Darren Schiller has added a photo to the pool:

Some of the historic architecture on King William Street, Adelaide CBD

Darren Schiller has added a photo to the pool:

Premier and Minister of Railways, John Gunn, laid the foundation stone of the new Adelaide Station, on 24 August 1926. The building was completed in June 1928. The total cost is unknown but probably exceeded £800,000 ($1,600,000). The building has 30 Ionic columns and thousands of square metres of polished granite and reinforced concrete.

Darren Schiller has added a photo to the pool:

Just love the patterns in the sand made by the waves. Port Elliot, South Australia

A new loophole to avoid Microsoft's insistence that you need a Microsoft account to use the Home edition of Windows 11 has appeared, and it's so ludicrously simple we can only assume the good bug fairy has paid a visit to Redmond. The workaround is in the normal Windows 11 Out-of-Box Experience (OOBE) that users see when setting up the operating system. Get to the point where Windows prompts for a Microsoft account, then click the "Learn more" hyperlink beneath the text box and the Sign-in options link, and the OOBE skips to prompting for the user's name and eventually a password. Just like it used to do before Microsoft decided that you needed one of its accounts to use the software you thought you'd paid for. "Bob Pony" created a helpful post demonstrating the workaround. We checked it, and it worked exactly as demonstrated in the video. However, we can't imagine Microsoft leaving this in the setup program for long, considering the company's desire to drive users into its preferred online world. Indeed, some components installed with Windows won't work without a Microsoft account, but at least users can choose whether or not to use them. Microsoft has played whack-a-mole with workarounds users have found to avoid a Microsoft account in the Windows setup application over the years. In 2025, it snapped shut a popular loophole in the name of keeping users safe and ensuring Windows is stable, secure, and ready to deliver the experience users expect from Microsoft's operating system. It is worth emphasizing that the workaround is only for the Home Edition of Windows 11, so it will be useful when friends or family pick up a new PC and don't want to go through the Microsoft account rigmarole. Windows 11 Pro users, or administrators, obviously have other options and aren't forced down the Microsoft account route, which may hint at why this loophole exists in the first place. It's unclear when Microsoft will close this loophole, and we certainly aren't going to ask it. Until then, Home Edition users can avoid a Microsoft account without resorting to third-party scripts, tools, or instructions. Just use a simple click of the mouse to Learn more. ®

The rise of AI-generated tributes and bots for ‘talking’ to the dead has experts concerned more people will grieve in isolation

Tributes rolled in after the death of Dolly Parton last month. Jack White performed Jolene at a London gig. Kesha sang Old Flames (Can’t Hold a Candle to You), a single her mother wrote for the country music titan. Even Pitbull stopped his Madison Square Garden show to memorialize Parton and all the other “powerful women” in the crowd. But one of the strangest – and most viral – eulogies did not come from a celebrity. It did not even come from a person.

Run Jolene, at just under five minutes, is an earworm of a country song, containing all the cliches of the genre: twangy singer, banjo licks, corny lyrics. Those lyrics concern Jolene, the fictional romantic rival made infamous by Parton. “Somebody better warn Jolene / Dolly’s coming through those gates,” the voice croons. “Run Jolene / Girl you better move your feet.”

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Exclusive: Alzheimer’s blood tests should not be used on their own and risk leading people to believe they are inevitably going to develop dementia

Researchers have warned that social media may be misleading healthy people into taking Alzheimer’s blood tests, causing severe anxiety over biological markers that may never actually cause dementia.

Blood-based biomarker tests, such as p-tau217 and p-tau181, detect biological signs of changes in the brain associated with Alzheimer’s disease, which is a progressive brain disorder and the leading cause of dementia.

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Surely that’s the lesson the Reform polling furore should teach us. Politics should be about actually helping people, not mastering the line on a graph

Solemn faces all round. We will listen. We will learn. We will hone and improve. Yes, it’s time for the latest bout of profound soul-searching in the UK polling industry following the allegations raised by the recent Channel 4 investigation that a polling firm reportedly failed to declare that three polls it published before the local elections in May were commissioned by Reform. By now these reckonings are becoming a regular occurrence in the wake of big elections: pollsters gather in a room, nibble biscuits, ritually self-flagellate, and pledge to learn all the right lessons from the electorate they’ve just catastrophically misread.

