Well, folks, I promised you I’d be working on interviews on Things of Internet this year. And what a fine way to start this will be. Utsav Mamoria is a dear friend who runs a short-format travel podcast called Postcards from Nowhere. It’s a travel podcast but rather than give influencer-style clickbait about places to visit, Utsav encourages you to slow …

Welcome to BIG, a newsletter on the politics of monopoly power. If you’d like to sign up to receive issues over email, you can do so here. Google just lost its first antitrust trial, as a San Francisco jury returned a decision that Google harmed rival Epic Games, maker of the popular video game Fortnite, in the $48 billion dollar app store Android market…

As formerly (thankfully!) striking writers justifiably emphasized, AI is transforming Hollywood. It already has. The major streaming services have long used artificial intelligence and machine learning to enhance overall viewing experiences, accelerating cord cutting – and fundamentally transforming Hollywood economics - in the …

Next Week in The Sequence: Edge 329: The second installment of our series about fine-tuning covers the different types of fine-tuning methods, MIT’s research around multi-task prompt tuning and the Lamini platform. Edge 330: We discuss DSPy, a new language model programming framework that represents an alternative to LangChain an…

I have just got back from an epic month of travelling. I have been to Trinec in the Czech Republic twice, flying into Katovice and then Krakow airports, and then driving two hours. Its the first t…

Members, Just a quick tactical note. This will be informal and concise. About 2 Months ago during the SVB crisis back in March, I found opportunities to help our folks here to take advantage of tactical disloc…

We took part in a quick rapid fire interview with Larry Cheung, CFA covering AI, geopolitics, financial markets, and other areas we frequently speak about. Larry Cheung is a CFA Charterholder, professional Investment Strategist, and the Author of one of Substack's most popular finance newsletters called "Letters from Larry: U.S. & China Investment Strategy." In this ne…

The Best Buy PS5 restock date and time in July 2022 will come to you via my PS5 restock Twitter tracker – follow and turn on notifications. That’s because I’m now tracking where and when the PlayStation 5 is in stock at retailers in the US, including Best Buy, where there has been a PS5 restock nationwide once in July. Now that demand for the Sony cons…

An emergency podcast on the escalating pandemic crisis in Indonesia. Dr Sana Jaffrey is the new director of the Institute for Policy Analysis of Conflict (IPAC), the organisation founded by Sidney Jones in Jakarta. She is also a non-resident scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, DC., for whom she is writing about Indon…

In this episode we speak to Ian Wilson (@iwilson69) about his research of over a decade on the Islamic Defenders Front (FPI), an Islamist group that challenges Indonesia’s democratic status quo. We talk about how to distinguish the FPI from other militant groups and Ian explains his concept of “morality racketeering”. We end by covering some curious gan…

I have been the storyteller of my dad’s non-Hodgkins, mantle-cell lymphoma since he was diagnosed in early 2019 to his extended community of friends and family. It’s a difficult story for me to tell. It requires delicacy, nuance, and just the right amount of revelation and firmness to share it in a way where everyone knows enough information and (hopefu…

Note: This is the fourth post in a new series I am now titling [Jason’s] Unfolding Queer Cosmology. The name has changed to better reflect the specificity of the Queer Cosmology. It is [mine]. [I] references that it also is not mine alone. Read “The First Post” here.

Vlog: Art Camp for Comrades!

A note: This post talks frankly about bullying and queerness. This autumn my dad asked me to start a project with him. I suggested we write letters to each other based on how he used to write me cards as a kid. We’ve sent a few back and forth. It’s been beautifully healing.

A note: This post talks frankly about bullying and queerness. This autumn my dad asked me to start a project with him. I suggested we write letters to each other based on how he used to write me cards as a kid. We’ve sent a few back and forth. It’s been beautifully healing.

Image description: The QUEERSPELL logo. I was born Catholic and named Jason, which means “Healer,” so I’ve always been drawn to ritual and to the larger questions in life. In fact, I’ve been on a quest to discover more and more about who I be, who I have been, and who I want to be.

Vlog: Art Update

Chit Chat is a video interview series where an artist-comrade and I shoot the shit about our art, values, practices, and praxis for 30 to 60 minutes. There will be uproarious laughter, cursing like a sailor, idle chatter, and maybe even a tear or two. Consider it a love letter between two friends about how we collectively get free.

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: As you’ve no doubt heard, on Day One of his presidency, Biden put a temporary moratorium on all leasing-related activities in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Couple this with an unprecedented public response against opening the coastal plain to oil drilling during the comment period in December, a commitment by a…

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge: Following President Biden’s day-one temporary order to halt oil and gas activity on the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, Federal house and senate lawmakers, working across the aisle, introduced legislation to permanently protect the coastal plain

The dogs barreled out of the house, barking as if they meant it. Mama moose, fearing for her calf, charged out of the garden, strait through the fence and the bird feeders, in a bee-line for her calf. The wire fencing crumpled, birdseed flew, and the feeders lay upended on the ground.

The Future We Make This issue of News Watch features several videos including A Message From the Future (which came out before the pandemic). This upbeat YouTube video is a message about the future we want to make and the Green New Deal narrated by Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. A follow-up video came out mid-pandemic and is entitled

With 13 active oil and gas leases already located in Cook Inlet, a million acres in new lease sales has the potential to turn the Lower Cook Inlet into an industrial zone. For many Alaskans that collective sigh of relief when a gridlocked Congress finally adopted the Inflation Reduction Act was short-lived. On the one hand, the Act includes $369 billion …

Steady boys walk on Our work is nearly done No more we’ll till or plow the fields The horses’ day is gone And this will be our last trip home So, study boys walk on The excerpt above is from a song by Scottish singer-songwriter Dick Gaughan about the end of an era of draft horses that pulled plows to ready the fields for planting These majestic beasts were re…