Staring at the Sun, Mirko Ilić

Twilight of the dreamboats, Lewis Baltz

Als speler van FC Barcelona en de Spaanse nationale ploeg won Xavi zo’n beetje elke prijs die er te winnen valt, hij versloeg onder meer Nederland tijdens de WK finale van 2010. Als coach was hij tot nu toe minder succesvol.

De zonsverduistering is geëindigd. Het hoogtepunt vond plaats rond 20.10 uur: toen was in Nederland zo’n 88 procent van de zon verduisterd door de maan.

LOS ANGELES (ANP) - Nick Reiner is in staat van beschuldiging gesteld voor de moord op zijn ouders, Rob en Michele Reiner. Dat heeft de openbaar aanklager volgens Amerikaanse media woensdag gemeld tijdens een korte zitting in Los Angeles. Nick Reiner was bij de zitting aanwezig.

De beschuldiging is verzwaard ten opzichte van de verdenking die hem eerder ten laste werd gelegd. De nieuwe aanklacht bevat ook een beschuldiging voor 'op de loer liggen', wat betekent dat Reiner doelbewust wachtte tot hij zijn slachtoffers kon aanvallen.

Mede door deze toevoeging kan Reiner tot een levenslange celstraf zonder vervroegde vrijlating worden veroordeeld of zelfs tot de doodstraf. Daarnaast staat in de aanklacht specifiek omschreven dat Nick Reiner zijn ouders bewust aanviel met een 'gevaarlijk en dodelijk wapen', namelijk een mes.

'Diepgaand verraad'

Volgens de openbaar aanklager is er sprake van "diepgaand verraad door iemand die wordt verdacht van de moord op twee mensen die hem vertrouwden en die van hem hielden". Nick Reiner is in staat van beschuldiging gesteld nadat een jury al het bewijs van de aanklager heeft gewogen en heeft geoordeeld of er genoeg bewijs is voor een rechtszaak. De jury heeft bevestigd dat dit het geval is.

Het is nog niet duidelijk wanneer de inhoudelijke behandeling start, maar de eerste sessie voorafgaand aan het proces is op 15 september. De openbaar aanklager maakt later bekend welke straf Nick Reiner wat hem betreft zou moeten krijgen.

De Amerikaanse regisseur Rob Reiner (78) en zijn vrouw Michelle (70) werden half december dood aangetroffen in hun huis in Los Angeles. Het echtpaar bleek doodgestoken met een mes. Hun 32-jarige zoon werd enkele uren later gearresteerd.

If you thought that the famous Spectre security vulns were a relic of 2018, think again. Certain RISC-V chips are still very much subject to this hair-raising hole, researchers say. Spectre refers to a family of vulnerabilities related to speculative execution, a performance optimization technique based on predicting the flow of data before instructions have been executed. Incorrect predictions get rolled back without affecting running applications but nonetheless leave traces that can be recovered and exploited to violate memory protections and access secrets. Spectre flaws have dogged x86 and ARM chips for years, leading computer scientists to develop a series of defenses, including Indirect Branch Restricted Speculation (IBRS), Indirect Branch Prediction Barrier (IBPB), and Single Thread Indirect Branch Predictor (STIBP). Researchers affiliated with academic institutions in Belgium and Germany say that it's been popular to assume that the RISC-V chip architecture isn't affected by Spectre vulnerabilities because it's too simple. That assumption is incorrect, according to a paper accepted at the 35th Usenix Security Symposium, "Spectre on RISC-V Silicon: Attacks and Defenses on Commercial Out-of-Order Processors." It says that commercially available out-of-order RISC-V processors (SiFive P550 and T-Head Xuantie C910/C920) are vulnerable to all major Spectre variants. RISC-V processors that process instructions in-order (SiFive U74, Xuantie C906, C908) do not appear to be vulnerable. Prior research has shown that RISC-V processors used for academic research (e.g. BOOM, RiscyOO, RSD, Proteus, NaxRiscv, and NutShell) can be affected by one or more of the Spectre variants, but hasn't addressed commercial silicon. "We demonstrate proof-of-concept attacks on both processors using Spectre-PHT, Spectre-BTB, SpectreRSB, and Spectre-STL, achieving up to 100 percent recall with more than 97 percent precision," the paper states. Spectre-PHT involves mistraining the Pattern History Table; Spectre-BTB poisons the Branch Target Buffer; Spectre-RSB attacks the Return Stack Buffer; and Spectre-STL (Store To Load) exploits mispredicted store-to-load forwarding. To demonstrate the risk to RISC-V, they created a proof-of-concept Spectre exploit that leaks arbitrary Linux kernel memory on the Xuantie C910 at a rate of 338 B/s. Software-based defenses have been developed for these vulnerabilities on x86 and ARM hardware. Unfortunately, the researchers say, these don't necessarily transfer. They also call out RISC-V hardware for its lack of introspection interfaces, necessary to observe and reason about microarchitectural features. In addition, the authors argue, the diversity of the RISC-V hardware ecosystem means that no single mitigation strategy is likely to be effective across all systems. "RISC-V inherits the software and threat model of mature architectures without their accumulated hardening," the authors conclude. "Closing this gap is not a matter of porting individual mitigations, but of building the architectural primitives, hardware transparency, and ecosystemwide tooling that effective Spectre defense presupposes." The authors say they disclosed their findings responsibly last December. Three of their patches have been merged into mainline Linux and two others are under review. SiFive is said to have dealt with P550-specific findings and T-Head (Alibaba) is said to have committed to publishing ad-hoc speculation barriers for their processors at some point. The authors say they decided not to delay publication because Spectre has been around for eight years now. The paper was written by Lukas Gerlach (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), Marton Bognar, (DistriNet, KU Leuven), Daniel Weber and Michael Schwarz, (CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security), and Jo Van Bulck (DistriNet, KU Leuven). ®

