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Leaders from Coinbase, M13, and Mignano Law Group talk about how M&A is an early-stage strategy at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026. Register to hear this live.

Here’s what’s happening on Santa Cruz County roads this morning…

▼︎ new incidents

Road incidents as of 7 a.m. on May 6

• A traffic collision happened at Highway 17 north and Laurel Road in Scotts Valley at 5:53 a.m. today. A Toyota hit the right-side barrier, crossed both lanes, and hit another vehicle. Both vehicles could still be driven, and no one was hurt. There was debris on the road, and a lane was closed to turn a vehicle around.
    
• A lane on westbound Highway 152 at Clifford Drive/Ohlone Parkway in Watsonville is closed for asphalt paving. The closure is expected to last until July 3.
   

Disclosure: Traffic incidents are partially generated by artificial intelligence. We are constantly working to improve the accuracy and quality of our AI-generated content. However, there may still be errors or inaccuracies. If you have any questions or concerns, please contact us.

The post Wednesday morning traffic: Highway 17 crash, lane closed; Highway 152 paving appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

Three days left to lock in 50% off a second ticket to Disrupt 2026. Buy one TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 ticket, and get a second ticket at 50% off. Gain more visibility in the tech industry. Offer ends May 8 at 11:59 p.m. PT.

The Boys is back and things are moving faster than the A-Train, baby. Too soon? Not really. This final season is delivering another round of unfortunate souls who won’t survive. So, who dies in The Boys season five? There are some shocking names on this list. 

RELATED ARTICLE

5 BIG Questions That THE BOYS Season 5 Must Answer

Note: We are only counting main and frequently recurring characters on this list. Sorry to all the ancillary humans and supes. 

Love Sausage

MM is surely rejoicing at Love Sausage’s demise. We would feel the same way if this supe put his penis on us more than once, and even knocked us out with it to get us locked up in a “freedom” camp. Gross. We even see him beating a freedom camp detainee with it early in episode one of season five. But MM finally gets the win by fighting Love Sausage and strangling him to death with his own massive penis. 

A-Train Prime Video

The end of episode one shocked the hell out of us, too. After having quite the epic redemption arc, making amends with Hughie, and mending his relationship with his family and community, A-Train’s character arc came full circle. He was a far cry from the brash and braggadocious speedster we met in season one, in the best way. We knew that he would be a part of the resistance after showing up alongside Annie in the Gen V season two finale.

And, the first episode of The Boys season five briefly showed what his life was like on the move. He continued to protect his family from Homelander’s wrath and work with Annie to make America a better place. After Annie asked him to help break MM, Hughie, and Frenchie out of a freedom camp, he refused and said he had to take care of his family. But, we think his confrontation with the Deep, who continued to follow him yet keep his findings from Homelander, could have been a game changer. 

A-Train knew that the Boys would need his help to escape the freedom camp. Right now, they are the best chance to take down Homelander. And, A-Train was probably tired of running and fighting. He knew there would be a chance for him to get hurt or worse, but it was worth taking to defeat Homelander. It seemed he would get to be around longer, but Eric Kripke had other plans. He shows up right in time to save Hughie’s life and give them a chance to escape. 

Prime Video

A-Train is running from Homelander, who is flying close behind him and lasering everything with rage. A woman is crossing the street and A-Train sees her. Instead of running right through her like he did with Hughie’s girlfriend in the first episode of The Boys, he slows down, causing him to go off track and hit a few trees. Homelander has him and, even in the face of death, A-Train finally tells Homelander exactly what he thinks of him with a smile on his face. His scathing remarks put tears in Homelander’s eyes.

Sadly, Homelander snapped his neck and the A-Train came to his last stop. It’s a sad way for him to go. The funeral is an interesting time for Homelander, who seems to have some anger/remorse for his actions. He even talks to A-Train’s casket after everyone leaves. Hughie also honors A-Train, actually calling him a hero.

Firecracker Prime Video

Homelander’s media mouthpiece and all-around terrible American girl Firecracker also met her demise at the hands of the man she promoted as a god. In the end, Firecracker seemed like she was oh-so-close to flipping on Homelander, but she was already in too deep with all of this mess. After Soldier Boy gets Homelander’s mental wheels spinning when he suggests that Firecracker is into too much pillow talk, Homelander confronts Firecracker.

RELATED ARTICLE

THE BOYS’ Valorie Curry on Firecracker’s Conflict and Consequences

He doesn’t believe that she’s fully devoted to him anymore, and he’s not necessarily wrong. She begs with him, saying that she’s the only one who is truly all the way in his corner. And she’s not necessarily wrong about that either. Homelander slams her temple into the wing of an eagle statue, leaving her hanging there. It’s pretty tense and brutal but you cannot expect a predator to not eventually try to kill you.

Adam Bourke

Bourke had quite a bit of screen time throughout The Boys run as well as its spinoff series Gen V. It’s hard to believe that he had been around since season two and interacted with pretty much everyone in the Seven. The director of great supe films like Dawn of the Seven saw potential in Justin, who played the role of Black Noir after the original’s death. He wanted Justin to be in his upcoming Broadway play, which was what Justin dreamed of. But, the Deep kills Bourke because he’s still upset about the director cutting his improved dialogue years ago, and to also keep Justin from realizing that dream. It is terrible to die by eel in a bathroom.

Black Noir II a.k.a. JustinPrime Video

After the Deep killed Bourke and took credit for capturing Stan Edgar, Black Noir II busted up the oil pipeline that Deep promised was safe to his many fish friends. They get into a confrontation in the Deep’s podcast recording studio and it sends with Deep killing Justin. Afterwards, he looks shocked by his actions, but he shouldn’t be. He’s a cold killer, just like Homelander… except stupider. And, to be fair, Justin did kill people too while in this role, so he’s not innocent. The theme here remains the same: get away from Homelander and STAY AWAY.

We will keep you updated on the death toll as it rises in The Boys season five.

Originally published on April 8, 2026.

The post All The Big Characters Who Die in THE BOYS Season 5 appeared first on Nerdist.

Samsung crossed the $1 trillion valuation mark after shares surged on AI-driven chip demand, making it only the second Asian company after TSMC to hit the milestone.

Yukihiro Matsumoto - better known as Matz - is building Spinel, a native compiler for Ruby, with help from Anthropic's Claude Code. Spinel, which is on GitHub under the MIT license, works by parsing Ruby code into AST (abstract syntax tree) files, then converting it to C code for compilation by a standard C compiler. In Matz’s tests, Spinel-compiled code runs approximately 11.6 times faster than MiniRuby - a stripped-down Ruby build - using the in-development Roby 4.1.0. The output is C code, compilable to a native executable via gcc (GNU Compiler Collection) on Linux or Windows (with MinGW - Minimalist GNU for Windows), or via LLVM's Clang on Linux or macOS. BSD will "probably work", according to the readme, but is not tested. Ruby is an interpreted language, meaning it depends on a runtime engine to parse and run the code. In order to improve performance, Ruby can use just-in-time (JIT) compilers including MJIT (method-based JIT), YJIT and ZJIT, with the latter two developed by Shopify, a prominent Ruby user. Spinel is different in that it generates standalone native code executables, which can be deployed without any additional runtime. The downside of Spinel is that it supports only a subset of Ruby. Unsupported features include eval statements, which evaluate and execute Ruby code at runtime, threads, text encoding other than UTF-8, metaprogramming such as defining a method at runtime, and deeply nested lambda functions. Ruby variables are not typed, though objects are strongly typed. Spinel performs type inference to enable C code generation, since C is a strongly typed language. The code makes use of an existing and mature Ruby parser called Prism. There are many optimizations, such as method inlining and dead code elimination, and the generated C compiles cleanly at the default warning level. Spinel includes a garbage collector, to reclaim memory automatically, and supports FFI (foreign function interface) for integrating with native code libraries such as libc or SQLite. Spinel is experimental and will not work with most existing Ruby code, including the web application framework Ruby on Rails. But it is possible for Ruby developers to write code with Spinel in mind, such as for helper functions that can then be called from other Ruby code, as a means of optimization. Matz presented Spinel at RubyKaigi 2026, a conference in Hakodate, Japan last month. According to attendees such as this one (original text in Japanese) Matz said the idea for Spinel was conceived three years ago, but has now been implemented in a few weeks using AI. Most of the code in the Spinel repository is headed with a comment including "co-authored by: Claude Open 4.7 (1M context)." Further, the project has already been rebuilt three times over, in a series of experiments. Matz, perhaps, is an ideal user of AI-generated code. He understands the code, and can benefit from the increased speed of development without losing grip on what the code does, and is able to refine it with his existing skills as well as with further AI prompting, and the code is covered by hundreds of tests and benchmarks. ®

A new survey found that kids find it easy to bypass age checks, despite a rise in age verification laws around the world.

Ahead of the June 2 primary, California’s gubernatorial race is unclear at best. After the scandalous exit of former Democratic Rep. Eric Swalwell, there has been no obvious front-runner. Democrats Tom Steyer and Xavier Becerra and Republican Steve Hilton have been swapping in and out of the top two spots depending on the polls you look at. That matters in the state’s nonpartisan primary…

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This post contains major spoilers for The Boys season five, episode six. If it would kill you to read them, check out our episode five coverage until you’re caught up.Prime Video

The Boys has always managed to let us see the human side of its greatest monsters, and that’s why the show’s latest major supe death might seem sadder than most. Justin just wanted to be an actor. He was seemingly cast in the role of a lifetime when Vought picked him to replace the silent, recently murdered member of the Seven. Instead he found the part of Black Noir difficult and limiting. But his unexpected demise at the hands of the Deep was a fitting end for a man who fully embraced his role as a killer.

In episode six of The Boys‘ final season, Black Noir II got revenge against eternal garbage aquaman, the Deep. The aquatic superhero had sold out his fish friends when he publicly supported an underwater oil pipeline. That blew up in his face when the pipe blew up, resulting in the biggest oil spill in history. It was no accident, though. Justin had flown up there and punched a hole in the poorly made pipe. He wanted revenge against the Deep for stealing his spotlight with the capture of Stan Edgar and for murdering director Adam Bourke.

Prime Video

Noir thought the death of billions of marine life was fair payback for the death of one human. That clearly did not go over with the person who cares about fish the most. The Seven’s resident man-child dummy lashed out by lashing a cord around Noir’s neck. He then put a knife in his head, as the second iteration of the superhero ended the same as the first: slain by a team member.

It was unsurprising from the Deep (who quickly realized he’d done something very bad). It might have also seemed unfair or even sad, as Justin was just playing a part. He wasn’t as inherently evil or irredeemable as the Deep. Justin wasn’t a “true believer” willing to give up what he cared about like Firecracker. (As evident by his secret play that would have driven Homelander wild.) He just committed to a role like any good professional actor. Only, when the role is “guy who guts innocent people,” you are guilty all the same.

Prime Video

The maimed, injured, and dead bodies Justin piled up while playing a member of the Seven were just as authentically dead as all the people Homelander, the Deep, and every other Vought Supe has ever killed. His reason is not an excuse anymore than his humanity. It’s why he got what he deserved.

Maybe, if instead of playing the part, he’d truly embodied Black Noir he would have never ended up dead inside his suit.

Mikey Walsh is a staff writer at Nerdist. He’s looking forward to The Deep’s demise. You can follow him on Bluesky at @burgermike. And also anywhere someone is ranking the Targaryen kings.

The post THE BOYS’ Latest Major Death Makes the Seven Even Weaker appeared first on Nerdist.

Long before Copilot or even the Windows key, Microsoft and IBM were squabbling over Tab - a tale that says more about Big Blue's bureaucracy than hopping between fields. Veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen shared another war story this week, from the time IBM and Microsoft were at loggerheads over the Tab key during the OS/2 collaboration. This wasn't the tabs-vs-spaces debate that has long rumbled through the IT world (another Microsoft veteran, Larry Osterman, came down firmly on the side of tabs when storage was tight, then switched spaces when it wasn't). This was simpler: which key should move you between fields in a dialog box. Microsoft's preference was the Tab key. IBM strongly opposed the decision. Chen didn't elaborate on IBM's preference (and some keyboards in those days had a lot of keys that didn't survive into the modern era), only that the Tab key wasn't the way Big Blue wanted to go. IBM pressed the escalation button, and the issue was sent upstairs, first to the manager of Microsoft's Tab decision-maker. The response, according to Chen, went something along the lines of: "The reason you are in Boca is to make these decisions so I don't have to be in Boca." IBM's offices in Boca Raton, Florida, were where the discussion took place. Chen wrote: "My colleague rephrased this reply in a more corporate manner before passing it on to IBM: 'Microsoft supports the use of the Tab key for this purpose.'" IBM was not happy with this response, so the issue was escalated higher through the byzantine layers of Big Blue management until it reached a VP who was "absolutely opposed to use of the Tab for this purpose." Chen recalled this was approximately seven levels of management above the programmers. The VP demanded confirmation from the equivalent-level manager at Microsoft that the company stood by the choice. Equivalent-level? Who was that senior at Microsoft? Chen wrote: "My colleague replied, 'Bill Gates's mother is not interested in the Tab key.' This apparently ended the discussion, and the Tab key stayed." ®

Privacy groups, VPN providers, and civil liberties outfits have lined up to warn the UK government that its latest plan to slap age gates across swathes of the internet risks breaking the web while doing little to keep kids safe. In a joint statement, signatories including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, Mozilla, the Open Rights Group, Proton, and the Tor Project took aim at proposals now moving forward after the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill cleared Parliament, with access to some platforms, services, and specific features potentially restricted by age checks. "The open internet is a global public resource that has long since become foundational to the flourishing of individuals, businesses, and societies," the letter states, warning that "this openness and the opportunities it affords are coming under threat in the UK." Ministers are now consulting on measures that could include curfews for younger users and restrictions across services ranging from games and VPNs to static websites. The signatories say that will quickly turn into a system where everyone, not just children, has to prove their age to get full access. "Implementing such access restrictions hinges on all users having to verify their ages, not just young people," the letter warns, adding that the approach "focuses on restricting young people's access, rather than ensuring services are designed to uphold their rights and interests by default." Early results are not exactly inspiring. It's been months since tougher checks under the Online Safety Act began rolling out, and some systems have already been fooled by little more than a drawn-on mustache, raising questions about how effective the tech really is at keeping minors out. This hasn't gone unnoticed. "Existing age assurance technologies are either insufficiently accurate, undermine privacy and data security, or are not widely available across populations," the letter says, warning that rolling them out broadly "creates serious new security threats." It is not just a privacy headache either: the groups argue the policy could tilt the market further toward Big Tech. Mandating checks across more services risks "cementing the dominance of gatekeeper app stores, operating systems, and platforms' walled gardens," while turning the web into "a patchwork of age-gated jurisdictions." Instead of doubling down on access controls, the groups argue policymakers are targeting the wrong problem. "These risks are real and require thoughtful policy interventions that address the root of the issue, not just simplistic policies like access bans," the letter says, pointing to business models built on "massive collection of user data" as a bigger driver of harm. The closing line does not leave much room for interpretation: "Now is the time to hold tech to account, not undermine the open internet." ®

But long-standing stigma in public safety professions remains a major barrier to care. By Amanda Watford for Stateline Ty Wooten didn’t realize the weight of answering his first 911 call — until more than a decade later. A woman had dialed 911 to report that her husband had shot himself in front of her and their 7-year-old son, on the family’s living room couch. It was Wooten’s…

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The Current Work List The Fix List Deleting A Block An early issue users said they had was not knowing how to delete an image or block when writing a story on an iPad or phone. After investigating, we realized that we had removed a menu from the community story editor that we should not have. As of this morning, that menu is restored. To delete an image or block using…

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Denic says the DNS blunder that brought most of Germany’s internet down on Tuesday evening is now resolved, and that websites should be operating normally after hours of disruption. The registry, which looks after Germany’s .de top-level domain, said the problems were first detected at 21:57 on April 5, but engineers rolled out fixes by 01:15. It said the issues were related to Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC), and that faulty DNSSEC signatures were distributed. At the time of writing, it is still working on understanding the root cause of how this error came to pass. Denic did not provide many details about the specific tech glitch behind the disruption. Some online commentators have suggested it was related to a zone signing key rollover, although not everyone agrees, and this is not an official explanation. The registry promised to provide more details after its investigation concludes. As the issue was rooted in DNSSEC, only DNSSEC-signed domains were affected. According to ICANN, only 3.6 percent of .de domains are DNSSEC-signed, but this still represents hundreds of thousands of domains, given there are close to 18 million registered with the .de TLD. Downdetector’s German website shows thousands of outage reports made concerning major websites such as Amazon, DHL, Steam, Web.de, around the same times that Denic confirmed the problems. Anecdotal reports from the wider web indicate that the likes of eBay and mainstream news outlets were also unavailable. Enabling DNSSEC helps website owners tackle nuisances such as DNS spoofing by providing additional validation for DNS responses. Despite going mainstream in 2010, after DNS attacks really started picking up in 2008, DNSSEC uptake is generally low across the board. Less than 10 percent of most TLDs make use of the security extensions. There are a few outliers, including the Netherlands, Sweden, Czechia, and China, where uptake is more common, but DNSSEC is largely overlooked by most domains. The issues deterring website operators from making the switch include complexity, reduced web performance, and cases like Denic’s this week or New Zealand’s in 2023, whereby a website can be brought offline by a registry’s failure. ®

Follow me on Bluesky or Mastodon Related | How Democrats plan to fight the Supreme Court’s racist ruling…

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A version of the below article first appeared in David Corn’s newsletter, Our Land. The newsletter comes out twice a week (most of the time) and provides behind-the-scenes stories and articles about politics, media, and culture. Subscribing costs just $5 a month—but you can sign up for a free 30-day trial.

Last month, when MAGA luminaries Tucker Carlson, Megyn Kelly, Candace Owens, and Joe Kent turned on Trump over his impulsive war against Iran and his threat to destroy its “whole civilization,” Trump decried this gang as “low IQ.” That was an unusual move for him—in that three of the four are white.

As has been observed by others, Trump often hurls the “low IQ” insult at Black people. For some, that’s a sign he’s a racist. There certainly are others: His family real estate business was sued in the 1970s by the Justice Department for racial discrimination; he exploited the racially charged case of the Central Park Five in 1989, when five Black and Latino teenagers were wrongfully convicted of raping a jogger; he peddled the racist and fraudulent birther conspiracy about Barack Obama; people who worked with him on The Apprentice say he used racial slurs, including the n-word; he referred to Haiti, El Salvador, and African nations as “shithole countries”; he called on Democratic congresswomen of color to “go back” to their home countries; he characterized Mexican immigrants as criminals and rapists; during a 2020 campaign debate, he refused to condemn white supremacists; he has appointed people with racist records and ties to white nationalists; he shared a video on social media that depicted Barack and Michelle Obama as apes.

Then there’s his vicious assault on DEI and wokeness—and his hiring practices. As of the 300-day mark of his current term, 91 percent of his confirmed appointees were white. For Biden that figure was 61 percent. (About 60 percent of the current US population is white.) Photos like this one of Trump’s US attorneys tell the story:

via @patriottakes2.0 on Threads

Look, there’s one brown guy! And only a handful of gals.

So it’s not tough to make the case that Trump is a racist. And it’s easy to cite his frequent use of “low IQ” to denigrate Black people as another data point showing he’s a bigot. But might Trump just be a jerk who calls a lot of his critics and foes “low IQ”?

I asked the director of a research shop—which would prefer to not be named—to crunch the numbers on this. These bean counters looked at both Trump’s social media posts and his public statements. The findings are no surprise.

Since April 10, Trump has zapped out nine Truth Social posts deploying the “low IQ” tag. Six times his missive referred to a Black person.

This team examined his Truth Social posts for the past four years, ending on April 10. In that stretch, Trump called individuals and communities “low IQ” at least 50 times, and 60 percent of these instances involved Black public figures and legislators. These targets included Vice President Kamala Harris; Reps. Jasmine Crockett (D-Texas), Maxine Waters (D-Calif.), Ilhan Omar (D-Minn.), and Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.); the Rev. Al Sharpton; New York Attorney General Letitia James; and political strategist Donna Brazile. The white people he excoriated in this fashion included Joe Biden, Tim Walz, Liz Cheney, and Robert De Niro. 

Since April 10, Trump has zapped out nine Truth Social posts deploying the “low IQ” tag. Six times his missive referred to a Black person—House Democratic leader Hakeem Jeffries, Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, or Owens. Once the target was Gov. Gavin Newsom (D-Calif.); another time, Carlson. And there was that post that railed against his MAGA antagonists: Kelly, Kent, Carlson, and Owens.

The tilt is clear. Trump reaches for this characterization more often when he’s denouncing Black people. Notice, though, that it’s just not Black people but Black women who draw much of Trump’s wrath.

That pattern holds when the data set expands beyond his Truth Social rants. Those researchers also scrutinized a collection of Trump’s public statements for the past 10 years, searching through a repository of C-SPAN videos that covered Trump speaking at rallies, press briefings, and other events. They found he deployed the “low IQ” aspersion at least 75 times. Forty of these instances—53 percent—targeted Black people. He also used it to describe Somali and Hispanic immigrants.

Trump has often derided Obama’s intelligence and suggested he was accepted at Columbia University and Harvard Law School only due to his race. The idea that the first Black president was a smart fellow seems to be too tough for Trump to accept.

Harris clocked in with the most mentions (23). Biden was next (17). Then came Waters (8), Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson (5), and Crockett (3). Trump claimed Harris was too “low IQ” to be president. In October, he said Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was “low IQ” and could not pass a cognitive test.

Last week, speaking at The Villages, a retirement community in Florida full of Trumpers, he also declared that Barack Obama could not pass a cognitive test. In the past, he has often derided Obama’s intelligence and suggested he was accepted at Columbia University and Harvard Law School only due to his race. The idea that the first Black president was a smart fellow seems to be too tough for Trump to accept.

