Timing is everything. On the same day last week that Kyndryl told staff they were at risk of redundancy, a pulse survey landed on the desks of the entire workforce. The short questionnaire is used by organizations to measure sentiment toward the business, typically comprising one to 20 questions and sent weekly, monthly, or quarterly. It's a process that is commonplace across the world of work. Except on Wednesday, May 20, it happened to coincide with Kyndryl telling certain employees that their roles may get chopped. A source told us voluntary redundancy was offered in the first instance, including four months' salary. "With the hundreds that are on TUPE terms, I can't see a huge uptake but it may persuade some of the newer ones," claimed an insider. "As a (slightly) amusing aside and to show how joined up we are, the pulse survey went out on Wednesday afternoon just after most of the company had been told they were at risk." Kyndryl told us last week it is trying to "address labor costs" in some countries, including the UK. This followed financial results for the year ended March 31 when revenue grew $63 million to $15.057 billion and net profit shrank 21 percent to $198 million. Charges for severance are forecast at $200 million. A spokesperson at Kyndryl – the infrastructure tech services division that was spun out of IBM in 2021 – sent a statement to The Register on the distribution of the pulse survey. "Since becoming an independent company, we've invited Kyndryls globally to share input in a survey about our culture and workplace twice per year. This is part of our commitment to listen and take action based on employee feedback." At the end of last week, the tech biz held a town hall meeting with workers, according to a source, which we're told lasted about four minutes and gave away very few details. "Now teams are being asked to fill in their 'goals for 2027' when they don't even know if they will have a job," our source claimed. "Insensitive doesn't even come into it, all the while HR are saying how much empathy and respect they are showing." As we mentioned, timing is everything. The Reg suspects not everyone is entirely happy about the recent run of events, and may use the pulse survey to make those feelings heard loud and clear. ®
The EU's moderation appeals watchdog says Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube routinely leave hate speech online while stonewalling attempts to independently review suspended accounts. Appeals Centre Europe, an Ireland-certified dispute settlement body operating under the EU's Digital Services Act, says it overturned platforms' decisions not to remove reported hate speech 70 percent of the time between April 2025 and March 2026, including content targeting migrants, Roma communities, religious minorities, and LGBTQI+ people. TikTok fared worst, with the Appeals Centre overturning its decisions in 83 percent of reviewed hate speech disputes, followed by Instagram at 74 percent, Facebook at 61 percent, and YouTube at 58 percent. The report suggests that Europe's moderation accountability regime is functioning more or less how veteran tech policy watchers feared it might. In theory, the system gives EU users a free way to challenge moderation decisions through an independent review body. In practice, Appeals Centre Europe says platforms often fail to hand over the disputed content or account material needed to review cases. Account bans appear to be where the process really starts to fall apart. Appeals Centre Europe says that despite receiving more than 14,000 suspension disputes, it got enough content from platforms to fully review fewer than 150 cases. Instead, thousands of cases ended in what the Appeals Centre calls "default decisions," in which platforms failed to provide the material within 30 days, and the ruling automatically went in the user's favor. More than 7,300 disputes ended that way. Meta appears to be struggling most with the "independent review" part of independent review. The report says that out of more than 4,600 eligible Facebook and Instagram account suspension disputes, the company supplied the disputed content in fewer than 100 cases. The findings also complicate the increasingly popular narrative that platforms are over-censoring everything in sight. Appeals Centre Europe says it overturned decisions to remove users' content 52 percent of the time in cases where it could actually review the material. Rules around restricted goods and services proved especially messy, with the group overturning removals in 65 percent of reviewed disputes. In other words, the platforms appear capable of simultaneously leaving up content they should remove while deleting content they should leave alone, which is an impressive operational achievement even by social media standards. Thomas Hughes, CEO of Appeals Centre Europe, said: "Online hate and harassment have real-world consequences for many people and communities. In more than two-thirds of our decisions about hate speech, we found that platforms failed to enforce their own policies and left up hateful content. This goes to show that platforms don't always get it right. If you're in the EU, you can challenge a platform's decisions free of charge to Appeals Centre Europe and get an expert, impartial review." However, the report also suggests platforms do not always implement the Appeals Centre's decisions even after cases are reviewed. In one section covering disputes submitted by civil society groups, the organization says it is aware of only "a handful" of cases in which platforms acted on its rulings, while many disputed posts remained online. That's not exactly the robust moderation accountability system Brussels has spent years promising users. ®
