In 1934 bezochten mijn grootouders de toen al zeer beroemde Mexicaanse schilder Diego Rivera in zijn huis en atelier in Mexico-Stad.

Wie of wat staat er midden in het nieuws? Een actuele puzzel, die makkelijker is als je het nieuws een beetje volgt.

Een Precies Vier bestaat uit 16 woorden, begrippen of namen, die moeten worden verdeeld in precies vier groepen van vier. Er is telkens maar één oplossing mogelijk. Welke woorden vormen een connectie?

Een kruiswoordpuzzel, maar dan heel klein (en snel).

Je krijgt een paar cijfers cadeau, maar het grid van 9x9 moet foutloos ingevuld worden.

The Qataris Gave Trump an Airplane. He Crippled Their Country in Return. Shane Harris in the Atlantic.

From the article:

The Qataris play every side, and many of their partners resent them for it. Nonetheless, for decades their experience seemed to show that they really could just buy their national security, along with global influence and even a cosmopolitan culture. Trump must initially have seemed to them to be an ideal partner. And indeed, just four months after the delivery of his airplane, in September 2025, the president signed an executive order that ostensibly guaranteed American protection. But recently, Qatar's leaders haven't gotten what they paid for. In February, the United States attacked Iran with practically no warning to the Qataris, despite the fact that they host a major U.S. military base. Then Iran attacked Qatar, badly damaging the country's natural-gas facilities, the main source of its wealth. Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz, the only route available to Qatar to export its natural gas, which must be liquefied for transport and is complex to deliver. The country's neighbors can move oil over land and are planning to build new pipelines now that Iran controls the waterway. But Qatar is stuck, uniquely afflicted by the misadventures of the guy who took their airplane. In Trump, the Qataris had met a man who could not be bought. He could be paid, and expected to be. But the security the Qataris hoped for turned out to be a protection racket. A man who doesn't remember yesterday never asks Are we friends? He only wants to know, What have you done for me lately?

AI company Perplexity has already tried its hand at search services, advertising, personal assistants, browsers, and a hosted agent platform – and now it's getting into local AI services. The biz, having already built a hybrid agent inference orchestrator that connects cloud and local inference, has crossed that bridge to build a local agent called Portable Computer. That's in contrast to its cloud-based agent platform, Computer. Portable Computer consists of an agent harness, an orchestrator, and local AI models running on an Nvidia DGX Spark workstation, with the ability to tap into cloud inference if the situation demands. What's Nvidia DGX Spark doing there? Well, apart from the fact that DGX Spark is a capable bit of AI kit, Nvidia is said to be contemplating a $30 billion investment in Perplexity. Maybe, just maybe, that has something to do with six brand name mentions in one announcement. Perplexity casts its Portable Computer as a way to control AI costs, an issue of interest over the last few months as users find locally run open weight models may offer relief from bulging cloud bills. "Progress is most visible in very small and efficient models such as Nvidia Nemotron 3.5 Lightning (30B total parameters), Qwen 3.6 (35B), and Qwen 3.8 (27B)," the biz said in its post, paying somewhat more attention to Nvidia's model than other local AI enthusiasts. "These small models punch above their weight and are now capable of complex agentic workflows." What hardware might one run such models on? It may just be coincidence but Perplexity suggests Nvidia DGX Spark. "This local-first approach enables significant cost savings, since local inference avoids per-token API fees," Perplexity said. "It also naturally resolves the privacy and intellectual-property concerns: private tokens never need to be transmitted to remote clusters and remain safely within the boundary of the local device." Perplexity's current privacy policy doesn't specifically mention Portable Computer, but does reveal that Perplexity collects quite a bit of data through its other services. Most of Perplexity's pitch to potential customers involves sharing benchmark results that compare Portable Computer to two other agent harnesses, Pi and Hermes. The AI biz reports, "Across the various benchmarks, Computer matched or exceeded Hermes and Pi in accuracy while running Qwen 3.8 27B on an NVIDIA DGX Spark." And Portable Computer, Perplexity claims, proved fastest on BrowseComp and ParseBench-100 and used the fewest tokens on all three. The AI biz concludes that a decent open-weight model and capable local hardware, together with a suitable harness, "can handle real knowledge work at near-zero inference cost without requiring sensitive data to leave the device." And in the event Nvidia does invest $30 billion, Perplexity will have plenty of time to explore how much it can charge in a market where harnesses like Pi and Hermes are free. ®