If you want to get technical—and give Trump the benefit of the doubt—you could argue that since Democrats (and Democratic politicians) are disproportionately Black compared to the overall population, Trump’s political enemies will more likely be Black than an average sampling of Americans. Consequently, more targets of his “low IQ” slur will be Black. But it does seem that Trump often picks nasty fights with Black opponents—and relishes doing so. And there are plenty of ways to assail a political foe without calling him or her an idiot.

Trump has long displayed an obsession with IQ. He believes people are either born with intelligence or they’re not, and he has asserted that immigrants have brought “bad genes” into the country. He has frequently boasted his IQ is sky-high, attributing that to his “good genes” and pointing to his uncle, John Trump, who was a highly accomplished MIT professor. He has never made public any IQ test he’s taken, though he regularly brags about passing cognitive tests that screen for dementia. (Lion, rhinoceros, camel!) For him, “low IQ” is one of the most stinging insults he can sling. It’s hard not to attach significance to the fact that he so often hurls this barb at Black people.

To make the case that Trump is a racist, it’s not necessary to rely on his use of this epithet. But it’s an obvious piece of evidence. One would have to be not the sharpest tool in the shed to not see the connection.

The new Paper Pure is lighter and faster than the reMarkable 2, which is going to be retired six years since its launch.

The UK will spend £20.5 million developing "a numberplate system for the skies" that will centrally record the identity and location of drones when in flight. From the start of this year, the Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) has required some drones to fly with Direct Remote ID enabled, broadcasting identity and location to nearby devices, with more covered by the requirement from the start of 2028. The new system will use Hybrid Remote ID, in which drones also pass on this data via the internet for recording on a secure online system. The plans are broadly analogous to the Home Office's automatic numberplate recognition (ANPR) camera system that monitors road users, although in this case the drones will report the data themselves. "This funding will create a numberplate system for the skies," said security minister Dan Jarvis. "Law enforcement will be able to identify and take action against those who break the law, taking drones out of the sky and protecting the public." Unidentified drones have disrupted several airports, including Munich last October. CAA chief executive Rob Bishton said last November that it was only a matter of time before something similar happened in the UK following incidents at two Belgian airports. The Department for Transport is trying to prevent the release of a document on the lessons learned from the 2018 drone disruption at London Gatwick Airport. In February, the government granted the armed forces authority to take out drones threatening military bases after the Ministry of Defence said there had been 266 sightings of unauthorized drones near military sites in 2025, up from 126 the year before. Along with setting up the "numberplate" system, the government said it would spend £26.5 million on regulatory changes including faster approvals and a streamlined application process for the use of drones in emergency responses, medical logistics, and infrastructure inspection. It wants to see flying taxis in the UK's skies from 2028. ®

Java Junction’s River Street café will remain open after a local restaurant owner agreed to purchase the business, preserving staff and operations. The deal reverses a planned closure driven by steep rent increases, construction disruptions and declining sales.

Microsoft is halting Copilot development for Xbox consoles. New Xbox CEO Asha Sharma made the announcement on X (formerly Twitter), saying the company "will stop development of Copilot on console," retiring features that "don't align with where we're headed." Whatever the future holds for Xbox, it appears that Copilot will not feature in it. The Copilot brand has not become the halo Microsoft hoped for. The AI assistant has yet to catch fire with customers in the same way as rivals like Gemini and ChatGPT. Last month, the Copilot icon was removed from Notepad, and earlier this year, Microsoft promised to rethink its approach to foisting the technology into every crevice of its flagship operating system and applications. It is against this background that the Gaming Copilot is being discontinued in its current form before ever leaving beta. Although the recommendation engine may have been useful to some beta users, it doesn't fit with where Sharma wants to take the Xbox platform, so it must walk the plank. Sharma also said that "Copilot on mobile" is being wound down, which we suspect refers only to the Xbox-related mobile Copilot experience, not the wider Copilot apps for iOS and Android. Customers paying for Copilot services on other Microsoft platforms, such as GitHub, are no doubt watching the Xbox developments with interest. "Xbox needs to move faster, deepen our connection with the community, and address friction for both players and developers," Sharma said. Windows boss Pavan Davuluri said something similar regarding the operating system earlier this year. Whether Sharma's Xbox pullback and Microsoft's quiet de-branding of Copilot in Notepad mark a broader shift is still unclear. Microsoft has leaned hard into its Copilot identity - user reaction might give Redmond pause before it thrusts the technology on other customers. ®