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The tokenmaxxing era was brief. We now appear to be entering the era of token rationing.

Donald Trump totally isn’t bitter about having his name removed from the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. Nevermind the fact that his administration put up a massive tarp obscuring the building’s facade after a judge made the president take his name down.

The white tarp attached to the front of the Kennedy Center blocks most of the building’s lettering. (The nameplate now confusingly reads “THE JOHN F. — ORMING ARTS.”) It was erected on June 13, along with some extra scaffolding, one day after the court deadline to remove Trump’s name from the prestigious theater.

Workers took down the letters spelling out Trump’s name in a “predawn operation,” reported Reuters, and installed the tarp immediately afterward. On Wednesday, U.S. District Judge Christopher Cooper demanded the administration explain “the purpose and status of ​the tarp and scaffolding,” though he gave the White House a lengthy deadline, July 31, in which to do so.

Democratic Representative ​Joyce Beatty, a board member at the center, filed the initial lawsuit against Trump after he renamed the center after himself in December. Her lawyers have alleged that the tarp is the White House’s “effort to frustrate the ⁠restoration ​of the status quo as it ​existed prior to the renaming.”

Beatty herself called the new tarp an “act ​of petty defiance.”

The pettiness of this administration is indeed something to behold. Lest we forget, Trump also tried to close the Kennedy Center for two years for “renovations” after multiple artists canceled their performances in the public backlash to the name change. Cooper blocked the two-year closure, too, though the federal government has filed an appeal.

The Legend of Vox Machina’s fourth season is wrapping up, bringing with it many changes from Vox Machina’s original storyline during Critical Role’s first campaign. The new season of The Legend of Vox Machina is loosely based off of about 20 episodes of Critical Role, ranging from episodes 84 to 100. However, this season represents the biggest departure from the original Actual Play series to date, with a majorly reworked plot that serves to set up the fifth and final season of Vox Machina and better establish the final threat the intrepid heroes must face.

The Whispered One’s Cult Becomes the Recurring Enemy in The Legend of Vox Machina Season 4 Prime Video

The biggest change in the new season of The Legend of Vox Machina is the introduction of The Whispered One’s cult as the recurring enemies of the season. Although Vox Machina eventually collided with the followers of The Whispered One (including a resurrected Delilah Briarwood), they didn’t appear until much later in Critical Role and served as a much more abrupt threat.

In The Legend of Vox Machina, the followers of the Whispered One play a much more active role in the campaign, attacking Vox Machina at several points and injuring or killing their loved ones. Keyleth’s father and Pike’s great-grandfather are both victims of the cult’s attacks, both of which are new casualties in Critical Role lore. Of course, The Legend of Vox Machina hasn’t been shy about killing off beloved side-characters that survived in the original campaign, which often raises the stakes and keeps longtime fans of the show guessing about what will happen next.

The likely reason why the Whispered One and his followers show up earlier than in the Actual Play is to better establish the threat the dark would-be god represents on the world of Exandria. To be blunt, The Whispered One (also known as Vecna) arrives much more abruptly in The Legend of Vox Machina, with the group discovering a second ziggurat under Marquet, which leads them into conflict with his followers. By establishing his cult as enemies first, Vox Machina have a more unifying threat during this part of their story, one that was missing during the Critical Role actual play.

Pike Becomes a Main Character in The Legend of Vox Machina Season 4 Prime Video

In the original Actual Play, Taryon Darrington’s introduction and time with Vox Machina mostly served as a period in which various members of Vox Machina wrapped up the side quests they accumulated during the series. While many of those personal side quests are still addressed in The Legend of Vox Machina, they’re colored somewhat by the recurring threat of the cultists.

Although season four of The Legend of Vox Machina introduces Taryon Darrington as the newest member of Vox Machina, this season seems to focus mostly on Pike and her growing feelings of rage and resentment. Pike was more of a recurring character in Critical Role’s first campaign due to Ashley Johnson’s recurring Hollywood commitments as a cast member of Blindspot while Critical Role was going on. While Pike was present for large chunks of the series, her characterization and struggles with her faith are brand new to the series. One perk to the new characterization is that we don’t know how all these complicated feelings will pay off, although fans have some theories given the events of episode 9.