SPONSORED POST Five years ago, most cloud workloads ran on a single CPU architecture by default. No more. Today every major hyperscaler offers Arm-based compute, so what began as an option is now a core part of modern cloud infrastructure. The reason is straightforward. As AI workloads scale and cloud demand continues to grow, providers are under pressure to deliver more performance while controlling power consumption, cost, and datacenter footprint. Meeting those demands is forcing a rethink of the hardware foundations of the cloud. Arm-based silicon now powers many of these platforms. AWS offers Graviton processors, Google Cloud introduced Axion, Microsoft Azure runs Cobalt-based instances, and Oracle Cloud Infrastructure deploys Ampere Arm processors. Across these environments, the focus is consistent: improving performance while reducing power consumption and overall cost. The economics can be significant. Arm-based cloud instances have demonstrated up to 65% better price-performance and as much as 60% greater energy efficiency across various workloads, including databases, AI inference, and networking services. These advantages are already influencing large-scale production environments. Spotify has reported roughly 250 percent in performance improvements on Arm-based Axion processors while reducing compute costs. Meanwhile, using Arm-based AWS Graviton processors, Pinterest achieved 47 percent infrastructure cost savings and reduced carbon emissions by 62 percent for a major workload. At Uber, engineers have taken the multi-architecture approach even further. The company is integrating Arm-based hosts alongside x86 infrastructure across thousands of microservices as part of a broader migration to the cloud. It is shooting for increased hardware flexibility, improved price-performance, and support sustainability objectives while continuing to scale globally. Shifting toward heterogeneous cloud infrastructure doesn't necessarily mean rewriting applications from scratch. Modern cloud-native stacks already support multi-architecture environments through container tooling and orchestration platforms like Kubernetes. Many common frameworks, languages, and open-source packages now run natively on Arm. Arm is also expanding developer resources that simplify the migration process. The Arm Cloud Migration Program offers guidance, tooling, and technical expertise to help organizations move workloads to Arm-based platforms across major cloud providers. As AI infrastructure spending accelerates and cloud efficiency becomes a competitive priority, the industry is increasingly embracing heterogeneous compute strategies. Instead of relying on a single architecture, developers are designing systems that take advantage of multiple processor types optimized for different workloads. In that environment, Arm is quickly becoming a core component of the modern cloud stack. Learn more about the Arm Cloud Migration Program and resources for developers by visiting Arm today. Sponsored by Arm.
PWNED Welcome, once again, to PWNED, the weekly column where we cover high-security hijinks that are at least partially the victim’s fault. This week, we have a trio of tales that involve incredibly unprofessional behavior, inappropriate use of corporate resources, and outright theft, all dealt with by IT. Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Share it with us at pwned@sitpub.com. Anonymity is available upon request. Our trilogy of tech exposure comes courtesy of Zach Lewis, the current CIO and CISO at the University of Health Sciences and Pharmacy in St. Louis. Before his current role, Lewis worked for various other companies in IT roles and he has some tea to spill. At one job, Lewis was working as a sysadmin when the CEO asked for help recovering photos he had accidentally deleted from a company file share. The files were accessible to anyone at the organization, and Lewis searched archived copies in Google Picasa to restore them. Unfortunately, the pictures the CEO was missing included many that were very much NSFW. “So I was called in to sit down with him and look at it. And we're just like I restore everything. We start clicking images to make sure everything's there, just doing a random subset check,” Lewis said. “And, uh, just some pornography comes up and he's sitting right next to me. I mean, right next to me, he's just like, oh yeah, that's just some of my porn.” When he was done restoring the photos, Lewis left the room. It was clear the boss had no shame and no problem with IT seeing his explicit images or with storing them where any employee could download them. They were even mixed in with official photos and family pictures. However, knowing this was bad policy and could probably lead to a lawsuit, Lewis approached human resources and told them about the problem. The HR representative instructed him to delete all the smut from the network, even though it belonged to the big boss. He did that, and fortunately, did not face any repercussions at work for deleting the big man’s cheeky pictures. He wore a top hat In another instance, Lewis was asked to look at a coworker’s computer when the employee thought he had gotten a virus on his laptop. However, the colleague cautioned IT not to look through his files. After a little while, Lewis noticed a folder