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Quick Take
- Warner Bros. has revealed the first official details on Dyanmic Duo, a film featuring Batman’s first two Robins, blending puppetry and animation.
We’ve known about a unique puppetry/animation combo film coming from DC Studios for some time. It will focus on Batman’s first two Robins, Dick Grayson and Jason Todd, and is aptly titled Dynamic Duo. But, until now, there were few details about what the story would focus on. At the Annecy Festival, Warner Bros. revealed that the film would take a new approach to the origin stories of these two iconic heroes, changing it up from their DC Comics lore.
In this version, Dick and Jason are “street rats” together (like Aladdin?) who call themselves the Dynamic Duo. But eventually, the two go in very different directions. Dick starts working for Batman, while Jason ends up in the Red Hood gang. The two friends then wind up on opposing forces in Gotham City.
First plot details for DC's puppet-animated film ‘DYNAMIC DUO’.
• Follows Jason & Dick as duo of street rats who name themselves the dynamic duo
• The duo split up as Dick ends up joining Batman while Jason joins the Red Hood gang
Revealed at #AnnecyFestival pic.twitter.com/tHpepUW4H8
— DiscussingFilm (@DiscussingFilm)
June 22, 2026
Some of this tracks with DC Comics history. Jason Todd as a street-kid orphan is very much part of Batman lore. However, Dick Grayson was a circus acrobat of some acclaim before his parents were murdered, and Bruce Wayne adopted him. This synopsis does not sound like they are sticking to that. Although we suppose that he could still have been a circus kid who lost his folks, and wound up on the street. The use of the Red Hood Gang also implies that the Joker will be a part of this story. Before he became the Clown Prince of Crime, the Joker was part of that criminal gang. The Joker famously killed Jason Todd when he was Robin, only for him to come back years later as the Red Hood.
DC Comics
We imagine at some point in the movie, Jason will turn on the gang and join the side of the good guys as a more heroic Red Hood. At first, there was some speculation that this movie would take place in the DCU. But it seems James Gunn has debunked that, maintaining that this is its own standalone story. So when Dick Grayson does appear in the DCU, probably as Nightwing, it will likely be a more traditional version. Dynamic Duo currently has a release date of June 30, 2028. Although given the complicated productions for animated projects, we suspect that the release date is not firm. We’ll have to wait and see.
The post DC’s DYNAMIC DUO Film Officially Reveals First Story Details appeared first on Nerdist.
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Quick Take
- Keanu Reeves is reportedly in negotiations to star in a live-action/animated hybrid LEGO movie directed by Toy Story 4’s Josh Cooley.
Toy Story 4 introduced a Canadian icon to the franchise. The Duke Caboom toy might have disappointed kids who got him as a gift, but he didn’t disappoint viewers. Now the duo that helped bring the mustachioed daredevil to the screen are looking to team-up once again. But this time, they’re going to blend animation and live-action. A new report says Keanu Reeves is in negotiations to star in a hybrid LEGO film from Toy Story 4 director Josh Cooley.
Pixar
Deadline‘s Justin Kroll says Keanu Reeves is currently in negotiations to headline LEGO’s long-planned answer to Who Framed Roger Rabbit? And it sounds like he’s pretty far along in the process after weeks of discussion. Universal was reportedly looking for a big name star to finally get a long-gestating project off the ground. The studio first acquired the rights to the LEGO property in 2020. According to Kroll, after many false starts, Universal started to build the film around Reeves’ unknown character. He then signed off on the idea after Cooley, who also penned Inside Out, was brought on to sell his idea.
It’s a pretty good combo. A longtime Pixar veteran, Cooley most recently directed 2024’s Transformers One. Reeves also just reprised his role as Duke Caboom with a small role in Toy Story 5. The LEGO Group’s Jill Wilfert and Ryan Christians will serve as producers.
Netflix
There are no details about Cooley’s pitch just yet. All that is known is that it will combine animation and live-action. While Reeves could certainly voice a cartoon character, as he more than proved with Duke Caboom, it seems impossible he won’t be the live-action lead. (Hence the whole “Universal wanting an A-lister” thing.)
Keanu Reeves interacting with sentient LEGO characters is pretty much all we need from a movie pitch.
The post Keanu Reeves Will Reportedly Star in LEGO Hybrid Live-Action/Animated Movie appeared first on Nerdist.
