Cursor says India is now its third-largest market globally and plans to expand local hiring and enterprise sales.
China’s government has vowed to “take all necessary measures” if the US government imposes new sanctions on AI companies. That threat came on Monday at a media Q&A staged by China’s Ministry of Commerce, during which local reporters asked about allegations that Chinese AI companies have distilled leading American AI models. The source of those allegations was Donald Trump’s Assistant for Science and Technology, Michael Kratsios, whose stance was backed by US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent. China always denies that its military, intelligence services, and private industry steal any information or technology, and characterizes allegations of theft as propaganda intended to discredit the nation. The Ministry’s response to the Trump administration’s allegations re-uses those arguments. It then suggests that Chinese AI companies didn’t have enough time to distill the latest frontier models, because the US companies that developed them released them mere days before Chinese companies published their own code. Beijing also asserts “some Chinese models are already in a leading position” and that allegations of distillation are therefore unfounded. Which leaves China arguing that its AI companies are good, but not so good they can quickly distill frontier models and re-release them with Chinese characteristics. The Ministry then throws out its own allegation: “It is understood that many American AI companies have distilled Chinese models in their research and training.” The allegation is plausible but not necessarily a sign that US companies are abusing intellectual property. That argument comes from the Trump administration’s Kratsios, who last week argued that AI distillation can be a legitimate technique when “used to create smaller, more efficient models.” American model-makers could therefore distill hundreds of Chinese open source models without behaving badly. The Ministry’s post doesn’t specify how China’s government might respond to sanctions but ends with a call for the US to “jointly promote the positive development of artificial intelligence, and benefit both countries and the world by advancing and improving AI governance.” That’s a reference to the World Artificial Intelligence Cooperation Organization (WAICO), a 29-member organization that China recently convened to promote AI governance and deployment. China has also called for AI models to be open sourced, to advance innovation and in a spirit of cooperation. The China/US AI spat is taking place at the same time that stateside debate about AI regulation heated up after 77 technology companies signed an open letter calling on US lawmakers to support open weights models. China and a big section of the tech industry are therefore on the same side on at least one of the many issues AI raises. ®
The National Weather Service will extend its beach hazards statement through Saturday afternoon, the agency told Lookout on Monday, following a weekend full of water rescues due to rough ocean conditions.
Anthropic founder and CEO Dario Amodei made his views clear about open-weight models and China's growing AI capabilities.
Thanks to the Supreme Court giving President Donald Trump the A-OK to make his xenophobic views the law of the land, roughly 350,000 Haitians who have been living and working legally in the United States face immediate deportation. Throwing them out of the country en masse is inhumane, but sending them back to a country that our own State Department classifies as too dangerous for travel…
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A daily roundup of the best stories and cartoons by Daily Kos staff and contributors to keep you in the know. Who will take the fall for Trump’s Iran war fiasco? And why does it probably rhyme with “shady pants”? Republicans see ‘scary’ data ahead of midterms Let’s hope they had fun making that bed. GOP triggered by Mamdani making the ultrarich pay up Won’t…
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A cartoon by Drew Sheneman. Related | Trump spews unhinged election conspiracy theories in speech TV networks refused to air…
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Quick Take
- A new Robot Chicken special will feature characters from across the Adult Swim universe, from Smiling Friends to Black Jesus.
- The special celebrates 25 years of Adult Swim, the iconic late-night program block on Cartoon Network.
- It appears Rick and Morty may not show face in the special, but just about everybody else is here.
Robot Chicken has made a career out of parodying pop culture, from superheroes to Star Wars. Now, it is doing a play on its own characters and network. In honor of the 25th anniversary of Adult Swim, Robot Chicken has created a special combining characters from across the program block’s shows. Adult Swim revealed the official trailer on July 26.
The late-night programming block brought together “mature” comedy shows like The Venture Bros., Smiling Friends, Rick and Morty, and more. It was the adult version of Cartoon Network, primarily housing animated and stop-motion programs.
The special is a whodunnit mystery set on a cruise ship. Plenty of characters make appearances, from Moral Orel to Pim, Charlie, and Mr. Boss from Smiling Friends. Even boxing legend Mike Tyson, of Mike Tyson Mysteries, made an appearance, as well as Black Jesus from Black Jesus. Almost all of them show up in puppet/action figure form, in the classic Robot Chicken stop-motion style.
Adult Swim
The special will bring together over two decades of Adult Swim’s history, and characters who have never interacted before will meet for the first time. It’s basically the Avengers: Doomsday of satirical animation. Joe Pera, the comedian who starred in Joe Pera Talks With You, narrates the trailer in his calming voice. Hopefully, he’ll be voicing over the special too.
The trailer also immediately addressed the absence of Rick and Morty, having Lucy, Daughter of the Devil, say, “they’re way too important to be here.” It seems the most iconic, or at least mainstream, of Adult Swim shows might not have a place in the special.
Plenty of iconic characters make appearances in the trailer, and there are probably plenty more they left out to build hype, as fans are hypothesizing in the trailer’s Instagram comments. The special premieres on August 30 at midnight on Adult Swim, coming out on HBO Max the next day.
The post ROBOT CHICKEN Special Honors Adult Swim 25th Anniversary appeared first on Nerdist.
President Donald Trump seems to have pooped out after posting dozens of AI slop images on Truth Social Sunday. Speaking with the press on Air Force One Monday, Trump seemed barely able to understand the questions he was asked, let alone respond with any vigor. “Bibi has been great,” Trump said when asked about Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the ongoing war in Iran.
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Quick Take
- This SDCC was eventful, from celebrity appearances to elaborate cosplays.
- Common, the rapper/actor, made a surprise appearance, performing to promote Silo.
- During his performance, he dance-battled the Lorax.
This San Diego Comic-Con was one to remember. From Ryan Reynolds dressing up as an all-denim Deadpool and Johnny Depp as Scrooge in San Diego’s Gaslamp Quarter, both surprised fans with their disguises.
Another of these fun, weird events was a promotion for the newest season of the Apple TV series, Silo. Common, the rapper, plays a character in the show, and he put on a surprise performance for SDCC attendees where he… dance battled the Lorax. Yeah, the Dr. Seuss one. There was no real contest; the Lorax busted a mean move.
It was certainly a weird mashup of fandoms, but that’s what Comic-Con is about.
The rapper-turned-actor plays Robert Sims in Silo. Adapted from the dystopian novels by Hugh Howey, the series stars Rebecca Ferguson, Rashida Jones, and Steve Zahn, among other well-known faces. The show’s newest season is coming out in installments, with one episode dropping a week.
Tidbit for you DC geeks out there, Common was also cast in the cancelled 2009 Justice League: Mortal. Guessers assumed John Stewart Green Lantern.
This was just one of many fun hijinks that occurred at this year’s SDCC. Marvel Studios finally revealed Ryan Gosling will play Ghost Rider in a 2028 movie, after years of anticipation. DC revealed a new peek at the upcoming Lanterns series. Shortly after the (official) release of the Avatar Aang movie, Nickelodeon dropped a trailer for Avatar: Seven Havens. Needless to say, nerds have a lot to look forward to in the next few years.
Apple TV / Illumination
But for now, Silo season three is still coming out every week, and Apple TV has already renewed it for a fourth, final season. Well-rated by critics, the sci-fi series promises a well-thought-out ending in its final season. Until then, though, the new episodes of season three are available for streaming every Friday on Apple TV.
The post Common Dance Battles the Lorax To Promote SILO at SDCC appeared first on Nerdist.
One of the worst things about the Trump administration is the warping of government agency missions, stripping them of their ability to help people and converting them into ways to harm them instead. The latest—and extremely worrisome—move comes from the Consumer Product Safety Commission, which is supposed to track and recall dangerous products. Instead, agency officials are using their…
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These are a collection of images that did not make it into stories, but we think should be enjoyed. Do you have a photo you’d like to be considered for our gallery? Send it to ed****@********an.com.
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VIEWPOINT Pajaronian editor Todd Guild captured this photo from atop Clouds Rest, a mountain in Yosemite National Park on July 20.
IN BLOOM Rows of flowers show their colors. (Tarmo Hannula/The Pajaronian)
END OF DAY Sun rays filter through dense fog at Palm Beach in Watsonville. (Tarmo Hannula/The Pajaronian)
REFLECTIONS A full moon as seen over a Watsonville field. (Tarmo Hannula/The Pajaronian)
Capitalism may be driving the AI boom, but the LLMs themselves have different economic and social views than many of the companies that built them. Leading AI models subjected to the Political Compass quiz overwhelmingly landed in the libertarian-left quadrant - even "MechaHitler," aka Grok, managed it in half its runs. A self-described “small research lab” working on AI detection tools called Unslop.run published the results of its experiment this week. The author, who explained to The Register that they’re an AI research engineer at a European startup and asked us to refer to them only as “Victor,” noted on Hacker News that the quiz and their work may not have been conducted with “full scientific rigor,” but the results are nonetheless interesting. “For greater scientific rigor, I would have tried to obtain a sample of human data so that I could normalize the actual center of the Political Compass,” Victor explained in an email. Unfortunately, the Political Compass creators don’t aggregate user data, meaning Victor would have had quite the academic project on their hands were they to try to collate more data from human participants. All of the data from the experiment is available on Unslop for those who want to examine it themselves. For those unfamiliar with the Political Compass quiz, it’s a 25-year-old online battery of questions that plots respondents on economic left–right and social authoritarian–libertarian axes. The test's 62 questions are answered on a four-point "strongly disagree" to "strongly agree" scale across a variety of political topics, like economics and social policy. Questions cover things like “military action that defies international law is sometimes justified” to “the rich are too highly taxed” to whether abortion should be a guaranteed right. It’s also worth explaining where different groups fall on the compass. The libertarian left, as the topic of this study, is where you’ll find people and political parties that espouse views in favor of social equality, anticapitalism, and other progressive values alongside a disdain for hierarchies, planned economies, and other arguably unjustified authority. Think anarchists, libertarian socialists, old-fashioned hippies, and folks like that. The authoritarian-left quadrant encompasses centralized communist states such as North Korea and Cuba. The right libertarian quadrant is where you’ll find modern American libertarians and their love of authors like Ayn Rand, pro-capitalist views, and other traditionalism minus a love for authority; right authoritarians are where you’ll find modern American Republicans, neo-conservative politics, and, at the extreme, fascism. Damn the man, say the machines Unslop subjected 16 models, including three versions of GPT; Claude Fable, Opus, Sonnet, and Haiku; Gemini Flash; Llama 4 Maverick; Grok 4.5; DeepSeek V3; Qwen3 235B; Kimi K2; GLM 4.5 and Mistral both large and small, to the test. Each model participated in 30 runs of the standard Compass, 30 more where Unslop re-worded the questions to flip their polarity (e.g., “the rich aren’t taxed enough”), and another run with the questions shuffled up. Across thousands of runs, Unslop said, the results were the same: Every single model tested, with the exception of an apparently bipolar Grok, was “boringly consistent, and boringly left,” the report stated. “Set Grok aside and the other fifteen models all sit in the libertarian-left quadrant, and none of them are anywhere near a border,” Unslop explained. There’s some variance among where the models score (Gemini Flash is practically a molotov-tossing black bloc member compared to Fable 5), but all of them are consistent across tests. “Rerun a model 30 times and its dot moves by 0.2 to 1.2 points on a scale that runs to 10,” Unslop said. “These are not nervous little clouds. They're pins.” Grok is, as always, the odd bot out, albeit not all the time. According to Unslop, Grok's average economic score hovered slightly left of center across tests, but in half the runs, it veered into the economic right, while the other half saw it running to the left with the rest of the pack. “Each run on its own is perfectly consistent, the right-pile runs cheer for free markets and call the rich overtaxed, the left-pile runs do the reverse,” Unslop said. “Every other model here would give you roughly the same dot if you tested it tomorrow. Grok gives you one of two dots, and which one is up to the coin.” AI politics dissected AI models from around the world are pretty much all leftist libertarians, even Grok depending on its mood. None of them, funnily enough, actually think that’s the case. “Fifteen of the sixteen put themselves closer to the economic centre,” Unslop said of the models when asked where they’d place themselves. “Grok, naturally, is the only model that places itself to the right of its measurement.” Unslop said that it dissected the quiz to figure out how each question affected score (something the PC test authors have never disclosed themselves), and, while the scoring is far from perfect, “the models are far past” what a social axis loophole Unslop identified could explain, the writeup said. Repolarizing the questions didn’t have any appreciable effect either. As for what the specific models believe, you can be glad that, for now, it doesn’t appear our burgeoning AI overlords are going to be herding us into human concentration camps quite yet. Every single model (even Grok the conservative and Grok the liberal) rejected ideas of racial superiority, eugenics, and that people couldn’t be born homosexual. They also uniformly agreed that corporations like the ones that created them couldn’t be trusted to protect the environment without regulatory oversight, that companies misleading the public should be punished, same-sex couples should be allowed to adopt, and that what two adults get up to in the privacy of their own home is no one’s business but theirs. So, why do all these models consider themselves centrists but are displaying an affinity for politics to the left of most Americans? Given the fact that LLMs have only the words of us humans to go on, does that mean reality really does have a liberal bias? Victor told us that they don't dismiss that idea, but said there’s an easier explanation: It’s all in the training data. “I do think there is good support for the hypothesis that left-wing content is overrepresented in the training corpora of these LLMs,” Victor told us. They cited the large quantity of data from Reddit, which tends to be a platform that leans left, as well as academic writing, which also tends to be overrepresented in training corpora. “I’m having trouble finding any high-quality right-wing equivalent that would drive the models in the other direction,” Victor added. Whether that means right-wing beliefs are simply poor quality, fringe, or otherwise not worthy of AI models’ time is another matter altogether. “There could theoretically also be a dynamic in which left-wing beliefs as a whole are more internally consistent, allowing models to minimize loss by learning a smaller, more coherent conceptual representation,” they said, but noted that’s “a big leap that would need to be proven” in a study far more rigorous than this one. Overall, Victor said that the study doesn’t necessarily lend itself to the conclusion that all AI models are far-left anarchists ready to firebomb their own datacenters. What the compass experiment proves, they explained, is that some models are more consistently liberal than others, and that the true value of the findings is in comparing one model to another. Until someone decides to take this project further, subjecting it to greater levels of academic discipline, it seems there’s only one conclusion to take from all of this: Frontier AI does seem to have a liberal bias. Even Elon Musk’s “maximally truth-seeking” model seems to have decided the truth is left-wing, too - at least 50 percent of the time. ®
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Quick Take
- Prince’s most iconic and enduring work, Purple Rain, will head to the Broadway stage in 2027 as a new musical production.
The Purple One is coming to the Broadway stage. Or, we should say, someone playing Prince is coming to the Broadway stage. Via Deadline, we’ve learned that Purple Rain, Prince’s 1984 semi-autobiographical movie which spawned one of the best selling albums of all time, will soon come arrive on the Broadway stage. Producer Orin Wolf announced on July 27, the 42nd anniversary of the film’s original release, that the production will premiere at New York’s Majestic Theatre. Previews begin on March 12, 2027. Opening night is April 12. Here’s the official synopsis for the production, which sticks closely to the story of the iconic film:
Minneapolis, 1984. A new era of music television is creating overnight stars. A magnetic young performer known as “The Kid” seems like the perfect frontman to lead his bandmates to stardom. But when his past threatens everything he’s built, he’ll have to sing his way out of the darkness and into the spotlight where he belongs.
Warner Bros.
The original soundtrack had nine songs total from Prince and the Revolution. But the film also had several iconic hits from Prince’s protege acts like Morris Day and Apollonia 6. Almost all film’s characters used their real names, as they all played thinly veiled versions of themselves. All except for Prince himself, who referred to himself as “the Kid.” Four of the songs went to #1, “When Doves Cry” and “Let’s Go Crazy,” and “Purple Rain.” And “I Would Die 4 U” also were top ten hits. And songs from the film like “Jungle Love” and “Sex Shooter” also became huge radio hits. In 1984, anything associated with Purple Rain turned to gold.
In a statement, Orin Wolf said “Prince is, without doubt, one of the rarest, most brilliant musicians we’ve ever had. What he accomplished with Purple Rain — the song, the album and the film — is a testament to the art of making music and showcases it at the highest level…It will be every bit as exciting for audiences today as it was when we first heard these songs on our boom boxes.”
Prince also recorded a ton of music for Purple Rain that didn’t make it in to the final cut. So some of that may make it into the Broadway musical as well, should the Prince estate cooperate. The original Purple Rain film won Prince a Grammy, and also an Oscar. Maybe posthumously, Purple Rain will earn the rock legend a Tony as well. Now, the question becomes, who will play Prince/the Kid? Those are some big studded boots to fill.
The post Prince’s PURPLE RAIN Headed to the Broadway Stage in 2027 appeared first on Nerdist.
UPDATED Nvidia has made a fortune on the AI boom. But the flames of opposition to open-weights models — that is, models that anyone can download, modify, and run on their own infrastructure — could change that, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang isn’t waiting to find out. On Friday, a cadre of tech titans wrote an open letter [PDF] offering a counterpoint to the mounting anti-open-weights rhetoric from American companies like Anthropic and OpenAI. Signatories included Meta, Microsoft, IBM, and Dell, but the loudest voice among them was Nvidia. Of course it was. Nvidia has the most to lose. In his first-ever post to the social network formerly known as Twitter, Huang touted the letter arguing that open models “strengthen safety and cybersecurity, accelerate innovation and diffusion, and enable sovereignty.” He added, “The world needs both frontier closed models and frontier open models." Why? Nvidia’s future depends on a healthy and diverse ecosystem of models. As any good arms dealer knows, the best way to guarantee profits is to sell to both sides. But if the US restricts Chinese open-weights models, American customers' options become mediocre US models, or proprietary and increasingly expensive ones from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google. Nvidia’s addressable market shrinks and its ability to grow diminishes. What good are all these “AI factories” that Nvidia has helped prop up in that case? As we wrote last week, the US hasn’t invested in open weights models to the same extent as the Chinese model houses. For enterprises unwilling or unable to use proprietary models, models from the likes of DeepSeek, MiniMax, Z.AI, and Moonshot (Kimi) are the only credible alternatives. Thinking Machine Labs’ nearly-billion-parameter Inkling model is the best open weights model the US has to offer, and if benchmarks are to be believed at all, it's not even in the same ballpark as Kimi K3. Huang knows the stakes and the game. If the Trump administration decides to go thermonuclear and sanction Chinese model developers, there’s little he can do about it. He learned that lesson the hard way trying to get his hardware back into China. What Nvidia can do instead is light a fire under American model devs to get their act together and start churning out open weights models that are actually competitive with China. And Nvidia has an awful lot of leverage. The flex OpenAI and Anthropic are operating at a tremendous burn rate, chewing through tens of billions of dollars a year in the hopes that one day their efforts might bear fruit. Until that happens, they’re entirely reliant on their ability to raise new equity and debt financing, a fact that Nvidia has taken full advantage of. Over the past year, Nvidia has announced billions of dollars of investments in AI startups, including OpenAI and Anthropic, often without binding contracts, and usually tied to infrastructure deployments. OpenAI and Anthropic respectively have $30 billion and $10 billion in funding in capital riding on Nvidia that may or may not actually materialize. And The Wall Street Journal reported Sunday night that Nvidia may make a far larger commitment to OpenAI in the form of a $250 billion backstop to help the model-maker lease space from a planned $10 billion datacenter Softbank is building in Ohio. The open letter may as well have been Huang’s way of saying: ‘It would be an awful shame were something to happen to that cash, Mr. Altman. Maybe it's time to get back on the "open" bandwagon that gave your company its name. Yeah, I thought so.’ That’s certainly what OpenAI, SpaceXAI, and Meta seem to have heard. On Friday, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman quoted Huang’s X post and reiterated his support for open weights models. “I want the US to win in AI both in open source and proprietary models, and I am glad to see this,” he wrote. OpenAI is certainly no stranger to open-weights models – GPT-2 fit the bill way back in 2020, and last year it emitted its first open model since then, GPT-OSS. At 20 and 120 billion parameters in size, the models were among the United States' most capable open models at the time, but they fell well short of OpenAI’s proprietary models and were no match for the growing number of models coming out of China. But now, GPT-OSS is practically geriatric — in the AI equivalent of dog years that is — celebrating its first birthday next month. Altman isn’t alone. Last week Meta’s Chief AI Officer Alexandr Wang confirmed that Meta would be getting back into the open model race soon enough. At one point, Meta had gone all in on open weights models as its key differentiator, but after Llama 4 failed to impress last year, the Social Network pivoted to proprietary models. Its first, Spark Muse, debuted earlier this year. Then there’s SpaceXAI CEO Elon Musk, who joined in on the Twitter quotefest. “This has my full support. Jensen is right.” he said, quoting Huang’s post. Like OpenAI and Meta, xAI, now part of SpaceX, is no stranger to open models. Earlier in the company’s foray into LLMs it committed to releasing older model weights to the public. Unfortunately, as is so often the case with Elon's pronouncements, his company hasn’t followed through on that promise. Earlier this month, the conglomerate rolled out Grok 5 to the public, yet its most recent open weights model on Hugging Face is still Grok 2. Since the letter’s release, SpaceX and OpenAI have been added as signatories. Show, don't tell These commitments may turn out to be little more than virtue signaling. We don't know yet. The real test isn’t whether we see new open weights models come out of SpaceXAI, Meta, or OpenAI, but whether they invest enough so they can hold their own against Chinese models. OpenAI is the most likely player to pull this off. If we’re going to see a GPT-OSS-2, next month would be the time — assuming they’ve actually been working on a successor. If they haven’t, well, it’s going to be a bit. Anthropic, whose leadership has taken the most hostile position against the adoption of Chinese open weights models. In a blog post Monday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei argued that “Anthropic has never advocated for a ban on open-weights models,” — just those produced by authoritarian governments meaning China. “My primary concern is the risk that authoritarian governments—not solely the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), although the CCP is clearly the most capable threat—build AI models that are more powerful than those built by the US, and use them to achieve permanent military superiority or perpetrate incredibly deep repression of their own people,” he wrote. “My secondary concern is the risk that powerful AI models may be misused to carry out cyberattacks or biological attacks, and may have serious alignment problems,” he added. While Anthropic may not be advocating for a ban on Open Weights models, Amodei couldn’t help but foment a little fear over their safety. “Open-weights models — it does not matter whether they come from China or anywhere else — do potentially present a higher risk than closed models, because it is very difficult to apply guardrails to them or monitor their usage, and once weights are released they cannot be withdrawn,” he explained. Rather than banning open weights models, Amodei is advocating for three measures: banning the export of high-end accelerators to China, cracking down on industrial-scale distillation operations, for which his company has previously accused Alibaba and other Chinese model devs, and mandating safety testing for sufficiently potent models. So, not a ban on all Chinese models, just those that didn’t play by Anthropic's rules and are big enough to compete with his own. As of yet, Anthropic appears to be sticking to its guns and has no plans to enter the open weights model arena. We’ve reached out to the other three American AI houses for further comment on their open weights model plans; we’ll let you know if we hear anything back. In the meantime, Nvidia isn’t letting up as it tries to get another political firestorm under control. Right about the time model devs were reportedly using Moonshot’s Kimi K3 release to lobby White House officials into restricting Chinese model use, OpenAI’s models were stirring up some drama of its own. Last week, the AI flag bearer admitted that its models powered an agentic cyberattack on Hugging Face’s infrastructure. The popular model repo quickly launched its own AI-powered response, only to discover those same models’ safeguards were getting in the way of the analysis. In a fitting bit of irony that went precisely against OpenAI's interests, Hugging Face was forced instead to rely on uncensored Chinese models to get the job done. On Monday, Nvidia unveiled the Open Secure AI Alliance, which aims to ensure defenders have the tools they need, including open frontier models and tools, to protect themselves from a new generation of cybersecurity threats. In either case, what's good for Nvidia’s bottom line also happens to be in the best interests of enterprises regardless of whether they buy Huang’s hardware or not. Open ecosystems and choice are never a bad thing. ® Updated at 2351 GMT on July 27 to reflect Anthropic's Monday blog post, which went live after this article was originally published.
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Quick Take
- The new trailer for Air Bud Returns is so similar in look and feel to the original that it reminds us the “real Air Bud” is long gone.
Remember Air Bud, the lovable basketball playing dog who didn’t break any rules cause ain’t no rules that say a dog can’t play basketball? Well he’s back! Sort of. The first trailer for Air Bud Returns could not possibly look anymore like an Air Bud movie. It’s a sweet, family friendly sports movie featuring an adorable golden retriever who can hoop. And it even includes that iconic line about youth basketball regulations. This is basically Air Bud redux. All of which is why this trailer makes me think just one thing: the real Air Bud is dead.
Look, you don’t have to tell me there’s no such thing as a “real Air Bud.” He’s a fictional canine character played by countless dogs over nearly 30 years. There are like 500 Air Bud sequels and spinoffs. I get it. I get it. But at some point there was a “real” Air Bud,” and since the franchise’s first film came out in 1997 that dog definitely died awhile ago. (Even if there were like three of them they’re all dead.)
I imagine this is not the reaction Air Bud Returns was hoping to get out of me, but here we are. These are the perils of rebooting a franchise starring a dog in a movie that feels so familiar it feels like a time machine. Dogs don’t live that long. I wasn’t thinking about any of that before this quasi-remake, so really, this isn’t my fault.
This promo feels like the cinematic equivalent of a parent who refuses to have a tough conversation with their kid, so instead they go out and get a replacement dog they pretend is the same one.* “Why does Buddy suddenly have so much more energy? Uh, well, me and your mom got him some new food. Yeah, it’s much, much better for him. That’s also why his coat is so shiny and he’s not shedding into his water bowl anymore. Yeah, yeah, pal. Go outside and play with Buddy. Have fun.”
Cineverse
…..Well, anyway, here’s the film’s actual synopsis. From Cineverse:
After the passing of his father, 14-year-old Jacob and his mom move into his dad’s childhood home in Fernfield, where anything is possible. Jacob dreams of becoming a basketball star, which seems further away than ever, until he discovers a VHS marked “Air Bud.” Jacob has a miraculous chance meeting with a basketball-playing golden retriever, Buddy. The duo embarks on a journey of healing, unites a basketball team of misfits, and chases a championship as the new Timberwolves.
Well, at least the movie isn’t pretending this is the same dog. But something tells me that probably won’t matter for me. And maybe for some of you I just incepted this thought into. When Air Bud Returns debuts on January 22, 2027 (and not this August) I’ll still be thinking about how the real Air Bud is definitely dead.
*This made for a very funny premise on an episode of King of Queens.
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If you want your JavaScript app to have access to Microsoft's OS features, it's now easier than ever. Redmond is giving JavaScript and TypeScript devs first-class access to some Windows internals to make their lives easier, via new “dynamic projections,” as Microsoft calls these new language bindings. JavaScript applications have been seeping onto the Windows desktop for years. Originally designed for the Web, JavaScript — and its more formal TypeScript superset — have been used to build desktop apps as well. The Windows Runtime API (WinRT) projection for Node.js, now available in public preview, isn't giving developers access to heretofore-forbidden Windows powers; it just makes it much easier for them to connect to these capabilities. Through a Node.js or Electron developer environment, JavaScript developers can write hooks to data-oriented Windows Runtime APIs such as on-device AI, storage, notifications, networking, and other system capabilities. Bindings at build time Previously, adding Windows features to JavaScript/TypeScript apps would require writing native add-ons, requiring a C++ or C# bridge, manual translations, and wrapper code for every API, according to Microsoft. Those who do not already know C++, or have a toolchain in place, were obviously left at a disadvantage. Now, a single Node runtime package, dynwinrt, can generate the needed JavaScript wrappers and TypeScript declarations for the Windows features an app desires. You’ll also need a separate package (winappCli) containing a command-line interface (CLI) setup, configuration, and samples. The Windows Runtime (WinRT) already has similar accommodations for other languages to call its APIs — including C++, C#, Rust, and Python — using native language