The Circumstances Behind Scanlan’s Departure Is Different in the Series

Another big change to the show is the Bard’s Lament, Scanlan’s crashout and subsequent departure from Vox Machina. In the original Critical Role series, Scanlan leaves Vox Machina due to what he feels is unfair treatment by the rest of the party in the aftermath of their battle with the Chroma Conclave. It directly leads to Taryon Darrington replacing Scanlan for a time in Vox Machina, and Scanlan seems reluctant to rejoin Vox Machina even when he discovers the growing threat of The Whispered One.

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THE LEGEND OF VOX MACHINA Exclusive Season 4 Finale Clip Makes You Laugh and Sob

In The Legend of Vox Machina, the Bard’s Lament is reframed as Scanlan being heartbroken that his old friends have only tracked him down after a year away from the party to ask for his legendary sword Mythcleaver, which they believe is key to killing The Whispered One. It also ends on a much more conciliatory note, with Scanlan quickly realizing that his friends do care about him, even if they do act a bit selfishly at times. While the Bard’s Lament doesn’t have the same impact as it did in the original series, it’s likely for the best as Scanlan will likely need to return to Vox Machina much sooner than he did in Critical Role, especially as he may be the only one who could reach Pike in her critical state.

Laudna’s Appearance In the Whitestone

A big addition to the fourth season of The Legend of Vox Machina is an appearance by Laudna in the bowels of Whitestone. In the cartoon, Laudna appears as Vox Machina uncover the backstory of Delilah Briarwood and she eventually aids them in temporarily driving Delilah from Whitestone. Laudna’s backstory in the cartoon is largely the same as it was in Critical Role, although her presence in general is new to the story. Laudna is eventually introduced in Critical Role as a member of Bell’s Hells, the third main adventuring group and centerpiece of Critical Role’s third campaign. Laudna is notably the second Bell’s Hells character to appear in animated form, following a cameo appearance by Braius in the first season of The Mighty Nein.

Prime Video The Confrontation With Delilah Briarwood in Vox Machina Is a Major Change From the Critical Role Campaign

Perhaps the biggest departure from Critical Role occurred in the ninth episode of the season when Vox Machina moves to confront Delilah Briarwood and her lieutenants outside of the cult’s secret headquarters. There, Vox Machina discovers a second sphere that connects Exandria to Thar Amphala, the plane where Vecna dwells. During the confrontation, Grog is tossed into the sphere and seemingly disintegrates, as he lacks a magic amulet needed to safely pass through into the other plane.

This serves as a major blow to Pike, who had already lost her grandfather, and she (having an amulet herself) passes through the portal in pursuit of the cultists. Grog didn’t die during this portion of Critical Role, although some are speculating that it will set up a “Search for Grog” mini-arc similar to the postscript of Critical Role’s first campaign, when Grog was whisked away to another dimension. It’s doubtful that Grog’s death will be a permanent one, although his eventual resurrection may be tied to the culmination of Pike’s character arc this season.

The makers of The Legend of Vox Machina have shown that they are unafraid to make big changes to Critical Role’s original storyline in pursuit of a good story. Although the changes made to Vox Machina Season 4 are significant, the show itself is inarguably still the tale of Vox Machina. It’s just served differently to the delight of both longtime Critical Role fans and newcomers to the fandom.

The post The Biggest Changes VOX MACHINA Season 4 Made From the Critical Role Campaign appeared first on Nerdist.

