Wel.nl

Minder lezen, Meer weten.

OPEC verlaagt verwachting wereldwijde olievraag door hoge prijzen

WENEN (ANP/BLOOMBERG) - Oliekartel OPEC heeft de verwachting voor de groei van de wereldwijde vraag naar olie voor dit jaar verlaagd. Dat heeft te maken met de forse prijsstijgingen van ruwe olie door de oorlog in het Midden-Oosten. OPEC verwacht echter dat de vraag volgend jaar sterker zal herstellen dan eerder werd voorzien.

De oorlog heeft de Straat van Hormuz, een belangrijke wereldwijde olieroute, vrijwel volledig afgesloten. Daardoor is de export van miljoenen vaten olie uit het Midden-Oosten beperkt en zijn de brandstofprijzen sterk gestegen. De fors duurdere brandstoffen treffen zowel consumenten als bedrijven.

Volgens OPEC neemt de wereldwijde vraag naar olie dit jaar met 1,17 miljoen vaten per dag toe, minder dan de eerder verwachte 1,38 miljoen vaten per dag. Voor 2027 verwacht de organisatie juist een stijging van 1,54 miljoen vaten per dag, 200.000 vaten per dag meer dan eerder voorspeld.


Lust je kind geen groente? Dat is misschien al in de baarmoeder ontstaan

Wetenschappers van de Durham University in het Verenigd Koninkrijk denken dat baby’s al vóór hun geboorte vertrouwd raken met smaken die hun moeder regelmatig eet. Volgens hen kan die vroege blootstelling ervoor zorgen dat kinderen later een voorkeur ontwikkelen voor bepaalde geuren en voedingsmiddelen die zij tijdens de zwangerschap al hebben leren kennen.

Voor hun studie lieten de onderzoekers zwangere vrouwen capsules innemen met poeder van wortel of boerenkool. De smaakstoffen kwamen via het vruchtwater bij de ongeboren baby terecht. Omdat foetussen in de baarmoeder vruchtwater doorslikken, maken zij daar mogelijk al kennis met uiteenlopende aroma’s en smaken.

Vervolgens onderzochten de wetenschappers hoe kinderen op verschillende leeftijden reageerden op die geuren. Tijdens de zwangerschap werden met echo’s de gezichtsreacties van de foetussen geobserveerd. Daarna bekeken de onderzoekers hoe baby’s van een paar weken oud reageerden, en later opnieuw toen dezelfde kinderen drie jaar waren.

Toen de peuters drie jaar oud waren, kregen ze natte wattenstaafjes met de geur van wortel- of boerenkoolpoeder aangeboden. Kinderen die vóór hun geboorte vaker met wortel in aanraking waren gekomen, reageerden doorgaans positiever op die geur en minder enthousiast op boerenkool. Bij de groep die tijdens de zwangerschap juist aan boerenkool was blootgesteld, werd het tegenovergestelde patroon gezien.

Hoofdonderzoeker Nadja Reissland verklaarde tegenover de Britse krant The Times dat deze bevindingen erop wijzen dat ervaringen met smaken in de laatste fase van de zwangerschap mogelijk langdurig worden opgeslagen in het geheugen van kinderen. Volgens haar zou dat jarenlang invloed kunnen hebben op voedselvoorkeuren na de geboorte.

Beperkingen

Niet iedereen is echter overtuigd van de conclusies. Voedingswetenschapper Jaap Seidell benadrukt dat het onderzoek slechts een kleine groep van twaalf kinderen omvatte. Daarnaast ontbrak een controlegroep van kinderen die tijdens de zwangerschap niet met de smaken in aanraking kwamen. Daardoor blijft volgens hem onzeker of de verschillen daadwerkelijk door de capsules zijn veroorzaakt. Het kan ook zijn dat jonge kinderen van nature anders reageren op bepaalde smaken of dat hun voorkeuren vooral ontstaan door eetgewoonten thuis. De onderzoekers erkennen zelf eveneens dat vervolgonderzoek nodig is.

Bron: RTL Nieuws


The Guardian

Latest news, sport, business, comment, analysis and reviews from the Guardian, the world's leading liberal voice

One in seven in UK prefer consulting AI chatbots to seeing doctor, study finds

Exclusive: Doctors say ‘highly concerning’ poll highlights risk to patients of turning to AI for medical advice

One in seven people are using AI chatbots for health advice instead of seeing their GP, a UK study has found.

