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Sons of Anarchy was a popular cable show that ran for seven seasons. It told the story of a modern-day outlaw motorcycle club. While set in the present day, the series frequently referred back to the club's origins in the late ‘60s and early ‘70s.  The Sons, as established by the series, got their start as a group of recently returned Vietnam veterans, some of whom were about brotherly companionship, but others who were more interested in making the motorcycle club into more of a full-on outlaw criminal organization.

Welcome to issue #47 of next big thing. One refreshing aspect of market cycles is the ability to re-evaluate the metrics and goal posts that companies should be aiming for. A decade ago, venture capitalist Aileen Lee coined the term Unicorn, referring to companies that are valued at over $1 billion either in the public or private markets or at exit. Back then, in late 2013, there were 39 members of the “Unicorn Club” which consisted of companies that had been started since 2003.

This newsletter is presented by Rebuy. If you like the newsletter, feel free to subscribe below, get in touch, or follow me on Medium, X, and LinkedIn. Modern advancements in large language models (LLMs) are mostly a product of scaling laws [6]. As we increase the size of the underlying model, we see a smooth increase in performance, assuming that the model is trained over a sufficiently large dataset [7]. Such scaling laws eventually led us to the creation of GPT-3, as well as other (more powerful) LLMs that followed it.

Happy Thursday! This issue of the Animation Obsessive newsletter is about Charlie Brown’s All Stars (1966), the second animated Peanuts special. During most of the years he spent drawing Peanuts strips, Charles Schulz was also writing Peanuts cartoon specials for television. The first, A Charlie Brown Christmas (1965), is an annual tradition close to 60 years strong. Before his death in 2000, Schulz would oversee 38 more Peanuts shows. Initially, convincing the networks to take a full special based on Schulz’s work was hard.

            At a rally in Vandalia, Ohio last Saturday, Trump promised a "bloodbath for the country" if he's not elected president.              Then followed a predictable bout of (self-)deception, the claim that Trump's bloodbath was out of context.  Well, everything does have contexts, including bloodbaths.  So let's put Trump's in context.             The Vandalia rally began with a brazen celebration of the convicted criminals who took part in Trump's failed coup attempt.

So I’m a little bored and lamenting the damage done to Zhang Zhehan’s acting career although his singing gigs seem to be taking off. I turn my attention to this 3-year-old drama hankering for the Yunxi pairing of Ju Jingyi and Zhang Zhehan. Viki has done a generally decent translation of the series with the odd inexplicable mistake here and there. At least I am placated by the decent translations of the aristocratic titles.

In pagan Germany sometime in the 8th century, legend has it that a Christian monk, who would later become known as Saint Boniface, gathered a tribe of non-believers around him and their most sacred tree. Thought to incite a vengeful bolt of lightning from Thor himself if cut down, Boniface, in front of all who could see, felled the tree with a single chop of the axe, aided by a gust of wind seemingly from another divinity, and no lightning.

Adam Mares from DNVR Sports joins us to look at one of the NBA's more fascinating teams in 2021, the Denver Nuggets. Mares guides us through the Jamal Murray injury, how the Nuggets stack up against other Western Conference contenders and a look at some of the recent draft picks the Nuggets have made Follow Adam on Twitter at @Adam_Mares for more of his fantastic work on the Denver Nuggets and the entire DNVR team for some of their awesome coverage throughout the year.

I miss the days of melodramatic made-for-TV movies. Lifetime picked up what network television left behind, but there’s a distinct sense of self-awareness to their movies, not quite parody, yet still with a clear message: “We know this is cheesy, you know this is cheesy, let’s just accept that and have a good time.” And yet, the seriousness was what made those old movies so much fun! A movie like The Babysitter wouldn’t have been nearly as enjoyable if it came off like it was poking fun at the slasher genre.