Robert M Van Praag

#TasteTheSunrise #SpringFlowers #StayAwesome🙌 #MorningMovement grokipedia.com/page/Narcissus…

Koolzaadveld

The Tulip Church - one of my favourite locations this year for photographing tulips. I decided to photograph it in the evening when it was lit up with the dark blue sky, matching the colour palette of the tulips.

@albertdrosphoto Mega🙌

@AlexanderNL 😂, Precies zoals in de studie. Wellicht smaakt dit beter. 👇 x.com/echotruthhub/s…

Ja daag ik ga dit niet allemaal zitten lezen

That's a Badaas baby 😁 #archaeohistories

@AXorbitant 😯…😂

Als Japanners mee gaan doen aan de open wereldkampioenschappen fierlejeppen kunnen ze het in Friesland wel schudden.

@SamaHoole 😂 ¿El meu amic espanyol entra al xat preguntant de què van aquests americans? Bisous des Pays-Bas! 🇳🇱 youtu.be/b58eYTMxTxc?si…

Nobody has ever given a full-throated sales pitch for a tin of sardines. That is a market gap. Allow me. The tin is food-grade steel, lined, sealed, oxygen removed. The environment inside is more controlled than most restaurant kitchens you have eaten in happily and without incident. No preservatives. Canning is heat and the absence of oxygen. Just the fish, suspended exactly as they were the day the boat came in. The omega-3s survive it. Studies comparing fresh to tinned show no meaningful difference in EPA and DHA. The fish was caught, canned within hours, and the fatty acids went nowhere. The bones are edible. They have been sitting in olive oil long enough to become soft, and they are the calcium delivery mechanism the sardine built for itself. You eat them. That is the intended use. What the tin actually contains: EPA and DHA in immediately usable form. Selenium, iodine, B12, CoQ10, vitamin D, calcium, complete protein with every essential amino acid. Your protein shake has twenty-three ingredients. The sardine grew its own nutrition in the North Atlantic and asked for nothing. A food humans have eaten since before written history now apparently requires a defence. Buy the tin.

One of the rarest and most valuable cars in history. A 1938 Bugatti Type 57SC Atlantic of which only four were ever built.

De verbazing zit ’m denk ik in het aannemen dat men hetzelfde ziet en weet zoals jij dat doet. En voor diegenen die het niet zien, zullen ze je dankbaar zijn voor je inzicht. Doch komt de realiteit ook om de hoek kijken en met alle goede wil wordt in jouw werkelijkheid geen objectieve beleving gevonden. 😬 Voel met je mee.

@collapsologist Ik heb het correcte beeld maar het blijft me toch steeds verbazen.

Mijn x ontplofte gisteren vanwege mijn post over leeftijdsverificatie en DigitalID. Veel medestanders. Klinkt mooi maar ben toch niet gerust. De eerste persoon (buiten X) die ik spreek: “lijkt me alleen maar goed dat kinderen minder op social media zitten”. Zonder brede uitleg aan de bevolking wat de échte effecten zijn voor ons allemaal gaan we dit niet winnen. Hoe leg je uit dat ouders de kinderen geen smartphone of social media hadden hoeven te geven als ze het zo slecht voor de kinderen vinden? Daar heb je toch geen overheid voor nodig? En waarom is er geen brede informatiecampagne over alle tweede orde effecten van digital id? Ik ben serieus verbaasd over hoe schouderophalend men autonomie uit handen wil geven. En als je het uit handen geeft komt het niet vanzelf meer terug.

In Italy, one of the hobbies for older men is “Umarell”. Retired men who enjoy watching construction sites while giving unsolicited advice

@BillionMagazine 👻

Billionaire Leonardo Maria Del Vecchio arrives in his Ferrari F80 to his $182M 72m Superyacht No Rush. 👀

@HistoryBoomer 😂😂

The first one of these I’ve actually liked. Stephen Hawking is hilarious. “Ha ha ha ha ha ha”

Dutch winter landscape with 3 windmills and a Koek-en-Zopie (hot drinks and snacks). Charles Leickert, 17th century

Engel de Ruyter, Vice Admiral, Son of Michiel de Ruyter. Jan Lievens, 1667 - 1680 #DutchGoldenAge

You’ve actually explained the linguistic behaviour of a majority of people, with or without AI. The problem isn’t comprehension of typography, but the evolution of writing habits, the tools used to write as @SylviaGarassino points out, among those not professionally inclined to use the full punctuation range, shaped by years of informal, punctuation-light writing. So when AI produces fluent, full-range prose, it reads as foreign, and actual writers get caught in the crossfire. Appreciate the explanation, and you’re right — though you can’t blame the users entirely. Would you be open for a DM on this?

𝐍𝐎, 𝐈𝐓'𝐒 𝐍𝐎𝐓 𝐀𝐈. 𝐈𝐓'𝐒 𝐂𝐀𝐋𝐋𝐄𝐃 𝐏𝐔𝐍𝐂𝐓𝐔𝐀𝐓𝐈𝐎𝐍. I see it constantly now. Someone reads a post or an article and spots an em dash — that long horizontal line — and immediately declares it was written by AI. 𝐓𝐡𝐚𝐭'𝐬 𝐚𝐧 𝐞𝐦 𝐝𝐚𝐬𝐡, 𝐝𝐞𝐟𝐢𝐧𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐥𝐲 𝐂𝐡𝐚𝐭𝐆𝐏𝐓. You know who else uses em dashes? People who actually learned how English punctuation works. I don't normally step on this particular soapbox — and I commit authorial malpractice by never trying to sell you my books — but I've authored over 30 of them. Many have been international bestsellers. Well over 𝟏,𝟎𝟎𝟎,𝟎𝟎𝟎 𝐜𝐨𝐩𝐢𝐞𝐬 in print, translated into 7+ languages, sold around the world. I am, amongst many other things, an actual author. So let me give you a quick education your grammar teachers apparently skipped. The em dash — this thing right here — is one of the most versatile punctuation marks in the English language. It's called an "em dash" because in traditional typesetting, it was the width of the capital letter M in whatever typeface you were using. It serves three primary functions. First, it sets off a parenthetical statement within a sentence — like this one — when you want more emphasis than commas provide but less formality than parentheses. Second, it signals an abrupt break in thought or a dramatic pivot. Third, it introduces an explanation or amplification of what came before it. Writers have been using it for centuries. Emily Dickinson used em dashes so obsessively her manuscripts look like they were attacked by a horizontal line. Mark Twain used them constantly in dialogue. So did F. Scott Fitzgerald. None of them had access to ChatGPT. Now for a bit of trivia most people never learn. There's also an 𝐞𝐧 𝐝𝐚𝐬𝐡 — slightly shorter, the width of the letter N. The en dash has a narrower purpose: it connects ranges. Pages 12–44. The years 1941–1945. The New York–London flight. It's the dash between two things that are connected but distinct. Most people have never heard of it, and most fonts render it just barely shorter than an em dash, which is why almost nobody notices the difference. Both have been part of formal typography since the invention of movable type in the 15th century. Gutenberg's typesetters used varying dash lengths to organize text. By the 18th century, printers had standardized the em and en dash as distinct glyphs with distinct grammatical functions. This isn't some modern AI invention — it's older than the United States. And if you use Microsoft Word, they're trivially easy to type. An en dash is Ctrl + Minus on the numeric keypad. An em dash is Ctrl + Alt + Minus on the numeric keypad. Word also auto-converts two hyphens (--) into an em dash if you have autocorrect enabled. That's why you see me use them in my books and in my posts — because I know they exist and I know the keyboard shortcut. The reason AI chatbots use em dashes frequently is because they were trained on well-written text — books, journalism, academic papers — written by people who knew the rules. The AI learned proper punctuation from proper writers. That doesn't make proper punctuation a sign of AI. It makes it a sign of 𝐥𝐢𝐭𝐞𝐫𝐚𝐜𝐲. For the record, the only things I use AI for are conjuring up a quick graphic — like the image on this post — or as a shortcut for preliminary research. Think of it as a Google accelerator. The writing? That's all me. It has been for 30+ books and countless social media posts such as this one. If you've reached the end of this post, you now know more about dashes than most people who graduated with an English degree. And the next time you see an em dash and your first instinct is to scream "AI" — maybe consider that what you're actually looking at is someone who paid attention in class. Or someone whose grammar teachers didn't fail them quite as badly as yours failed you. 𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐞𝐦 𝐝𝐚𝐬𝐡 𝐢𝐬 𝟓𝟎𝟎 𝐲𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐬 𝐨𝐥𝐝. 𝐒𝐭𝐨𝐩 𝐛𝐥𝐚𝐦𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐢𝐭 𝐨𝐧 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐫𝐨𝐛𝐨𝐭𝐬.

@IntCyberDigest @chat @signalapp @session_app @ThreemaApp Hasn’t launched yet. But thank you.

@RobertMVanPraag @chat There are better alternatives. Check out @signalapp, @session_app and @ThreemaApp..

❗️ WhatsApp moved status updates to the Chats tab in the latest beta, bringing ads closer to where users spend most of their time. Likely a push to make advertising more viable.

@IntCyberDigest @chat x.com/chat/status/20…

@IntCyberDigest Well then. Isn’t this time to explore XChat when it launches?

@CraigBrockie I would add outdoors. mountain &/ sea air to that and open water swimming.

8. Grounding

What if the most powerful health solutions were FREE? 1. Fasting 2. Sunlight 3. Exercise 4. Urotherapy 5. Dianetics 6. Optimism 7. Deep breathing