mukao has added a photo to the pool:

Teruhide Tomori has added a photo to the pool:

Location : Taira, Tango-cho, Kyotango-shi, Kyoto pref.

丹後半島 鬢櫛（びんぐし） / 京都府京丹後市丹後町平

banzainetsurfer has added a photo to the pool:

Obanazawa, Yamagata Prefecture, Japan

banzainetsurfer has added a photo to the pool:

Obanazawa, Yamagata Prefecture, Japan

WASHINGTON (ANP/RTR) - De Amerikaanse president Donald Trump heeft aangekondigd dat TrumpRx.gov nu ook generieke medicijnen zal gaan aanbieden. TrumpRx.gov is een door de overheid gesteunde website die kortingen biedt op receptgeneesmiddelen.

"Ik ben verheugd aan te kondigen dat we het aantal medicijnen dat beschikbaar is op TrumpRx bijna verzevenvoudigen, door meer dan 600 betaalbare generieke middelen aan de website toe te voegen", zei Trump tijdens een evenement in het Witte Huis.

Zestien grote farmaceutische bedrijven spraken eerder al met het Witte Huis af hun prijzen te verlagen in ruil voor vrijstelling van Amerikaanse invoertarieven. Die prijsverlagingen gelden onder meer voor de medicijnen op de website.

Nintendo is trying to secure a touchscreen-specific monster-catching patent that could be relevant to Palworld Mobile. Japan's patent office has initially rejected the application for lacking an inventive step over prior art, but the company could appeal or amend the claims. Games Fray reports: The Japan Patent Office (JPO) has now made a new monster-catching patent application by Nintendo public. Patent Application No. 2026-019762 covers monster-catching of the kind already asserted against the PC and console versions of Palworld and is from the same patent family as two of the three patents Nintendo is already asserting against Palworld, but with a touchscreen focus. Potential targets are the upcoming Palworld Mobile game and Tencent's Roco Kingdom: World, which is presently available only in China but likely to expand internationally. Nintendo filed the application this year with a request for a fast-tracked review. The JPO has indeed been quick, and the response is that Nintendo's application lacks an inventive step over the prior art.

Nintendo already amended the claims in February and can try to amend them again. It can try to persuade the examiner and potentially appeal the decision. But the initial rejection suggests that Nintendo will not obtain the desired touchscreen monster-catching patent quickly. The rejection was communicated on April 24, 2026. Nintendo could abandon the application now, but Nintendo being Nintendo, they are more likely to try to persuade the examiner to arrive at a different conclusion, even though the reasons for the rejection are strong. In many patent examination processes, the initial rejection is essentially just an invitation to present one's best arguments. Here, however, the rejection notice is so well-reasoned that it will be an uphill battle for Nintendo. Nintendo's application would cover a touchscreen-controlled game in which a player moves through "a field in a virtual space," uses "a capture item for capturing a field character," and can summon "a battle character" to fight that creature. During combat, the game would display "a plurality of commands including at least an attack command and an item command," selected through "an operation input using the touch panel."

The key claim is that when the capture item is used "during a battle" or "in a non-battle state," the game performs "a capture success determination," and, if successful, "the field character is captured and set to a state owned by the player."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Meta is expected to begin cutting about 8,000 jobs this week as it pours more money into AI infrastructure and looks to "offset" other investments, with additional layoffs reportedly possible later this year. According to CNBC, the morale has worsened inside the company. "Internally, there's an emerging sense of dread across wide swaths of the company," the report says, citing current and former Meta employees. "That's in part because more cuts are expected this year, including a potential round of layoffs in August, followed by another round later in the year, some of the sources said." From the report: [...] Whatever anxiety investors are experiencing, the feelings inside the company are more intense, with some longtime staffers questioning Meta's AI pursuits under AI chief Alexandr Wang, while also weighing if now is the time to leave for opportunities at other companies in the AI race, according to current and former employees. Data aggregated by Blind, an anonymous professional network that requires users to verify their employment with a work email address, reveals some of the internal malaise. Meta's overall rating by employees on Blind has declined 25% from a peak in the second quarter of 2024 to the current period, with a 39% drop in its culture rating. In every category other than compensation, Meta has seen a ratings decline and dramatically underperforms rivals Amazon, Google and Netflix, the Blind data reveals.