filled with other subfolders that were festooned with adult images, both of naked women and of the employee himself without clothes on. All of the photos had appropriately descriptive file names too. Perhaps most embarrassing of all for the coworker is that Lewis saw his semi-naked pictures. To be fair, he was dressed in the images, as he was wearing a top hat – but nothing else. The problem, Lewis notes, is that employees treat their work computers as if they are home computers and do not think about the implications of having personal images on something that belongs to a corporation. He suggests setting a firm policy against this kind of thing and educating workers about the policy. When workers inevitably violate the policy, it’s time for a gentle reminder. “A policy is just, you know, paper, right? It's hard to enforce that,” Lewis said. “You can talk to the user in this instance. In this most recent instance with this guy in the top hat, it was ‘hey, these are company resources’ when I gave the computer back to him.” Kids’ YouTube upload exposed a potential thief In another gig, Lewis worked at a university. When one athletics coach quit, he was supposed to leave his school-issued iPad on his desk. But when the IT department came to collect the equipment, this tablet was missing. No one could find the missing iPad, but a month later, someone uploaded a new video to the school’s YouTube channel. The video featured a different coach's kids and appeared to have been uploaded from his house. Apparently, the other coach had allegedly snatched the iPad off of the first coach’s desk and given it to his kids. The kids then used the iPad to film a funny home video and upload it to YouTube, not realizing that it was connected to the school’s official YouTube account. Lewis notified HR, who called the apparent thief in. At first, he denied that the children in the video were his offspring. However, the HR agent then showed him a photo of him and his kids on social media together and he admitted, okay, he was their dad. The coach then said he didn’t know how the iPad got into his house. But he grabbed it and returned it to IT. There are a lot of problems with the iPad situation from a security perspective. First, the iPad that wasn’t turned over clearly was not locked to the point where someone else couldn’t get into it. It had access to the school’s YouTube account, so any thief could add their own content to it and it may have even had PII (personally identifiable information) about some student athletes. Bottom line: make sure departing employees hand over equipment directly to IT. Don’t let them just leave equipment on a desk. And make sure even tablets require biometric access. ®
Built on top of the open-source Hermes project, Vertu's new foldable combines AI-agent workflows, enterprise integrations, and ultra-premium luxury finishes.
Analyst firm Gartner thinks at least half of all generative AI projects “will overrun their budgeted costs due to poor architectural choices and lack of operational know-how,” and most organizations that try to build custom models “will abandon their efforts due to costs, complexity and technical debt in their deployments.” Those findings headline the Hype Cycle for Generative AI the firm published last week, which considered 30 AI technologies and found none have reached the “plateau of productivity” – Gartner-speak for products and technologies that have gone through two or three generations of evolution, stabilized, and produce verifiable real-world benefits. To reach the plateau, tech ascends the Peak of Inflated Expectations, falls into the Trough of Disillusionment, and slowly climbs a Slope of Enlightenment. Gartner labels Domain-specific GenAI models – models built from scratch or fine-tuned on domain data – as likely to produce superior results and fewer hallucinations compared to the output of general-purpose models in fields such as healthcare, finance, law and other industries. But the firm advises building these models “requires significant compute resources, specialized expertise and ongoing maintenance,” and rates their maturity as “adolescent” and placed it just before the Peak of Inflated Expectations and at least two to five years from becoming mature enough for mainstream use. Just one of the technologies Gartner considered is climbing the slope: Generative-AI-enabled applications such as coding assistants, graphics and video creation, and summarizing content. The firm worries that intellectual property concerns and the tendency to create inaccurate output continue to plague these tools but feels rapid evolution of underlying models means these applications are quite mature – as shown by over half the target market having adopted such applications. The Hype Cycle rates AI agent communication protocols – a specification that defines the rules that allow agents to interact with each other and the wider environment to enable an AI agent to interact with its environment or – as the least mature AI technology. The analyst firm notes that Model Context Protocol (MCP) and agent-to-agent protocol (A2A) are currently the most popular such tools, but says several alternatives are already emerging and that all are evolving quickly as early adopters find weaknesses and omissions. Gartner thinks two technologies – Disinformation Security and World Models – have the greatest potential impact. The analyst firm describes the first as tools that help an organization fight back against disinformation campaigns that use