Photo credit: Barny Dillarstone
Barny Dillarstone is an adventurer who enjoys traveling to distant bodies of water and placing baited camera systems in places that most don’t even think of. He chose a location near Nusa Penida, a small Indonesian island nicknamed the “Black Magic Island” due to its murky legend and hazardous tides. Over the course of a few days, he was able to get his beloved Insta360 Ace Pro 2 down to about 170 metrers / 600 feet, where the water is so forceful that only the most desperate life can cling to the bottom.

Using squid as bait, which allegedly smells like the dinner bell for these animals, as well as some lights and weights to attract anything in the vicinity, Dillarstone was surprised to snag a western highfin spurdog right immediately. This is a shark with a serious expression on its face, a short snout, large dorsal fins, long spines, and a stunning tail with white edges. They’ve developed enormous eyes to cope with the lack of light, which is essentially what you need to exist in this pitch dark planet. What’s even more astounding is that, unlike certain predators found in shallower water, these creatures can locate their prey using their sense of smell before pouncing on it. Unsurprisingly, and perhaps unexpectedly, they didn’t take off when they noticed the light. That might differ from a few species you encounter at shallower waters.

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Dillarstone captured a number of western highfins in the area, some of which had suffered serious injuries but still showed up for the party, as well as a couple with gear that would not be spotted in deep water. He also saw a houndshark drifting by at a safe distance; later, he noticed an Indonesian wobbegong, a carpet shark with a flat body and mottled patterning that allows it to lie down and attack any unwary prey that passes by. Interestingly, this shows it prefers colder, deeper water than you might expect.

One of the absolute highlights he managed to record on camera was a stunning purple eagle ray that appeared. In gliding smoothly closer, he revealed a flat, mottled brown and purple body, a pretty standard eagle ray head and snout, a teeny little dorsal fin, and a pair of barbs on the end of its tail that were just as lethal as they appeared and ready to unleash at a moment’s notice. It flew by the rig a couple of times, doing these rapid bursts of speed that made it appear to be stumbling around for a second at a time – it appeared disoriented from where I was standing, and was this possible the first time this species had ever been seen on camera in the wild? Could be.

Other species were going about their daily activities all throughout the region. There were jobfish and deep water snappers that appeared to have legs inspecting the bait. Squat lobsters burst out on all sides, hot on the tails of the scraps, little urchins clinging to the sand, catching everything that came falling down, and the occasional sandperch would spring up, hanging around with its nose twisted up as if it was trying to figure something out. And just when you thought it was getting too much, schools of fusiliers would dart into view from above.
[Source]

The UK government announced new regulatory requirements that will bring major video-on-demand (VoD) platforms under tighter oversight by Ofcom, aligning them more closely with traditional television broadcasters.

The changes are part of implementing the Media Act 2024 and mark one of the most significant shifts in how online streaming services are governed in the UK.

Under plans laid out by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, VoD services with more than 500,000 average monthly UK users, including Netflix, Amazon Prime Video, Disney+, ITVX and Channel 4’s on-demand service, will be designated as Tier 1 services and required to comply with a new VoD accessibility code.

The new accessibility code will introduce minimum standards around subtitles, audio description, and signing for content on these platforms. According to government guidance, services must ensure at least:

• 80 percent of their total catalogue is subtitled.
• 10 percent has audio description for viewers with sight loss.
• 5 percent includes sign language support.

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These thresholds mirror accessibility requirements that traditional UK broadcasters have long followed, helping ensure that visually impaired and deaf or hard-of-hearing audiences have better access to streamed content.

Platforms will have four years to meet the standards, with interim targets after two years.

Why this matters?

Streaming services have overtaken broadcast TV as the dominant way people consume video entertainment in the UK, with research showing that a large majority of households now subscribe to at least one major streaming platform.

Traditional broadcasters have long been subject to Ofcom’s Broadcasting Code, which includes accessibility and audience protection measures. The shift to extend similar rules to VoD services reflects how viewing habits have changed and aims to close a regulatory gap.

