In de aan zee gelegen exclave Khasab komen mensen rond van de visserij en het toerisme. Hier was „nooit haast, nooit stress”. Maar nu is er oorlog met Iran en ligt de economie plat. Vissers met motorbootjes riskeren tandenknarsend het gevaar op zee.

Eerst de begroting op orde, dan kijken of er nog wat over is voor het klimaat: zo werkt het nu vaak, ziet Hans Stegeman. De rekening die we uiteindelijk gepresenteerd zullen krijgen, wordt er alleen maar hoger van.

The SPFL and SFA wobble at the knees when it comes to punishing their biggest clubs but scenes at Celtic Park risk setting a dangerous precedent

The placing of a full stop on any league campaign offers cause for reflection. In Scotland, there are reasons to wonder if the grim denouement to a stunning title race will prompt a shift in attitudes on two fronts. Whether a Celtic board which has been castigated for its stewardship regard the securing of another title as vindication is an intriguing question. More immediate is how the champions and others will respond to the grim scenes that triggered an enforced conclusion to the visit of Hearts. The behaviour of a section of the Celtic support is so unruly during dominance that one wonders what on earth may happen if the team struggle badly.

On Sunday, the Scottish Professional Football League “utterly condemned” Celtic supporters who flooded on to the pitch at the time of Callum Osmand’s third goal. “Supporters entering the field of play in any circumstances is wholly unacceptable and puts those participating and working at a match at risk,” added the SPFL. Hearts players were accosted and abused during their most crushing of moments, having lost the opportunity to break the Old Firm’s four decades of title dominance.

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It is hardly a surprise that outbreaks can occur and experts say many of the factors involved are not easy to change

It was a voyage that promised such stuff as dreams are made of, yet within weeks the Atlantic expedition of the MV Hondius had become a nightmare, with three passengers dead from hantavirus and more showing symptoms.

Meanwhile, an outbreak of norovirus is under investigation on another cruise ship, while flu, E coli and varicella – the virus that causes chickenpox – have also caused problems in such settings. Perhaps most memorably, in 2020 the Diamond Princess became a breeding ground for Covid, with passengers and crew quarantined for two weeks off the coast of Japan and more than 700 of the 3,711 people onboard eventually testing positive.

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​De 28-jarige Woerko Hangmaat laat zijn bestellingen altijd bezorgen bij hetzelfde pakketpunt. De reden voor die voorkeur is simpel: wanneer hij moet tekenen voor ontvangst, neemt dit pakketpunt namelijk genoegen met een getekend piemeltje.

Volgens Woerko ontdekte hij dit per ongeluk en was het geen vooraf bedacht plan om de grenzen van zijn handtekening op te rekken. “Ik zette een keer gewoon mijn handtekening en die begint met een speelse W. Die bewuste dag viel het me op dat die W best lijkt op twee olijke teelballetjes. Nog voordat ik het zelf goed doorhad, had ik intuïtief al een schacht met pompende ader en een subtiel eikeltje erbij getekend. Toen daarna de man achter de balie mij achteloos het pakketje meegaf, wist ik het zeker: ik blijf loyaal aan dit pakketpunt.”

Woerko weet inmiddels niet meer hoeveel pakketjes hij al heeft opgehaald met behulp van een getekend piemeltje. Wel weet hij dat hij een stuk kritischer is gaan kijken naar het concept van een handtekening. “Eigenlijk is het wel gek dat je in je jeugd ooit een krabbel bedenkt en er dan de rest van je leven aan vastzit. Als ik dat toen had geweten, had ik er wel wat coolers van gemaakt dan gewoon mijn naam met een krul erdoorheen. Dan had ik er misschien wel vlammen bij getekend. Of een boom. Wat dat betreft is het best leuk dat ik bij dit pakketpunt vrij kan omspringen met mijn handtekening.”

Op de vraag waarom getekende piemeltjes hier worden beschouwd als handtekeningen, reageerde de eigenaar van het pakketpunt met ‘Heh, wat?’

