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It’s almost time to return to Westeros for more fire and blood as the Dance of the Dragons kicks off on House of the Dragon season 3! But if you need a refresher on all the Aegons, family drama, and dragons running around, Dan Casey is here with a recap of the Targaryen timeline to catch you up on everything you need to remember before House of the Dragon season 3 premieres on HBO on June 21!

Special thanks to Nerdist’s grand maester Michael Walsh for his help in putting this video together.

The post HOUSE OF THE DRAGON Recap: Everything You Should Know Before Season 3 appeared first on Nerdist.

Snap's long awaited smart glasses debut hasn't exactly done wonders for the company's stock.

Alabama Senator Tommy Tuberville may not be eligible to run for governor in his home state, according to a lawsuit filed in state court Wednesday.

Tuberville, a former college football coach, is being accused of failing to meet the eligibility standard for state residency as outlined in Alabama’s constitution. Candidates have to live in the state for at least seven years in order to be eligible to run. The plaintiffs in the lawsuit say that Tuberville has “usurp[ed], intrude[d], into or unlawfully holds or exercises a public office.”

Tuberville sold all of his property in Alabama as of 2023 but has since claimed that he lives in a 1,500-square-foot property, which originally listed only his son and wife on the deed. Meanwhile, Tuberville’s wife was working as a real estate agent in Florida. He also voted in Florida in 2018.

Earlier this month, Tuberville’s gubernatorial campaign released tax documents claiming to prove that he has lived in the state since 2018, but critics such as Ken McFeeters, another Republican candidate, say that they don’t prove anything, claiming they aren’t accurate.

“I want his wife to tell me, with a straight face, that she lives in a one-bathroom house with her husband and adults and guests,” McFeeters told AL.com. “A woman like that is not going to share a bathroom.”

Those documents were enough for Tuberville to fend off a residency challenge from McFeeters to the Alabama Republican Party. The party’s 21-member steering committee ruled in Tuberville’s favor Sunday, saying he met the state’s residency requirements.

“We looked at it with the facts. The contest was unsuccessful. And Coach Tuberville will be our nominee for governor,” said the chair of the state Republican Party, Scott Stadthagen.

But this new lawsuit, assuming it goes to trial, will open up Tuberville’s records even further, and could result in new information coming to light in the discovery process. The public will find out if Tuberville is actually a Florida man.

Tokenmaxxing was the hottest trend in Silicon Valley earlier this year, with CEOs encouraging employees to push AI usage as far as it would go. Then the bill came due. Uber reportedly blew through its annual AI budget in a few months, some companies cut Claude licenses for parts of their org, and Meta killed its internal leaderboard.  This tension between […]

The right is seething over the details of President Trump’s memorandum of understanding with Iran, seeing the decision as a massive capitulation to the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps.

The full text of the 14-point agreement was released Wednesday, revealing the United States will end its blockade of the Strait of Hormuz, work with other countries to give Iran access to $300 billion to rebuild its infrastructure, and cease sanctions, among other concessions.

“I’ve heard from the president. I have tremendous respect for him. I’d like to hear from Marco Rubio, and I’d really like to hear from John Lee Ratcliffe on the intelligence of whether or not Iran thinks they got the better of us. Because I guarantee, we got the best intelligence community in the world. I’d be really interested in what [Iran’s] reaction to this MOU is. It might be. ‘I can’t believe we got this, because we were losing,’” former Republican Representative Trey Gowdy said on Fox News after the MOU was released. “We had an economic stranglehold on that country. So, when you go back to the status quo ante before the blockade, how are we better off? What did we get?”

Gowdy then claimed the pressures of low approval ratings and incoming midterm elections may have gotten to the president.

“Don’t we have midterms coming up? Are gas prices high? I mean, I hate to be cynical, but I don’t think it’s a national security document,” he said.

Gowdy: How are we better off? What did we get? pic.twitter.com/VEBx6IZE1d

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 17, 2026

“Make no mistake: This MOU is a capitulation to the Iranian terrorist regime, potentially more dangerous than Obama’s JCPOA,” wrote Joel Griffith, a senior fellow at the conservative American Advancing Freedom and co-chair of Young Jewish Conservatives. “This will rejuvenate a terrorist regime with nuclear ambitions committed to global ideological domination through terrorism.”

“This is an American surrender,” MAGA commentator Erick Erickson said.

“This MOU with Iran does smack of the kind of appeasement that our administration rejected in the Obama-Iran nuclear deal and also when Joe Biden attempted to return to the politics of appeasement during his administration,” Trump’s former vice president, Mike Pence, posited. “I would urge the President to take a step back, continue the blockade and pursue a negotiated settlement that commits Iran to dismantling their nuclear program, dismantling this missile program, ends support for terrorist proxies and opens the strait. Failing that, we should let our Armed Forces finish the job on our terms.”

“Reagan is rolling over in his grave,” Louisiana Senator Bill Cassidy wrote. “Iran’s nuclear ambitions were not curbed, and they have learned that threatening the Strait of Hormuz works and will undoubtedly leverage it in the future.… Before the war, the strait was open, Iran was being crushed by sanctions, and 13 service members were still alive. Now, 13 Americans are dead, families have paid billions at the pump, sanctions will be lifted, and the bombing has stopped. This is the worst foreign policy blunder in decades.”

“This MOU appears to be … a disaster that does not achieve any of the actual signal goals that were set by the administration at the beginning,” commentator Ben Shapiro said on Fox News. “There are effectively five goals that were set by the administration at the beginning. One was ending the nuclear program: not just nuclear weapons; no nuclear enrichment, zero enrichment, that is not in the deal. Ballistic missiles ended, that is not in the deal.… In my opinion, the vice president of the United States, the chief negotiator on this particular project, has not well served the president.”

Ben Shapiro: This MOU appears to be a disaster that does not achieve any of the actual goals set by the administration at the beginning. The Vice President, the chief negotiator on this project has not well served the president. pic.twitter.com/pQWgnZOBLe

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 17, 2026

A new FTC lawsuit reveals how sophisticated subscription app operators can allegedly use shell companies and payment infrastructure to stay active on app stores despite mounting consumer complaints.

President Donald Trump refused to mete out consequences for the horrific U.S. missile strike in Iran that killed more than 175 people, most of them children.

During a press conference Wednesday at the G7 summit, Trump was asked whether he planned to hold anyone accountable for the attack on a girls primary school in Minab that killed dozens of young girls between the ages of seven and 12.

“No, if it was a fault—and as you know that’s under investigation—it’s such a strange question to be asked at this state because we’re talking about a long time ago,” Trump said. “Nobody did that on purpose.”

A preliminary inquiry found that the strike was the result of using outdated intelligence. Trump seemed to suggest that because the strike had been made in error, there was no reason to punish anyone.

Clearly, a deadly mistake warrants a response, and failing to respond in a timely manner is not in itself an excuse for doing nothing. If Trump were a real leader who valued human life, this would be unacceptable.

Instead, Trump insisted that one would have to examine how many soldiers Iranians had killed and chalked it all up to the cost of doing business.

“No mistakes are made. Yeah, war is nasty. But I know it’s under investigation, I could have a report for you tomorrow,” Trump said, adding that the question would be better directed to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

NYT: Now that you're approaching a new phase in this conflict in this Iran, can you now say whether you will hold anyone in your administration accountable for the strike on a school that killed more than 100 children?

TRUMP: No. It's such a strange question to be asked. It's a… pic.twitter.com/vh0plTlYKZ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 17, 2026

More than 100 days after the strike in Minab, the DOD’s investigation is now complete and awaiting sign-off, military officials told The New York Times Tuesday. The report became delayed as a result of the slow-moving bureaucratic review process, the Pentagon’s efforts to save its own skin, and intelligence and targeting agencies that couldn’t believe their data could possibly be wrong.

If you're exposing your agent to a strong odor, it's time to clean up your instructions. Risky or poorly structured code patterns are known as "code smells," and it turns out coding agent directives can be similarly redolent, leading to wasted tokens and worse output. Coding agents rely on configuration files that summarize expected agent behavior. These context-enhancing files are commonly written in Markdown and named either CLAUDE.md for those using Anthropic models or AGENTS.md for pretty much everyone else. They include various text instructions that advise the coding agent about desired behavior and tool use. And they can get rather wordy. Anthropic advises no more than 200 lines of text because longer files consume model context and may hinder model coherence. Researchers affiliated with the computer science department of the Federal Institute of Minas Gerais in Brazil recently scoured some 532,000 files to build and analyze a dataset of 100 popular open-source projects containing either an AGENTS.md or a CLAUDE.md file. "Our results show that configuration smells are widespread," the authors state. "Lint Leakage was the most common smell, affecting 62 percent of the files, followed by Context Bloat (42 percent) and Skill Leakage (35 percent)." Linting is the process of running automated tools to check code for programming and style errors. Lint Leakage refers to agent instructions that repeat rules already enforced by linters, format checkers, and static analysis tools. Duplicative rules waste tokens by burdening the underlying model with guidance for a task already handled reliably by programmatic tools. Context Bloat, as its name suggests, describes the tendency of developers to overspecify code agent behavior. "Bloated configuration files increase token consumption, raise costs, and reduce the visibility of important instructions," the authors observe, pointing to Anthropic's recommendation of no more than 200 lines of text. Skill Leakage, another common configuration smell, occurs when rarely used tools or practices get added to the AGENTS.md file, which gets loaded in every agent session. The agent instructions would be better in a separate skills file (e.g. SKILLs.md) that gets loaded only when needed. Skill leakage also expands the agent's context unnecessarily and potentially distracts agents from other things. Other agentic odors include: Blind References, which happens when configuration files reference external documents (e.g. via URLs) without explaining when that resource becomes relevant; Init Fossilization, configuration details set up upon a project's initialization that are no longer relevant; and Conflicting Instructions, which occur when agent directives contradict each other. The study authors say that they found at least one of these six smells in 91 of the 100 AGENTS.md files tested. "These results suggest that developers could benefit from catalogs and tools designed to spot configuration issues in agent configuration files," they conclude in the preprint paper, entitled "Configuration Smells in AGENTS.md Files: Common Mistakes in Configuring Coding Agents." The authors are Helio Victor F. dos Santos, Vitor Costa, Joao Eduardo Montandon, Luciana Lourdes Silva, and Marco Tulio Valente. The message here is that less is more when it comes to code agent configuration files, perhaps even to the point that anything is worse than nothing. Similarly, when ETH Zurich boffins examined the impact of context files for agents a few months ago, they found [PDF] that developer-generated instructions raised costs and only improved code performance about 4 percent, while LLM-generated instructions had a small (3 percent) negative impact on agent-generated code. They concluded "unnecessary requirements from context files make tasks harder, and human-written context files should describe only minimal requirements." ®

Donald Trump on Wednesday threatened to resume his bombing campaign against Iran. The threat comes as details of the proposed agreement to end hostilities emerged—and were criticized and mocked. Speaking at the G7 conference in France, Trump said, “If I don’t like it, if they don’t behave, we’ll go right back to dropping bombs right smack in the middle of their head.

Source

A cartoon by Clay Jones. Related | You’ve got 1 trillion new reasons to hate Elon Musk…

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It’s been nearly five years since Tom Holland graced our movie screens as our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man. But the long wait for his return is nearly over. Will Tom Holland’s return live up to five years of built-up anticipation? Judging from this newest (and final?) trailer, we’d say yes to that question. This new trailer for Destin Daniel Cretton’s Spider-Man: Brand New Day gives us all the good stuff we’ve been waiting for, including the return of Zendaya as MJ and Jacob Batalon as Ned Leeds. You can watch the new trailer for Spider-Man: Brand New Day below:

So what have we gleaned from this trailer? For starters, we can confirm there’s a time jump taking place in real time. Both Ned and MJ mention graduating MIT, which makes this about four years from where No Way Home ended. We also see that Peter meets Bruce Banner (Mark Ruffalo), who is back to being a college professor in his post-Avengers life. But at some point, the Hulk again will rise again. And we’ll get our first cinematic version of a Spidey/Green Goliath brawl. Peter seeks help from Jon Bernthal’s Punisher as well, suggesting these two know each other, teaming up already, during the time between films.

Sony Pictures/Marvel Studios

There’s also a mysterious threat that apparently, Spider-Man, whose body is mutating, is the only one to sense. Speaking of mutating, there’s a hooded figure throughout the trailer waving their hands around. Is this Sadie Sink? Possibly as future X-Man telepath/telekinetic Jean Grey? There is still a shortlist of characters she could play. But our money is currently on Sink playing the future host of the Phoenix Force. We’ve even got Spidey fighting Scorpion (Michael Mando), taking on ninjas, and delivering some classic Stan Lee quips. What more could you want?

Spider-Man: Brand New Day, starring Tom Holland, Zendaya, Jon Bernthal, Mark Ruffalo, Jacob Batalon, and Sadie Sink, arrives in theaters on July 17.

The post SPIDER-MAN: BRAND NEW DAY Trailer Gives Us Hulk and the Punisher appeared first on Nerdist.

French President Macron and Indian PM Modi raised alarms at the G7 summit that the U.S. could cut off access to American AI overnight — a fear the Anthropic blackout just made real.

The Upside Down leaking into Universal Studios for lots of Halloween horror scares. The fifth and final season of Stranger Things will get its own haunted house at both Universal Studios Orlando and Universal Studios Hollywood this fall to showcase some of the season’s most intense moments as guests find themselves immersed in the final stand against Vecna to save Hawkins. And no, we don’t think any Conformity Gate theories are gonna be a part of this special event. Universal Studios

Here’s more about what Stranger Things fanatics can expect to see at Universal Studios to celebrate Halloween: 

The harrowing adventure will immediately transport guests to the town of Hawkins, as the barrier between reality and the supernatural is collapsing to unleash an ominous darkness. As visitors make their way through familiar scenes, including the Wheeler House, Hawkins National Laboratory, the MAC-Z military base, as well as the haunting realms of the Upside Down and the Abyss, they’ll be hunted at every turn by Demogorgons and other sinister creatures. With Vecna on their heels, the terror intensifies, pulling guests into an all-or-nothing battle for survival.    

Universal has also released a sneak peek of what this haunted house will offer in a YouTube promo clip. We absolutely feel the hairs standing up on the backs of our necks like Will Byers.

Universal Studios’ Halloween Horror Nights runs select nights from August 28 through November 1 at Universal Orlando Resort, and from September 3 through November 1 at Universal Studios Hollywood. Event tickets for both locations are on sale now, so visit www.HalloweenHorrorNights.com to get more info and secure your place among your fellow nerds. 

The post STRANGER THINGS 5 Is Coming for Blood at Universal Studios’ Halloween Horror Nights appeared first on Nerdist.

⚡ Quick Take

• An “enchanced” version of the iconic cult classic musical The Rocky Horror Picture Show is coming to the Sphere in Las Vegas in 2027.

Love it or hate it, the version of The Wizard of Oz that has played at the Sphere in Las Vegas has been an unqualified financial success. In less than a year since it opened, it has generated over $400 million in ticket sales. So, it was only a matter of time before they took on another classic Hollywood film, and essentially turned it into an overpriced theme park experience. Well, according to a report in Variety, the next film to get the Sphere treatment is 1975’s cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show. Yes, Tim Curry’s Dr. Frank N. Furter will arrive in his Transylvanian glory at the Sphere in 2027. So get ready to do that Time Warp again.

Sphere Entertainment

Here’s what Sphere Entertainment’s CEO Jim Dolan had to say about Rocky’s upcoming “enhancement.”

Through Sphere Studios, we are building a slate of original experiences that push the boundaries of technology and storytelling for this new medium, while always keeping the audience at the center of the experience. Since The Rocky Horror Picture Show premiered in 1975, it redefined audience participation and became a cultural phenomenon. With Sphere, we have the opportunity to take that spirit of immersion to an entirely new level.

So why is this controversial? For starters, some people hated that they edited The Wizard of Oz to pieces for this. But that is not that bothersome to us, because this is more like translating a movie into a theme park ride. We’ve seen that many times before. No one thinks of it as the actual film itself. No, what many rightly frown upon is the huge amount of AI used to make it happen. And we imagine it will be the same with Rocky. That alone is enough to not get us to put down money to go and see this. Otherwise, it might be kind of fun?

Twentieth Century Studios

Still, the choice of Rocky Horror for the next Sphere movie is odd, to say the least. Is it an iconic movie? Certainly. But it’s also a movie celebrating transgressive ideas and sexual liberation. Even though it was made over fifty years ago, many elements of that movie are more controversial now with a segment of the American population than they were in 1975. Given how so many Vegas tourists are conservative middle Americans, how do organizers expect them to react? Besides, the biggest draw for Rocky is the audience participation portion. Doubtful the Sphere will encourage throwing toast and yelling curse words at the screen. We’ll just have to see how long this one lasts.

The post ‘Enhanced’ ROCKY HORROR Coming to the Sphere in Las Vegas appeared first on Nerdist.

President Trump said Wednesday that Iran could have its own nuclear program.

“It is a little hard that when you say that somebody wants it, other people have it, other adjoining states have it, and you’re not letting them have it for purposes of electricity and things like that. It’s always a little tough. You have to use a little common sense,” Trump said at the G7 summit in France, alongside Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick.

Trump leaves door open to Iran enriching: "It's a little hard when other people have it, other adjoining states have it, and you're not letting them have it for purposes of electricity and things like that. You have to use a little common sense." pic.twitter.com/oVfBz4nuI8

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 17, 2026

It seems to be a sharp departure from Trump’s previous claims during the war. After months of insisting that the purpose of the war was to get rid of any nuclear capability, demanding “zero enrichment,” Trump is now saying that the country can use nuclear power for electricity.

One wonders what Republicans in Congress—let alone the international community—will think of Trump’s latest concession. If a final peace deal between Iran and the U.S. doesn’t have any restrictions on the country’s nuclear program, it will be effectively worse than the 2015 JCPOA agreement with Iran.

That agreement was drafted not only between the U.S. and Iran, but the other members of the U.N. Security Council, including China, Russia, the U.K., and the European Union. This deal was negotiated without Congress even being aware of the details. Iran will likely be receiving $300 billion in reconstruction funds, and now they might have a nuclear program too. What did the Trump administration accomplish?

President Trump has given up his efforts to destroy Iran’s ballistic missile stockpile, reneging on one of his central aims in “Operation Epic Fury.”

“We’ll be working on a parallel effort with the Gulf nations to address nonnuclear issues, such as [Iran’s] conventional ballistic missiles,” Trump said at the G7 summit on Wednesday. “I mean, they have to have some. Because other people have some. You gotta have some. Somebody said ‘You shouldn’t give them more … sir, you shouldn’t let them have any missile.’ … What am I gonna do? I’m gonna let Saudi Arabia have missiles, but they can’t have them?

“It doesn’t work that way,” Trump continued. “Missiles, they hurt a little location. But they don’t blow up the planet.”

Trump says that Iran "has to have" ballistic missiles, adding "what am I going to do? Am I going to let Saudi Arabia have missiles but they can't have them?" pic.twitter.com/32nPskhLpb

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 17, 2026

“One of the goals of Epic Fury, you said going into it, was to destroy Iran’s ballistic missiles and its capabilities to build more,” a reporter asked Trump moments later. “Why is it acceptable to you now that they keep some of that capability?”

“What are they keeping? They have less than other nations now. We knocked out probably 84, 85 percent of their missiles. The rest of them are underground; they can’t even get ’em out,” Trump replied. “They’re gonna have a hard time rebuilding.”

Trump’s memorandum of understanding with Iran secures virtually nothing he sought at the beginning of this war. The Strait of Hormuz was already open, and Iran wasn’t anywhere close to obtaining a nuclear bomb. Now, even as the Strait of Hormuz is set to reopen, it appears that the president is back at square one—all while allowing Iran to retain their missile stock that he claimed to have destroyed.

Reporter: One of the goals of Epic Fury was to destroy Iran's ballistic missiles. Why is it acceptable to you now that they keep some of that capability?

Trump: What are they keeping? They have less than other nations now. The rest of them are underground. They can't even get… pic.twitter.com/3LVPRJlRtE

— Acyn (@Acyn) June 17, 2026

Georgia Republicans have decided not to redistrict their state, after all.

The decision came Wednesday after Governor Brian Kemp called the legislature into a special session to do so ahead of the 2028 election. But Peach State lawmakers flouted Kemp’s demands, arguing that the executive had not given them enough time to shift the state’s voting maps.

“When the House learned that it was placed on the call for a special session, we knew it was not the right path forward for our state at this time. We believe that it is important to do things the Georgia way—responsibly, transparently, and with ample opportunity for public input,” said House Speaker Jon Burns during a press conference at the state Capitol.

In a letter to Kemp, Georgia House Republicans wrote that they would entertain changes to the state’s voting maps “only when members of the General Assembly and citizens have been given ample opportunity to gather the facts, provide input, and engage in meaningful discussion.”

The discussion does not seem to be dead in the water. Instead, state lawmakers are expected to revisit redistricting further down the road, according to Republican state Senate President Pro Tempore Larry Walker III.

“Because any changes to our current congressional or legislative districts would not go into effect until 2028, we believe it is prudent to take the appropriate and necessary time to do this important duty the right way and not to rush through it,” said Walker.

Kemp pressed the issue in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Louisiana v. Callais decision, which struck down Louisiana’s maps on the charge that they were racially gerrymandered.

The Georgia legislature’s conclusion is a rejection of a national GOP movement, spearheaded by Donald Trump, to redistrict their locales in an attempt to carve as many Republican seats in the U.S. House as possible.

Several red states have already caved to the White House’s demands. Alabama, Florida, Louisiana, and Tennessee redrew their maps in time to affect the results of the 2026 midterm elections.

Yet not everyone has uniformly complied. Republican lawmakers in South Carolina and Indiana balked at the prospect, and subsequently earned the president’s ire in the process.

Anthropic has joined the Frontier coalition, which received another $915M in pledges to fund carbon removal projects.

An alleged Russian-speaking group of cybercriminals are reportedly compromising and targeting several major companies that use Fortinet Firewalls and VPNs through previously known passwords.

Social media feeds are becoming more customizable as platforms like Threads, Instagram, and TikTok introduce tools that let users directly influence the algorithms powering their recommendations.