bienve958 has added a photo to the pool:

The image shows the main entrance of Tokyo Disneyland in Japan, with the glass roof of World Bazaar framing Cinderella Castle in the background.

Arutemu has added a photo to the pool:

Shinjuku, Tokyo.
Sony A7R II + Katana MC Auto 28mm f/2.8 via Techart AF adapter.

Arutemu has added a photo to the pool:

Shinjuku, Tokyo.
Sony A7R II + Katana MC Auto 28mm f/2.8 via Techart AF adapter.

NASHVILLE (ANP) - De ter dood veroordeelde Christa Pike is bij bewustzijn en aanspreekbaar nadat haar executie vorige week was mislukt. Dat laten haar advocaten weten aan ABC News. Pike zou op 30 september met injecties worden geëxecuteerd in de Amerikaanse staat Tennessee, maar dat ging mis. Sindsdien was ze buiten bewustzijn en lag ze aan een beademingsmachine.

NEW YORK (ANP) - De S&P 500-index op de aandelenbeurzen in New York is dinsdag voor het eerst boven de 7800 punten gesloten. Koersstijgingen van technologieaandelen en gedaalde rentes op staatsobligaties zorgden voor een positieve stemming. Beleggers keken daarnaast uit naar het aankomende cijferseizoen, dat binnenkort begint.

"Recente cijfers over de economische groei zijn sterk geweest en de bijstellingen van de winstverwachtingen voor de bedrijven in de S&P 500 zijn overwegend positief gebleven", schreven strategen van Goldman Sachs volgens persbureau Bloomberg.

De brede S&P 500-index sloot 0,6 procent hoger tot 7818,93 punten. Het is voor het eerst sinds augustus dat deze graadmeter een nieuwe recordslotstand bereikt. De Nasdaq scherpte zijn slotrecord van maandag verder aan. De techindex steeg 0,5 procent naar 27.599,79 punten, nadat de Nasdaq maandag ruim 1 procent won. De Dow-Jonesindex klom 0,5 procent op 51.521,28 punten.

