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AI may or may not be pushing lots of people out of the workforce, but Anthropic has good news as the Claude creator is creating temporary positions to promote the adoption of AI, even as CEO Dario Amodei ponders policy interventions to counter "job displacement." The AI biz has announced the launch of Claude Corps, a $150 million program that will pay 1,000 Claude Corps Fellows $85,000 (plus benefits and a token budget) for one year to help advance the missions of nonprofit organizations using generative AI. Meanwhile, the tech industry continues to take on debt to build datacenters while balancing its books by shedding employees. According to job search biz TrueUp, the tech sector this year has averaged 935 layoffs per day, up from 674 per day in 2025. Anthropic's program debuts alongside the publication of Amodei's latest musing about his optimism "that, even in a world with AIs that are better than everyone at everything, humans can live lives of deep purpose and strive to build awe-inspiring and beautiful things." Claude Corps' stated goal is to provide host organizations with valuable tools and systems and to help participating fellows "build AI skills that will serve them in their careers" – however long those careers last until AIs are better than everyone at everything. There is, of course, no guarantee that AI will surpass human cognition or folly. But Amodei likes to talk about the idling of human labor, just in case, even if that sort of chatter fuels the firebombers. Anthropic says that it is announcing Claude Corps alongside its policy framework for dealing with AI's impact on work. The framework is titled "Policy on the AI Exponential," which is the same title Amodei used for his post. The policy's call for company-endorsed regulatory intervention is predicated on the claim that "AI is advancing at exponential speed," though the document cites no evidence of exponential capability gains and offers no time frame – a necessary variable to calculate periodic gains. Judging by AI model benchmark metrics, recent AI improvement has been incremental, a rate of advancement too timid to turn heads in the attention economy. Using data from Stanford HAI's 2026 AI Index report, even impressive gains such as AI model performance on the SWE-bench Verified benchmark rising from 60 percent to nearly 100 percent of the human baseline in a single year are not, by themselves, evidence of broad "exponential" progress across AI. Alarmism aside, Claude Corps will be funded and steered by Anthropic and implemented by computer education nonprofit CodePath, which will serve as the employer of record for fellows. The 12-month-long fellowships begin with "intensive training on using Claude in non-profit settings," augmented by five hours of additional training each week. Fellows are expected to use their remaining time coaching their respective nonprofits on the ins and outs of AI workflows. The gig comes with support from a CodePath mentor and office hours from Anthropic, which may prove useful for reactivating Claude accounts that have been suspended after triggering Claude's overly sensitive safety guardrails. Some 400 nonprofits are expected to host Claude Corps Fellows over the next 12 months, including Braven (job prep for low-income students), Code the Dream (coding education), and Heartland Forward (economic growth for middle America). "If Claude Corps works, we'll have a foundation for something much larger: a model for widening AI's benefits during a period of vast economic change," Anthropic says. And if not, as New Yorker cartoonist Tom Toro put it, "Yes, the planet got destroyed. But for a beautiful moment in time we created a lot of value for shareholders." ®

⚡ Quick Take

• Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness new trailer makes clear that America has given Larry David centuries worth of topics to get angry about.

Larry David’s place in both television and comedy history is secure thanks to Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm. But not only is he not ready to rest on his laurels, his new sketch comedy series Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness will send him through history. And the show’s new trailer makes clear that America has given Larry David centuries worth of topics to get angry about.

“Those who don’t know history… are doomed to watch Larry David repeat it.” That’s a pretty, pretty, pretty good logline. This is also a great trailer and premise. Setting Larry David lose on a few hundred years of America is exactly what we need right now. (Those Wright Brothers have it coming!)

All of the show’s many incredible guest stars—which includes Jon Hamm, Sean Hayes, Isla Fisher, Jerry Seinfeld, Susie Essman, Greg Kinnear, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Chris Parnell, and more—will only make it better.

In addition to starring as America’s timeless grump, David serves as writer and executive producer. Series co-creator Jeff Schaffer also serves as director. Plus, this show has an actual, direct connection to American history. Seriously. Former President and First Lady Barack and Michelle Obama also serve as executive producers via Higher Ground. Will that mean we might get to see Larry David complaining about a president wearing a tan suit? C’mon. That’s absurd. Not even Larry David would whine about something that dumb.

John Johnson/HBO

The seven-episode first season of Life, Larry and the Pursuit of Unhappiness will debut at HBO on Friday, June 26 at 9 p.m. ET. New episodes will follow every week until the August 7 season finale. They will also be available at HBO Max.

Will you make Larry David happy if you tune in? Probably not, but think about how unhappy he’ll be if you don’t. Then remember he’ll be unhappy for a few centuries.

The post Larry David Makes American History Funny in LIFE, LARRY AND THE PURSUIT OF UNHAPPINESS Trailer appeared first on Nerdist.

Data theft and extortion group ShinyHunters claims to have exploited a critical Oracle PeopleSoft bug as a zero-day to compromise more than 100 organizations, including the University of Nottingham, across 300 vulnerable instances. A spokesperson for the cybercrime crew on Thursday told The Register that they exploited CVE-2026-35273 to break into the university’s PeopleSoft system and steal 40 GB of personal data and billing records belonging to hundreds of thousands of current and former students. ShinyHunters posted the UK university on its data leak site on Tuesday before publishing the stolen files later that same day, presumably because the school refused to pay the extortion demand. “University of Nottingham on our leak site is one of the first publicly confirmed incidents,” a ShinyHunters spokesperson told us. “We have only just started outreach to affected orgs and are actively looking to reach an agreement with affected orgs.” They didn’t say when they planned to post the other 100 or so claimed victims. PeopleSoft is a widely used enterprise software suite that large corporations and institutions use to manage their human resources, payroll and billing applications, supply chains, and student records. CVE-2026-35273 is a 9.8 CVSS-rated vulnerability that allows remote, unauthenticated attackers with network access via HTTP to compromise PeopleSoft Enterprise PeopleTools and fully take over the platform. On Wednesday, a day after ShinyHunters leaked the school’s data, the University of Nottingham confirmed the breach and Oracle issued an out-of-band security alert. It’s unclear, however, if the software provider has issued a patch to fix the security flaw. The Register reached out to Oracle, and did not receive any response to our questions. Google-owned Mandiant Chief Technology Officer Charles Carmakal, in a brief LinkedIn post on Thursday, warned that PeopleSoft was one of two zero-day vulnerabilities “actively being exploited in the wild.” “Oracle released mitigations,” Carmakal wrote. “Patches should come soon.” The other zero-day, for the record, is this Cisco Catalyst SD-WAN Manager vulnerability.®

Democrats’ odds of taking control of the Senate just got even better, with The Center for Politics Sabato’s Crystal Ball flipping three races blue. According to the new ratings, North Carolina’s open Senate race is now projected to flip into Democrats’ hands, with the contest now rated “Lean Democratic.” And the Senate contests in Alaska and Ohio—states that President Donald Trump…

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The boffins on Google’s DeepMind team unveiled an experimental new language model this week that uses techniques originally developed for AI image generators to boost text output performance by as much as 4x when running on resource-constrained consumer hardware. It's free to download and you can run it with just 18 GB of DRAM or VRAM. The model, codenamed DiffusionGemma, is the latest addition to Google’s open weights model family. But unlike Gemma 4, which launched this spring, the 26 billion-parameter mixture of experts (MoE) model isn’t a large language model in a conventional sense. Instead, it’s actually closer to image models like Stable Diffusion or Flux. Rather than generating tokens one after another in an autoregressive fashion, DiffusionGemma generates entire paragraphs' worth of tokens at the same time. The process looks a lot like how a diffusion model turns what’s essentially static into an image through a series of denoising steps. As Google explains it, DiffusionGemma works by laying out a canvas of random tokens, and then refining them until the final output is reached. Compared to conventional LLMs, which are memory-bandwidth bound and require a lot of VRAM, diffusion models are a predominantly compute-bound workload, which is why the Chocolate Factory is positioning these models for local deployment. LLMs are autoregressive. During token generation, the model’s active parameters need to be streamed from memory for every token generated, making memory bandwidth a major bottleneck. In the cloud, inference providers balance compute and memory bandwidth by processing hundreds or thousands of requests in parallel. As you might have guessed, this isn’t something the average user running a local model on their notebook can do. However, many consumer products, like high-end graphics cards, have plenty of excess horsepower, which DiffusionGemma can take advantage of to boost output performance. Diffusion language models aren’t perfect. Google isn’t the first to explore this tech. Previous models, like DREAM or Mercury 2, demonstrated major speedups over conventional LLMs, but generally underperformed them in benchmarks for their size. DiffusionGemma doesn’t appear to be any different. According to Google, the 26 billion-parameter model falls just behind Gemma 4 12B in the GPQA-Diamond benchmark, with its main advantage being output speed, and even then it’s not as impressive as Google has made it out to be. The chart shows a roughly 2.25x speedup for DiffusionGemma over the 12B parameter LLM with speculative decode enabled. Compared to Gemma 4 26B-A4B, the speedup is nearly 4x when running a single Nvidia H100. DiffusionGemma is being released as an experimental model rather than an enterprise focused one, like we saw with Gemma 4. The model is available for download on popular model repos like Hugging Face under a highly permissive Apache 2.0 license with support already merged into popular inference engines like vLLM, MLX, and HF Transformers, with support for Llama.cpp coming soon. While local inference has largely been the domain of AI enthusiasts, companies like Google are increasingly leaning on the tech to cut cloud costs associated with their AI services. As you may recall, back in May, Google quietly began shipping a small LLM with its Chrome web browser. ®

Homeland Security Secretary Markwayne Mullin attacked New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani on Thursday as the Trump administration continues threatening to invade the Big Apple with Immigration and Customs Enforcement troops. “He and I don’t get along,” Mullin said when asked if he worried that treating New York with an authoritarian hand would yield the same destructive results seen in Los…

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With the weekend nearly here, check out things to do around Santa Cruz County with a recommendation from Lily Belli and a specially curated list from Lookout’s BOLO events calendar.

ALT

Nightmare Eclipse, the prolific zero-day vulnerability hunter with an axe to grind against Microsoft, released yet another exploit late Wednesday that the researcher claims will spawn a command prompt that provides total access to the BitLocker volume. This bug, called GreatXML, was “an accidental discovery,” according to the researcher, who said it only took four hours to find. They claim this exploit (published on GitHub and Git-based code-hosting platforms) can bypass BitLocker on any system that has ever run a Microsoft Defender Offline scan at any point in the past. GreatXML comes just a day after Nightmare released exploit code for RoguePlanet, which allows local privilege escalation and leads to SYSTEM-level control over an affected machine. This brings the researcher’s zero-day count to eight. The earlier six - RedSun, UnDefend, BlueHammer, YellowKey, GreenPlasma, and MiniPlasma - all have patches as of this week’s Patch Tuesday event. Redmond on Wednesday told The Register that it is aware of RoguePlanet, and “actively investigating the validity and potential applicability of these claims.” The Windows giant didn’t immediately respond to our inquiries about GreatXML, including when it planned to issue a patch. Microsoft has said none of the vulnerabilities were reported via its official channels prior to being made public. The company also banned Nightmare’s earlier GitHub account, and seemingly threatened legal action before dialing back its rhetoric after steep backlash from the security community. Nightmare Eclipse, who some researchers suggest is an ex-Microsoft employee, harbors a very personal grudge against the Windows giant and its communications with bug hunters. They have promised to keep the zero-days coming, but waffle on the timing. Last month, the researcher pledged a big July 14 drop: “I will make sure your bones are shattered that day,” and then added, “nothing will be released this June (or maybe I will release smtg, depending on circumstances).” On Tuesday, they changed course. “I will be unable to mass disclose zerodays in July 14th, RoguePlanet took way more time than expected and truly drained me. I might take a break but I can't say for sure what I will be doing for next month, maybe it's nothing, maybe it's smtg.” A day later, Nightmare released the “accidental” GreatXML BitLocker bypass. According to the researcher, the BitLocker bypass first requires copying “unattend.xml” and the “Recovery” directory to the root of the recovery partition. The next step is rebooting into WinRE by Shift-clicking Restart. “If everything was done correctly, a shell with unrestricted access to the bitlocker volume will spawn,” Nightmare wrote. Also, if the scan hasn’t even been initiated on the Windows system, first you’d need to either log in and initiate it, or “figure out a way to boot into WinRE in offline scan state.” Security sleuth Will Dormann followed Nightmare’s steps to reproduce GreatXML, and said the writeup seems “flawed.” In his testing, Dormann said the command prompt appeared the next time a Defender Offline scan ran. “And in order to trigger a Microsoft Defender Offline scan, you both need to be logged in to Windows, and also have admin credentials,” he wrote on social media. “And if you've already got that level of access, you can just turn off bitlocker.” “The writeup for GreatXML suggests that the prerequisite is that Windows Defender Offline has been executed at some point in the past,” Dormann added. “And that after planting two files in WinRE, all you need to do is [Shift]-reboot into WinRE, and Windows will automatically go into Microsoft Defender Offline scan mode. But this is not the case in any of the 3 lineages of Win11 that I have handy.” ®

⚡ Quick Take

• Mark Ruffalo voices Nero, a cat regretting his work with the feline mob in Venice, in the first teaser trailer for Pixar’s Gatto.

Toy Story 5 will soon arrive in theaters, but Pixar is already looking ahead to its next featured film. The studio has released its first look at Gatto. It shows that while these Venetian cats might be a lot more sophisticated than your average kitty, they still enjoy typical feline fun.

In fairness, that chain did look awfully enticing. Certainly way more fun than shaking down a little guy over some tuna.

As for the actual film, this teaser gives us an idea what we can expect from the movie’s animation, characters, tone, and sense of humor. It also reveals more about the plot than you might expect. Here’s the film’s official synopsis from Disney and Pixar:

In Gatto, after years of maneuvering the canal-ridden, superstitious city of Venice, Italy, Nero begins to question whether he’s lived the right lives. Indebted to Rocco, the local feline mob boss, Nero finds himself in a quandary and is forced to forge a truly unexpected friendship that may finally lead him to his purpose—unless Venice gets the better of him first.

The studio also released a new poster for the movie and oh Madone! It shows Nero in a less than peaceful situation amid the nighttime beauty of La Serenissima.

Disney-Pixar

Poor little guy. Speaking of Nero, he’s played by someone who usually plays a very big guy for Disney. That’s the voice Marvel’s Hulk, Mark Ruffalo. Laurence Fishburne (John Wick) plays the “ruthless mob boss cat” Rocco. It also comes from a creative team who knows a little something about making Pixar movies set in Venice, Luca director Enrico Casarosa and producer Andrea Warren.

But while Pixar released this teaser ahead of Toy Story 5‘s debut, it won’t be arriving in theaters until next year. Gatto‘s cats will get to have soem big screen feline fun on March 5, 2027.

The post Pixar’s First GATTO Trailer Introduces the Venetian Cat Mafia appeared first on Nerdist.

Team BOLO (Be On The Lookout) is gathering and curating all of Santa Cruz County’s biggest and best happenings from now until forever — or at least until the latest gigs are officially announced.

Latest additions are marked as NEW below.

Use the following links to see the major events happening by month:

• June
• July
• August
• September
• October
• November
• December
• April 2027

And away we go with Down The Line …

June

June 11: Nicole Zuraitis, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

June 11: Rayburger, The Catalyst

June 12: Monolord, The Catalyst

June 12: The Smithereens, Moe’s Alley

June 13: Santa Cruz Symphony: “Movie Night,” Santa Cruz Civic

June 13: Santa Cecelia, Moe’s Alley

June 13: Sin Sisters: Pride, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

June 15: Jason Marsalis, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

June 17: Barbara Higbie & Teresa Trull, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

June 18: Mary Gauthier, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

June 18: GayC/DC, Moe’s Alley

June 18: Lucinda Williams, The Rio

June 19: Phish tribute, Felton Music Hall

June 19: Israel Vibration, Moe’s Alley

June 20: The Joy of Zimbabwean Music, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

June 20: The Verve Pipe, Felton Music Hall

June 21: Death Angels, The Catalyst

June 22: Santa Cruz Guitar Co. tribute, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

June 24: Wallace Baine, Bookshop Santa Cruz

June 25: “Wild Women of the ’60s,” Kuumbwa Jazz Center

June 25: Khemmis, Felton Music Hall

June 27: Santa Cruz Roller Derby, Santa Cruz Civic

June 27: Andre Nickatina, The Catalyst

June 28: Billy Childs, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

June 29: Luciana Souza & Marcel Camargo, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

July

July 7: Taj Farrant, Moe’s Alley

July 7: Angelica Glass, Bookshop Santa Cruz

July 8: TAE & the Neighborly, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

July 9: Beth Stelling, Felton Music Hall

July 9: Mads Tolling, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

July 10: Fleetmac Wood, Felton Music Hall

July 10: Alice Howe & Freebo, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

July 10: Cabrillo Stage opening night: “Sister Act, the Musical,” Crocker Theater

July 11: Depeche Mode tribute, Felton Music Hall

July 11: Santa Cruz Shakespeare opening night: “Much Ado About Nothing,” Audrey Stanley Grove

July 12: Santa Cruz Shakespeare opening night: “Macbeth,” Audrey Stanley Grove

July 13: Maruja Limon, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

July 13: White Denim, Moe’s Alley

July 14: Nation of Language, Felton Music Hall

July 16: RJD2, Felton Music Hall

July 16: Tony Lindsay Quintet, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

July 17: Hot Buttered Rum/Tea Leaf Green, Felton Music Hall

July 18: Kr3ture, Felton Music Hall

July 18: Water Tower, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

July 18: Babe Rainbow, The Rio

July 19: Leah Song, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

July 19: Los Tranquilos, Felton Music Hall

July 20: Keshav Batish, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

July 20: Pink Ladies of the Sonnets, Audrey Stanley Grove

July 21: Ocean Vuong, The Rio

July 23: James McMurtry, The Rio

NEW: July 26: Sue Foley, Moe’s Alley

July 27: Ray Obiedo’s Latin Jazz Ensemble, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

July 27: Chloe Chapin, Bookshop Santa Cruz

July 28: Yilian Cañizares, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

July 28: Santa Cruz Shakespeare opening night: August Wilson’s “Fences,” Audrey Stanley Grove

July 29: Monophonics, Moe’s Alley

July 30: Peter Asher & Jeremy Clyde, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

July 31: Maria Muldaur, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

July 31: Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music: “On Freedom,” Santa Cruz Civic

August

Aug. 1: Joe Russo’s Almost Dead, Quarry Amphitheater

Aug. 1: Eileen Jewel, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

Aug. 1: Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music: “Defiant Dreams,” Santa Cruz Civic

Aug. 2: Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music: Family Concert, Santa Cruz Civic

Aug. 3: Kim Nalley, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

Aug. 3: Heart tribute, Audrey Stanley Grove

Aug. 6: Sylvia Cuenca’s Bridging Generations, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

Aug. 7: Bria Skonberg, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

Aug. 7: ALO, Felton Music Hall

Aug. 8: Shawn Colvin, The Rio

Aug. 8: Mickey Avalon, Felton Music Hall

Aug. 8: Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music: “Control,” Santa Cruz Civic

Aug. 9: Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music: “Hope As Our Banner,” Santa Cruz Civic

Aug. 10: David Bowie tribute, Audrey Stanley Grove

Aug. 12: John-Robert, The Crepe Place

Aug. 13: Marina Crouse, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

Aug. 14: Death & Saxes, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

Aug. 14: The Polish Ambassador, Felton Music Hall

Aug. 14: Atmosphere, Quarry Amphitheater

Aug. 15: Snail, The Rio

Aug. 15: Ani DiFranco/Valerie June, Santa Cruz Civic

Aug. 16: The Blues Project, Moe’s Alley

Aug. 17: Jazz Mafia, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

Aug. 17: Nina Simon, Bookshop Santa Cruz

Aug. 19: Bill O’Connell Trio, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

Aug. 19: Steve Hawk, Bookshop Santa Cruz

Aug. 20: Jon Dryden, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

Aug. 21: Oliver Tree, Quarry Amphitheater

NEW: Aug. 22: Earthless, Moe’s Alley

Aug. 24: Keyon Harrold, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

Aug. 25: La Luz, Felton Music Hall

Aug. 26: Duane Betts, Felton Music Hall

Aug. 26: The Kirtan Love Experience, The Rio

Aug. 26: Built to Spill, The Rio

Aug. 27: Simon Phillips, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

Aug. 28: Tim Flannery & the Lunatic Fringe, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

Aug. 29: Greyboy All-Stars, Moe’s Alley

Aug. 31: Eagles of Death Metal, The Catalyst

September

Sept. 1: Rehash, The Catalyst

NEW: Sept. 3: Paula Arai, Bookshop Santa Cruz

Sept. 4: Santa Cruz Shakespeare opening night: Noel Coward’s “Private Lives,” Audrey Stanley Grove

Sept. 5: Clinton Fearon & the Boogie Brown Band, Moe’s Alley

Sept. 5: Public Image Ltd., The Rio

NEW: Sept. 6: Tommy Castro & the Painkillers, Moe’s Alley

Sept. 7: Tom Petty tribute, Audrey Stanley Grove

Sept. 9: PawPaw Rod, The Catalyst

NEW: Sept. 9: Laurie R. King, Bookshop Santa Cruz

Sept. 10: Nduduzo Makhathini, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

Sept. 11: Santa Cruz Shakespeare opening night: Jason Robert Brown’s “The Last 5 Years,” Audrey Stanley Grove

Sept. 12: Black Uhuru, Moe’s Alley

Sept. 14: John Pizzarelli, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

Sept. 15: “Smoke Cabaret,” Laurie Rivera, Audrey Stanley Grove

Sept. 17: The Growlers, The Catalyst

Sept. 17: Sarah Elizabeth Charles, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

NEW: Sept. 19: Rayland Baxter, Moe’s Alley

Sept. 20: Vieux Farka Toure, Felton Music Hall

Sept. 22: Al DiMeola, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

NEW: Sept. 22: Welcome Week Rave, Santa Cruz Civic

Sept. 23: Brass Queens, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

Sept. 24: Bill Frisell & Harmony Five, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

Sept. 28: Linda Ronstadt tribute, Audrey Stanley Grove

Sept. 29: Aldous Harding, The Rio

Sept. 30: Cyrille Aimee & Mathis Picard, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

October

Oct. 1: El Khat, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

Oct. 2: Soda Blonde, The Crepe Place

Oct. 2: Fruit Bats, The Rio

Oct. 3: The Bends, Felton Music Hall

Oct. 4: Mike Dawes, Felton Music Hall

NEW: Oct. 5: Hiromi, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

Oct. 6: Kishi Bashi, The Rio

Oct. 8: Rickie Lee Jones, The Rio

NEW: Oct. 8: Ben Flocks, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

Oct. 10: Damien Jurado, Felton Music Hall

NEW: Oct. 10: Banff Center Mountain Film, The Rio

NEW: Oct. 11: Yellowjackets, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

NEW: Oct. 12: Somi, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

Oct. 14: Bonnie Raitt, Santa Cruz Civic

Oct. 14: Acoustic Alchemy, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

NEW: Oct. 14: Alborosie & Shengen Clan, Moe’s Alley

Oct. 15: Bumpin’ Uglies, The Catalyst

Oct. 23: Black Flag, Felton Music Hall

Oct. 26: Fonville & Fribush, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

NEW: Oct. 29: Laura Anglade, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

November

NEW: Nov. 1: Andrew Duhon, Moe’s Alley

Nov. 7: Henry Diltz: Behind the Lens, Kuumbwa Jazz Center

Nov. 8: Southern Culture on the Skids, Moe’s Alley

NEW: Nov. 9: Alex Cameron, The Crepe Place

Nov. 12: Jake Xerxes Fussell, Felton Music Hall

Nov. 14: Nick Shoulders, Felton Music Hall

Nov. 14: Jon Spencer, Moe’s Alley

December

Dec. 8: Buck Meek, Moe’s Alley

Dec. 17: Pokey LaFarge, Felton Music Hall

April 2027

April 23: Fashion Teens, The Rio

HOW TO MAKE THE MOST OF BOLO

Sign up for Lookout’s Weekender newsletter, sent every Thursday afternoon.

If you’re planning or producing your own event, click CREATE AN EVENT on the calendar.

Questions, comments, concerns? Email bolo@lookoutlocal.com.

The post Down The Line: All the biggest and best shows, gigs & events ahead in Santa Cruz County appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.

By integrating an AI assistant directly into Edits, Meta is aiming to keep creators engaged on Instagram as it continues to compete with TikTok and YouTube for creators' attention.

SpaceX, arguably the most legitimate of Elon Musk’s businesses, is set to have the largest initial public offering ever. But even if you’re not someone whose heart goes aflutter at the prospect of a multibazillion-dollar tech deal, and even if you’re not some day-trader wannabe, you apparently get to care about SpaceX. A lot. Why? Because if you’re a normie with a 401(k)…

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A cartoon by Clay Bennett. Related | Inflation skyrockets to highest level in years—Trump says all is well…

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⚡ Quick Take

• A new report says Doctor Who could be off the air until at least 2028 following the dissolution of the BBC’s partnership with Bad Wolf.

Yesterday’s bombshell announcement that the BBC has canceled the previously greenlit Doctor Who Christmas special, and that they had split with Russell T Davies and Bad Wolf Productions, sent the Whovian community spiraling. What does it mean that the property has no showrunner, or even season order, in place? Who will take over such a massive property? The announcement also came with the promise that the Beeb would take bids from production companies to co-partner on Doctor Who. The series is really expensive and the BBC can’t incur the cost on its own. Today, fans get a little more info, and it’s not the kind of time travel we’d hoped for.

BBC Studios/Bad Wolf

In a piece on Deadline, we’ve learned, via two insiders, that the creative breakup between network and production company was mutual. The show needs a creative overhaul that simply a single Christmas special couldn’t hope to fix. Moreover, this overhaul is “expected to take years, potentially keeping the show off TV until 2028 at the earliest, sources said.”

It’s not a particularly optimistic bit of news, but I wouldn’t say it’s all that surprising. Given the turmoil surrounding the second season of Davies’ second tenure with the show, which saw co-producing partner Disney+ throwing less of its heft behind it and ratings tanking, the special would have been more of a Band-Aid than a way forward. At this point, the notion that, without a script (allegedly) or a lead actor, Doctor Who would be ready for Christmas was more than a pipe dream.

RELATED ARTICLE

DOCTOR WHO’s Billie Piper Stunt Was Never Going to Pay Off

The problem with the BBC putting the series out to creative tender—a process by which the State-run broadcaster takes bids from producers on making the series—is that, from the independent production companies’ perspective, there isn’t much of an upside. One such anonymous producer told Deadline, “you would have to be mad” to take on the show. “[It’s a] bit of a nightmare for any producer in this market with the shadow of the Disney fallout,” was the verdict of another highly-regarded producer.

This person added: “It’s hard to see another major U.S. studio replacing Disney. So the budget would be hard to get above £3M ($4M) [per episode] without significant co-pro or insane investment from the distribution arm [BBC Studios], which they will struggle to recoup on sales.”

BBC

Doctor Who also badly needs a creative refresh. Since returning in 2005, Doctor Who has not gone a single calendar year without at least one episode. Even during the COVID years. In the 21 years since Davies’ first series, we’ve had 197 episodes. A staggering 123 of those were written or co-written by only three men. Those are the showrunners, Davies, Steven Moffat, and Chris Chibnall. That is an exceedingly small creative pool. I would posit that for any new producers to come on board, they’d want to drastically revamp the show and not merely continue on in the same direction of the past two decades.

Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Letterboxd.

The post DOCTOR WHO Will Reportedly Stay Off the Air ‘For Years’ appeared first on Nerdist.

Datacenters got you down? Worried that even the most innocuous questions will spin up AI models running in water-guzzling, energy-sucking, planet-destroying hyperscalers? You need CrankGPT. No, we’re not talking about surrendering to AI psychosis: we’re talking about a literal hand-cranked machine loaded with a voice agent that can respond to questions and even translate speech into other languages, provided someone keeps the power flowing. There’s an onboard custom-built capacitor board to store some juice, mind you, but it only provides around 20 seconds of crank-free runtime before you’ve gotta keep crankin’ to keep it alive. That, and it takes a bit of time to get it running - according to the documentation website, it’s a 30-second process “from the moment you start cranking to the moment you’re having a conversation with CrankGPT.” According to the AI expert duo behind the device, computer scientist Katrin Tomanek and former Google Advanced Technology and Projects Group technical project lead Alex Kauffmann, CrankGPT still delivers impressive results despite the need to perform some hard physical labor for your tokens (though we’d argue some exercise for your AI might not be a bad thing). “Asking Claude to add two numbers for you is like swatting a fly with a wrecking ball,” Kauffmann told The Register in an email. This tongue-in-cheek demonstration, Kauffmann said, may be a bit of light fun, but it’s an exercise in demonstrating what his and Tomanek’s AI company, Squeez, is all about: small, private specialized AI models that, in a pinch, might not even need very much energy or a connection to the web to operate. “Squeez produces customized, efficient, and private models that can run on small, inexpensive hardware to solve specific problems,” Kauffmann explained, citing tasks like voice recognition for someone with a strong accent or speech impediment, or specially-trained, local AIs that are subject matter experts in topics like gardening or auto repair, but won’t touch subjects outside their wheelhouse. Contrary to the flashy dot-com for CrankGPT the pair have set up, Kauffmann told me, Squeez has no plans to pursue spin cycle class-powered AI stacks for dev teams, though he said if anyone wants to foot the bill, he'd be happy to give it a shot. "Off-the-shelf bike generators are shockingly expensive and they're fussy to build," Kauffmann said. Still, "a good biker can maintain a steady 120W output, so a class of twenty could power a Blackwell." Speaking of wheelhouses, what’s inside that box? If there’s a tiny computer in a 3D-printed box with a crank attached, there’s a good possibility it’s going to be a Raspberry Pi, and that’s the case here. CrankGPT’s brain is built on a stock RPi 5 with 8 GB of RAM and a cooling fan HAT, and audio input and output are handled by a dedicated I/O HAT designed for voice assistants running RPis. Power comes from the aforementioned crank, which is actually an off-the-shelf 20W switchable voltage hand crank unit built for emergency USB device charging, and is stored in the custom capacitor unit the duo built. “The neatest part of the whole thing is that you can actually feel the inference,” Kauffmann told us. “The amount of resistance the crank presents varies depending on the amount of work the board is doing, so when it's really working (generating words for instance), the crank becomes much harder to turn than when it's idling waiting for you to say something.” As for software, the device is running the most stripped-down, bare bones instance of DietPi the pair could compile, which is able to boot into a functional userspace in about three seconds. The voice agent is the truly original piece of work done for the project, as detailed in the documentation page, and was built entirely from scratch. “We wanted to understand the system end to end and have as few dependencies as possible,” the documentation page notes. It’s available on GitHub for those interested in trying it out. Speech recognition is handled by the Moonshine automatic speech recognition engine, chosen for its speed, while text-to-speech synthesis is handled by Piper, chosen again for its low-resource edge inference capabilities. As for the models running on the thinking itself, there are a few that are behind CrankGPT, with Liquid LFM2 1.2B providing a general-purpose voice agent, and Gemma 3 1B being used for translation. CrankGPT can switch between translation and various prompts (e.g., general question answering and games like two truths and a lie) via a knob on the side of the enclosure. “It’s entirely configurable,” Kauffmann told us. “We added a couple of physical inputs (the knob, a button, a switch) to make experimentation easier.” Kauffmann added that he and Tomanek were surprised by how well the translation function worked. “We did no fine tuning, it's just a two-line prompt and it works really well for high-coverage languages,” he explained. While the demonstration focuses on audio prompts and responses, Kauffmann explained that the device supports all sorts of different models, with the only real limitation being inference time and the amount of hand cranking one wants to do to get their response. “We’ve generated images (small), made poetry (bad), and written code using the same setup,” the CrankGPT makers wrote in their documentation, all with “a hand crank, a little computer, and a small stack of speech and language models running locally.” If you’re interested in building your own CrankGPT model, keep an eye on the documentation page we linked earlier in this story, as Kauffmann told us he and Tomanek are planning to release all the plans and schematics in the coming days, while the aforementioned custom voice agent is already available for tinkering. “It's a pretty straightforward setup, the only tricky part is that SBCs like the Raspberry Pi will sometimes draw enough current to trigger a little generator's overcurrent protection,” Kauffmann told us. If you have a spare $300 lying around (that’s what Kauffmann estimates the RAM pricing surge has driven the build cost up to, from the $150 he spent when building CrankGPT last year), then you, too, may soon be able to build your own completely off-grid, standalone AI box so you can keep chatting with your favorite micro LLM if and when its bigger cousins knock the grid offline. ®

⚡ Quick Take

• If you feel like you’ve been personally victimized by SantaCon, you can now let the FBI know in service of its federal criminal indictment.
• SantaCon has terrorized cities for years, but it turns out it was also committing actual crimes.
• Money earmarked for charity raised by SantaCon went to its organizer instead.

If you’ve ever lived in NYC, Seattle, San Francisco, LA, Portland, and many other places, or even if you haven’t, you probably know the terror that is SantaCon. Every December, a band of roving, drunken revelers dressed in Santa, elf, or Christmas-adjacent costumes take to the streets in a massive bar crawl, purportedly for Charity, and menace the citizens of whatever town they’ve overrun. But it turns out, SantaCon isn’t just spiritually a villain, it’s literally one. And if you feel like you were personally victimized by organizer Regina George, we mean, Stefan Pildes, you can let the FBI know today.

Cineverse

Evidently, Pildes, who sold ticketed entry to SantaCon events, claimed that profits would go to charity, but Gothamist revealed that “less than a fifth of that money has gone to registered nonprofits.” And instead, as U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton shares, “Pildes promoted SantaCon as an event grounded in charitable giving, but instead of donating the millions of dollars he raised, he ran his own con game.” Among other things, Pildes used the SantaCon money earmarked for charity to “pay for extensive renovations to a lakefront property in New Jersey, luxury vacations in Hawaii, Las Vegas, and Vail, Colorado, concert tickets, extravagant meals, and a luxury vehicle, prosecutors said.

