With every team and driver eager to tick off more laps and gather as much data as possible, there will be plenty of action on Day 2 of the first pre-season test at the Bahrain International Circuit. But who will be behind the wheel throughout Thursday’s running? Check out the complete list below...

Keep up to date with all the action - both on track and off it - as the 11 F1 teams work on preparations for the 2026 season. Live coverage of Day 2 in Bahrain.

Apple's long-promised overhaul of Siri has hit fresh problems during internal testing, forcing the company to push several key features out of the iOS 26.4 update that was slated for March and spread them across later releases, Bloomberg is reporting.

The new Siri -- first announced at WWDC in June 2024 and originally due by early 2025 -- struggles to reliably process queries, takes too long to respond and sometimes falls back on OpenAI's ChatGPT instead of Apple's own technology, the report said. Apple has instructed engineers to begin testing new Siri capabilities on iOS 26.5 instead, due in May, and internal builds of that update include a settings toggle labeled "preview" for the personal data features. A more ambitious chatbot-style Siri code-named Campo, powered by Google servers and a custom Gemini model, is in development for iOS 27 in September.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Being a passenger in this vast country is ‘a full-blooded immersion in the local’, says the novelist whose latest protagonist is lured by the romance of the rails

I carry my train journeys in my bones, the juddering song of the Indian rail. Our first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, famously likened India to a palimpsest, no layer quite effacing the one that went before. That’s how I think of Indian railway journeys. They inscribe on the mind our fellow travellers, our ways, our thousand languages, our landscapes, our climate.

I think of a rail journey I made in 1998 – that brutal summer of nuclear testing – setting out from Mumbai, in an ordinary three-tier sleeper, for Dehradun, 1,000 miles (1,600km) north. The frazzled train fell off any semblance of a schedule. The voyage grew longer, past 50 hours; hotter, past 50C. I remember the metallic burn on the window grilles; the hot, killing wind that blew through them; the sizzle of water drops splashed on the face when theyhit the uncovered platforms in the heart of the country; the melt of my rubber soles. A fortnight later, having trekked to the mouth of a tributary of the Ganges, completing my expedition from the Arabian Sea to a Himalayan glacier, it was possible to look back on the rail ordeal with affection.

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People are (rightly) complaining about the records being set for extreme rainfall. Personally, I’m finding it oddly rewarding

Whenever it rained when I was a child, my mother did something that seemed normal at the time yet seems quite mad looking back: she dragged the huge, heavy plants from the living room – the massive bird of paradise; the hulking clivias in their enormous tubs – out on to the patio so they could “enjoy a drink”. She came from the southern hemisphere where water was in short supply and, while she grew depressed every January and hated English winters, she never found rain less than thrilling.

Well, here we are in February after more than a month of what the Met Office is delicately calling the “unusually southerly jet stream”, what Shakespeare neatly immortalised with “for the rain it raineth every day” and what the rest of us have been summarising with the sentiment “is it ever going to fucking stop”? I’m English, so talking about rain and its related conditions occupies 30% of my personality at any given time, but most of us have hit a wall at this point. According to the weather people, 26 weather stations in the UK set new records for the highest-ever January rainfall last month and in Aberdeen they haven’t seen the sun since the iron age.

Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist

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Spanning eras of conflict and Covid in Lebanon, this irresistible queer coming-of-age tale explores what it means to be truly free

Meet Raja, the narrator of Rabih Alameddine’s new novel. A 63-year-old gay philosophy teacher and drag entertainer, he is a stickler for rules and boundaries, living in a tiny Beirut flat with his octogenarian mother, the nosy and unfettered Zalfa. Invited to a writing residency in the US, Raja will use the occasion to relate his life – that is, if you don’t mind him taking the scenic route. “A tale has many tails, and many heads, particularly if it’s true,” Raja tells us. “Like life, it is a river with many branches, rivulets, creeks and distributaries.”

Winner of the 2025 US National Book Award for fiction, Alameddine’s seventh novel opens and closes in 2023, but the bulk of its action takes place earlier: encompassing the lead-up to and aftermath of the Lebanese civil war (1975-1990), the Covid pandemic, Lebanon’s 2019 banking crisis, and the Beirut port explosion in 2020. If this timeline makes the book sound like a punishing tour of Lebanese history, I promise it isn’t. More than a war chronicle or national exposé, it is a queer coming-of-age tale, an exploration of the bond between a mother and a son, and a meditation on storytelling, memory, survival and what it means to be truly free. Told in a voice as irresistibly buoyant as it is unapologetically camp, this rule-breaking spin on the trauma plot holds on to its cheer in the face of sobering material. Poignant but never cynical, often dark but never dour, wise without being showy and always eager to crack a joke, this is a novel that insists that the pain of the past need overwhelm neither present nor narrative, identity nor personality. With Sartre as his guide, and a drag fabulousness all his own, Raja shows us how.

