Mr Mikage (ミスター御影） posted a photo:

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Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

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sz-da has added a photo to the pool:

Mount Takao (高尾山)

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.

The attacks followed a barrage of Russian missiles and drones that struck infrastructure across Ukraine Sunday.

Zelensky told the BBC that the war was the Russian leader’s attempt to impose a “different way of life” on the world.

Bij een controle op een ferry in Hoek van Holland zijn zaterdagavond vijf Vietnamese vreemdelingen gevonden. Ze zaten in een caravan achter een auto, zegt de Koninklijke Marechaussee. Twee Britse mannen van 38 en 46 jaar zijn aangehouden voor mensensmokkel.

Dick Advocaat en Cor Pot gaan niet als bondscoach van Curaçao naar het WK voetbal. Fred Rutten neemt de taken van Advocaat over bij het eindtoernooi in Noord en Midden-Amerika.

Met de gewelddadige dood van de machtigste drugsbaron van het land geeft president Claudia Sheinbaum een stevig signaal af aan zowel de kartels als aan Donald Trump. Maar in Mexico zelf kunnen de gevolgen van El Mencho’s uitschakeling groot zijn. Hoe werd hij zo oppermachtig?

Analog curio nestled between fax and typewriter - this is a very different definition of 'legacy support'

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 AI Disruption We've Been Waiting for Has Arrived [ungated; cf.] - "We're entering a new renaissance of software development. We should all be excited, despite the uncertainties that lie ahead." (previously, viz. usw.)

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...

• @___frye: "i don't think the general public understands what it means that the cost of building any software product is now $200/mo."
• @CaptKevin0x: "A full-time cardiologist built an AI care platform in 7 days—coding between shifts and on flights—and won 3rd place out of 13,000 apps. The 'I don't know how to code' excuse is officially dead. In the AI era, execution and ideas are literally the only things that matter now."
• @bcherny: "Coding is now 'solved' for most use cases."
• Chris Lattner: "I've spent a large part of my career working on compilers and programming languages, so when Anthropic announced the Claude C Compiler (CCC), I paid close attention. My basic take is simple: this is real progress, a milestone for the industry. We're not in the end of times, but this also isn't just hype, so take a deep breath, everyone. AI building a C compiler is not truly revolutionary, but it does reveal how far AI coding has progressed and where it may be heading next."
• AI has moved beyond writing small snippets of code and is beginning to participate in engineering large systems.
• AI is crossing from local code generation into global engineering participation: CCC maintains architecture across subsystems, not just functions.
• CCC has an "LLVM-like" design (as expected): training on decades of compiler engineering produces compiler architectures shaped by that history.
• Our legal apparatus frequently lags behind technology progress, and AI is pushing legal boundaries. Is proprietary software cooked?
• Good software depends on judgment, communication, and clear abstraction. AI has amplified this.
• AI coding is automation of implementation, so design and stewardship become more important.
• Manual rewrites and translation work are becoming AI-native tasks, automating a large category of engineering effort.
• AI, used right, should produce better software, provided humans actually spend more energy on architecture, design, and innovation.
• Architecture documentation has become infrastructure as AI systems amplify well-structured knowledge while punishing undocumented systems.
• The Real Reason Anthropic built a Compiler - "This is going to be a weird video because I'm going to say something positive about Anthropic. And then I'm also gonna call Anthropic one of the most deceitful companies I have ever seen."
• Pentagon-Anthropic battle pushes other AI labs into major dilemma - "The Pentagon is threatening to sever its contract with Anthropic and declare the company a 'supply chain risk' because it's unwilling to lift certain restrictions on its model, Claude. The company is particularly concerned about Claude being used for mass domestic surveillance or to develop fully autonomous weapons."
• OpenAI debated calling police about suspected Canadian shooter's chats - "An 18-year-old who allegedly killed eight people in a mass shooting in Tumbler Ridge, Canada, reportedly used OpenAI's ChatGPT in ways that alarmed the company's staff."
• OpenAI is Suddenly in Trouble - "OpenAI is the company that led the generative AI revolution. But that was 2022, today in 2026 things look very different. From growing competition to top talent leaving to losing 10s of billions of dollars with no way to profitability."
• OpenAI executive who opposed 'adult mode' fired for sexual discrimination - "OpenAI has cut ties with one of its top safety executives, on the grounds of sexual discrimination, after she voiced opposition to the controversial rollout of AI erotica in its ChatGPT product."
• AI insiders are sounding the alarm - "Anthropic published a report showing that, while low risk, AI can be used in heinous crimes, including the creation of chemical weapons. This so-called 'sabotage report' looked at the risks of AI without human intervention, purely on its own. At the same time, OpenAI dismantled its mission alignment team, which was created to ensure AGI (artificial general intelligence) benefits all of humanity, Platformer author Casey Newton reported Wednesday."
• @TheStalwart: "They believe they're shepherding an extremely destabilizing, yet inevitable technology.
• @arindube: "You market your product as something that will turn human civilization upside down and destroy livelihoods, and somehow everyone is not super excited about it."