The rivalry between Anthropic and OpenAI, the two leading US AI model makers, is no contest when it comes to assessing which one gives you more value for your subscription money, according to industry research firm SemiAnalysis. Following changes to OpenAI's $200 per month subscription plan that effectively halved its value, SemiAnalysis looked at the various subscription plans offered by AI companies, because that's still the main way that individuals and small businesses buy AI services. AI subscriptions are heavily subsidized – customers get far more tokens for their money than they would paying metered API rates. And SemiAnalysis argues that it's necessary to delve into subscription pricing to evaluate AI shops financially because subscription usage consumes a disproportionate amount of company compute resources. Claude subscriptions, the biz claims, take up about 42 percent of Anthropic's inference compute while generating just 10 percent of its revenue. And those subscriptions provide considerable value. "Anthropic is an overwhelmingly better deal, offering ~5x the API-equivalent value across the board," SemiAnalysis claims in reference to mid-tier models GPT-6.1 Sol and Claude Opus 5.5. "You could argue that this is unfair for [OpenAI] because 6.1 Sol is much cheaper per token than Opus 5.5, but the gap is still massive even if you switch to comparing the number of tokens." OpenAI did not immediately respond to a request for comment. SemiAnalysis' calculation relies on measuring token output rates, converting those into tokens per 5-hour usage window and per month, and then computing the API-equivalent value. Company researchers contend that API-equivalent value is the best figure for capturing the value of a subscription plan, though they allow that other measures like raw token volume may be more appropriate in some instances. API-based comparisons can be slow to account for the rapidly shifting capabilities of models that come to market. The debut of a new open source model, for example, can alter what's possible at a given price. For those with access to subscription plans, the subsidized prices clearly offer real value, so much so that there's an underground market for reselling tokens from pooled subscription accounts in many parts of the world. But there are other ways to measure AI value. Artificial Analysis, for example, tracks cost per task – the estimated dollar cost of completing a specific task. By that yardstick, GPT-6.1 Sol ($0.72) is far more affordable than Claude Opus 5.5 ($5.98), at least for those paying API rates. But that ratio may not be true for different tasks – benchmark performance may not reflect your workload. As measured by tokens, Claude Pro ($20 per month) provides 2.9 billion tokens per month, compared to ChatGPT ($20/mo) at 1 billion tokens per month, according to SemiAnalysis. But models may use more or fewer tokens than others for the same task, and when the output is functional, like code, AI output may achieve a similar result across different models but with differing degrees of efficiency. Anticipating AI costs gets more complicated for businesses, which can't count on subscription subsidies and may not have experience with AI cost management. In a July report, McKinsey said 93 percent of enterprises exceeded their AI budgets. "I think all businesses are seeing their AI costs rise," said Dhruv Amin, co-founder of AI agent biz Anything, in an interview with The Register. Since the beginning of the year, he said, AI has been getting better at solving certain business problems, and companies have started deploying AI more widely, then noticing their token bills going through the roof. "The labs typically subsidize their prosumer plans with subscription pricing massively," said Amin. "And I think it's part of their marketing funnel because more people are able to use the tools, get familiar with the tools, and then bring those tools to work." But for larger companies, he said, two problems arise. You have more employees than can fit on a subsidized plan and, at scale, costs add up fast. "A huge way that enterprises solve this is being able to make a workload work well on the frontier and then quickly switch it to an open source model that they control and that they can serve at a much lower fraction of the cost," he said. "And so for us internally we were able to drop our AI costs 75 percent plus just by moving them all to Skydive Glide, which is our model router that for the given workload tries to find an equivalent open source model that can handle that workload without a quality drop. And so today we run a lot of our workloads on GLM-5.3 Flash." Amin said that companies adept at AI cost management maintain evaluation benchmarks that reflect their workloads. Companies use those metrics to test new models as they come out in whatever AI harness they're using, to ensure consistency. Looking ahead, he said, he expects companies will trust more of that work to service providers. "So what this means is that if you deploy an agent on top of us, we capture in the background the data of how that agent's actually running in production," he said. "And then we use that to construct the eval data set on the fly." ®