A federal judge has killed the Trump administration’s attempt to subpoena Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, and other state leaders, finding that the Justice Department used the subpoena to force them to capitulate to their demands regarding Operation Metro Surge in January—which saw federal agents kill two American citizens, Alex Pretti and Renee Good.
“Initiating a criminal investigation in order to harass political opponents or to coerce them into taking official action-particularly official action that the federal government cannot directly require those political opponents to take-is a blatantly unlawful and unethical use of the grand-jury process,” Judge Patrick Schiltz wrote. “The only question, then, is whether the challenged subpoenas were issued for one of these forbidden purposes. The Court has no doubt that they were. On the other hand, the Department has struggled—without success—to identify a single plausible investigatory justification for the subpoenas.”
Walz, Frey, Attorney General Keith Ellison, and St. Paul Mayor Kaohly Her were each subpoenaed in January on the grounds that they were impeding federal agents from doing their jobs. The subpoenas also accompanied weeks of vitriolic rhetoric from the administration regarding Somali-Americans and immigrants.
“Today’s ruling is a victory for the rule of law and our democracy. A federal district judge found that the U.S. Department of Justice’s investigation into me and other Minnesota elected officials was politically motivated, unconstitutional, and meritless,” Walz wrote on X after the news. “The U.S. Justice Department is pursuing criminal investigations into the President’s political opponents. This case was just one example of that, but we are seeing daily reminders of this administration’s lawlessness - in Minnesota and around the country. We all must continue to seek justice and uphold the rule of law. I will never stop exercising my constitutional rights to stand up for Minnesotans and the American freedoms that we hold dear.”
“Subpoenaing political opponents because they spoke on behalf of their constituents violates the core tenets of our democracy and human decency,” said Frey.
The Trump administration has yet to respond to Judge Schlitz’s ruling.
Nvidia is pushing agentic AI for scientific computing, and says that this requires a new scientific computing stack, which the GPU giant is ready to deliver, of course. At the ISC High Performance 2026 event in Hamburg, Germany, Nvidia is lauding its own achievements in supercomputing, highlighting just how many of the world’s top compute clusters use its hardware these days. But just as agentic AI has become this year’s buzzword in the machine intelligence industry, so the GPU slinger is pushing it as the next big thing for supercomputers and their research programs, driven by its next-gen Vera Rubin platform and new software tools. “We are currently witnessing a massive inflection point with agentic AI. AI is shifting from a tool that simply answers questions to an autonomous system that executes complex tasks,” Nvidia’s senior director of HPC and AI Factory Solutions Dion Harris told the media in a briefing. The Mission and Vision systems at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in the US will be the world's first agentic AI supercomputers when they come online, he says. A new scientific computing stack connects agents, simulation, and AI together to accelerate the next generation of scientific discovery, Harris claims. “Scientists leverage agentic AI co-scientists that call simulators and surrogate models alongside tools and applications, to do everything from planned experiments to write code to run the simulations to simulations and AI and data analytics converging into one single workflow,” he explained. This requires an incredible amount of compute, memory, and networking, which, in Nvidia’s eyes, means supercomputers built on its Vera Rubin and Grace Blackwell platforms, plus Quantum InfiniBand networking, and new software for accelerating discovery. The latter comprises ALCHEMI, DAQIRI, and cuPhoton. The first is described by Nvidia as a domain-specific toolkit for chemical and material discoveries, using the BGR microservice for simulating millions of molecules and structures. DAQIRI is designed for the next-generation scientific instruments, connecting sensors directly to real-time AI inference points, Harris says. “At CERN's ATLAS experiment, less than 2 percent of collision data can typically be stored. DAQIRI introduces a GPU accelerated AI trigger pipeline