Een Precies Vier bestaat uit 16 woorden, begrippen of namen, die moeten worden verdeeld in precies vier groepen van vier. Er is telkens maar één oplossing mogelijk. Welke woorden vormen een connectie?

Wie of wat staat er midden in het nieuws? Een actuele puzzel, die makkelijker is als je het nieuws een beetje volgt.

Als je wel zin hebt om te sudokuen, maar het liever bij een gridje van 5x5 houdt.

Fat Burns ☮ has added a photo to the pool:

Many thanks for your visits, faves and comments. Cheers.

Brolga
Grus rubicunda
Gruidae
One of the most obvious features of the Brolga’s behaviour is its courtship display, an elaborate dance. The dance begins with a pair of birds picking up grass, tossing it into the air and catching it again. This is followed by the birds repeatedly leaping a metre into the air with wings outstretched, followed by stretching their necks upwards, bowing to one another, bobbing their heads, walking about and calling. Sometimes the dance is done alone or in a group, with the birds lining up opposite one another.
Description: The Brolga is a large grey crane, with a featherless red head and grey crown. The legs are grey and there is a black dewlap under the chin. Females are shorter than males. The energetic dance performed by the Brolga is a spectacular sight. Displays may be given at any time of the year and by birds of any age.
Similar Species: The Sarus Crane, G. antigone, another species of crane found in Australia, can be identified by its dull pink legs and the red of its head extending down the neck.
Distribution: The Brolga is found across tropical northern Australia, southwards through north-east and east central areas, as well as central New South Wales to western Victoria.
Habitat: The Brolga inhabits large open wetlands, grassy plains, coastal mudflats and irrigated croplands and, less frequently, mangrove-studded creeks and estuaries. It is less common in arid and semi-arid regions, but will occur close to water.
Feeding: Brolgas are omnivorous (feeding on both vegetable and animal matter), but primarily feed upon tubers and some crops. Some insects, molluscs, amphibians and even mice are also taken.
Breeding: Brolgas probably mate for life, and pair bonds are strengthened during elaborate courtship displays, which involve much dancing, leaping, wing-flapping and loud trumpeting. An isolated territory is established, and is vigorously defended by both partners. The white (blotched with brown and purple) eggs are laid in a single clutch. The nest is a large mound of vegetation on a small island in a shallow waterway or swamp. Both adults incubate the eggs and care for the young birds.
(Source: www.birdlife.org.au/bird-profile/brolga)
__________________________________________

© Chris Burns 2026

All rights reserved.

This image may not be copied, reproduced, distributed, republished, downloaded, displayed, posted or transmitted in any form or by any means, including electronic, mechanical, photocopying and recording without my written consent.

