Ook dit jaar weer een mooie offspring van de Ateliers in Amsterdam, zoals elk jaar luchtige, grote presentaties waarin te zien is dat de residenten met het gebouw hebben geleefd. Geen white cube presentaties maar [Meer...]

MPs have told the government to cut its ties with Palantir, and end the US spy-tech firm's controversial involvement in the National Health Service's Federated Data Platform. Warning against vendor lock-in across government, the House of Common science and technology committee said it was most concerned about Palantir, which had secured central roles in health and defense systems. “Palantir should not have a such a significant role in the UK public sector… it is far from the only company capable of providing the data analysis ‘middleware’ required by public bodies,” the report from the Science Innovation and Technology Committee said. The report notes concerns about Palantir’s origins as a company getting a foothold in government with security, immigration services, and defense contracts. It also describes the political musings of co-founder Peter Thiel and CEO Alex Karp. However, it added: “Our view that Palantir’s increasing presence across the public sector represents an unacceptable point of weakness is not ideologically motivated or driven by concerns about the quality of their products. The government should retain the ability to pick and choose individual suppliers and safeguard against the risk of vendor lock-in and debilitating dependencies, particularly in areas of critical national importance such as healthcare and national security infrastructure.” Palantir won the £330 million Federated Data Platform (FDP) contract in November 2023 after a procurement process, which NHS England, the soon-to-be-defunct health quango, maintained was open and fair. The award followed £60 million in Covid-era NHS contracts awarded without competition. The committee recommended that the government use the February 2027 break clause in the FDP contract and either “develop an in-house replacement or seek an alternative developed by UK-owned and UK-based providers that are more compatible with UK values, and do not pursue either technical or contractual dependencies.” The Science Innovation and Technology Committee said dependency on a small number of suppliers, locked into repeated government contracts, was one of the factors holding up delivery of the broader vision for digital government. The others included over-reliance on legacy systems, the problem of digital sovereignty and over-hype by senior politicians and industry figures. Dame Chi Onwurah MP, Committee chair, said: “We welcome the government’s intentions to make the UK a ‘truly digital state,’ but it’s not clear how this will be delivered. Without a detailed and measurable plan, it risks falling short – but there’s still time to put this right. “A critical part of this transformation should include reducing the UK’s dependence on a small number of big US tech companies like Palantir. Vendor lock-in isn’t inevitable, and the current position leaves us seriously exposed. The UK can and should be aiming for technology sovereignty in critical parts of our public sector and supporting domestic alternatives through smarter procurement,” she said. The committee said the government needed to get its approach right before embarking on ambitious projects such as the digital ID scheme, expected to roll out by the end of the current Parliament. Without modernized digital infrastructure, digital ID will struggle to succeed, and to keep citizens’ data secure. “Only once the foundations of the UK’s digital infrastructure are secure, and public trust has been gained, should the government proceed with its planned digital ID. The success or failure of this project will be a defining test of its wider digital transformation ambitions," Onwurah said. ®