"I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism. And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us. And technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it's hard to distinguish the two." --Ted Chiang[1]

• Billionaires' low taxes are becoming a problem for the economy - "Billionaires have ways to lower their tax bills that aren't available to most Americans. A common strategy is to avoid salaries, which are heavily taxed... Billionaires prefer to be paid in shares, which are subject to capital-gains taxes when sold. But they don't need to sell to fund their lifestyles. Billionaires use borrowed money for living expenses, pledging their shares or other assets as collateral. The interest on the debt is much lower than a capital-gains tax bill would be, and their stock portfolios can continue accumulating paper gains."
• @JustinWolfers: "On Gen Z's (understandable!) anxiety: AI is likely to boost productivity, so we can create more with less. That likely creates a bigger pie. But a bigger pie won't pay the bills unless we figure out how to ensure that everyone gets a reasonable slice."
• @brian-goldstone.bsky.social‬: "Reading this story—about how the Pentagon has been given so much extra money it's struggling to spend it all—while thinking about the formerly homeless tenants I've spoken with in recent weeks whose housing vouchers are being discontinued for 'lack of funds.'"
• @grahamformaine: "Susan Collins's husband's lobbying firm received over $50 million in federal contracts, with tens of millions of dollars from agencies Susan Collins oversees. It's got to be one of the great coincidences of American history."
• @karenguzzo.bsky.social‬: "Thanks to the OBBB, Amazon's tax bill for 2025 is $1.2 billion, down from $9 billion the year before despite a 45% jump in profits."
• @TheMaineWonk: "Tax breaks for the wealthy cost more than any individual government spending program. It's an oligarchy."
• @TheMaineWonk: It's worse than you imagine. 935 billionaires & families make up 17% of all campaign contributions. Top 10% make up 80% (!!!) of all campaign contributions. Working class Americans & their policy prescriptions are getting left behind in favor of the oligarch donor class."
• @ianbremmer: "are us elections free and fair? or bought and paid for?"
• @lastpositivist.bsky.social‬: "Individually one cannot, but it is striking (in a way that really advocates the old Marxist in me) that socially we can only really see a technology that saves a bunch of labour without generating replacement level jobs as a disaster. This is because we are *so* sure the profit will be privatised."
• @tszzl: "it's a bad situation to be in where you have to rely on the goodness or righteousness of any one person or organization do something important correctly-but therein lies the seeds of the 'enemy'. you crave the guarantees of algorithm and machine to overcome the weaknesses of men."

Pre-Industrial Economic Growth - "In a world in which there cannot be enough for all, at the foundation politics and governance can be little more than an élite elbowing competitors out of the way, and running a force-and-fraud exploitation game on the rest of humanity."[2]

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:

• 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.

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.

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]

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)...

• The Chinese Factory That Opened in the US and Clobbered Its Rivals - "President Trump has pressured trading partners for investment in U.S. manufacturing plants. What if local industries can't compete?"[8,9,10]
• @ianbrooke: "To put a point on this, industrial success is measured in tonnage, watts, seconds, meters and microns. That is base reality, everything else is an abstraction."
• @kyleichan: "BYD and Tesla both make EVs in China. Yet BYD has significantly lower costs. Two major factors: 1) Vertical integration is very high for BYD. 2) Doing R&D in China is far cheaper. State subsidies are a small part. It's more a structural advantage."
• @pitdesi: "BYD's vertical integration is insane, much moreso than Tesla's. They make their own batteries, chips, motors, and even mine their own lithium. A couple of years ago they felt there weren't enough transport options for their cars, so they built their own fleet of car carrier ships, and- per this video, the cars drive off of the ships autonomously. They now operate the largest car carriers in the world. Each carries up to 9,200 cars and is powered by LNG. The fleet can export ~1M cars/year and cuts per-vehicle shipping costs 30-40%. Wild!"
• Battery storage prices drop to record low, report finds - "Battery storage prices dropped more than a quarter last year to a record low, a boon for grids straining under rising electricity demand, a new BloombergNEF report found."[11,12,13]
• Why Hokkaido is the New Taiwan - "Today, Japan holds a 50%+ global share in semiconductor materials. For specific high-end segments like EUV photoresists, that share is near 100%. You cannot print a chip at TSMC without Shin-Etsu Chemical. You cannot coat a wafer without Tokyo Electron. You cannot cut a silicon ingot without Disco Corporation."[14,15,16,17]
• @Gaurab: "Nittobo is a Japanese glass fiber company with 2,745 employees. Nvidia, Apple, Google, Amazon, AMD, Microsoft, and Qualcomm have all sent executives to Japan to personally lobby for supply. T-glass forms the structural core of every AI chip substrate. Nittobo controls 90% of it. It sells for $80 to $100 per kilogram. Standard glass fiber is $3 to $5. The thermal expansion has to match silicon almost exactly or the substrate warps and the chip fails. Nvidia locked up supply through long-term binding contracts. New capacity won't arrive until 2027. The CEO told Nikkei he won't expand at the pace of the AI market. He doesn't need to."
• @ramez: "While Trump dithered on Tomahawks, Ukraine designed their own cheaper, longer range, more powerful cruise missile, and they and European allies started manufacturing it in volume."[18,19,20,21,22,23,24,25]

Can we escape AI slavery? Only the Left can tame big tech - "This is light years beyond mere surveillance capitalism, an earlier system where machines spied on you so that advertisers could target their marketing material."

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.”

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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.

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