The company's full-court press with AI included the recent debut of an employee tracking tool intended to collect data from staffers' actions, such as mouse movements and keystrokes on their work computers. The Model Capability Initiative, or MCI, as it's called, is part of Meta's efforts to train AI models to power digital agents that can perform various coding and white-collar tasks. Employees have characterized the data tracking tool as "dystopian," according to messages viewed by CNBC, with some workers expressing fear that personal information could be leaked. Some Meta workers have noted that their workplace computers appear slower since the company initiated the project, adding to their frustration, sources said.

Meta workers responded by creating an online petition that urges Zuckerberg and leadership to shutter the project. "Collecting and repurposing this kind of data raises serious concerns around privacy, consent, and trust in the workplace," the petition says. "It should not be the norm that companies of any size are permitted to exploit their employees by nonconsensually extracting their data for the purposes of AI training." Further reading: NYT: 'Meta's Embrace of AI Is Making Its Employees Miserable'

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Few had heard of the crude oil-derived chemical until recently, but shortages caused by the blockade of the strait of Hormuz have led to a spike in concern

Japan’s government is fighting to cushion the economic impact of the Middle East war, as the shortage of oil sends inflation rising, with the crisis threatening to undermine prime minister Sanae Takaichi’s wide poll lead.

Amidst it all, new polling shows that Japan has seen a surge in concern over shortages of naphtha, a crude oil product that is used to make a wide variety of products.

Continue reading...

Fire on Santa Rosa Island in Channel Islands national park becomes state’s largest this year and threatens rare plants

A wildfire that broke out on an island in the Channel Islands national park has become California’s largest wildfire so far this year, burning through more than 10,000 acres, destroying historic structures and endangering rare plant communities that conservationists had struggled to reclaim.

About six dozen firefighters have been deployed to control the blaze, which broke out on Friday, but their efforts have been undermined by strong winds. The fire is now at 0% containment, according to a Cal Fire incident report.

Continue reading...

OpenAI’s plans now seem all but guaranteed, given that the world’s richest man couldn’t put a stop to them

On Monday morning, a jury in Oakland, California, handed a resounding victory to Sam Altman and OpenAI in their long, bitter courtroom battle with Elon Musk.

The federal jury found Altman, OpenAI and its president, Greg Brockman, not liable for Elon Musk’s claims that they unjustly enriched themselves and broke a founding contract made with Musk when founding the startup. The unanimous verdict, delivered after less than two hours of deliberation, is a stark rebuke of Musk and his lawyer’s claims that Altman “stole a charity” through his leadership of OpenAI.

Nick Robins-Early contributed reporting

Continue reading...

Figures disclosed by nursing union show big rise on reported incidents which may only be ‘tip of the iceberg’

Racist abuse of NHS nurses has jumped by 86% in the last few years, which their union’s boss has blamed on the normalisation of extreme views in politics and the media.

One nurse was called a monkey by a colleague, a patient threw a hot drink at a nurse and followed up with racial abuse, and in several cases others were called the N-word, the Royal College of Nursing (RCN) disclosed.

Continue reading...

UK foreign secretary says urgent pressure needed to get strait of Hormuz reopened and fertiliser and fuel moving

Global fertiliser supplies must be freed up within weeks to avoid disaster, with harvests suffering and food prices rising, the UK’s foreign secretary, Yvette Cooper, has said.

The war in Iran has frozen shipments of fertiliser through the strait of Hormuz, creating a supply crunch that has already damaged farming in the UK, Europe and the US and is having its worst impacts in the developing world, where farmers cannot afford the higher prices now being charged.

Continue reading...

Tracker of attitudes towards artificial intelligence also finds almost half of the public would prefer to avoid it

One in three university students think AI will wipe out jobs so rapidly it will trigger civil unrest, according to a survey by King’s College London (KCL).

Students are among the heaviest users of AI, the poll found, with 77% using it at least a few times a month – compared with 46% of workers – and 27% using it daily or almost daily.

Continue reading...

Whatever Nicolas Jover is being paid, it’s not enough – or so it must have felt for Arsenal fans watching tense title pursuit

The best way out of a corner? A corner, it turns out. Nobody knows how much the dead-ball goal bonus is in Nicolas Jover’s contract. Or indeed, if it exists at all. Although it would definitely explain why Arsenal’s set-piece coach leaps up with such thigh-quivering excitement at every opportunity, presumably seeing the potential rewards whizzing by in front of his eyes, like the conveyor belt in a 1970s gameshow, a corner sofa, a speed boat, an enormous wheel of cheese.