The poll of more than 2,000 people found that – of the 15% turning to chatbots – one in four had done so because of long NHS waiting lists.

Continue reading...

Les Simpson: Québécois version of show to return on air after uncertainty

Beloved animated series will return for 36th season in the fall after telecoms giant Bell Media reaches deal with Disney

Fans of Les Simpson have a message for anyone who doubted the future of the beloved and long-running Québécois version of the animated satirical show: Mange de la crotte.

Les Simpson will return for its 36th season in the fall after telecoms giant Bell Media said it had reached an agreement with Disney for the rights to air and dub the show. The deal caps nearly a year of uncertainty surrounding the adaptation, which is beloved in Canada’s lone francophone province.

Continue reading...

EU proposes end to ‘five tabs, three apps and a prayer’ for cross-border train bookings

New rules would enable single-ticket bookings across multiple rail operators throughout Europe

Cross-border train journeys through several European countries are the stuff of many a holidaymaker’s dreams.

But the reality of trying to buy the tickets, navigating multiple websites without knowing who can help if a connection is missed, can prove less than relaxing. As one MEP puts it, it can often require “five tabs, three apps and a prayer”.

Continue reading...

Rijnmond - Nieuws

Het laatste nieuws van vandaag over Rotterdam, Feyenoord, het verkeer en het weer in de regio Rijnmond

Pascal Bosschaart vanaf volgend seizoen assistent-trainer bij FC Dordrecht

Pascal Bosschaart wordt volgend seizoen assistent-trainer bij FC Dordrecht. De afgelopen jaren was de Rotterdammer trainer van Feyenoord onder 21.

Aanhouding voor brandstichting dure Audi

Een jongen is woensdag aangehouden in een onderzoek naar de brandstichting van een Audi RS3 Sportback in Rotterdam-Zuid. De auto, met een nieuwwaarde van bijna 120.000 euro, werd op zaterdag 15 november in een parkeergarage aan de Factorij in brand gestoken.

Veelpleger vast voor twintig babbeltrucs

Een 53-jarige man is aangehouden voor twintig babbeltrucs in Rotterdam. De man zou eind vorig jaar actief zijn geweest in het Oude Noorden, Schiebroek en Oud Crooswijk.

Auto’s zwaar beschadigd bij kop-staartbotsing in Barendrecht

Op de Vrijenburgweg in Barendrecht zijn woensdagavond meerdere auto's betrokken geweest bij een kop-staartbotsing. De drie voertuigen zijn zwaar beschadigd en er raakte niemand gewond.

Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow

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Pluralistic: Billionaire solipsism, dictator solipsism, AI, and the fascist paradigm (13 May 2026)


Today's links



An aerial image of the planned city of Levittown, tinted light green. A circuit board bleeds through the open spaces on the town plan. Hovering over the town are Trump's disembodied, bloodshot eyes, in pouchy orange nests. Orange tentacles swarm over the town.

Billionaire solipsism, dictator solipsism, AI, and the fascist paradigm (permalink)

With great power comes great solipsism: the more power you wield over other people, the less real they become to you. To rule is to see people as aggregates, statistical artifacts, as a means to an end. It's how people seem when you're at the bottom of a k-hole.

Per Granny Weatherwax, this is the root of all evil: "Sin is when you treat people like things":

https://brer-powerofbabel.blogspot.com/2009/02/granny-weatherwax-on-sin-favorite.html

The problem (for powerful people) is that other people aren't things; they're people, with stubborn attachments to their own priorities and needs. This is a huge problem for social media bosses, since the force that keeps you stuck to their platforms is your love of your friends, which sucks (for social media bosses), because your friends refuse to organize their interactions with you to "maximize engagement." There is a group of platform users who are dedicated to maximizing your engagement: performers (which is why legacy social media platforms have reduced the quantum of your feed given over to your friends to a bare minimum and swapped in the amateur dramatics of theater kids). But even "influencers" demand treatment as people, not things (which is why legacy social media is squeezing out performers in favor of slop):

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/17/for-youze/#forever

Running a social media service is especially solipsism-inducing, since the back-end of a social media service always reduces people to statistical artifacts to be steered, thwarted, or rewarded based on the degree to which they are "maximizing engagement." No wonder zuckermuskian social media bosses mythologize themselves as dopamine-hacking wizards who've built a mind-control ray. Skinnerism and solipsism fit together very neatly, seducing you into the belief that everyone else is a stimulus-responding automaton, programmed to think they have free will:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/05/07/rah-rah-rasputin/#credulous-dolts

(Of course, the AI boss version of this is the belief that everyone else is a "stochastic parrot":)

https://xcancel.com/sama/status/1599471830255177728

But in truth, any corporate boss is prone to solipsism. To maximize corporate profits, you must view other people – employees, suppliers and customers – as inconvenient problems to be solved, not true people with feelings and needs that are co-equal with your own.