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The trusty cartoon franchise brings Daffy Duck and Porky Pig back for fresh antics, updated pretty neatly for our times

The Looney Tunes franchise has been regularly resuscitated and rebooted for new generations ever since Warner Bros stopped making the original cartoons back in the 1960s, creating more minutes of screen time than all the Dracula, Wuthering Heights and Jurassic Park remakes and spin-offs combined. Like some fiendish glue from the Acme corporation, the Looney Tunes IP is sticky, resilient stuff: instantly recognisable, easily dubbed into other languages, with codes and quirks peculiarly pleasing to audiences of all ages, and yet easily malleable to fit the comic modes and manners of each age.

This feature, starring Daffy Duck and Porky Pig (both voiced by Eric Bauza), feels very 2020s – in that it’s not embarrassed about getting sappy from the off and then resolving its core dramatic problems with a big dose of child psychologist-friendly empowerment lessons about accepting people for who they are and the value of loyalty. Bizarrely for anyone raised on Saturday-morning repeats of the original 1930s-50s toons where the two were usually adversaries, Daffy and Porky are best friends forever here, raised together like brothers by their adoptive parent, Farmer Jim (Fred Tatasciore), who then promptly carks it in the first 10 minutes after enjoining them to always stick together.

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EL PASO (ANP) - De sluiting woensdag van het luchtruim bij het Amerikaanse El Paso volgde op onenigheid tussen overheidsdiensten. Dat zeggen bronnen tegen media als CBS News en The New York Times. De grensbewakingsdienst zou een anti-dronelaser hebben ingezet zonder de luchtvaartautoriteiten voldoende tijd te geven om risico's voor het vliegverkeer in te schatten.

Het luchtruim bij de grensstad ging plots dicht. Luchtvaartautoriteit FAA besloot tot een sluiting van tien dagen, maar kwam daar uren later op terug. Dat gebeurde naar verluidt in opdracht van het Witte Huis. De regering verklaarde dat de sluiting volgde op de inzet van drones door Mexicaanse drugsbendes.

Over wat precies is gebeurd, bleef onduidelijkheid bestaan. Bronnen zeggen dat een laser is getest zonder voldoende afstemming met de FAA. Media als Fox News linken de sluiting ook aan een verkeerde inschatting: de autoriteiten meenden op een drone te schieten, maar het bleek te gaan om een feestballon.

MAASTRICHT (ANP) - Gezondheids- en voedingsbedrijf dsm-firmenich heeft de omzet het afgelopen jaar op peil gehouden en verwacht de komende jaren harder te groeien. Het Nederlands-Zwitserse concern verkocht de afgelopen jaren veel bedrijfsonderdelen om zich volop te richten op grondstoffen die terechtkomen in consumentenproducten zoals make-up, parfum en voedingssupplementen. De eerder deze week aangekondigde deal om de diervoedingstak te verkopen was het sluitstuk van die koerswijziging, meldt topman Dimitri de Vreeze.

De omzet van de overgebleven activiteiten van dsm-firmenich kwam vorig jaar uit op iets meer dan 9 miljard euro, vrijwel evenveel als in 2024. Na een correctie voor onder andere wisselkoersen stegen de opbrengsten 3 procent. De nettowinst daalde zo'n 5 procent tot 359 miljoen euro, wat te maken had met afboekingen.

Dsm-firmenich hoopt de overgebleven onderdelen sneller te laten groeien op eigen kracht, dus zonder grote overnames. Dat moet de komende tijd voor zo'n 5 tot 7 procent omzetgroei en een hogere winstmarge zorgen.

PARIJS (ANP) - Noodweer leidt in het zuiden van Frankrijk tot problemen. 850.000 mensen zitten zonder stroom, meldt BFMTV op basis van energiebedrijf Enedis. Weerdienst Météo France waarschuwt dat lagedrukgebied Nils in grote delen van het land zorgt voor gevaarlijke situaties door harde wind, zware regenval en onweer.

Voor vrijwel heel Frankrijk geldt code geel, voor een groot deel van de zuidwestelijke helft van het land code oranje. Het departement Aude wordt volgens Météo France het zwaarst getroffen. Daar geldt code rood voor harde wind en wordt ook gewaarschuwd voor hoogwater en overstromingen door regenval. Alle scholen blijven daar dicht.

