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ritesh KhoreThere are many variations of passages of Lorem Ipsum available, but the majority have suffered alteration in some form, by injected humour, or randomised words which don't look even slightly believable. If you are going to use a passage of Lorem Ipsum, you need to be sure there isn't anything embarrassing hidden in the middle of text. All the Lorem Ipsum generators on the Internet tend to repeat predefined chunks as necessary, making this the first true generator on the Internet. It uses a dictionary of over 200 Latin words, combined with a handful of model sentence structures, to generate Lorem Ipsum which looks reasonable. The generated Lorem Ipsum is therefore always free from repetition, injected humour, or non-characteristic words etc. There are many variations of passages of Lorem Ipsum available, but the majority have suffered alteration in some form, by injected humour, or randomised words which don't look even slightly believable. If you are going to use a passage of Lorem Ipsum, you need to be sure there isn't anything embarrassing hidden in the middle of text. All the Lorem Ipsum generators on the Internet tend to repeat predefined chunks as necessary, making this the first true generator on the Internet. It uses a dictionary of over 200 Latin words, combined with a handful of model sentence structures, to generate Lorem Ipsum which looks reasonable. The generated Lorem Ipsum is therefore always free from repetition, injected humour, or non-characteristic words etc. There are many variations of passages of Lorem Ipsum available, but the majority have suffered alteration in some form, by injected humour, or randomised words which don't look even slightly believable. If you are going to use a passage of Lorem Ipsum, you need to be sure there isn't anything embarrassing hidden in the middle of text. All the Lorem Ipsum generators on the Internet tend to repeat predefined chunks as necessary, making this the first true generator on the Internet. It uses a dictionary of over 200 Latin words, combined with a handful of model sentence structures, to generate Lorem Ipsum which looks reasonable. The generated Lorem Ipsum is therefore always free from repetition, injected humour, or non-characteristic words etc.
ritesh KhoreIt is a long established fact that a reader will be distracted by the readable content of a page when looking at its layout. The point of using Lorem Ipsum is that it has a more-or-less normal distribution of letters, as opposed to using 'Content here, content here', making it look like readable English. Many desktop publishing packages and web page editors now use Lorem Ipsum as their default model text, and a search for 'lorem ipsum' will uncover many web sites still in their infancy. Various versions have evolved over the years, sometimes by accident, sometimes on purpose (injected humour and the like).
riteshMatilda is born of whizpopping minds. From Roald Dahl’s original battle cry to young rebels to the smash hit stage musical dreamed up two decades later by Tim Minchin, Dennis Kelly and Matthew Warchus. It’s their take on the tale that forms the basis of this new film. Dahl’s book has, after all, enjoyed the pleasure of adaptation, courtesy of Danny DeVito’s fondly remembered 1998 box office flop. As though to mitigate potential reprisal for such financial failure, Roald Dahl’s Matilda the Musical – to give the film its full title – is to be constrained to Netflix in all global territories but the UK. What a crying shame. This may be a film for and about little people but it’s a tour de force show stopper and duly demands the very biggest of screens. On the stage, a clutch of youngsters rotate the role of Matilda across any given week. Here, the whole film rests on the shoulders just one. Alisha Weir, an Irish starlet plucked straight from drama school, makes for a spirited and surprisingly fierce hero. There’s an intensity to her gaze far older than her years. Certainly, it’s easier to believe Weir’s Matilda to be the victim of eleven years’ neglect than ever were the case with the doe eyed Mara Wilson. It figures. As directed by Warchus, this is a far nastier film than was DeVito’s. Nasty in that most delicious of family film flavours. Comedy bleeds seamlessly into the darkness of Dahl’s imagination and, while never traumatic, the film is brave in its refusal to blunt the brutality of the story’s sharper corners. In doing so, of course, the pay off proves all the sweeter. Give or take the odd librarian or solitary teacher, Matilda is surrounded in life by utterly fowl adults. Right from the off, in a fabulously over-saturated opening number, Matilda’s parents are introduced as Thenardier types, bitterly convinced that the world owes them more than their lot. Stephen Graham plays Mr. Wormwood, a car dealer cum con artist, who comes increasingly to resemble an Oompa Loompa on falling fowl of his daughter’s wrath. That he spends the entire film calling her ‘boy’ does justify the prank. Andrea Riseborough is Mrs. Wormwood, a woman whose dislike of children is so intense that she denies the very existence of her own right up until the final moment of the third trimester. When asked if she’d like to hear about Matilda’s first ever day at school, Mrs. Wormwood drolls: ‘I’d rather eat vegetables’. It’s proper pantomime stuff, vocal intonation and all. Quite the left turn from an actor usually found on the film festival circuit. Never has she worn such horrifically eighties excess.
