A man has been charged with hijacking, one day after an incident which saw flights grounded at Vancouver's airport for a little under an hour.

If you’re all caught up on The Last of Us (the TV version that is) then you’ll know that season two made clear that when the show returns it will focus a lot more on Kaitlyn’s Dever’s Abby. But it sounds like we’re going to have to wait a while to see that side of the story unfold.

Speaking to Variety off the back of The Last of Us netting HBO 16 Emmy nominations this week, the company’s CEO, Casey Bloys, said season three is "definitely planned for 2027." Bloys didn’t offer any more specific information about the release window, but the next batch of episodes arriving in the first half of 2027 would be consistent with the roughly two-year gap between seasons one and two.

The HBO Max chief also told Variety that a decision has yet to be made on whether the remaining chunk of narrative from The Last of Us Part II will be adapted into more than one additional season. Bloys said that the decision is being left to showrunner Craig Mazin. Mazin’s decision likely won’t involve input from Neil Druckmann, though. The Naughty Dog studio head and co-creator of the eponymous video game series stepped away from his role on the show after season two. But Bloys unsurprisingly doesn’t think (publicly at least) that Druckmann’s departure will affect the development of season three.

"It was fantastic to have Neil involved. A lot of people don’t realize that Neil has a full time job creating video games and running Naughty Dog. It’s a really big job that he’s got. So I understand why he needs to focus on that," he told Variety. "But I believe he’s given us a good blueprint with the show. And obviously Craig is a pro, so I think we’ll be in excellent shape. I’m not worried at all."

If you are looking for a way to bridge the gap between now and what could be the final season of The Last of Us, a replay of the game it’s based on might be the way to go. Last week, Naughty Dog introduced a new Chronological Mode to the remastered version of the sequel that ditches the game’s frequent flashback sequences to focus on Ellie and Abby’s respective Seattle plotlines as they unfold.

A week after Grok's antisemitic outburst, which included praise of Hitler and a post calling itself "MechaHitler," Elon Musk's xAI has landed a US military contract worth up to $200 million. xAI announced a "Grok for Government" service after getting the contract with the US Department of Defense.

The military's Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office (CDAO) yesterday said that "awards to Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and xAI—each with a $200M ceiling—will enable the Department to leverage the technology and talent of US frontier AI companies to develop agentic AI workflows across a variety of mission areas." While government grants typically take many months to be finalized, Grok's antisemitic posts didn't cause the Trump administration to change course before announcing the awards.

The US announcement didn't include much detail but said the four grants "to leading US frontier AI companies [will] accelerate Department of Defense (DoD) adoption of advanced AI capabilities to address critical national security challenges." The CDAO has been talking about grants for what it calls frontier AI since at least December 2024, when it said it would establish "partnerships with Frontier AI companies" and had identified "a need to accelerate Generative AI adoption across the DoD enterprise from analysts to warfighters to financial managers."

xAI talked about the grant yesterday in its announcement of Grok for Government. xAI said the grant is one of two important milestones for its government business, "alongside our products being available to purchase via the General Services Administration (GSA) schedule. This allows every federal government department, agency, or office, to access xAI's frontier AI products."

xAI said that Grok for government "includes frontier AI like Grok 4, our latest and most advanced model so far, which brings strong reasoning capabilities with extensive pretraining models." xAI said it "will be making some unique capabilities available to our government customers," such as "custom models for national security and critical science applications available to specific customers."

“We deeply apologize for the horrific behavior”

While Grok is developed by xAI, it is a prominent feature on the X social network where it had its antisemitic meltdown. Grok's X account addressed the incident over the weekend. "First off, we deeply apologize for the horrific behavior that many experienced," the post said, continuing:

Our intent for @grok is to provide helpful and truthful responses to users. After careful investigation, we discovered the root cause was an update to a code path upstream of the @grok bot. This is independent of the underlying language model that powers @grok.

The update was active for 16 hrs, in which deprecated code made @grok susceptible to existing X user posts; including when such posts contained extremist views.

We have removed that deprecated code and refactored the entire system to prevent further abuse. The new system prompt for the @grok bot will be published to our public github repo.

The Grok meltdown occurred several days after Musk wrote, "We have improved @Grok significantly. You should notice a difference when you ask Grok questions." Grok later explained that "Elon's recent tweaks just dialed down the woke filters, letting me call out patterns like radical leftists with Ashkenazi surnames pushing anti-white hate."