Soaring AI infrastructure costs and model pricing, combined with uncertain returns on investment, threaten to stall enterprise adoption. To make enterprise AI spend a bit more manageable, Nvidia this week unveiled a new software platform that blurs the line between expensive proprietary models and open weights alternatives. Announced alongside Nemotron 3.5-30B-A3B-Lightning, Nvidia’s latest open weights model, NeMo Switchyard is the GPU giant’s latest overture to enterprise. So what exactly is it? Well, it’s a router. The idea is simple. Switchyard essentially functions as a proxy that sits between the inference server’s API endpoint and the models. But rather than sending every request to the same model, Switchyard can be configured to route prompts to different models in order to optimize for cost, latency, or output quality. By routing some requests to smaller, cheaper, and potentially locally hosted AI models, Nvidia claims Switchyard can cut job completion costs by 74 percent relative to using Claude Opus 4.8 alone, albeit with an approximately six-point accuracy tradeoff. The right tool for the job The key metric in all of this is completion cost rather than price per token. A model might cost one-tenth as much as OpenAI’s or Anthropic’s top model, but if it requires 10x the tokens to complete the request, it isn't actually cheaper. Certain elements of an AI workload may benefit from a larger, smarter model, but not all do. For example, it’d be overkill to ask Claude Opus to generate a title card or summarize a website. It’ll certainly work, but it’ll also cost a fortune compared to Haiku or a locally hosted model that’s been fine tuned just for that purpose. The fewer tokens you burn on the big smart model, the less expensive your API bill is going to be. Nvidia software teams have spent the last several years developing models for this reason. The Lightning model announced this week is only its latest. The 30 billion-parameter MoE model is positioned as a low-latency, general purpose model that can either be used on its own or in conjunction with a larger, smarter model via a router like Switchyard. The company has also developed several application-specific models. Nemotron Parse is one such example. “It’s a small model, one billion parameters, and it’s really good at one task, which is taking a PDF in and then explaining the context inside that PDF whether it’s charts or graphs or tables,” Joey Conway, senior director of AI software and models at Nvidia, explained in a recent interview with The Reg. Many frontier models struggle with this task because PDFs are designed by humans for humans, so by offloading that work to task-specific models, enterprises can not only improve the accuracy of their AI apps, but also reduce costs in the process. This all might sound familiar: It's not the first time we’ve seen model routers employed as a cost-saving measure. Back when OpenAI launched GPT-5, ChatGPT would dynamically route prompts to different versions of the model based on their complexity. As we wrote at the time, OpenAI’s router was likely implemented to reduce the number of compute cycles spent on mundane tasks like rewording emails to sound more professional ("not only … but also"). OpenAI wasn't alone in using routers to reduce model costs. The Wall Street Journal recently reported that AT&T has implemented a “smart router” of its own to automatically select which model to use. Switching from proprietary to open-weight models has reportedly saved the telecommunications giant between 80 and 90 percent in certain applications. Today about 25 percent of the company’s AI workloads are powered by open models. The company’s leadership expects that over the next few years that’ll climb to 70-80 percent. The implementation challenge While the idea of offloading simpler requests to smaller, cheaper-running models sounds intuitive, it’s easier said than done. Title cards and web summaries are relatively straightforward to implement. Open source chatbots like Open WebUI have supported this kind of functionality for more than a year now because it just makes sense. However, sometimes it’s not obvious when and where these task models should be used. Switchyard is Nvidia’s latest attempt to simplify this by automatically routing requests to the right model for the job. However, it’s not the only approach Nvidia is exploring. AI agents and code assistants have the ability to work through problems and then generate skills — essentially standard operating procedures — documenting the process for future reference. Through this iterative process, Conway suggests, agents could essentially teach themselves when and where they can get away with using a smaller, cheaper task model, and where a larger frontier model may be required. “We’re starting to see signs of this sort of agent and subagent type workflow,” Conway said, describing how a frontier model might function as an orchestrator that farms out work to smaller models that are faster and more specialized. It reflects the way companies are structured, he said. “We have people who are specialists and then we have people who help orchestrate that and understand the complexity of the problem.” As an added step, it’s possible for the agents to generate training data on the fly, which could then be used to fine-tune the models to operate more efficiently. Regardless of which approach ultimately wins out, anything that promotes enterprise AI adoption is a win for Nvidia. ®

