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Watsonville police officers were investigating a suspicious device found on the Watsonville High School campus Thursday morning. 

On its Facebook account, the police department said that all summer school students and staff are safe and evacuated from the school as officers investigate the device. 

“We ask everyone to avoid the area,” the department wrote, adding that the school district would provide parents and guardians with updates.  

City of Watsonville spokesperson Erika Vazquez told Lookout that no further information was available at publication time. 

Have news that should be in Lookout Briefs? Send your news releases, including contact information, to news@lookoutlocal.com.

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The post Police investigating suspicious device found at Watsonville High School  appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

About 47% of singles look negatively at the use of AI in dating -- but, many dating app users are open to AI helping with profile punch-ups and conversation starters.

AWS is in talks to sell its chips to other data centers. CEO Andy Jassy has said this represents a $50 billion opportunity for the company.

A San Francisco startup best known for its AI-generation software is making a bizarre leap into medical imaging, and trying to says it hopes draw curiosity-seekers into its new spa to get scanned. On Wednesday, Midjourney announced the establishment of Midjourney Medical, which it admitted was a bit out of left field. To promote the tech, it claims to be opening a spa in San Francisco where guests will be able to step “into a shallow pool of golden light,” before being lowered into a tank where ultrasound sensors bombard their bodies in order to take a scan that AI pieces together into MRI-like images. This sounds like the plot of a cheap sci-fi movie, but there is some real science behind it. “As you descend into the water, hundreds of thousands of tiny elements take turns, sending out waves, listening together, compressing and then streaming data to a massive cluster where thousands of computers split the task,” Midjourney explained in the announcement. “By looking at how the shapes of all the waves change, we reconstruct a detailed map or ‘image’ which basically lets us figure out what’s in there.” That “basically” isn’t exactly reassuring when Midjourney says it wants to have 50,000 or more of the things deployed around the world by 2031 “with a total scanning capacity of a billion scans a month” for use as a preventative health tool. It’s not clear how fast the process is with the prototype unit, but Midjourney said its goal is for the whole thing to take around a minute. “We think it's completely possible that with enough early imaging in the future, the world could avoid 30% of all deaths and 50% of all healthcare costs,” the company added. According to a “technical” video included in the announcement, there’s a ring of 40 scanners included in the prototype unit the company has built. That ring of 40 elements contains 358,000 ultrasonic elements made up of tiny transducers that create ultrasound waves in water while listening for how they change when they slap the body of whoever is in Midjourney’s dunk tank up to a thousand times a second. The Midjourney Scanner, as the company has named it, can capture tissue details up to half a millimeter, which is on par with standard clinical MRIs, but pales in comparison to the resolution of more advanced designs. Oh, did we not mention our partner? Midjourney said its scanner is the first of its kind ever constructed, but the technical video says it relies on Fullbody Ultrasound Computational Tomography (FUCT, or USCT, as the industry has taken to calling it to avoid the more questionable acronym). That's not new. Fast, full-body ultrasound scanning that requires patients to be submerged in a water tank has been an active project at Caltech based on a research paper from earlier this year. Same goes for the sensors Midjourney is including in its scanner. You wouldn’t know that from reading the announcement, which makes it seem like this was a project entirely of Midjourney’s own AI fever dreams, but ultrasound tech firm Butterfly Network was compelled to issue its own press release “following Midjourney’s public announcement” in order to “provide commentary” on the AI outfit’s new venture. Butterfly confirmed in its release that it provided the 40 ultrasound imaging modules for the Midjourney Scanner. The hardware was “licensed under a co-development agreement between the two companies,” according to Butterfly. According to a 2025 SEC filing, Butterfly expects to rake in $74 million over five years for providing the hardware. There's some irony in Midjourney's failure to mention its partner: The company has faced lawsuits claiming it used copyrighted works without permission to train its AI image generation model. We reached out to both companies to learn more. Midjourney didn’t respond, and Butterfly declined to add anything beyond what was in its press release. Midjourney said that it’s planning to open its first ultrasound scanner spa at the end of 2027, but it has another hurdle to jump: FDA approval. Beyond improving its tech so that the second-generation scanner is ready for its 2027 spa date, “regulation is the next limit,” the company said. “Normally, for every diagnostic medical capability you need FDA approval,” Midjourney explained. “We’re starting by just giving you detailed body composition maps — and we’ll be submitting regular test results to the FDA for increased capabilities.” Midjourney also fails to mention how it will store and secure those scans, whether it will use said scans to train its body composition-detection algorithms, and how it’s ensuring those algorithms get things right that it usually take a human a few years of education and training to learn. ®

Many Republicans across the right are bashing interim deal between the US-Iran as an unnecessary surrender. 

