Bartel Van de Walle

@UN Director @UNUMERIT @UNuniversity. Opinions my own. Frmr @tudelft @HHI Senior Fellow - @ISCRAM founding president - proud @ugent alumn.

[Nassos Stylianou @nassos_]

NEW: Tropical nights come to Europe

One of the most striking features of June's heatwave was the intense night-time heat. Globally, the hottest nights are warming at a faster rate than the hottest days — with increasingly severe consequences.

https://t.co/rIIyLlwjHg

[BabelColour @StuartHumphryes]

On such a beautiful day like today my mind is drawn back to one of the most beautiful autochromes ever taken: a study of artists on the banks of the Dordogne at Beaulieu in France 101 years ago. The light, the colour & the composition are works of art in itself!
I have cleaned up this stunning photographic plate showing an artist at his easel being painted in turn by a woman at hers. In the distance is the St Pierre Abbey church. It captures a moment of true serenity and beauty.
You will notice, because of the long exposure time required by Autochromes, that the female painter has become a double-exposed through motion blur. It was taken in colour Jules Gervais-Courtellemont in 1925 using an early colour glass-plate process and isn't colourised. It remains one of my favourite works.

[Qiusheng Wu @giswqs]

GeoLibre v2.0.0 is here!

GeoLibre is a free and open-source geospatial platform that runs everywhere: as a native desktop app, in the browser, on Android, and embedded right inside Jupyter notebooks. It brings modern web mapping, cloud-native data formats, and a full processing toolbox together in one place, all built on MapLibre and https://t.co/Iu3zs18eJk with no proprietary lock-in.

Our first major release adds a true 3D globe, takes mapping beyond Earth to Mars and the Moon, lets styles round-trip with QGIS, and turns loaded vector layers into editable, save-back-to-source data.

What's new in v2.0.0

- Planetary mapping: explore Mars, the Moon, and other bodies with the OpenPlanetaryMap basemaps, a per-project ellipsoid, and a planet switcher right in the Layers panel.
- CesiumJS 3D globe: switch any map pane to a photorealistic 3D globe that stays camera-synced with your 2D maps and mirrors the layer stack.
- True 3D data: render vector layers with Z coordinates, load TIN/MultiPatch 3D shapefiles, and display KML/KMZ Collada (.dae) 3D models.
- Symbology interchange: import and export vector styling as OGC SLD, QGIS QML, and Mapbox GL style JSON, so styles round-trip between GeoLibre, QGIS, and the Mapbox/MapLibre ecosystem.
- Editable source layers: edit vector layers and write the changes back to their source, including GeoPackage and GeoJSON files and PostGIS database tables.
- Weather and sky: a new Weather menu with live cloud and precipitation radar overlays (RainViewer), plus a Google Earth-style sun position simulation for realistic lighting.
- Terrain and lighting: double-click the terrain control to set vertical exaggeration, and view any scene in true 3D relief.
- Smarter data import: bring in CSV without coordinates as an attribute table, split GPX track points and route points into separate layers, and load macOS-zipped and projected-CRS shapefiles.
- Raster in the browser: build normalized-difference indices for any HTTP COG and extract COG/WMS/XYZ bounding-box subsets client-side.
- Field Calculator upgrades: compute geometry length and area directly on your features.
- Attribute table: multi-select rows with Ctrl and Shift, plus faster navigation.
- Google Earth-style extras: "View in Google Maps / Google Earth" actions, camera-reset keyboard shortcuts, and a UTM easting/northing grid mode for the Gridlines overlay.
- New plugins: a Mapillary coverage and street-level image viewer, a Historical Imagery panel, and an Elevation Profile tool.
- Fully localized: all 13 language catalogs are complete, so the entire UI is translatable.