In de departementen Gironde en Lot-et-Garonne geldt code rood voor hoogwater, in Savoie voor lawines. Op verschillende plekken waaien bomen om. In de plaats Mées in de Landes kwam volgens BFMTV een vrachtwagenchauffeur om doordat een tak op zijn vrachtwagen viel.

De keuze tussen een houten of plastic snijplank lijkt klein, maar voor je gezondheid en hygiëne maakt het wél verschil.

• Houten snijplanken
• Plastic snijplankenZijn vaatwasbestendig, wat een voordeel is bij grondig reinigen.Snedes blijven openstaan, waardoor bacteriën in kleine groeven kunnen blijven zitten.Geschikt voor rauw vlees, mits regelmatig vervangen.
• Beste aanpak in de keuken
• Gebruik aparte planken: één voor vlees, één voor groente en brood.
• Reinig planken grondig met heet water en afwasmiddel.
• Vervang plastic planken zodra ze diepe groeven vertonen.
• Laat houten planken goed drogen en wrijf ze af en toe in met minerale olie.

Conclusie:Een goed onderhouden houten snijplank is doorgaans hygiënischer dan plastic – zolang je hem droog houdt en niet gebruikt voor rauw vlees.

DEN HAAG (ANP) - Het aantal faillissementen is in januari op jaarbasis opnieuw afgenomen, meldt het Centraal Bureau voor de Statistiek (CBS). In totaal gingen vorige maand 279 bedrijven failliet. Dat zijn 39 faillissementen minder dan in dezelfde maand een jaar eerder, een daling van 12 procent. Ten opzichte van december steeg het aantal faillissementen met 6 procent.

De faillissementsgraad, het aantal faillissementen per 100.000 bedrijven, kwam in januari uit op 7,5. Een jaar eerder werden er per 100.000 bedrijven 8,7 failliet verklaard. De faillissementsgraad geeft volgens het CBS een zuiverder beeld van de ontwikkeling van het aantal faillissementen. Ook bedrijfstakken kunnen hiermee beter met elkaar vergeleken worden. Het aantal bedrijven kan namelijk fluctueren door de tijd heen en sterk verschillen tussen bedrijfstakken.

In de horeca werden in januari relatief gezien de meeste faillissementen uitgesproken. Per 100.000 bedrijven in de horeca gingen er 30,5 failliet, een jaar eerder waren dat er 35,2.

In each successive generation of code creation thus far, we’ve abstracted away the prior generation over time. Usually, only a small percentage of coders still work on the lower layers of the stack that used to be the space where everyone was working. I’ve been coding long enough that people were still creating code in assembly when I started (though I was never any good at it!), though I started with BASIC. Since BASIC was an interpreted language, its interpreter would write the assembly language for me, and I never had to see exactly what assembly language code was being created.

I definitely did know old-school coders who used to, at first, check that assembly code to see if they liked the output. But eventually, over time, they just learned to trust the system and stopped looking at what happened after the system finished compiling. Even people using more “close to the metal” languages like C generally trust that their compilers have been optimized enough that they seldom inspect the output of the compiler to make sure it was perfectly optimized for their particular processor or configuration. The benefits of delegating those concerns to the teams that create compilers, and coding tools in general, yielded so many advantages that that tradeoff was easily worth it, once you got over the slightly uncomfortable feeling.

In the years that followed, though a small cohort of expert coders who would hand-tune assembly code for things like getting the most extreme performance out of a gaming console, most folks stopped writing it, and very few new coders learned assembly at all. The vast majority of working coders treat the output from the compiler layer as a black box, trusting the tools to do the right thing and delegating the concerns below that to the toolmakers.

We may be seeing that pattern repeat itself. Only this time, the abstraction is happening through AI tools abstracting away all the code. Which can feel a little scary.

Squashing the stack

Just as interpreted languages took away chores like memory management, and high-level languages took away the tedium of writing assembly code, we’re starting to see the first wave of tools that completely abstract away the writing of code. (I described this in more detail in the piece about codeless softwarerecently.

The individual practice of professionalizing the writing of software with LLMs seems to have settled on the term “agentic engineering”, as Simon Willison recently noted.

