Feed aggregator

What if one pitch changed everything? The next company nobody has heard of yet is building something that will matter. It could be yours.

Now more than ever, we modern-day court jesters need your support! Become a paid subscriber to any (or all!) of the platforms below to keep Keef gentleman-cartooning into the future and beyond! www.patreon.com/keefknight keithknight.substack.com ko-fi.com/… kchronicles.com/… Related | Trump threatens to sue over reporting on Reflecting Pool scandal…

Source

Claude Code users are reporting that the app is silently deleting conversation transcripts – yours may even already be gone if you don’t know to change a default setting that the platform never bothers to tell users about. Claude Code’s GitHub repo features multiple open issues from the past couple of months, as users of the coding tool are finding their conversation transcripts gone. The problem appears to come down to the cleanupPeriodDays configuration option, which defaults to 30 days and runs every time Claude Code starts up, wiping out any .jsonl file it finds that isn’t fresh enough. Anthropic suggested the blame lies with users for not checking the documentation, telling The Register that the 30-day erasure policy has been there since Claude's launch as a security measure, and is documented. "Keeping plain text transcripts of coding sessions on disk indefinitely creates real security and privacy risks, since they can contain source code, credentials, and other sensitive material," the company said in a statement. "The 30-day default balances the ability to resume recent work against not holding that data on disk longer than needed. This has been part of Claude Code's design since launch as a security measure." This might not be such a huge deal if Claude Code bothered to inform 8naware users that their 30-day-old conversations with the bot would be wiped out the next time they opened the application, or informed them that the setting exists. But users are saying that's not the case. “Cleanup runs out of the box with no install-time disclosure or first-run dialog,” GitHub user FTSBrand wrote in his original post, which has since become the issue of record. “Users who treat their conversation history as durable working knowledge are silently mistaken about the persistence model.” Another user in their own issue thread reports that code and git history for a project remained after the cleanup wipe, “but the reasoning trail - design discussions, debugging context, analysis - is gone.” “For research work that context is the artifact,” GitHub user joekhochstetter said. This cleanup feature appears to bypass any form of recovery, with no soft-deletion option, grace period, or option to restore. User reports also suggest there’s no log of what’s deleted either, leaving people with no way to confirm what’s been wiped after it happens. Moreover, one might assume that simply changing the retention period to a higher number would render the issue irrelevant, but several users say setting a large value for retention isn’t working properly. GitHub user ojura’s root cause analysis suggests that’s because deletion is keyed to a transcript’s mtime (modification time) rather than its actual last activity timestamp. "Because mtime is externally mutable, anything that touches it flips the outcome: a restore, a sync client, or a script that sets mtimes to a session's true (old) last-activity date makes a present session look old, and it is silently deleted on the next sweep,” ojura explained. The only solution in the thread is to ensure Claude Code transcripts are backed up, with several different iterations of such a workaround suggested. That hasn’t been enough to satisfy some Claude Coders - they want it fixed. “Backups are good hygiene, but they don't replace product-level disclosure/provenance for a destructive retention sweep,” writes GitHub user caioribeiroclw-pixel. ®

ph @arietanto
#Chivasso
#ilprimocaffèdelmattino

In a bit of news that we all should have seen coming, President Donald Trump is using a secret no-bid contract—that means taxpayer dollars, y’all—to build his big, dumb ballroom. How much, you ask? Just a wee bit, hardly worth mentioning, really: $500 million. Honestly, this whole thing is like a greatest hits of how Trump has utterly corrupted the government. First…

Source

The Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s executive order that sought to curb birthright citizenship on Monday, dealing a crushing blow to the administration’s efforts to redefine a central tenet of the American constitutional order.

“Citizenship, then and now, was the right to have rights—to freely participate in our political community,” Roberts wrote for the court in Trump v. Barbara. “The Framers of the Fourteenth Amendment extended that promise to ‘every free-born person in this land.’ We keep that promise today.”

Roberts was joined by Justice Amy Coney Barrett, a fellow conservative, as well as the court’s three liberal members: Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson. Standing athwart the majority were Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, and Brett Kavanaugh, who all wrote separate dissenting opinions.

Thomas, who led the charge, argued that the Citizenship Clause meant to affirm citizenship only for formerly enslaved Black Americans after the Civil War. He leaned heavily on the idea that one’s parents must be “domiciled” in the United States to acquire U.S. citizenship at birth, as well as a burst of right-wing legal “scholarship” that emerged last year to sloppily backfill a legal rationale for Trump’s executive order.

“I am not sure that today’s opinion will stand the test of time,” Thomas wrote in his dissent. “The Citizenship Clause ‘added greatly to the dignity and glory of American citizenship.’ Today’s opinion devalues that citizenship.” Alito, who wrote separately, also lamented that the court had “made a serious mistake” in his view in “one of the most important decisions in the history of the court.”

Alito is right, if nothing else, about the decision’s significance. By affirming the longstanding rule of birthright citizenship, the Supreme Court prevented the Trump administration from robbing millions of Americans of their constitutional right to live in the only country that they have ever known. In short, as our nation’s 250th anniversary nears, it is a victory worth celebrating.

Congress and the states ratified the Fourteenth Amendment in 1868 to resolve a variety of post-Civil War legal disputes, mainly involving the rights of formerly enslaved Black Americans in the South. Among the amendment’s provisions is the Citizenship Clause, which states that “all persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”

The Civil Rights Act of 1866 had already affirmed the citizenship of formerly enslaved Americans by statute, but Republicans in Congress sought to entrench it even further and place questions of citizenship beyond future political dispute. The Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification also permanently nullified the Supreme Court’s disastrous 1857 decision in Dred Scott v. Sandford that held, among other things, that people of African descent could never become citizens of the United States.

The Citizenship Clause’s sole exception was for people who were not “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States at birth. This language applied, according to contemporaries, to children born to foreign diplomats who possess diplomatic immunity, as well as to Native Americans living under tribal governments beyond U.S. jurisdiction. The former exception is still operative; the latter was superseded by the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, in which Congress extended U.S. citizenship to all Native Americans by statute.

In 1898, the Supreme Court affirmed the clause’s protection of birthright citizenship in United States v. Wong Kim Ark. The plaintiff was born in San Francisco to Chinese parents who had emigrated to California prior to the enactment of the Chinese Exclusion Acts. They returned to China with Wong in the 1870s, where he lived until adulthood before returning to California multiple times. On the second trip, in 1895, customs officials detained Wong and denied him permission to enter the country because, in their view, he was not a U.S. citizen.

The Supreme Court reached the opposite conclusion when it ruled on the case three years later. Justice Horace Gray, writing for the high court, held that Wong had acquired U.S. citizenship by virtue of his birth on U.S. soil, even though his parents were not U.S. citizens themselves and later returned to China. As a result, the court affirmed the principle of birthright citizenship for anyone within U.S. jurisdiction. The Nationality Act of 1940 later repeated the clause’s language into statutory law.

At odds with this longstanding view of American citizenship is the Trump administration. President Donald Trump has long viewed himself as the arbiter of who is and isn’t an American. His initial entry into the American political scene came in the early 2010s when he falsely claimed that President Barack Obama was born in Kenya and thus not a natural-born citizen. On the campaign trail in 2016, Trump also proposed ending birthright citizenship, but he did not seriously pursue it during his first term.

On the first day of his second term, Trump issued an executive order titled “Protecting the Meaning and Value of American Citizenship.” It claimed that the Citizenship Clause only meant to extend citizenship to people of African descent who had been denied it by Dred Scott. Trump ordered the executive branch to deny recognition of U.S. citizenship to children born on U.S. soil whose mother and father were undocumented immigrants or on temporary visas. Legal challenges naturally followed.

By the time the case reached the Supreme Court, Trump and his allies had congealed around a few overlapping arguments. They argued that “children of temporarily present aliens” and “children of illegal aliens” were not subject to the United States’ political jurisdiction. Proponents had to add “political” to the clause’s text because the idea that they weren’t subject to the ordinary jurisdiction of the United States is patently absurd: They can be arrested, sued, fined, taxed, and so on.

The Justice Department also argued that their interpretation did not clash with Wong Kim Ark by leaning heavily on that decision’s references to Wong’s parents as domiciled in the United States. Again, there was some flubbing here. The administration had to add “lawfully” to “domiciled” to read the concept of illegal immigration into the Fourteenth Amendment. Such a concept did not exist in American law or practice in 1869.

Roberts, writing for the court, dispensed with this nonsense handily. He traced the American law of citizenship back to its British roots. (I’ll refer to those origins as “British” for coherence’s sake even though some sources predate the Act of Union 1707.) British subjecthood, Roberts explained, was a reciprocal relationship between king and subject. It did not extend to those born to foreign diplomats, who served another sovereign, or to those born under foreign occupation.

That relationship attached at birth under British law. “A foreign mother could enter the British Isles, give birth, and leave with her child the very next day, and that child would remain a British subject,” Roberts explained, citing a famous 1608 decision known as Calvin’s Case. “Why? Because the child owed an implied allegiance to the sovereign who protected him at his birth—no matter how ‘momentary and uncertain’ his presence in the King’s realms.”

Even children born to parents “subject to expulsion,” the chief justice wrote, fell under that rule. “For those children, and all others born in Britain, the rule was the same: With protection came allegiance, and with allegiance came the status of a natural-born subject,” he wrote. This rule “crossed the Atlantic with the colonists” and was “adopted with little fanfare after the Revolution,” albeit by changing “subject” to “citizen.”

Deviating from this norm were Southern states that held the children of slaves in permanent servitude. “The common law ‘made no distinction on account of race or color” when it came to citizenship, Roberts explained. “But the slave states did.” Dred Scott, the chief justice wrote, “imposed the Southern states’ beliefs onto the nation. […] For them, blood, not soil, was made the rule.” Only through the Civil War and the Fourteenth Amendment’s ratification was the proper rule restored, which endures to the present day.

Describing this as a 5-4 ruling or a 6-3 ruling would oversimplify the different positions of the dissenting justices. The only justice who endorsed the executive order in its entirety was Alito. His 39-page dissent is primarily focused on undocumented immigration, writing at length about various policy decisions since the 1970s that led to the current status quo.

“As a result of the events of the past 50 years, the United States now has a huge contingent of people who entered or remained in this country illegally, as well as a large group of people who were born here to such parents,” Alito wrote. “The Court’s interpretation of the Fourteenth Amendment makes all the members of this latter group citizens.”

Alito disputed Roberts’ account of the rule of citizenship before 1869. In his view, it was “unsettled” and there was “little litigation about the meaning of American citizenship.” He argued that the Citizenship Clause established a new rule that only children who are “not subject to any foreign power.” Alito is also the only justice who took issue with Wong Kim Ark itself, arguing at first that it “showed little respect for precedent” before reconciling himself to a much narrower reading of it.

Towards the end of his dissent, with a whiff of desperation, he also claimed there were national-security risks to the majority’s approach due to birth tourism. “Suppose that country is a strategic adversary or enemy of the United States,” he warned. “Suppose the child never visited the United States while growing up and was inculcated with hatred of this country. According to the Court, that person is a citizen of the United States.” One hypothetical person’s imaginary crime does not seem like a very good reason to exclude millions of people from American citizenship.

Alito’s position drew the support of no other justice. The only other isolationist was Kavanaugh, who concurred with the majority on the outcome but sharply disagreed on how to reach the result. Kavanaugh disagreed with the court’s interpretation of the Citizenship Clause, but argued that the executive order was still invalid because it ran counter to a provision in federal immigration law known as Section 1401(a).

Section 1401 defines those who are “nationals and citizens of the United States at birth,” and Subsection (a) says that one of the categories is “a person born in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof” In other words, it simply restates the relevant text of the Fourteenth Amendment. If you are baffled by this approach, you are not alone. Both the government and the plaintiffs stipulated at oral arguments that the clause and the statute should be read identically. No other justice adopted this interpretation either.

This too-clever-by-half approach allows Kavanaugh to vote with the majority on the outcome, but also propose that Congress could end birthright citizenship by legislation—namely, the legislation that merely repeats the Citizenship Clause. He argued that the clause’s exceptions were not fixed or closed at ratification; instead, Congress or the courts could add new ones to confront new situations.

This is not really how the Constitution or citizenship works, either. As Roberts said, citizenship is essentially the “right to have other rights.” Even Thomas, Alito, and Gorsuch highlight its special significance in their own opinions, and they all found constitutional principles to anchor it in, disparate as they may be. Kavanaugh’s approach is simply “we’ll know it when we see it.”

The third and most important dissent is by Thomas, which Gorsuch joined. The court’s seniormost justice argued for narrowing the Citizenship Clause by hinging its application on the parents’ domicile status. “Both the Civil Rights Act [of 1866] and the Citizenship Clause guaranteed citizenship to persons born and domiciled in the United States regardless of their race,” he wrote. “Neither guaranteed citizenship to persons who were not domiciled in the United States.”

It is worth noting, of course, that the word “domicile” is not present in either the Civil Rights Act of 1866 or the Citizenship Clause. It can be found instead in Wong Kim Ark, where the court frequently noted that Wong’s parents were “domiciled” in San Francisco when he was born. Roberts interprets this language to be merely descriptive; as he noted, this conflation of domicile with citizenship does not follow either historical practice or common understanding.

This emphasis on domicile does not take Thomas and Gorsuch as far afield from Roberts’ majority opinion as it may seem. Indeed, in some crucial ways, they are much closer to the majority than to the other dissenters or the government. The greatest gap with Roberts is with children of temporary visa holders and “birth tourists,” where the domicile question is much more cut-and-dry.