Microsoft has released Aspire 13.4, with the key feature being general availability of the TypeScript AppHost, as well as new integrations for Go, Bun, Blazor and WebAssembly. The company currently describes Aspire as a "code-first orchestration and observability layer for distributed applications" which makes it sound like some kind of service, but it is not. Developers use the Aspire CLI (command line interface) to model, develop and debug distributed applications, originally just for .NET, but now for a variety of languages, with TypeScript now first-class so that even the core Aspire file, called the AppHost, can be written in the language. Aspire can also deploy applications, though it is not a service that runs in production. Instead, developers add targets to an Aspire project to enable commands including publish, which builds the artifacts to be deployed, and deploy, which deploys the artifacts to the configured target, such as Azure container apps, Azure app service or Kubernetes. Other targets include Docker Compose, AWS services, and others via third-party integrations. The AppHost in the .NET variant is a C# project and for TypeScript, a code file called apphost.mts which imports an Aspire module. The AppHost configures and assembles the distributed application. For example, by running aspire add postgres the AppHost gains the ability to add PostgreSQL support with a few lines of code, including options to add a container image to run the database engine, creating a database, adding a web-based admin dashboard, mounting a data volume outside the container, adding health checks and telemetry for the database server to the Aspire dashboard, and injecting connection properties as environment variables to selected projects. The Aspire dashboard is a development feature that consumes OpenTelemetry data to monitor the health of a running application and show data such as memory usage. It is not primarily intended for use in production but can be run standalone or even used in environments which do not otherwise use Aspire, available in a Docker image. Aspire 13.4 adds critical features for Kubernetes deployment, including support for cert-manager, Gateway API, manifest resources and external Helm charts. There are also enhanced resource commands, which execute commands exposed by resources in a running AppHost, and new AppHost APIs for Go and Bun, so that applications using these can be added. Python, Java and Rust were already supported. A new aspire-skills bundle is provided for AI agents. The full list of new features is here. Aspire was first released in 2024 but its roots go back further, to an experimental tool called Project Tye that appeared in May 2020. It is a bold effort to simplify and improve the developer experience for distributed applications, though held back from wider adoption by its .NET and Azure flavor, which Microsoft is now attempting to broaden. Another issue is that articulating what Aspire is has proved difficult, leading to questions like, why not use Aspire in production? "You don’t run Aspire in production. You develop your app with it locally and then deploy to the platform you want," said James Newton-King, a principal software engineer at Microsoft working on the project. Distinguished engineer David Fowler acknowledged the communicating exactly what the project is has been difficult and added that "lots of the impressions about what Aspire is and how it worked is outdated because it’s changed so much." ®

banzainetsurfer has added a photo to the pool:

Ichijodani Restored Townscape 乗谷・朝倉氏遺跡 復原町並 Fukui Prefecture, Japan

etsu2 has added a photo to the pool:

​Er is veel commotie ontstaan over een vakantietrip met influencers naar Griekenland, georganiseerd door New York Pizza. Een van de deelneemsters, influencer Anna Dobber, bekend van haar schoonmaakvideo’s, liet weten erg gepest te zijn door andere influencers tijdens de reis. New York Pizza heeft daarom besloten om een aantal pestende influencers in te laten slapen om rust in de groep te brengen.

New York Pizza geeft toe dat dit een drastisch besluit is, maar dat het na de aanhoudende spanningen de enige oplossing was. Een woordvoerder van het bedrijf legt uit: “Er is gezocht naar meerdere oplossingen. Zo zijn de pesters al eens uit de groep gehaald en is daarna gekeken of de onruststokers konden worden overgeplaatst naar een andere vakantievilla. Helaas was er nergens plek voor hen.”

De woordvoerder vervolgt: “Zo bleef er nog maar één oplossing over en dat was inslapen, een situatie die vaker voorkomt in dit soort lastige groepen.”

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Ja okee relschoppers harder straffen maar MÉÉR MACHT geven aan burgemeesters? Ongekozen partijmarionetten die via het baantjescarrouselprincipe van hot naar her worden geplucheplakt een 'breder instrumentarium' geven om in volledige willekeur dan wel volgens partijlijn laten bepalen welke demonstraties wel en welke demonstraties niet met geweld worden beëindigd. De meeste burgemeesters zitten op schoot bij de islamlobby (deze niet trouwens, is geeneens burgemeester), dan zijn er een zooi GroenLinksers die openlijk of heimelijk stevige connecties hebben met (en wel begrip hebben voor) klimaatactivisten, dan zijn er burgemeesters die sommige demonstraties het liefst zouden beleven als deelnemer, dan zijn er burgemeesters voor wie het gewoon allemaal net effe te spannend is, dan zijn er ook nog een boel burgemeesters die gezien hun omgang met een paar voetbalsupporters zich laten leiden door angst en bewezen incompetent zijn (Doetinchem, Breda, Tilburg, Volendam, enz.). Maar geef de ongekozen burgemeester vooral meer bevoegdheden! Kamerbrief hierrrrrrr.

Het huwelijk tussen 007 en de sluip-charmeer-strijd-formule van IO Interactive leek bij voorbaat al geslaagd. De game ‘007: First Light’ verliest de Bond-ervaring nooit uit het oog.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

date stamped on slide September 1992