Mr Mikage (ミスター御影) posted a photo:
Mr Mikage (ミスター御影) posted a photo:
AMSTELVEEN (ANP) - Luchtvaartmaatschappij KLM blijft voorlopig vliegen op Mexico. Ook Nederlandse reisbureaus merken nog weinig van de situatie in het land, laten zij desgevraagd weten. In een deel van Mexico is het onrustig sinds de dood van de beruchte drugsbaas El Mencho zondagochtend.
"KLM vliegt op dit moment een ongewijzigd schema op Mexico", meldt de luchtvaartmaatschappij. Maandag staat een vlucht naar Mexico-Stad gepland. KLM zegt de veiligheidssituatie continu te monitoren en actie te nemen als dat nodig is.
TUI biedt reizen aan naar het oosten van Mexico. De onrust vindt vooral in westelijke deelstaten plaats. Brancheorganisatie voor reisbureaus ANVR zegt geen melding te hebben gekregen van problemen bij leden.
Het ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken adviseert Nederlanders die zich in bepaalde deelstaten bevinden om binnen te blijven. Met name in Jalisco, in het westen van Mexico, is het onrustig door onder andere wegblokkades.
De voormalige Britse prins Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor heeft in zijn tijd als handelsgezant kosten voor massages en dure reizen afgewenteld op belastingbetalers. Dat schrijft de BBC op basis van getuigenissen van oud-overheidsmedewerkers.
Volgens een van de medewerkers die de BBC sprak, zou interne kritiek op Andrews pogingen om "massagediensten" niet zelf te betalen, van hogerhand zijn afgewezen. Op foto's die van Andrew opdoken in de zogenoemde Epstein-files is onder meer te zien hoe hij een voetmassage krijgt van een jonge vrouw in een woning van de Amerikaanse investeerder en zedendelinquent Jeffrey Epstein.
Hoewel volledige cijfers ontbreken, bedroeg Andrews laatst bekende salaris voor zijn adellijke rollen 249.000 pond (indertijd circa 290.000 euro). Vermoed wordt dat hij nadien financieel werd bijgestaan door toenmalig koningin Elizabeth.
Epstein overleed in 2019 in zijn cel, in afwachting van zijn proces voor het op grote schaal seksueel uitbuiten van minderjarige vrouwen.
DEN HAAG (ANP) - Bij de bordesscène van het pas beëdigde kabinet-Jetten waren maandagochtend protestgeluiden te horen van klimaatactivisten van Extinction Rebellion. Zij voerden actie bij het hek van Huis ten Bosch in Den Haag omdat zij teleurgesteld zijn in de klimaatambities van het nieuwe kabinet. Terwijl de staatssecretarissen en ministers poseerden voor de foto, waren daardoor onder andere fluitjes en alarmgeluiden te horen.
"Wij vragen aandacht voor de richting die deze coalitie opgaat, en dat is de verkeerde", lichtte een woordvoerder van de protestbeweging toe.
Bork!Bork!Bork! There are occasions when flicking a power switch can send a user into a world of bork-related pain, so it is sometimes worth taking a step back and reconsidering one's life choices.…
The tech industry is a global culture — an identity based on craft and skill. Software development has been a solid middle-class job for a long time. But that may be slipping away. What might the future look like if 100 million, or a billion, people can make any software they desire? Could this be a moment of unparalleled growth and opportunity as people gain access to tech industry power for themselves? According to the market, the answer is no. Recently, software stocks — Monday.com, Salesforce, Adobe and many others — plummeted all at once; the Nasdaq 100 lost half a trillion dollars in two days. Legal software company stocks slumped recently because Anthropic released tools to automate some legal work. Financial services firms and real estate services — the market keeps devaluing them because traders expect there to be less need for humans at desks in an A.I.-automated future. Why will anyone need all that legacy software when A.I. can code anything up for you in two shakes of a robotic lamb's tail? Personally this all feels premature, but markets aren't subtle thinkers. And I get it. When you watch a large language model slice through some horrible, expensive problem — like migrating data from an old platform to a modern one — you feel the earth shifting. I was the chief executive of a software services firm, which made me a professional software cost estimator. When I rebooted my messy personal website a few weeks ago, I realized: I would have paid $25,000 for someone else to do this. When a friend asked me to convert a large, thorny data set, I downloaded it, cleaned it up and made it pretty and easy to explore. In the past I would have charged $350,000.from [mefi's own] Paul Ford: "how I feel about writing for a general audience in the age of social media." also btw...