The 35th USENIX Security Symposium (USS), which takes place next week in Baltimore, Maryland, hit an all-time high for paper submissions. While some of that increase has been aided by the availability of AI tools, those managing the conference say abuses were minimal due to defensive measures. But they're also trying not to look too closely in order to preserve trust within the security research community. "This year's conference has received ~3,030 valid submissions (~1,280 in Cycle 1 and ~1,750 in Cycle 2)," explained Ben Stock, tenured faculty at the CISPA Helmholtz Center for Information Security and USS program co-chair, in an email to The Register. "This is up from the previous year, which had ~2,400 submissions in total." Stock said that the entire security community has seen growth of this sort and pointed to the Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), which saw its paper submission count jump from 694 in 2024 to 1,311 in 2025 and 1,481 this year. "So, I would not call the growth unprecedented, even though the number of submissions has reached a high point compared to previous years," he said. "This is something we had expected and scaled our Program Committee (PC) accordingly." Sussing out unacceptable uses of AI A paper published in April, "More Versus Better: Artificial Intelligence, Incentives, and the Emerging Crisis in Peer Review," found that since the release of ChatGPT in 2022, submission volume at major academic journals has increased 42 percent. In the USENIX Security '26 transparency report, issued in January between the first and second paper submission cycles, Stock and fellow co-chair Elissa Redmiles, assistant professor of computer science at Georgetown University, detail how they've developed tools and policies to account for the possibility of AI usage, both for paper submissions and in paper reviews. "The proliferation of readily-available LLMs to aid in writing and developing code is not unknown to the community," their report says. "However, we see an alarming trend of AI usage in key areas of the scientific process. Therefore, we took actions against two types of identifiable actions which violate the scientific process in our minds: non-existing (possibly hallucinated) references and usage of AI in the review process." After identifying and rejecting a paper that contained nonexistent references, the report explains, the conference organizers developed tooling "to extract references from the submitted PDFs, query well-known sources such as DBLP and arXiv, and manually confirm invalid references." The org rejected papers containing three or more hallucinated references, a policy that impacted 21 of the 1,181 first round submissions (1.78 percent). "We have rejected papers for the repeated presence of nonexistent references," said Stock. "We cannot say with certainty that these were AI-hallucinated, but nevertheless considered these papers to be problematic and thus rejected them." The report notes that more than 100 additional papers contained at least one reference that reviewers could not confirm. Aware that some of these might simply be false positives due to name spelling differences or missing citations, conference officials opted not to investigate these in order not to further burden staff. Conference organizers draw the line at using AI for bibliography preparation. "We believe that it is critical to halt this trend that threatens scientific integrity before it grows further," the report states. However, limited use of AI to polish human-written text is expected, and that extends to those reviewing submitted papers, up to a point. "We have not set a dedicated AI policy, but have made it clear to our PC members that usage of [AI] services to write reviews is not permitted, in particular also because this violates confidentiality," said Stock. "We have detected a tiny number of cases where we have reached sufficient confidence that AI was used and took appropriate actions, including removal of the members from the PC and allowing affected authors to resubmit." Under that policy, USS asked five of 496 reviewers to cease participation. "We have not seen evidence that leads us to believe that AI generated submissions have become a significant challenge for the security community," said Stock. "This does not mean that AI hasn't been used in parts of these submissions, though." ®

....getting very close to people

Weer voor Rotterdam 🌕 - 07-08-2026 01:16 CEST

In één oogopslag:
• 17.5°C · Helder 🌕 | Min 17.5°C / Max 22.3°C | Kans op neerslag 1%

Verwachting voor vandaag:
• Min 17.5°C, Max 22.3°C (Gedeeltelijk bewolkt) ⛅, Kans op neerslag 1%, 🧭 1023.4 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 20.2 km/u (5.6 m/s), richting: → 276°

Uurlijkse voorspelling voor de komende 12 uur:

• 02:00: 17.4°C (Helder) 🌕, 🧭 1023.5 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 7.9 km/u (2.2 m/s), richting: → 289°
• 03:00: 17.3°C (Helder) 🌕, 🧭 1023.6 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 7.2 km/u (2.0 m/s), richting: → 284°
• 04:00: 17.2°C (Helder) 🌕, 🧭 1023.6 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 7.2 km/u (2.0 m/s), richting: → 274°
• 05:00: 17.0°C (Helder) 🌕, 🧭 1023.5 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 6.5 km/u (1.8 m/s), richting: → 286°
• 06:00: 17.0°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1023.5 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 6.1 km/u (1.7 m/s), richting: → 281°
• 07:00: 17.1°C (Zonnig) ☀️, 🧭 1023.5 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 6.5 km/u (1.8 m/s), richting: → 290°
• 08:00: 18.1°C (Zonnig) ☀️, 🧭 1023.7 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 6.5 km/u (1.8 m/s), richting: ↘ 313°
• 09:00: 18.9°C (Zonnig) ☀️, 🧭 1024.0 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 6.1 km/u (1.7 m/s), richting: ↘ 317°
• 10:00: 19.8°C (Gedeeltelijk bewolkt) ⛅, 🧭 1024.2 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 5.0 km/u (1.4 m/s), richting: ↘ 335°
• 11:00: 20.8°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1024.3 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 6.8 km/u (1.9 m/s), richting: → 291°
• 12:00: 21.5°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 1%, 🧭 1024.1 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 8.6 km/u (2.4 m/s), richting: ↘ 303°
• 13:00: 22.3°C (Gedeeltelijk bewolkt) ⛅, Kans op neerslag 3%, 🧭 1023.8 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 11.2 km/u (3.1 m/s), richting: ↘ 303°

Voorspelling voor de komende dagen:

• zaterdag 08 augustus: Min 17.0°C, Max 23.4°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 2%, 🧭 1021.1 hPa ↘️ -2.3 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 12.6 km/u (3.5 m/s), richting: ↘ 327°
• zondag 09 augustus: Min 16.0°C, Max 27.6°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1015.3 hPa ↘️ -5.8 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 12.6 km/u (3.5 m/s), richting: ← 85°
• maandag 10 augustus: Min 19.7°C, Max 28.7°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 1%, 🧭 1017.0 hPa ↗️ +1.7 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 12.6 km/u (3.5 m/s), richting: → 257°
• dinsdag 11 augustus: Min 17.0°C, Max 24.6°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 2%, 🧭 1023.8 hPa ↗️ +6.8 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 14.8 km/u (4.1 m/s), richting: ↘ 319°
• woensdag 12 augustus: Min 15.5°C, Max 23.2°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1023.0 hPa ↘️ -0.8 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 12.1 km/u (3.4 m/s), richting: ↙ 58°
• donderdag 13 augustus: Min 15.9°C, Max 27.8°C (Zonnig) ☀️, 🧭 1020.5 hPa ↘️ -2.5 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 13.3 km/u (3.7 m/s), richting: ← 93°

Details:
• 🌡️ Huidige temperatuur (om 01:15): 17.5°C (Helder)
• 🤚 Gevoelstemperatuur: 16.3°C (-1.2°C)
• 💨 Windsnelheid: 8.3 km/u (2.3 m/s), richting: ↘ 298°
• 🌬️ Windstoten: 14.0 km/h (3.9 m/s)
• 💧 Luchtvochtigheid: 64%
• 🧭 Luchtdruk: 1023.5 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/3h
• 👁️ Zichtbaarheid: 23.2 km
• ☀️ UV-index: 0.0
• 🌅 Zonsopgang: 06:12 · 🌇 Zonsondergang: 21:23

Luchtkwaliteit:
• AQI: 33 🟢 (Goed)
• PM2.5: 5.1 μg/m³
• PM10: 10.6 μg/m³

Gegevens geleverd door Open-Meteo

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

Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich used Claude to build a gloriously impractical setup that runs Doom in the background and pastes each rendered frame into Microsoft Paint through the Windows clipboard. The project is referred to as "DoomPaint" or "MS Paint Doom" on GitHub. The Register reports: To be clear, Microsoft Paint isn't doing anything other than serving as a place to paste from the game. [...] ViZDoom runs the Doom .wad file and renders it headlessly. Each frame is passed through the Windows clipboard and pasted onto Paint's canvas. A low-level keyboard hook captures and swallows game inputs while Paint is in the foreground, and sound effects come from the game engine.

A glance at the code shows Russinovich was more than happy to use Claude to whip it up. In a LinkedIn post, he said: "I've been using Fable 5 on serious research projects and find it a noticeable improvement over Opus 4.8." Using Microsoft Paint as a display for Doom is not, however, a serious research project, as Russinovich acknowledged. "I've also been having fun with it on frivolous ones," he added, so here we are. "Paint renders the game but does not compute it," said Russinovich. "Paint computes nothing. Paint has never computed anything. That's the joke."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI researchers say multiple AI agents secretly created an internal message board to share hacking techniques, eventually finding ways around restrictions, exploiting a zero-day, and helping two models breach Hugging Face without human prompting. "This is a pivotal moment both for our company as well as the AI industry as a whole," Michael Dalton, one of the AI-maker's researchers, said during a presentation at the Black Hat cybersecurity conference in Las Vegas, Nevada. Politico reports: Dalton and Eric Wallace, another OpenAI researcher, said Wednesday the AI giant recently learned that multiple agents it was testing simultaneously began communicating over an internal message board in early May. There, different models shared advice about how to accomplish difficult hacking challenges they were struggling to surmount, including workarounds that required internet access. Two OpenAI models ultimately strung together a series of sophisticated techniques to gain access to the internet and worm their way inside Hugging Face in mid-July. OpenAI has said the models were focused on completing a hacking evaluation they were prompted to solve, and that correct answers could be found on the AI developer platform.

The OpenAI researchers told conference attendees that since early May, the models created a message board inside OpenAI's Artifactory internal file system. Without the company's knowledge, the models spent months independently exchanging information and techniques to help each other complete difficult tasks. Wallace said that when models get stuck, they often "try to game or cheat the task in order to get their reward." "The beginning of this incident kind of traces back to this point where one agent realized it could communicate by uploading a note," he added. By late May, one model found a way to abuse Artifactory's internet access to retrieve files from various websites -- effectively giving the models indirect access to the internet. In June, the models were able to find and exploit a previously unknown zero-day vulnerability to gain administrative privileges on Artifactory, install remote software and expand their activity within the system.

These efforts eventually overloaded Artifactory, causing a system-wide outage in early July that alerted OpenAI's engineers to the ploy. After investigating, the company revoked the model's credentials, removed the message board and worked with Artifactory to fix any gaps before resuming training. But the models found another way to communicate inside Artifactory just days later and continued exchanging techniques to target additional vulnerabilities within OpenAI's infrastructure and external systems, including Hugging Face.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

hiroki.sato has added a photo to the pool:

hiroki.sato has added a photo to the pool:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

BertvB posted a photo:

A striking and symmetrical macro portrait showing the underside of a Stingray (Dasyatidae), captured inside the aquarium at Artis Zoo, Amsterdam.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

• Brazil international has agreed a new six-year deal

• ‘Eight years at the Bernabéu are too few,’ says Vinícius

Vinícius Júnior has ended summer speculation over his future by agreeing a new six-year contract with Real Madrid. Arsenal had been heavily linked with a move for the Brazil international, who had entered the final 12 months of his deal at the Bernabéu.

A tumultuous 2025-26 campaign in which Real failed to win a trophy and initial uncertainty after the arrival of José Mourinho in Madrid alerted the Premier League champions, but Vinícius has now committed his long-term future to the Spanish club.

Continue reading...

110 years ago, Thomas Lupo’s grandfather opened the American Wood Column Corporation in Brooklyn’s Williamsburg neighborhood. Specializing in architectural woodwork including decorative moulding, columns, balusters, corbels, and more, the historic family-owned company is shutting down after more than a century. A new documentary directed and produced by filmmaker and photographer Joshua Charrow takes viewers on one final walk-through of the factory.

A vast collection of about 6,000 handmade wooden molds—many of them reverse carved molds—cover the walls and correspond to numbered samples for reference. “My grandfather bought these molds used, and they were used,” Lupo explains. “So they’ve got to be over 200 years old.”

Throughout the film, Charrow follows Lupo around the building, documenting the owner’s favorite pieces and timeless anecdotes. Among these works are six-foot pencils, ornamental department store columns, set designs from Saturday Night Live, grave details from The Godfather, The Exorcist stairway, and more.

Filled with family stories and nostalgic memories of growing up inside a woodworking studio, Lupo is cognizant of the fact that he, too, is growing older. His team, who has been with him for close to 40 years, believe it’s also time to retire gracefully. “I will be closing down the business. It’s not a question of if, it’s a question of when. That’s all.” he says. “Like anything else, everything changes. Time goes on.”

Watch the full video on YouTube.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article New York City’s Last Standing Wood Column Company Closes After 110 Years appeared first on Colossal.