Entertainment

Fortnite’s Dragon Ball Z event is too good to skip, plus more weekend recs

Don’t know what to do this weekend? We’ve got you covered.

Fortnite’s Dragon Ball Z event is too good to skip, plus more weekend recs

Our recommendations for your weekend.

Image: Hulu; Epic Games; New York Magazine

Summer’s almost over, but there’s still time to check out some content. This week we’re excited to play Fortnite’s Dragon Ball Z event; “Prey” on Hulu includes some award-winning performances; and we can’t wait to spend the weekend with the comically sinister Cult of the Lamb.

Fortnite’s Dragon Ball Z event

Fortnite’s latest anime collab is really too good to miss. Following a successful crossover with the Naruto universe earlier this summer, Akira Toriyama’s “Dragon Ball Z” has finally landed in Epic’s battle royale, and it's even better than we could have imagined. There are of course skins for purchase featuring protagonists Goku and Vegeta, and a quest tracker to unlock some other nice cosmetics for free. But it’s all the small touches — the in-game Kamehameha energy blast item and the ability to “power up” and transform your hair color, to name a few — that really push it over the edge and prove why Fortnite is truly at the forefront of the metaverse.

How the Three Arrows Capital co-founders torched the crypto market

The story of the so-called crypto geniuses behind crypto hedge fund Three Arrows Capital — Kyle Davies and Su Zhu — is almost too unbelievable, and you can already sense the limited-time HBO series or feature film Hollywood producers might try to cook up from these details. By far the best accounting yet of what exactly happened with TAC comes from Jen Wieczner at New York Magazine, who chronicled the rise and fall of the fund in a new feature this week, dishing out some hilarious new details, including the name of the duo’s $50 million super yacht that now sits vacant in Italy while Davies and Zhu remain in hiding.

‘Prey’ on Hulu is a refreshing update to the series

The Predator franchise isn’t exactly known for its sensitive portrayal of indigenous cultures. Yet, inexplicably, the new entry in the series about head-hunting alien assassins manages to accomplish many different things at once — including an award-worthy performance of a Comanche warrior from Sioux actress Amber Midthunder. The film features stellar action sequences and a refreshingly deep exploration of native gender roles as Midthunder’s Naru is pitted against a technologically advanced adversary.

Cult of the Lamb is comically sinister

Devolver Digital’s latest indie hit is Massive Monster’s Cult of the Lamb, an action-sim hybrid that blends elements of Animal Crossing with roguelike dungeon crawling. One part of the game involves growing a religious cult of followers through often vicious and manipulative means as part of a vengeful plot to strike back at the gods of old who sent you to be sacrificed. The other involves venturing into randomized dungeons to grow your following and strike your enemies down, all while providing for your growing religious order. The game’s comically sinister overtones mixed with its cartoony art style keep the overall tone light, but with enough depth to say something meaningful about the perils of organized religion.

A version of this story also appeared in today’s Entertainment newsletter; subscribe here .

Fintech

Judge Zia Faruqui is trying to teach you crypto, one ‘SNL’ reference at a time

His decisions on major cryptocurrency cases have quoted "The Big Lebowski," "SNL," and "Dr. Strangelove." That’s because he wants you — yes, you — to read them.

The ways Zia Faruqui (right) has weighed on cases that have come before him can give lawyers clues as to what legal frameworks will pass muster.

Photo: Carolyn Van Houten/The Washington Post via Getty Images

“Cryptocurrency and related software analytics tools are ‘The wave of the future, Dude. One hundred percent electronic.’”

That’s not a quote from "The Big Lebowski" — at least, not directly. It’s a quote from a Washington, D.C., district court memorandum opinion on the role cryptocurrency analytics tools can play in government investigations. The author is Magistrate Judge Zia Faruqui.

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Veronica Irwin

Veronica Irwin (@vronirwin) is a San Francisco-based reporter at Protocol covering fintech. Previously she was at the San Francisco Examiner, covering tech from a hyper-local angle. Before that, her byline was featured in SF Weekly, The Nation, Techworker, Ms. Magazine and The Frisc.

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FTA
The Financial Technology Association (FTA) represents industry leaders shaping the future of finance. We champion the power of technology-centered financial services and advocate for the modernization of financial regulation to support inclusion and responsible innovation.
Enterprise

AWS CEO: The cloud isn’t just about technology

As AWS preps for its annual re:Invent conference, Adam Selipsky talks product strategy, support for hybrid environments, and the value of the cloud in uncertain economic times.

Photo: Noah Berger/Getty Images for Amazon Web Services

AWS is gearing up for re:Invent, its annual cloud computing conference where announcements this year are expected to focus on its end-to-end data strategy and delivering new industry-specific services.

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Donna Goodison

Donna Goodison ( @dgoodison ) is Protocol's senior reporter focusing on enterprise infrastructure technology, from the 'Big 3' cloud computing providers to data centers. She previously covered the public cloud at CRN after 15 years as a business reporter for the Boston Herald. Based in Massachusetts, she also has worked as a Boston Globe freelancer, business reporter at the Boston Business Journal and real estate reporter at Banker & Tradesman after toiling at weekly newspapers.

Image: Protocol

We launched Protocol in February 2020 to cover the evolving power center of tech. It is with deep sadness that just under three years later, we are winding down the publication.

As of today, we will not publish any more stories. All of our newsletters, apart from our flagship, Source Code, will no longer be sent. Source Code will be published and sent for the next few weeks, but it will also close down in December.

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Bennett Richardson

Bennett Richardson ( @bennettrich ) is the president of Protocol. Prior to joining Protocol in 2019, Bennett was executive director of global strategic partnerships at POLITICO, where he led strategic growth efforts including POLITICO's European expansion in Brussels and POLITICO's creative agency POLITICO Focus during his six years with the company. Prior to POLITICO, Bennett was co-founder and CMO of Hinge, the mobile dating company recently acquired by Match Group. Bennett began his career in digital and social brand marketing working with major brands across tech, energy, and health care at leading marketing and communications agencies including Edelman and GMMB. Bennett is originally from Portland, Maine, and received his bachelor's degree from Colgate University.

Enterprise

Why large enterprises struggle to find suitable platforms for MLops

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, and as larger enterprises go from deploying hundreds of models to thousands and even millions of models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

As companies expand their use of AI beyond running just a few machine learning models, ML practitioners say that they have yet to find what they need from prepackaged MLops systems.

Photo: artpartner-images via Getty Images

On any given day, Lily AI runs hundreds of machine learning models using computer vision and natural language processing that are customized for its retail and ecommerce clients to make website product recommendations, forecast demand, and plan merchandising. But this spring when the company was in the market for a machine learning operations platform to manage its expanding model roster, it wasn’t easy to find a suitable off-the-shelf system that could handle such a large number of models in deployment while also meeting other criteria.

Some MLops platforms are not well-suited for maintaining even more than 10 machine learning models when it comes to keeping track of data, navigating their user interfaces, or reporting capabilities, Matthew Nokleby, machine learning manager for Lily AI’s product intelligence team, told Protocol earlier this year. “The duct tape starts to show,” he said.

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Kate Kaye

Kate Kaye is an award-winning multimedia reporter digging deep and telling print, digital and audio stories. She covers AI and data for Protocol. Her reporting on AI and tech ethics issues has been published in OneZero, Fast Company, MIT Technology Review, CityLab, Ad Age and Digiday and heard on NPR. Kate is the creator of RedTailMedia.org and is the author of "Campaign '08: A Turning Point for Digital Media," a book about how the 2008 presidential campaigns used digital media and data.

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