riteshThings don’t exactly get off to a promising start with Black Adam. It’s all a bit Scorpion King – and not only because of the Dwayne Johnson connection. There’s an oddly echo laden narration. The grading is dire. As for the narrative itself, it all feels immediately suffocated by its grandiose sense of self importance. The mythos is as nonsensical as the setting is bizarrely groundless. Somewhere Middle Eastern, potentially but inconclusively on a different planet, and yet in an age long before the pyramids were built. Not that you’d think it from the fashion. A more adventurous romp will eventually ascend from the hogwash but only in the sense that it’s prelude achieved such a sterling feat in crippling expectations. Johnson is Teth-Adam. He’s a Kahndaqi slave in the opening and later rediscovered beholden of the powers of Shazam. Superhuman abilities bequeathed him via the very same Council of Wizards that turned Asher Angel into Zachary Levi back in 2019. Though originally attached to that film, when Johnson turned down Levi’s super in favour of Black Adam – Shazam’s then villain – it was deemed a waste not to give the character his own blockbuster. The logic is clear. In a tough era for the multiplex, Johnson has crowd drawing credentials. Many a likely flop has been saved by his winning smile and megawatt charisma. Not so much here. Johnson’s Teth-Adam is appealing but dour by default. Anyone would be with this back story. Adam is a formerly oppressed slave turned demigod who emerges from three thousand years of entrapment to a world that treats him as a threat. He’s an antihero with a brutal approach to dispatching ne’er do wells. There is humour in the horror – think Marvel’s deadpan Drax the Destroyer – but it’s an uneasy fit. The Rock’s a broad comic, sure, but he’s warm too and twinkly and surprisingly wry. Dave Bautista makes it look easy and it’s disappointing to find Johnson less able with the delivery. True, he’s not helped by a woefully inconsistent script and writing that can never quite decide how self-aware and even wise Black Adam should be, but even so.
riteshThis week, Pitchbook published their latest Emerging Tech Indicator (ETI) report which tracks early stage investment activity amongst the world’s most successful venture capital firms to “gauge which areas of tech are grabbing VCs’ attention”. In Q3, the sector that received the largest amount of VC dollars according to the ETI report was Web3 with nearly $900 million. That’s more than fintech, biotech, security, ecommerce, gaming, and dozens of other mainstream industries. And Q3 wasn’t the first time that Web3 topped the ETI report. In fact, Web3 has led the ETI rankings for 5 consecutive quarters now. Over the past 12 months, there has been over $6.5 billion of ETI capital invested into Web3, which is more than double that of the next highest category of fintech at $2.7 billion. Building a good Web3 startup is hard. Explaining what makes a startup Web3 in the first place is even harder. Here are a few attempts. Leading Web3 investor A16Z describes Web3 as “the internet owned by the builders and users, orchestrated with tokens”. Ethereum co-founder Gavin Wood, who coined the term Web3, describes it as “an alternative vision of the web, where the services that we use are purely algorithmic things hosted by everybody”. Web3 has also been called “the hyperfinancialization of all human existence” and where “every product is simultaneously an investment opportunity”. Pretty confusing right? All consumer products need data. If you’re building a restaurant discovery website, you need reviews. If you’re building a shopping app, you need a product catalog. If you’re building a photo or music or video sharing service, you need (obviously) photos or music or videos. Sure you can get users to create that data for you — after all, users authoring data is the core tenet of Web2. But it takes a lot of users to create a useful amount of data, and until then the product experience for those few initial users will be incomplete or simply bad, which is then an impediment to acquiring more users. So you’re stuck in not a vicious cycle, but a stagnant cycle.
ritesh Khoref you looked at my Spotify Wrapped summary today and concluded, “You spent a lot of 2019 being sad and/or going on long, moody walks with your headphones,” you’d be correct: Apparently, I listened to a lot of folk-pop singer-songwriter Phoebe Bridgers and her indie rock outfit, Better Oblivion Community Center. Today I was one of thousands of Twitter users (based on the hashtag #spotifywrapped2019) to post a screenshot of the streaming service’s individualized end-of-year roundup — the condensing of a year’s worth of data, showcasing what we pumped into our ears while we worked, commuted, cleaned the apartment, or lay in bed staring at the ceiling. An editor here at Forge used the moment to open up about her love of show tunes. Many parents whose playlists have been hijacked by offspring riffed on how, as one tweet put it, “children will bring you low”: There’s some humblebragging, as always: These screenshots are a handy way to display how we like and engage with good things. But these lists are not carefully curated personal branding exercises, like the “My Top 10 Albums” lists that insufferable music nerds would post on Facebook during the heyday of such things. They are pure data, unfiltered reflections of who we are when no one is looking — which can be surprising even to ourselves. I can no longer hide from the fact that I listened to Weezer’s cover of Toto’s “Africa” quite a few times, though I have no memory of doing so. Or “Back to You” by Selena Gomez, which I do remember listening to quite a few times but would be embarrassed to admit (except here I am, admitting it). (In the interest of transparency, I should acknowledge that apparently I also listened to a lot of Led Zeppelin and the Rolling Stones, proving that I am fundamentally a dad.)
ritesh KhoreChatGPT is blowing up. Twitter is inundated with screenshots of the app, coding sites like Stack Overflow are already banning answers produced with it, and over 1 million people have played with it. It’s a sensation. As a professional AI researcher, I wouldn’t have called that. ChatGPT is trained specifically to act as a chat bot, but fundamentally it’s using the same GPT-3 technology that’s been available for over two years now. What ChatGPT 3 demonstrates — moreso than impressive technology — is the crucial role that access plays in making breakthroughs truly usable. By packaging GPT-3 in a way that normal people can use, OpenAI has finally made people sit up and realize the incredible power of today’s AI. This is nothing new; we think of Thomas Edison as the inventor of the lightbulb, not because he actually invented it, but because he successfully brought it to market and turned it into something that normal people could understand. That will be a trend in the AI industry going forward; the companies that make using AI as easy as possible will be the ones that thrive. The Importance of Use Cases Most of today’s impressive AI systems are built on massive language models. These language models are trained on, essentially, all of the text humans have created over the last 6,000+ years. GPT-3 ate 8 billion pages of text, almost every book ever published, and all of Wikipedia. It spat out an AI system that exhibits properties of general intelligence and can do everything from writing sea shanties to solving coding problems.