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Sydney Opera House, Viewed from Circular Quay

Edge of the Quiet

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Edge of the Quiet

Along the Naturaliste coast

Electrik-King St Crawl- Aussie Rock

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Electrik-King St Crawl- Aussie Rock

The Evening Watch

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The Evening Watch

Busselton sunset

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A lone surfer contemplating the surf at Kelvedon Beach, Tasmania.

De Speld

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Jelle (5) wil later systemic transformation alignment coach worden

De vijfjarige Jelle uit Velsen-Noord wil later wel een héél bijzonder beroep beoefenen. In tegenstelling tot leeftijdsgenoten ligt zijn passie niet bij de brandweer, politie of boerderij; maar bij systemic transformation alignment coaching. "Als ik later groot ben ga ik commmunicatietrainingen geven."

In het klaslokaal kijken klasgenoten gek op van Jelle, die met een clipboard en een wascokrijtje rond paradeert. "Ik speel in de pauze altijd HR-medewerkertje" zegt hij, en spreekt één van de andere kleuters aan op grensoverschrijdend gedrag. "Joëlle was eerst met die blokken aan het spelen Sjors." Hij krabbelt wat op het clipboard en loopt door. "Ik zou veel liever systemic transformation alignment coachje spelen, maar daar willen ze nooit aan meedoen."

Jelle's juf, Nina, weet niet wat ze met zijn eigenaardige droom aan moet. "Laatst vroeg Jelle of hij de leiding mag nemen in de vertelkring om te oefenen voor later. Toen ik hem vroeg wat hij dan precies wilde worden zei hij 'STA-coach'. Hij heeft daarna nog uitgelegd wat dat precies inhoudt, maar toen kwam er een heel lang en vaag verhaal. Iets met verandering binnen een systeem en dat je, eh, ja ik weet het echt niet." Ze komt iets dichterbij en fluistert. "Het klonk een beetje als een bullshitbaan, maar dat durfde ik hem niet te vertellen."

Van wie Jelle deze passie precies heeft gekregen is niet duidelijk, in ieder geval niet van zijn ouders. "Papa is profvoetballer en mama dolfijnentrainer, maar dat vind ik stom. Systemische opstellingen in organisaties, dat is pas cool."

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Slashdot

News for nerds, stuff that matters

Facial Recognition in UK Shops Will Soon Instantly Alert Police About Offenders

Facial recognition technology in U.K. shops "will soon alert police in real time to the presence of serious offenders," reports The Guardian, "with civil liberties groups warning of a 'dangerous escalation' towards surveillance and criminalisation in the retail sector."

Facewatch, a facial recognition system used by more than 100 businesses including Sainsbury's, B&M and Spar to monitor thieves, said it was launching a UK-first feature to "alert police instantly when the most serious offenders trigger a live facial recognition match". Facewatch's chief executive, Nick Fisher, said the "unique technical development" would be launched in autumn and would warn police in an average of four seconds when the "worst offenders" were flagged on its network... Charlie Whelton, the policy and campaigns officer at [civil liberties nonprofit] Liberty, said it was concerned about this "untested, opaque development" and the way facial recognition technology had been allowed to "proliferate without anything to govern it".
"It's not against the law to walk into a shop even if you've committed crimes in the past," he said. "The idea of calling the police on somebody who hasn't committed a crime, but there's a concern they might, is really upending the way we do things. And of course, it's not infallible. These systems do make mistakes, and it's very hard to argue with that when it happens to you." A number of people have been forced to leave shops after being falsely identified by Facewatch technology as a shoplifter, with some describing it as "Orwellian" and saying they felt as though they were "guilty until proven innocent"...

The use of the Facewatch technology looks set to quickly expand, with Sainsbury's recently announcing plans to increase its use from 55 stores to more than 200 by the end of the year. Facewatch said it alerted retailers almost 300,000 times that a "known repeat offender" had entered a store during the first six months of 2026, and that its system allowed staff to intervene "before theft, abuse or violence could occur or escalate"... [E]xperts argue the use of facial recognition technology in shops to catch shoplifters is disproportionate. Nuala Polo, the UK public policy lead at the Ada Lovelace Institute, which studies the impact of AI on society, said: "There are other, much less intrusive means that you can use to catch shoplifters where you don't need to be scanning millions of faces every day, virtually without consent...."

The campaign group Big Brother Watch has criticised police for "inserting themselves into this cowboy operation" and said people would be matched against "a secret blacklist compiled by unaccountable businesses and private security guards".

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sinclair

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Sinclair

The Summer of Love

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The Summer of Love

Talk to Me About Art

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Talk to Me About Art

Cocktails

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Cocktails

As American As Mississippi

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As American As Mississippi

Hello I'm In South Dakota

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Hello I'm In South Dakota

Portrait of Louise-Antoinette Feuardent, Jean-Francois Millet

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Portrait of Louise-Antoinette Feuardent, Jean-Francois Millet

Found Photograph

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Found Photograph

Where Is My Mind?