“This is the worst foreign policy blunder in decades,” Sen. Bill Cassidy of Louisiana wrote in a Wednesday post on X. “Iran’s nuclear ambitions were not curbed, and they have learned that threatening the Strait of Hormuz works.”

“Now, Iran gets to build brand-new infrastructure under this deal,” he continued. 

Other Republicans, like Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina, have balked at the amount of resources the US is giving to Iran—including sourcing at least $300 billion to fund reconstruction in Iran. The Trump administration has repeatedly said this week that the money would come from other Gulf countries. 

The Trump administration read the agreement to journalists on Wednesday and both countries are expected to sign it in a formal ceremony on Friday. While extremely vague in how it will be achieved, the “memorandum of understanding” provides financial and political concessions to Iran for the country to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and reaffirm that it will not develop nuclear weapons: immediately allowing Iran to sell its oil and terminating all sanctions against Iran, among others. 

But as I wrote on Wednesday, Trump seems to be aware of the dissatisfaction from his own party, stating that the deal isn’t “final,” he may resume bombing if Iran doesn’t “behave,” and that Vice President JD Vance—and definitely not the president—is responsible for the negotiated deal.

While Sen. Cassidy lost last month’s primary election to two Republicans, including Trump’s choice, Julia Letlow, even the president’s allies voiced opposition (although in a less direct way). 

“The president is getting, I think, very poor advice when it comes to this deal,” Sen. Ted Cruz told the Daily Wire on Wednesday. “History teaches that giving billions of dollars to theocratic lunatics who want to murder us is a bad idea.”

Likewise, on Wednesday, far right political commentator Ben Shapiro said on Fox News that the agreement looks like a disaster and “does not achieve any of the signal goals that were set by the administration at the beginning,” including ending all nuclear enrichment, ballistic missiles, and support of terrorism.

“In my opinion, the Vice President of the United States, the chief negotiator on this particular project, has not well served the president,” Shapiro concluded. 

On Thursday afternoon, the US military announced that it had officially lifted its blockade on ships entering and exiting Iranian ports. The Trump administration stated that the blockade, which started in April, was designed to stop Iran from profiting off its closure of the Strait of Hormuz and put further pressure on the country to reopen the passageway.

Just after the deal was announced on Sunday, Sen. Lindsey Graham, one of the president’s most devoted loyalists, wrote on X that he was “somewhat concerned that Iran’s view of the agreement seems different than what the American negotiating team is claiming.” The senator didn’t elaborate on what specific worries he had but said on Wednesday that it was worth seeing whether Iran would follow through on its word, as the agreement would significantly help his and Trump’s “ultimate goal” of normalizing relations between Israel and several Arab countries.

But JD Vance, who has seemingly become the fall guy if the deal with Iran fails, has, at least publicly, chosen to stand by the negotiations, saying in a White House press conference on Thursday that critics should, “number one, have a little bit of faith in the president.”

JD Vance: "What I would say to any of the critics is number one, have a little bit of faith in the president"

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2026-06-18T16:11:02.442Z

And Trump, who notably didn’t name anyone specific, wrote on Truth Social on Thursday that any opponents to how his administration has handled Iran are “fools” given that “the Stock Market Just Hit A RECORD HIGH, and Oil prices are “tumbling” down.”

For the record, the rising stock market is largely down to the most wealthy investors who avoid the struggles of everyday costs and the average oil price in the US is still 34 percent more expensive than when the US and Israel started bombing Iran again in February.

Plaintiffs in the class action complaint allege Rivian falsely promised for years it would bring hands-free driving to its first-generation R1 vehicles.

Doomscrolling on social media is a very common problem and can feel like an endless loop of constantly losing track of time. Instead of tackling this issue with strict limits, a new mindful screen time app called Mivo Scrolling is trying to shake things up. Launched last month, Mivo doesn’t look super different from other […]

Poor Tommy Tuberville. All he wants to do is become governor of Alabama and shed his nickname as the dumbest man in the Senate. But Tuberville seems to have forgotten a key factor in his cunning plan to get a new job: You have to, well, live in Alabama to run for governor of Alabama. And Tuberville … does not, at least per the lawsuit just filed in Alabama state court.