Try it out

- Launch GeoLibre Web: https://t.co/8gMtkVtfnm
- GitHub: https://t.co/VXq8c1o2Nd
- Documentation: https://t.co/7VA2AQoCUc
- Release notes: https://t.co/M0kRTsFXR0

#GIS #GeospatialData #OpenSource #RemoteSensing #DataVisualization #MapLibre #GeoLibre

[Jonathan Overpeck @GreatLakesPeck]

This is a scary fact: "The rise in observed temperatures in France has outpaced projections made by climate models, with June maximum temperatures more in line with what was expected for the 2070s." It's going to get worse.
https://t.co/C0NqoBlyE6

[World Meteorological Organization @WMO]

June 2026 is Western Europe’s warmest June on record and the 2nd-warmest June globally, according to @CopernicusEU Climate Change Service's latest bulletin. The global average surface air temperature was 16.54°C—1.39°C above pre-industrial levels.
🔗 https://t.co/E25oWMkSse

[Luiza Jarovsky, PhD @LuizaJarovsky]

🚨 The Netherlands launched its international AI strategy. It's PROUDLY European and focuses on responsible and safe AI. Main goals and action lines:

A) Enhancing Dutch and European competitiveness in AI

- Strengthening AI ecosystems through joint investments
- Increasing international market access for the Dutch AI ecosystem
- Intensifying international partnerships for AI innovation, capacity, and adoption
- Putting the Netherlands on the map as a pioneer in sustainable AI

B) Strengthening Dutch and European sovereignty in AI

- Strategic management of dependencies in the AI value chain
- Establishing strategic partnerships in the AI value chain
- Positioning Europe externally and communicating strategically
- Mitigating risks associated with AI capabilities

C) Responsible and safe use of AI

- Strengthening and internationalizing norms and rule of law principles for AI
- Promoting standards for safe and responsible AI
- Protecting human rights, democratic values, and resilience in AI applications
- Bolstering the international response to AI-driven threats

Will other European countries follow suit?

👉 Link to the full document below.

👉 To learn more about global AI governance, join my newsletter's 98,000+ subscribers (link below).

[Pete F. Carefree @tsigalkoesque]

Only 5 countries managed to reach the QF in 3 out of the 4 last World Cups, they are:

Brazil 🇧🇷
Argentina 🇦🇷
France 🇫🇷
England 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿
Belgium 🇧🇪

Make no mistake, Belgium is one of the greats in modern football history and should not be underestimated.

[Peter Van Elsuwege @P_VanElsuwege]

Mood after #Belsen #Worldcup

[Ethan Mollick @emollick]

This is a fascinating and important set of data which shows us where things are going, using OpenAI as a canary in the coal mine.

The chatbot era is over, and agentic systems are coming to tasks beyond engineering. And skills show promise as a way to standardize AI use in firms.

[Hilmar @hilmarxo]

Ok @grok, from 1-10, how fucked are we Europeans if we no longer have access to US frontier models and can only use European ones?

[Rob Davitt @robdavitt]

https://t.co/JQ6vpcB6nh

[Anthropic @AnthropicAI]

The US government, citing national security authorities, has issued an export control directive to suspend all access to Fable 5 and Mythos 5 by any foreign national, whether inside or outside the United States, including foreign national Anthropic employees.

The net effect of this order is that we must abruptly disable Fable 5 and Mythos 5 for all our customers to ensure compliance.

Access to all other Claude models is not affected.

We apologize for this disruption to our customers. We believe this is a misunderstanding and are working to restore access as soon as possible.

Read our full statement: https://t.co/bwn0sximKZ

[Dario Amodei @DarioAmodei]

Today I'm publishing a new essay, Policy on the AI Exponential. AI is progressing extremely fast—much faster than the policy process was built to handle. The essay lays out where I think the technology is now, and the action needed to close the gap: https://t.co/Lh6PWae178

[Fotballandslaget @nff_landslag]

Norway is coming🇳🇴

[GREG ISENBERG @gregisenberg]

Funny how the pendulum shifts

1. "GPT wrappers are worthless" → the value acrues to application layer

2. "AI will eliminate white collar jobs" → someone needs to manage all these AI agents and everyone is now saying white collar workers will rise due to AI

3. "Open source will never catch up" → Gemma and DeepSeek are good enough for 80% of tasks

4. "I only use Claude Code, Codex is mid" → Codex is becoming a super app. Coding, docs, browser, computer use, automations, all in one surface.

4. "You need to pick a model and go deep" → model loyalty is dead, the best founders swap weekly based on the task

5. "SaaS is dead" → This was mostly true but for some SaaS margins actually improve when agents pay for their own tokens and need their own seats

6. "AutoGPT is the future" → AutoGPT died. Then agents actually got good 2 years later with Hermes, OpenClaw, and managed agents. The idea was right. The timing was wrong.

7. "Prompt engineering is a career" → lasted about 18 months as a job title. Workflow engineering replaced it.

8. "Computer use is a gimmick" → "sent from computer use/ai agent will be the new sent from iphone

9. "AI design looks generic" → the generic look is a taste problem not a technology problem. The founders feeding their agents references from Japanese packaging, brutalist architecture, and 1960s print are getting beautiful output.

10. "Fine-tuning is the moat" → a well-structured Obsidian vault with good markdown files outperforms fine-tuning for most use cases and costs nothing.

11. "Benchmarks tell you which model to use" → benchmarks tell you which model won a test. I think we're all waking up to this lol.

12. "AI will consolidate into 2-3 winners" → AI is fragmenting into thousands of vertical applications built on commodity models. The consolidation is at the model layer. The explosion is at the application layer. Both are happening simultaneously.

13. "The hard part is building" → the hard part is choosing what to build. Building takes a weekend. Choosing the right thing to build takes taste, domain knowledge, and customer conversations. thats why i built https://t.co/a5ARFnvky2 to make it easier for you.

14. "The terminal is the future" → desktop apps just ate the terminal. Claude Code desktop, Codex app, both shipped GUI versions in the same month. The next 100 million agent users will never open a terminal (thank god).

I guarantee you I'm holding at least 2-3 beliefs right now that will look stupid by Christmas. I just don't know which ones. Neither do you. No one does. Build anyway.

Keep moving because this is the greatest time to be building.

I'm rooting for you.

[Ministerie van Economische Zaken en Klimaat @Ministerie_EZK]

De staatssecretaris van Economische Zaken en Klimaat neemt het advies van het Bureau Toetsing Investeringen over en besluit tot een verbod van de overname van Solvinity door Kyndryl.

Kamerbrief ⤵️

https://t.co/QZ50cMgRu2

[Bob Sutton @work_matters]

I just learned Karl Weick died

One of the greatest organizational psychologists, and perhaps the most imaginative

So kind and shy

I wrote a tribute @LinkedIn about what so many of us--e.g. @HQCJane @AdamMGrant @MarinaNitze--learned from Karl

Link to my post in the comments

[Bartel Van de Walle @bvdwalle]

@TijlDeBie Inderdaad. En waarom zouden serieuze academici zich hier mee bezig houden? Zooo veel betere dingen te doen, zoals thesissen degelijk begeleiden of nakijken, ik zeg maar wat. Of, vooruit, een goeie paper schrijven. Maar dit??? Media aandacht, het doet wat met een mens blijkbaar.

[Météo 06 @Vincent_06v]

Je n’ai tout simplement pas les mots sur ce qui est entrain d’arriver..

Flemme de débattre avec ceux qui vont dire « c’est normal c’est l’été » alors qu’on est encore au printemps..

Bref, on se dirige vers la vague de chaleur la plus précoce et intense de l’histoire..

[EU Civil Protection & Humanitarian Aid 🇪🇺 @eu_echo]

🗺️ Mapped: Democratic Republic of the Congo | Ebola Bundibugyo virus disease outbreak ⬇️