deepfakes, impersonation, and other content to besmirch a company or individual – or to create content involved in cyberattacks. “Attack vectors are varied and can include using GenAI-created content to fool voice or face biometric authentication, or to trick identity verification processes used in account recovery workflows,” Gartner’s analysts suggest. “Once authenticated as the perceived user, malicious actors can take nefarious actions such as planting ransomware, stealing intellectual property, theft of funds and spreading disinformation.” The commercialization of open LLMs has been challenging for builders “Most employees have never seen a deepfake of their leadership or someone they know, and this is a liability in the event of an attack against your organization,” the document states. Gartner thinks red-teaming exercises to detect deepfakes are therefore in order and suggests monitoring social media and forums for nasty AI content about your brand. Good luck with that effort, because Gartner rates these tools as five to ten years away from maturity. World Models are abstractions of a physical environment that Gartner says “empower AI to perform more sophisticated prediction and planning tasks, moving beyond mere pattern recognition in observed data. By simulating and understanding the dynamics of environments, AI can better handle uncertainty or missing information and therefore make informed decisions that account for future possibilities and contingencies.” They’re also useful to guide robots through the human world or to create AI-generated videos that more accurately depict the laws of physics. Gartner also thinks that organizations that want to build their AI on open models won’t be able to access the best technology unless they’re willing to consider Chinese tech. “The commercialization of open LLMs has been challenging for builders and many Western tech companies are being selective with releasing open models, which has relegated innovation in this space to China,” the firm observes, adding that while these models “continue to advance in terms of quality and speed of innovation, the innovation ecosystem for open models has shifted east to China.” ®
Hyperscalers’ purchasing power means bare metal servers offered by major clouds can now be cheaper and easier to acquire than on-prem servers, according to Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami. The CEO told The Register hyperscalers’ ability to buy servers and memory in bulk means they can often make infrastructure available faster than enterprise hardware players, and sees some customers who have previously preferred on-premises infrastructure heading for the cloud. Ramaswami said he expects high memory and solid state storage prices will persist into next year and noted the impact of current price rises on the cost of servers. “What that means for customers is they need to plan and budget carefully,” he said. “They pick servers on price and lead time” – and clouds often win on both metrics. At the same time, Ramaswami said customers increasingly favor on-prem AI infrastructure to keep costs predictable. They want that because the CEO thinks AI remains “one of those things where people feel they have to do it” and return on investment is unclear. “People are seeing incremental benefits,” he said, citing document search and summaries as the most common on-prem AI applications. Nutanix, he said, has measured a ten-percent improvement in service response times from using AI, while its developers are delivering new features 50 percent faster than before they used AI helpers. Enterprise virtualization stacks like Nutanix’s products can require several hefty hosts to run. Ramaswami said he’s comfortable the footprint of his company’s products is not an issue for new buyers, but that he is also keenly aware that customers are looking for smaller hosts – and even servers running non-x86 processors. For now, he doesn’t see sufficient appetite for Arm servers that Nutanix will devote developer time to porting its stack to that platform. But if demand comes, Ramaswami is confident it won’t be a major job as FOSS projects the company relies on – such as Kubernetes and the KVM hypervisor – already run on Arm silicon. The CEO’s remarks came on the same day Nutanix reported its Q3 2026 results, which included news that the company won 730 new clients in the last quarter with Ramaswami saying “most moved from legacy vendors to us.” That’s almost certainly a reference to VMware. Whether Nutanix is hurting its rival remains to be seen: pre-acquisition VMware had over 350,000 customers and now focuses on the top 10,000. Nutanix can pick up former Virtzilla users without disrupting Broadcom’s master plan. Ramaswami said many new customers have taken advantage of Nutanix’s shift to allow use of external storage, a change from its previous insistence on using only its own software-defined storage. The CEO said the company scored a pair of seven-figure deals with companies that chose to continue using external storage from Everpure (formerly Pure Storage) and Dell, respectively. Q3 revenue was $703 million, a ten percent year on year jump. Nutanix has always preferred to emphasize annual recurring revenue as a metric, and that rose 15 percent year over year to $2.43 billion. Investors liked what they heard, sending Nutanix’s share price up a couple of points in after hours trading. ®
According to the complaint, a Google engineer risked over $2.7 million on wagers related to Google's 2025 Year in Search campaign.