But whatever it is, it isn’t enough. Or so it must have felt for Arsenal’s fans watching another step in this most gruelling of title pursuits, another night of football as pain, sport as trauma, leavened only by the sight with 35 minutes gone of Kai Havertz floating in the soft evening air, as light as a reed, all alone suddenly in front of the Burnley goal as the ball veered gently into his orbit, one of those moments where the day just seems to stop.

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A new infostealer variant targets macOS users by spoofing Apple, Microsoft, and Google and then then gets to work searching for victims’ password managers so it can steal all of their credentials and access cryptocurrency wallets such as MetaMask and Phantom. The updated SHub stealer variant is called Reaper, and it uses macOS Script Editor, pre-populated with the malicious payload to execute the malware, according to SentinelOne research engineer Phil Stokes, who documented the attack in a Monday blog. But unlike earlier SHub versions and similar macOS stealer campaigns that rely on ClickFix social engineering tactics to trick the user into pasting a ScriptEditor command into Apple’s Terminal command-line interface, Reaper bypasses Terminal altogether and therefore defeats defenses Apple added to Tahoe 26.4. The attack starts with fake WeChat and Miro installer websites, hosted on a domain designed to instill trust in users by typo-squatting a Microsoft URL: mlcrosoft[.]co[.]com. When a user visits these pages, hidden JavaScript collects a ton of information about their system and browser, including IP address, location, WebGL fingerprinting data, and indicators of virtual machines or VPNs. The attack stops if the victim is located in Russia. Assuming that the machine is located elsewhere and the user clicks on the fake tool installer, they open Apple’s Script Editor app via a sneaky link that’s heavily padded with ASCII art and fake terms to push the malicious command far below the visible portion of the window when it loads. When the victim clicks “Run” in Script Editor, the hidden command executes the malicious AppleScript and displays a popup message purporting to be a security update for Apple’s XProtectRemediator tool. Instead of updating the security tool, however, it calls a curl command to silently download the shell script and it asks the victim to enter their login details – which are scraped and used to decrypt various credentials – and then displays a fake error message. Earlier SHub versions harvested users’ browser data, cryptocurrency wallets, developer-related configuration files, macOS Keychain and iCloud account data, and Telegram session data. Reaper does all of this and more. It includes a filegrabber that searches for files that contain business or financial info in the user’s Desktop and Document folders. That approach is similar to the document-theft functionality seen in Atomic macOS Stealer (AMOS). The script also searches for several desktop cryptocurrency tools including Exodus, Atomic Wallet, Ledger Wallet, Ledger Live, and Trezor Suite. If it finds any, it injects the wallet with malware to ensure continued funds theft. And then, to ensure persistence, it backdoors the infected device by creating a directory structure designed to mimic Google Software Update: ~/Library/Application Support/Google/GoogleUpdate.app/Contents/MacOS/. “The LaunchAgent executes the target script GoogleUpdate every 60 seconds,” Stokes explains. “The script functions as a beacon, sending system details to the C2’s /api/bot/heartbeat endpoint.” This ensures the attacker can remotely execute code on the backdoored machine. If the attacker-controlled server sends a “code” payload, the script decodes it, writes it to a hidden file and executes the code with the users’ privileges before deleting the file. The backdoor gives the malware operators “more ways to steal data or pivot to other malicious installs after the initial compromise,” the threat hunter warns. About the only thing it doesn't do is implore the band to add more cowbell. ®