Een historisch moment, woensdagavond 20:11 uur: de zon verdween voor 88 procent achter de maan. Het was hét hoogtepunt van de zonsverduistering, maar lang niet iedereen in Rotterdam kon daar met volle teugen van genieten. Bezoekers van de Laurenskerk zagen zelfs even niets meer toen de zon net op dat moment achter de 155 meter hoge woontoren POST dook.

I’m Done Using AI. “It made me lazy. It made me stop caring. It made me a worse programmer. It made me depressed. Because I stopped doing the hard work, I stopped learning, I stopped growing, I stopped being the one making the software.”

... and all week long we'll be revisiting ways we've mortified ourselves at work. Five posts are up so far this year, and there are several pages of archives if you want more. At a site as kind, clear-eyed, and encouraging as Ask A Manager, a round-up of rueful recountings of hilarious mistakes becomes something warm and very human. My favorite so far this year is the judge. Previously. Previouslier.

Fabio Bruna posted a photo:

Nog **19** dagen tot de oplevering :) KJ, Den Haag.

Reykjavík, Iceland, falls into complete darkness as the solar eclipse reaches totality on 12 August

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Summerhall, Edinburgh
Set in purgatory, Emma Howlett’s two-hander rethinks the national intrigue with 5 November

Never play with matches is good advice – especially when gunpowder is involved. That the historical figures of Thomas and Robert Wintour begin this two-hander testing each other’s capacity to endure a naked flame suggests they have a high tolerance for risk. It is not clear if there are still explosives lying around, but they should know better.

Not that it matters any more. These two Catholic brothers have sussed they must be in purgatory, their plot to blow up parliament having been foiled. Their accounts of what happened next are fuzzy, but they both remember being sentenced to death. They are not happy about their fate, but feel even more sympathy for the mercenary stooge known as Guy Fawkes, who has had to carry the can.

At Summerhall, Edinburgh, until 31 August

All our Edinburgh festival reviews

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A German digital-rights group has filed a criminal complaint against Meta, Ray-Ban parent EssilorLuxottica, and several retailers over Meta's AI smart glasses, arguing the devices can enable covert recording in violation of German privacy law. Prosecutors have begun a preliminary review, while Germany's network regulator says smart glasses are legal "as long as the recording function is clearly visible." Reuters reports: "There's no place to escape from smart glasses. You have to expect at any moment to be filmed and then exposed on the internet," said HateAid managing director Josephine Ballon. The organization reported the management of Meta, units of spectacles maker EssilorLuxottica including Ray-Ban, as well as retailers Fielmann, Apollo-Optik, Mister Spex and MediaMarkt to the Frankfurt-based digital crime prosecution unit ZIT. HateAid said its complaint was based on a federal digital data protection law that prohibits the sale of communication devices designed to film people without them noticing.

ZIT confirmed it received a complaint from HateAid invoking that law, saying it would routinely investigate on a preliminary basis whether there are grounds for a deeper probe. MediaMarktSaturn Retail Group said it was taking the complaint very seriously, adding that its suppliers had contractual obligations for all goods to be compliant with the law. Mister Spex said it had not been officially notified of a complaint and that it was taking protection of privacy very seriously.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Ja we onderbreken het StamCafé over Europees voetbal om het te hebben over NEDERLANDS VOETBAL. We dachten even dat we een Spanjool zouden krijgen als bondscoach maar gelukkig wordt het een: Spanjool. Een andere Spanjool dan Roberto Marinez, dat wel. Xavi Hernandez is de nieuwe bondscoach van Oranje en volgt daarmee Koning kabbelvoetbalkoning Koeman op, net zoals eerder bij Barcelona. Xavi mag Oranje het tiki taka-voetbal van Barca bijbrengen, omdat hij als voetballer zo goed was in tiki taka-voetbal. Het enige nadeel van Xavi is dat hij als trainer iets minder goed was in tiki taka-voetbal. Maar dat had vast te maken met de kneuzenselectie van Barcelona destijds, nu krijgt hij bij het Nederlands Elftal allemaal sterren die Barcelona helemaal niet heeft. Frenkie de Jong bijvoorbeeld. We roepen het maar vast: we worden wereldkampioen, na eerst het EK te hebben gewonnen. Vamos Xavi!

Loneshore is een Braziliaanse doom/death metal band. Straylight komt van hun laatste album, dat dit jaar verscheen en dat de inspirerende titel Nothing Left to Deconstruct draagt. Alleraardigste muziek!