Salesforce's decapitated response to the SaaS-pocalypse has quickly won adoption, as Headless 360 – which allows customers to access all of their Salesforce data from Cursor, WhatsApp, ChatGPT, Claude, or a terminal – has processed 4.5 million MCP calls, and a nearly a trillion API calls, since launching at Trailhead DX in April, CEO Mark Benioff said on Wednesday. “It's going to lead implementations, drive consumption, more actions, more workflow, more data, more intelligence, all compounding across Salesforce. We're meeting our customers where they are,” Benioff said during the company’s first quarter 2027 earnings call. “With Headless 360, Indeed is building and deploying Agentforce agents right from Cursor.” Salesforce chief revenue officer Miguel Milano said the real breakthrough wasn't for builders but for knowledge workers, because they can now access Salesforce through Slack, Claude Cowork, or other tools in their daily flow without context-switching into a separate app. “We're going to bring our number one agentic CRM to every surface, meeting customers where they are, and we're going to work together with our customers and with our partners to find the right ways to, in a fair way, to monetize those new interactions and those new uses are accessing our platform," he said during the call. Headless 360 attempts to expand Salesforce's addressable market into areas it's never previously entered. Milano said it is a fourth monetization vector beyond seat upgrades, new user pockets, and flex credits — though he said they're still working with customers and partners to figure out the right pricing for the new headless interactions. Milano gave two customer stories. Adecco, a staffing company, had been building recruiter agents with outside AI labs that needed to pull data from Salesforce. He said when Headless 360 launched, they called and asked if those external agents could now access the platform natively. “Are you saying that now these agents that we are building outside Agentforce can also leverage Salesforce?” Milano said. “And we said, ‘Exactly.’ “ Milano's second example was Anthropic, which he described as one of Salesforce's biggest users of CRM, Sales Cloud, and Slack. He said Anthropic’s Sales Cloud usage with Salesforce grew fivefold in Q1 because employees started accessing it through Claude Cowork and Slack rather than logging in directly. “Sales Cloud has become more prominent and more strategic for them than ever, because of headless,” Milano said. Analysts questioned whether making Salesforce data available from multiple platforms outside of Salesforce’s native app may abstract the value of the product. Salesforce chief marketing officer Patrick Stokes said on the contrary, customers still need and rely on the data that is inside the platform, even if they don’t need the UI. “What's so exciting about headless is two things: one, it's having a real impact on making it easier to implement with Salesforce, so building out with Salesforce has now become easier than ever because we've seen these coding agents Claude and Codex from from Open AI, as you use these things, what you realize is you need to be able to connect the underlying APIs which you do through this layer that's MCP, and if you can connect those into the coding agents, it makes it faster than ever to implement and deploy Salesforce,” he said. Stokes said customers aren't using coding agents to replicate Salesforce capabilities themselves. Instead, they want to consume Salesforce in more ways and get more value from it — plugging MCP servers into ChatGPT, Claude, or Slack rather than logging into discrete applications. Salesforce president and chief engineering and customer success officer Srini Tallapragada said this is part of a trend the company is seeing where customers still rely on the architecture, the data, the compliance, and the security they find in Salesforce, but they want to access the data from where they are working. To prove this point, he said in addition to the millions of calls to Salesforce headless MCP server since it launched, Slack’s headless MCP server has seen between 30 to 50 million tool calls from customers, which also represents a new avenue for Salesforce to monetize. “We want to capture value wherever the work is happening, and that's the conversation we are having with our customers, and as we talk to our customers, ISV partners, and all," he said. "We'll figure out the right value. So, I think it's a new monetization area for us.” Compared to the previous earnings call, where Benioff cited 200 new deals and name checked three ServiceNow take outs, Salesforce's chief SaaSquatch was relatively muted about its nascent ITSM rivalry with ServiceNow. He noted that anti-virus firm McAfee left ServiceNow for Salesforce Agentforce ITSM during the quarter. “They are using it for everything, ticket deflection, hardware provisioning, incident management. Really cool,” he said. Salesforce reported first-quarter fiscal 2027 revenue of $11.13 billion, up 13% year-over-year. Net income rose to $2.10 billion, or $2.42 per diluted share, up from $1.54 billion, or $1.59 per share, in the year-ago quarter. For the next quarter, Salesforce guided to revenue of $11.27 billion to $11.35 billion, implying 10% to 11% year-over-year growth. The company also raised its full-year fiscal 2027 revenue guidance to a range of $45.9 billion to $46.2 billion, representing roughly 11% growth. The stock dipped very slightly in after-hours trading on the results. ®
Google is embarrassing itself, again.
No escaping inflation right now, somehow an even worse time for consumers than the already bad times of recent years. Shit is way too expensive and it seems like prices won’t go down any time soon. And this goes for everything, from staples like groceries and gasoline, to luxuries like technology and entertainment. But even at a time when price hikes are commonplace, what Valve has just done is unprecedented. They’re raising the price on their proprietary Steam Deck handheld gaming system by an exorbitant amount. Like, legitimately a “f**k you” amount.Valve
As we saw in a BlueSky post by Wario 64, Valve’s prices for the Steam Deck have gone up close to 50%.
