SLA cannot absorb. Martel's argument is that the on-call experience has to change before the clock can. "You want to get to the situation where you're not on a call with 20 other teams. Instead you're in front of a document that's outlining the explanation of what's happening and either giving me a solution or telling me who should get involved," he says. The agent does the legwork before the engineer logs in, so by the time the engineer arrives, the early triage questions have already been answered and only the interesting decisions remain. What IT means for the observability bill The most provocative finding, for incumbent observability vendors at least, is that 52 percent of respondents would consider switching telemetry tools if AI-driven insights worked across any back-end. Asked where this goes, Martel doesn't hedge. "In the future observability will be dominated by open source, cost effective storage indexing technology like Grafana, Elasticsearch, or OpenSearch." In that scenario the strategic asset shifts from whoever hoards the most telemetry to whoever can investigate it most intelligently, which means a context engine sitting above whatever storage layer is cheapest. This is a useful lens for buyers about to renew an observability contract, because the dashboards they have paid a fortune for are the human-readable layer of a system that increasingly has machine readers too. What next? The survey describes a market that badly wants AI in operations but has learned to be suspicious of vendors promising results without evidence. Martel's pitch is that the platforms surviving the next two years will be the ones that show their work and fit into the existing change-management apparatus rather than demanding a rewrite of it. The winners will treat operational context as a first-class engineering problem rather than a prompt-stuffing exercise. Martel has a blunt answer for SRE leads still wondering whether their team is behind the curve. "There are advantages you'll gain in terms of keeping up with a growing production estate with flat operational budgets," he says. "If you don't adopt it, what are you going to do? You're going to struggle." Sponsored by NeuBird AI.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

The purchases mark an 18% increase compared to the same period in 2025 and comes despite the EU’s plan to completely phase out all imports of Russian LNG by the end of the year.

Putting on the $3,000 Katalyst suit is like sliding around with an electric eel. First you lay out the vest, shorts, and arm straps (on a towel if you don’t want to make a mess) and spray their electrode pads with a lot of water. “More water is better,” Katalyst’s CEO Brendan Kennedy told me. You then clip the vest and shorts together, creating a single, dripping suit. After wrapping those around your body and zipping up, you put on the arm straps and connect them to the main suit with a pair of delicate cables. You slip a battery pack into a pocket near your thigh, snap its magnetic plugs to the vests and shorts, and you’re ready to work out, soaking wet and maybe cold if you took too long to assemble the contraption.

The pitch is that Katalyst will essentially supercharge your workouts. The suit electrocutes your muscles while you do basic movements alongside a virtual instructor in the accompanying app. Think lunges, squats, and the movement of a deadlift. You can get the equivalent of a 2 hour strength session in just 20 minutes, Katalyst says. George Clooney has praised the suit, telling Esquire “my arms are twice the size they’ve ever been. It’s crazy.” Bloomberg Businessweek has covered the suit too, writing, “here’s the thing: The Katalyst suit worked.”

I already own a bunch of exercise and wellness tech, from smart swimming goggles to the Oura ring. I often plan my workout time as efficiently as I can. That’s one reason why my main form of exercise is rowing, which uses a lot of muscles at once, and why I sometimes wear resistance gloves during swimming to squeeze out as much benefit as possible. So, as a tool that promised super-efficient sessions even if the price tag is obviously insane, I really wanted to like Katalyst. I thought it might be the secret to finally branching out from rowing and swimming to more strength-focused routines.

But it wasn’t. It gave me pins and needles in my feet for days at a time and made my limbs numb and cold, derailed my other workouts, and it simply wasn’t fun in the way good and long-lasting exercise habits ideally should be. Instead, slipping into the $3,000 cyber suit for around a month made me reassess my obsession with fitness, optimization, and efficiency. It made me consider which of those concepts were actually helping me, and which were ultimately holding me back. What the fuck am I even doing? I eventually thought to myself, dripping water all over my apartment floor.

I wasn’t the only one. “Legit you are the craziest person I know,” 404 Media’s Emanuel Maiberg said after I sent a photo of the soaking wet suit to our group chat. They compared me to an Infinite Jest character, with Sam Cole saying “we’re laughing IRL over here.” Jason Koebler added: “As your friends and colleagues and cofounders. This is not normal. The bit has gone too far.” 