allowing FPGAs to handle low latency routing while GPUs run deep learning models to ensure we learn from significantly more data,” he explained. Finally, cuPhoton is built to process petabytes of camera and telescope data to help scientists analyze massive cosmic data sets in minutes rather than months. “In testing with 32 Grace Blackwell superchips simulating data from the Rubin Observatory, cuPhoton loaded and read images 15,000 times faster and accelerated signal processing and analysis by up to 8,000 times,” Harris claimed. But Nvidia is pitching its next-gen silicon as the platform for agentic supercomputing. Due to be available in Q4 this year, the Vera Rubin NVL rack will cram in up to 144 GPUs per rack, and deliver 5 petaFLOPS of FP64 floating-point performance. Because many high-performance computing workloads are often bound by memory performance, Vera Rubin increases memory bandwidth by 2.8 times compared to Blackwell, Harris says, using 41 TB of HBM4 memory per rack to achieve three petabytes per second of bandwidth. Systems that are getting Vera Rubin include the Mission and Vision systems at LANL. These stack up to 2,160 Rubin GPUs plus 1,080 Vera CPUs, in the case of Mission, while Vision has a more modest 1,298 Rubins and 648 Veras. “Then there's Veritas, which is being announced at ISC, which deploys 576 Rubin GPUs, along with 288 Vera CPUs,” Harris says. We asked Nvidia what the purpose is of embedding agentic AI into scientific computing, much of which is about research driven by human curiosity. “Agentic AI, or in fact any AI, is not required to do science,” Harris told The Register. “But Nvidia believe agentic AI is already emerging as a powerful tool to do science at a scale that isn’t possible when human scientists alone drive the process. Agents don’t need to sleep, or eat, or take breaks. They can consume thousands or millions of technical papers and remember the details, and in some cases, they benefit from PhD-level understanding across diverse fields from astrophysics to zoology,” he said. Nvidia’s vision is that human scientists will have a team of agents running around the clock, able to do investigations they couldn’t themselves perform. “But agents require foundation models, LLMs, and connections to data and tools to perform science. They run on CPUs, but access tools, many of which need GPUs to run at maximum performance and efficiency,” Harris added. Nvidia claims that Europe is now a hotspot for HPC, with 35 new supercomputers brought online in the past year, all using Nvidia tech. These include Jupiter, Europe’s exascale system, MareNostrum 5 at the Barcelona supercomputing center, Bavaria AI's Blue Swan, HammerHAI at the University of Stuttgart, and Italy’s CINECA. ®
Claude's chatbot may ask to verify your age and identity "in certain circumstances," such as with a passport or driver's license, according to a privacy policy change.
The Department of Homeland Security has proposed a massive increase in citizenship application fees as the Trump administration’s latest move to upend legal immigration.
The U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services proposed a rule Monday that would raise the fee for a paper citizenship application by 75 percent from $760 to $1,330, and the fee for an online application by 80 percent from $710 to $1,280, according to Newsweek.
The proposed rule would also make it more expensive to seek a hearing challenging a denied naturalization. If adopted, the rule would raise the fee for an appeal from $830 to $1,475 by paper, and $780 to $1,425 online.
Under the proposed rule, the government would scrap fee waivers and a reduced fee option for individuals experiencing financial hardship. The changes would present a significant financial hurdle for lower-income immigrants, further transforming legal immigration into a privilege for the extremely wealthy and a money-making scheme for the federal government.
This proposed rule is yet another way the Trump administration is attempting to curb legal immigration. The government has already stacked the deck with immigration judges bent on denying asylum claims, curbed the refugee program, and imposed steep price increases on H-1B visas.
ALT
By Anna Maria Barry-Jester for ProPublica After the Trump administration upended the world’s largest foreign aid provider last year, terminating thousands of programs and firing nearly all of its staff, its plan for the agency was clear: Eliminate it entirely. But because it is a congressionally created agency, President Donald Trump needed lawmakers’ permission to do so.