Valve has raised Steam Deck prices in the US
• 1TB OLED $649 -> $949
• 512GB OLED $549 -> $789
still out of stock
store.steampowered.com/steamdeck
Now, $650 for a handheld was already pretty damned expensive. Nintendo’s Switch 2 is only $499.99, for example. But, given the robustness of Steam as a gaming platform and a digital storefront, it’s somewhat understandable. But going up by $300?! Nearly a thousand dollars for a gaming system when nobody in America can afford to drive places is truly criminal.
Valve is clearly trying to keep pace with Sony. Earlier this year, PlayStation announced the prices of its PS5 console would increase. The PS5 Pro went up to $899.99, which is crazy expensive. However, that’s a full console with 4K capabilities. The Steam Deck is still just a handheld. A very good handheld, but not in the ballpark of a PlayStation 5. Valve also announced its own console a while back, but no date or price for that have materialized, owing to costs of everything. So is raising the price of Steam Deck just a way to subsidize the Steam Machine?
Valve
It’s a rough time in the gaming world for everyone, but it’s an especially bad time for people trying to get into playing games. Video games are a bigger industry than movies but with a much, much higher cost of entry. With thousand-dollar consoles and AAA games heading steadily toward $100 per game, this century’s definitive artform looks to also be its most exclusive.
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.
This post has affiliate links, which means we may earn advertising money if you buy something. This doesn’t cost you anything extra, we just have to give you the heads up for legal reasons. Click away!
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House Democrats are getting ready to fight the Trump administration’s corruption, with the launch of an “End Corruption Caucus” on Wednesday. In a press release, the caucus—which is chaired by Reps. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Jason Crow of Colorado, and Mike Levin of California—said it will “work to advance legislation, bring together like-minded partners, and aim to root out…
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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. Rejoice! Trump Mobile’s ‘urine sample’ phone finally launched. And it’s far from a viable phone. Ken Paxton’s win is another fake victory for Trump Just because Trump wanted it doesn’t make it good for the GOP. Trump plots to muzzle federal workers’ First Amendment…
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Consider supporting my work so I can continue creating it: Substack: https://nickanderson.substack.com/ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/c/editorialcartoons Ko-Fi: https://www.patreon.com/c/editorialcartoonsCartoon Related | Ken Paxton’s win is another fake victory for Trump…
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Santa Cruz County agricultural officials are urging residents to check recently purchased grape plants after the invasive glassy-winged sharpshooter insect was discovered on grapevines sold at Costco stores across the San Francisco Bay Area.
The Santa Cruz Costco store was among those that received these grape plants from a wholesale nursery store in Fresno County, according to a Santa Cruz County media release.
The insect, a type of leafhopper, can spread Pierce’s disease, which threatens grapevines and other agricultural and ornamental plants.
Anyone who purchased grape plants from Costco on or after April 21 is advised to not move or dispose of the plant, cover the plant securely with two garbage bags, and contact the Santa Cruz County Agricultural Commissioner’s Office at 831-763-8080 or Agc002@agdept.com for inspection instructions.
In a media release, David Sanford, Santa Cruz County’s agricultural commissioner, said his agency is working closely with Costco, as well as state and local partners, to identify affected plants and safeguard agriculture.
This issue involves grape plants intended for planting, not grapes sold for consumption.
Have news that should be in Lookout Briefs? Send your news releases, including contact information, to news@lookoutlocal.com.
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The post County agricultural officials urge residents to report possible invasive insect on grape plants appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.
A 21-year-old Watsonville man was arrested early Wednesday on suspicion of threatening a mass shooting at an unspecified Pajaro Valley Unified School District graduation ceremony.
Moises Resendiz was charged with making criminal threats, a felony. He was booked into Santa Cruz County Jail and was being held without bail, according to jail records.
Detectives and the Santa Cruz County Anti-Crime Team served a search warrant in the 700 block of Rodriguez Street, where Resendiz was arrested. No firearms were found, and no guns are registered to him, Watsonville Police spokeswoman Erika Vazquez said.
“We want to assure the community that there are no active threats at this moment, and school safety remains a top priority for us,” Vazquez said.
In a prepared statement, PVUSD Superintendent Heather Contreras said “safety is our absolute priority, especially during this season of celebration.”
“We are grateful to the alert citizen who reported this post,” she said. “Threats against our schools are never a joke; they are crimes that we and our law enforcement partners will always take seriously.”
Contreras added that the district will maintain a heightened security presence at all graduation events.
Police said Resendiz admitted posting the threatening social media comment to “rage-bait” the community, a term used to describe content intended to provoke anger.
A citizen reported the threat to Watsonville police on May 9. Detectives launched an investigation that day and gathered information and evidence to obtain the search warrant, which was served Wednesday.
“We needed to wait in order to make sure we didn’t interfere with the investigation and wouldn’t be releasing premature information,” Vazquez told the Pajaronian.
She added that police take all threats made on social media seriously and that such threats will be fully investigated “without exception.”
Practically every day, we learn more about how the Trump administration is taking your money and giving it to a motley of cronies who are trashing the place. In the latest insult to our ongoing injury, we’ve found out that the sweet little no-bid contract received by Atlantic Industrial Coatings, the company wrecking the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, is excessive.
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After a long two-year wait, X-Men ’97 will return in July with its long-awaited second season. We finally got our release date along with the new trailer for season two, which continues on from the iconic X-Men: The Animated Series. But fans of Marvel’s mutants have even more to rejoice about, as we now know that X-Men ’97 will have not only a third season, but also a fourth as well. And the wait between seasons won’t be more than a year, unlike the last time. All of this was confirmed in an interview with X-Men ’97 executive producer Larry Houston in Entertainment Weekly. Here’s what he had to say:
They want everyone to know it’s only gonna be a year now between seasons, not two-and-a-quarter years. It’s gonna be a year until the next one and a year until the next one [after that]. They are on schedule now. One of the reasons they’re on schedule is we’ve gone over, given notes on, responded to not only all the scripts for season 3, all the animatics for season 3, we are in season 4 giving script notes. So that’s how deep they are into the development.
Marvel TelevisionHouston also said nothing is stopping Marvel Television from doing a fifth season, and even more after that. X-Men ’97 co-producer Eric Lewald, in the same interview, said, “There’s a commitment until our grandchildren have grandchildren.” Houston and Lewald, along with his wife Julia Lewald, are all veterans of X-Men: The Animated Series. Look, we’d be happy with the traditional “six seasons and a movie.” But we’ll gladly take more.
With an upcoming farewell to the Fox-era X-Men in Avengers: Doomsday, an MCU X-Men reboot following Secret Wars, a possible Deadpool and X-Force movie, and X-Men ’97, we may be entering into a new Golden Age for Xavier’s students on screen. And it’s long overdue. They’ve taken a backseat to those Avenging people for long enough. X-Men ’97 season two drops on Disney+ on July 1.
The post X-MEN ’97 Confirmed for a 4th Season on Disney+ appeared first on Nerdist.
Summer is arriving in Santa Cruz County, and with it, Santa Cruz County is gearing up for a sunny set of engaging events. June’s lineup is all about local flavor, community connection and celebrating the people and places that make Santa Cruz County special. From exclusive tastings to trivia nights and networking events, we’re excited to gather with readers, members and partners out in the community.
We’re proud to partner with local organizations to highlight events that reflect the heart of Santa Cruz County. It’s all part of our mission to make local news a living, breathing part of community life.
And we couldn’t do it without our Marketing Partners, who help us spotlight key happenings across the county. Interested in joining our Media Sponsorship program? Contact Duffy Barrett at duffy@lookoutlocal.com.
See you out in the community this month!
Private VegFest tasting tour with Lily Belli | June 6
Join Lookout’s food and drink correspondent, Lily Belli at 10:30 a.m. until noon, for a curated tasting experience at VegFest, featuring standout bites, sips and stories from festival vendors before the crowds arrive.
Trivia Night with Wallace Baine at Abbott Square | June 10
Wallace might have retired, but he’s still got the trivia! Bring your friends and test your local knowledge for a fun evening of trivia, conversation and community gathering at Abbott Square beginning at 6:30 and ending around 8 p.m.
Business After Hours with the Santa Cruz Area Chamber of Commerce | June 11
Tour the Lookout office, meet the team and connect with local professionals, business leaders and community members during this special after-hours networking event hosted with the chamber of commerce from 5-7 p.m..