Writing prompts is so … 2025! AI influencers and industry luminaries have declared that prompts are out and loops are in, and maddeningly this has become blog fodder and grist for the news cycle. Never mind that AI agents, which are models using tools in a loop, have involved loops since people started yammering about them last year. Never mind that programming has always had constructs for repetition, even before the do-loop appeared in Fortran. The word from the AI-pilled is that if you're writing prompts and checking each response, as opposed to having AI agents address multi-step tasks with minimal input, you're doing it wrong. The recent focus on loops can be attributed in part to Peter Steinberger, the creator of OpenClaw who went on to join OpenAI, even though the likes of Andrej Karpathy were writing about and implementing AI loops months earlier. "Here’s your monthly reminder that you shouldn’t be prompting coding agents anymore," Steinberger wrote in a social media post on June 7. "You should be designing loops that prompt your agents." Ed Zitron, the harbinger of AI doom, landed the first body blow with his reply: "Does OpenAI bill itself for its token spend?" That's primarily what this is about – celebrating and evangelizing autonomous token consumption, spending that OpenAI and its peers would very much like to stimulate and capture. Imagine a for-profit but heavily indebted utility advising customers to remember to leave their lights and appliances on all night. That's about where we are. To underscore the spending assumptions baked into loops über alles, Zitron in a recent post skewered Anthropic's Boris Cherny for his advocacy of loops as the successor to prompts: "Pretty convenient for a guy who’s allowed to burn upwards of $130,000 a month in tokens by Anthropic." But back to the X thread: Gautham Pai, founder of corporate learning biz Jnaapti, answered Steinberger, "Oh god, LinkedIn will now start a new fad, 'Loop Engineering'. Harness Engineering is so last year. Loop Engineering is what you should be doing." In response, Steinberger quipped, "Don’t worry it’ll take 3 months until it’s there. We’ll be talking about fleets that design your loops then." A blog post titled "Loop Engineering" appeared that very day, not on LinkedIn, but on the blog of developer Addy Osmani. And unlike the humble-brag, jargon-strewn river of scintillating affirmation that is LinkedIn, Osmani's take is worthwhile if you happen to be actually trying to implement an AI agent loop. His conclusion is particularly worthwhile, though it rather undercuts the whole idea of loops: "The loop changes the work, it does not delete you from it." Another way to put that is, "Automate at your peril." If you set an inherently non-deterministic AI model on a task and expect flawless operation, you deserve to clean up the inevitable mess. The major AI companies would love to see set-and-forget service consumption. Your job is to be the human in the loop. Your livelihood may depend on that. ®

⚡ Quick Take

• The Batman: Caped Crusader season two trailer has finally dropped.
• The new season will have the Riddler, Poison Ivy, Mad Hatter and more.
• The first season premiered in 2024.

Prime Video has released the season two trailer for its animated series, Batman: Caped Crusader. The show’s first season premiered in 2024, and its second season is finally dropping this July. Caped Crusader‘s style is very noir-like, reminiscent of the original Batman: The Animated Series from the ’90s. This makes sense—Bruce Timm, the head producer for that series, is also producing Caped Crusader. Everything from the characters’ costuming to the dark, shadowy world they live in feels straight out of the early 1900s, film noir’s peak, which the earlier series also aimed for.

Matt Reeves, director of The Batman (2022), and J.J. Abrams, producer of the Star Wars sequels, are executive producing the show, as well.

Based on the trailer, it seems the Riddler will fulfill the role of the leading villain in the season, though other classic antagonists do make appearances. We see a woman who appears (and who most have deduced) to be Poison Ivy working with the Riddler. Riddler wears a similar costume to his Animated Series counterpart, a green three-piece suit and bowler hat. He and Ivy also seem to be in a romantic relationship, which is a new, definitely odd pairing. Harley Quinn and Man-Bat also show face in short clips.

The next season of the show certainly promises plenty of action, with explosions and gunfire riddling the trailer. The video ends with a clip of the Joker talking directly to Batman and cackling evilly.

“I’ve come to awaken you. To show you what you are.”

Prime Video

The first season introduced new versions of villains like Harley Quinn, Clayface, and Catwoman, and paid close attention to the detective aspects of Batman’s character, another way it leaned into the noir plot style. Jim and Barbara Gordon also both played significant roles as allies to the hero.

Batman: Caped Crusader is a hard-boiled animated series that follows the fearsome vigilante in his early years. Forged in the fire of tragedy, billionaire Bruce Wayne becomes something both more and less than human–the BATMAN. Night after night, against overwhelming odds, he wages his relentless one-man war on crime.

Season one also featured Oswalda Cobblepot as the Penguin, a gender-swapped classic villain. The next season promises a female version of the Mad Hatter stirring up trouble in Gotham.

Batman: Caped Crusader gained massive popularity when it came out, spending seven weeks on Prime Video’s top ten list, and was received well by fans.

All ten episodes of season two will premiere on July 31.

The post Prime Video Drops BATMAN: CAPED CRUSADER Season 2 Trailer appeared first on Nerdist.

The national median price for a house is now three times higher than the median household income for Americans under 40—an obvious explanation for why nearly all young people say it’s harder for them to buy a home than it was for their parents.

A study from the Pew Research Center released Wednesday shows home prices spiking tremendously in the beginning of the 2010s, and median home value rose 30 percent (from $269,600 to $350,000) from 2019 to 2024. This surge occurred at almost three times the pace of median income, which has risen very slowly.

Pew also noted that a whopping 89 percent of Americans under 40 think their parents had an easier time buying property—and that 60 percent of metro areas in the U.S. were classified as “unaffordable.”