This is why AI is so attractive to the ruling class. For corporate leaders, the fantasy of your own worth is always dangerously close to collapsing, due to the haunting knowledge that if you don't show up for work, everything continues as per normal; while if your workers don't show up for work, the shop closes down and stays closed. Bosses really want to be in the driver's seat, but ultimately they know that they're strapped into the back seat, playing with a Fisher Price steering wheel. AI is a way to wire that toy steering wheel directly into the drive-train: it's the fantasy that a boss can have an idea and the corporation will execute it, without any messy human needs or demands getting in the way:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/01/05/fisher-price-steering-wheel/#billionaire-solipsism

Solipsism is why bosses fetishize IP and ignore process knowledge. IP is the part of the job that the worker can explain (and that you can train an AI model on). Process knowledge is the part of the job that can't be abstracted, alienated or commodified. The very existence of process knowledge is the major impediment to de-skilling workers so they can be interchanged with other, more desperate, more timid workers (or with sycophantic AI):

https://pluralistic.net/2025/09/08/process-knowledge/#dance-monkey-dance

Of course, there's a whole group of powerful people outside of the political world who are gripped by solipsistic AI fantasies: politicians. Like social media bosses, politicians deal with people as statistical artifacts who respond to policy inputs with semi-predictable outputs:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seeing_Like_a_State

And of course, politicians have their own detested class of workers whom they fantasize about replacing with chatbots: bureaucracies. When Trump et al bemoan the "deep state," they are engaged in the politicians' version of the corporate boss's solipsism: "I make policies, but to enact them, I have to convince civil servants to turn my agenda into action. This sucks. Can't we just have an all-powerful executive who decides on things and then those things just happen?"

Writing for Columbia's Knight First Amendment Institute, political scientist Henry Farrell and statistician Cosma Rohilla Shalizi have produced the definitive account of how AI psychosis has infected our political classes:

https://knightcolumbia.org/content/ai-as-social-technology

Farrell and Shalizi use this political AI psychosis to explain DOGE, framing DOGE as a project where politicians and their loyal vassals cut such a deep wound in the administrative state on the basis that general AI was about to emerge. With godlike AI around the corner, these bureaucrats – who insist on having opinions based on long experience and ethical sensibilities – could be replaced with sycophantic chatbots who'd turn the will of the unitary executive into policy without any filtration through unreliable, squishy humans.

This is a political version of my maxim that "the fact that an AI can't do your job doesn't stop an AI salesman from convincing your boss to fire you and replace you with an AI that can't do your job." Private sector bosses are easy marks for AI salesmen, and not just because they want to reduce their wage bills, but also because it will fulfill the solipsist's fantasy of a corporation that turns the singular genius of the boss into a product without any messy demands from workers (and, if you're Zuckerberg and convinced that you've created a mind-control ray, your product can be rolled out without any messy demands from your customers, either, since you've hypnotized them into doing as they're told).

The public sector version of this is the fantasy that you can eliminate the civil service and use an army of chatbots to do the job – not merely as a way of slashing the federal budget, but also as a way of purifying the transfer of the leader's will to the people without any intervening loss of fidelity resulting from the need to have your policies interpreted (and willfuly misinterpreted) by bureaucrats.

This is a very important framing, and it explains why fascists like Trump and dead-eyed technocrats like Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney are hell-bent on gutting their countries' civil service and replacing it with chatbots:

https://policyoptions.irpp.org/2026/04/carney-ai-government-risks/

This is how Muskism and DOGE connect to Trumpism and AI: Musk doesn't believe other people are real. He calls them "NPCs" (non-player characters). He wants to put a microchip in your head so he can "replace your bad programming":

https://pluralistic.net/2026/04/21/torment-nexusism/#marching-to-pretoria

It's the fascist paradigm: the idea that people are incapable of self-rule, save for a very small number of singular geniuses who should be put in a position of absolute authority over all of us, to keep us safe from our own foolish impulses:

https://pluralistic.net/2026/05/12/donella-meadows/#paradigmatic

The Technocrats – a protofascist Italian movement that once captured the imagination of Musk's great-grandfather, and now are frequently quoted and alluded to by the likes of Mark Andreessen – were addicted to the quantitative fallacy that infects economics and other disciplines. That's the idea that every social process can be expressed as a mathematical model, which can then be optimized.