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A cartoon by David Horsey. Related | Republicans cry fraud in Los Angeles because they’re sore losers…

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FERC told grid operators to give data centers a fast lane for interconnections, but it failed to address electricity supply shortages.

⚡ Quick Take

• Netflix’s The Boroughs, which premiered in May 2026, has already been cancelled and won’t return for season 2.
• The show’s budget and drop in viewership are apparently the cause.
• Matt and Ross Duffer, creators of Netflix’s Stranger Things, served as executive producers for the show.

Sci-fi mystery series The Boroughs was Matt and Ross Duffer’s newest project after Stranger Things concluded last year. But, after just one season, Netflix has suddenly cancelled the show. The show had some big names, too. Alfred Molina, a.k.a Tobey Maguire’s Doc Ock, and Geena Davis, Thelma of Thelma and Louise, were just two of the various stars who appeared in the show.

Netflix

The star-studded cast alongside the SFX-heavy subject matter, according to The Hollywood Reporter, required a hefty budget; “sci-fi is expensive.”

In addition, The Duffers’ production house, Upside Down Pictures, made an August 2025 deal with Paramount. They ended their deal with Netflix this April. According to Deadline, the show garnered almost 20 million views in its first week on Netflix. However, it experienced a swift drop to just over 3 million in its second week out. Both of these factors could also explain Netflix’s decision to cut the show.

For those who still haven’t seen the one-season-wonder, here is a synopsis:

In a seemingly perfect retirement community, a crew of unlikely heroes must stop an otherworldly threat from stealing the one thing they don’t have: time.

Netflix

The Boroughs has appeared on Netflix’s “Top 10” list since it dropped in May. And, as previously reported by Deadline, season two writers had begun to convene in hopes of getting ahead. The show was projected to span three seasons, and everybody on the team hoped for a renewal, including star Alfred Molina.

“We’ve got a great premise. The sets are all there. I’d love to do more.”

Unfortunately, this was not enough in light of the show’s expenses, the drop in viewership, and the Duffer Brothers’ move to Paramount, so The Boroughs is now officially cancelled. For Netflix, it probably was as simple as weighing the costs versus the benefits of continuing this now-short story.

Recently, Paramount announced it will be working on an “event movie” with the brothers. The studio has kept any further details from reaching the public, other than that it will come out in November 2028.

The post Netflix Cancelled Duffer Brothers’ THE BOROUGHS Series appeared first on Nerdist.

Vice President JD Vance told three massive lies while defending the recently signed memorandum of understanding with Iran, which includes what many see as multiple U.S. capitulations on key points of contention.

Vance took the podium in Washington, D.C., Thursday afternoon to make his case.

“The nuclear weapons program is destroyed. It is gone. If the Iranians decided tomorrow to build a nuclear weapon, they simply don’t have the capacity in order to do that,” Vance said. “What we’re trying to ensure is they don’t rebuild that capacity—not just a year from now, two years from now, but many many years from now.”

JD Vance: "The nuclear weapons program is destroyed. it is gone."

(Bookmark this one!) pic.twitter.com/T9vSdVBbeo

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 18, 2026

This is lie number one. Although President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have claimed to have completely destroyed Iran’s nuclear program multiple times, U.S. intelligence reveals that there was limited damage during the course of the war. In fact, the time Iran would need to build a nuclear weapon has not changed since last summer. (Iran has long maintained that it is not seeking a nuclear weapon through its program.)

Vance also claimed that Iran has committed to destroying their enriched uranium stockpile and to cease enrichment—two more lies that aren’t even mentioned in the recently signed memorandum of understanding. In fact, Iran has never promised not to enrich throughout their entire nuclear history.

“Under this deal [Iran is] being allowed now to sell their oil freely. How is that not a financial benefit?” a reporter asked Vance. “And they’re being allowed to do that without making any new concrete nuclear commitments. So can you explain, how is that not lopsided?”

“They’ve made very concrete nuclear commitments—they’ve committed to the destruction of the highly enriched stockpile that they have in their possession,” Vance replied.

But that’s not what’s in the MOU. The final text says that Iran will use “minimum methodology” to gradually down-blend their stockpile. That is not the same as “the destruction of the highly enriched stockpile,” as Vance said. All other references to the uranium in the MOU remain vague, as both sides have agreed to revisit the issue at the end of a 60-day negotiating period.