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Where Is My Mind?

Well, You Know I'm Not Much Good at Writing Letters

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Well, You Know I'm Not Much Good at Writing Letters

Bassiehof - Dit WK bewijst dat de VVD als law & order-partij een lachertje is

Het was een slechte week voor het rechtsgevoel en het vertrouwen in de VVD als law & order-partij. Die begint met de Amsterdamse ME-commandant Sander van der Huillie die in De T. zijn schild en lange lat in de ring gooit en vertelt liever niet in te grijpen in het geval van rellend Marokkaans rapaille. Minister van Justitie David van Weel (VVD) zwijgt in alle talen.

Maar vrijdagavond belt minister van Defensie en VVD-vicepremier Dilan Yesilgöz vanuit de dienstauto live in bij Nieuws van de Dag in om zich te beklagen over het gedrag van de Marokkaanse relschoppers de afgelopen weken. Terwijl Van Weel diezelfde ochtend juist kwezelt dat de onrust rond Frankrijk-Marokko gelukkig meeviel.

Ondertussen twittert VVD-fractievoorzitter Ruben Brekelmans op zaterdag – het riekt in alles naar een liberale PR-operatie - dat hij de avond daarvoor een dienst met de Haagse politie heeft meegedraaid. Die vrijdagavondshift was dus 24 uur ná de gebeurtenissen rond de kwartfinale in de Schilderswijk.

Het VVD-probleem beperkt zich niet tot deze WK-avonden. Brekelmans’ politie-uitje moet namelijk ook maskeren dat de VVD op het dossier zware criminaliteit weinig waarmaakt. Yesilgöz schreef namelijk diezelfde vrijdag aan de Kamer dat ze ‘omwille van de veiligheid en vertrouwelijkheid’ niét wil zeggen of diezelfde Brekelmans in zijn tijd als haar voorganger op Defensie drugsbaas Bolle Jos had laten glippen omdat hij bang was te moeten onderduiken.

Ook blijkt deze week dat een bezoek van asielminister Bart van den Brink (CDA) aan Ter Apel vanwege de veiligheid niet kan doorgaan. Daarnaast wordt duidelijk dat het Rode Kruis wél Gaza maar niet het Groningse AZC in durft. Ach, zaten er maar VVD’ers op Justitie en Defensie. Die hadden direct blikken agenten en Koninklijke Marechaussees opengetrokken om de bewindsman en de rest van Ter Apel te beschermen tegen het asielschorriemor…. oh wacht.

De enige tastbare VVD-prestatie dit WK is een meerderheid krijgen voor de trieste toetermotie van backbencher Bart Bikkers. Verdrietig want onnodig toeteren is al verboden, gezien de beelden deze week (en afgelopen jaren) wordt er toch niet gehandhaafd en het filmpje waarmee hij zijn plan lanceerde was ronduit achterlijk.

Het ‘keihard aanpakken’ van VVD-voorvrouw Yesilgöz wanneer ze het heeft over rapaille van allerlei kunne, klinkt na al die jaren schel en krachteloos. Het laffe optreden van haar man op Justitie Van Weel – het antisemitische Extinction Rebellion aanpakken lukt hem niet eens – vormt inmiddels een vaste kernwaarde van het falende veiligheidsbeleid van dit én het vorige kabinet.

De antwoorden op de Kamervragen die Mona Keijzer deze week stelde aan Van Weel over de uitspraken van de hoofdstedelijke ME-chef, kan beschouwer dezes nu al uittekenen: het is aan de Amsterdamse driehoek en de gemeenteraad, ik ga er niet over.

Dat is een patroon. Het kabinet Jetten heeft vanaf dag één de mond vol over ‘normeren’, tenzij het gaat over types als Femke Halsema of haar Utrechtse Nakba-herdenkende collega Sharon Dijksma. Hetzelfde geldt voor de hoogste hoofdcommissaris Janny Knol en de op alle vlakken falende OM-eindbaas Rinus Otte.

De cruciale rol in dit alles is weggelegd voor de VVD die met de grootste bek én verantwoordelijkheid voor wet en orde ondertussen helemaal niets klaarspeelt (behalve dan die ridicule toetermotie). Als het excuus van de liberalen is: ja maar we zitten nu eenmaal met die laffe D66’ers en CDA’ers in een kabinet, staat ze maar één ding te doen. Afscheid nemen van deze coalitie.

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The red colour of the dedicated species is a reminder of his feat

After winning plaudits across the globe for his World Cup performances with Cape Verde, goalkeeper Vozinha has another honour - with a newly discovered species of sea slug being named after him.