Until now, many of the biggest streaming platforms were either unregulated in the UK or faced only limited oversight.

The upcoming rules will also give Ofcom broader data-gathering powers and the responsibility to review audience protection tools, from age ratings to parental controls, used by these services.

The changes come as the broader regulatory framework for UK media is being updated. The Media Act 2024 amended parts of the Communications Act 2003 to allow the designation of Tier 1 VoD services and introduce codes that better reflect modern media consumption.

What comes next?

Ofcom will launch consultations on the new VoD standards, giving platforms, creators and audiences a chance to weigh in on the details before enforcement begins.

The government says the new rules are a step toward a more consistent media landscape in which streaming services are accountable for audience protection and accessibility just like traditional broadcasters.

If you’re looking to get a dog but have reservations about all the poop, pee, and chewed shoes that you’ll have to deal with, then how about getting a robot one instead?

Unitree has brought the idea a step closer with the launch on Tuesday of the impressive-looking As2 quadruped.

The Chinese robotics giant already has plenty of experience building robot dogs, but the newly unveiled As2 stands out from its other models as a lighter, more agile consumer-grade contraption with a superior runtime of more than 4 hours, a walking range of 8 miles, and a top speed of 11 mph. It even supports large AI models for embodied AI interaction and autonomous decision-making.

Features include a high-definition front camera, a built in mic and speaker, remote control and intelligent following modes, and a lighting system to aid night walks. It also has an IP54 rating, making it resistant to dust and rain.

A video (top) accompanying the launch positions the As2 as a companion pet, with clips showing it being taken for a walk and running to its owner. It also shows off the robot’s strength and balance, as the 18-kg machine is able to stay standing and remain steady with a 105-kg human standing on its back.

The As2 has a few tricks up its sleeve, too, taking it far beyond what a regular dog can do. Like play tennis. It’s true — if you attach the optional seven-axis robotic arm, you can stick a tennis racket in its gripper and have a knockabout.

It looks like a lot of fun, though if you think you might miss all of the cuteness, slobbering, and quirky behavior that comes with a regular flesh-and-blood mutt, then the As2 probably isn’t for you.

Unitree has yet to publicly reveal pricing for its new robot dog, asking interested folks to “contact sales.”

Anthropic opened its virtual “Briefing: Enterprise Agents” event on Tuesday with a provocation. Kate Jensen, the company’s head of Americas, told viewers that the hype around enterprise AI agents in 2025 “turned out to be mostly premature,” with many pilots failing to reach production. “It wasn’t a failure of effort, it was a failure of approach, and it’s something we heard directly from our customers,” Jensen said.

The implicit promise: Anthropic has figured out the right approach, and it starts with the playbook that made Claude Code one of the most consequential developer tools of the past year. “In 2025 Claude transformed how developers work, and in 2026 it will do the same for knowledge work,” Jensen said. “The magic behind Claude Code is simple. When you can delegate hard challenges, you can focus on the work that actually matters. Cowork brings that same power to knowledge workers.”

That framing is central to understanding what Anthropic announced on Tuesday. The company rolled out a sweeping set of enterprise capabilities for Claude Cowork, the AI productivity platform it first released in research preview in January. Scott White, head of product for Claude Enterprise, described the ambition plainly during the keynote: “Cowork makes it possible for Claude to deliver polished, near final work. It goes beyond drafts and suggestions — actual completed projects and deliverables.”

The product updates are dense but consequential. Enterprise administrators can now build private plugin marketplaces tailored to their organizations, connecting to private GitHub repositories as plugin sources and controlling which plugins employees can access. Anthropic introduced new prebuilt plugin templates spanning HR, design, engineering, operations, financial analysis, investment banking, equity research, private equity, and wealth management. The company also shipped new MCP connectors for Google Drive, Google Calendar, Gmail, DocuSign, Apollo, Clay, Outreach, SimilarWeb, MSCI, LegalZoom, FactSet, WordPress, and Harvey — dramatically extending Claude’s reach into the software ecosystem that enterprises already use. And Claude can now pass context seamlessly between Cowork, Excel, and PowerPoint, including across multiple files, without requiring users to restart when switching applications.

White emphasized that the system is designed to feel native to each organization rather than generic. “We’ve heard loud and clear from enterprises — you want Claude to work the way that your company works, not just Claude for legal, but Cowork for legal at your company,” he said. “That’s exactly what today’s launches deliver.”

Real-world results from Spotify, Novo Nordisk, and Salesforce hint at what’s coming

To ground the product announcements in measurable outcomes, Anthropic showcased three enterprise deployments that illustrate both the scale and the variety of impact the company claims Claude can deliver.

At Spotify, engineers had long struggled with code migrations — the slow, manual work of updating and modernizing code across thousands of services. Jensen explained that after integrating Claude directly into the system Spotify’s engineers use daily, “any engineer can kick off a large-scale migration just by describing what they need in plain English.” The company reports up to a 90% reduction in engineering time, over 650 AI-generated code changes shipped per month, and roughly half of all Spotify updates now flowing through the system.

At Novo Nordisk, the pharmaceutical giant built an AI-powered platform called NovoScribe with Claude as its intelligence layer, targeting the grueling process of producing regulatory documentation for new medicines. Staff writers had previously averaged just over two reports per year. After deploying Claude, Jensen said, “documentation creation went from 10 plus weeks to 10 minutes. That’s a 95% reduction in resources for verification checks. Medicines are reaching patients faster.” Jensen also noted that Novo Nordisk used Claude Code to build the platform itself, enabling contributions from non-engineers — their digitalization strategy director, who holds a PhD in molecular biology rather than engineering, now prototypes features using natural language. “A team of 11 is operating like a team many times its size,” Jensen said.

Salesforce, meanwhile, uses Claude models to help power AI in Slack, reporting a 96% satisfaction rate for tools like its Slack bot and saving customers an estimated 97 minutes per week through summarization and recap features. The partnership reflects Anthropic’s broader ecosystem strategy: Jensen described the companies featured at the event as “Claude partners and domain experts with the data and trusted relationships that make Claude work in the real world.”

Enterprise leaders reveal the messy reality behind AI transformation

Perhaps the most illuminating segment of the event was a panel discussion featuring executives from Thomson Reuters, the New York Stock Exchange, and Epic, who provided candid assessments of AI’s enterprise reality that went well beyond the polished case studies.

Sridhar Masam, CTO of the New York Stock Exchange, described his organization as “rewiring our engineering process” with Claude Code and building internal AI agents using the Claude Agent SDK that can take instructions from a Jira ticket all the way to a committed piece of code. But he also identified fundamental shifts in how leaders must think. “The accountability is shifting,” he said. “Traditionally, we are so used to building deterministic platforms. You write code requirements and build. And now, with AI being probabilistic, the accountability doesn’t end when the project goes live, but on a daily basis, monitoring the behavior and outcomes.” He described a new paradigm beyond “buy versus build” — what he called “assembly,” the practice of combining multiple models, multiple vendors, platforms, data, and internal capabilities into solutions. And he noted that highly regulated industries must shift “from risk avoidance to risk calibration,” because simply avoiding AI is no longer a competitive option.

Steve Haske from Thomson Reuters, whose Co-Counsel product has reached a million users, was frank about the gap between what the technology can do and what organizations are ready for. “The tools are in many senses ahead of the change management,” he said. “A general counsel’s office, a law firm, a tax and accounting firm, an audit firm, need to rewire the processes to be able to take advantage of the benefits that the tools provide. And I think it’s 18 months away before that sort of change management catches up with the standard of the tool.” He also stressed an “ironclad guarantee” to Co-Counsel customers that “their input will not be part of our AI output,” and urged enterprise leaders to be “feverish” about protecting institutional intellectual property.