Katalyst is an electro muscle stimulation, or EMS, suit. The pads send electrical pulses that make your muscles contract. At first, as the suit and app ramp you into a workout, the pulses feel like a light tingling sensation. Then, a solid block of electricity across your arms, legs, and abs. You wet the pads, and sometimes the base layer of shorts and a long-sleeve t-shirt, because the water helps conductivity between the electrode and your skin, Katalyst says.

“That was absolutely insane,” I texted the rest of 404 Media after my first workout.

At some points, your limbs may lock in place due to the intensity of the blast. I tweaked my settings so I could complete the movements fully and with a good amount of difficulty and resistance, while not completing locking my legs or arms out. The app encourages and makes this easy to do: during a workout there are buttons in the app you can quickly press to increase or turn down the intensity of the pulses. The instructor in the pre-recorded video will often bring up the power during the workout to reach an electrocuting crescendo. It can take a few of the recommended three or so workouts a week to find your ideal baseline.

Katalyst’s instructors recommend you breathe out while the suit pulses. You perform a squat, or a lunge, or another movement for four seconds while the suit shocks you. Then you rest for four seconds. You keep doing that through different motions and intensities. In 20 minutes, the workout is over. 

This timesave is obviously the big attraction of the Katalyst; the idea that you can somehow squeeze hours of work into mere minutes without even leaving your home. “I'd been trying to go back to the gym a dozen times over the preceding 2-3 years with no luck. The time savings/mental ease of EMS training really is a blessing,” AustinAfter40, a YouTuber who makes EMS-related videos, told me in an email. Within the first few months of getting an EMS suit in 2023, Austin says he gained 10 pounds of muscle. In the years since that’s gone up to 20 pounds, without, Austin says, really touching anything heavier than a 15lb dumbbell. “My bone density has increased significantly, body fat has lowered, and back pain I've dealt with much of my life is now a distant memory,” he says.

If you scroll the Katalyst subreddit, you find many people saying much the same thing. But navigating the world of EMS can feel like the Wild West. Austin makes money from his EMS-related videos with affiliate links, so viewers need to keep that in mind when watching whatever suit he is currently making videos about even if the information is sincere and helpful (he has since moved onto TitanBody, a Katalyst competitor). The intensity and metrics of EMS suits are not standardized, so you don’t really know what you’re getting. An intensity rating of, say, 200 on a Katalyst is probably not going to be the same on a TitanBody suit. Or a VisionBody suit. Or any of the other EMS suit companies that have clearly bought Google Search ad space when you look for anything EMS-related. 

Katalyst is FDA-cleared. That is not the same as FDA-approved. The Katalyst suit falls into Class II of the FDA’s different groups for devices, putting it in the moderate risk category. Being cleared means Katalyst can sell the suit, but the FDA is not saying everyone should slip it on.  

On the Katalyst subreddit, people have historically complained about the company’s customer service or suit delivery times (the customer service was very good for me, with a dedicated Zoom call to talk through the issues I was facing). Kennedy, through his company Mont y Mer, acquired Katalyst in 2025. He said the previous CEO and Katalyst’s founder, Bjoern Woltermann, had “essentially bankrupted the company twice in six years,” and had taken orders and payment from more than 1,000 customers but hadn’t created any suits. Kennedy said he then went around the world meeting with different suppliers to produce those original 1,000 suits. For me, it took around five months for my suit to arrive when I ordered it in 2025. Kennedy said Katalyst has inventory now and has “sort of solved that problem.” Woltermann acknowledged a request for comment but did not provide a response in time for publication.

Beyond the anecdotal, the science suggests EMS suits can work. Professor Yong-Seok Jee at Hanseo University, who has researched EMS, told me in an email that while athletes often use EMS to target specific muscle groups, he says the suits can also help normal people. Like me, presumably. “For non-athletes or the general population, EMS can be particularly useful as a time-efficient and low-impact training option, especially for beginners, older adults, or individuals with limited mobility,” he continued. 