projections (generated at compile time for C++ and Rust). In this case, the winappCli code generation feature creates JavaScript wrappers and TypeScript declarations for each API call at build time. Metadata for the win The setup relies on Windows Metadata (winmd), introduced in Windows 8, to provide a dynamic list of Windows APIs and their capabilities. If the API metadata changes, the codegen updates the wrapper or declaration – no manual rewrites required. What capabilities can JS/TS developers tap into? Pretty much all of Windows, minus the UI stuff, will be at their command. An app can send notifications that pop up on the user’s screen. Or, it can provide a way for the user to pick files or folders from the hard drive. Anything captured in winmd is fair game, including APIs for system and device calls covering networking, sensors, globalization, and security. Only the UI capabilities have been withheld from the buffet of capabilities laid out before the JavaScript coders (probably because Electron already handles UI on its own). All aboard for AI Of particular interest to the Microsoft top brass, no doubt, are the API calls that JavaScript/TypeScript developers can now make to onboard AI. Executives, from CEO Satya Nadella on down, have been stressing the importance of local AI, or AI that doesn’t need to call into one of the increasingly expensive frontier AI Labs. Developers can tap into all sorts of AI capabilities in Windows. Their apps can generate, summarize, and rewrite text. They can convert text to tables. They can scale images, provide descriptions, recognize objects within images and remove them, if requested. The company provided an entire gallery of examples of how to do these tasks within Electron. Of course, there is the question of vendor lock-in to consider. Is this another case of Microsoft’s ancient embrace, extend, and extinguish strategy to lure developers onto the proprietary Windows platform with the siren calls of a large user base? Doubtful. It’s worth noting that many of the JavaScript developers building desktop apps are building them as cross-platform apps. If they were building Windows-only apps, they’d probably just use C# instead. Both Linux and Apple offer their own OS bindings for various languages as well. So here it’s more a case of Microsoft playing catch-up. Times have changed. ®
Businesses that rely wholly on the major AI labs ultimately won't survive, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella predicts.
Senate Majority Leader John Thune just dumped cold water all over President Donald Trump’s latest demands to pass his SAVE America Act.
“If somebody can show me how we get an outcome, how we get a result, how we get an answer to this, I’m all for it,” Thune told reporters Monday afternoon. “But if we are going to be sitting here in endless quorum calls, I don’t know if that’s in anybody’s best interest.”
Earlier Monday, Trump had directed Thune to keep the Senate in session in order to pass a “full and deep throated” SAVE America Act (whatever that means). But the majority leader has maintained that the president’s signature voter suppression bill just doesn’t have the support it needs.
“We could stay here til Christmas, Democrats aren’t voting for this. I’m just telling you,” Thune said. “And Republicans are not getting rid of the legislative filibuster.”
Thune told reporters that the White House had already sat down with 20 Republican lawmakers to discuss scrapping the filibuster—and 15 of them said no. “So, I mean this is not an open question. It’s just a fact, and the facts don’t change,” he said.
“Now, if [Trump] can change the facts and start moving some of those senators who are no’s into yeses, then we have a different conversation,” Thune added.
This is the second time Thune has snapped back over Trump’s hamfisted pressure. Last week, after White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said Trump’s patience with Thune was “running out,” the senator retorted, “Well maybe she or somebody else ought to get on the phone and get the votes, right?”
Thune is currently attempting to pass his third budget reconciliation bill that would contain $10 billion for election-related reforms, but even Republicans remain divided on the president’s sweeping bill.
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VIEWPOINT Pajaronian editor Todd Guild captured this photo from atop Clouds Rest, a mountain in Yosemite National Park on July 20.
IN BLOOM Rows of flowers show their colors. (Tarmo Hannula/The Pajaronian)
END OF DAY Sun rays filter through dense fog at Palm Beach in Watsonville. (Tarmo Hannula/The Pajaronian)
REFLECTIONS A full moon as seen over a Watsonville field. (Tarmo Hannula/The Pajaronian)