Seth Hain from Epic — the healthcare technology company behind MyChart — offered a finding that may foreshadow where enterprise AI adoption is truly heading. “Over half of our use of Claude Code is by non-developer roles across the company,” Hain said, describing how support and implementation staff had adopted the tool in ways the company never anticipated. Hain also described a deliberate trust-building strategy: Epic’s first AI capability was a medical record summarization that included links to the underlying source material, giving clinicians the ability to verify and build confidence before the company introduced more autonomous agent capabilities.

A year of Claude Code and MCP adoption explains why this moment feels different

Tuesday’s announcements cannot be understood in isolation. They are essentially the culmination of a year in which Anthropic transformed itself from a research-focused AI lab into a company with genuine enterprise distribution and developer ecosystem gravity.

The trajectory began with Claude Code, which Jensen noted had taken coding use cases “from assisting on tiny tasks to AI writing 90 or sometimes even 100% of the code, with enterprises shipping in weeks what once took many quarters.” But the deeper structural shift was the adoption of MCP — the Model Context Protocol — which has become the connective tissue allowing Claude to reach into and act upon data across an organization’s entire technology stack. Where previous AI tools were constrained to the information users manually fed them, MCP-connected Claude can pull context from Slack threads, Google Drive documents, CRM records, and financial systems simultaneously. This is what makes the plugin architecture announced Tuesday fundamentally different from earlier chatbot-style enterprise AI: it turns Claude into a reasoning layer that sits across an organization’s existing infrastructure rather than alongside it.

The implications for the broader AI industry are profound. Anthropic is effectively building a platform play — private plugin marketplaces, portable file-based plugins, and an expanding library of MCP connectors — that echoes the ecosystem strategies of earlier platform giants like Salesforce and Microsoft. The difference is velocity: Anthropic is compressing into months the kind of ecosystem development that previously took years. The company’s willingness to ship sector-specific plugin templates for investment banking, equity research, and wealth management alongside general-purpose tools signals that it sees no bright line between platform and application, between enabling partners and competing with them.

This strategic ambiguity is precisely what has spooked Wall Street. IBM shares suffered their worst single-day loss since October 2000 — down nearly 13.2% — on Monday after Anthropic published a blog post about using Claude Code to modernize COBOL, the decades-old programming language that runs on IBM’s mainframe systems. Enterprise software stocks had already been under heavy pressure since the initial Cowork announcement on January 30, with companies like ServiceNow, Salesforce, Snowflake, Intuit, and Thomson Reuters all experiencing steep declines. Cybersecurity companies tumbled after the company unveiled Claude Code Security on February 20.

Yet Tuesday’s event triggered a partial reversal that revealed something important about how markets are processing AI disruption. Companies named as Anthropic partners and integration targets — Salesforce, DocuSign, LegalZoom, Thomson Reuters, FactSet — all rallied, some sharply. Thomson Reuters surged more than 11%. The market appears to be drawing a new distinction: companies integrated into Anthropic’s ecosystem may benefit, while those standing outside it face existential risk.

Anthropic’s own economist warns that AI’s impact will be uneven — and fast

Peter McCrory, Anthropic’s head of economics, presented data from the Anthropic Economic Index that offered a sober counterweight to the event’s product optimism. Using privacy-preserving methods to analyze how people and businesses use Claude, McCrory’s team has tracked AI’s diffusion across more than 150 countries and every US state.

The headline finding is striking: a year ago, roughly a third of all US jobs had at least a quarter of their associated tasks appearing in Claude usage data. That figure has now risen to approximately one in every two jobs. “The scope of impact is broadening out throughout the economy as the tools and as the technology becomes more capable,” McCrory said. He characterized AI as a “general purpose technology” in the economic sense — meaning virtually no facet of the economy will be unaffected.

McCrory drew a critical distinction between automation, where Claude simply executes a task, and augmentation, where it collaborates with a human on more complex work. When businesses embed Claude through the API, he noted, “we see overwhelmingly Claude is being embedded in automated ways” — a pattern consistent with how transformative technologies have historically diffused through the economy.