The Register

Biting the hand that feeds IT — Enterprise Technology News and Analysis

It's an AI web, and we're just rats in the walls

OPINION Things you might not know about me. I was the first person to write a popular article about the web. Little did I, or anyone else, know how it would change everything. Our lives were transformed when all of human knowledge became just a click away. That was then. This is now. Today, more web traffic now comes from bots than humans. We're just picking up AI's crumbs. That was not how it was meant to be. Mind you, I was never an internet idealist. I didn't think the internet would set us free and lead us to a technological paradise. I did think, however, we'd do better than we have. The internet quickly became, as the song goes, for porn. That was relatively harmless, though, compared to doxxing, targeted misinformation, and automated botnets and troll farms. But there was still some good, although it was hard to find at times. And it was all driven by people. Now it's another story. Cloudflare's public Radar "Bot vs Human" tracker is reporting that bots now account for roughly 57-58 percent of HTTP requests for HTML content, compared with about 42-43 percent from humans. Meanwhile, Imperva's Bad Bot Report based on 2025 data put bots at about 53 percent of measured web traffic for the second year in a row, with humans at 47 percent. Separately, according to Pangram, an AI detection company, on websites such as LinkedIn, Medium, Twitter, and Reddit, "about one in four long-form items were fully AI-generated." The company went on to report that "LinkedIn was the most AI-saturated platform, where more than 40 percent of long-form posts [were] flagged as fully AI-generated. However, if we included mixed AI and human content, X/Twitter was the worst off: almost half of X articles were either fully AI-generated (23.9 percent) or AI-assisted/mixed (22.9 percent), with only 53.2 percent of X articles flagging as fully human-authored." There are that many flesh-and-blood people still posting on LinkedIn and Twitter? Based on what I've been seeing, I'd have guessed there were fewer. So, with the web increasingly written and consumed by AI, where does that leave us, exactly? Nowhere good. It's not just online. AI is everywhere. A non-fiction writer friend of mine "wrote" a novel last year using AI as a goof. It was, well, awful. But he put it online to see what would happen. A year and a half later, it's still bringing in a few thousand dollars a month. That's a lot better than many full-time, mid-tier novelists I know are doing. Of course, AI isn't actually writing anything. It's really a copy-and-paste scam on an industrial scale. OpenAI and the other AI powers claim it's not so. However, a recent court filing by the New York Times and others alleges that Vincent Monaco, who leads privacy engineering at OpenAI, acknowledged in a deposition that "OpenAI had searched training datasets and output data despite the company's initial claims that it couldn't access that data. The outlets also alleged OpenAI deleted logs, a violation of the court's preservation orders." As it happens, one of the publishers suing OpenAI is Ziff-Davis, which published my web article back in 1993. Since then, it's published thousands of my Linux and open source news stories, how-tos, interviews, and features. So, when someone accuses me of using AI in my Linux stories, my reply is "Where do you think AI got that information and phrasing in the first place? Hello! It was me." Just go ahead and cut me a check, OpenAI, and all will be forgiven. That said, another AI problem I'm all too painfully aware of is that you can't trust AI's answers. When AI tells you something about Linux, for example, it's not just quoting me, the Linux Kernel Mailing List, or Linux Weekly News. No, it's also pulling data from Ima Moron, a poster from a deservedly obscure subreddit. Repeat after me: AI isn't intelligent at all. It's just a copy-and-paste of words that are likely to go together. It may sound right, but it often isn't. Confidence is why so many buy AI garbage as gospel truth. You really can't trust it. The reason I use Perplexity as my search engine isn't that it's more accurate than other AI LLMs; it's that it shows me its sources. I can see if what it just turned up is the real thing or just BS. Guess what? It's often crap. It's only going to get worse. I saw the AI model collapse coming back in 2025. It's here now. When I dive into AI "answers" today, every time and in every question, I find it referring not to primary or reputable secondary sources, but to AI summaries. When you pile garbage on top of garbage you do not get reliable information. I see this all the time in Google's AI Overviews. That's one of the reasons I almost never use Google anymore. Unfortunately, everyone else is using Google's made-up answers and not even looking down the page to get a real answer from a true expert, or at least someone with a clue about your question of the day. I can tell on many subjects when an answer is likely to be accurate. But I don't have a clue about medical treatments. I wouldn't trust an AI answer on a serious health problem at all. Nevertheless, I know millions of people do that every day. That's seriously scary. Equally worrying is that many of us now turn to AI for companionship. I understand loneliness, but this is no cure; it's, at best, a sticking plaster. You see, the web really is written by AI for AI. We're losing both accuracy and humanity. This is not the web I'd hoped we would end up with. I fear there's no way we can reverse this trend. We'd rather have easy, fast answers and artificial companionship than the real things. That's profoundly sad. Pass the cheese. ®