On undocumented immigrants, however, both Thomas and Gorsuch are much less enthusiastic. Most of their respective dissents are focused on the non-domiciled temporary visitors. When it comes to the children of long-term undocumented immigrants, there is palpable discomfort with excluding them categorically.

The two justices’ position was that the government need only prove that the administration’s order was valid to survive a facial challenge like the one brought by the parties. Under his and Thomas’s domicile reading, that held true for children of temporary visa holders, so they voted to uphold it. Nevertheless, they declined to conclude the executive order was constitutional in all circumstances.

The Trump administration (and some of its allies) claimed undocumented immigrants could never claim domicile status. “About that, however, I harbor doubts,” Gorsuch noted. “Perhaps Wong Kim Ark does not squarely foreclose the government’s position. After all, that case addressed a child born to parents who lawfully resided in this country. Still, I wonder: Is a child born here to parents who have long chosen to make this Nation their permanent home not a citizen under the Fourteenth Amendment solely because his parents’ presence violates statutory law? If those parents are not domiciled here, then where are they domiciled? And if the answer is nowhere, how can we reconcile that conclusion with this Court’s longstanding recognition that every person is domiciled somewhere?”

Thomas also did not view it as a closed question. “That said, many others understandably have suggested that long-term resident illegal aliens satisfy the elements of domicile because they reside here with the intent to permanently remain,” he added, pointing to Gorsuch’s separate dissent. “Such questions are best resolved in the context of as-applied challenges.” Thomas is rarely hesitant to share his thoughts on future legal questions for the court to consider, so his reticence to take a stand here is notable.

This distinction might seem arcane, but it could be crucial in a future as-applied case. Imagine a modern-day Wong Kim Ark: a child born to two parents of undocumented Somali immigrants in Minneapolis who lived there for 20 years. The child’s parents returned to their home country during Trump’s mass-deportation campaign, but the child returns to the United States as an adult sometime in the 2030s.

A future Republican administration, adopting Alito’s reasoning, tries to challenge Barbara by arguing that immigration agents could exclude the child from re-entry as a non-citizen. Their parents had no allegiance to the United States and therefore the child did not obtain U.S. citizenship at birth. If Thomas and Gorsuch are still on the court, they could consistently hold that this 21st-century Wong Kim Ark was a U.S. citizen by birth by virtue of their parents’ domicile status, no matter their lawful immigration status.

To sum up: President Donald Trump and the Justice Department argued that children of undocumented immigrants are categorically excluded from U.S. citizenship at birth. On that proposition, it lost 8-1. Roberts and the other four justices in the majority say those children are always covered by the Citizenship Clause. Thomas and Gorsuch say they might be covered by the Citizenship Clause if their parents are domiciled. And Kavanaugh says they’re covered by statute, at least for now.

On whether the children of temporary visa holders and birth tourists are categorically excluded from U.S. citizenship at birth, it’s a 6-3 result. Again, Roberts and the majority say they’re covered by the Citizenship Clause and Kavanaugh says they’re covered by statute. Thomas and Gorsuch say that they aren’t domiciled so the Citizenship Clause does not apply.

In an ideal world, Trump v. Barbara would have been a 9-0 decision. It should have been one. In April, I wrote about my concerns that the Supreme Court’s conservative majority might limit or narrow birthright citizenship in some way even when ruling against Trump’s executive order. Fortunately, those fears were unrealized. Roberts’ majority opinion is clear, eloquent, and uncompromising. Future generations will likely rank it among the finest of his judicial career.

Whatever the count, Tuesday’s ruling is ultimately a triumph. There is no reward for second place at the high court, and the right-wing legal scholars who claim to have shifted the Overton window must still reckon with their failures, both moral and professional. In an era where the promise and the power of the Reconstruction Amendments is fading once more, any victory is better than a defeat.

The Bay Area will host one more World Cup match, which is slated for Wednesday at 5 p.m. — and it’s a big one. The U.S. men’s national team takes the pitch for a high-stakes knockout match against Bosnia-Herzegovina just a short drive up the road from Santa Cruz County. 

There are still last-minute tickets available at Levi’s Stadium through authorized resale sites, as FIFA’s primary sale has ended and the organization is no longer selling tickets. Those resale platforms are StubHub, SeatGeek and Vivid Seats.

However, jumping at the opportunity will be costly. To the surprise of no one, even the cost of the cheapest tickets dwarf most prices you’ll find for a typical sporting event. No single ticket is priced beneath a four-digit dollar amount.

On StubHub on Tuesday afternoon, tickets ranged from $1,407 to $3,487. Tickets from SeatGeek were similar, ranging from $1,386 to $5,852. Vivid Seats tickets started at $1,329 and reached all the way to $9,316 and above for the Category 1 and 2 seats — considered the best views in the house.

If those figures don’t scare you away, make your way to one of those providers as soon as you can. Tickets are going fast and there is only a limited number remaining.

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

MORE LOCAL COVERAGE

The post There are still tickets left for the final World Cup match in Santa Clara — if you can pay the price appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

The free open source agentic program is finally invading your phone.

President Donald Trump invited Tina Peters, the former Colorado county election clerk found guilty of tampering with voting machines, to the White House on Tuesday.

Trump took to Truth Social to brag about the “honor” of meeting up with a fellow election denier.

“Tina Peters just came to the White House to thank me for getting her released from prison in Colorado,” the president wrote. “She was put there because she found Election Fraud, but instead of arresting the people that committed the Fraud, they arrested her!”

Trump posted a photograph of the two of them smiling from behind his desk in the Oval Office.

Peters became a mascot of the MAGA movement’s supposed victimhood after she was sentenced to nine years in prison for conspiring to publicize the voting machine records in Mesa County. She turned all the cameras off while allowing fellow election denier Conan Hayes to copy, photograph, and download information in an effort to prove Trump’s election fraud claims in 2020. Peters was freed from prison after the Trump administration pressured Democratic Colorado Governor Jared Polis into granting her clemency.

“What she went through should never happen to anyone again,” Trump wrote. “Just think of it, she caught the Democrats cheating, and they put her in jail for Voter Fraud.”

Of course, the Mesa County district attorney’s office uncovered zero evidence to back up Peters’s claims of voter fraud. The only evidence of any election meddling in 2020 came from Trump’s own camp.

Poor Kash Patel. Talk about a dude who really, really isn’t cut out for his job. It’s not just that he’s woefully unqualified to be the director of the FBI. It’s also that he really, really isn’t interested in it. The man just wants to post on social media. But nearly every time he does this, it’s a disaster—a product of Patel popping up to show that, hey, guys, he does too matter!

Source

A cartoon by Clay Jones. Related | Mamdani’s got Trump and Fox News big mad…

Source

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s complaints about media coverage came back to bite him Tuesday.

A federal judge ordered a preliminary injunction against the Defense Department’s restrictions on press access to the Pentagon, based in part on “a consistent stream of derisive comments beginning shortly after the confirmation of Secretary Hegseth and continuing through the present.”

U.S. District Judge Paul Friedman temporarily blocked a rule stating that all journalists visiting the Pentagon were required to have an official escort while a lawsuit The New York Times filed against the rule is reviewed in full by the court.

“This court has spoken at several points about the critical importance of protecting the freedoms enshrined in the First Amendment, and that evergreen message bears repeating,” Friedman wrote.

Hegseth has criticized media outlets whose coverage has not reflected well on himself or the department. The judge quoted Hegseth’s March attack on the Times, where he accused the paper of “slashing and burning people to ruin their reputations.”

Friedman quoted Hegseth’s complaints about the “legacy Trump-hating press” peddling “endless stream of garbage,” as well as the time he compared reporters to the biblical “Pharisees” who “held counsel against [Jesus]” and “scrutinized every good act in order to find a violation, only looking for the negative.”

The judge also made sure to include several quotes from Sean Parnell, the assistant to the secretary of defense for public affairs, including when he called the Times “garbage.”

In October, the Department of Defense said that it would revoke the press passes of journalists who shared classified or unclassified information without the Pentagon’s preapproval. The Times sued, and Friedman ruled in the newspaper’s favor in March, after which the DOD issued a revised policy with the escort rule. In May, the Times sued again over the new rule, which prevented journalists from free movement around the building in authorized spaces without an escort.

The DOD has argued that reporters have gained sensitive information based on roaming around Pentagon headquarters, alleging that they “maintain a persistent physical presence near sensitive spaces within the Pentagon.” It has also granted press credentials to friendly right-wing media outlets and influencers at the expense of critical outlets. On Tuesday, though, Hegseth and the rest of the department had to face the consequences of their own words and actions.

EquiLibre Technologies, a Prague-based AI lab founded by three ex-DeepMind researchers is now valued at more than $500 million.

The Adventure Zone: Balance is coming to an end all over again! The Adventure Zone: Story and Song is the final volume of the graphic novel adaptation of the critically acclaimed actual play podcast. To celebrate, Dan Casey sat down with Griffin McElroy, Clint McElroy, Justin McElroy, and Travis McElroy to dive deep into what to expect from the final volume; saying goodbye to Taako, Magnus, and Merle all over again; and much more.

The Adventure Zone: Story and Song is available from Macmillan and 23rd St. on July 14, 2026: https://bit.ly/TAZStoryAndSong

Listen to more of The McElroy Family’s excellent work at https://www.themcelroy.family/

Learn more and sign up for the Geek & Sundry newsletter at ⁠https://www.geekandsundry.com/⁠!

Subscribe to Geek and Sundry: ⁠http://goo.gl/B62jl⁠

Twitter: ⁠http://twitter.com/geekandsundry⁠
Facebook: ⁠http://facebook.com/geekandsundry⁠
Instagram: ⁠http://instagram.com/geekandsundry⁠
TikTok: ⁠https://www.tiktok.com/@geekandsundry

#podcast #boardgames #author #adventurezone

The post Quests N’ Answers: The Adventure Zone w/ The McElroy Family appeared first on Nerdist.

Qualcomm is finally getting serious about AI infrastructure, but its push into the datacenter hinges on the success of an ambitious near-memory compute architecture designed to deliver better inference economics than today's GPUs. Announced during its 2026 investor day last week, the tech will see Qualcomm stack layer upon layer of DRAM on top of its XPUs to form a single unified compute and memory module it's calling high-bandwidth compute (HBC). “We offer all of the performance advantages of SRAM, but with the density and the memory capacity that HBM (high-bandwidth memory) stacks offer,” Tony Pialis, Qualcomm’s EVP of datacenter, claimed during last week's investor presentation. This technology is set to launch next year as part of Qualcomm’s AI250-series of Dragonfly rack systems, and marks a distinct shift in Qualcomm’s AI infrastructure strategy. The handset giant is no stranger to AI accelerators. Essentially every Snapdragon processor sold today ships with an NPU on board. But in the datacenter, the company has struggled to garner the same excitement as Nvidia, AMD, and even startups like Cerebras. Compared to the big two’s GPUs, Qualcomm’s AI-series accelerators haven’t compared that favorably, but that could soon change as the company looks to make its mark on the datacenter. With the AI250, the SoC maker is claiming 768 GB of memory capacity and up to 133 TB/s of effective memory bandwidth per card. For reference, Nvidia's Groq 3 LPUs offer just 500 MB of SRAM and 150 TB/s of bandwidth. If that seems too good to be true, that’s because it is. Qualcomm is leaning heavily on the word “effective.” We know that because for the AI200-based Dragonfly systems rolling out this year, they claimed 414 TB/s of “effective” memory bandwidth across all 56 chips. On its face, that seems more realistic, but actually achieving that with 8800 MT/s LPDDR5x alone would require a 6,720-bit-wide bus, which it almost certainly does not possess. Qualcomm insists that this is the "pure physical bandwidth of the LPDDR interface," but declined to offer any specifics as to how it's somehow managed to achieve what Nvidia needed eight HBM3e stacks to do. In any case, according to Qualcomm’s marketing materials, with the move to HBC, the AI250 will offer 18x the effective bandwidth of the AI200, while the forthcoming AI300 will deliver 54x the bandwidth. Given the context, these seem like outlandish claims, but these "effective" multipliers are really a feature of Qualcomm's HBC architecture. Unpacking high-bandwidth compute Amplifying “effective” bandwidth isn’t the only party trick from these HBC-based accelerators. Qualcomm claims that by moving some of the XPU’s compute under the DRAM, it can significantly reduce the amount of power its chips consume. On a conventional datacenter GPU, data is rapidly shuffled between HBM and the compute dies. Even using advanced packaging technologies like TSMC’s CoWoS, the power required to move this data back and forth is significant. By stacking the DRAM directly on top of some of the logic and connecting them using through-silicon vias (TSVs), the path from compute to memory is shortened considerably. "Imagine working in the same building that you live in so you only travel up and down," Pialis said. "What does that mean for the highways and the roads that connect the suburbs to the city? Guess what? The roads are clear. The value this brings to the industry is lower power consumption, less heat, and that expensive road of silicon interposer that HBM solutions use is no longer needed." Performing bandwidth-bound operations on the base die also has the benefit of reducing the amount of data that needs to be shuttled to and from the HBC to the SoC. In effect, memory bandwidth is amplified. This is why Qualcomm is using “effective bandwidth" so liberally. Compared to doing all of that work on a conventional GPU or XPU with distinct HBM and compute dies, the effective bandwidth would be significantly higher, which also achieves better density than SRAM-only designs, like Nvidia’s LPUs or Cerebras’ dinner plate sized accelerators. With that said, Qualcomm probably won’t be running its entire AI software stack on HBC. Higher memory bandwidth primarily benefits decode, when the entirety of the model’s active weights are streamed autoregressively from memory one token after another. Decode isn’t particularly compute-intensive. As such, doing decode partially or entirely in HBC starts to make a lot of sense because it also avoids the thermal constraints associated with burying the compute under multiple layers of DRAM. Qualcomm tells us that the AI250 can be used as a standalone AI accelerator, but notes it is heavily optimized around addressing bandwidth bottlenecks. So, in addition to being a dedicated inference chip, it can be used in disaggregated inference architectures that use GPUs or other Qualcomm parts for prompt processing and the AI250 to speed up memory intensive decode operations. Peak FLOPS are notably missing from Qualcomm’s AI250 disclosures — the company declined to share specifics upon our request. Is HBC actually a competitive advantage? While Qualcomm is early among chip designers to make a fuss about near-memory or HBC, it’s not the first, nor is the technology beyond the means of Nvidia or AMD. In fact, both Nvidia and AMD are rumored to be working with HBM suppliers and TSMC to develop custom base dies to boost the performance of their next-gen chips, though it's still not clear how much, if any, compute has been integrated into them. Qualcomm tells us its HBC "uses LPDDR memory in a purpose-built near-memory computing architecture that combines compute and highly-accelerated memory bandwidth within a 3D-stacked silicon design. While both HBC and HBM use stacked-memory concepts, HBC is a distinct architecture designed to address AI’s data-movement bottleneck by bringing compute and memory closer together, increasing memory bandwidth efficiency and improving energy efficiency for AI inference workloads. HBM has more stacks of DRAM, uses 2.5D interposer to route more wires, and does not do computing in the base logic die." AI chip startup d-Matrix is also developing accelerators that will use 3D stacked DRAM to extend their in-memory compute capabilities. The underlying technology described by Pialis may not be as unique as Qualcomm would like investors to believe, but it shows the company hasn’t missed the boat. However, Qualcomm’s ability to work with Nvidia and AMD may end up doing more to sell customers on its tech than anything. As we previously wrote, in a disaggregated AI world, Nvidia can be both a friend and an enemy. Qualcomm finds its Mojo In addition to teasing its upcoming AI250 and AI300 accelerators, Qualcomm’s investor day also coincided with the acquisition of AI software startup Modular. Modular was founded by Tim Davis and Chris Lattner, the latter of whom you may recognize as the creator of LLVM, Clang, the Swift programming language, and the multi-level intermediate representation (MLIR) compiler infrastructure. At Modular, Lattner and crew developed Mojo, a low-level programming interface for GPUs, which offered a high-performance alternative to Nvidia’s CUDA or AMD’s HIP and ROCm stacks. The big idea is that users should be able to write highly performant AI apps that’ll run regardless of the underlying hardware. For Qualcomm, Mojo presents an opportunity to sidestep the CUDA moat, which has dogged AMD for so long. With Mojo, Qualcomm’s customers won’t need to choose one platform; they can develop their apps and run them on whatever compute is handy at the time. It’s not all or nothing either. Modular should help to support heterogeneous deployments similar to what Nvidia is doing with Groq’s LPU tech, where GPUs might be used for prefill and AI250s are used for decode in whatever ratio makes the most sense for that specific application. However, the acquisition doesn’t just buy Qualcomm a vendor-neutral programming model. The folks buying these systems are primarily concerned with one AI workload in particular: LLM model serving. For this, Modular developed a serving platform called Max. Max is a bit like SGLang or vLLM in that it’ll run interchangeably on AMD or Nvidia hardware, but because it’s built atop Mojo, it, at least in theory, shouldn’t require nearly as much hand tuning. The offering should help Qualcomm compete in a landscape where software has become even more important than the hardware it runs on, if it manages to close the acquisition this year without regulators stepping in. In any case, we won’t have to wait much longer to see the HBC in action. After launching its AI200-series racks later this year, Qualcomm plans to push its first-gen HBC-based AI250 out the door beginning in 2027, while its second-gen HBC platform is slated for 2028. While you wait, why not read up on Qualcomm’s new datacenter CPU, which we explored in more detail last week. ®

Sophisticated AI models tend to require a lot of memory and take up a lot of storage space. One of the ways to reduce that footprint involves a process called quantization, which changes how model weights are represented and stored. But quantization has its drawbacks. Andrés Mac Allister, CEO and founder of The SEMQ Group, believes there's another way to make machine learning more efficient and less resource intensive. Instead of compressing model weights (specifically embeddings), he contends you can separate the semantics (the meaning) from how that meaning is represented. Model weights, including embeddings (which map tokens to vectors), are the numbers in a machine learning model that determine how strongly one piece of information relates to another. Taken all together, they reflect learned behavior. These parameters are commonly represented in Full-Precision (FP32), which requires 4 bytes per parameter. A 7B parameter model at FP32 would need about 28 GB of disk space and memory. To save space, the model might be quantized at FP16/BF16, which requires 2 bytes per parameter. The resulting model would need about 14 GB of disk space and memory. And there are smaller quantization options like FP8, INT8/Q8, Q6, Q5, Q4, Q3, and Q2, each of which reduces the storage and memory footprint while also reducing precision – the answers get worse. SEMQ stands for Symbolic Embedding Multi-Quantization. As described in a paper published earlier this year, SEMQ "replaces raw vectors with fixed-dimensional symbolic structures that preserve relational properties, such as relative similarity ordering and neighborhood structure, while decoupling representation from metrics, indexing, and execution semantics." Essentially, Mac Allister has devised a way to construct a semantic abstraction layer that decouples the meaning captured in embeddings – vectors representing data – from the way that data is represented. The operative idea is that semantic relationships depend primarily on the relative orientation of embedding vectors, so the absolute magnitude of those vectors becomes less important to preserve. That's less data to store. The potential impact to businesses running AI workloads depends on the portion of infrastructure costs attributable to semantic state. "An embedding is usually represented as a long vector of floating-point numbers," Mac Allister explained in an email to The Register. "In conventional embedding systems, semantic state is typically stored as a sequence of high-precision numerical coordinates. Those coordinates jointly encode both magnitude and direction in the embedding space. "Our original question was whether a substantial part of the useful semantic information could instead be represented through the structural relationship among components, how they move relative to one another, which regions they occupy and what directional configuration they form in the overall space." To this end, SEMQ aims to represent relative geometry rather than an enumeration of independent floating-point magnitudes. "That matters because semantic systems generally care about relationships, similarity, neighborhood, continuity, retrieval behavior, change over time, rather than only about preserving each raw numeric value in isolation,' said Mac Allister. "The result is a portable representation of semantic state that can be reproduced, audited, compared and transferred across processes." According to Mac Allister, initial validation tests that focused on converting the embedding-based semantic state into a deterministic .semq representation, restoring it, and evaluating the stability of retrieval and classification operations have shown good results. "For example, in one benchmark using the Banking77 dataset from MTEB and the all-MiniLM-L6-v2 embedding model, the FP32 baseline achieved 92.26 percent accuracy. SEMQ achieved 92.27 percent effectively matching the FP32 baseline within 0.03 percentage points." SEMQ thus did substantially better than 4-bit quantization, which registered 56.05 percent accuracy, 36.22 percentage points less than FP32. "These are not claims that conventional quantization is universally ineffective but they show that, in this particular semantic classification setting, preserving the relevant semantic structure is materially different from simply reducing numerical precision," said Mac Allister. Applying SEMQ can be done at the point of data ingestion – organizations can use the SDK on the vectors generated by their embedding model on their documents to encode that data as an .semq artifact – or at query time to load, query, compare, restore, and verify that encoding. "That means a team can adopt SEMQ without replacing its LLM, embedding model, vector database or agent framework," said Mac Allister. "It can initially run alongside the existing stack as a sidecar layer, then become the representation used for selected retrieval or memory workloads." Potential use cases, he said, include making embeddings or memory state portable across systems, reproducing semantic state across different runs or machines; auditing model changes; reducing dependence on opaque or hard-to-reproduce stateful pipelines; and diffing semantic state. He added that the SEMQ can be extended to runtime cognitive state. "In our research, .semq files have been used to snapshot and restore transformer KV-cache state across process boundaries," he said. "That is not a pre-training workflow either: but a runtime-state workflow for pausing, transferring and resuming an active model session." Mac Allister isn't yet ready to talk about specific customers. He said his company is working through a Founding Design Partnership Program with organizations exploring applications in enterprise AI, retrieval, agent memory, and auditable AI workflows. This includes some AI infrastructure hyperscalers and some companies operating at the AI application layer. "We signed NDAs with all of them, so I cannot name all of the organizations publicly yet," he said. "What I can say is that the interest has come from teams dealing with AI systems where reproducibility, state, lower infrastructure overhead, and the ability to inspect semantic behavior are operationally important. So this is a big problem for big companies." ®

A procedural vote on the National Defense Authorization Act failed to pass the House Tuesday, in no small part because the SAVE America Act was attached to it.

The lower chamber voted 198-224 to reject the rule, with 14 Republicans joining Democrats to oppose the last-minute addition of Donald Trump’s voter restriction bill to the proposed Pentagon budget.

Representatives Tim Burchett, Eric Burlison, Eli Crane, Randy Fine, Andy Harris, Anna Paulina Luna, Max Miller, Chip Roy, Keith Self, Victoria Spartz, Mike Turner, Thomas Massie, and Lauren Boebert all voted no. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise switched his vote as well, but only so that Republicans could readdress the matter in future.

The stalled NDAA vote is a major blow to leaders of both parties, who have historically passed the defense spending package with minimal partisan objections. But the wide rejection also illustrates the low support behind the SAVE America Act, despite repeated insistence from the White House that it needs to be turned into law.

Since he lost the 2020 election, Trump and his allies have amped up their base over contrived claims of voter fraud, a statistical nonissue in U.S. elections. Trump has worked overtime to force his unpopular election reform proposals through the legislature, throwing confirmation hearings and bipartisan bill signings to the wayside while demanding Republicans prioritize passing the SAVE America Act.

The backlash to the bill—which was introduced months ago—has been grave, so much so that it gummed up efforts to fund Homeland Security for several months. Republicans eventually had to bail on the package to end the congressional gridlock.

Yet Trump has nonetheless opted to make it a legislative priority once again, effectively paralyzing the House for another week. House Speaker Mike Johnson told reporters Tuesday that the lower chamber would work on the matter for another day and a half and try to hold another vote by the end of the week.

Another member of “60 Minutes” is making his exit from the once-renowned TV newsmagazine. The latest to call it quits? Veteran producer Henry Schuster. “It has been a great run at 60 MINUTES and what I got to do there was extraordinary. But I have been thinking about leaving for a while now and when the opportunity presented itself in February, I took it,” Schuster wrote on LinkedIn Monday.

Source

In a widely anticipated defeat for transgender rights, the Supreme Court upheld state laws in Idaho and West Virginia that ban transgender girls from playing on girls’ school sports team. The decision, issued on Tuesday, does not impose a nationwide ban on trans athletes. But it does preserve laws passed in 27 states by GOP politicians and anti-trans activists who argued that transgender women threaten safety and fairness in women’s athletics.

All nine Supreme Court justices agreed that Title IX, the federal law forbidding sex discrimination in schools, allows states to ban trans girls from girls’ sports. They also ruled 6-3, along ideological lines, that such bans do not violate the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution.

“He’s not only creating a bad precedent for trans people, he’s significantly lowering the protection all women get under Equal Protection.”

The science is far from settled about whether trans girls who have received gender-affirming treatment actually have a competitive advantage or pose a greater risk of injuring other players. But the majority opinion, authored by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, glosses over those unknowns—reasoning that “biological sex” is a good enough proxy for athletic ability for states to categorically ban trans girls from girls’ sports.

“Separate sports teams for biological males and biological females are reasonable,” Kavanaugh writes. “Given the inherent physical differences between the sexes, allowing only biological females to play on women’s and girls’ teams can reduce the risk of physical injury and ensure fair competition.”

Yet the ruling has much broader implications. In her dissent, Justice Sonia Sotomayor points out that the majority opinion is allowing states to make laws based on broad differences between boys and girls, without looking closer at the subcategories of people who may not fit into those generalizations. “In so concluding,” she writes, “the Court…lowers the State’s burden for justifying the use of sex classifications in potentially all cases.”

In other words, the decision makes it easier for states to justify treating men and women differently. In the past, Sotomayor argues, the court has overturned laws that used “overbroad generalizations” that suited most men and most women but failed make exceptions for a minority who did not conform to sex stereotypes. But this case breaks that longstanding pattern: The court on Tuesday failed to account for the minority of students who have received gender-affirming treatment and thus may not conform to sex stereotypes about their athletic performance.

As a result, the ruling could threaten decades of progress on gender equality, Sotomayor warns. “The majority applies its diminished view of equal protection to the sports context today,” she writes. “One can only hope that the same misguided approach does not and will not extend to other contexts tomorrow.”

The legal cases, known as Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J., began in 2020 and 2021, when trans students’ participation in sports had not yet become a culture-war flashpoint or presidential campaign-defining issue. Back then, conservative political strategists had just begun to invest in messaging on trans athletes, and Republican legislators began to introduce legislation banning them —even though many couldn’t identify a single trans athlete playing school sports in their state.

“There was a concerted effort to use this issue as the wedge for establishing…that transgender women are not women.”

The issue of trans athletes in sports proved persuasive. Soon, Republican legislators were introducing and passing a wide array of anti-trans laws, targeting LGBTQ-inclusive school curricula and medical gender transitions for minors, and even successfully passing the kinds of bathroom bans that had failed in the past. “There was a concerted effort to use this issue as the wedge for establishing, both in law and in public opinion, that transgender women are not women, and that they should be treated differently from cisgender women,” explained Joshua Block, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer who argued one of the cases before the Supreme Court, in an interview last year. “They go right from ‘transgender women don’t belong on our sports teams’ to ‘and they don’t belong in our restrooms or in our social clubs.’ It’s been a very potent political weapon for them.”

When Idaho and West Virginia passed their sports bans, trans students in each state sued, arguing that the laws were discriminatory and unjustified—not just because there are so few trans athletes, but also because the science remains unsettled about whether athletes who medically transition from male to female retain any physical advantage. The plaintiff in the West Virginia case, Becky Pepper-Jackson, had identified as a girl at school since the third grade, and, thanks to puberty blockers, never went through a male puberty; still, she was banned from trying out for her middle school’s girls’ cross-country team. Meanwhile, in Idaho, Boise State University student Lindsay Hecox was also barred from running women’s cross-country, even though she had medically transitioned and suppressed her testosterone for a year, as NCAA rules at the time required. In response to their challenges, federal appeals courts blocked the bans in both states. Then the Republican-led state governments asked the Supreme Court to take up the issue.

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court overruled those appeals courts decisions. “This is a heartbreaking ruling for our clients and transgender girls like them who’ve asked for nothing more than the same opportunities afforded to their peers,” Block said a statement following the ruling. “The reality is that the equality of transgender women and girls takes nothing away from, and in fact promotes, the equality of all women and girls.”

The court’s decision on Tuesday is limited in some important ways.

For one thing, it doesn’t require all states to ban trans girls and women from women’s sports. “This ruling does not require any state to follow West Virginia’s or Idaho’s cruel, overly-broad approach, and it does not mandate categorical bans on transgender students participating in school sports,” Chris Erchull, Senior Staff Attorney at the nonprofit GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders, said in a statement following the ruling.

On top of that, the Title IX ruling is specific to sports—citing an amendment made to Title IX in 1974 that allowed schools to separate athletic teams by sex—and does not say whether Title IX allows or forbids discrimination against trans students in other contexts. That means trans students can continue to use Title IX to fight back when schools impose policies that harm them—such as rules that restrict their bathroom use, forbid teachers from using their preferred pronouns, or forcibly out them to unsupportive parents or guardians.

And while the justices decided that trans sports bans are allowed under the Equal Protection Clause of the Constitution, they didn’t rule on a broader question: Whether judges, when analyzing other anti-trans laws, should apply the same rigorous legal analysis they use for laws that treat men and women differently. That bigger, still-unresolved question has enormous consequences for transgender rights. If that answer is yes, courts must examine whether anti-trans laws are “substantially related” to an “important government” objective. That standard, known as “intermediate scrutiny,” is tough, and it makes it more likely that anti-trans laws of all kinds will be overturned.

In Tuesday’s ruling, Kavanaugh said that trans sports bans must be analyzed under intermediate scrutiny—because they treat people differently based on “biological sex.” But the court still hasn’t decided whether other laws that treat people differently based on transgender status qualify for the more rigorous legal analysis.

Still, Tuesday’s ruling could have much wider consequences for gender equality under the Constitution—affecting not just trans people but cisgender men and women.

As I reported in depth earlier this year, feminist legal scholars have been sounding alarms about the conservative legal movement’s strategic use of anti-trans laws to chip away at the Equal Protection Clause’s protections against sex discrimination. The term “biological sex” has become “the new takedown strategy for anti-discrimination law,” legal historian Mary Ziegler, of the University of California, Davis, explained:

“What they’re trying to do is to replace sex discrimination law with a Trojan horse sex discrimination law that no longer prohibits sex discrimination,” Ziegler says. Rather than attacking protections head on, she explains, “they’re going to say, ‘American anti-discrimination law means you can treat men and women differently because they have different bodies.’” If courts embrace this logic, Ziegler says, it would be much harder to fight back against potential restrictions on women’s lives—laws that limit job options for pregnant workers, for example, or that ban women from military schools—by arguing they violate the Constitution’s equal protection clause.

Sotomayor points out a similar threat in her dissenting opinion. Under the court’s previous precedents, Sotomayor explains, states are not allowed to treat people of different sexes differently based on generalizations about “the way women are.” Instead, they have to account for the subset of women who might not fit into sex stereotypes. In a famous case, the court ruled that the Virginia Military Institute couldn’t categorically exclude women by reasoning that most women wouldn’t do well under its adversarial style, since at least a small subset of women would, in fact, succeed there. 

In the case of the trans girls who have received gender-affirming care, Sotomayor argues that it’s too soon to say whether or not they fit into generalizations about the athletic ability of “biological” boys. “West Virginia might be right that transgender girls retain some inherent athletic advantage over cisgender girls due to their sex identified at birth even after receiving the hormonal therapy B. P. J. identifies,” she writes. “At this point, however, neither the District Court nor the Fourth Circuit has passed upon any of the available evidence or made the necessary factual findings about the state of the scientific debate.”

Trans girls who have received gender-affirming treatment may, in fact, not threaten safety or competitive fairness in girls’ sports. The court simply doesn’t have enough evidence to tell.

In other words, trans girls who have received gender-affirming treatment may not, in fact, threaten safety or competitive fairness in girls’ sports. The court simply doesn’t have enough evidence to tell, Sotomayor argues. Instead, she says, Idaho and West Virginia’s laws “[rest] on exactly the kind of overbroad generalizations based on sex the Equal Protection Clause is supposed to root out.”

“Even if most trans athletes would have strength advantages or potentially raise safety concerns, not all of them would, and that’s what intermediate scrutiny requires you to look at, and [Sotomayor] thinks that the court is watering down that part of equal protection,” Ziegler explains.

That’s important, explains Albany Law School professor Ava Ayers, because Kavanaugh’s decision on Tuesday could make it easier for courts to uphold other laws that generalize about all men and women based on sex. “What really concerns me about this decision is that he’s not only creating a bad precedent for trans people, he’s significantly lowering the protection all women get under Equal Protection,” Ayers says.

In the immediate term, the people who will have to live with the Supreme Court’s decision are mainly teenage girls. Disturbingly, Idaho’s law allows a “dispute” about a student’s sex to be resolved by a “physical examination” of their “reproductive anatomy.”

Many of the transgender girls seeking to play on the girls’ team simply want to play sports with their friends. “Where are they supposed to go?” says Ayers, who clerked for Justice Sonia Sotomayor before she was appointed to the Supreme Court. “It’s not safe for a trans girl to play on a trans boy team, or at least she’s very justified in feeling that way.”

And there are the harder-to-quantify consequences for teenagers encountering rigid gender policies at school—no matter whether or not they’re trans. “I didn’t realize I was trans until I was about 40, but I was deeply confused and perplexed by gender when I was a kid, and sports is a fraught experience,” Ayers says. “I think there are lots of kids who may not grow up to identify as trans, but who benefit immensely from a space in which they can think about their gender with a measure of freedom that these laws deny to people.”

The Supreme Court on Tuesday struck down yet another campaign finance restriction in what has become its years-long aim to obliterate regulations governing money in politics. In a decision that broke down along party lines, the six Republican appointees lifted limits on how much parties and candidates could spend in coordination with each other. The decision will effectively allow wealthy donors to circumvent caps on direct giving to candidates by routing funds through the party, which can now spend the entire sum in coordination with the candidate.

The majority’s decision, authored by Justice Brett Kavanaugh, hangs the ruling on the First Amendment. To restrict how a political party coordinates with one of its candidates—whether to consult on an ad or to pay the pizza bill—now infringes on the party’s free speech rights. To reach this conclusion, the majority overruled both Congress’ judgment about how to stop political corruption and its own precedent in a case just 25 years ago.

“The political party coordinated-expenditure limits impose a ‘stifling effect on the ability of the party to do what it exists to do,'” Kavanaugh wrote, arguing that the coordination limits imposed by Congress some 50 years ago are too burdensome.

In a dissent joined by the Democratic appointees, Justice Elena Kagan warned that the decision endangers our democratic system of government. As it has in other campaign finance cases, she wrote, the majority “jettisons a rule needed to protect our democracy’s integrity.”

This court has repeatedly blocked Congress’ attempts to limit political spending.

Indeed, with Tuesday’s opinion in NRSC v. FEC, the Roberts Court has, once again, nullified Congress’ judgment about how to stop corruption and given wealthy donors another vehicle to influence elections and extract favors from politicians. Thanks to the court’s past rulings, our elections are already defined by massive spending from the ultra-wealthy and our politics is already reoriented toward repaying those oligarchs for their donations. Though the Federal Election Commission announced after Trump’s inauguration it would not enforce the coordination limits struck down today, the ruling is a green light to both rich donors and candidates that their cozy relationship can become even closer.

Just by looking at the case docket, it’s clear that this case was a partisan brawl where the Republican-appointed justices threw in with the Republican Party. On one side were the GOP party committees, the sitting vice president, and the Trump administration, all urging the court to strike down the limits. In amicus briefs, conservative organizations funded by GOP-backing billionaires like Charles Koch joined their political allies. A win would allow these billionaires to have more influence over politicians, and for the politicians to get more money in return. The Roberts Court appears endlessly solicitous of both these groups. On the case’s other side were a handful of left-coded good government groups, Democratic politicians, and the Democratic National Committee. While some billionaires give to Democrats, Republicans receive a much larger slice of the billionaire pie. The New York Times recently found that in the 2024 election, Republicans took in five times as much as Democrats from billionaire donors.

Congress passed the Federal Election Campaign Act just ahead of the Watergate scandal, then amended it after President Richard Nixon’s quid pro quo with the dairy industry came to light as part of the Watergate investigation. Over many decades, the Supreme Court has eroded the anti-corruption limits that Congress enacted in this era. The Roberts court has knocked down limits on outside political spending, creating a free-for-all of super PAC and nonprofit election spending. Corruption and outsize influence from the wealthiest has predictably followed. In today’s opinion, the court turns to restrictions on donations that, effectively, go directly to candidates and starts to dismantle those.

After Watergate, Congress realized that if it wanted to limit how much money an individual could give to a campaign, it also needed to restrict how much parties could spend in coordination with a candidate to prevent circumvention of that limit.

After today’s decision, one of the last remaining pieces of Congress’ anti-corruption campaign finance laws is a limit on how much individuals can give to parties. For now, that means that technically there remains a ceiling on the amount of money a donor can route to a candidate through the party apparatus. But that number is still high. In her dissent, Kagan lays out how the decision allows donors to get around the individual contribution limit, now $7,000 for both a primary and general election campaign. The majority enables “a party to serve as an alternative checking account for a campaign,” she writes. “As a result, a donor will be able to give a party as much as half a million dollars (as compared to the $7,000 he can give directly to the candidate) to cover the candidate’s bills.”

The remaining aggregate limits on how much people can give parties and directly to candidates will almost certainly become the next targets of Republicans and their wealthy allies. In fact, during oral arguments, the attorney for the GOP political committees, former solicitor general Noel Francisco, admitted as much.

For decades, this Supreme Court has repeatedly blocked Congress’ attempts to limit outside political spending which is ostensibly—though not in reality—independent from the candidate and therefore uncoordinated. But it has repeatedly upheld Congress’ ability to limit direct payments to candidates, including through parties, as part of Congress’ power to limit quid pro quo corruption schemes. Tuesday’s ruling argues that there are other avenues to combat corruption that are less burdensome on First Amendment rights: namely that records of donations to parties are available for people to find online. It’s hard to see how that sort of disclosure will stop an exchange of favors for donations, but the majority thinks it’s enough.

Not only does the majority use the First Amendment to attack the integrity of our democratic system, but it also based its opinion on its members’ own policy preferences. Suffice to say, that’s Congress’ and the president’s job—not the court’s. Nonetheless, the opinion is overly concerned with the weakened status of political parties in relation to the massive figures flowing through outside super PACs and other independent dark money groups. What the court doesn’t admit is that it created this current imbalance, most notably in Citizens United, when it lifted outside spending limits on corporations and unions. To enact one policy due to the ill effects of another is Congress’ role—but in Tuesday’s opinion, the Supreme Court acts as a super legislature, responding to its own folly by pursing a new policy.

Perhaps most galling, Kavanaugh lays the blame for the parties’ weakened state at the feet of the 2001 precedent he overturns, Colorado II, which 25 years ago upheld these coordination limits. “That one is rich,” Kagan rights in dissent. “If one is overruling—or just reversing—decisions on that ground, I can think of a couple of more obvious ones—that is, the ones that created the modern Super PAC system, and thus the complained-of imbalance,” she added, going on to reference Citizens United.

Both Democrats and Republicans have been preparing for the court’s decision. In the short term, it is likely to change how they pay for television ads. By allowing coordination, the party expects to purchase ad time at a lower rate that is generally reserved for candidates, allowing them to buy more ads. After the midterms, this rule could result in more advertising and longer campaigns, as the parties’ dollars stretch further.

So perhaps the most immediate consequence felt by voters will be an even greater barrage of ads. But in the long term, far more is at stake. The result, in Kagan’s words, is “a legal regime increasingly unable to stop political corruption, and thus to preserve our institutions’ democratic legitimacy.”