In Wilnis vond in 2003 een dijkdoorbraak plaats, vanwege een uitgedroogde veendijk. De vraag is nu of Nederland met het aanhoudende hete voorjaar en de droge zomer iets dergelijks opnieuw kan overkomen. „Van deze dijkdoorbraak heeft iedereen in Nederland iets geleerd.”

Bij Sotheby’s in New York is door een anonieme bieder een recordbedrag neergeteld voor een skelet van een tyrannosaurus rex: 44 miljoen euro. Steeds vaker worden paleontologische vondsten opgekocht door private verzamelaars in plaats van musea – iets waar paleontologen niet blij mee zijn. „Ze concurreren de wetenschap kapot.”

Het aantal arrestaties van ICE bereikte deze maand een recordhoogte van tweeduizend personen per dag, bleek begin deze maand. Vorige week en deze week werden migranten gedood na fatale beschietingen door ICE. Wie waren de twee mannen die nu door ICE zijn doodgeschoten?

Mr Mikage (ミスター御影） posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Fabio Bruna posted a photo:

Klim Monte San Lorenzo, Friuli.

Fabio Bruna posted a photo:

Klim Monte San Lorenzo, Friuli.

Salesforce’s flagship AI agent platform is struggling to convince customers of its value, according to an investment bank. The SaaS giant has bet the farm on AI agents, hoping they will fetch and carry data from its systems into a conversational UI, according to its vision of headless CRM. The cornerstone of the strategy is Agentforce, which the vendor promises will help customers build, test, deploy, manage, and orchestrate AI agents in the enterprise. However, a report from KeyBanc Capital Markets cites its recent CIO survey, which found customers did not view the CRM plan favorably. "Our checks and customer conversations have not been strong, nor has the feedback been on Agentforce. What we can piece together in the disclosed numbers does not signal building momentum and, most recently, our CIO survey delivered another blow with Salesforce being a standout for the wrong reasons," the report says. The report, authored by Jackson Ader, the investment bank's managing director for software equity research, and three other analysts, says KeyBanc Capital Markets view of Salesforce was not down to the negative perception of software companies generally — the so-called SaaS-pocalypse. "We attend more Salesforce partner and customer events than any other company in our coverage, and feedback from those customers has been consistent in two ways: 1) customers' data is not in order to do meaningful AI work; and 2) Agentforce, as a product, just isn't there," it claims. "Partners we speak with are just now beginning to convert Agentforce proof of concepts into deals in the pipeline, and more CIOs in our survey expect to deprioritize Salesforce within their IT budget than the other way around over the coming 12 months." A Salesforce spokesperson told The Register: "Agentforce is the fastest-growing product in Salesforce history, with customers like Engine, Falabella, and AAA going live in weeks, not months. We’re focused on helping customers move faster, including through forward-deployed engineers and out-of-the-box agents." The KeyBanc report says Salesforce is presiding over "aggressive price increases" while the majority of customers are "not willing to pay for AI capabilities through their CRM provider." Salesforce, nonetheless, has retained a commanding position in the CRM market, the investment bank says. Speaking of pricing, back in January, Gartner warned Salesforce users that a capped enterprise agreement for its AI and data platforms may not be available when they come to renew these deals, potentially meaning customers could struggle to predict costs and understand value – although Salesforce strongly disputed this contention at the time. Bill Patterson, Salesforce EVP, Corporate Strategy, told us at the time, "The claim that we are moving away from capped agreements is inaccurate." Meanwhile, an earlier report from global equity research firm Bernstein said Agentforce was "still in early stage of adoption" and would not drive Salesforce’s growth in the short term. "Consumption-driven monetization at AgentForce will take longer than most expect. We also believe that AgentForce will be most successful in the company’s core CRM market and not that well-used outside the core as there are other AI platforms and many SaaS vendors and the hyperscalers are offering their own AI functionality," the report says. Wall Street bettors seem to share this bearishness toward the company in general, sending its stock down over 36% this year. ®

Chief penguinista Linus Torvalds has declared that Linux is not an "anti-AI" project, telling contributors who object they can either walk away or fork the kernel. On lore.kernel.org, the archive for Linux kernel mailing lists, reformed potty mouth Linus was responding to a discussion about some negative sentiments toward AI. It is one area where Torvalds said he was willing to “absolutely put my foot down as the top-level maintainer … Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that they can do the open-source thing and fork it." “Or just walk away.” Ever the pragmatist, Torvalds described AI as a tool, “just like other tools we use. And it’s clearly a useful one. It may not have been that ‘clearly’ even just a year ago, but it’s no longer in question today. “Anybody who doubts that clearly hasn’t actually used it.” In October 2024, the Linux kingpin branded 90 percent of AI as marketing hype, saying he hated the hoopla generated by the tech industry. He said at the time: “I really don’t want to go there, so my approach to AI right now is I will basically ignore it.” He predicted things would change in five years, though he has softened his stance in 21 months. AI can be a “somewhat painful tool, both for maintainer workloads and just from an ‘it keeps finding embarrassing bugs’ standpoint,” Torvalds conceded this week. “But the solution is not to put your head in the sand and sing ‘La La La, I can’t hear you’ at the top of your voice like some people seem to do.” The solution, he said, is to make sure LLM tools help maintainers rather than cause them pain. “We’re not forcing anybody to use it, but I will very loudly ignore people who try to argue against other people from using it.” The kernel project continues to be about technology, Torvalds added, and while the social angle of developing open source software is an important aspect, it is a “side benefit, not the point of the project.” “In the kernel community we do open source because it results in better technology, not because of religious reasons. And so we make decisions primarily based on technical merit. Not fear of new tools.” The seeming shift in stance was evident when The Register's SJVN spoke to senior Linux maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman in March: he told us AI-assisted bug reports and code review had improved dramatically. "Something happened a month ago, and the world switched. Now we have real reports… All open source projects have real reports that are made with AI, but they're good, and they're real." Torvalds in May said AI tools were only useful if they help “rather than cause unnecessary pain and pointless make-believe work.” Some maintainers in open source have complained of burnout - not helped by AI slop bug reports - and others worry about the quality of vibe-coding. Work still lies ahead before AI consistently proves it's more help than hindrance. “AI isn’t perfect,” said Torvalds in the mailing-list post on Tuesday. “But Christ, anybody who points to the problems at AI [sic] had better be looking in the mirror and pointing at themselves at the same time. Because it’s not like natural intelligence is always all that great either.” Quite right. ®