But the next step beyond that is when teams don’t write any of the code themselves, instead moving to an entirely abstracted way of creating code. In this model, teams (or even individual coders):

• Define the specifications for how the code should work
• Ensure that the system is provided with enough context at all times that it can succeed in creating code that is successful as often as possible
• Provide sufficient resources that a redundant and resilient set of code outputs can be created to accommodate failures while in iteration
• Enforce execution of tests and conformance systems against the code — including human tests with a named, accountable party, not just automated software tests

With this kind of model deployed, the software that is created can essentially be output from the system in the way that assembly code or bytecode is output from compilers today, with no direct inspection from the people who are directing its creation. Another way of thinking about this is that we’re abstracting away many different specific programming languages and detailed syntaxes to more human-written Markdown files, created much of the time in collaboration with these LLM tools.

Presently, most people and teams who are pursuing this path are doing so with costly commercial LLMs. I would strongly advocate that most organizations, and especially most professional coders, be very fluent in ways of accomplishing these tasks with a fleet of low-cost, locally-hosted, open source/open-weight models contributing to the workload. I don’t think they are performant enough yet to accomplish all of the coding tasks needed for a non-trivial application yet, but there are a significant number of sub-tasks that could reasonably be delegated. More importantly, it will be increasingly vital to ensure that this entire “codeless compilation” stack for agentic engineering works in a vendor-neutral way that can be decoupled from the major LLM vendors, as they get more irresponsible in their business practices and more aggressive towards today’s working coders and creators.

For many, those worries about Big AI are why their reaction to these developments in agentic coding make them want to recoil. But in reality, these issues are exactly why we desperately need to engage.

Seizing the means

Many of the smartest coders I know have a lot of legitimate and understandable misgivings about the impact that LLMs are having on the coding world, especially as they’re often being evangelized by companies that plainly have ill intent towards working coders. It is reasonable, and even smart, to be skeptical of their motivations and incentives.

But the response to that skepticism is not to reject the category of technology, but rather to capture it and seize control over its direction, away from the Big AI companies. This shift to a new level of coding abstraction is exactly the kind of platform shift that presents that sort of opportunity. It’s potentially a chance for coders to be in control of some part of their destiny, at a time when a lot of bosses clearly want to get rid of as many coders as they can.

At the very least, this is one area where the people who actually make things are ahead of the big platforms that want to cash in on it.

What if I think this is all bullshit?

I think a lot of coders are going to be understandably skeptical. The most common concern is, “I write really great code, how could it possibly be good news that we’re going to abstract away the writing of code?”. Or, “How the hell could a software factory be good news for people who make software?”

For that first question, the answer is going to involve some grieving, at first. It may be the case that writing really clean, elegant, idiomatic Python code is a skill that will be reduced in demand in the same way that writing incredibly performant, highly-tuned assembly code is. There is a market for it, but it’s on the edges, in specific scenarios. People ask for it when they need it, but they don’t usually start by saying they need it.

But for the deeper question, we may have a more hopeful answer. By elevating our focus up from the individual lines of code to the more ambitious focus on the overall problem we’re trying to solve, we may reconnect with the “why” that brought us to creating software and tech in the first place. We can raise our gaze from the steps right in front of us to the horizon a bit further ahead, and think more deeply about the problem we’re trying to solve. Or maybe even about the people who we’re trying to solve that problem for.

I think people who create code today, if they have access to super-efficient code-creation tools, will make better and more thoughtful products than the financiers who are currently carrying out mass layoffs of the best and most thoughtful people in the tech industry.

I also know there’s a history of worker-owned factories being safer and more successful than others in their industries, while often making better, longer-lasting products and being better neighbors in their communities. Maybe it’s possible that there’s an internet where agentic engineering tools could enable smart creators to build their own software factories that could work the same way.

Wipers

Alice in Chains

Supergrass

Chris Cornell

Weer voor Rotterdam 🌦️

In één oogopslag:
• 7.9°C · Lichte motregen 🌦️ | Min 6.0°C / Max 8.7°C | Kans op neerslag 46%

Verwachting voor vandaag:
• Min 6.0°C, Max 8.7°C (Matige motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 4.4 mm, Kans op neerslag 46%, 🧭 981.8 hPa ↗️ +5.7 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 22.7 km/u (6.3 m/s), richting: → 285°

Uurlijkse voorspelling voor de komende 12 uur:

• 08:00: 8.1°C (Matige motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 0.9 mm, Kans op neerslag 68%, 🧭 976.1 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 8.6 km/u (2.4 m/s), richting: ↘ 326°
• 09:00: 8.1°C (Lichte motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 0.3 mm, Kans op neerslag 61%, 🧭 977.3 hPa ↗️ +1.2 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 12.2 km/u (3.4 m/s), richting: ↘ 309°
• 10:00: 8.3°C (Matige motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 0.5 mm, Kans op neerslag 55%, 🧭 978.1 hPa ↗️ +0.8 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 7.9 km/u (2.2 m/s), richting: ↘ 309°
• 11:00: 8.1°C (Mist) 🌫️, Kans op neerslag 54%, 🧭 979.1 hPa ↗️ +1.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 13.0 km/u (3.6 m/s), richting: → 283°
• 12:00: 8.1°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 54%, 🧭 979.7 hPa ↗️ +0.6 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 9.4 km/u (2.6 m/s), richting: → 277°
• 13:00: 7.8°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 53%, 🧭 980.5 hPa ↗️ +0.8 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 14.4 km/u (4.0 m/s), richting: → 266°
• 14:00: 8.2°C (Lichte motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 0.1 mm, Kans op neerslag 48%, 🧭 980.9 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 13.0 km/u (3.6 m/s), richting: → 259°
• 15:00: 8.2°C (Lichte motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 0.3 mm, Kans op neerslag 40%, 🧭 981.6 hPa ↗️ +0.7 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 18.0 km/u (5.0 m/s), richting: → 263°
• 16:00: 8.7°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 33%, 🧭 982.2 hPa ↗️ +0.6 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 20.2 km/u (5.6 m/s), richting: → 272°
• 17:00: 8.6°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 27%, 🧭 982.8 hPa ↗️ +0.6 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 20.5 km/u (5.7 m/s), richting: → 269°
• 18:00: 8.5°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 21%, 🧭 983.6 hPa ↗️ +0.8 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 21.6 km/u (6.0 m/s), richting: → 271°
• 19:00: 7.2°C (Lichte motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 0.1 mm, Kans op neerslag 16%, 🧭 984.5 hPa ↗️ +0.9 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 18.7 km/u (5.2 m/s), richting: → 285°

Voorspelling voor de komende dagen:

• vrijdag 13 februari: Min 1.2°C, Max 5.8°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 10%, 🧭 992.9 hPa ↗️ +11.1 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 22.0 km/u (6.1 m/s), richting: ↓ 12°
• zaterdag 14 februari: Min -1.2°C, Max 4.8°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 3%, 🧭 1010.8 hPa ↗️ +17.9 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 22.0 km/u (6.1 m/s), richting: ↙ 23°
• zondag 15 februari: Min -3.0°C, Max 1.2°C (Matige sneeuw) ❄️, Neerslag 2.7 mm, Kans op neerslag 28%, 🧭 1009.4 hPa ↘️ -1.4 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 19.8 km/u (5.5 m/s), richting: ↑ 164°
• maandag 16 februari: Min 1.1°C, Max 6.5°C (Matige sneeuw) ❄️, Neerslag 9.8 mm, Kans op neerslag 49%, 🧭 998.2 hPa ↘️ -11.2 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 16.7 km/u (4.6 m/s), richting: → 250°
• dinsdag 17 februari: Min 2.3°C, Max 7.2°C (Matige sneeuw) ❄️, Neerslag 3.0 mm, Kans op neerslag 29%, 🧭 1013.2 hPa ↗️ +15.0 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 16.6 km/u (4.6 m/s), richting: ↘ 310°
• woensdag 18 februari: Min 2.3°C, Max 10.1°C (Zware motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 7.8 mm, Kans op neerslag 51%, 🧭 998.1 hPa ↘️ -15.1 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 21.7 km/u (6.0 m/s), richting: ↗ 212°

Details:
• 🌡️ Huidige temperatuur (om 07:15): 7.9°C (Lichte motregen)
• 🤚 Gevoelstemperatuur: 6.0°C (-1.9°C)
• 💨 Windsnelheid: 10.4 km/u (2.9 m/s), richting: ↘ 334°
• 🌬️ Windstoten: 19.8 km/h (5.5 m/s)
• 💧 Luchtvochtigheid: 91%
• 🧭 Luchtdruk: 976.1 hPa ↗️ +2.0 hPa/3h
• 👁️ Zichtbaarheid: 29.6 km
• ☀️ UV-index: 0.0
• 🌅 Zonsopgang: 08:02 · 🌇 Zonsondergang: 17:50

Luchtkwaliteit:
• AQI: 34 🟢 (Goed)
• PM2.5: 11.5 μg/m³
• PM10: 13.3 μg/m³

Gegevens geleverd door Open-Meteo

#Rotterdam #Meteo #MeteoBot #MeteoNetherlands #OpenMeteo #FediMeteo

joka2000 has added a photo to the pool: