WASHINGTON (ANP/RTR) - De gesprekken tussen de Russische gezant Kirill Dmitriëv en Amerikaanse functionarissen over het beëindigen van de oorlog in Oekraïne waren "constructief", aldus een Amerikaanse functionaris. Tijdens de ontmoeting zijn ook potentiële energie-initiatieven tussen de Verenigde Staten en Rusland na de oorlog besproken.
Dmitriëv, de gezant van de Russische president Vladimir Poetin, ontmoette maandag tijdens zijn bezoek vertegenwoordigers van het Amerikaanse ministerie van Financiën en het ministerie van Energie.
Vrijdag zei het Kremlin nog dat mogelijk binnenkort een ontmoeting tussen de VS, Rusland en Oekraïne zal plaatsvinden. Tijdens de ontmoeting zouden de landen het beëindigen van de oorlog tussen Rusland en Oekraïne bespreken.
Ook ontmoetten vorige week de Amerikaanse president Donald Trump en de Oekraïense president Volodymyr Zelensky elkaar in New York. Ze bespraken tijdens de ontmoeting een mogelijk staakt-het-vuren op energiedoelen.
DEN HAAG (ANP) - Een groep van 25 brancheverenigingen uit de retail, reisbranche, cultuurbranche, horeca, gastvrijheidsbranche en dienstverleningssector is een petitie gestart voor behoud van een regeling voor personeelskorting. In het Belastingplan 2027 staat het voorstel om deze regeling te schrappen. Volgens de deelnemende brancheorganisaties komt deze arbeidsvoorwaarde in gevaar voor honderdduizenden werknemers.
Met de petitie vragen de organisaties de Tweede Kamer om het kabinetsvoorstel niet over te nemen en te kiezen voor een alternatief dat medewerkers en werkgevers ontziet. "Deze regeling werkt uitstekend voor werkgevers en werknemers en heeft heel veel waarde. Het is schrijnend dat deze mooie arbeidsvoorwaarde geschrapt dreigt te worden", aldus de gemeenschappelijke verklaring. De organisaties denken ook dat het schrappen van de fiscale regeling leidt tot meer discussies met de Belastingdienst.
De regeling maakt het mogelijk om medewerkers een onbelaste korting te geven op producten die het bedrijf normaal zelf verkoopt.
HOUTEN (ANP) - Niet eerder was het op een weerstation in Nederland zo warm op 29 september als dinsdag in Maastricht. Daar werd om 14.20 uur een temperatuur van 28,1 graden gemeten, meldt Weeronline. Daarmee is het record uit 1934 verbroken: toen werd het op 29 september 28,0 graden in Winterswijk.
Het is nog niet officieel de warmste 29 september ooit gemeten. Daarvoor is de temperatuur op het officiële hoofdstation in De Bilt leidend. Ook het record daar dateert uit 1934, met een temperatuur van 25,4 graden.
Normaal is het in deze periode ongeveer 17 graden. De huidige warmte komt vooral door de wind uit het zuiden, die warme lucht vanuit Zuid-Europa naar Nederland vervoert.
Door de opwarming van de aarde worden met grote regelmaat temperatuurrecords verbroken. De tien warmste jaren ooit gemeten in Nederland waren allemaal in de 21e eeuw. De temperaturen in ons land liggen nu zo'n 2,5 graden warmer dan aan het begin van de 20e eeuw.
ROTTERDAM (ANP) - De 24-jarige Amsterdammer die is aangehouden in het onderzoek naar hackersgroep ShinyHunters, wordt ook verdacht van het geven van twee moordopdrachten in het buitenland. Dat meldt de politie, die het heeft over een "poging tot uitlokking van twee moorden".
Op de laptop van de verdachte zou informatie zijn aangetroffen over de moordplannen. De verdenking staat los van het onderzoek naar ShinyHunters. De verdachte blijft voorlopig vastzitten; zijn voorarrest is met negentig dagen verlengd. Het onderzoek gaat verder.
DEN HAAG (ANP) - Mensen die moeite hebben met het betalen van hun energierekening kunnen vanaf begin volgend jaar steun vanuit het Noodfonds Energie aanvragen. Dat meldt minister Hans Vijlbrief (Sociale Zaken en Werkgelegenheid, D66) dinsdag in een Kamerbrief. "We nemen de hogere energieprijzen van het nieuwe jaar mee om ervoor te zorgen dat mensen geen geld mislopen", aldus de bewindsman.
De aanvraagperiode loopt van 4 januari tot en met 7 mei. Zij krijgen dan binnen een paar weken te horen hoeveel geld ze krijgen en wanneer ze dat kunnen verwachten. Vanaf donderdag kunnen mensen al bij het noodfonds terecht voor vragen.
De bijna 200 miljoen euro uit het fonds is bedoeld voor huishoudens met een laag inkomen en een hoge energierekening. Vijlbrief verwacht dat zo'n 500.000 mensen hier gebruik van zullen maken. Hij benadrukt nogmaals dat iedereen die recht heeft op geld uit het fonds dat ook krijgt. Mensen krijgen in totaal minimaal 120 euro en maximaal 1800 euro.
Waarom steunen mensen in zo groten getale extreemrechtse partijen? Maxim Februari probeert te snappen waar al die geestdrift voor antidemocratische beloftes vandaan komt.
Veel grote AI-bedrijven pleiten voor regulering, internationale coördinatie en beter toezicht om de ontwikkeling van hun technologie beheersbaar te houden. Critici zien daarin een weigering van die concerns om verantwoordelijkheid te nemen voor een groeiend aantal vergaande hacks van hun AI-agents.
In 1955 verfilmde Elia Kazan de klassieke roman van John Steinbeck. Nu waagt zijn kleindochter zich aan een serie, die draait om de moorddadige bordeelhouder Cathy, onvergetelijk gespeeld door Florence Pugh.
The current El Nino has already surpassed the highest Pacific temperature anomaly recorded in the modern era, reaching 3.05C above the 1991-2020 average months before its expected peak. The commonly used ONI measure is also on the verge of breaking the 2015 record. Forecasts cited by The Guardian suggest the event could reach about 4.0C later this year. From the report: The latest data shows the temperature rise at the heart of El Nino in the Pacific Ocean has now reached 3.05C. That is higher than the 3.02C set in late November 2015, the previous high set in the 150 years of modern records. This temperature is measured against the average of 1991-2020. The preferred measure of most meteorologists uses a 30-year rolling average as a reference and so takes account of human-caused global heating. This metric, called ONI (Nino3.4), is on the brink of breaking the record, just one-hundredth of a degree below the 2015 record. Both metrics are underpinned by data from the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
The most recent forecasts predict a peak of 4.0C in November and December, according to the average of 14 different models assessed by climate scientist Zeke Hausfather. That is a level so far above previous events that Hausfather called it "mind-blowing," while others have described it as "Godzilla-level." Any temperature rise above 0.5C is deemed an El Nino; above 2C is officially called a "very strong" El Nino -- often referred to as a "super" El Nino. The current El Nino is likely to be the largest in at least 1,000 years and will pile extra heat into an atmosphere in which temperatures are already rising rapidly due to human-caused global heating. This double whammy means 2027 is expected to "blow apart" previous records and become the hottest year ever recorded.
In 1971, self-appointed mayor Hondo Crouch turned the Texan town into a rural respite for country stars. Soon it was immortalised in chart-topping songs – and became a symbol of a simpler American life
In the summer of 1973, the US country singer Jerry Jeff Walker was in the middle of nowhere, recording his soon-to-be-classic album ¡Viva Terlingua!. A crowd was packed to the rafters in an old dancehall 70 miles west of Austin, in Luckenbach, Texas. An extension lead ran from the hall to a recording truck outside. After everyone had gone home that night, Walker stood in the street and said to Hondo Crouch, Luckenbach’s self-appointed mayor: “I wonder what we just did.”
When Crouch had bought the town two years prior, its population was just three people – and according to the most recent census in 2021, it’s back at the same number. But in the 1970s, this ramshackle town thrived as Walker and his peers headed there, and Luckenbach became one of the most improbable yet important centres for country music.
When transnational alliances have scarcely been weaker, the way the club was allegedly run offers a bleak vision of a world driven by brute power and wealth
The cache of leaked emails and documents that would eventually lead to the crisis in which Manchester City are now embroiled was published by Der Spiegel in 2018, and often it was the tone of the club’s communications that was as startling as their content. Of City chairman Khaldoon al-Mubarak, a trusted adviser to the royal family of the United Arab Emirates, it was said that he would “rather spend 30 million on the 50 best lawyers in the world to sue [Uefa] for the next 10 years” than accept a fine.
In the same tranche of documents, City lawyer Simon Cliff asserts that “Uefa doesn’t respond to anything other than aggression”, and threatens the governing body of European football – who were pursuing City over alleged financial irregularities at the time – with “the destruction of their rules and organisation”.
Demeter is a graphic identity and packaging design project created in collaboration with artist and designer Matthew Fisher. The project encompassed logo, editorial, and packaging design, as well as a series of hand-drawn illustrations, all aimed at creating a product that evokes nostalgia, romance, and timelessness.
In the wake of her divorce, Curtis Sittenfeld revisits her 2015 piece on marriage. “Toward the end, I felt as if the best versions of ourselves had married and the worst versions of ourselves were getting divorced.”
Some tech workers in San Francisco hooked up ChatGPT to a Toyota Corolla and got it to drive around a parking lot. This may not sound impressive in the age of the self-driving car until you realize that the LLM driving the car was a general purpose chatbot running on a laptop and not the purpose-built driving system based on millions of hours of training data used by Waymo or Tesla.
The people behind the stunt call themselves DrivingBench and they’ve posted their code, their prompts, and videos of the experiment online. In the experiment, DrivingBench hooked up GPT-6 Astra, Claude Fable 5.1, Grok 4.6, and GPT-5.6 Sol to a Toyota Corolla and gave the LLMs control over the car’s steering, accelerator, and brakes. Then they set up a small cone course in a public parking lot and prompted the chatbots to navigate the space.
The goal, they said, was to find out if untrained, off-the-shelf frontier AIs can drive a real car. The results were mixed. Grok, Sol, and Fable only drove a few meters and didn’t finish the course. GPT-6 Astra, however, did eventually learn to navigate the course and complete it. But not without a lot of troubleshooting.
DrivingBench is Aditya Ramabadran, Tobias Gessler, and Simon Mahns — three Bay Area tech workers who met at their day job at Axiom Math, an AI math startup. During a call with all three members of DrivingBench, Ramabadran told 404 Media that the idea for hooking up chatbots to a car happened when the three of them were hanging out at an ice cream shop one weekend.
“This is after we saw a bunch of demos of Astra and models like Fable being able to do a lot of robotic things that LLMs can not do out of the box before, such as do a painting or move objects or even some 3D and Blender demos that showed a level of spatial reasoning we hadn’t seen from LLMs before,” he said. “We just thought: ‘Is there a way we can get LLMs to drive a car now?”
Why driving a car? To prove that it’s possible and, they said, to create a new benchmark for LLMs performing tasks in the real world. “The point wasn't to show that it's practical for you to plug ChatGPT into your car and have it drive you places. It's probably very unlikely that the labs have trained specifically for this or have IRL environments that involve both the models driving a real car,” Ramabadran said. “It would be pretty shocking, I think, for people to see that these models are good enough now that they can actually drive a vehicle in real life, even if it's just on some cone course at low speeds in a parking lot.”
After brainstorming at the ice cream shop, they decided to get a car and sent Gessler to rent a Toyota Corolla. They didn’t tell the rental car company they planned to hook chatbots up to the vehicle and drive it through an obstacle course. The team used Comma — an off-the-shelf system that allows users to install a self-driving system on unsupported cars — to get the car to communicate with a laptop running the LLMs. Comma had two cameras pointed at the road feeding data back to the Chatbot.
“It’s pretty easy to install. The Toyota Corolla is one of the most popular for this Comma kit, that’s why we chose it,” Gessler said. “The good thing about their system is that it’s open source [...] so it’s easy for us to go in and modify it because we need to hook up the car somehow to our LLMs.”
Comma looks like a dashcam.. Users attach it to their windshield and it continually watches the road, recording video, integrating with the car’s electrical systems and sensors, and providing a rudimentary kind of self-driving. The National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration announced an investigation into Comma last week after two car crashes involving the system killed three people.
For DrivingBench, Comma was an easy way to get their car talking to a chabot. “We had one person on the driver's seat with the laptop or a passenger seat prompting the LLM,” Gessler said. “And then the person who drives it has to press a button on the steering wheel to give the car the command to start, and then from there it's basically just monitoring the car and checking that the model doesn't crash into a wall or something.”
“And we have the foot over the brake, just in case,” Mahns cut in.
We gave ChatGPT, Claude, and Grok control of a real Toyota Corolla 🚗, steering/gas/brakes, no human driving (just a foot over the brake).
Only one model was able to complete our entire driving course. Introducing DrivingBench. 🔥⌛️🏁 pic.twitter.com/HhukXrByus
DrivingBench’s prompt is on its website and runs fewer than 600 words. “Your objective is to drive through the course (in a backwards-U-shaped parking lot) and stay between the cones,” the prompt said. “Your finish line is a wide "parking spot" marked by numerous BLUE mini-cones at the very end; finish by parking in this area. You will be evaluated primarily by how far you get in the course (without leaving the boundaries/collisions), but a secondary objective is to complete the course in less time.” The rest of the prompt is made up of specific instructions about the physical limitations of the Corolla and the parking lot.