Source
A federal judge has blocked an attempt by the Trump administration to subpoena Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz and other state officials, calling it an effort to “harass and retaliate against them.” In a ruling unsealed Monday, U.S. District Judge Patrick Schlitz found the “dominant purpose” of the subpoenas was to “coerce Minnesota officials into assisting the federal government with enforcing civil…
Source
FEATURE Today Postgres is one of the most widely used database systems, but its launch and subsequent development were inauspicious to say the least. If it weren’t for a league of exceptionally devoted open source contributors, it probably would be another forgotten also-ran just like Ingres, the database system on which it was based (“Postgres” was shorthand for “Post-Ingres”). The creator of both systems, Michael Stonebraker, is perhaps the preeminent database pioneer in the field. Earlier this month, he spoke at PGDay, a conference in Boston hosted by the U.S. PostgreSQL Association, where he detailed the complicated history of the open source database system, which actually existed long before the term "open source" was even uttered. In a sense, “Postgres is the epitome of open source software, because it doesn't belong to anybody. It was picked up by this team of programmers without any specific affiliation,” Stonebraker said. Stonebraker essentially abandoned Postgres in the mid-1990s. But instead of fading into obscurity, the codebase was salvaged by a fiercely-dedicated volunteer community that bolted on standard SQL while preserving Stonebraker’s revolutionary extensible architecture. Three decades later, this stubbornly-independent database has become the bedrock of modern cloud infrastructure. Data should be relational When it comes to relational database systems, British computer scientist and then-IBM employee Ted Codd got the ball rolling in 1970. A database is where you store your data so it can be queried in a predictable way. A database system is the software that manages the database (don’t confuse the two). That year, Codd decreed that all data should be stored in tables and accessed using a high-level query language. IBM implemented Codd’s idea in System R, and created SQL as the query language. The results were eventually rolled into IBM's DB2. Stonebraker, then an assistant professor at UC Berkeley, also implemented Codd’s ideas. Stonebraker and his team of grad students created not only a working prototype, but a full-scale implementation – he later cofounded a startup, Relational Technology, to sell Ingres commercially. Ingres did not use SQL, but instead employed another query language, QUEL (Query Language), although the fundamentals were similar. A relatively primitive version of Ingres was even released gratis for academic research. But by the early 1980s, Stonebraker had “pushed the code off a cliff” and started building something new. Thus, Postgres was born. Beyond Ingres: Postgres At the time, Stonebraker explained, the business world was pushing for databases to hold additional data types beyond the integers, floats, and character strings required for basic business accounting. There was complicated CAD data and GIS data, with multiple data points that needed to be stored and reasoned against. It was clear to Stonebraker and his colleagues that the ideal database system needed to be extended with more data types, user-defined data types, user-defined operators, and user-defined functions. Adding more data types and such might seem simple enough, but the “devil is in the details,” he noted. “You need to be able to teach the query optimizer about new types, and that's not exactly easy.” Commutative rules had to be worked out, and they had to be optimized. This led to what was probably Postgres’ most successful feature: support for abstract data types (ADTs). Stonebraker had other ambitions for Postgres as well. He also wanted to incorporate new work from Chris Date on referential integrity, which brought “semantic consistency between foreign keys and primary keys” to the relational model. He wanted to add in a rules engine, which would continually monitor for changes and make decisions based on those changes. Also, he wanted crash recovery. The crash recovery and the rules engine never quite worked out, but the ADTs took root, and now most database systems support this extensibility, pretty much exactly like they were devised by Stonebraker and Co. in 1983. “We pretty much got it right,” he said. In fact, he reckons that his work on ADTs was probably the major reason he landed the Association for Computing Machinery’s 2014 A.M. Turing Award. Stonebraker and his mates were eager to make money from their creation. So they rolled Postgres into a start-up, Illustra, which was eventually purchased by Informix, which promptly digested the technology into its own database server. But they also maintained an open source version…barely. It wasn’t even called open source (which wasn’t a formal term until 1998). It was considered freely available academic software, something for fellow researchers to tinker with. And it was based on the very-permissive BSD license. The architecture that refused to die In 1995, two Berkeley graduate students, Andrew Yu and Jolly Chen, resurrected Postgres from the last 4.2 academic release. They jettisoned the poorly-running rules engine and disaster recovery features, and, most importantly, swapped out QUEL for the then industry standard of SQL, releasing the software as Postgre95 (and later PostgreSQL). “I didn't know any of these people,” Stonebraker said of this all-volunteer development crew. They were “a collection of super programmers who picked up this open source project and started shepherding it forward, and they've been shepherding it for the last 30 years.” This sovereignty made Postgres safe for anyone to use and modify. Postgres’ wire interface has been widely used as the base for building other database systems, including CockroachDB, YugoByteDB, and TimeScale. Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud each have their own database-as-a-service built on Postgres. Chief selling point? Each is fully Postgres compatible. “The elephants have basically bet the ranch on Postgres,” he said. Even AWS’ graph database service is built on Postgres (“the relational implementation of [a graph database] is almost always faster, usually substantially faster, than doing it natively,” Stonebraker quipped.) Top of the heap These days, Postgres sits near the top of the DB-Engines ranking of the world’s most popular database systems, just below Oracle, MySQL and Microsoft SQL Server. Unlike those rivals however, Postgres continues to steadfastly gain market share. Tom Kincaid helped organize the PGDay meetup – and is a vice president of EDB, a Postgres service company. He offered several reasons why Postgres made such a big impact, despite its initial lack of support from any of the IT giants (unlike the fellow open source MySQL, now managed by Oracle, which many open sourcerers distrust for that reason alone). Extensibility was a major help in adoption, especially as the role of databases expanded beyond basic business accounting. ADTs gave the database system an easy entry into an expanding geospatial market, and later, document databases. “Postgres was quickly able to provide developers exactly what they needed for storing, retrieving and searching JSON documents,” Kincaid told The Register. “The fact that you could combine SQL with many different data types allowed it to thrive with every new trend in application development.” Also helping was the quality of the codebase (“It is held to the highest standard of review,” Kincaid said) which attracted top developers, as did the quality of the optimizer. The permissive licensing also helped, allowing start-ups and project leaders to build derivative products without fear of legal repercussions. Why Postgres still doesn’t have file-level encryption Despite all the love from the open source community, Postgres is still missing features that it might need to maintain parity with commercial database systems. This was the focus of another illuminating PGDay talk by long-time Postgres contributor (and always dapper) Bruce Momjian. He ran down a long list of missing features, most of which the development team are currently grappling with. The database system could use 64-bit transaction IDs to accommodate very large databases. It could also use support for columnar storage, which is all the rage for large-scale data analysis. Global indexing, server-threading, internal connection pooling and sharding are also features in various stages of assembly. The major feature Postgres currently lacks, however, is file-level encryption, or “transparent data encryption,” as it is called in the industry. TDE is supported by all commercial database vendors, and it is required by the latest Payment Card Industry (PCI DSS) specifications for storing financial transaction data. Currently, Postgres lets the operating system handle the encryption. Current development on Postgres file-level encryption is stalled “in many ways,” Momjian said. “The code changes became too heavy for the value of the feature,” he said. Not only would the functions touching the data files themselves need modification, but all the other functions scattered through the system that write temporary files must be altered as well. This would be a “monstrous” job, he said. Still, missing features allow commercial entities to fill in the gaps. Percona, for instance, offers the feature as part of its own Postgres commercial distribution. Commercial database companies are very sensitive to customer requirements, whether those requirements are truly necessary in a practical or technical sense, or if they are merely external or regulatory in nature. It’s the latter set of requirements that don’t make it to the top of the Postgres to-do list as quickly, Momjian said. “We don't want to add a feature unless it really has technical value,” he said. Momjian pointed out that the PCI mandate itself also has questionable value purely from a technical view. Once the contents are copied into the server’s memory, the encryption protection vanishes. If an attacker can bypass a system’s file system permissions, they can probably read the raw working memory and get the encryption key. “If we're trying to lock down the file system, we'd also have to lock down memory. We don't know how to do that,” he said. But the missing TDE may not even be a bug at all, but an actual feature of Postgres's fundamental philosophy. “While proprietary databases target the workloads of their largest customers, Postgres targets the workloads of general users,” he said. And that may be the best kind of success for an open source project. ®
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Quick Take
- Valve has announced a massive new piece of hardware, with the Steam Machine coming in 2026, a PC/console hybrid 6x faster than Steam Deck.
- The Steam Machine will cost between $1,049.00 and $1,428.00, making it more expensive than other consoles.
- Nerdist Take: The Steam Machine could bridge the gap between console gaming and PC gaming.
With Microsoft effectively ceding the console wars to Sony and Nintendo, giving the competition access to once-proprietary Xbox games like Halo, it seemed like it’s a two-horse race. Will it be PlayStation or Nintendo Switch that reigns supreme? Well, don’t count Valve out of that battle. The company behind Steam has announced a massive new piece of hardware. (Via IGN.) And now, we officially have pricing for this next-gen Steam Machine and Steam Controller, as well as its specs and size. According to Valve, the console/PC hybrid will have six times (that’s 6x!) more powerful than Steam Deck. And it will cost…
Valve
How Much Will the Steam Machine Cost?
In all, the Steam Machine will cost between $1,049.00 and $1,428.00, making it more expensive than most other consoles out there. However, the Steam Machine is also a full gaming PC, so it is more than just a console.
The pricing breakdown is more specifically:
- Steam Machine 512GB costs $1,049.00
- Steam Machine 512GB with Controller costs $1,128.00
- Steam Machine 2TB costs $1,349.00
- Steam Machine 2TB with Controller costs $1,428.00
What Are the Features of the Steam Machine?