Yet for all its very public ignominies, political polling is one of those rare and precious industries that somehow manages to keep failing upwards. You might think that after botching the 2015 and 2017 general elections, the 2016 Brexit vote and the 2021 London mayoral poll, we might have learned better than to trust in the mystical magic graph. In this parallel universe Keir Starmer is now sitting on a colossal 318-seat majority, as forecast by Survation in its final MRP poll on the eve of the 2024 general election, overstating the actual result by a mere 144 parliamentary seats.

Jonathan Liew is a Guardian columnist

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DEN HAAG (ANP) - PRO-leider Jesse Klaver vindt dat koning Willem-Alexander "een hele mooie troonrede" heeft gehouden. Vooral met diens oproep tot samenwerking kan hij instemmen. Maar: "De woorden van de koning kunnen niet verbloemen dat het kabinet stuurloos is, dat ze geen richting kiezen voor Nederland en dat we daarom niet vooruitkomen."

"De politiek móet samenwerken", beaamde Klaver na afloop van de troonrede. Maar hij vindt niet dat de coalitie van zijn partij kan vragen om in te stemmen met bezuinigingen op de sociale zekerheid. De bescherming daarvan is het bestaansrecht van PRO, vindt hij.

Dat het kabinet denkt de linkse oppositie te kunnen paaien door iets minder te bezuinigen, is "een Haagse werkelijkheid", vindt Klaver. "Haal die bezuinigingen nou van tafel, dan kunnen we samen verder bouwen aan een eerlijker Nederland."

DEN HAAG (ANP) - De balkonscène met de koning en zijn familie op Paleis Noordeinde is zonder problemen verlopen. Anders dan in 2022 was er geen geschreeuw of boegeroep, zag een ANP-verslaggever in Den Haag.

Koning Willem-Alexander, koningin Máxima, de prinsessen Amalia, Alexia en Ariane en prins Constantijn en prinses Laurentien verschenen rond 14.15 uur op het balkon. Ze keerden terug bij het paleis nadat de koning eerder op de middag de troonrede had voorgedragen in de Koninklijke Schouwburg.

DEN HAAG (ANP) - In zijn troonrede vroeg de koning gemeenten om "solidair te zijn met Ter Apel en al die andere locaties die al veel te lang worden overvraagd". Daarmee adresseerde hij namens het kabinet de maatschappelijke spanning rond de spreidingswet. Inmiddels staan 42 gemeenten onder toezicht van asielminister Bart van den Brink (CDA), omdat die niet het aantal asielzoekers opvangen dat wettelijk voorgeschreven is.

Hij had het ook over de polarisatie rond dit onderwerp. "Ondertussen neemt de polarisatie rond de opvang van asielzoekers helaas steeds extremere vormen aan, zoals recent in Loosdrecht en Engelen. Dat is zorgelijk. De zachtere stem van mensen die zich oprecht zorgen maken over hun eigen omgeving, of die zich het lot van anderen aantrekken, raakt hierdoor ondergesneeuwd", aldus de koning.

„Niet ophef van de dag moet leidend zijn, maar wat mensen nodig hebben en wat de toekomst van ons vraagt”, benadrukte koning Willem-Alexander tijdens de Troonrede op…

De landelijke politie is begonnen met een strafrechtelijk onderzoek naar de ontregeling van het treinverkeer dinsdagochtend.

A declaration signed by 25 Fields medalists: “The goals of the AI companies and the goals of the mathematical community are severely misaligned.”

Audi's Freddie Slater has landed a seat on next season’s Formula 2 grid with Invicta Racing.

Franco Colapinto believes that his seventh-place finish in last weekend's Spanish Grand Prix culminated in "probably my best race weekend" for Alpine this season.

The New York Post wrote that OpenAI "stunned the mathematics world" last week when it announced its AI model "cracked a legendary math problem left unsolved for nearly a century in just 88 hours."

But a New York University professor "has come forward alleging OpenAI may have copied his work after asking him to collaborate — with one of the company's scientists allegedly warning he might 'ruin his career' if he refused."


[P]rofessor Tristan Buckmaster, a British-Australian researcher who trained in Germany... had been working with Long Island-raised math prodigy Levent Alpöge, a researcher with OpenAI rival Anthropic, on a different elusive fluid dynamics equation, known as the Euler problem, when he found a solution using AI tools from both Anthropic and ChatGPT. He said scientists from OpenAI approached him and tried to convince him to jointly announce the solution, claiming they had independently solved Navier-Stokes. Buckmaster questioned the timing of their finding the solution in a blog post, noting OpenAI had only done so "in the past few days" — after the company became aware of his work. He asked OpenAI experts whether its AI systems used to solve the equation had been "trained on, or had access to" his research, but said they declined to answer, prompting him to wonder how they had advanced toward the solution so quickly. The puzzle is "not the direction one arrives at in a few days," Buckmaster wrote incredulously...

