A newsletter about Pop Culture, Software Studies, Business Strategy, Media Platforms, Algorithmic Management, Game Design, and everything in between.
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How AI Tokens Challenge Broadband Economics
The parallel evolution of two foundational commodities in a new economic layer.
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Indian companies have sent more than 320 million synthetic opioid pills to West Africa – where they have not been approved by regulators – in three years. https://www.bellingcat.com/news/2026/04/17/painkiller-pipeline-300-million-tapentadol-pills-sent-from-india-to-west-africa/ more ›
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“Scaling compute” is AI industry jargon for spending more and more money on data centers and the chips (typically GPUs made by Nvidia) inside those data centers. So called hyperscalers like OpenAI, Alphabet, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft, xAI and Anthropic aim… more ›
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ByteDance and Kuaishou outshine western rivals, lifting AI video quality across advertising and entertainment https://share.google/bQZGTNCeN6P8urw8c more ›
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Perplexity AI shifts from search to agentic AI with Computer and Personal Computer, chasing growth, partnerships, and a new way to get work done with AI https://www.forbesindia.com/article/news/deep-dive/how-perplexity-is-remaking-itself-into-a-smart-digital-co-worker/2993628/1 more ›
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In 1939, the South African artist Ernest Mancoba turned toward abstraction for the first time. Although this artistic development has been associated with Mancoba’s relationship to the CoBrA movement, Joshua Cohen argues that his embrace of abstraction also can be… more ›
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Trump is meeting Xi in Beijing, with the two superpower leaders expected to discuss the Iran war, trade, Taiwan and artificial intelligence https://www.theguardian.com/world/gallery/2026/may/14/donald-trump-meets-xi-jinping-china-summit-in-pictures?CMP=Share_AndroidApp_Other more ›
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Chinese AI researchers and founders have become central to Silicon Valley’s AI boom, joining Meta and OpenAI and building a new tech elite from Mark Zuckerberg’s old house. https://restofworld.org/2026/chinese-ai-researchers-silicon-valley/ more ›
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Listen: https://ift.tt/Eh57Z2V Theories that inaccurately observe the present will inevitably fall short in predicting the future. Yet, our dominant frameworks for understanding international relations remain anchored in assumptions about power and sovereignty that no longer hold. If we want to… more ›
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How do we reconcile an increasingly fractured order with an increasingly planetary reality? https://www.noemamag.com/the-coming-entropy-of-our-world-order more ›