This comes as President Trump canceled the signing of the 21st Century Road to Housing Act on Wednesday—the largest bipartisan housing affordability bill in decades—to pressure Republicans into passing his anti-voting rights SAVE America Act. The housing affordability crisis seems to be on everyone’s list of priorities except the president’s.

Amid an influenza outbreak, major branches of the U.S. military are reinstating mandatory flu vaccines for recruits just over two months after Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth threw out the longstanding policy. ABC News reported on Tuesday that recruits for the Army, Navy, and Air Force will be required to take flu shots, and that the Air Force now has set the goal of vaccinating all…

Source

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 | Trump’s fall guy will deserve all the blowback if Iran deal collapses…

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While there was probably a moment when Slate’s leadership had to green-light the switch from one battery type to another, the momentum toward that decision had been building for years.

President Donald Trump is evidently still reeling from the results of last night’s congressional primaries, especially in New York, where multiple democratic socialists won their races.

After posting on Truth Social Wednesday that he was refusing to sign a bipartisan housing bill until the Senate passed his unpopular voting from bill, the SAVE America Act, the president spoke to reporters on Capitol Hill before a lunch with Senate Republicans—and quickly veered off topic.

One reporter asked, “Buying a home is unattainable for so many Americans. Is this election legislation more important to you than resolving the housing crisis?”

“Every election is important, we’re doing very well,” Trump responded. “They want a lot of communists to come in…The people that they’re pushing are communists, and this country is not going to have communists.”

asked about high housing costs and why he won't sign the housing bill, Trump immediately pivots to ranting about "communists" and says, "this country is not going to have communists" (in other words, rigging elections for Republicans with the SAVE Act is more important to him… pic.twitter.com/bVKphElGBF

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 24, 2026

Trump went on a posting spree Wednesday morning, writing, “America the Beautiful will NEVER be a Communist Country!!!” and “history has conclusively shown that the downtrodden States that [the communists] will soon be running will ONLY GET WORSE.”

Meanwhile, his decision not to sign this housing bill has sent his own party into a tailspin. As the midterms approach, Republicans are in dire need of a victory to show voters, and this housing package would demonstrate their commitment to making life more affordable for their constituents.

But Trump does not seem to take the housing crisis seriously. He said on Truth Social the bill was “of minor importance,” and that it “pales in comparison” to his SAVE Act, which would limit mail-in voting and require voters to show a passport or birth certificate in order to register to vote. As of now, it just doesn’t have the votes to pass.

Representative Anna Paulina Luna was caught using Claude to do her job—and she doesn’t care.

A description of Luna’s National Defense Authorization Act amendment that appeared on the House Rules Committee website Wednesday was filed with a tell-tale indicator of the artificial intelligence assistant.

Squeezed in the middle of the text: “11:25 AM????Claude responded.” The language of Luna’s amendment description has since been revised.

Luna was quick to respond to the controversy on X, writing that her staff had used AI to “spell/grammar check the amendment SUMMARY, not the actual amendment text itself.

“Not a shocker. Most staff use it. I have told them to make sure they are double checking and more thorough,” she continued. “What dork planted this story?”

Luna added that she loves Claude, but Grok is “way more savage.” Elon Musk’s AI chatbot alternative has been riddled with a number of scandals, including instances in which it unquestioningly created nude images of underage girls and espoused Nazi beliefs.

In a separate post, Luna clarified that “NO legislation is ever drafted with AI.”

“All bill text from the House comes from the House Legislative Council which is prohibited from using AI,” she wrote. “The screenshot you’re referencing is an AI summary of the bill that’s also used for spellcheck, c’mon man.”

Nonetheless, it’s important to keep public officials honest about the issue. Federal and state officials alike have been caught leaning on artificial intelligence. In October, federal judges were accused of using AI to write court orders, resulting in serious factual inaccuracies. The year before, a Republican Arizona state representative was found to have used AI software to draft deepfake legislation that was later signed into law.

A federal judge on Wednesday permanently barred President Donald Trump’s administration from implementing most of his first executive order on elections, part of which sought to require people to show documentary proof of citizenship when they register to vote. The ruling by U.S. District Court Judge Denise Casper in Boston effectively converts a preliminary injunction she issued a year ago…

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⚡ Quick Take

• Adult Swim dropped a new trailer for Rick and Morty spinoff President Curtis.
• The series will premiere July 26 at 11:30pm.
• We think it looks even more absurd than Rick and Morty.