This élite of thugs-with-spears (and later thugs-with-gunpowder-weapons), along with their tame accountants, bureaucrats, and propagandists—they could have enough. And with their enough they could build and enjoy their high culture. But those who controlled the commons, and had enough so that they could have the leisure to write the literatures that have come down to us—those were hard men, who reaped where they did not sow, and gathered where they did not scatter. They made typical human life fairly dystopian back in the long Agrarian age, even after taking account of the general poverty. But why was technological progress slow back then? A good deal of the answer is that they simply were not enough people and not enough sufficiently educated people to have the energy and time to think about solving the problems of advancing technology. Two heads are not twice as good as one, quite. But two heads are considerably better than one. And heads that are not exhausted by the combination of hard work and a scant diet have more energy to think, plan, experiment, and evaluate. Plus we humans are much smarter when we think together. Thinking together requires that we be able to communicate not just within our own little band or village, but communicate across space and across time. To the extent that humanity is more numerous, richer, better educated, and better able to communicate across space and time, we can become a truly remarkably intelligent anthology intelligence. In the years since 1875, that ability to transform ourselves into such an anthology intelligence has allowed us to power technological progress forward at 2% per year on average, even though the low-hanging technological fruit has long been harvested, and even though a great deal of the technological fruit we are now harvesting is a very, very high indeed. But there is more than a lack of numbers, lack of education, lack of energy and leisure, and lack of the means of communication and memory behind the slow rate of technological progress back before modern economic growth. In a society where the typical activity of those who deploy resources is to use them to grab enough for themselves from everybody else, the ideas that will be promoted will not be ideas that are true, but rather ideas that are useful for that grabbing process. The consequences of general poverty for inequality, and the consequences of inequality for ideas and for the direction of societal effort are major drags on even the possibility of technological development.Bubbles, Productive & Unproductive; Builders; & Bots: Why the AI Boom Isn't One Story, But Rather the Vector Driving the AI Economy Is at Least 12-Dimensional - "The AI surge looks to me half like a familiar 'productive bubble' and half like something much more complicated and new and strange. The productive bubble terrain of grifters, wasteful overbuilding, socially valuable but privately unprofitable infrastructure construction, coordination cycles, a few rock‑solid business models, and financial-crisis risk is at least somewhat familiar."
But then we also have:The Positive Possibilities of Gen AI - "First, look at those of our institutions that do harness us cooperatively. The institutions of scientific discovery are powerful mechanisms to give people incentives to turn their individual productivity to tasks that make us all smarter. The institutions of the market economy are powerful mechanisms to give people incentives to turn their individual productivity to tasks that make us all richer—as long, at least, as we are producing rival, excludable commodities under competitive conditions."[3]As an optimist, I see the likely equilibrium is user surplus rising fast—cheap, ubiquitous natural‑language access to data—while margins migrate to trusted data, integration, and uptime rather than model scarcity. I see policy choices around competition, energy, and data governance determining whether we get a broad productivity growth acceleration, or another round of attention enclosure. But the future is one I cannot see.
- Platform near‑monopolists investing defensively at staggering scale;
- Millenarian enthusiasts with their religious-cult agendas;
- Natural‑language interfaces promise massive user surplus while commoditizing producers, as modes of human interaction with the infosphere are transformed utterly;
- These transformations do not just produce new technologies of nature-manipulation and human coöperation, they also rewire the brain and restructure human thought in unpredictable ways;
- Newer and stronger forms of attention extraction looming as the default monetization path.
- The downstream consequences of what will be a revolution in the modes of human collective cognition
- most durable value likely sits in small, task‑specific models tied to trusted data, and in moats built on workflow, reliability, and proprietary information. Even if many investors lose money, the infrastructure and capabilities will persist.
But, second, we have no similarly well-crafted institutions or arrangements in communication and in information evaluation that work nearly as well. Thus third, building such is, I think, the challenge that must be addressed if we are to fully realize the potential of machine learning technologies... collective intelligence is our most-powerful tool.[4] [...] But, sixth, this works only if our communications and action systems harness us so that we pull together. And that problem is highly multidimensional. We need to think hard about just how multidimensional.[5] Seventh, I think that the most important dimension is our need for systems to direct our attention—about to be the only thing truly scarce—usefully.[6,7] Eighth, I think the second most important dimension is that we need processes to mentor the young—as the ways they used to rub up against people who have the useful tacit knowledge continue their decline. This will be essential in ensuring that the next generation of workers is able to fill our shoes. But education and training for tacit as well as formal knowledge is really hard in anything other than an apprenticeship setting, and the jobs that apprentices would have filled will soon be, many of them, the province of the 'bots.meanwhile, although bit shifting may be limitless, moving atoms remains hard(er)...