In OpenAI's post on its website sharing the Navier-Stokes proof, which it credited to Astra, the company's latest AI bot, the firm insisted no user data was incorporated into its model to solve the problem. However, it noted that it "cannot rule out" that anonymized data was used to "improve our models."

"We congratulate Levent Alpöge and Tristan Buckmaster on their remarkable mathematical work," OpenAI said in the announcement.

Buckmaster shot back, "Is it ethical to use customer's data to try to scoop their customer?"

Alpöge's affiliation with Anthropic "seems to have been a sore point for OpenAI," writes TechCrunch.

Buckmaster's public statement says the OpenAI's Sebastien "twice asserted that he wanted Levent removed from authorship" and also said that "it was so annoying that Levent works at Anthropic" — but that Buckmaster still refused to remove the Anthropic mathematician's credit.

I said that if OpenAI released its result in the way proposed I would go
public with what happened. The reply was, "Why would you ruin your career?" [OpenAI's Bubeck said later on X that he'd meant unfounded accusations could damage Buckmaster's career.] I replied that I am an academic, and asked why he thought going public would ruin my career. The reply was, "If you don't want me to be nice, then I don't have to be nice."



Buckmaster later told Australia's public broadcaster ABC that the companies building AI "have zero respect for the scientific community. I mean, it's appalling, honestly." But he went on to say AI has made the race to publish mathematical breakthroughs pointless.

"I think it's pointless. Like, I think the game is up...." Professor Buckmaster said he and Dr Alpöge had more research they could publish but questioned the point of racing ahead with it when AI could perform work that had previously occupied researchers for years.

He said there needed to be a discussion about how mathematics should operate in this new environment. Professor Buckmaster said some mathematicians had stopped publicly sharing what they were working on to avoid tipping off AI companies about their plans. He has called on academics and people from OpenAI, Anthropic and DeepMind to discuss ground rules for how they worked together.
He said the companies' power carried responsibilities that went beyond competing to solve problems before their rivals...

Building on the work of mathematicians Diego Córdoba and Luis Martínez-Zoroa, the pair found a solution to the Euler problem, a stepping stone to the Navier-Stokes problem. Professor Buckmaster said he spent weeks checking and improving the "slop" proofs generated by AI...

For now, Professor Buckmaster said he wanted to finish existing work and support his PhD students and postdoctoral researchers, rather than chase another Millennium Prize. "I think it's more important to re-evaluate what math is," he said.

"The New York University professor also warned Australia about the centralisation of resources into the hands of a small number of privately owned foreign companies..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

​De aanwezigen bij de Troonrede zitten allemaal al een uur vast in de Hollandse Schouwburg. “Niemand verlaat deze zaal voor we een meerderheid hebben gevonden voor de begroting”, brieste koning Willem-Alexander na zijn Troonrede. De vorst zette zijn woorden kracht bij door beveiligers op te dragen om twee enorme balken voor de toegangsdeuren te schuiven.

Sindsdien zitten de onderhandelingen weer in een impasse. “Of we nu linksom gaan of rechtsom, jullie zorgen maar dat er een meerderheid komt. Dan moet het maar zo”, stelt de vorst streng terwijl hij zijn armen over elkaar vouwt. Voorzichtig steekt Gidi Markuszower zijn vinger in de lucht. “Ja maar wij doen niet echt mee in de onderhandelingen, mogen wij al wel gaan?” “Nee”, snauwt Willem-Alexander. “Als de dames en heren van het kabinet zo onvolwassen zijn om er niet samen uit te komen, dan moet iedereen dat maar voelen.”

Verschillende partijleiders kijken geërgerd in de richting van Rob Jetten, die op zijn beurt Dilan Yesilgöz op een boze blik trakteert. Henri Bontenbal begint zenuwachtig te neuriën. Zolang de koning iedereen vasthoudt, is het nog niet duidelijk of de Algemene Beschouwingen morgen wel kunnen aanvangen. “Ieder jaar weer hetzelfde hoerengezeik”, mompelt SGP-leider Chris Stoffer.

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Thomas Hawk posted a photo: