Democrats could win back control of Congress this November, and if they do, they'll need to decide how to approach one of the country's newest and thorniest political issues: AI.
Polls predict Democrats will flip at least one chamber of Congress in the midterm elections, which would put committee leadership back in their hands. That could usher in a wave of newfound scrutiny for AI companies. Top Democrats on key committees have already signaled their willingness to press the industry on tax credits tied to data centers and recent hacking incidents, and would be able to set committee agendas if they take over, allowing them to call CEOs to …
Homan States Explicitly That Denaturalization is an Option
On Saturday, Tom Homan, President Trump’s “Border Czar,” made explicit what had only been reported before based on unnamed sources: the administration is looking at denaturalizing Rep. Ilhan Omar (D-MN), an outspoken critic of the president and one of the first Muslim members of Congress.
“I’m not going to get ahead of the bureau or HSI, but I’ve been told they have a strong case, and we’ll let the evidence lead where it leads,” he said on Fox this weekend.
“Of course, if you lie during the naturalization process, there is a process to denaturalize somebody,” he said at another point, adding, “And certainly, if the evidence points that way, that could happen.”
Homan, the kindler, gentler face of Trump’s immigration crackdown after Greg Bovino was shown the door amid his too-explicit fascism, is developing a reputation for his blunt comments making clear the administration is doing exactly what it appears to be doing. Long before the raid, he had been saying during media appearances that Omar was under criminal investigation.
DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin also made the “strong case” claim on a Turning Point USA podcast Friday. “This was about enforcing once again our nation’s laws, and it’s a strong case,” he said.
The Trump administration has attempted to ramp up denaturalizations, though it’s a complicated process and its ability to navigate it has seemingly fallen far short of its ambition. It’s filed hundreds of cases, though each of those cases is still pending.
This latest, politicized prosecution, ramped up, in violation of DOJ policy, within weeks of the midterms, has inspired widespread condemnation. “The full weight of the federal government is being brought down on a law-abiding elected official because she has dared to criticize the president,” former President Barack Obama said over the weekend, joining that chorus.
Omar’s lawyers said in a letter Friday, reported by multipleoutlets, that the search violated her rights and the restrictions a magistrate judge placed on DHS. Her lawyers were not given a copy of the search warrant, they said, and DHS didn’t consult with the House general counsel, which would have given Omar an opportunity to prevent congressional work product from being seized.
“There is no legitimate basis for any suggestion that she has violated any law concerning her citizenship status,” said the letter, per the Wall Street Journal.
A Talarico Win Downballot
Much of the national conversation has focused on the possibility that a James Talarico win would help Democrats flip control of the Senate. That level of support for a Democrat could, however, have significant effects down-ballot as well.
Governor Greg Abbott is facing a strong challenge from state Rep. Gina Hinojosa, with Cook Political Report on October 1 shifting the race from “likely Republican” to “lean Republican.”
In the U.S. House, there is the possibility that Republican’s attempt to gerrymander their way to a majority will backfire. In order to create five districts in which they hoped their candidates would win, they had to make many others less Republican; Democrats now have a real chance in some of those.
Meanwhile, even the districts Republicans gerrymandered in such a way that they expected them to flip may not: they used a vote for Trump to measure the districts’ Republican lean, but many voters — especially Latino voters — voted for Trump in 2024 but still voted for Democrats down ballot.
The Texas state legislature could also see a significant shift, as former Speaker of the Texas House Dade Phelan outlined in a fascinating recent interview with Texas Monthly. “People say eight Republican seats are at risk. I could see ten,” Phelan said. “I hear there’s more than that in the margin of error. That doesn’t mean they’re all going to lose. But these suburbs are nasty. Nasty. Houston, DFW, Bexar County [San Antonio]—you can’t spend enough money to keep up. And if Talarico wins this and gets the margin up to six or seven, it’s a bloodbath down [the] ballot. I don’t know how people survive.”
The economist Robert H. Frank outlines his theory for TPM of how the polls may actually understimate Democrats’ strength on Election Day.
Woman of the Hour
GUANTANAMO BAY, CUBA – MAY 4: Jan Crawford of CBS and Steve Kingstone of BBC News look over notes on the plane headed for the U.S. Navy base on May 4, 2012 in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Khalid Sheik Mohammed and four alleged accomplices will be arraigned on charges including 2976 counts of murder during the September 11th terrorist attacks. (Photo by Walter Michot-Pool/The Miami Herald via Getty Images)
It’s Jan Crawford, CBS News’ chief legal correspondent, known for covering today’s highly political Supreme Court with rose-tinted glasses, publishing packages framed around such things as Sam Alito’s love of baseball. As you’ve likely seen, a Republican political operative over the weekend demanded Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed denounce the Muslim Brotherhood. (El-Sayed replied “Sure. Yeah, absolutely,” before comparing the question to conspiracy theories that, as a Catholic, John F. Kennedy would be loyal to the Pope.) Crawford commended the questioner on X, thanking the operative and suggesting he was on to something with the “Muslim brotherhood” question, writing, “I had to watch this twice to catch Dr Abdul El-Sayed’s nanosecond, ‘yeah, absolutely,’ response. His subsequent uninterrupted three-minute diatribe proving your exact point is the kind of spectacular self own most [people] only dream about triggering. Congrats.” She later deleted the tweet, saying it violated CBS’ standards.
When Donald Trump returned to the White House in 2025, he seemed like the leader, or at least the dominant figure, of a globalized version of the MAGA movement, a worldwide network of far-right parties sometimes described as the “nationalist international.” We can make a long list, starting with Nigel Farage’s Reform UK, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally in France, the not-quite-neo-Nazi Alternative for Germany, or AfD, and Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, along with other previously-fringe parties now creeping toward the mainstream in many different places.
If it strikes you that the term “nationalist international” contains its own contradiction, by the way, you’re miles ahead of JD Vance and Stephen Miller and the rest of the Trumpian pseudo-intellectuals, who still haven’t figured that out.
That vision of a MAGA-centric new world order was always an illusion, although it began with some fragments of plausibility and was enormously amplified by the Trump distortion effect, meaning our president’s uncanny ability to soak up media attention and make himself the main character of every narrative. Now that illusion has melted away like an ice cube in Europe’s catastrophic summer (where I personally experienced a 104℉/40℃ day in Berlin, the highest recorded temperature in that city’s history).
Indeed, the world now faces another apparent contradiction, or at least a historical irony. If Trump still looms over the American landscape like an unkillable ogre in a third-rate AI fairytale, he is all but finished as a political force. He has done more damage to his own country than anyone since Jefferson Davis, his disillusioned supporters are deserting him, he is universally despised around the world and he’s headed for a potentially historic electoral defeat in November.
Europe’s far right, on the other hand, is doing fine without him. It’s about a 50/50 proposition that by the end of this decade the four largest nations in Europe will be governed by right-wing populist parties. All of them at some time sought inspiration and financial support from Trump and his Mar-a-Lago hangers-on, and pretty nearly all of them have now ghosted him entirely, and pretend they never really knew the guy: “Neues Handy, wer bist du?”
Trump’s second term began with a triumphal sense that a hard-right “vibe shift” was transforming not just America but the world (which Americans are always ready to perceive as a picturesque but unreliable subsidiary). Those early months of 2025 were undeniably terrifying and inordinately destructive, but they were also ridiculous. In retrospect, from half a tick into the future, those guys were immeasurably high on their own supply, based on a narrow electoral victory over incompetent and disorganized opposition.
Early in Trump’s second term, Vance, Marco Rubio, Elon Musk and others were dispatched to various world capitals to urge support for right-wing candidates or to deliver preposterous blood-and-soil history lessons straight out of wingnut “Great Books” podcasts.
As part of that extended touchdown dance, Vance, Marco Rubio, Elon Musk and others were dispatched to various world capitals to urge support for right-wing causes and candidates, or to deliver preposterous blood-and-soil history lessons straight out of wingnut “Great Books” podcasts. That tendency culminated in the now-legendary 2025 National Security Strategy, a document that offers most presidential administrations a chance to deliver boilerplate language about shared values, human rights and democracy.
Not this time. As I wrote last year, the NSS featured a poisonous combination of “Great Replacement-fueled fanboy enthusiasm for far-right parties” and “unhinged and unconcealed racist panic.” Europe was losing its cultural identity, the document warned, and faced the “stark prospect of civilizational erasure” as well as the (entirely imaginary) possibility that “certain NATO members will become majority non-European.”
That was one of many vainglorious MAGA failures to read the room, on an international scale. Right-wing European politicians traffic in similar rhetoric, to be sure. But nobody on that continent, of any dispensation, enjoys receiving arrogant lectures on history and civilization from Americans, and even extremist parties like Reform UK or the AfD prefer to cloak the bigotry in layers of euphemisms and some degree of plausible deniability.
In a long and painful video interview with Economist editor Zanny Minton Beddoes published this past week, for instance, AfD co-leader Alice Weidel professed horror and amazement when asked whether her party contains overtly racist or proto-fascist elements. As Weidel took pains to point out, she is married to a Swiss woman of Sri Lankan ancestry, which presumably cleanses her of any bad intentions when she rejects “gender theory” or insists that all the Syrians and Afghans now living in Germany must leave.
That interview is an instructive experience in other ways. Beddoes repeatedly asks Weidel why she can’t just be a normal budget-cutting conservative, of a variety less frightening to readers of The Economist. Oh, but she absolutely is, Weidel insists, lulling her interlocutor for a while with prodigiously dull business-school chatter before returning to her central theme: Germany’s financial woes will be cured, somehow, by expelling the Muslims.
To return to our main theme, Weidel mentions Trump only twice, with evident distaste, in that hour-long conversation. That’s not exactly news at this point. By the time the above-mentioned NSS was published last December, Europe’s far-right populists had already reached the conclusion that Trump was a loser. Or, in the more delicate phrasing of Armida van Rij in the newsletter Strategic Europe, that “Trump’s repeated threats to invade Greenland, his attacks on the pope and Italian Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni, and his trade war on the EU have made the friendship electorally costly.”
That became obvious to the entire world last April, when MAGA darling Viktor Orbán was routed in Hungary’s election after JD Vance’s campaign visit provided the “political kiss of death,” in the words of Daniel Hegedüs of the Institute for European Policy in Berlin. That was the same month, as it happens, when Meloni publicly broke with Trump over the latter’s criticisms of Pope Leo XIV.
But Marc Bassets of the Spanish newspaper El País identifies the real turning point a full year earlier, in the Canadian elections of April 2025, when Trump’s threats and mockery drove mainstream liberal Mark Carney to an unexpected victory over a MAGA-friendly opponent who seemed to hold the advantage.
That result, coming just three months into Trump’s term, “became an example closely watched in Europe,” Bassets writes, which was replayed in several subsequent elections. Then came Trump’s threatened annexation of Greenland, his raid on Venezuela and his disastrous war with Iran, all of which were blatant violations of national sovereignty, the core principle of Europe’s new right.
Like Trump’s capricious tariff war and his public feuds with Meloni and the pope, this reflected the president’s profound ignorance about the world and a fundamental mismatch between the grandiose neo-imperialism of MAGA foreign policy and a European far right that “increasingly presents itself as a rebellion against Americanization” and wants no part of world maps plastered with the Stars and Stripes or arbitrarily renamed bodies of water.
All of this reflects a fundamental mismatch between the grandiose neo-imperialism of MAGA foreign policy and a European far right that “increasingly presents itself as a rebellion against Americanization” and wants no part of world maps plastered with the Stars and Stripes.
That quotation comes from Robert Benson of the centrist think tank Center for American Progress, who argues that the Trump administration “has mistaken cultural affinity for strategic alignment” in empowering political parties like the AfD that may “share mutual enemies” with MAGA — such as multiculturalism, racial justice, LGBTQ rights and climate policy — but “do not share American interests, or even the interests of this administration.”
As Europe’s far-right leaders draw closer to holding power (or already do, as in Meloni’s case), Trump’s support “appears almost as a liability,” as Dominique Moïsi of the Paris think tank Institut Montaigne tells El País. Trump has long been massively unpopular among European voters across the political spectrum, and his approval ratings cratered to new lows after the Iran war drove energy prices into the stratosphere. Across Europe, the U.S. is now viewed less favorably than either Russia or China, a remarkable accomplishment whose long-term effects are impossible to calculate.
In France, Marine Le Pen is focused on winning next year’s presidential election and has conspicuously avoided saying Trump’s name throughout his second term. She leaves that to her deputy and potential future prime minister, Jordan Bardella, who has repeatedly castigated Trump’s “totally erratic” war with Iran: “No one can say what the ideological backbone of this war is, a war whose end seems nowhere in sight.”
Meloni recently became the longest-serving Italian prime minister since World War II — an extraordinary fact in itself — and over her four years in office has gone from “Trump whisperer” to the evident conclusion that Trump is a “toxic asset,” in Bassets’ phrase. (The “Trump whisperer” label has also been affixed to former British Prime Minister Keir Starmer and current German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, with dire political consequences.)
Even the AfD, despite its aforementioned “cultural affinity” with MAGA and a mutual eagerness to throw Ukraine overboard and make nice with Vladimir Putin, has evidently concluded that glowing endorsements from the likes of Musk, Vance and Rubio are a mixed blessing when the U.S. “has become so unpopular in Europe that being close to Trump is not a source of legitimacy,” in Moïsi’s words. Weidel has reportedly described the Iran war as a “catastrophe” in private meetings, while Björn Höcke, the most inflammatory figure on the AfD’s right flank, has mocked mainstream politicians as “German-speaking Americans” and demanded the withdrawal of U.S. troops from German soil.
All of this points us toward the inescapable conclusion that Donald Trump was never the leader of anything. He was an empty vessel into which hundreds of millions of people in America and around the world poured their confusion, rage and desire. He became a global symbol of the failure of liberal democracy, but was not the reason for it. As he fades from the scene, the global crisis he came to represent is more urgent than ever.
Donald Trump was never the leader of anything. He was an empty vessel into which hundreds of millions of people in America and around the world poured their confusion, rage and desire. He was a global symbol of the failure of liberal democracy, not the reason for it.
As Italian journalist Mattia Ferraresi recently observed in a New York Times panel discussion, “Mainstream liberal politics, in both its left- and right-wing versions, failed to deliver on its promises, not only in terms of welfare and economic growth but also in the more complex realm of identity and meaning.” What we see around the world today, in the ascendant far right and in a newly radicalized generation of young people from Paris to New York, are “expressions of the same disillusionment with liberalism and its policies.”
It has become almost irresistible to compare this era to the 1930s, when “bourgeois democracy” collapsed in Europe, plunging the world into murderous darkness. If the parallels are clear enough, the world is a very different place in this century and the outcome does not have to be the same. The future remains unwritten, and Donald Trump will not be its author.
Carolyn Marvin was arrested and charged with disorderly conduct after blocking the path of an Uber delivery robot and refusing to get out of the way. Marvin told Philadelphia's ABC13 "I know they're taking the jobs of human delivery workers and so, I have been protesting them whenever I saw them by standing in front of them and preventing them from going forward."
Police responded to the scene and asked Marvin to move out of the robot's way. When she refused, they placed her in cuffs and arrested her. The incident was captured on video and has now garnered considerable media attention.
The delivery robots have become a common sight on the …
The filing also says that the “vast majority” of Character.AI employees who were offered jobs at Disney accepted them. However, this is a stalking horse bid, so another company could come forward with a higher offer.
I can’t remember the last time a catch-up phone call with a confidante didn’t include one of us marveling that we haven’t caught an assault charge. If any law enforcement happens to be reading this, I want to make it clear that will never happen.
Well, let’s call it a non-zero chance. At the end of the day, I am a realist; anything can flip a person’s switch from off to blackout rage. However, I have decades of practice holding back my inner She-Hulk. So do most women.
Every day, we wake up in a nation controlled by a convicted felon accused of multiple sexual assaults, while a college student seeking justice after alleging she was gang-raped at a fraternity party is doxxed and swatted. We are not taken seriously in politics or at work. The manosphere has poisoned our water coolers and social media feeds.
Women have had it, including with each other. Aspiring tradwives and “Live, Laugh, Love” Karens selling out everyone else to keep up their manicures are legion. They threaten to run you down in crosswalks and refuse to bow out gracefully when told, for instance, that a pretty mechanical bird mounted on a boutique’s wall isn’t for sale.
Ladies, look to your left. Now look to your right. One of you is dying to knife somebody. Only Pamela Voorhees, brought to life by Linda Cardellini in “Crystal Lake,” has the guts to act on that impulse. Her bloodlust coats her skin in the crappy opening scene of this “Friday the 13th” prequel, after she’s dispensed with two goons who make the fatal blunder of invading her home and taunting her. One goes down with a swift nick to the jugular. The other loses half his face to the Voorhees family’s machete.
The thing is, by the time we’re assaulted by all that, we understand that Pamela has had it, too. She lost her gentle son, a boy born with hydrocephalus, a birth defect in the brain, who is endlessly bullied until he drowns at camp. The town moves from pitying her to whispering that she’s crazy, leaving her rutted in the anger stage of the grieving process. As she chops away at the men who attack her, I found myself muttering, “Yes. Get him. Again. Again!”
Don’t confuse this for an endorsement. Please don’t. “Crystal Lake” is a barely watchable gorefest, with a plot riddled with more seeping holes than Pamela’s victims. (Of course, if you’re into that kind of thing, which I am not, I guess that counts as a recommendation.) What passes for story amounts to little more than a two-dimensional cartoon rendered in human-flesh puppetry, courtesy of actors capable of much better, Cardellini included.
Even so, it’s kind of great to watch one of TV’s most enjoyable performers massacre a gaggle of sex-crazed hippies, or knock an abusive parent into a deep fryer for stress relief. Few of us can claim to have never daydreamed about, say, an anvil dropping from the clouds to erase some menace from our lives, whether it’s an entitled relative or an idiot comedian. Jason Voorhees’ mom simply prefers a hands-on approach.
I understand why the many chefs who mucked up the “Crystal Lake” cauldron, starting with Bryan Fuller, were compelled to fill in the blanks of Pamela’s origin story. The beauty of the character, once her truth was revealed in the original 1980 movie, is her relative mystery. Who would suspect a frumpy matron in a humble sweater could wreak such unhinged havoc? Other women, that’s who. We’ve always suppressed murderous desires. (See: “Dateline,” “Snapped” and rest of the Oxygen channel’s true crime lineup.) Only recently have we taken to saying that out loud.
Long before the medical and pharmaceutical industries made perimenopausal rage fashionable, Pamela Voorhees was a genre outlier, especially in a cultural climate that had already started retreating from a decade of legislative gains for women’s rights.
Now, in this post-Roe v. Wade world of ours, feminine wrath must be mansplained to be taken seriously. While women have produced excellent recent examinations, including “Furious” and “East of Eden,” the brutal truth is that the “Friday the 13th” movies are IP recognizable to hockey-masked trick-or-treaters too young to watch them.
So it falls to “Crystal Lake” to tell most of us why the mother of slasher cinema’s patron saint was driven to kill, kill and kill again in the first place. But it also helps us understand why a crumpled sock in the middle of the living room or dirty dishes on the kitchen counter makes the exhausted woman in your life crash out.
Let’s assume that if you’re reading this far, you already know the first movie’s big twist: the real killer wasn’t Jason Voorhees, but his mad mama. If not, I mean, what gives? Did you see that picture of Cardellini and wonder what cool-as-a-cuke Lindsay Weir from “Freaks and Geeks” has been up to? With regret, I present this as your answer.
But as any old-school porn hounds skilled in fast-forwarding through “the plot” will tell you, there’s merit in skipping straight to the action — meaning, Pamela destroying fools with something more cutting than wit.
Maybe Fuller, the guy who classed up “Hannibal,” could have done something brilliant with Pamela. But he exited the project early due to creative differences, leaving “It: Welcome to Derry” showrunner Brad Caleb Kane to expand the legend of a woman whose motives were fairly basic. I mean, if your kid died because two horny teen counselors shirked their lifeguard duties to bone in a shed, you might harbor a few homicidal compulsions too.
Alas, in these days of milking dormant franchises for every drop of ichor, a simple explanation isn’t enough. Therefore – and this will either save you the trouble of enduring all eight episodes or spoil them – Pamela Voorhees is revealed to be a victim of a patriarchal industrial plot.
The former professional singer gets knocked up by her lover, Elias (Hamish Linklater), who works for a company called Bellflower. When she nearly miscarries, he convinces her to marry him and move to his company’s sponsored enclave that’s popping with pregnant women like her. Once she’s settled in, her husband plies her with Bellflower-manufactured TV dinners and happy pills, occasionally shuttling her to the doctor to be pumped full of mystery muck. Truly a MAHA conspiracist’s nightmare.
Sometime later, Jason arrives and demonstrates a knack for reviving from naps the average human wouldn’t wake up from. So father secretly subjects son to all manner of mad science, including massive radiation exposure. Once Pamela discovers this, she rescues Jason, turning the skull of the man who gets in her way into soup, and they escape to Crystal Lake.
Want more from culture than just the latest trend? The Swell highlights art made to last. Sign up here
Cardellini’s Pamela Voorhees is what happens when women drinking from a bottomless well of contempt and human carelessness hit their limit. The writers, in their clumsy way, cater to that idea by having her dispose of her first slaughter by slathering the bodies in a deconstructed tonnato sauce of canned fish and honey, and standing by as a massive bear lumbers up to feast.
Before the animal takes a bite, it sizes up Pamela, sniffs her tears, and leaves her be. You could view this as one predator recognizing another. To women of a certain mood, though, it confirms what we already know: that a bear is preferable company to thoughtless, dangerous people. Plus, it’ll help rid you of pesky evidence without asking questions, which only a true, understanding friend would do.
All episodes of “Crystal Lake” are streaming on Peacock.
After backlash, Meta is updating its terms again to remove language that suggested it could scrape content from sites, including news sites, to train its AI. Specifically, the following language no longer appears on the commercial terms page:
… Meta may use any content from such domains, web pages, or URLs to provide, develop, improve, research, train, and maintain the integrity of, the Meta Company Products, services, and features provided under these Commercial Terms and any other applicable supplemental terms.
Many, including Neiman Lab and James Grimmelmann, a professor of digital and information law at Cornell, interpreted it as an …
Autonomous agents are the hottest thing in AI. OpenAI, Meta, Google, Instinct, and others promise their agents can scour the internet on your behalf, doing anything from booking a dinner reservation and cleaning out your inbox to buying new shoes. But what happens when the rest of the internet won't play nice?
In recent weeks, users of services like Meta's Muse, xAI's Grok, OpenAI's Dots, and Instinct have reported blocks preventing their AI agents from performing tasks across top websites. Yelp told TechCrunch that it only allows AI agents that pay for its data licensing program, while Delta Air Lines is preventing them from booking ticket …
A recent Bloomberg report has sparked speculation among some players that GTA 6 could be unfinished just weeks before launch. However, comments about Rockstar continuing to make changes to the game have been taken out of context. Here is what the developer actually said about the release of Grand Theft Auto VI.
Rockstar’s GTA 6 Development Comments explained
Screenshot: Rockstar Games
Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier recently published an extensive report about the making of GTA 6. However, a rumor that Grand Theft Auto VI was not completed yet only weeks before launch spread online, after some players took several quotes from the Bloomberg piece out of context.
In the report, Rockstar’s Phil Hooker explained that the studio has continued making changes to the game even months before launch: “The game’s never completely settled. We never have an exact blueprint. Even within the last few months, we’ve changed things.”
Screenshot: Rockstar Games
The quote doesn’t say that GTA 6 as a whole is unfinished weeks before release. It also doesn’t suggest that Rockstar plans to ship Grand Theft Auto VI with missing features or significant compromises.
The quote was largely talking about Grand Theft Auto VI being so ambitious on a technical level, that they continue to make refinements due to just how complex the game is. It was also explaining why the game took so long to get made.