The administration trotted out Vance to lie about how great his paltry deal he made with Iran was, and even he struggled to push the narrative effectively. The next 60 days will be a huge indicator of Vance’s actual negotiating abilities. As of right now, it’s not looking good.

Q: They are being allowed to sell oil without making concrete nuclear commitments. How is that not lopsided?

JD VANCE: They've made very concrete nuclear commitments. They have committed to the destruction of their highly enriched stockpile. pic.twitter.com/vsJ3ZVeAt9

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 18, 2026

⚡ Quick Take

• Rockstar Games has set a June pre-order date for GTA IV once again. The game will still likely arrive in November 2026.

In a slightly irritating turn of events, Grand Theft Auto VI has been delayed once again. Gamers will have to wait almost 6 months longer to play the game, as Grand Theft Auto VI‘s makers announced Thursday that they’re pushing back the release date to November 19, 2026. C’mon, guys, we just wanna steal some cars already. And it seems that this date is sticking because pre-orders will be available starting on June 25.

Rockstar Games

Previously, Take-Two Interactive broke the news of the new Grand Theft Auto VI release date delay as part of its quarterly earnings report on November 6. A statement from CEO Strass Zelnick is as follows:

“Rockstar Games will now release Grand Theft Auto VI on November 19, 2026, and we remain both excited and confident they will deliver an unrivalled blockbuster entertainment experience,” Zelnick said.

“We are sorry for adding additional time to what we realize has been a long wait, but these extra months will allow us to finish the game with the level of polish you have come to expect and deserve,” Rockstar Games added in a blog post. “We want to thank you again for your patience and support. While the wait is a little longer, we are incredibly excited for players to experience the sprawling state of Leonida and a return to modern day Vice City.”

RELATED ARTICLE

Rockstar Delays GRAND THEFT AUTO VI to 2026

Unfortunately, this isn’t the first time the highly anticipated game has been delayed, either. The original 2025 release date was first pushed back earlier this year, when the company set a new date for May 2026. That decision rocked the gaming world, causing the whole industry to take a $2.7 billion dollar hit. With yet another Grand Theft Auto VI delay, our patience is growing thin—we can only replay the first trilogy of games for so long.

Rockstar Games When Will Grand Theft Auto VI Finally Release?

The GTA franchise is one of the biggest in the gaming industry, with GTA VI being one of the most anticipated video games in years. The trailer, released in May, absolutely exploded online with 475 million views and counting. For long-time fans of the franchise, it is truly frustrating to have to wait any longer. But, wait we must. The new game takes place in Vice City, though details remain scarce. After this latest delay, Grand Theft Auto VI will now release on November 19, 2026.

Fingers crossed, at least.

Originally published November 6, 2025.

This post has affiliate links, which means we may earn advertising money if you buy something. This doesn’t cost you anything extra, we just have to give you the heads up for legal reasons. Click away!

The post GRAND THEFT AUTO VI Sets June Pre-Order Date, Will Release in November 2026 appeared first on Nerdist.

The Trump administration is ordering National Park Service employees to wear pins promoting Freedom 250, a semi-private group that the president has used to turn celebrations of the country’s 250th anniversary into what critics call a partisan party for himself. Several NPS employees told me that they were even threatened with professional reprimands if they refused to don the lapel pins at events celebrating the Declaration of Independence.

These orders were issued verbally by local supervisors at various Park Service offices in the last few weeks, according to emails reviewed by Mother Jones and accounts from NPS employees who spoke on the condition of anonymity.

“When I asked if I would receive any disciplinary action if I chose not to wear the pin, I was told, ‘Yes,'” one person said. “I chose not to continue the conversation after that.”

These mandates for Freedom 250 flair may seem reminiscent of the 1999 satire Office Space. But in the case of the Park Service, they are very real orders that come as part of Trump’s push for an anniversary celebration that appears to have a vanishing connection to the actual ideas behind the American Revolution.

Trump’s semiquincentennial events have included a massive military parade on his 79th birthday, followed by a crypto-sponsored UFC fight on the White House lawn for his 80th. The next day, Trump announced that the July 4 celebration on the National Mall, the marquee event of the 250th anniversary, would feature a “TRUMP RALLY.” 

The July 4 bash is being organized by Freedom 250. Trump advisers created that group late last year to seize control of anniversary planning, after becoming frustrated with America250, a separate organization created by Congress a decade ago to plan anniversary commemorations. America250 is legally required to hold bipartisan events and report to a congressionally appointed commission, which includes Democrats. While America250 was pliant enough to organize Trump’s military parade, the organization raised objections when Trump insisted on increasingly partisan and garish events. Those disputes led the administration to launch Freedom 250—an alternative entity that Trump could effectively control—a person familiar with the decision told me.

The establishment of Freedom 250 has allowed Trump to more easily plan events that double as campaign rallies, to privately raise funds from corporations seeking influence with the administration, and to avoid disclosing exactly how much all this is costing US taxpayers. Consequently, NPS employees say that wearing Freedom 250 pins amounts to a partisan declaration, akin to donning a MAGA hat, or worse.

“Knowing the difference between the congressionally-mandated group and Trump/Project 2025’s personal, political grift-machine, the little lapel pin takes on the historical weight of a collaborator’s badge,” said one NPS employee. “Some within my division have taken to calling it the ‘Vichy Pin.'”

Critics also contend that mandating that pins be worn by feds, who are barred from engaging in partisan political activity while on the job, is illegal.

“Requiring NPS personnel, uniformed or not, to wear a pin displaying the trademarked logo of Freedom 250, LLC is unlawful, full stop.”

“Requiring NPS personnel, uniformed or not, to wear a pin displaying the trademarked logo of Freedom 250, LLC is unlawful, full stop,” said Tim Whitehouse, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, a watchdog group. “In addition to violating the rights of the employees, any such requirement also likely lines the pockets of Trump-affiliated vendors who supply the Freedom 250 pins, with federal funds.”

Freedom 250 has a complex setup that has led Democrats to describe it as a dark money group. It’s a limited liability corporation operating under the National Park Foundation, a nonprofit partner of the National Park Service. Freedom 250 is spending taxpayer dollars, but it has not submitted to congressional oversight.

Interior Secretary Doug Burgum, who oversees the Park Service, has eagerly supported Trump’s anniversary agenda. And despite recently claiming ignorance of how Freedom 250 came to operate under his department, Burgum has tasked the Park Service with supporting the group’s plans.

In January, administration officials began sidelining America250, including by redirecting funds appropriated to the group to Freedom 250 instead. At the same time, NPS instructed workers to start promoting the new group, exclusively.

The agency told its employees to replace “America250” references and logos displayed online with Freedom 250 insignia. “Freedom 250 was launched by President Donald J. Trump and is the Administration’s primary branding for the celebration of America’s 250th anniversary,” an Interior Department guidance document explained.

In an April 13 memo to National Park superintendents and senior agency officials, Charles Cuvelier, an NPS associate director, wrote that “all non-uniformed and administrative employees” in the agency “are highly encouraged” to wear Freedom 250 pins. The memo also “authorized” uniformed NPS employees to wear the pins—and instructed them on where to place them. “To maintain a professional and uniform appearance, the pin shall be worn centered and one-quarter inch above the name plate on the uniform shirt,” it explained.

“Wearing the pin serves as a mark of Esprit de Corps, demonstrating our collective pride and unity as we celebrate this semi-quincentennial anniversary,” Cuvelier wrote.

Although that memo stopped just short of demanding that NPS employees wear the pins, people who work at the agency said that many park superintendents and division chiefs have verbally ordered subordinates to put on the pins at anniversary-related events occurring at sites where they work. These officials said they were passing on orders from Washington, according to NPS sources.

This requirement does not seem to be wholly consistent across the agency. Some NPS staffers said they have not been ordered to wear the pins.

But elsewhere in the agency, supervisors told employees that refusal to wear the pins would result in an official reprimand, according to three NPS employees. For federal workers, written rebukes are part of an escalating scale of disciplinary actions that can lead to firing.

The Interior Department press office, which covers NPS, did not directly answer when asked if employees are required to wear Freedom 250 pins.

“Department of the Interior employees are excited to participate in our nation’s 250th,” a spokesperson said, adding: “It is bizarre that such a historic event celebrating our amazing country is being villainized by the liberal legacy media, but their TDS [Trump Derangement Syndrome] apparently forces them to try to divide the people of the greatest country in the world led by the greatest president in the history of our country.”