Phew, we knew SantaCon was rotten through and through. While you can’t legally complain about being hassled on the subway, if you feel you were in some way victimized by SantaCon in a way pertinent to the federal criminal indictment, you can share your information with the FBI.

The official Santa Con investigation page notes:

The FBI’s New York Division is seeking to identify potential victims of Stefan Pildes, who organized and operated the annual SantaCon event in New York City, from at least 2019 to present. Pildes was recently charged with wire fraud. The FBI believes Pildes primarily targeted SantaCon attendees who purchased tickets to the event, as well as bars that participated in the event, between the timeframe of October 2019 to present.

If you were victimized by Stefan Pildes, please fill out this short form.

If you know of someone else who has possibly been victimized by Stefan Pildes, please encourage them to complete the form themselves.

The FBI is legally mandated to identify victims of federal crimes it investigates. Victims may be eligible for certain services, restitution, and rights under federal and/or state law. Your responses are voluntary but may be useful in the federal investigation and to identify you as a potential victim. Based on the responses provided, you may be contacted by the FBI and asked to provide additional information.

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Well, godspeed to all. Hopefully, no successor will rise to take SantaCon’s place. Even if it was actually for charity, we think EasterBunnyCon would be too much for us.

The post If SantaCon Has Personally Victimized You, the FBI Wants to Know appeared first on Nerdist.

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Amazon, along with the rest of the industry, has gotten so used to framing everything that happens through the context of AI that it has lost the plot on their Graviton chip lineup, and along with it their own credibility. Which is a shame, because it's actually a triumph of a chip. First, the Wall Street Journal breathlessly reported that Snowflake's $6 billion AWS commitment was "for agentic computing chips." Then AWS's own press release heralded the release of their latest chips "for the Agentic AI era." In both cases, they were referring to their Graviton line. You could be forgiven for thinking this was some kind of GPU. No, that's Trainium. (Technically, Trainium isn't a GPU, nor is it a CPU, but rather a systolic array. Don't worry; most AI engineering software doesn't know what the hell that is, either.) Graviton is AWS's general purpose Arm CPU, which can be used for AI in much the same way as Excel can be used as a database. But that's far from its only, or even primary, purpose. Let's dive into what Graviton actually is. Price / Performance / Reality For the longest time, Amazon refused to issue benchmarks, competitively positioning its then-nascent Arm line against Intel. Many of us thought this meant that the results would underwhelm — so you can imagine my surprise when real-world workload tests showed 35 percent to 40 percent better performance in a wide variety of situations. It was as if Amazon had built something amazing, but was somehow embarrassed to admit it. Those days are long behind us; they trumpet in the subhead of their announcement that Graviton 5 means "apps run 35% faster, ML inference is 35% faster, and databases are 30% faster." To their credit, I was expecting those numbers to be against something ancient, but in a refreshing bout of honesty, they're comparing them to Graviton 4, itself no slouch. They are also 9 percent more expensive. Once upon a time, new generations of AWS instances were notably less expensive than their predecessors. Going from a c4.large to a c5.large meant you'd get better performance, and the instance itself was a whopping 15 percent cheaper. Upgrading was a no-brainer! That started changing, and now upgrading means the instance becomes more expensive. AWS's position is that this is an incomplete analysis, since the improved performance means you'd pay less for a given workload. In some cases, this is correct, but in others, it's akin to saying that a Ferrari offers better price performance than my Honda CR-V because I can drive it to work three times faster. Logic, as well as traffic lights, disagree. Amazon's contention is correct for customers who have large fleets of nodes that they run at high degrees of CPU utilization. Switching those fleets to the new hotness will absolutely result in a price performance improvement, provided the workload and the stars both align. However, for customers who need a fixed number of nodes (think database companies, who offer each customer of theirs a set number of replicas, or workloads of the form "each environment gets three nodes, one in each AZ"), this represents a pure 9 percent price hike going from old generations to new ones. That puts many customers in a pickle: upgrade to new instance families, or stay on the old ones and watch availability become constrained in the coming years as AWS stops racking old chips. (Hi, Amazon PR! If you're about to pop into my inbox to tell me that won't happen, I have a customer I'd love for you to have a chat with!) But this price hike isn't happening in a vacuum. It's happening against a backdrop of "an 8GB Raspberry Pi is now $175, over twice its launch price of $85." Components have become fiendishly expensive across the board as giant companies compete for capacity, and AWS has to be feeling that pressure. Two companies each asked to buy all of AWS's Graviton capacity for the year; AWS clearly has room to kick their prices into the stratosphere! Somehow, they're not only resisting the siren song of "please gouge me, business daddy," but also managing to keep availability strong for customers of all stripes; I upgraded my developer node in my tiny unremarkable AWS account yesterday, and it Just Worked. And so... Despite the nonsense marketing, I don't want to detract from just how amazing Annapurna Labs (Amazon's chip division) has been at churning out wildly performant silicon year over year. Their chips are legitimately great, and the Graviton 5 numbers are a triumph. Lost against the backdrop of "Agentic AI," the stuff underpinning all of it continues to work, improve, and largely pass by unremarked. Keep going. ®