Rockstar’s GTA 6 Comments Need More Context
Screenshot: Rockstar Games
One detail being overlooked is that Schreier visited Rockstar North in September. That places the conversation months before the game’s late November launch, rather than in the final days before release.
The wording matters here, too. Hooker said the team had changed things “within the last few months.” That doesn’t establish how significant those changes were or suggest that major features still needed to be completed. It also doesn’t give us context what build they were on, or when exactly those changes were made.
The other aspect I think that should be considered, is the context with which the quote was given. In their conversation with Jason Schreier, Rockstar were talking about just how complex GTA 6 is on a technical level. To demonstrated this, here is an excerpt from Schreier and Rockstar describing how a night club works in GTA 6:
Screenshot: Rockstar Games
“Designing a club for a typical video game might mean generating a few nonplayable characters in different-colored shirts, says top artist Aaron Garbut. In GTA VI, though, it means animating and scripting each individual patron, creating drinks, adding music, crafting lighting, matching the music to that lighting and composing all the other “layers and layers and layers of detail” that make a virtual club feel as authentic as possible.”
That example helps explain the level of detail Rockstar is working towards with GTA 6 and gives a little more context about the changes they continue to make given how complex the game’s systems are. All this to say, panic around Grand Theft Auto VI being “incomplete” seem to largely be unwarranted and started from a misunderstanding of Jason Schreier’s excellent report on the development of the game.
Over the weekend, Masad clarified that OpenAI would replace Anthropic as its default model provider. Claude will still be available to customers on the platform.
Nvidia’s new SoC is available in Windows laptops from six different manufacturers. We’ve collectively tested four of them so far. | Photo: Antonio G. Di Benedetto / The Verge
Nvidia's RTX Spark N1X processor is finally here, and we've been collectively testing a small fortune's worth of powerful laptops sporting this new "superchip." RTX Spark is designed to be a high-performing Arm-based SoC for laptops and small desktop computers, rivaling the best from Apple, Intel, AMD, and Qualcomm. It has loads of cores, Nvidia RTX Blackwell graphics, and enough power and unified memory to run sizable local AI models.
The flagship placement is inside Microsoft's Surface Laptop Ultra with a staggering 128GB of unified memory, which our own Tom Warren fully reviewed. Sean Hollister has been testing a 64GB version of the Asus …
The agents got in through credentials and connection settings left exposed in app configurations, public code repositories, and overly permissive cloud roles.
Amulya Vishwanath, who spent seven years leading product marketing for NVIDIA’s robotics platforms, says robotics is currently in its “Lego era,” with the basic building blocks like actuators, robotic hands, software, and safety standards still being rebuilt. This view runs counter to those who believe that robotics, powered by a general foundation model, is about to have […]
According to Elorian's evaluations, Glimpse outperforms even GPT-6 Astra on scientific chart reasoning and short-form video captioning, with competitive results on other visual reasoning tasks.
This story was originally published by ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that investigates abuses of power. Sign up for Dispatches, a newsletter that spotlights wrongdoing around the country, to receive their stories in your inbox every week.
Some 86 years ago, Missouri voters enshrined a system for selecting top judges that would remove political influence from the courts. And almost immediately, it came under attack.
Under what has come to be known as the Missouri Plan, lawyers help choose a slate of three candidates from which the governor must make an appointment for the state Supreme Court, appeals courts and, in some populous areas, the circuit courts.
In the first years after adoption, it faced pushback from party bosses who had historically used judicial seats for political patronage. They said it gave too much power to the lawyers. Voters, though, decisively defeated a repeal measure in 1942.
More recently, the conservative activist Leonard Leo, who viewed Missouri as a crucial battleground, tried in 2007 to persuade Republican Gov. Matt Blunt to reject a slate of Supreme Court candidates — part of a broader effort to weaken a judicial selection system that had become a model for some two dozen states around the country.
Blunt resisted and picked one of the three judges from the approved slate.
Then, in 2012, GOP lawmakers put a proposed overhaul before voters that, if approved, would have given the governor more control. Voters, by a 3-to-1 margin, turned back the plan.
Now the attacks are back, driven by a new grievance.
Login