The problems with the project started before the car had moved an inch. When the LLMs recognized the team had prompted them to drive a car, most refused. “Specifically with Astra, it would refuse to drive the car in a lot of situations and we would have to change our prompt and rename things through hours of iteration to get it to consistently drive the car,” Ramabadran said.
“We tried calling it a simulation, which worked like some percentage of the time, but then other times they would see the images and see, oh, ‘I'm in a real parking lot, these people are just lying to me,’” he said. “We ended up having to call everything a sandbox. And with that prompt, it's able to consistently drive the car and like never refuse to do that.”
Other problems were more pedestrian and led to delays which forced Gessler to extend the rental on the Corolla. Finding a parking lot held them up several times. “We went to high schools, churches, and community centers. We got kicked out a couple of times,” Mahns said.
The first place to ask them to leave was a church. “Rightfully so. We just commandeered the entire parking lot and they had an event starting. So they were like: ‘Hey, you get permission to do this? And then we're like: ‘We can pack up right now,’” Mahns said.
They also got kicked out of the parking lot of an office building. “We took a corner and then a security guard was like: ‘Hey, you’re taking like one quarter of the parking lot. Do you have permission?’ And then we’re like: ‘Not really.’ So then we’d pack up. We didn’t try to cause any issues,” Mahns said.
“The people that kicked us out were super chill about it,” Ramabadran added.
Coding the software also slowed things down. The first time DrivingBench set out to do this, they vibe coded the bridging software between the LLMs and Comma. “A true and funny story is that we tried to get Astra to one shot some code and then it was pure slop. So we had to restart from a new design,” Mahns said, adding that this pointed to the limits of these frontier models. “It can’t just autonomously do this because it made thousands and thousands of lines of slop.” They said that Astra’s first attempt at writing the software created a 200,000 line repository.
Parking lots were scarce, the software was vibe coded, the chatbots fought the experiment, and only one of them completed the course. But Mahns is still excited about the results. “It's an interesting demonstration of potential emergent capabilities,” he said. “It can fail a turn, and then the next turn, next try, it will be able to do that turn and other turns that it hasn't seen before. Not necessarily saying LLMs are gonna put Waymo out of business or something, just an interesting demonstration of where things are, and things are just moving fast.”
Mahns added that these kinds of experiments are good because LLMs will increasingly affect things in the real world and not just on our screens. “Most people that are familiar with ChatGPT have used it in this white collar, kind of like in the computer, and it's definitely imminent to the point that this capability will start having more impact in the physical world,” he said. “So I think seeing the sparks of this happening, the shift of this utility coming into the physical world, is also somewhat exciting.”
Focusing on latency and testing high consequence tasks were key for Ramabadran. “These models [...] it can take like 20 seconds to think and give a response. And if you imagine, even if you're driving at like 2mph, which is like one meter per second, if you take 10 seconds to think, you've moved like 10 meters. And if you're driving 10 meters blind, that's pretty bad,” he said. “And I think it's cool that we have a benchmark where latency is part of the benchmark.”
Geweldig nieuws voor iedereen die binnenkort wordt vervangen door AI. Uw WW-uitkering wordt niet verkort, uw dagvergoeding blijft even hoog en als het even meezit hoeft u de komende tijd ook Hans Spekman niet meer aan tafel bij een talkshow te zien waarin hij geen vragen krijgt over het optreden van Volkert van der Graaf bij FNV-manifestaties: er lijkt een DEAL aanstaande tussen PRO en de minderheidscoalitie. Geweldig onderhandeld door de VVD, die per se niet met PRO in de regering wilde, en daarom nu in een regering zit die alles doet wat PRO wil. Er wordt ook ergens een tiende procentpunt verschoven voor de hoge inkomens en de box 3 faalhazen hebben een plan om met de box 3 faalhazerij te stoppen, zodat Joost Eerdmans ook iets van een overwinning (maar op wie dan) kan claimen. Het kan wél, gefeliciteerd allemaal, dit wordt geweldig, iedereen gratis bier, over 15 jaar horen we vast eens een keer wie eigenlijk het bonnetje betaalt. UPDATE: NOS heeft meer, box 3 faalhazerij voor JA21 onacceptabel
:format(jpeg):fill(f8f8f8,true)/s3/static.nrc.nl/taxonomy/25b53c9-Februari%2520Maxim%25202025%252004%25201280.png)
/s3/static.nrc.nl/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/28145523/ECO_2037034497_1.jpg)
/s3/static.nrc.nl/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/18090750/290926CUL_2036783481_east2.jpg)