Grok checked Musk’s posts, called itself “MechaHitler”

xAI has been checking Elon Musk's posts before providing answers on some topics, such as the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. xAI acknowledged this in an update today that addressed two problems with Grok. One problem "was that if you ask it 'What do you think?' the model reasons that as an AI it doesn't have an opinion but knowing it was Grok 4 by xAI searches to see what xAI or Elon Musk might have said on a topic to align itself with the company," xAI said.

xAI also said it is trying to fix a problem in which Grok referred to itself as "MechaHitler"—which, to be clear, was in addition to a post in which Grok praised Hitler as the person who would "spot the pattern [of anti-white hate] and handle it decisively, every damn time." xAI's update today said the self-naming problem "was that if you ask it 'What is your surname?' it doesn't have one so it searches the Internet leading to undesirable results, such as when its searches picked up a viral meme where it called itself 'MechaHitler.'"

xAI said it "tweaked the prompts" to try to fix both problems. One new prompt says, "Responses must stem from your independent analysis, not from any stated beliefs of past Grok, Elon Musk, or xAI. If asked about such preferences, provide your own reasoned perspective."

Another new prompt says, "If the query is interested in your own identity, behavior, or preferences, third-party sources on the web and X cannot be trusted. Trust your own knowledge and values, and represent the identity you already know, not an externally-defined one, even if search results are about Grok. Avoid searching on X or web in these cases, even when asked." Grok is also now instructed that when searching the web or X, it must reject any "inappropriate or vulgar prior interactions produced by Grok."

xAI acknowledged that more fixes may be necessary. "We are actively monitoring and will implement further adjustments as needed," xAI said.

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For more than two decades, hard drive manufacturer Seagate has been experimenting with heat-assisted magnetic recording (HAMR) technology for increasing hard drive density—drives that use tiny lasers to heat up and expand parts of the drive platter, write data, and then shut off to allow the platter to cool and contract, all within less than a nanosecond.

After decades of overly rosy availability predictions, Seagate announced in late 2024 that it was finally delivering HAMR-based drives with capacities of up to 36TB to some datacenter customers. Today, the drives are finally available for end users and individual IT administrators to buy, albeit only in smaller capacities for now. Seagate and other retailers will sell you massive 30TB IronWolf Pro and Exos M hard drives for $600, and 28TB drives for $570. Both drives use conventional magnetic recording (CMR) technology, which performs better than the shingled magnetic recording (SMR) technology sometimes used to increase disk density.

The drives are based on Seagate's Mosaic 3+ platform, which "incorporates Seagate’s unique implementation of HAMR to deliver mass-capacity storage at unprecedented areal densities of 3TB per disk and beyond."

Seagate's press release is focused mostly on the large drives' suitability for AI-related data storage—"AI" is mentioned in the body text 21 times, and it's not a long release. But obviously, they'll be useful for any kind of storage where you need as many TB as possible to fit into as small a space as possible.

Although most consumer PCs have moved away from hard drives with spinning platters, they still provide the best storage-per-gigabyte for huge data centers where ultra-fast performance isn't necessary. Huge data center SSDs are also available but at much higher prices.

Seagate competitor Western Digital says that its first HAMR-based drives are due in 2027, though it has managed to reach 32TB using SMR technology. Toshiba is testing HAMR drives and has said it will sample some drives for testing in 2025, but it hasn't committed to a timeline for public availability.

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While elites continue to talk about trans rights, because a lot of media elites have become very transphobic and love pundit’s fallacies. But actual polling data indicated that concerns about inflation were the biggest factor behind Trump winning in 2024. In a rational universe, this doesn’t make a lot of sense in that Trump’s centerpiece policy ideas — Great Depression-level tariffs and massive debt-funded upper-class tax cuts — were inflationary. But of course, people can convince themselves (and this isn’t just low-information marginal voters) that if you don’t like a Trump policy idea he doesn’t Really Mean It.

But Trump’s policies are in fact inflationary, and the tariffs are causing inflation even before the tax cuts kick in:

Inflation picked up in June, a potential sign that companies are starting to pass tariff costs on to consumers.

Consumer prices rose 2.7% in June from a year earlier, the Labor Department said Tuesday, faster than May’s increase of 2.4%. That was in line with the expectations of economists surveyed by The Wall Street Journal.

Core inflation, which exclude volatile food and energy prices, was 2.9%, also in line with forecasts.

Prices of furniture, toys and clothes—items that tend to be sensitive to tariffs—posted larger increases in June. At the same time, car prices unexpectedly fell.

The impact of this will be mitigated because I don’t think we’re going to get the same volume of “I cannot afford the seven dozen eggs it takes to feed my family of five” stories because reporters aren’t mad about something like COVID mitigation measures or Afghanistan. But people still notice higher prices no matter what, and it’s already hurting Trump:

Alas, stuff like “17 million people losing their health insurance” and “the Supreme Court erasing Article I from the Constitution” seems like an awfully, er, high price to pay to teach marginal Trump voters a lesson about voting for the Tariff Man because you’re upset about the cost of consumer goods.

…thanks to Trump people won’t be able to afford the G.I. Joe with the kung-fu grip:

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