PicoBlog

Dr Ruja Ignatova’s younger brother Konstantin is the second most famous face of the OneCoin scam. After Ruja’s vanishing act in October 2017, Konstantin took over as de facto boss, a role he held until his arrest on 6 March 2019, as he was leaving the US. Konstantin’s final Facebook post before his arrest at Los Angeles International Airport in 2019 Aft… ncG1vNJzZmiikaK2prbBmqmtpJWpwW%2B%2F1JuqrZmToHuku8xop2ilmajAqrrGZpqrsaCpvLLBxJ6lZq2gma61sYxtZKSnnqjBorrToqU%3D

In our house, there are two of us who are prone to nostalgia and two of us who are not. It isn’t without coincidence that the same two have an easier time living in the present than the two of us who often ruminate about the past and worry about the future. There seems to be a correlation; I will let you guess which side of the line I fall. I’ve always wondered why some people are more nostalgic than others.

What does it mean to call Mississippi home? Why do people choose to leave or live in this weird, wonderful, and sometimes infuriating place? Jerid P. Woods (also known as Akili Nzuri) started the Instagram account @ablackmanreading in 2018 as a way to connect communities of color across all diasporas through a shared love of literature. From the beginning, says Jerid, “it was going to be important that folks not only knew that I was from Mississippi, but that I was very proud of it, and that this was headquarters.

What does it mean to call Mississippi home? Why do people choose to leave or live in this weird, wonderful, and sometimes infuriating place? Today we hear from archivist, poet, and preserver of Mississippi stories, Laura Heller. Where are you from? I grew up during the 1980s and 1990s in Madison County, near but not in Gluckstadt. I had the whole Madison County experience of public schools, merged high schools, and growing communities bursting at the seams.

What does it mean to call Mississippi home? Why do people choose to leave or live in this weird, wonderful, and sometimes infuriating place? Novelist Tyriek White grew up in East New York in a housing project on the outskirts of Brooklyn. He moved to Oxford, MS in 2017 to pursue an MFA at the University of Mississippi, and still calls Mississippi home. Tyriek’s debut novel We Are a Haunting, winner of The Center for Fiction First Novel Prize, follows three generations of a working class family in East New York and their inherited ghosts.

Mistral revealed key performance data and model characteristics today for the newly released Mixtral 8x22B open-source large language model (LLM). While the new model performs very well on select benchmarks compared to open-source peers, the company stresses a non-functional metric: efficiency. For the MMLU benchmark, it outperformed all of its cited peer models for correct responses, though it appears to fall slightly short of the new Grok-1.5 model from X.

You have probably heard of Palm reading - it’s an ancient fortune telling art which originated in India. Palmistry believes a person’s hand can tell a lot about them, and also predict their future. So, does it work for cats? We believe it can. The amazing astrologer, Jessica Adams, who is also a colleague of mine, has written about cat star signs for me and she also read my cat’s paw.

Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape. We have a conversation with Mitchell Green, Founder and Managing Partner at Lead Edge Capital.  With offices in New York and Santa Barbara, the firm has over $5B in Assets under management and specializes in helping growth-stage companies scale. The firm has an interesting model that combines elements of PE, growth, and an active network of over 700 LPs to build a very powerful moat.

Any fan of martial arts will know of Miyamoto Musashi, the Japanese swordsman from the 1600’s that pioneered niten ichi-ryu, or “the way of two swords” as it is known in the west. Musashi is the author of The Book of Five Rings which has been ubiquitous in the study of the fine art of violence for centuries now. Even today, modern fighters study his writings alongside Sun Tzu’s The Art of War.