On the question of job displacement, McCrory was measured but direct. He noted that “roles that typically require more years of schooling have the largest productivity or efficiency gains,” suggesting a dynamic economists call skill-biased technical change. He expressed concern about “jobs that are pure implementation” — citing data entry workers and technical writers as examples where Claude is already being used for tasks central to those occupations. But he emphasized that no evidence of widespread labor displacement has materialized yet, and pointed to forthcoming research that would introduce methodology for monitoring whether highly exposed workers are beginning to experience it.

His advice to enterprise leaders cut to the heart of the organizational challenge. “It might not just be about fundamental capabilities of the model,” McCrory said. “Do you have the right sort of data ecosystem, data infrastructure to provide the right information at the right time?” If the knowledge Claude needs to execute a sophisticated task exists only in a coworker’s head, he argued, “that’s not a technical problem, per se. That’s an organizational problem.”

The question every enterprise leader is now asking — and why no one has the answer yet

Jensen described a concept Anthropic calls “the thinking divide” — the growing gap between organizations that embed AI across employees, processes, and products simultaneously, and those that treat it as a point solution. The companies on the right side of that divide, she argued, will compound their advantage over time. Those on the wrong side “will find themselves falling further and further behind.”

Whether Anthropic ultimately functions as the rising tide that lifts the enterprise software ecosystem or the wave that swamps it remains genuinely uncertain. The same event that triggered a rally in shares of Anthropic’s named partners has also accelerated a broader reckoning for legacy software companies that cannot yet articulate how they fit into an AI-native world. McCrory, the economist, counseled humility. “Capabilities are moving very, very quickly,” he said. “It might represent an innovation in the method of innovation. So it’s not just making us better at the things that we do — it’s helping us discover new ways to do things.”

Thomson Reuters’ Haske perhaps put it most practically. “As leaders, we all have to get personally involved and personally invested in using the tools,” he said. “We’ve got to move fast. This environment is changing quickly. We cannot afford to get left behind.”

A Fortune 10 CIO recently told Jensen that enterprises would need to fit a decade of innovation into the next few years. The CIO smiled and said: “We’re going to do it in one with you.” Whether that confidence proves prescient or premature, one thing is clear from Tuesday’s event — the window for figuring it out is closing faster than most boardrooms realize.

Tech giants’ efforts to ramp up AI adoption in India may be about to hit a turning point, as companies end free promotions with hopes to convert the world’s fourth-largest economy into a windfall of paid subscribers.

India became the world’s largest market for generative AI app downloads in 2025, according to market intelligence firm Sensor Tower, widening its lead over the U.S. as installs jumped 207% year-over-year.

Companies including OpenAI, Google, and Perplexity rolled out extended free premium offers to accelerate user growth in the price sensitive market. Leading AI firms have also backed India in its push to become a global artificial intelligence hub. A major AI summit in New Delhi last week was attended by leaders including OpenAI’s Sam Altman, Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, and Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai — a sign of the country’s growing weight in the global AI race.

Now, some of those early promotional pushes are winding down. Perplexity ended its bundled Pro offer with Indian telco Airtel in January, while OpenAI’s free ChatGPT Go access in India is no longer available, potentially setting the stage for a clearer test of how many newly acquired users convert to paying subscribers.

Despite strong download growth, India still generates a disproportionately small share of AI app revenue, accounting for about 1% of in-app purchases even as it drives roughly 20% of global GenAI app downloads, according to the Sensor Tower data shared with TechCrunch, highlighting the monetization challenge in one of the industry’s fastest-growing markets.

GenAI app adoption in India accelerated sharply through 2025, with downloads peaking in September and October at year-over-year growth rates of about 320% and 260%, respectively, according to the data. Yet the surge in usage did not fully translate into revenue gains. In November and December 2025, AI app in-app purchase revenue in India fell 22% and 18% month over month, respectively. ChatGPT’s revenue dropped even more sharply — down 33% and 32% over the same period following the November launch of free sub-$5 ChatGPT Go access — reflecting the near-term impact of aggressive promotional pushes.

