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Month: August 2026
Gracie Abrams has no bad blood with Taylor Swift.
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Diane Warren’s newest family member has truly been hogging the spotlight.
The Oscar-nominated songwriter came out victorious in an Aug. 20 bidding war over a baby pig that became a viral…
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INDYCAR is in Washington, D.C., this weekend for the Freedom 250, and the unique event is getting a unique trophy. The Freedom 250 will be a street race to celebrate the United States’ 250th birthday. It was designed as a 250-mile race on a 1.7-mile layout across landmark locations in D.C. Winning team owners will receive hardware built specifically for the event. The trophy scales and blends two D.C. icons: the Washington Monument and the U.S. Capitol dome. The trophy is a representation of this one-of-a-kind venue framed by two historic landmarks on either end of the track. The look, according to designer Michael Montri, reflects the perspective from behind and through the Washington Monument while looking toward the Capitol Building across the National Mall and this incredible course. Here are four things to know about the official INDYCAR Freedom 250 trophy. The upper shaft of the Freedom 250 trophy isn’t a random pyramid. Instead, it’s a proportionally scaled tribute to the Washington Monument. The upper section features a solid clear crystal pyramid modeled after the Washington Monument profile. The crystal pyramid features a 72.6-degree face angle and a 1,600 height-to-base ratio, matching the proportions of the physical monument. A hollow shaft continues down from the crystal at the same 72.6-degree angle in a straight line to the plinth. The owner trophy is produced in three scaled sizes for the podium finishers. Construction specs detail a black hollow base assembled with 45-degree miter joints and a mirror-finish polish where the plinth meets the base. Crowning each trophy is a detailed model of the U.S. Capitol dome, and the components are scaled down across all three podium spots: Tucked right beneath the plinth is a clever optical detail. The underside of the hollow plinth features a mirror-finish polish where it meets the black base. This reflective deck directs light upward into the hollow shaft, illuminating the solid crystal pyramid and Capitol dome from within during victory lane celebrations. The circular black base uses clever fabrication tricks to keep the design sleek. Assembled from a cylindrical wall ring and top deck disk, the base is brought together using 45-degree miter cuts along the slope. This hides the bond line seam completely inside the corner, giving the base a monolithic appearance. The Freedom 250 will be an exceptional race but also expected to be the only one of its kind. INDYCAR could return to D.C. or the general mid-Atlantic area in the future, but this race is a one-time deal. And that easily could be the case for the trophy as well. Only one driver in INDYCAR’s history will be able to say they conquered the U.S. Capitol course, and while there are three versions of the Freedom 250 trophy, there’s still only one first-place trophy. Overall, as our Bob Pockrass pointed out, racing through the streets of the nation’s capital is a rare historic occasion. “Racing on the streets of Washington, D.C., racing around some of the more iconic venues of the nation’s capital,” Pockrass said, “It’s going to test the drivers when it comes to heat. It’s going to test the drivers when it comes to strength, and it will be a test of the pit crews, since they’ll probably have at least four stops.” Freedom 250 is slated to begin Sunday at 11:30 a.m. ET, and the green flag for the main race is expected to wave around 1:13 p.m. ET.Latest Sports News from FOX Sports
Charlotte Tilbury knows how to get her glow on, and now you can too (on sale)!
Her products are seriously iconic, loved by celebs and shoppers with a major cult-following, so when they go on sale…
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Matt: Homework from WordCamp
A few times during the WordCamp US keynote, I asked for a show of hands and got mostly blank stares back, especially on the AI questions. That’s not a criticism — it’s a reading list. If the future is going to be built on this stuff, the WordPress community should be fluent in it. Here’s the homework.
How models are actually trained
When I asked who knew about the reinforcement learning models go through, Robert looked out and said “I see no yeses.” Base models are trained to predict the next word across huge amounts of text; the friendly, helpful behavior comes after, in post-training, where human/AI feedback reinforces some responses over others. If you use these tools every day, understanding that pipeline changes how you prompt them and what you expect from them.
Start with Hugging Face’s Illustrating RLHF, a visual explainer. Chip Huyen’s RLHF deep dive is the best longer read, and Anthropic’s Constitutional AI paper shows where post-training went next. If you only have time for one thing, watch Andrej Karpathy’s Deep Dive into LLMs — pretraining, fine-tuning, reinforcement learning, and why models behave the way they do, all in one sitting.
Uncensored models
Almost nobody had tried an OBLITERATED model. Since refusal behavior is added in post-training, researchers found it can also be removed — it turns out to be, roughly, a single direction inside the model that you can subtract out. Maxime Labonne’s Uncensor any LLM with abliteration explains the technique, and the paper behind it, Refusal in Language Models Is Mediated by a Single Direction, is short and genuinely fascinating. Whatever you think of the applications, it’s worth understanding that open weights mean the community can modify these models, the same way the GPL means you can modify WordPress.
The open-weight wave
Only a few hands went up for Qwen 3.8. The open-weight models coming out of Chinese labs — Qwen, DeepSeek, Kimi, GLM — are at or near the frontier at a fraction of the cost, and the smaller ones run on a laptop. I demoed one from this MacBook on stage. Token costs have dropped about 20x, and that curve isn’t slowing down.
The easiest way to feel this for yourself is to run one locally tonight: install Ollama or LM Studio, pull a small Qwen model, and talk to an intelligence that lives entirely on your own machine, no cloud required. For a community built on the four freedoms, that should feel familiar — and exciting.
Read one, watch one, run one. Then bring what you learned to your next meetup.
It is really important to me that WordPress community members ride this AI wave.
Errata: I said Automattic has 32 or 33 data centers; the actual number is 29, all co-located.
A murder investigation is ongoing amid a French influencer’s death.
A week after the body of Sonia Bellina—known for her lip-sync videos on TikTok—was discovered “partially burned” in a vineyard…
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‘There’s a peacefulness and an acceptance that was hard-earned, that is a part of this record’s narrative,’ Worsham reflects. Continue reading…Country Music News – Taste of Country