But EMS is not some magic tool you can use instead of actually working out and exercising normally. “That said, EMS is not a shortcut or replacement for exercise. Its effectiveness depends heavily on appropriate intensity, supervision, and program design, and there are safety considerations (e.g., avoiding excessive stimulation),” Jee said.

Casey Johnston, who runs the lifting-focused newsletter She’s a Beast and author of A Physical Education, told me in an email Katalyst is “definitely in no way a replacement or even effective complement to strength training.” 

“If anything, similar to the drag suit argument, wearing a thing like the Katalyst would probably hamper your ability to effectively learn strength training movements and form, which is a huge cornerstone of translating strength to real life, before it would be additive in any meaningful way with, I can't put enough quotes, ‘muscle stimulation,’ or whatever term they use,” she added.     

“This suit looks like the biggest scam I’ve ever seen,” Johnston wrote. She pointed to the Relaxacisor, a device from 1949 that blasted your abs with electrical pulses. “This thing is no different, and equally scammy,” Johnston said.

I didn’t want to replace my current exercise regime of rowing and swimming five or six times a week with the Katalyst. I wanted to slot it in. I’ve repeatedly injured myself with various strength routines, to the point where I’ve had to do physical therapy and had medical procedures done, so I wanted Katalyst to supplement my existing exercise and get more strength in there. That didn’t work.

First, obviously, you ache after blasting yourself with electricity. So much so that you (wisely) need to rest, but also so much so that you can’t then row or swim, even at a lower level. So I found myself not doing the two forms of exercise I love and get great joy from and which have drastically improved my health over the years. 

Next, I started to essentially injure myself with the suit. I often got pins and needles in my hands and feet. One of the instructors in the app said pins and needles in your hands can happen and should go away quickly. But mine would last for hours, and my feet multiple days. Then my limbs would feel numb and I would be incredibly cold, so much I would start sneezing. Kennedy told me getting pins and needles for this long was “extremely abnormal.” I took his advice of wetting the pads even more, and even the base layer you put on. I also did some workouts without the arms turned on at all. That stopped the issue with my hands at least.

But it still wasn’t working for me, mentally. It made me think what was I even doing this for. To be efficient for efficiency’s sake? 

There is something lost when you favor efficiency above all else. You lose the joy of just moving in a way that feels good. You lose embracing the process of exercise itself when trying to make the time spent as short as possible. You lose sight of your actual goal with exercise, which for me is to keep active and healthy, not get insanely jacked. You lose that state of everything fading away, your mind clearing, endorphins flowing, and nothing else existing but your body moving without you even thinking about it. What runners call the runners’ high, or what I get in rowing when I’m on a longer workout. Maybe some people do get that or feel good with EMS suits. The in-app instructors said you might. I know I didn’t get it with Katalyst.

Afdeling sociale demografie van GeenStijl feliciteert Rens Kroes - zus van Doutzen, zelf nadenkend wetenschapper bekend van de theorie dat je kanker kan genezen door door het bos te wandelen. Rens Kroes heeft in de bajes gevreeën met haar eigenaar man Sid Soumahoro, die een celstraf van 4,5 jaar uitzit wegens verkrachting. Het Hof destijds over die verkrachting: "Hij heeft haar door fysieke en verbale bedreigingen in doodsangst gebracht en haar urenlang (met tussenliggende pauzes) verkracht, zodanig dat het haar naar eigen zeggen ‘ontzettend pijn deed’. Zijn reactie daarop was: 'I hurt you because I love you'." Tijdens de verkrachting zei Siddick ook: "Je gaat nu op de bank zitten en respect voor me tonen. Je gaat nu relaxen. Ik breek je nek als je je beweegt. Ik vermoord je serieus." Enfin, leuke kerel, leuk genoeg om een liefdesbaby mee te maken! Rens Kroes op Instagram: "Ik volgde de rivier en luisterde naar de hartslag van Moeder Aarde. Ze leidde me door diepe wateren, op weg naar de oceaan. Ik heb stormen doorstaan, mijn kracht gevonden en geleerd mijn hart te vertrouwen. Nu geef ik me over aan het getij." Was het vrijwillig, meid?

Once Unimaginable, Publishers Are Preparing to Opt Out of Google Search. “We’ve been clear about what we want. We want a technical solution that allows you to be discoverable without having to give your content away for free.”