ChatGPT still commands more than 60% of GenAI in-app revenue in India, meaning shifts in its pricing strategy can significantly influence overall market performance.

Alongside promotional pushes, Sensor Tower attributed the surge in GenAI app adoption in India last year to a mix of new product launches, including the debut of platforms such as DeepSeek, Grok, and Meta AI, as well as upgrades to major chatbots like ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude, and Perplexity. Viral interest in AI-generated content also helped fuel adoption, with content creation and editing tools accounting for seven of the 20 most downloaded GenAI apps in India in 2025.

The user surge has been equally pronounced. India accounted for about 19% of the global user base of leading AI assistant apps in 2025, ahead of the U.S. at 10%, Sensor Tower said. ChatGPT continues to dominate the Indian market by monthly active users, though rivals including Google’s Gemini and Perplexity have also seen rapid growth following promotional offers. ChatGPT was the most downloaded GenAI app in India and globally in 2025, according to earlier Sensor Tower data. Earlier this month, OpenAI’s CEO said that the chatbot now has more than 100 million weekly active users in India.

The promotional push in India reflects a broader strategy by AI firms to reduce pricing friction in a highly value-conscious market, betting that early user adoption and engagement will translate into stronger long-term retention once free access periods expire, said Sneha Pandey, insights analyst at Sensor Tower.

India’s appeal lies in its massive digital base. The country has more than a billion internet users and around 700 million smartphone owners, making it one of the largest potential markets for AI services globally and a critical battleground for user growth.

Nonetheless, user engagement in India still trails more mature markets. In 2025, users of leading AI chatbot apps in the U.S. spent about 21% more time per week on the apps than their counterparts in India and logged 17% more sessions on average, per Sensor Tower.

“AI in-app revenues will likely see meaningful but gradual improvement as users become more deeply integrated into these platforms, making sustained engagement paramount,” Pandey told TechCrunch.

She added that pricing pressure in India is likely to remain elevated given the country’s young and value-conscious user base, making lower-cost tiers, telecom bundles, and micro-transaction models important for long-term retention.

ChatGPT remained the clear market leader in India entering 2026, with 180 million monthly active users in January, per Sensor Tower, followed by Google’s Gemini with 118 million, Perplexity with 19 million, and Meta AI with 12 million. The figures underline both the scale of India’s AI opportunity and the growing challenge for firms to convert rapid user adoption into sustained revenue.

Google, OpenAI, and Perplexity did not respond to requests for comments.

A chunky blue slab sits on a desk, with RCA jacks protruding like forgotten relics from a garage cleanup. This 8-bit console, known as the GameTank, recently reached its crowdfunding goal on Crowd Supply, and backers are now looking forward to a July 12 2026 ship date, a target that has been locked in after more than $45,345 was raised (as of today) against a $30,000 goal.

Clyde Shaffer is the mind behind the GameTank, having created it from the ground up at Clydeware, and this project is the culmination of his efforts. Shaffer wanted technology that allowed him to play really cool 8-bit games, not a ported-over replica of a classic hit (he’d had enough of those). The entire thing was made to seem like vintage circuit boards, right down to the individual chips and board arrangement.

Hyperkin RetroN 2 HD Gaming Console for NES/Super NES/Super Famicom (Gray)

• HD audio and video (720p) with 16: 9/4: 3 Switch (HD cable only); 3 ft. HD cable; includes AV ports with AV cable
• High compatibility with (NTSC/PAL) NES, Super NES, and Super Famicom cartridges
• Hyperkin-engineered perfect pin (patent pending) Technology sets a new standard for state-of-the-art, high-quality pins

The main powerhouse of the device is a W65C02S CPU that runs at 3.5 MHz. Then there’s a second W65C02S humming around at 14 MHz only for sound, as there are no fancy field-programmable gate arrays or modern controllers here, and no hidden logic chips or RAM.