The memory for the Steam Machine is pretty huge. As mentioned, two models will be available in 2026. One will be 512GB and the other 2TB. It will ship both alone and in a bundle with Steam Controller. The Steam Machine, a follow-up to the previous 2015 version, will feature a semi-custom AMD Zen 4 6C / 12T CPU, a semi-Custom AMD RDNA3 GPU, and supports 4K gaming at 60 frames per second with FSR. Valve described the new Steam Machine as six times more powerful than Steam Deck, with 16GB DDR5 and 8GB GDDR6 VRAM.
In more technical terms, here are the exact specs of the Steam Machine 512GB.
- Semi-custom AMD Zen 4 6C / 12T
- Semi-custom AMD RDNA3 28CUs
- 16GB DDR5 + 8GB GDDR6 VRAM
- 512GB NVMe SSD, microSD card slot
- Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, Gigabit ethernet
- Integrated Steam Controller wireless adapter
- Small form factor, ~6 inch cube
- SteamOS 3
And the exact specs of the Steam Machine 2TB:
- Semi-custom AMD Zen 4 6C / 12T
- Semi-custom AMD RDNA3 28CUs
- 16GB DDR5 + 8GB GDDR6 VRAM
- 2TB NVMe SSD, microSD card slot
- Wi-Fi 6E, Bluetooth 5.3, Gigabit ethernet
- Integrated Steam Controller wireless adapter
- Small form factor, ~6 inch cube
- SteamOS 3
- Extra faceplates – red fabric and solid walnut
When Will the Steam Machine Release? And How Can You Buy It?
Valve
To get your hands on a Steam Machine, you’ll have to first sign up for a reservation to be able to buy the Steam Machine. You can sign up for your reservation any time before Thursday, June 25th, at 10 a.m. Pacific. After that:
We will close signups and do a one-time randomization to determine the reservation and waitlist order.
Based on the reservation order, you will receive an email on June 25th indicating one of two things:
- You’ve been added to the reservation queue and a Steam Machine has been reserved in your name. As units become available for shipment, people in the reservation queue will receive an email with the option to purchase.
- We’ll send the first batch of those starting Monday June 29th, and will continue to go through the reservation queue as units become available.
- You’ve been added to the waitlist and we’ll let you know when more units become available.
What Games Will the Steam Machine Play?
The Steam Machine will play “your whole Steam library, including your favorite AAA titles. Just sign in with your Steam account and your entire library is there.”
Nerdist Take: The Steam Machine Could Bridge the Gap Between Console and PC Gaming
Valve
Console gaming versus PC gaming has long been the dividing line, and if this is legitimately both, that really makes the next-gen Steam Machine an intriguing proposition for all parties. As a pure console player, I’ve missed out on a lot of PC-only titles. I’m sure it’s the same the other way for PC gamers. The versatility of such a powerful device will bring a lot of interest from either side. It will, of course, be dependent on the price. My guess? Quite high.
Gabe Newell, the head honcho of Valve, said the following: “We’ve been super happy with the success of Steam Deck, and PC gamers have continued asking for even more ways to play all the great titles in their Steam libraries. Our work over the years on other hardware and even more importantly on SteamOS has enabled Steam Controller, Steam Machine, and Steam Frame to do just that.”
If you’d like more info on particular specs, you can visit the Steam site.
Originally published November 12, 2025.
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.
Originally published on June 5, 2026.
The post Steam Machine Gets Pricing and Release Date appeared first on Nerdist.
Amazon is planning to increase the footprint of its new conversational AI assistant Alexa+ to India and is inviting users in the country to test out a Hindi-language version.
President Donald Trump has struck out nine times in court in his quest to obtain voter registration data from states, reports Democracy Docket.
On Thursday, a federal judge threw out the Department of Justice’s lawsuit seeking voter data from Maryland.
“This Court joins every court to have addressed this issue in concluding that an [statewide voter registration list] is not a record or paper that a state must produce to the United States under the CRA,” District Judge Stephanie Gallagher wrote in the ruling.
The DOJ’s quest to weaponize voter registration data as part of its immigration crackdown has not been going too well. So far, it has not prevailed in a single case: The suits have been dismissed in California, Oregon, Michigan, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Arizona, Wisconsin, Maine, and now Maryland.
And these dismissals aren’t just coming from Democratic-appointed judges. Five of the nine judges were appointed or renominated by Trump, including Gallagher.
The DOJ could still see a victory: It has sued 31 states and Washington, D.C. Outside of lawsuits, the DOJ has sent letters to all states asking for their voter rolls. At least 16 Republican-led states have complied, according to Democracy Docket.