The problem, of course, is that much of the real world is qualitative, and the act of quantizing those qualia is a very lossy process. To quantize a qualitative question is to incinerate all the qualitative aspects and then do mathematics on the dubious quantitative ash that is left behind:

https://locusmag.com/feature/cory-doctorow-qualia/

In their paper, Farrell and Shalizi cite Ben Recht's maxim that "you can’t optimize a trade-off":

https://www.argmin.net/p/are-there-always-trade-offs

But of course, we optimize trade-offs all the time. That's what being a boss means, and it's also at the very core of self-determination: the right to decide what trade-offs you want to make. What Recht means is "you can't optimize a trade-off for everyone else." Those stubborn not-quite-people – customers, workers, bureaucrats – insist that they want different trade-offs.

In translating the will of a supreme leader to policy without any intervening need for buy-in by humans, fascist projects like DOGE seek to optimize trade-offs according to the preferences of the supreme leader. AI in government is grounded in the idea that a sufficiently deserving leader can be trusted to vibe-code the entire apparatus of state, checked only by his own sense of rightness:

https://thehill.com/policy/international/5680714-trump-morality-international-law/

Farrell and Shalizi forcefully make the point that statecraft is not a set of discrete problems with provably correct answers that must be solved. Government is a matter of making choices between mutually exclusive policies that have benefits and costs, and those costs and benefits befall different groups differently.

The idea that you can simply feed every fact about a society into a chatbot and order it to "solve" the nation reveals a profound ignorance about the nature of political contests. There's no empirical way of deciding whose priorities deserve to be realized and who must be disappointed. There isn't even an empirical way to compare the benefits that one group receives to the costs another group pays.

What's more, any system that uses LLMs to make high-stakes tradeoffs between different societal priorities will be relentlessly targeted by the groups that stand to win or lose based on those decisions, and by bureaucrats whose careers depend on making the number go up. They will poison the LLMs' training data, figure out how to trick it into deceiving their bosses about the situation on the ground.

Back in 2018, Yuval Harari predicted that LLMs would supercharge dictatorships by overcoming "authoritarian blindness" – when the suppression of political opinion is so effective that the first sign that a dictator has of his waning support is a mob that burns the presidential palace down. This prediction failed, because people who live under dictators have switched all the energy they used to use to put on a good show for the secret police into putting a good show on for the chatbots:

https://pluralistic.net/2023/07/26/dictators-dilemma/#garbage-in-garbage-out-garbage-back-in

Meanwhile, the "variability" introduced by bureaucrats who adapt political policies is a feature, not a bug. When a long-tenured public official receives a directive from on-high that they know will be a disaster if implemented unchanged, they can tweak the policy so that it is at least partially successful.

Fire that bureaucrat and hand the policy to a rigidly loyal LLM that will not deviate from its strict instructions and you will end up with nothing (rather than a perfect policy implementation). Indeed, you may end up with less than nothing, as resentful local populations sabotage your agenda.

Both Hayek and Marx agreed that people at the very periphery of the system have insights into local conditions that no boss/central planner can know (though they disagreed about what that fact implied). An LLM is the ultimate micro-manager, and government by Computer Says No would only work if the person writing the system prompt knew everything about everyone everywhere.

As Farrell and Shalizi write,

The frustrations of actually existing bureaucracy do not merely arise from inept or technically-inadequate solutions to the principal-agent problem. They emerge too from the collision of multiple incommensurable demands, each with its own problems and benefits, so that there are no optimal design solutions. Those who build or reform bureaucracies, like those who build other artifacts, need to satisfice across multiple intersecting needs and pathologies. Designs that neatly address one kind of problem may radically worsen others. Actually-existing AI has its own imperfections, some of which are endemic. Grafting AI systems onto existing bureaucracies will solve some problems but will worsen others and make altogether new ones. It will not eliminate the political difficulties of mediating across different, often non-commensurable, goals. Imagining replacing bureaucracy wholesale with AI is only plausible if one waves away the actual difficulties associated with real social technologies.


Hey look at this (permalink)



A shelf of leatherbound history books with a gilt-stamped series title, 'The World's Famous Events.'