OPINION The future of AI is unwritten, but the writing is on the wall – your margin is my opportunity. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos said as much more than a decade ago in support of the e-souk's low-price, low-margin sales strategy. That opportunity exists in the AI training and inference business. But perhaps not for long. Two leading American AI companies, Anthropic and OpenAI, are not actually profitable at this point, but their pitch to investors is something along the lines of "just hang in there a few more years and keep sending cash." Given reports that Claude Code subscribers paying $200 a month can potentially consume $5,000 worth of tokens and that OpenAI is also losing money on subscriptions, it starts to become a bit clear why Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, and Microsoft have already started pushing customers toward metered usage pricing. AI revenue needs to go up for frontier model makers to survive. And then AI adoption needs to grow. Government agencies and large corporations that don't keep a close eye on fees may be terrified enough of AI-enabled exploitation to pay a premium for models like Anthropic's Mythos and OpenAI's GPT-5.5. But more price-sensitive folk may shop for cheaper tokens. And they're likely to find them. Benedict Evans, among the more astute industry observers, expects AI models will be commoditized. In his recently updated presentation, "AI eats the world," he suggests that the AI supply/demand imbalance will ease and the pricing power of leading AI labs will dissipate. He argues that models will become commodity infrastructure and that innovation and pricing power will have to move up the stack. That's already evident in Anthropic's efforts to keep developers interacting through its own tools like the Claude Code CLI and desktop app, and through services that sit atop its models like Claude Cowork, Claude Design, and Claude for Creative Work. But it's more apparent in US companies lobbying for regulatory intervention as a defense against competition from China, some of which has taken the form of copying AI models via a process called distillation. Zilan Qian, a research associate at the Oxford China Policy Lab, recently explored how software developers in China are acquiring AI tokens for pennies on the dollar. She writes that despite the fact that leading US model makers try to prevent people in China from using US models, everyone who wants access can get it through API proxies. "The logs they generate may have become a commodity, traded for purposes ranging from model training to targeted fraud," Qian wrote. "Meanwhile, every layer of control frontier US AI companies have added (geoblocking, phone verification, credit card requirements, and now live biometric KYC checks) has produced a corresponding layer of evasion infrastructure." This process may not be savory or sustainable – Qian posits these token sellers are just trying to acquire customers and obtain data – but it points to the difficulty US firms will have maintaining their margins and their exclusivity. Open weight models like GLM-5.1, Kimi K2.6, DeepSeek V4-Pro, and Qwen3-Coder-Next are already adequate for less demanding software development work and some, like Qwen3.6-27B, run quite well on suitably provisioned local hardware. US companies are estimated to have a lead of about seven months on Chinese AI companies. But that race will not go on forever. Even if US AI models continue to improve at their current pace, open weight models from China and elsewhere should match current leaders Claude Opus 4.7 and OpenAI GPT-5.5 by the end of 2026. At that point, better benchmarks will no doubt be welcomed, but they won't be necessary. Commodity AI will be good enough for enterprise and entrepreneurial software development. And maybe other uses will emerge, but coding right now is what people are paying for. As noted by Andreessen Horowitz, annualized AI spending by enterprises reached $3 billion annually for coding. In other categories (legal $500 million, support $400M, and medical/health $300M), adoption is significantly less. Looking at Evans's "AI eats the world" figures, promoting AI adoption will be a challenge. The tech industry is the only US workplace sector where more than 25 percent use AI on a daily basis. In finance, professional services, healthcare, retail, manufacturing, and government, there's less daily usage. And in the consumer space, only five percent of ChatGPT’s 900 million-plus weekly users pay for the privilege. Among software developers, most of those using AI are not trying to apply it to cutting-edge research or to develop complex attack chains. They're using it for fairly well understood software applications and workflows, or they're experimenting with AI agents. And increasingly, it looks like they can buy tokens at a discount if that matters. Anthropic and OpenAI need pricing and adoption to go up in order to thrive. Their margin is their vulnerability. They're going to strike deals with incumbents to make their models available on desktop and mobile hardware, particularly given the space and power constraints of phones. That will come at a cost. The likely winners will be the companies that control software distribution and delivery – operating system vendors like Apple, Google, and Microsoft, and cloud service providers like Amazon, Google, and Microsoft. Absent regulatory or legal barriers, supply constraints, or practical obstacles, prices face downward pressure where margins are high. And when you're many billions in the hole like Anthropic and OpenAI, that makes escape more difficult. In his presentation, Evans observes, "Sometimes software eats the world, and sometimes it only nibbles." ®

Here's how to build a conversational agent that actually remembers what you said, using LangChain and GPT-4o-mini.

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Weer voor Rotterdam 🌕 - 19-05-2026 01:15 CEST

In één oogopslag:
• 11.2°C · Helder 🌕 | Min 10.9°C / Max 15.5°C | Kans op neerslag 45%

Verwachting voor vandaag:
• Min 10.9°C, Max 15.5°C (Lichte motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 0.5 mm, Kans op neerslag 45%, 🧭 1014.0 hPa ↘️ -1.8 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 16.6 km/u (4.6 m/s), richting: ↗ 224°

Uurlijkse voorspelling voor de komende 12 uur:

• 02:00: 11.1°C (Licht bewolkt) 🌕, 🧭 1015.8 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 10.4 km/u (2.9 m/s), richting: ↑ 176°
• 03:00: 10.7°C (Gedeeltelijk bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1015.7 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 10.4 km/u (2.9 m/s), richting: ↑ 179°
• 04:00: 10.3°C (Helder) 🌕, 🧭 1015.2 hPa ↘️ -0.5 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 10.1 km/u (2.8 m/s), richting: ↑ 175°
• 05:00: 10.1°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, 🧭 1015.1 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 11.2 km/u (3.1 m/s), richting: ↑ 166°
• 06:00: 9.7°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 2%, 🧭 1014.9 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 11.9 km/u (3.3 m/s), richting: ↑ 164°
• 07:00: 9.9°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 6%, 🧭 1014.9 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 10.8 km/u (3.0 m/s), richting: ↑ 169°
• 08:00: 11.1°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 10%, 🧭 1014.9 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 12.2 km/u (3.4 m/s), richting: ↑ 174°
• 09:00: 12.0°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 14%, 🧭 1015.1 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 13.7 km/u (3.8 m/s), richting: ↑ 186°
• 10:00: 12.8°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 18%, 🧭 1014.9 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 13.7 km/u (3.8 m/s), richting: ↑ 181°
• 11:00: 12.8°C (Lichte motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 0.1 mm, Kans op neerslag 24%, 🧭 1015.0 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 15.8 km/u (4.4 m/s), richting: ↑ 164°
• 12:00: 13.1°C (Lichte motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 0.2 mm, Kans op neerslag 32%, 🧭 1014.4 hPa ↘️ -0.6 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 17.6 km/u (4.9 m/s), richting: ↑ 163°
• 13:00: 13.1°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 42%, 🧭 1014.1 hPa ➡️ 0.0 hPa/1h, Windsnelheid: 20.2 km/u (5.6 m/s), richting: ↑ 165°

Voorspelling voor de komende dagen:

• woensdag 20 mei: Min 9.7°C, Max 13.7°C (Lichte motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 2.1 mm, Kans op neerslag 41%, 🧭 1017.8 hPa ↗️ +3.8 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 21.6 km/u (6.0 m/s), richting: ↑ 181°
• donderdag 21 mei: Min 12.5°C, Max 17.7°C (Lichte motregen) 🌦️, Neerslag 0.5 mm, Kans op neerslag 36%, 🧭 1026.8 hPa ↗️ +9.0 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 24.8 km/u (6.9 m/s), richting: ↗ 231°
• vrijdag 22 mei: Min 12.8°C, Max 19.4°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 2%, 🧭 1027.9 hPa ↗️ +1.1 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 14.8 km/u (4.1 m/s), richting: ↗ 237°
• zaterdag 23 mei: Min 13.4°C, Max 23.8°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 1%, 🧭 1026.8 hPa ↘️ -1.1 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 8.4 km/u (2.3 m/s), richting: ↖ 139°
• zondag 24 mei: Min 15.1°C, Max 26.0°C (Bewolkt) ☁️, Kans op neerslag 6%, 🧭 1028.8 hPa ↗️ +2.0 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 10.8 km/u (3.0 m/s), richting: ↙ 59°
• maandag 25 mei: Min 16.2°C, Max 25.8°C (Zonnig) ☀️, Kans op neerslag 1%, 🧭 1030.2 hPa ↗️ +1.4 hPa/24h, Windsnelheid: 14.5 km/u (4.0 m/s), richting: ↙ 51°

Details:
• 🌡️ Huidige temperatuur (om 01:15): 11.2°C (Helder)
• 🤚 Gevoelstemperatuur: 8.9°C (-2.3°C)
• 💨 Windsnelheid: 10.8 km/u (3.0 m/s), richting: ↑ 181°
• 🌬️ Windstoten: 18.4 km/h (5.1 m/s)
• 💧 Luchtvochtigheid: 79%
• 🧭 Luchtdruk: 1015.8 hPa ↘️ -0.6 hPa/3h
• 👁️ Zichtbaarheid: 50.0 km
• ☀️ UV-index: 0.0
• 🌅 Zonsopgang: 05:43 · 🌇 Zonsondergang: 21:33

Luchtkwaliteit:
• AQI: 40 🟢 (Goed)
• PM2.5: 12.1 μg/m³
• PM10: 15.1 μg/m³

Gegevens geleverd door Open-Meteo

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

De twee daders van het ‘haatmisdrijf’ hebben na de schietpartij bij de grootste moskee van de stad vermoedelijk zelfmoord gepleegd.