Oddly, the spokesperson also insisted that department employees were not being forced to purchase the pins with their own funds—something I had not asked about. “Any insinuation that employees were tasked with buying Freedom 250 pins is categorically false,” the spokesperson said. “These pins have been given to all Park employees free of charge to commemorate this landmark chapter in American history.”

The spokesperson did not say what the department had spent to provide the pins—versions of which sell online for $8 to $10 each—to its roughly 20,000 staffers.

But according to the NPS memo, those pins were provided by Ace Specialties. That’s a Louisiana-based apparel company that touts its background selling Trump-campaign merchandise, “including the iconic MAGA hat.” The company bills itself as a premier provider of campaign merchandise “for Republicans.”

Ace’s CEO did not respond to questions about its business with the Park Service.

Another NPS missive notes that agency officials can contact Ace to purchase additional Freedom 250 pins for volunteers or employees. But they have to buy in bulk: “Orders must be placed in quantities of 100 or more.”

If you live long enough, you'll wake up one day and find that you're living in a world you no longer understand. Lately there are things happening with AI in a couple of disparate parts of Amazon that brought that lesson home in a big way. The first is that, late last year, they acquired Bee, an AI wearable that is distressingly, upsettingly good. The second, which I want to talk about today as I fly back from AWS's NYC Summit, is Quick Desktop. The best way to describe this is "Enterprise OpenClaw in a polished app." Yes, I know this sounds like I'm being blackmailed. Read on. You work at Amazon, right? Amazon has spent the last three years breathlessly telling us that they're a leader in AI, then shipping products which make it clear that they're unsure what leadership looks like. They've spent far longer building user interfaces that carry a design aesthetic of "complete crap." Even Amazon's website, where you buy everything from underpants to chainsaws to dog food to more underpants, is not a well-designed interface; we've all just learned to live with it. The single good interface to come from Bezos and Coo was the Kindle e-reader: push a button, the page turns. And then they removed the buttons. So yes; "We're launching a desktop AI assistant" is the exact opposite of encouraging coming from these folks. It started like you'd expect. You pop over to the download page and grab the download. On a Mac it's half a gigabyte because of course it is; this is totally normal and fine in 2026. Install it, fire it up, and ... wait a bit. It has to think, and gather its wherewithal before it can get to work. And then the hits start coming. I had talked to people who have used this and raved about it. The problem here is that all of these people work at Amazon, and the current state of the product reflects that. They have a single identity provider they use internally; external users see a confusing array of offerings, each with its own byzantine flows. The feeling is not dissimilar to waking up in the middle of a hedge maze, with no idea how you got there, and discovering that someone just set it on fire. At one point during my time using Quick Desktop, I was logged out and had to log back in. After guessing seven different identity providers, I gave up and emailed the service team for help with this. After some back and forth, I was able to get back in. (GitHub! Future Corey, if you find yourself in this situation, you authenticated via GitHub!) It's clear that the people building this service aren't living the external user experience. It's why I maintain that Amazon's internal AWS account management tool is the service that I hate the most; it separates the people building AWS from the customers using it. At the moment, other similar challenges show up. You'd never have more than one email account from the same provider, right? (Google Workspace in my case, provided it hasn't been deprecated by the time this article goes to print.) You'd never have business conversations via iMessage, or Signal, or LinkedIn DMs, or any number of other services, right? The point isn't the snark; it's that Quick Desktop only knows about the channels its connectors deign to support. Every deal I've ever closed in a LinkedIn DM, every favor traded over Signal, every "hey, quick question" that arrived via iMessage is simply invisible to it — but it makes its confident little suggestions anyway, blissfully unaware that a good chunk of my professional life happens in places it can't see. Here's a free hint to the product team: do you think I mentioned the Bee in the opening of this article because I'm making a fashion statement? And then it starts to work… Once you prove yourself worthy by getting Quick Desktop set up, it ... sits there without doing much. It has a chatbot interface, which surely you've never seen before in an app, backed by a personality I'll call "Uninspiring Accountant." What was the point? And then things start to happen. Your activity feed starts surfacing things from your email. From Slack. From your calendar. I don't know about the rest of you, but my email inbox is where tasks and hope go to die. Slowly but surely, Quick Desktop starts making suggestions, surfacing things that you should handle, proposing email drafts (ugh, in such a bland corporate voice; I hope this email finds you before I do), and giving you quick links to the various apps where these things live so you can see the context it's surfacing. I went in skeptical, partly because I'd already cobbled together a janky version of this for myself by pointing Claude Code at a pile of APIs, so I had a decent sense of what these things miss. And that's when I became a Quick Desktop convert: it flagged an email buried forty messages deep in my inbox that I'd mentally filed under "dealt with" - but very much was not. My own inbox had given up on me like everyone who's ever tried to love me, but Quick Desktop hadn't. This is an Amazon product, and it's pretty clear that they expect you to work with Quick Desktop the way they reportedly work with their own employees: by beating them into compliance. Their own custom connectors and (lack of) extensibility system make it pretty clear that there's a corporate IT department somewhere that's configuring and getting this set up for folks. I freely admit that's not my use case; I'm testing this by myself, not sharing it with my colleagues. But the product is improving. Today, it doesn't really sync data or state between multiple machines; we're still waiting for Amazon to discover this whole "cloud" thing. That's almost certainly going to change in the near future. Along with the just-announced AWS Context approach, once you have a team of people using it, the shared knowledge graph it can build about your entire organization promises to be a significant boon. The part where I trust Amazon That same knowledge graph is also a massive security treasure trove: every deal, every org-chart grudge, every "please don't forward this," every "how do I do the basic functions of my job" chat sessions, lives in one queryable place. Handing that to a vendor terrifies me. It should terrify you. And yet Amazon is one of a vanishingly small number of companies I'd trust with it. I want to acknowledge how strange it is that I just wrote that. I have spent a decade as a professional thorn in this company's side. I have a financial incentive, a personal brand, and frankly a temperament that all point toward not trusting AWS with so much as my lunch order. But credit where it's due: whatever else they get wrong, Amazon takes security and data privacy deadly seriously, and they have the scars and the org structure to prove it. I have lived through this multiple times, and I've seen what AWS does when security competes with other pressures. The list of companies I'd let build a map this detailed of my business is damn short, and most of the names on it are not the ones building these products. They have the security chops, but they have a completely different massive marketing problem. How do you get customers to try this out when you've incinerated your credibility in this space like it's your engineering team's token budget? "For once we have a product that is not shite," while honest, is probably going to be tricky to get through AWS corporate comms. Would I use it myself? I am Reader, I pay cash money for this. Everything I've said above about its sharp edges are true, and I've barely gotten started. I have three pages, ten slides, and one interpretive dance full of "here's why the product sucks" feedback I'll be giving to their product team, who are going to be astounded when I bust into their office uninvited. But I'm not throwing stones from the sidelines on this: "I am a paying customer, and I want this thing I pay you for to be better than it is, so you will listen to every goddamned word I have to say" is a powerful message, and one that's particularly resonant to Amazonians. I can see a world in which I roll this out to the rest of the company. My Claude Code contraption is interesting and in some ways more capable, but it scales precisely as far as "grumpy former sysadmin with a penchant for the CLI" and not one inch further. Our team would justifiably revolt if I tried to inflict it upon them. The hell of it is, the only thing that Amazon has to do to get Quick Desktop to beat my Frankenstein setup is "let Quick configure itself." Yes, there are problems with that approach; I leave them to Amazon to sort through. And so... I don't entirely know what to do with myself in a world where suddenly Amazon is shipping desirable AI products that I'm happy to pay for. First the Bee wearable and now this. That's two data points, and for a company whose AI track record reads like a list of things to apologize for, two data points is alarmingly close to a trend. Their biggest problem is going to lie in outrunning their own shadow, and changing their own nature. I used to be confident they couldn't. I'm less confident now, and I'm not sure how I feel about that. ®