Graphics are drawn into a 128×128 framebuffer, similar to how most old TVs cropped out a few rows at the top and bottom, leaving approximately 128×100 useable pixels. You have a whopping 200 colours to play with, all of which are completely usable on the screen at the same time, and a blitter copies bytes to the screen in real-time every single clock cycle, resulting in super-smooth movement without the unpleasant flicker you used to get on the NES or Atari.

Memory is generous by 8-bit standards (remember the old days?), with 32 kilobytes of general RAM divided into 8 KB chunks, 512 kilobytes for graphics data, and 4 KB for audio. Cartridges contain 2 megabytes of flash memory on a unique 36-pin board. You can control the device via two ports, each with a D-pad, A, B, C, and a Start button. The video output is NTSC composite via an RCA jack (think old TVs and VCRs), and there’s a 26-pin extension port on the back for tinkerers and GPIO lines to play with. Power comes from a wall wart, and for those inquisitive, Shaffer provided every single schematic, board file, and 3D print template on GitHub.

You can either build the thing yourself or get a soldered version from Soldered Electronics in Croatia (they handle manufacturing). If you want to get your hands dirty, there’s a C SDK based on CC65 for compiling code for the 6502 family, and if you don’t want to create it from the ground up, there’s even an emulator you can use to test your games on PC. If you decide to build it, you can load ROMs using a USB flasher. The developer kit costs $299 and includes the console, controller, analog cable, documentation, blank cartridge, and flasher. Blank carts are sold separately in two-packs for $40

Shaffer describes the GameTank as a playground for hackers and hardware aficionados. The 6502 core allows for easy porting of games from the NES or Apple II, but it’s the unique tools that actually set it apart. With the correct tools, you can make animations that flow like water and rich music that isn’t too tinny.

Crowd Supply is still open for pledges until the 26th. The prototypes have been running solid for the past two years, and the next step is to complete the numerous certifications. The first units will begin to arrive in the summer, and backers will be able to turn them on their CRTs or upscalers and load their new games from flashers or carts.
[Source]

from the lazy-Americans-stereotype-exists-for-a-reason dept

There’s not a single conservative left in the GOP. The ideals that were formerly considered “conservative” — small government, fiscal responsibility, etc. — have been replaced by white Christian nationalism, water-carrying for would-be autocrats, and immense amounts of deficit spending for the sole purpose of making America whiter.

That’s not the same as making it “greater,” no matter how Trump and his cohorts choose to spin it. Instead of asking themselves whether or not they’re actually making America worse, they just get on the bullhorn and blare racist invective on main.

Here’s Kristi Noem, engaging in the sort of thing most GOP politicians have managed to limit to PAC fundraisers behind closed doors:

Here’s her December 2025 X post in full:

I just met with the President.

I am recommending a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.

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Our forefathers built this nation on blood, sweat, and the unyielding love of freedom—not for foreign invaders to slaughter our heroes, suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars, or snatch the benefits owed to AMERICANS.

WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.

Lovely, eh? But she’s only doing what the Supreme Leader wants her to do. After all, the guy running the nation is no better. Actually, he’s worse, since he’s supposed to hold himself to a higher standard than his own political appointees.

President Donald Trump on Tuesday said he did not want Somali immigrants in the U.S., saying residents of the war-ravaged eastern African country are too reliant on U.S. social safety net and add little to the United States.

[…]

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“They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country,” Trump told reporters near the end of a lengthy Cabinet meeting. He added: “Their country is no good for a reason. Your country stinks and we don’t want them in our country.”

Counterpoint: this administration stinks and we don’t want them in our country. Every smear leveled against migrants by the Trump administration is a lie, starting with the “worst of the worst” posturing, continuing all the way down to the suggestion migrants add nothing to this country while dangling from the government teat the entire time.

It’s insanely ignorant to claim immigrants are more likely to be criminals than US citizens. That has never been true. Neither have the claims made by Trump and Noem. If there’s anyone capable of reducing the deficit, it’s migrants rather than the most powerful political party in the nation.

