When I interviewed The Simpsons Al Jean in 2020, I made sure to slip in a question about his other great animated series, The Critic. It only ran for two years across ABC and Fox in 1994 and 1995 before briefly returning online in 2000. That was never, ever enough Jay Sherman, so I wanted to know, in a pop culture world full of reboots, if Jean would ever bring his satirical look at Hollywood back to airwaves. “I would like to,” he said, “I can’t say for sure that it would happen. It would be great to see how Jon Lovitz’s character would be in today’s world. And I think he would be very interested. So, it’s definitely not a no. I would love it.” Now, six years later, it might finally happen. Jean and his fellow The Critic co-creator Mike Reiss said a reboot is closer than ever.Sony
Polygon‘s Brian Vanhooker made sure to also ask about The Critic when he recently spoke to Jean and Reiss about how The Simpsons inspired the new hit horror movie Obsession. Their answer was exactly what fans hoped to hear. Jean said he’s passed his own ‘hurdles” on making a possible reboot a reality. He also said Lovitz “definitely wants to do it” but that he hasn’t quite “closed” his own deal yet.
“I’m sure [Lovitz will] do it, although I can’t say I’m absolutely 100% sure,” added Jean. “But I’m confident that his deal will close. It’s never been closer to actually happening.” As if all that isn’t good enough, Jean said he already has episode ideas in mind. He cited one where Jay Sherman falls in love with Mrs. Met.
Yes, please.
Reiss doesn’t expect to be as involved this time around. But he’ll still be a part of the reboot. “I’m sort of on the sidelines,” he said. “I’m not running it, but I think I’ll be a little part of the thing. I’ll keep a hand in it.” Reiss is also confident someone will buy the show because every reboot sells.
That’s true. And while some, in the words of Jay Sherman, “stink,” we’re confident The Critic reboot will get rave reviews.
The post THE CRITIC Creators Say Reboot Has ‘Never Been Closer’ To Happening appeared first on Nerdist.
President Donald Trump’s announcement Tuesday that Bill Pulte will serve as acting Director of National Intelligence—taking over the post from the embattled Tulsi Gabbard—makes a weird kind of sense.
Pulte, who currently serves as head of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, has no experience that prepares him to oversee the 18 intelligence agencies that the DNI is supposed to manage. But he has used his traditionally low-profile job overseeing the home mortgage industry to help launch dubious criminal probes relating to supposed mortgage fraud by Trump critics and foes. Working closely with Ed Martin, the former head of the Trump DOJ’s “weaponization” task force, Pulte spurred investigations of Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.), former Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-Calif.), and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, as well as an ill-fated indictment of New York Attorney General Letitia James.
Gabbard, who left the DNI job last month, was largely sidelined from intelligence matter as Trump launched attacks against Venezuela and Iran. But she, too, used the role to pursue Trump’s political grievances, declassifying and misrepresenting documents to make the wild claim that former President Barack Obama led a “treasonous conspiracy” against Trump after the 2016 election and to prompt a questionable criminal investigation of national security officials who served during the Obama administration. She also seized voting machines in Puerto Rico and bizarrely showed up in person in Fulton County, Georgia, to watch FBI agents seize 2020 ballots. Pulte may not know anything about overseeing the CIA, but he seems well equipped to carry on the mission of using the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to target Trump’s critics. That’s clearly the job the president has in mind.
“William has deep experience managing the most sensitive matters in America,” Trump said on his Truth Social platform. The president said Pulte will also continue running FHFA.
Pulte’s experience at the FHFA, and in prior work, has raised serious questions about his own conduct. The Government Accountability Office—an investigative arm of Congress—is probing whether Pulte misused federal resources to launch politicized attacks. And even as he has pursued Trump critics for what in many cases appear to be paperwork mistakes, Pulte has substantial baggage of his own.
Pulte, a third-generation heir to real estate fortune, in 2023 gave $65,000 through a foundation he controlled to a supposed charity to support the poor, called One World Love. We found no indication a nonprofit with that name exits. Instead the funds appear to have gone to a Wyoming LLC tied to the Binnall Law Group—which represented Trump in various matters, including his effort to avoid paying damages after the January 6 attack. Pulte and Binnall have not responded to questions about the transaction.
“These facts raise serious concerns that Team Pulte Inc. may have illegally funneled cash out of a charity to support President Trump,” Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Elizabeth Warren (D-Ma.) wrote in a letter last month questioning Pulte about the transaction.
In a separate 2021 transaction, Pulte and his wife, Diana, appear to have used an LLC they controlled in Delaware to funnel a $500,000 contribution to a pro-Trump PAC. An FEC investigation into the gift ended last year without faulting Pulte. A spokesman told Mother Jones Pulte “was 100 percent compliant” and “anything else is Fake News, an attempt to smear Director Pulte.”
Pulte has also drawn notice for promoting a memecoin created by a social media influencer who the Justice Department and Securities and Exchange Commission later accused of defrauding investors in the coin of at least $114 million through a pump-and-dump scheme. That case is scheduled to go to trial in Texas next year.
Last year, Mother Jones also reported that Pulte, even as he pushed for criminal investigations based on apparent paperwork errors, had failed to file a required SEC disclosure form. Pulte filed the form the day after our report.
Fresh college graduates frozen out of the job market shouldn't blame AI for their struggles, says the New York Federal Reserve. Instead, get angry at the rise of remote work. According to the Fed's analysis, youth unemployment has risen significantly since the coronavirus pandemic, and hasn’t receded in the same way that unemployment numbers for older, more experienced college graduates has in recent years. The analysis notes that the prevalence of remote work has increased since COVID-19, and it believes those two trends have more than just a correlation. “Our analysis suggests that these trends are related, with remote work making it more difficult for managers to train and mentor new employees,” the Fed said of its data. “Accordingly, companies may be reluctant to hire less-experienced workers in distributed work arrangements.” Overall, youth unemployment has risen 20 percent since the pandemic, the Fed says, and the report estimates that 64 percent of that rise is attributable directly to remote work, not AI, though the study admits that could be a factor in the future. “The uptick in youth unemployment rates predates the rapid diffusion of AI,” the Fed researchers wrote. “Moreover, even when we hold occupations’ exposure to AI constant, we find that the differences between younger and older workers persist.” Those findings may stick in the craw of many remote workers, especially young ones whose careers were boosted by pandemic-era remote work. The Register has reported on multiple occasions that remote work had little effect on productivity in the past few years, and that return-to-office mandates are being resisted by employees who don’t want to ditch sweatpants, increased leisure time, and reduced expenses for more face time with the boss and their colleagues. That’s not at the heart of the Fed’s report, though: Raw productivity numbers from remote workers might look good, but the working paper [PDF] that goes along with Monday’s report found something else entirely: Junior employees working remotely are getting more done, but its quality has decreased. The paper, by New York Fed economist Natalia Emanuel and economics professors Emma Harrington and Amanda Pallais of the University of Virginia and Harvard, respectively, looked specifically at software developers, making their report particularly relevant to Reg readers. According to their findings, experienced developers who went from working in the office to remotely showed little change in the quality of the code they produced, which was quantified by code churn and the amount of bugs introduced. “When people work next to their colleagues, they receive more feedback on their output and more mentorship,” the economists said of their findings. Introducing just a bit of distance (e.g., a junior dev stuck hot-desking in a different part of the office) reduces mentorship and feedback opportunities, they added. “The loss in feedback is more pronounced for younger workers, who miss out on constructive comments that spur their development.” That’s not just the case among software developers, either: A 2024 paper from Emanuel and Harrington found that sending customer assistance employees to work from home had a similar effect. According to that work, the number of calls to resolve an issue and overall time to resolution both increased, suggesting again that the quality of work being performed remotely was declining. All of this, the researchers conclude, means that young people applying for remote jobs are not only having their career prospects hobbled due to lack of training and mentorship, but that companies may simply not want to hire them for remote jobs if they can’t give them the proper training needed to succeed. “Many firms’ RTO mandates have cited the importance of colocation for mentorship and learning,” Emanuel and her colleagues wrote. “Ironically, when jobs are scarce, it becomes even harder for young workers to secure the training they need.” If that holds true, it stands to reason that companies ought to be reserving remote jobs for more experienced employees and forcing the new kids to work at the office, at least a few days a week, in an environment where they’re directly interacting with their more experienced colleagues. ®
After industry objections, President Trump signed a revised AI executive order requiring only voluntary prerelease government reviews of advanced models.
OpenAI is getting serious about courting enterprise users. On Tuesday, the AI lab released a new set of capabilities for Codex, meant to expand the agentic tool’s uses in the workplace. Together with the new tools, the company released an internal report on how Codex is being used for knowledge work, finding its uses go […]
Board, the startup building what it calls "together tech" designed to bring people into the same room, has closed a Series A led by Union Square Ventures.
COMPUTEX 2026 Marvell enjoyed a fillip from Nvidia chief Jensen Huang at Computex, who praised the firm as it unveiled the latest 102.4 Tbps switch silicon it has purpose-built for AI infrastructure. The fabless semiconductor biz announced upcoming availability of its Teralynx T100 chip to coincide with the Taiwanese trade show, claiming that it needs 25 percent lower power than competitive solutions with lower latency for AI training and inference workloads. But the firm is late to this party, as other vendors are already shipping their equivalent products, such as Broadcom’s Tomahawk 6 that launched last year, or Cisco’s Silicon One G300 announced earlier this year. That didn’t stop Nvidia’s Huang from styling Marvell as the “next trillion-dollar company," and saying that its networking and connectivity chips are essential to datacenters where compute tasks are distributed across thousands of connected nodes. According to Reuters, the chipmaker’s shares surged in value more than 24 percent in pre-market trading following Huang’s remarks. The rockstar CEO will no doubt be pleased, as his company invested $2 billion in Marvell earlier this year, at the same time as announcing a strategic partnership to connect the firm with Nvidia’s AI factory initiative. Marvell has an estimated market capitalization of approximately $179 billion to $196 billion, so it has some way to go to get to that trillion-dollar mark, but perhaps it is hoping its new silicon will get it there. As GPU racks approach 120 KW of power, a low-power switch enables datacenters to deploy larger numbers of accelerators within existing power envelopes, the firm says. The Teralynx T100 is a monolithic device manufactured using a 3nm process technology, which eliminates unnecessary legacy elements that otherwise increase power and die area. Because of this, it comes in at under 1000 W typical power, which sounds like an awful lot to us, but it is claimed to be 25 percent lower than rivals. For scale-out deployments, the switch chip supports up to a 512-port radix, enabling operators to consolidate network tiers and reduce latency across large AI training clusters. The more ports there are in a switch, the higher the radix, and the fewer of them are needed for a given number of endpoints, as The Register previously detailed, cutting latency by flattening the hierarchy. However, for scale-up deployments, Marvell says the product’s programmable pipeline architecture supports a variety of interconnect standards and emerging scale-up fabric protocols. These include the Ethernet Scale-Up Networking (ESUN) protocol, the latest Ultra Ethernet Consortium (UEC) requirements and evolving AI Ethernet fabrics. “The Teralynx T100 was purpose-built for AI - designed without the legacy baggage that inflates power, and engineered to deliver the deterministic performance and efficiency required to scale next-generation datacenter infrastructure,” Marvell’s Data Center Switch Business Unit VP Rishi Chugh remarked. “As AI workloads evolve and scale exponentially, hyperscalers require network architectures that optimize latency, power and scalability simultaneously,” he added. The Teralynx T100 switch will begin sampling to customers this quarter. It will be available in multiple package configurations, including ball grid array (BGA), co-packaged copper (CPC) and co-packaged optics (CPO) implementations. ®
The password manager giant said hackers were able to 'brute-force' its two-factor system, allowing them to access customer accounts and download their password vaults.
The women building these over-the-top, bedazzled cyberdecks aren’t in it for the glitter alone. This trend is reaching its peak at a time when people feel powerless against big tech.
Prime Video’s The Wheel of Time series will likely never get a proper conclusion. The series based on Robert Jordan’s famed novels was cancelled after three seasons, leaving many fans rightfully upset at the streaming service. While that story is over, there’s a new way to explore the world of The Wheel of Time that will bring the Dragon Reborn right to your desktop. War of the Dragon: The Wheel of Time by Dire Wolf is an exciting upcoming board game, and you can contribute to its already wildly successful Kickstarter and snag your copy right now.
Dire Wolf
According to the landing page, War of the Dragon is a grand strategy board game where players step into the roles of Rand al’Thor aka the Dragon Reborn or his nemesis the Dark One. War is waged across this land full of magic, prophecies, and armies. War of the Dragon: The Wheel of Time a combination of tableau building, action selection, and area control mechanics.
WHEEL OF TIME Animated Series in the Works from ARCANE Producer
There are two ways to fight: Hero Mode for new players and Epic Mode where you control massive armies. The first mode allows for up to four players while the latter is designed for two, which makes it an intimate tabletop experience. Check out this gameplay preview for a taste:
As with any campaign, there are various tiers with perks that come with them. The campaign runs until June 23 and is far past its 50K goal, so there are plenty of stretch goals that will be met. Keep the wheel turning and bring your favorite fantasy to life.
The post THE WHEEL OF TIME Comes to Your Tabletop With New Board Game appeared first on Nerdist.
The Russo Brothers promised an Avengers: Doomsday “surprise” during their appearance at this year’s SXSW London. They made their exciting social media announcement with the hashtag “#DomLatveria” along with an address for a coffee shop. What could this big surprise? Most fans, reasonably, thought it would be the long-awaited release of the Avengers: Doomsday‘s first (public) trailer. But what did any of that have to do with a coffee shop? We now have our answer……:deep sigh:……it wasn’t a Doomsday trailer. Or a clip. Or anything, really. It was literally just a coffee shop. The big Avengers: Doomsday surprise that had MCU fans in a tizzy was a Doctor Doom pop-up with a few Easter eggs related to the iconic villain.
The Dom Latveria coffee pop-up menu for ‘AVENGERS: DOOMSDAY’ includes multiple references to the history of Doctor Doom.
(📸: @LuminousDagger) pic.twitter.com/a6wHpXP4y5
— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm)
June 2, 2026
Flying Horse Coffee on Holywell Lane in London became Dom Latveria Coffee as part of the underwhelming promo for Avengers: Doomsday. The pop-up experience included drinks that paid tribute to Victor Von Doom’s comic book past. It also offered a look at the fictional country’s flag. It did not offer a look at the Avengers: Doomsday trailer.
Dom Latveria Coffee Menu at the ‘AVENGERS: DOOMSDAY’ pop-up shop. pic.twitter.com/XB5htr8K1X
— Nexus Point News (@NexusPointNews)
June 2, 2026
First look at the Latveria flag in ‘AVENGERS: DOOMSDAY.’ pic.twitter.com/2kpAZJJ33R
— Nexus Point News (@NexusPointNews)
June 2, 2026
Customers were also able to buy their own bags of Dom Latveria coffee to take home. And that was it. That…..that was the surprise.
Excuse us real quick while we remove these big giant clown shoes we find ourselves wearing.
Marvel Studios
Although it had no Avengers: Doomsday trailer, the in-store menu did have one very fun element. It also had what certainly seems like a hint towards one of the villain’s motivations in his upcoming MCU film. The shop’s board read, “Richards was wrong.” That sounds like an obvious commentary on Reed Richards’ actions in The Fantastic Four: First Steps.
Usually, the very mention of “coffee” makes us happy, but this is one cup of joe dom that didn’t deliver. This whole endeavor certainly felt like a whole lot of build for not very much delivery. At least a very few MCU fans in London will remember it fondly. The directors did end up making their way over to the shop. That is probably what the actual “surprise” was.
We are at the ‘AVENGERS: DOOMSDAY’ pop-up with The Russo Brothers. pic.twitter.com/2vKhCZLyeh
— Nexus Point News (@NexusPointNews)
June 2, 2026
When Will We Get an Avengers: Doomsday Trailer?
As for that long-awaited Avengers: Doomsday trailer… we’re left to wait some more. When will we get a hot cup of trailer instead of coffee? Our bet is we won’t see anything until Marvel returns to Hall H at this year’s San Diego Comic-Con.
Hopefully, it will include Dom Latveria Coffee. We’re not anti-coffee. We’re just pro trailer.
The post AVENGERS: DOOMSDAY ‘Surprise’ Was NOT a Trailer, It Was a Doctor Doom Coffee Shop appeared first on Nerdist.
The global AI race is often framed as a battle between the United States and China. But at VivaTech, Europe is expected to make the case for an entirely different model.
Last year, on June 26, I wrote a story headlined, “Trump’s DOJ is targeting Daily Kos.” At the time, I couldn’t explain what was happening. A gag order prevented it. Now I can. It started on May 5, 2025, when I received an FBI order demanding that Daily Kos preserve records related to a user account on this site, which I will not identify. This is the document…
Source
AI workloads are eating into datacenter capacity faster than most operators can add to it, and once the power budget is spent and the racks are full, the wall is a physical one. Server consolidation, once treated as a long-term efficiency project, has become an immediate operational priority. In our latest Hot Seat, Tim Phillips talks to Kira Boyko, product manager at Intel, about how the Intel Xeon 6+ processor with 288 efficient cores has been engineered with core density in mind to address that constraint. Many organizations cannot easily build new datacenters or expand the ones they already have, Boyko explains, particularly at the edge. That makes consolidating legacy servers onto a denser, more efficient platform the practical route to immediate efficiency and TCO gainsIt also recovers space and power budget that the next generation of AI infrastructure will demand. The Intel Xeon 6+ processor is built for that high-density environment, with particular relevance for 5G core and cloud-native use cases. Consolidation and AI expansion, Boyko argues, can no longer be treated as separate exercises. Retiring older server estates onto Intel Xeon 6+ is how operators create the headroom their next AI deployments will require. Watch the Hot Seat for Boyko's view on the case for upgrading, the performance and efficiency gains on offer, and how soon Intel Xeon 6+ can be put to work. You will learn about: Server consolidation as your AI enabler: Why retiring older Xeon servers onto Intel Xeon 6+ can recover fleet footprint and energy budget, and why that recovery is likely to be a precondition for AI innovation across many service providers. New in Intel Xeon 6+: The shift to Intel's 18A manufacturing process doubles the core count and delivers a five-fold increase in last-level cache, alongside faster memory. This product is engineered for core density and delivers performance per watt, efficiency and TCO gains through consolidation. Help for 5G and edge environments: Why performance-per-watt now matters more than raw speed for telco and edge deployments, where power availability is scarce, cooling infrastructure is constrained, and carbon reduction commitments cannot be wished away. Security at scale: How Intel's SGX and TDX deliver hardware-level isolation for containerized workloads, cloud deployments, and agentic AI applications, with TDX enforcing security policy during execution rather than after the fact. How to monitor application energy usage: What Intel Application Energy Telemetry captures that package-level monitoring misses, including accurate per-workload billing and identification of the heaviest power consumers. Benchmarking against the competition: How Intel Xeon 6+ stacks up against AMD's EPYC 9965, and which metrics matter most when comparing performance in tomorrow's datacenter. Anyone responsible for infrastructure refresh, server fleet management, or making AI ambitions fit within a fixed datacenter footprint will want to watch this one. Sponsored by Intel.
Meta told TechCrunch that it's considering ways to monetize the new feature, but didn't share specifics on what that could look like.
X will now let you 'react with video' to posts.
Russia's domestic spy agency says it has uncovered a sprawling foreign espionage operation that allegedly turned the smartphones of senior Russian officials into pocket-sized surveillance devices, though it has so far offered little in the way of evidence. In a statement Tuesday, the Federal Security Service (FSB) claimed foreign intelligence agencies implanted malware on the mobile devices of high-ranking Russian officials, allowing operators to steal data, intercept conversations, and secretly activate microphones and cameras to monitor targets and their surroundings. “This software is used to steal existing data, eavesdrop on ongoing conversations, and conduct covert acoustic and video monitoring of the environment near electronic devices, all aimed at obtaining sensitive information,” the FSB said. The agency said it had opened a criminal investigation into illegal access to computer information and the distribution of malicious software. It did not identify the alleged intelligence service responsible, disclose how many officials were affected, name the malware involved, or provide any technical indicators that would allow independent verification of the claims. As things stand, the FSB has revealed the accusation but not the proof. However, the notion that foreign intelligence agencies might target the phones of senior Russian officials is hardly farfetched. State-backed mobile surveillance campaigns have become a routine feature of modern espionage, and Moscow has spent years accusing Western intelligence services of abusing consumer technology platforms for intelligence gathering. In 2023, the FSB claimed that thousands of iPhones had been compromised in a US National Security Agency spying operation. At the time, Russian security vendor Kaspersky disclosed what became known as “Operation Triangulation”, an iPhone surveillance campaign that infected devices through iMessage. Apple denied cooperating with any government, while Kaspersky stopped short of attributing the operation to the NSA. Moscow's spy agencies are hardly strangers to offensive cyber operations themselves. Last year, the FBI warned that hackers linked to the FSB's Center 16 were exploiting a years-old Cisco vulnerability to collect configuration files from thousands of network devices associated with critical infrastructure operators. So while the FSB's latest allegations may ultimately prove accurate, they lack the technical evidence security researchers would normally expect before accepting claims of a major cyber espionage campaign. ®
Anthropic is expanding Project Glasswing, its security vulnerability program, and access to Mythos to 150 organizations across 15 countries — targeting critical infrastructure in power, water, healthcare, and communications where a cyberattack could affect 100 million people.
The MacBook Neo shipped 1.1 million units in its first weeks on sale, IDC estimates, as Apple pushes deeper into the mainstream laptop market.
The continuing AI memory crunch saw DRAM prices effectively double in calendar Q1, and the bad news is they are likely to rise again by more than 50 percent in the current quarter, if TrendForce forecasters are on the money. The Taiwan-based market watcher says contract prices for conventional DRAM went up by up to 98 percent during Q1. This was good for the memory chipmakers - which have seen their industry revenue spike 81 percent to $97 billion in the same period - but not so good for buyers. The situation is not set to improve anytime soon, TrendForce says, as inventory levels held by DRAM suppliers remain extremely low, and any incremental supply is prioritized for high-capacity RDIMMs for AI servers. This continues to limit product availability for PC and smartphone vendors, with the result that bit shipment growth for conventional DRAM is expected to remain constrained. TrendForce expects contract prices for these everyday memory components to rise by another 58 to 63 percent this quarter. Hyperscale customers have shown a greater willingness to accept price increases, the market research firm claims, which has forced other customers to follow suit to secure supply allocations. The end customer has been the loser in all of this, with the average price of laptop and desktop PCs up by double-digit percentages in Europe, as The Register reported this week. Pricing pressure is only likely to ease if there is an increase in the available manufacturing capacity of everyday memory parts, or there is a slackening off in demand for the higher-margin high-bandwidth memory chips used in AI servers. However, TrendForce notes that the top three suppliers – Samsung, SK hynix and Micron - are continuing to prioritize production and shipments of HBM. SK hynix Chairman Chey Tae-won told reporters in Taipei this week that it aims to double its silicon wafer output capacity – but only gradually over the next five years. As such, the shortage could persist until 2030, he warned – but other analysts have said they expect it to last until the end of next year. Micron said last month it has started DRAM manufacturing at its Manassas, Virginia, fabrication plant and expects initial wafer output at its first Idaho fab in “mid-calendar year 2027.” Meaningful new capacity is projected to come fully online in 2027 and 2028, it said. One piece of good news is that a threatened strike by workers at Samsung Electronics was called off at the end of May after the company agreed to create a fund that will share profits with workers. Industrial action raised the prospect of disruption to memory production, which could have worsened the global shortage. Beyond the big three, Taiwan-based suppliers Nanya, Winbond, and PSMC continue to focus on mature-node DRAM products to fill market gaps left by tier one suppliers as they shift to advanced process technologies, TrendForce says. PSMC in particular is expected to aggressively expand supply capacity. ®
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