A data breach involving government-issued ID documents affects over three million people in Texas.

New York has been electric since the Knicks completed their storybook playoff run on Saturday to deliver long-suffering fans throughout not only the city but the entire tri-state area their first NBA title in 53 years. On Thursday, millions of fans gathered in lower Manhattan for the traditional ticker-tape parade down the aptly named “Canyon of Heroes,” with jubilant revelers chanting…

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Your next work PC could live in the cloud. A couple of years ago, the Cloud Software Group – the private-equity-owned vendor that mashed up Citrix with Tibco – built a tool to analyze the ideal desktop environment for its users, a cost-control exercise aimed at ensuring it wasn’t spending big on under-utilized endpoints. Last month, the company productized the result and put it on sale under the name “Citrix DaaS Flex.” The product is effectively a front for Citrix’s existing portfolio of desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) and application publishing tools. Deploying Flex starts with an assessment of an organization’s endpoint fleet, which general manager for the company’s DaaS portfolio Shawn Bass told The Register often includes many inappropriate machines. Bass believes that few organizations have the data to understand which cloudy PC instance types are appropriate for their users, or experience running fleets of hosted PCs, so they end up paying too much for virtual machines that have far more performance than some users require. Others, he said, end up with bill shock if they sign up for consumption-based pricing. Some use virtual PCs when they can easily get by with a hosted managed browser locked into certain SaaS sites and published apps. Once Citrix figures out what your users need, it suggests “personas” – a collection of templates that suit different users. Bass said that organizations often need three personas – one each for task workers, knowledge workers, and power users. A persona could involve a full cloud PC, a managed browser, or just access to published apps. Whatever the recommendation, Citrix goes and makes it all happen. Users don’t see the company’s products; they just get to consume endpoints. Citrix runs the virtual PCs in Azure. Citrix charges for Flex using a system of credits. It might price a virtual PC for a power user at 60 credits a month, for example. After assessing users’ endpoint needs, Citrix will propose a credit budget, and a deal spanning three or more years and billed monthly. Users can hold back some credits to take into account seasonal usage spikes – Bass suggested retailers who add staff for Christmas shopping might plan to use more credits for a couple of months a year, without exceeding the total credits available over the life of a contract. Citrix budgets for virtual PCs to run between 10 and 14 hours a day. If users burn the midnight oil and incur extra Azure costs, that’s Citrix’s problem. Bass told us that Citrix plans to bring Flex into other hyperscale clouds and is also looking to make it work with on-prem platforms. The Reg suspects that will mean long-time partners like Nutanix get a look-in. A version for the channel is also in the works. When we cover virtual desktops, readers often note that accessing a cloudy PC requires an actual PC, or another device, and suggest that’s wasteful. Bass thinks the times may now suit DaaS, because the high price of memory means PC fleet refreshes are more expensive. Cloudy desktops, he thinks, therefore represent an upgrade path. Of course, he would say that because Citrix offers its own lightweight OS – eLux from Unicon – tailored to remote access and which comfortably runs on old PCs. Bass said customer interest in that offering is rising. ®

What do you do if you’re nerdy and you own a pet? You make sure their accessories celebrate your favorite fandom, of course. Honestly, it’s not like they have much of a choice but to align with your interests. For those of us who love and adore Pokémon, there’s a new pet accessory line, Pokémon Playful Partners, that will bring a lot of fannish fun and adorableness to your furry loved one’s life. 

There are several items included in this new lineup for both cats, dogs, and maybe even other small friends like bunnies, including pet blankets, feeding bowls and silicone mats, beds, collars, leashes, and harnesses in several sizes. I personally own a big ole Labrador/German Shepherd mixed breed girl named Waffles, who is over 100lbs and quickly fell in love with the sample Pokémon Playful Partners pet blanket that was sent to me by Pokémon. 

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We also received the smaller pet bowls, which we will use for snacks and those special times when we give her a little human food, like chicken and rice. The silicone mat is good quality and easy to clean, a plus for a drooly dog like mine. And the leash, while not made for her size, will be a great gift that I’ll pass on to my good pal who owns a Dachshund.

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While many pet collections can often favor smaller dogs, it is nice to see several options run up through a large size. And, there’s a price point that works for every budget, with can covers for cats at $9.99, pet blankets for $39.99, and a large pet bed at $189.99. I really wish I could fit my adult human body into that Snorlax pet bed/couch, which is the priciest item at $229.99. But, then again, can you really put a price on your pet’s happiness. Of course not! Check out a few more photos of the collection to see if you wanna catch ‘em all. 

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The brand also partnered with the Louisiana SPCA Animal Protection Organization to host a pet adoption event in New Orleans during the 2026 Pokémon North America International Championships, which took place from June 12-14. So, hopefully many pets found their new furever homes.  

The Pokémon Playful Partners collection is currently on sale, so head over to the website and grab something cute for your companion.

The post These Pokémon Playful Partners Pet Accessories Are Adorable appeared first on Nerdist.

Karamo Brown, famous for his pep talks on Netflix’s “Queer Eye,” has jumped into the wellness and AI space with his new app, Kē. After spending a year and a half focusing on his own journey—from fitness and nutrition to meditation, sobriety, relationships, and personal growth—Brown wants to help others do the same.  Kē offers […]