Juneteenth Celebration | June 13
Join community members to celebrate Black liberation and freedom on Juneteenth for the 35th year at Laurel Park behind the Louden Nelson Community Center. This year’s event theme is resilience and will include soul food, craft booths, music, dance and poetry from the diaspora. Make sure to check out the ancestors altar and to arrive in time for the parade in the park starting at noon and including a live brass and drum band with an Honorary Grand Marshal.
Santa Cruz Symphony “Movie Night” | June 13
The Santa Cruz Symphony is proud to present their special annual POPS concert and benefit. Make sure to arrive early for a street party with live music, food trucks, and costumes in front of the Civic Auditorium at 5 p.m. Doors to the event will open at 6 p.m. and movie selections which will start around 7:30 include Pirates of the Caribbean, Titanic, Lord of the Rings, Interstellar, Avengers, and more. Make sure to reserve your tickets on the Symphony website before they sell out. Students are eligible to purchase discounted tickets 90 minutes prior to each regular symphony concert as long as they present their student identification.
Community Bridges – Farm to Fork Gala | June 27
Indulge in a night packed with regional wine, seasonal cuisine and a silent auction with Community Bridges for their Farm to Fork Gala from 5-9 p.m.. This event will bring together supporters, partners and community champions to celebrate the impact of Community Bridges ten different programs and the community that helps to make the organization’s work possible.
Sip for Second Harvest | June 28
Join Second Harvest for a celebration of community, compassion and charity at the beautiful Seascape Beachside Resort in Aptos from 1-4 p.m.. Sip on some fine wine, beer and cider alongside live music and delicious light appetizers. All proceeds benefit Second Harvest Food Bank of Santa Cruz County in providing healthy food and nutrition education to neighbors in need of the County.
Galicia Stack Lozano is a student at UC Santa Cruz and an intern at Lookout Santa Cruz through the Humanities EXCEL program led by the UC Santa Cruz Humanities Division with strategic support from The Humanities Institute
The post Lookout in the Community: Where to gather, celebrate and connect this June appeared first on Lookout Santa Cruz.
Cloud data warehouse Snowflake plans to spend $6 billion on Amazon’s custom Graviton CPUs and AI accelerators over the next five years. The collab aims to reduce friction in connecting Snowflake customer data with a growing number of AI services built atop AWS’ cloud infrastructure. “We are making it easier for enterprises to bring AI directly to governed data, so they can move faster, operate with greater density and create measurable impact at scale,” Snowflake CEO Sridhar Ramaswamy said in a canned statement. Snowflake is a long-time AWS customer, having built the company atop the cloud titan's servers going back to 2011. Over the past few years, Snowflake has shifted an increasing amount of compute from Intel and AMD CPUs to Amazon’s own Arm-based Graviton instances. Now in their fifth generation, Amazon’s latest Graviton processors cram 192 Arm Neoverse V3 cores which are fed by 12 channels of memory up to 8800 MT/s. As we’ve previously reported, CPUs are back in the spotlight again after years of being overshadowed by GPUs and other AI accelerators. The models themselves still run on GPUs, but the tools and functions those models call — a SQL query or Python script, for example — do not. Those workloads still rely on CPUs. This has driven renewed demand for CPU cores as each agent’s performance is inherently limited by how quickly the processor can service the request. Under the agreement, Snowflake will run and train its GenAI models and services using a combination of GPUs running in AWS and Graviton CPU cores. For example, Snowflake says that its Cortex AI platform can convert natural language to SQL queries, summarize data, and conduct sentiment analysis. According to Amazon, Snowflake’s lifetime AWS marketplace sales crossed $7 billion and exceeded $2 billion during the 2025 calendar year. Clearly the data warehousing platform is betting these AI tools will continue to drive revenues enough to justify splashing $1.2 billion a year on additional infrastructure. Gamble or not, Wall Street doesn't seem to worried, with Snowflake rallying by more than 30 percent in after hours trading Wednesday. Snowflake isn’t the only company diving deeper into Graviton’s orbit. Back in April, Meta revealed plans to deploy tens of millions of Amazon’s Graviton 5 CPU cores. The multi-year collaboration was expected to make the social network one of the biggest consumers of AWS’ homegrown silicon. Much like Snowflake’s $6 billion investment in Amazon’s infrastructure, Meta’s cloud spend is largely aimed at securing cores for AI agents. But unlike Snowflake, which for better or worse remains heavily reliant on AWS for compute, Meta’s tie up may only be a stopgap while it awaits Arm’s buzzword-packed AGI CPUs. ®
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