An infinite multiverse means an infinite amount of possibilities. Not just for our favorite grandpa and grandson duo, either. That’s also true of TV networks, so it only makes sense one of Rick and Morty‘s most memorable characters is getting his own spinoff. President Curtis will show what everyone’s favorite POTUS is up to when he doesn’t have to deal with the smartest asshole in all of existence. According to the show’s new trailer, his life as the leader of the free world isn’t all that different without Rick or Morty around. In fact, it might be even more absurd.

Does President Curtis ever have any normal days dealing with governance? Apparently not if the new promo for his spinoff, first announced at last year’s San Diego Comic-Con, is any indication. The series looks as wild and surreal as Rick and Morty. The show’s official synopsis from Adult Swim sounds just as ridiculous:

The series follows President Andre Curtis (Keith David) and his eccentric staff as they tackle the kinds of crises that Rick Sanchez could never be bothered with – from interdimensional diplomacy to paranormal investigations and unexplained phenomena.

It’s not all bad for the President. He does get to drive KITT from Knight Rider. That’s definitely a perk of the job. The ghosts and giant rats? Less so.

Adult Swim

President Curtis comes from co-creators Dan Harmon and James Siciliano. They also serve as executive producers alongside Danielle Uhlarik, Monica Mitchell, and Steve Levy. The spinoff also stars Stephanie Beatriz (Brooklyn Nine-Nine) and Jim Rash (Community) as POTUS’ staff.

Adult Swim is also making sure the show gets the best lead-in possible. The new animated series will premiere after Rick and Morty‘s season nine finale on Sunday July 26 at 11:30pm ET. President Curtis episodes will then become available to stream on HBO Max the next day.

The post RICK AND MORTY Spinoff PRESIDENT CURTIS Gets New Trailer and July Premiere appeared first on Nerdist.

In an already alarming moment for voting rights, the U.S. Postal Service wants to make things so much worse.

In response to a March executive order by President Donald Trump—which directed USPS to only provide mail-in ballots to voters on a federal list—the theoretically nonpartisan postal service is planning to implement a new rule forcing states to provide the Trump administration with a list of anyone who has requested an absentee or mail-in ballot. If the states refuse, their citizens wouldn’t receive their ballots.

Postmaster General David Steiner made the admission in a Senate hearing on Wednesday following questioning from Democratic Senator Gary Peters.

“If a state refuses to turn their absentee voter list over to the federal government, will the Postal Service still mail their ballots under this proposal?” Peters asked.

“Under our proposed regulation, no,” Steiner replied.

PETERS: Yes or no, if a state refuses to turn their absentee voter list to the federal government, will the Postal Service still mail their ballots under this proposed rule?

POSTMASTER GENERAL STEINER: No.

PETERS: So the proposed rule basically coerces states to hand over their… pic.twitter.com/5bnJb5Atnr

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 24, 2026

“This is basically a back-door way for the federal government to get voting information that states control under the U.S. Constitution,” Peters said later. “You’re telling the states, ‘Give the federal government this information—trust the federal government, trust the Trump administration, we’ll take good care of these—and if you don’t do it, you can’t mail absentee ballots.’”

Senator Margaret Hassan, another Democrat, said the USPS should “immediately” bin the new rule, labeling it “blatantly illegal.” Many postal workers have similarly spoken out against the idea, according to Democracy Docket.

Thankfully, the new rule can still be blocked in courts, and multiple lawsuits have been filed in order to do so. One Massachusetts lawsuit was allowed to proceed last week, after District Judge Indira Talwani stated the rule would hurt states’ constitutional right to run elections.

Steiner said the USPS would abide by whatever the courts rule. But it’s frightening to see, after years of trying to meddle with elections, that MAGA still isn’t done.

⚡ Quick Take

• A Supergirl producer says that Peter Safran and James Gunn have met with Paramount CEO David Ellison about DC Studios’ future.
• The producer says David Ellison is ‘Open to what [we’re] doing.’
• DC Studios has several movies and shows in production.

There’s considerable reason to worry if you’re a fan of the nascent DCU. Parent company Warner Bros. will evidently soon fall under the control of Paramount. That hasn’t gone great for some. What will happen to Peter Safran and James Gunn’s cinematic vision? Will it crash before it even takes off? Well, according to one producer, it’s going okay so far.