Massive economies of scale are synonymous with natural monopoly — it's one of the few useful things we teach economics students at university. That's the reason why we cannot have several water companies competing in the same city, laying down different water pipes that run through our streets and walls. For similar reasons, a handful of Big Tech hyper-scalers own and control the means of production of AI. For any company or startup wanting to build a serious AI capability, accessing these hyperscalers' infrastructure is not just convenient, but a fundamental necessity. This gives them immense influence over the pace, cost, and direction of AI's second face... AI's second face, the technofeudal one, is prevailing and will continue to do so after any bust of the AI bubble. It could not be otherwise. Given a choice between the precarious profits that any start-up, like DeepSeek, can dissolve overnight and the cloud rents that AI-enabled machines can lock in for the long run, Big Tech opted for the latter. Any company that, today, continues to try to profit by supplying AI-based commodities will either have to switch to extracting cloud rents in the technofeudal sector or perish. What does this mean for us, for humanity's future? The tech-optimists are convinced that AI will usher us into new vistas of pleasure, productivity and wealth. But I cannot share their cheerfulness... there is only one route from the Daedalian prison to the Promethean ideal: radical democratic politics. "Which means what?", they ask. It means starting with small regulatory steps, like legislating interoperability or rescinding legislation that heightens Big Tech's exorbitant power, before moving on to the grander tasks of building a digital monetary commons and re-thinking property rights over data and cloud capital. Only then will we have a shot at turning AI into humanity's benign enabler.Capitalism has already ended and we don't even know it, Yanis Varoufakis warns - "To rebalance economic power, Varoufakis called for democratising central banks... While the technology exists to do this, the political resistance is high because such reforms would reduce the influence of both financial institutions and major tech companies, the Greek economist concluded."[26]
Rolling coverage of the latest economic and financial news
The London stock market has dipped slightly in early trading.
The FTSE 100 index is down 19 points, or 0.18%, at 10,668 points.
Continue reading...The latest in our series of writers on their most important comfort films is a celebration of Nicolas Cage’s finest action moment
It’s easy to poke fun at Nicolas Cage. Between the meltdown memes, dodgy hairdos and his more taxman-friendly choices of roles, he has frequently made himself a target for ridicule among the masses.
Fresh off an Oscar win for Leaving Las Vegas, the actor’s decision to follow up with three action films must have seemed baffling at the time. The gambit paid off, though. Consisting of The Rock, Con Air and Face/Off, this unofficial “trilogy” of blockbusters would showcase the fundamental unknowability of Nicolas Cage.
Continue reading...A huge vaccination drive has been launched after the country’s first outbreak in years of the paralysing disease. But the battle to wipe out the virus is struggling elsewhere, so how can it be eradicated?
As a seven-year-old boy is treated for polio at a hospital in Malawi, the country has launched a major vaccination campaign to stem an outbreak of the disease.
The effort in Malawi, one of the world’s poorest countries and badly hit by the aid cuts, has seen an astonishing 1.3 million children already vaccinated against the disease in just four days after emergency supplies were airlifted in by the World Health Organization (WHO) just over a week ago.
Continue reading...New Art UK chair Ben Terrett appointed as charity marks 10 years of building online database
From a bronze Rodin sculpture of the naked Eve outside a Nando’s in Harlow to more than 6,000 artworks by JMW Turner, to a crumpled-up piece of A4 paper owned by Manchester Art Gallery, the UK’s public art collection is a wonderful and varied thing.
It is huge, as demonstrated by the charity Art UK, which has announced it has reached a million artworks on its database and appointed a new chair who said: “We’ve only scratched the surface.”
Continue reading...Als een bezoeker een zwangerschapstest in diens online winkelmandje doet, dan sturen de webshops van Nederlandse drogisten die informatie door naar tech-bedrijven als Google, Meta en Tiktok. Dat blijkt uit onderzoek van Investico, in samenwerking met De Groene Amsterdammer en tv-programma Radar.
Alle twintig onderzochte drogisten, waaronder Kruidvat, Etos en Trekpleister deonlinedrogist.nl sturen informatie over de gebruiker en diens klikgedrag naar Google. De helft van de drogisten doet dit ook naar Meta, het moederbedrijf van Facebook. Drogist DA, flitsbezorger Flink en online drogist plein.nl sturen zelfs informatie naar het Chinese Tiktok.
De drogisten overtreden daarmee de regels. ‘Een webshop moet een gebruiker heel expliciet vertellen wat er met de informatie over bijvoorbeeld een zwangerschapstest gebeurt, omdat het hier over je gezondheid of seksleven gaat.’ zegt Frederik Zuiderveen Borgesius, professor ICT en Recht aan de Radboud Universiteit.