Object permanence (permalink)

#25yrsago Woz's programmable remotes https://web.archive.org/web/20010603184833/http://www.celadon.com/Industrial/PIC200/pic200oem.html

#25yrsago Furbeowulf http://www.trygve.com/furbeowulf.html

#20yrsago Diebold voting machines can be 0wned in minutes https://blog.citp.princeton.edu/2006/05/11/report-claims-very-serious-diebold-voting-machine-flaws/

#20yrsago British farmer supplies gallows to totalitarian governments http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/suffolk/4754515.stm

#20yrsago Proposed law requires schools to censor MySpace, LJ, blogs, Flickr https://web.archive.org/web/20060521054806/http://www.pbs.org/teachersource/learning.now/2006/05/new_federal_legislation_would_1.html

#15yrsago Vernor Vinge on the promise, progress and threats of Augmented Reality https://www.ugotrade.com/2011/05/10/interview-with-vernor-vinge-smart-phones-and-the-empowering-aspects-of-social-networks-augmented-reality-are-still-massively-underhyped/

#15yrsago American oligarch buys the right to hire professors at Florida State U https://web.archive.org/web/20110511210435/https://www.tampabay.com/news/business/billionaires-role-in-hiring-decisions-at-florida-state-university-raises/1168680/

#15yrsago National Jukebox: public domain music archive from the Library of Congress https://www.loc.gov/collections/national-jukebox/about-this-collection/

#15yrsago America’s net censorship bill is back and worse than ever https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2011/05/revised-net-censorship-bill-requires-search-engines-to-block-sites-too/

#10yrsago DNC Host Committee composed of GOP megadonors, Net Neutrality haters, fracking boosters and anti-Obamacare lobbyists https://web.archive.org/web/20160511160814/https://theintercept.com/2016/05/11/lobbyists-dnc-2016-convention/

#10yrsago Minnesota lawmakers propose bizarre, dangerous PRINCE law https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/05/minnesota-legislators-go-crazy-pushing-dangerous-prince-act

#10yrsago NZ Prime Minister John Key ejected from Parliament over Panama Papers rant https://www.nzherald.co.nz/nz/prime-minister-john-key-thrown-out-of-debating-chamber-by-speaker/A5LQPMGB56QXTGE2ZFIK2MSRPE/?c_id=1&objectid=11637448

#10yrsago Putting two elevators in one shaft https://web.archive.org/web/20160512013856/https://www.wired.com/2016/05/thyssenkrup-twin-elevator/

#10yrsago Germany will end copyright liability for open wifi operators https://torrentfreak.com/germany-to-rescind-piracy-liability-for-open-wifi-operators-160511/

#10yrsago Save Firefox: The W3C’s plan for worldwide DRM would have killed Mozilla before it could start https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/04/save-firefox

#5yrsago Let's eat all the cicadas https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/11/uniboob/#eat-the-brood#5yrsago

#5yrsago Cyclopedia Exotica https://pluralistic.net/2021/05/11/uniboob/#one-eye-and-three-dot-dot-dot


Upcoming appearances (permalink)

A photo of me onstage, giving a speech, pounding the podium.



A screenshot of me at my desk, doing a livecast.

Recent appearances (permalink)



A grid of my books with Will Stahle covers..

Latest books (permalink)



A cardboard book box with the Macmillan logo.

Upcoming books (permalink)

  • "The Reverse-Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book about being a better AI critic, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, June 2026 (https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780374621568/thereversecentaursguidetolifeafterai/)

  • "Enshittification, Why Everything Suddenly Got Worse and What to Do About It" (the graphic novel), Firstsecond, 2026

  • "The Post-American Internet," a geopolitical sequel of sorts to Enshittification, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2027

  • "Unauthorized Bread": a middle-grades graphic novel adapted from my novella about refugees, toasters and DRM, FirstSecond, April 20, 2027

  • "The Memex Method," Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2027



Colophon (permalink)

Today's top sources:

Currently writing: "The Post-American Internet," a sequel to "Enshittification," about the better world the rest of us get to have now that Trump has torched America. Third draft completed. Submitted to editor.

  • "The Reverse Centaur's Guide to AI," a short book for Farrar, Straus and Giroux about being an effective AI critic. LEGAL REVIEW AND COPYEDIT COMPLETE.

  • "The Post-American Internet," a short book about internet policy in the age of Trumpism. PLANNING.

  • A Little Brother short story about DIY insulin PLANNING


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