The administration’s quest for complete, uncensored voter data is chilling—especially because they won’t provide a legitimate reason for this federal overreach, although some reporting hints at their plans. Over the course of the Maryland lawsuit, DOJ officials refused to answer the judge’s questions about what the agency planned to do with the data.
Russia’s equipment losses in Ukraine are about to become the world’s gain, as Kyiv has decided to hand out its intel on seized Russian battlefield assets to its international partners. And it has launched a new site to do so. Announced on Friday by Ukraine’s Ministry of Defense, the TrophyLab is being billed as a place for Ukraine and its allies to analyze Russian military technology for the benefit of both Kyiv’s government in its current fight against Moscow, and for anyone else that might face off against Russian gear in the near future. “From now on, the entire democratic world will have access to the secrets of Russian weapons and equipment,” the Defense Ministry said in a press release. International partners also have the opportunity to obtain samples of war trophies for their own research efforts via the program. As for how much equipment is in the database so far, the Defense Ministry said that TrophyLab currently contains samples from more than 115 war trophies divided into 79 categories, including bombs and missiles, aircraft, drones, electronic warfare equipment, tanks, and even small arms. More than 225 prior studies of the seized equipment are also included in the TrophyLab dataset, and that’s just the beginning, with Ukrainian defense forces, the Main Intelligence Directorate, and the country’s Security Service all continually providing data for the program. The included total so far is likely just a fraction of the data Ukraine could share with its international partners, as Russia’s losses since its 2022 invasion of its southwestern neighbor have been extensive. One estimate last year by the US Center for Strategic and International Studies suggests that Russia lost more than a thousand armored fighting vehicles, at least 3,000 infantry fighting vehicles, 300 self-propelled artillery units, and nearly 2,000 tanks. That only includes losses sustained between January 2024 and June 2025 when the report was published, mind you, meaning the actual total may be far greater. Russia’s gains in Ukraine have been largely erased outside of the Russian-annexed but contested Crimean peninsula, where it has focused most of its energy of late. Even then, it hasn’t had a successful run of things, with Ukrainian forces continuing to bomb its soldiers, forward bases, and logistical routes using long-range drones. Speaking of long-range Ukrainian drones, international media has been filled with images lately of Moscow being bombarded by suicide drones that have flooded Russian airspace and repeatedly struck a major oil refinery despite being shot down by the hundreds, according to Russian state media. Ukraine has captured some Russian territory, but like Russia's gains in Ukraine, many of those advances have been pushed back, leading to a prolonged stalemate between Russian forces and Ukrainian troops. Ukrainian scientific organizations, military units, and defense sector firms are all eligible for access to TrophyLab, as are the governments and defense departments of Ukraine’s allies and defense contractors in partner nations. That said, access is being tightly controlled. In order to get a peek at the TrophyLab data, applicants need to prove they don’t have any ties to Russia, haven’t been sanctioned by Ukraine, and meet other criteria set by the MoD. “Every missile, drone, and vehicle seized on the battlefield is now a source of knowledge for the free world,” Ukrainian defense minister Mykhailo Fedorov said of the new platform in a social media post over the weekend. “What was meant to be the enemy's secret advantage is being dismantled to defend democracy.” ®
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Quick Take
- Warner Bros. Pictures Animation has an animated movie for The Powerpuff Girls in the works.
- A deal has yet to be secured, so there are no further details about it at this time.
- Will the third time be the charm for reviving this beloved animated series?
An adorable mix of sugar, spice, and everything nice—along with some serious crime-fighting skills—is coming to the big screen. The Powerpuff Girls will rise again thanks to an animated movie that’s currently in development with Warner Bros. Pictures Animation. According to Variety, the news surfaced at the Annecy International Animation Film Festival in France.
Hanna-Barbera/Warner Bros. Animation
Right now, things are in the very early stages with no official deal in place. Therefore there are no further details about the plot and what we will see in the city of Townsville. All we know is that we better get more Mojo Jojo and HIM on the big screen. Since the animated show’s ending in 2005, attempts to bring the Powerpuff Girls back have not gone well, to say the least. Despite lasting for a couple of years, the 2016 rebooted series was critically panned and widely disliked by fans.
The Canceled Live-Action POWERPUFF GIRLS Series Trailer Surfaces and It’s Bizarre
And, well, there was that ill-fated live-action film that thankfully never came to fruition. We all saw the leaked trailer that explained so much about why it ended up never seeing the light of day. So, perhaps the third time is indeed the charm to revive Buttercup, Blossom, and Bubbles. We will keep an eye out and see if we are truly getting a Powerpuff Girls animated movie or if this project will end up falling into the abyss.
The post THE POWERPUFF GIRLS Animated Movie in Development appeared first on Nerdist.
The Trump administration is holding millions of dollars of Homeland Security funds hostage unless states agree to stop using electronic ballots and prove voters are citizens before they vote, CNN reports.
Trump is demanding that states carry out manual election audits at the administration’s direction, use their preferred system to verify citizenship, and promise to gradually end the use of electronic ballots—all things that could lead to actual voter fraud. States that rebuff Trump would lose 20 percent of their grants, which could be millions of dollars in security funds.
These grants help states prevent terrorist attacks, support infrastructure, and ready themselves for natural disasters. DHS has granted this funding to states for years, no questions asked.
But now, as the president approaches a potentially disastrous midterm, this funding is contingent on state governments completely changing their election apparatuses so that Trump can continue to delegitimize factual polling and push his baseless claims of voter fraud. This isn’t the first time the Trump administration has dangled funding above states’ heads to make them capitulate to its agenda, and it likely won’t be the last.
“I expect [the new requirements] will be blocked in the courts,” former Justice Department lawyer David Becker told CNN.
Reflection AI will pay $150 million a month beginning July 1, 2026 through 2029 for immediate access to Nvidia's latest GB300 AI chips and supporting hardware across SpaceX's Colossus 2 data center near Memphis, Tennessee.
It’s the latter half of June, which means everyone is bracing for disaster, thanks to the Supreme Court saving all the big cases for the end of the term. This year, they’ve sat on a lot of them, though they do this so often now that having 17 cases remaining is actually lower than previous years. Two opinions issued last Thursday weren’t ones everyone is waiting on with a mixture of worry…
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What do the first general-purpose programmable electronic computer and greeting cards that play musical jingles have in common? DARPA cites both of them as the inspiration for a project seeking low-resource computing paradigms to be used on future battlefields. DARPA on Friday put out a request for information (RFI) for new low-resource computing (LRC) paradigms and processes that haven't been utilized yet in microscale systems not unlike the tiny chip-and-battery combos found in greeting cards and children's books. Apparently, thinking about those and the 80th anniversary of the ENIAC (Electronic Numerical Integrator and Computer) has DARPA wondering why more useful things can't be made in a tiny form factor. "The physical and financial cost of computation has plummeted so far that it is routinely embedded in disposable novelties," the RFI said, pointing to the fact that a greeting card chip has processing speed and memory capacity vastly exceeding those of ENIAC. "The computation itself has become virtually free; the physical resources required to sustain, house, and power it have become the critical bottleneck." DARPA isn't trying to miniaturize a datacenter, in other words. This is specifically about what it said is a "resource paradox" at the low end of the computing spectrum, and it's one the Pentagon's research arm thinks is ripe for exploitation to power battlefield computing needs. To that end, DARPA said it's seeking concepts that address areas like operating with little power and memory, tolerating unreliable components, and requiring little technological sophistication. Regarding the latter, DARPA said it wants systems that can be built using low-precision manufacturing techniques, legacy fabrication processes, and/or "primitive technological ecosystems." Responses need to address at least one of those issues, DARPA said, and ideally (though optionally) one of its defined logistical predicaments as well. By those, DARPA is referring to the sorts of things that would constrain operation in environments where the US military typically operates. Concerns include low-trust environments where data sources and system components may not be trustworthy, operating with the minimum necessary privileges to avoid root access concerns, simple user experiences that even the average grunt can understand, and what may be the most complex issue of them all: self-hosting. We're not talking about soldiers in the field managing their own websites here, though. This is actually about autonomous systems. DARPA wants cheap, tiny, and reliable devices that are still "capable of native, user-directed, autonomous self-programming and self-modification without reliance on external cross-compilation toolchains or host machines," as well as "architectures that allow the system to adapt, recompile, or generate its own operational code entirely on device." That's quite the ask for microscale, low-end hardware, but hey – it's not like DARPA hasn't been the proving ground for a bunch of technology we all use on a regular basis. Someday soon even your average electronic greeting card might host a mini AI if this program proves successful. ®
A cartoon by Clay Bennett. Related | What do inflation and Iran have in common? Trump screwing up.
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