President Trump is pushing hard for the US Senate to make daylight saving time permanent so, among other things, golfers can stay on the course longer, but it may not be such a bright idea. New research out of Canada suggests that, even if Americans would get an extra hour of daylight in the evening, the ill health effects of permanent daylight saving time could outweigh the benefits. A paper published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal on Monday reviewed evidence on the health effects of permanent daylight saving time (pDST) as several Canadian jurisdictions move to stop changing their clocks. It finds that the opposite approach - adoption of permanent standard time (pST) - would actually be better for people’s health. Sorry, night owls and after-work social butterflies, but the science simply isn’t with you on this one. “Permanent DST preserves later evening light that may facilitate commuting, recreation, social participation, and some economic activity, but it also prolongs darkness on winter mornings,” the authors note. Prolonged morning darkness doesn't really jibe with the inner workings of the human body and light’s essential role in regulating the circadian rhythm. Sure, no one wants to drive home from work in the dark, but we really need morning light to get us functioning properly. Our circadian rhythms, the authors explain, actually run on a slightly longer schedule than a full day - 24.2 hours. For that reason, we rely on natural sunlight to keep us synchronized with the world around us. Morning light is some of the most important, the authors note, because it jump starts that rhythm, wakes us up and gets us moving. Evening light, on the other hand, delays the circadian rhythm, messing with our sense of “social time” and making it tougher to get to sleep and wake up rested in the morning. The effects of later evening light can show up in sleep, mood, education, and work productivity, the authors noted, and we don’t even need pDST to see some of those associations - we can just look at time zones. Move from east to west in the US or Canada and you’ll get some considerable differences in when the sun rises and sets in a particular time zone - in some cases, sunrise and sunset can differ by more than an hour of clock time across a single time zone. In one study cited by the Canadian analysis, residents on the western side of US time zones, where the sun sets later, got around an hour less sleep a week. The study also estimated that an additional hour of sleep per week was associated with around 5 percent higher long-term earnings. Similar results turned up in a German study, the team noted. Another study found that workers on the western end of US time zones ended up working fewer hours, too. On the educational front, an extra hour of sunlight before school was associated with higher math and reading scores in a Florida study “comparable in magnitude to meaningful class-size reductions.” “Ending biannual clock adjustments may eliminate transition harms that last a few weeks, but the health effects of permanent time are likely to be chronic,” the authors noted. “The preponderance of health evidence favors pST, which would align with the recommendations of sleep and chronobiology societies worldwide.” This isn’t the first time researchers have concluded such. British sleep scientists concluded much the same in 2024, which led to their recommendation to permanently kill DST in favor of a permanent shift to Greenwich Mean Time. That isn’t stopping the US from plowing ahead with plans for pDST, though. The Senate passed a measure to enshrine DST in 2022, but the House never acted on it. This time around, the House has passed its own bill to enact pDST, but the Senate is dithering, leading President Trump to go so far as to post the personal cellphone number of one Republican holdout on social media, Senator Tom Cotton (R-AR), who is opposed to the measure. “No one likes changing the clock, me included, but Congress has enacted permanent Daylight Savings Time multiple times before and repealed it each time once Americans experienced absurdly late sunrises in the winter,” Cotton explained in a post on X following Trump’s doxxing. He’s right, too: The US has twice enacted pDST - once during World War II, which ended after the war, and again in 1973 as an energy saving measure. Congress curtailed the experiment later in 1974 following public backlash over dark winter mornings. The US isn’t alone in trying and failing at enacting pDST, either, as the Canadian paper points out. Russia adopted pDST in 2011 and reversed it in 2014. Chile tried and reversed it as well. In those cases, the reasons for reversing course varied, but concerns included dark winter mornings, disrupted sleep and body clocks, safety, and public dissatisfaction. It’s unclear whether the US government’s latest attempt at enacting pDST will succeed despite political resistance and scientific evidence that it’s a bad idea, but the researchers sure seem to hope not: They note that, if the US makes such a change, Canada will likely be pressured to conform. At the end of the day, we might all be better off just dealing with a couple of clock changes and some short-term sleep disruption. ®

Court filing alleges Bryan Seaver, star’s ex-security head, has also posted no trespassing signs to thwart serving of lawsuit

Dolly Parton’s estate has alleged that her nephew and former security head is using barbed wire and a no trespassing sign to avoid being served in a lawsuit, according to a court filing confirmed by the Guardian.

The country star’s company has filed suit against her nephew, Bryan Seaver, claiming that he menaced and attempted to strong-arm Parton’s estate after she died on 25 August. Seaver announced Parton’s death in a video and previously said this was “something Dolly asked of me years ago”.

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Jaafar Ashtiyeh was covering violence against olive farmers when settlers set upon him with the butts of their rifles

Armed Israeli settlers beat a photographer in the presence of Israeli soldiers, hospitalising him, as he covered worsening settler violence against olive farmers in the occupied West Bank.

Jaafar Ashtiyeh, a 58-year-old veteran photographer for Agence France-Presse in Palestine, was assaulted by a group of settlers, who beat him with the butts of their rifles, despite him being marked as press. He was assaulted in view of about a dozen armed Israeli soldiers.

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It was a night that belonged to Harry Kane. Yet another one. It began with him being shown a replay of his first England goal during a pre-match interview with ITV – the header against Lithuania in 2015, just 79 seconds after he came on as a substitute for his debut. It ended with him reflecting on two more in what was a supremely comfortable Nations League victory over Czechia. Some things never change.

It remains a numbers game for Kane. They are getting bigger and ever more impressive. On the occasion of his 125th cap, the one that took him level with Peter Shilton at the top of the all-time England list, he moved to an astonishing 91 goals. Nobody will be surprised if he reaches the century. The only question appears to be when.

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This now constitutes a rocky start for Sébastien Pocognoli as Scotland’s manager.