Supergirl executive producer Lars P. Winther told The Hollywood Reporter that Safran and Gunn have met with Paramount CEO David Ellison ahead of the ongoing merger with Warner Bros. According to Winther, Ellison went to Atlanta to visit the studio producing Man of Tomorrow. There, during discussions, he said that he liked Gunn and Safran’s work as a duo.

DC Studios

This news comes as a pleasant surprise to those who were worried about what effect the merger would have on Gunn and Safran’s involvement in DC. Thankfully, it doesn’t seem that much will change, for now. Winther seemed hesitantly excited about those discussions.

“[Ellison is] pretty open to what we’re doing… he’s a big fan, he’s been great with us. He’s giving us kind of what we want. So far, everything’s good.”

Supergirl’s movie, coming out in just a couple of days, is another of many that the two have in the works.

Winther touched on how Supergirl’s story will continue—she will appear in Man of Tomorrow. Whereas her movie is more space-focused, he said Man of Tomorrow will primarily take place on Earth.

James Gunn, who worked as a director on Superman, took a producing role on Supergirl. Craig Gillespie served as its director. Gillespie told The Hollywood Reporter that Supergirl is a standalone film, not just a setup for Superman’s next story.

“When I first met James [Gunn], he was like, ‘We are treating each of these as their own graphic novel. This is your graphic novel.’”

The merger is still in motion, but in February, Paramount agreed to buy Warner Brothers for $111 billion. Judging by Winther’s enthusiasm, it seems the DC world will be in good hands. According to him, his name and Gunn’s will continue to be attached to DC content for the near future. No promises, but regardless, the two have Clayface and the TV show Lanterns coming out in the next year, alongside the next Superman. There will be no shortage of content from these two creators.

Supergirl comes out on June 26, and Man of Tomorrow next July.

The post SUPERGIRL Producer Says James Gunn Met with Paramount CEO appeared first on Nerdist.

A division of the Defense Department has been rolling out posts on X that contain clear references to the QAnon conspiracy theory, for reasons they have, unsurprisingly, declined to explain. The X account for the so-called Office of the Under Secretary of War for Research and Engineering produced three posts this week incorporating references to QAnon slogans and imagery, part of a broader pattern of weird, gross shitposting under Trump’s second administration. 

The posts purportedly celebrated President Trump’s Monday announcement that the United States would invest heavily in quantum computing systems to pursue “technological dominance,” an effort, the announcement said, that will involve “U.S. industry and research leaders” and stretch across “the Departments of Energy, War, Commerce, and the Intelligence Community.” In a related executive order, Trump said he would create a “National Quantum Initiative Advisory Committee.”

In response, whoever runs the “Department of War CTO” X account posted a meme showing Donald Trump positioned in the middle of large letter Q, below the words “Quantum Dominance.”

“Are you enjoying the show? Refill your popcorn… you’ll love this next part,” it read.

“Enjoy the show” was a phrase that QAnon believers often repeated to each other, especially during the height of the movement, promising that a great battle was about to unfold in front of their eyes. The conspiracy theory broadly held that President Trump was, during his first term, secretly fighting a global battle against a cabal of evildoers, pedophiles, sex traffickers, and Hillary Clinton. A person claiming to have a “Q” level security clearance posted cryptic clues on the messageboards 8chan and 8kun, inevitably promising that some revelatory Trump plan was about to unfold. “Trust the plan” thus became another popular movement slogan, alongside the rallying cry “Where we go one, we go all.” 

A few hours after the first post, the same Defense Department X account shared another “Quantum Dominance” meme, this one reading “Trust the plan, patriots.” A third post on Tuesday showed a drawing of a gun-wielding soldier in the middle of the letter Q and the phrase, “Where We Go One, We Go Quantum.” 

The posts found their intended audience: QAnon adherents. “Q IS REAL!!!!,” celebrated one X user with multiple QAnon references in his bio. “These Government pages are getting more and more blatant! NCSWIC!!!!” (That acronym stands for “Nothing can stop what is coming,” another QAnon slogan.) 

When reached for comment, Defense Department spokesperson Joe Loewy wrote, “We have nothing for you on this.” He did not respond to followup questions.

