While other social media sites and streaming services rush to scrub Kanye West’s pro-Nazi song from their platforms , the curious or the enthused can find memes, remixes, and unedited audio of West’s new song, “Heil Hitler,” all over Instagram.

Nazism is one of the only groups that Meta calls out by name in its own rules. In the current version of its community standards policy regarding “Dangerous Organizations and Individuals,” the company says it will remove any content that promotes Nazis. “We…remove content that Glorifies, Supports or Represents ideologies that promote hate, such as nazism and white supremacy.”

404 Media found dozens of Instagram reels that featured the song and several of them had been viewed more than a million times. One reel, which has been viewed 1.2 million times, declared it the song of the summer. “How we all bumpin’ Kanye’s New song This summer,” it says over footage of people dancing.

Another reel with more than 40,000 views shows Hasidic Jews dancing over the song under the caption “Amazing things are happening.”

A third depicts a white dude in khaki pants dancing to the song in front of a glowing and spinning swastika. “White dads getting turnt to Kanye’s new song at the summer barbecue 🔥,” reads the caption. It’s been viewed more than 700,000 times. The account that shared it describes itself as a “race realist and meme guy” in the bio. Much of its content is memed-up clips of avowed white supremacist Nick Fuentes.

“Heil Hitler” is the latest single from Kanye West’s forthcoming album Cuck. In the song he talks about how the world has been cruel to him. “Man, these people took my kids from me / Then they froze my bank account / I got so much anger in me,” Ye raps. It is these tribulations, he sings, that made him a Nazi.

The video for the song racked up millions of views on X and is still up. It was also briefly available on major streaming platforms like Spotify and Soundcloud before getting pulled. Even the Genius page for the song was pulled.

"We recognize that users may share content that includes references to designated dangerous organizations and individuals in the context of social and political discourse," a Meta spokesperson told us in an email. "This includes content reporting on, neutrally discussing or condemning dangerous organizations and individuals or their activities."

None of the videos we've seen were "reporting on" the song. Some were arguably making fun of it, but most of of them were just sharing or celebrating it.

We have reported many stories about Meta’s inability or unwillingness many types of content on Instagram that goes against its own rules, including accounts that face swap models that make them look like they have down syndrome, AI-generated accounts that pretend to be real people, accounts advertising illegal drugs and firearms on the site, and accounts promoting various scams.

In theory these videos should be relatively easy to find, remove, or even prevent people from uploading to begin with. Internet platforms like YouTube and Twitch have technology that automatically detects audio to flag content that may violate copyright. The same method can also be used to flag certain audio and prevent users from uploading it. Additionally, one reason we were able to find so many of these videos so quickly is that, like TikTok, Instagram has a feature that shows users what other videos were uploaded to the platform using the exact same sound. 

Update: This article has been updated with comment from Meta.

This week's Tuesday Telescope photo is pretty meta as it features... a telescope.

This particular telescope is under construction in the Atacama Desert in northern Chile, one of the darkest places on Earth with excellent atmospheric visibility. The so-called "Extremely Large Telescope" is being built on a mountaintop in the Andes at an elevation of about 3,000 meters.

And it really is extremely large. The primary mirror will be 39 meters (128 feet) in diameter. Like, that's gigantic for an optical telescope. It is nearly four times larger than the largest operational reflecting telescopes in the world.

The Europeans are in a contest, of sorts, with other very large telescope construction projects. A consortium of several countries, including the United States, is building the Giant Magellan Telescope, which will have a primary diameter of 25.4 meters. This facility is also located in the Atacama Desert. Both facilities are targeting first light before the end of this decade, but this will depend on funding and how smoothly construction proceeds. A third large project, the Thirty Meter Telescope, is planned for Mauna Kea on the Big Island of Hawaii. However, this effort has stalled due to ongoing opposition from native Hawaiians. It is unclear when, or if, it will proceed.

In any case, within less than a decade, we are going to undergo a radical revolution in how we see the cosmos when one or more of these next-generation ground-based optical telescopes come online. What will we ultimately observe?

The mystery of what's up there left to be discovered is half the fun!

Source: European Southern Observatory

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We're about three weeks out from the theatrical release of From the World of John Wick: Ballerina, starring Ana de Armas. So naturally Lionsgate has released one final trailer to whet audience appetites for what promises to be a fiery, action-packed addition to the hugely successful franchise.

(Some spoilers for 2019's John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum.)

Chronologically, Ballerina takes place during the events of John Wick Chapter 3: Parabellum. As previously reported, Parabellum found Wick declared excommunicado from the High Table for killing crime lord Santino D'Antonio on the grounds of the Continental. On the run with a bounty on his head, he makes his way to the headquarters of the Ruska Roma crime syndicate, led by the Director (Anjelica Huston). The Director also trains young girls to be ballerina-assassins, and one young ballerina (played by Unity Phelan) is shown rehearsing in the scene. That dancer, Eve Macarro, is the main character in Ballerina, now played by de Armas.

Huston returns as the Director, Ian McShane is back as Winston, and Lance Reddick makes one final (posthumous) appearance as the Continental concierge, Charon. New cast members include Gabriel Byrne as the main villain, the Chancellor, who turns an entire town against Eve; Sharon Duncan-Brewster as Nogi, Eve's mentor; Norman Reedus as Daniel Pine; and Catalina Sandino Moreno and David Castaneda in as-yet-undisclosed roles.

The first trailer was released last September and focused heavily on Eve's backstory: Having been orphaned, she chose to train with the Ruska Roma in hopes of avenging her father's brutal death. Wick only made a brief appearance, but he had more screen time in the second trailer, released in March, in which the pair face off in an atmospheric wintry landscape.

This final trailer opens with Eve looking up while directly in Wick's crosshairs. Much of the ensuing footage isn't new, but it does show de Armas to her best deadly advantage as she takes on combatant after combatant in true John Wick style. Her vow: "This isn't done until they're dead."

From the World of John Wick: Ballerina hits theaters on June 6, 2025.

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The White House Office of Management and Budget dropped its "skinny" budget proposal for the federal government earlier this month, and the headline news for the US space program was the cancellation of three major programs: the Space Launch System rocket, Orion spacecraft, and Lunar Gateway.

Opinions across the space community vary widely about the utility of these programs—one friend in the industry predicted a future without them to be so dire that Artemis III would be the last US human spaceflight of our lifetimes. But there can be no question that if such changes are made they would mark the most radical remaking of NASA in two decades.

This report, based on interviews with multiple sources inside and out of the Trump administration, seeks to explain what the White House is trying to do with Moon and Mars exploration, what this means for NASA and US spaceflight, and whether it could succeed.

Will it actually happen?

The first question is whether these changes proposed by the White House will be accepted by the US Congress. Republican and Democratic lawmakers have backed Orion for two decades, the SLS rocket for 15 years, and the Gateway for 10 years. Will they finally give up programs that have been such a reliable source of good-paying jobs for so long?

In general, the answer appears to be yes. We saw the outlines of a deal during the confirmation hearing for private astronaut Jared Isaacman to become the next NASA administrator in April. He was asked repeatedly whether he intended to use the SLS rocket and Orion for Artemis II (a lunar fly around) and Artemis III (lunar landing). Isaacman said he did.

However nothing was said about using this (very costly) space hardware for Artemis IV and beyond. Congress did not ask, presumably because it knows the answer. And that answer, as we saw in the president's skinny budget, is that the rocket and spacecraft will be killed after Artemis III. This is a pragmatic time to do it, as canceling the programs after Artemis III saves NASA billions of dollars in upgrading the rocket for a singular purpose: assembling a Lunar Gateway of questionable use.

But this will not be a normal budget process. The full budget request from the White House is unlikely to come out before June, and it will probably be bogged down in Congress. One of the few levers that Democrats in Congress presently have is the requirement of 60 Senators to pass appropriations bills. So compromise is necessary, and a final budget may not pass by the October 1 start of the next fiscal year.

Then, should Congress not acquiesce to the budget request, there is the added threat of the White House Office of Management and Budget to use "impoundment" to withhold funding and implement its budget priorities. This process would very quickly get bogged down in the courts, and no one really knows how the Supreme Court would rule.

Leadership alignment

To date, the budget process for NASA has not been led by space policy officials. Rather, the White House Office of Management and Budget, and its leader, Russell Vought, have set priorities and funding. This has led to "budget-driven" policy that has resulted in steep cuts to science that often don't make much sense (i.e., ending funding for the completed Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope).

However, there soon will be some important voices to implement a more sound space policy and speak for NASA's priorities, rather than those of budget cutters.

One of these is President Trump's nominee to lead NASA, Isaacman. He is awaiting floor time in the US Senate for a final vote. That could happen during the next week or two, allowing Isaacman to become the space agency's administrator and begin to play an important role in decision-making.

But Isaacman will need allies in the White House itself to carry out sweeping space policy changes. To that end, the report in Politico last week—which Ars has confirmed—that there will be a National Space Council established in the coming months is important. Led by Vice President JD Vance, the space council will provide a counterweight to Vought's budget-driven process.

Thus, by this summer, there should be key leadership in place to set space policy that advances the country's exploration goals. But what are those goals?

What happens to Artemis

After the Artemis III mission the natural question is, what would come next if the SLS rocket and Orion spacecraft are canceled?

The most likely answer is that NASA turns to an old but successful playbook: COTS. This stands for Commercial Orbital Transportation System and was created by NASA two decades ago to develop cargo transport systems (eventually this became SpaceX's Dragon and Northrop's Cygnus spacecraft) for the International Space Station. Since then, NASA has adopted this same model for crew services as well as other commercial programs.

Under the COTS model, NASA provides funding and guidance to private companies to develop their own spacecraft, rockets, and services, and then buys those at a "market" rate.

The idea of a Lunar COTS program is not new. NASA employees explored the concept in a research paper a decade ago, finding that "a future (Lunar) COTS program has the great potential of enabling development of cost-effective, commercial capabilities and establishing a thriving cislunar economy which will lead the way to an economical and sustainable approach for future human missions to Mars."

Sources indicate NASA would go to industry and seek an "end-to-end" solution for lunar missions. That is, an integrated plan to launch astronauts from Earth, land them on the Moon, and return them to Earth. One of the bidders would certainly be SpaceX, with its Starship vehicle already having been validated during the Artemis III mission. Crews could launch from Earth either in Dragon or Starship. Blue Origin is the other obvious bidder. The company might partner with Lockheed Martin to commercialize the Orion spacecraft or use the crew vehicle it is developing internally.

Other companies could also participate. The point is that NASA would seek to buy astronaut transportation to the Moon, just as it already is doing with cargo and science experiments through the Commercial Lunar Payload Services program.

The extent of an Artemis lunar surface presence would be determined by several factors, including the cost and safety of this transportation program and whether there are meaningful things for astronauts to do on the Moon.

What about Mars?

The skinny budget contained some intriguing language about Mars exploration: "By allocating over $7 billion for lunar exploration and introducing $1 billion in new investments for Mars-focused programs, the Budget ensures that America’s human space exploration efforts remain unparalleled, innovative, and efficient."

This was, in fact, the only budget increase proposed by the Trump White House. So what does it mean?

No one is saying for sure, but this funding would probably offer a starting point for a robust Mars COTS program. This would begin with cargo missions to Mars. But eventually it would expand to include crewed missions, thus fulfilling Trump's promise to land humans on the red planet.

Is this a gift to Elon Musk? Critics will certainly cast it as such, and that is understandable. But the plan would be open to any interested companies, and there are several. Rocket Lab, for example, has already expressed its interest in sending cargo missions to Mars. Impulse Space, too, has said it is building a spacecraft to ferry cargo to Mars and land there.

The Trump budget proposal also kills a key element of NASA's Mars exploration plans, the robotic Mars Sample Return mission to bring rocks and soil from the red planet to Earth in the 2030s. However, this program was already frozen by the Biden administration because of delays and cost overruns.

Sources said the goal of this budget cut, rather than having a single $8 billion Mars Sample Return mission, is to create an ecosystem in which such missions are frequent. The benefit of opening a pathway to Mars with commercial companies is that it would allow for not just a single Mars Sample Return mission, but multiple efforts at a lower cost.

"The fact is we want to land large things, including crew cabins, on the Moon and Mars and bring them back to Earth," one Republican space policy consultant said. "Instead of building a series of expensive bespoke robotic landers to do science, let's develop cost-effective reusable landers that can, with minimal changes, support both cargo and crew missions to the Moon and Mars."

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Intel's i486 was the first "computer number" I ever really understood. Sure, my elementary school computer lab had both the Apple IIGS and Apple IIc, and one of them was slightly more useful, for reasons unexplained to me. But soon after my father brought home his office's discarded Gateway desktop with a 486DX 33 MHz inside, I was catapulted into my first Intel sorting scheme. I learned there was an x86 before this one (i386), and there were models with different trailing numbers (16–100 MHz) and "DX" levels. This was my first grasp of what hardware I was actually using and what could improve inside it.

More than 36 years after the release of the 486 and 18 years after Intel stopped making them, leaders of the Linux kernel believe the project can improve itself by leaving i486 support behind. Ingo Molnar, quoting Linus Torvalds regarding "zero real reason for anybody to waste one second" on 486 support, submitted a patch series to the 6.15 kernel that updates its minimum support features. Those requirements now include TSC (Time Stamp Counter) and CX8 (i.e., "fixed" CMPXCH8B, its own whole thing), features that the 486 lacks (as do some early non-Pentium 586 processors).

It's not the first time Torvalds has suggested dropping support for 32-bit processors and relieving kernel developers from implementing archaic emulation and work-around solutions. "We got rid of i386 support back in 2012. Maybe it's time to get rid of i486 support in 2022," Torvalds wrote in October 2022. Failing major changes to the 6.15 kernel, which will likely arrive late this month, i486 support will be dropped.

Where does that leave people running a 486 system for whatever reason? They can run older versions of the Linux kernel and Linux distributions. They might find recommendations for teensy distros like MenuetOS, KolibriOS, and Visopsys, but all three of those require at least a Pentium. They can run FreeDOS. They might get away with the OS/2 descendant ArcaOS. There are some who have modified Windows XP to run on 486 processors, and hopefully, they will not connect those devices to the Internet.

Really, though, if you're dedicated enough to running a 486 system in 2025, you're probably resourceful enough to find copies of the software meant for that system. One thing about computers—you never stop learning.

This post was updated at 3:30 p.m. to fix a date error.

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What's a reformed villain gotta do to impress the Justice League? That's the dilemma faced by John Cena's titular antihero in the first teaser for S2 of Peacemaker, James Gunn's Emmy-nominated series spun off from his 2021 film, The Suicide Squad. We've got the same colorful cast of characters, but the new season will serve as something of a "soft reboot" as part of the new DC Universe (DCU) franchise.

(Spoilers for S1 and The Suicide Squad below.)

The eight-episode first season was set five months after the events of The Suicide Squad. Having survived a near-fatal shooting, Peacemaker—aka Christopher Smith—is recruited by the US government for a new mission: the mysterious Project Butterfly, led by a mercenary named Clemson Murn (Chukwudi Iwuji). The team also includes A.R.G.U.S. agent John Economos (Steve Agee) of the Belle Reve Penitentiary, National Security Agency agent and former Waller aide Emilia Harcourt (Jennifer Holland), and new team member Leota Adebayo (Danielle Brooks).

Project Butterfly turned out to be a mission to save Earth from an alien species of parasitic butterfly-like creatures who took over human bodies. The misfit members of the project eventually succeeded in defeating the butterflies in a showdown at a ranch, and even survived the carnage despite some severe injuries.

Creating a spinoff series around the villain who killed Rick Flagg (Joel Kinnaman) in The Suicide Squad was a bold move, but my initial doubts proved unfounded. As I wrote in my 2022 review, "Gunn has successfully taken a seemingly irredeemable character and sent him on an emotional journey that made us love him—all framed in a blood-soaked, action-packed, cheekily irreverent main story that makes for top-notch entertainment." I wasn't alone in my assessment. So it wasn't surprising when HBO Max renewed the show for a second season just before the S1 finale was set to air, even though it was originally conceived as a limited series.

Gunn and Peter Safran have since become co-CEOs of DC Studios and are developing a 10-year plan for the DC Universe, starting with this year's Superman. Peacemaker S2 will build on the events of that film. As for the killer S1 opening title sequence—featuring cast members dancing to Norwegian metal band Wig Wam's "Do You Wanna Taste It?"—Gunn has said that we're getting a new title sequence for S2 set to a new tune.

Cena, Brooks, Holland, Agee, and Stroma are all back for S2, along with Nhut Lee as Judomaster and Eagly, of course. Robert Patrick is also listed in the S2 cast, reprising his role as Chris' father, Auggie; since Chris killed him in S1, one assumes Auggie will appear in flashbacks, hallucinations, or perhaps an alternate universe. (This is a soft reboot, after all.) New cast members include Frank Grillo as Rick Flagg Sr. (Grillo voiced the role in the animated Creature Commandos), now head of A.R.G.U.S. and out to avenge his son's death; Tim Meadows as A.R.G.U.S. agent Langston Fleury; and Sol Rodriguez as Sasha Bordeaux.

Set to "Oh Lord" by Foxy Shazam, the teaser opens with Leota driving Chris to a job interview, assuring him, "They're gonna be doing backflips to get you to join." It turns out to be an interview with Justice League members Green Lantern/Guy Gardner (Nathan Fillion), Hawkgirl/Kendra Saunders (Isabel Merced), and Maxwell Lord (Sean Gunn), but they are not really into the interviewing process or taking note of Chris' marksmanship and combat skills. They even diss poor Chris while accidentally keeping the microphone turned on: "This guy sucks." (All three reprise their roles from Superman and are listed as S2 cast members, but it's unclear how frequently they will appear.)

The other team members aren't faring much better. They saved the world from the butterflies; you'd think people would treat them with a bit more respect, if not as outright heroes. Leota is "living in the worst level of Grand Theft Auto," per John Economos; Emilia Harcourt has anger management issues and is diagnosed with "a particularly severe form of toxic masculinity"; and Vigilante is working in the food service industry. There's not much detail as to the plot, apart from Chris going on the run from A.R.G.U.S., but the final scene shows Chris walking through a door and encountering another version of himself. So things are definitely about to get interesting.

The second season of Peacemaker will premiere on Max on August 21, 2025.

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