The claiming of four points from three Nations League games was adequate until Slovenia inflicted this defeat. It was the abject nature of Scotland’s display this time that was so stark. Pocognoli’s team were comprehensively outplayed by a side who themselves are no better than functional.

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bpanneman has added a photo to the pool:

braart has added a photo to the pool:

Beautiful work

Science is thinking both about whether they could and whether they should! One-pager interview with Dr. Tai, who is researching potatoes grown from seed, thinking about what plant traits and growing approaches might make potato growing easier or more productive. That's all!

The newsletter this is from is a trade publication, so, potatoes from many an angle.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: VMware customers face multiple obstacles as they rethink their virtualization strategy to reduce dependence on VMware. Today, Rimini Street published its "2026 IT Virtualization Survey -- What's Next for VMware Users." The survey examined 300 organizations worldwide that use VMware. Notably, Rimini sells third-party support for VMware and other software, including Oracle and SAP. That means there's an incentive for Rimini to portray VMware users as experiencing obstacles. However, the survey was also conducted by a third-party research company, Unisphere Research, and the results align with other recent reports about VMware customers. For example, 90 percent of participants in Rimini's survey said they're exploring VMware alternatives due to VMware's higher licensing costs, while 54 percent pointed to Broadcom killing support for perpetual license holders.

Since Broadcom took over VMware, customers have said that their VMware costs increased by as much as 1,000 percent, with many more pointing to more modest price hikes of around 100 to 300 percent. In Rimini's survey, 73 percent of participants pointed to cost savings as a top priority in their virtualization roadmap decisions. In today's announcement, Rimini pointed to "significant barriers to progress" for organizations exploring virtualization options, with the most cited barriers being operational complexity (named by 40 percent of respondents), multi-vendor management challenges (38 percent), securing the increased attack surface (37 percent), and team skills requirements (37 percent). "These findings suggest that while organizations are actively pursuing change, they are also looking for ways to reduce risk and avoid unnecessary disruption," Rimini's announcement said.

[...] Rimini reported that 60 percent of the organizations it surveyed are considering a multi-hypervisor strategy, which is indicative of "growing interest in more flexible, mixed environments that support both operational and financial goals." "In addition, 47 percent are favoring a hybrid IT virtualization environment consisting of hypervisors and containers for 'best of both worlds' workload placement," the announcement said. Rimini noted that 48 percent of respondents aren't planning to move any of their assets to VMware's hybrid cloud platform, Cloud Foundation.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Het kabinet heeft de ambitie om tenminste 50 procent van het militair materieel voortaan in Europa te kopen. Maar de trend gaat een andere kant op.

Direct na de aanslag van Hamas op 7 oktober 2023 was Israël eensgezind, maar daar is inmiddels weinig van over. Met verkiezingen in aantocht zijn Israëliërs sterk verdeeld, zowel over de toekomst van het land als over de herinnering aan de slachtoffers. „Ze zouden niet moeten dansen op hun bloed.”

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Silent Friend is a historical drama written and directed by Hungarian filmmaker Ildikó Enyedi. Here’s the description:

In the botanical garden of a medieval German university, a ginkgo tree hundreds of years old watches its human neighbors through the slip-stream of time. Among them, a young woman in 1908 attempts to break through the botany department’s masculine academic culture; an idealistic couple in 1972 performs experiments on plant communication under its branches; and a neurologist on lockdown in 2020 turns to it as he tries to push the boundaries of perception.

It’s got a 94% rating on Rotten Tomatoes and some good reviews on Letterboxd, including this one from film reviewer David Ehrlich:

me before seeing this movie: that is a big tree.

me after seeing this movie: that is a giant, hormonal, unbearably horned up 900-year-old virgin that understands loneliness on a level that most humans could never even begin to imagine.

The trailer and description put me in mind of Peter Wohlleben’s The Hidden Life of Trees, The Overstory by Richard Powers, and Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard.

Tags: Ildikó Enyedi · movies · Silent Friend · trailers · trees · video