Cato Institute continues to expose the government’s lies about migrants by doing nothing more than simply looking at the data. While Trump continues to pretend immigrants are robbing the country blind and that levying tariffs will make average Americans richer, Cato is delivering the facts. And the facts say that the best thing this country could do for both the economy and national deficit is bring in as many migrants as possible.

• Every year from 1994 to 2023, immigrants have paid more in taxes than they received in benefits.
• Immigrants generated nearly $10.6 trillion more in federal, state, and local taxes than they induced in total government spending.
• Accounting for savings on interest payments on the national debt, immigrants saved $14.5 trillion in debt over this 30-year period.

Immigrants have always paid more than their “fair share” in taxes. Tax cheats like Donald Trump are the kind of people who always insist otherwise while preaching to the ignorant faithful. Of the $14.5 trillion in debt reduction created by our nation’s migrant population, more than a third of it ($6.3 trillion) was generated by non-citizens — people who are here illegally or have yet to become naturalized citizens and/or permanent residents.

The upshot of the data is this: without immigrants, this nation would be so far underwater that it would threaten the future of the nation itself:

Without the contributions of immigrants, public debt at all levels would already be above 200 percent of US GDP—nearly twice the 2023 level and a threshold some analysts believe would trigger a debt crisis.

Both Kristi Noem and Donald Trump should be made to eat every word of this next paragraph, as painfully and protractedly as possible:

Immigrants accounted for more US income and generated more revenue for the government because they were, on average, over 12 percentage points more likely to be employed than the US-born population. This means that even if immigrants earn lower hourly wages, they can still account for more total income per capita than the US-born population by working cumulatively more hours. This higher employment rate was driven by the fact that immigrants were, on average, 20 percentage points more likely to be of working age. Immigrants usually arrive in the US as young adults and often leave before retirement.

Calling immigrants “leeches” and “entitlement junkies” is nothing but naked bigotry. It has fuck all to do with the actual facts — facts this government has access to but chooses to ignore in favor of blowing its handful of racist dog whistles repeatedly.

And yet again, let’s take the latest look at the fact that is perhaps the most uncomfortable for a regime that repeatedly infers that being a migrant means being a criminal worthy of speedy ejection:

It’s BOGO time at the migrant facts warehouse: by committing fewer crimes migrants are less of drain on public resources than US citizens, who are spending more time behind bars than their “illegal” counterparts. And lest we forget, racists think the reason migrants commit less crime than American citizens is because we have Black American citizens. Cato has already dismantled this counterargument, even after factoring in the blatant racism this collection of “but for the Black people” asshats think will allow them to double-down on their bigotry:

A persistent criticism of Cato’s paper in this series is that the native-born incarceration rate is only higher because black native-born Americans have a high incarceration rate (see Table 1 from our paper). It’s certainly true that black native-born Americans have the highest incarceration rates of any ethnic or racial group in any immigrant category. However, the high black American incarceration rate does not overturn our results. It merely narrows them. Immigrants have lower incarceration rates even without considering black native-born rates….

Excluding black native-born Americans and black immigrants reduces the native-born incarceration rate by 27 percent, from 1,221 to 891 per 100,000 in 2023 (see Table 1 for reference). Excluding black immigrants barely reduces the legal immigrant incarceration rate to 312 per 100,000, but increases the illegal immigrant incarceration rate to 626 per 100,000. Excluding blacks increases the illegal immigrant incarceration rates because their rate is below that of the rest of the population. The legal and illegal immigrant incarceration rate gap with natives also narrows to 65 percent and 30 percent lower, respectively. Excluding only black native-born Americans and keeping black immigrants in the sample, which doesn’t make sense but critics have brought it up, produces almost identical results.

This government can continue to stoke the flames of hatred. But it will never have the facts to back its hateful rhetoric. Of course, that hardly matters to this government and its top officials. But it should matter to everyone else who’s not part of the Executive Branch circle jerk. Migrants are better equipped to make this country great than the people who think merely existing here as the offspring of white people makes them the superior breed.

Filed Under: bigotry, cbp, dhs, donald trump, ice, immigration, kristi noem, maga, mass deportation, racism, trump administration

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