While the first Trump presidency ended without QAnon’s promised great global battle where President Trump revealed and conquered forces of pedophilic evil, related ideas have nonetheless thoroughly suffused and saturated our culture. The conspiracy’s adherents have also committed acts of violence, often against those close to them: in 2021, for instance, a California father killed his young children after becoming more enmeshed in QAnon beliefs, claiming he’d murdered them to “save the world” from the “serpent DNA” he believed his wife had passed down. Edgar Maddison Welch, who shot up Comet Pizza in Washington D.C. in 2017 in an attempt to “save” children he delusionally believed were held hostage in the restaurant’s non-existent basement, died in a 2025 traffic stop shootout with police. 

The Trump administration, which has branded itself “the most transparent administration in history,” has previously refused to disclose the authors of its social media posts. Those posts have contained white supremacist language, virulently anti-immigrant statements, and even a Michael Jackson lyric that used an antisemitic slur. When journalists ask about these statements, the agencies involved tend to deflect, insult the questioner, or, as happened in this case, simply decline to answer.

The Defense Department itself employs Kingsley Wilson, a Pentagon spokesperson, who before her time in government had a long history of posting bigoted and xenophobic statements, including the extremist slogan “Ausländer Raus,” a phrase meaning “foreigners out” that is viewed as a neo-Nazi rallying cry in Germany. Wilson also explicitly supported the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, which holds that non-white people are being deliberately sent to the United States to replace white populations.

The Pentagon also never responded to reporting about Wilson’s history of extremist statements. 

OpenAI and Broadcom have teamed up – with a little help from some of the former’s AI models – to develop the frontier model lab’s very first inference chip, dubbed Jalapeño, the companies announced in a press release on Wednesday. Details of the spicily named silicon are scarce in the announcement, with the company admitting that it’s running engineering samples of Jalapeño in its lab “at target frequency and power,” but noting that it won’t have any technical details to share until a report on its performance is released in the coming months. But that doesn't stop it from claiming that "early testing shows that Jalapeño will deliver performance per watt substantially better than current state-of-the-art." Alright then! OpenAI said that it designed Jalapeño itself, with Broadcom serving as its implementation and integration partner (i.e., they made the darn thing), but it wasn’t humans alone who helped come up with Jalapeño’s made-for-inference ASIC architecture: AI helped, natch, and the result is what OpenAI says is the fastest ASIC development cycle ever in the high-performance advanced semiconductor space. “Jalapeño was co-developed from initial design to manufacturing tape-out in just nine months,” OpenAI claimed. “That speed reflects deep software-hardware co-development with OpenAI’s engineering teams, Broadcom’s silicon implementation expertise, and the use of OpenAI models to accelerate parts of the design and optimization process.” In other words, AI is now helping design the chips it’ll run on. Here’s hoping they ironed out the hallucinations before heading to production. OpenAI explained in the announcement that Jalapeño is just the first of its AI accelerators, with the chip serving to define its “vision for the future of LLM inference,” and one that will involve OpenAI controlling the entire stack behind its models and products. According to the release, OpenAI envisions a future where it doesn’t just own the frontier models and the products built on top of them, but the infrastructure underneath as well. “Chip architecture, kernels, memory systems, networking, scheduling, deployment systems, and product experience” are all part of OpenAI’s full-stack vision, which it said will enable it to make models “faster, more reliable, and more affordable.” And more locked in, one would assume, like a proverbial walled garden. The Apple of the AI world, if you will. OpenAI is far from alone in developing its own silicon to help power AI – most of the giants in the space, including Amazon, Google, Meta, and Microsoft, have been building and using their own silicon for AI for several generations now, and OpenAI arch-rival Anthropic is reportedly considering a similar move. No telling, either, how OpenAI is intending to continue funding this capital-intensive initiative, given that it ran an operating loss of over $20 billion last year, according to leaked financials reported by Ed Zitron, and has apparently committed massive amounts ($600 billion? $1.4 trillion?) to infrastructure spending over the next few years. But hey – if we questioned AI economics, nothing would ever get built, would it? ®

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It’s been four years to the day since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, paving the way for Republican-controlled states to ban abortion—actions that have caused pain, suffering, and even death for pregnant people unable to obtain necessary medical care. The Supreme Court ruling was made possible by Republicans like Maine Sen. Susan Collins, who abandoned her previously stated…

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A rural area of Northern California experienced its strongest earthquake since 1940 on Wednesday morning, but the 5.6 magnitude temblor caused only mild shaking with no immediate reports of damage or injuries. The epicenter was about 7 miles northwest of Willits.