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Chris Willis, chief design officer and futurist for data platform biz Domo, wonders why people aren't more annoyed with AI companies. Willis said he was in San Francisco a few weeks ago and he couldn't fathom the lack of resentment. "Why aren't people more resentful that these companies have pushed this technology upon them and now everyone is feeling a tremendous amount of anxiety," he told The Register in an interview. "I'm sure you've seen the surveys and the research. Everyone from the C-suite on down feels like the clock is ticking and their careers are on the line." San Francisco is the home of OpenAI and Anthropic. Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are also in town. So there's a lot of self-interested AI enthusiasm in the city by the bay. The resentment is there if you look beyond the billboard evangelism shouting its way down the US 101 corridor that connects the city to Silicon Valley proper. But the existential dread behind Stop AI, Pause AI, Poison Fountain, and the firebombing of OpenAI CEO's Sam Altman's home isn't quite what Willis has in mind. He's concerned with the way AI has been marketed through fear – act now or be left behind by this technology that might just take everyone's job and enable DIY biological weapons, now that LLMs can more reliably count the number of "r"s in "strawberry." "Fear," he said, "is not a durable strategy for innovating." The problem as Willis sees it begins with the fact that AI models are a product without a spec. "When you're trying to create a product and you're trying to figure out how that product fits in the market, you have to figure out who it's for and what it's going to do and what it's not going to do," he said. "And these large language models, essentially the feature spec is: 'It'll do anything for anyone, anyway, anyhow, in any language.'" So it's not surprising, he said, that there's some confusion. "From a leadership perspective, we've seen many times the pattern where there is a lot of pressure for companies to suddenly innovate with a technology that's not well understood," he said. "And so organizations are spending a lot on buying these AI tools and then expecting innovation to just happen. And that's not usually how innovation works." What company leaders face, he said, is not an innovation problem but an impatience problem. "They're thinking, 'we have to do something now," he said, "and so AI in many ways is becoming a sort of theater. We have to show that we're doing something." The phenomenon known as "tokenmaxxing" – buying access to AI models and directing or expecting employees to use them as much as possible – illustrates the lack of strategy, Willis said. "In certain organizations where AI is theater and impatience is driving rather than innovation, tokenmaxxing is a convenient way to feed that narrative," he said. "But it doesn't change anything. The research does suggest that you might have people putting through a lot of tokens and maybe they are personally becoming more productive. But it's not changing the bottom line." The deeper problem, he said, is that companies are treating AI itself as a solution rather than as a tool to help power the solution. The result is a lot of proof-of-concept projects that lack what's required to make them durable, trustworthy, and deployable at scale. Starting with business needs first is essential, Willis argues. "If you don't understand the process and the automations and the workflows in your business, you run the risk of putting in a very powerful engine that's going to drive your business way faster, but with the lights off, at night," he said. Willis suggests companies should not set moonshot goals for AI, and start with something simple, like automating processes tied to a spreadsheet. He described work done with one customer that involved developing an app to go through company invoices, check for discrepancies, and surface anomalies for review by a person. The clients were thrilled. Understanding where human judgement is required and where decisions can be verified and hence automated, is key, he said. "Usually that question is not asked." Failing to ask questions like that invites problems. Willis pointed to the way that Swedish fintech biz Klarna replaced customer service staff with AI, only to return to replace the AI with people. "It's very enticing to say we're just going to replace everything with a chatbot," he said. "Frankly, no customer ever just wants to talk to your chatbot." Willis said there's no magic for innovating. Companies need to do the hard work of understanding how AI may or may not be useful for the desired outcome. "There will be a reckoning when it comes to budgets around these things," he said, "because CFOs are starting to as 'Why are we spending all this money and not gaining anything?'" ®

The Raconteurs

JERUZALEM (ANP/BLOOMBERG) - De Israëlische economie is in het eerste kwartaal van dit jaar aanzienlijk gekrompen als gevolg van de oorlog in het Midden-Oosten. Dat volgt uit zondag gepubliceerde cijfers van het Israëlische statistiekbureau.

Israëls bruto binnenlands product (bbp) nam met 3,3 procent af. Het gaat hier om krimp op geannualiseerde basis, waarbij de afname van het bbp in het kwartaal wordt doorgetrokken naar een heel jaar. De krimp was volgens persbureau Bloomberg sterker dan economen in doorsnee hadden voorzien.

Bij wijze van vergelding vuurde Iran in maart veel raketten en drones af op Israël, terwijl strijders van Hezbollah het land vanuit Libanon onder vuur namen. Dit leidde er onder meer toe dat bedrijven in Israël om veiligheidsredenen tijdelijk de deuren sloten of te maken kregen met verstoringen. Meer dan 100.000 mensen werden ook opgeroepen als reservisten van het leger en scholen waren een maand dicht. De consumptie liep volgens het statistiekbureau met bijna 5 procent terug.

xAI has launched Grok Build, "a coding agent of its own to serve as competitor to its rivals' products, such as Anthropic's Claude Code," reports Engadget:


As Bloomberg notes, xAI has been trying to catch up to its rival companies like Anthropic and OpenAI. Elon Musk, the company's founder and CEO, previously admitted that it has fallen behind its competitors when it comes to coding. A couple of months ago, Musk said he was rebuilding xAI "from the foundations up" after several co-founders had left the company. One of the company's executives reportedly told staffers to work on getting Grok to match Claude's performance across various tasks.

More details from PCMag:

Grok Build is currently available in beta to those with a SuperGrok Heavy subscription, which starts at $300 per month. Just download it from the xAI website and log in. It's described as "a powerful new coding agent and CLI for professional software engineering and complex coding work." In its early version, xAI is seeking feedback and looking to fix any bugs... Only a few features have been highlighted, including a plan mode that lets you review, edit, and approve a plan before execution, and support for existing plug-ins and workflows.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.